Current Posts for January 2008 - The Criterion Collection

14Jan08

Lipp Service BY ABBEY LUSTGARTEN

From upstairs at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris, you have a perfect view of the Café de Flore, directly across the boulevard Saint-Germain. Both are famous Left Bank institutions where filmmakers such as Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard rubbed shoulders with musicians, fashion designers, and literati alike. (A good shot of le Lipp, as it’s known locally, can be seen in Malle’s The Fire Within, as Alain Leroy, played by Maurice Ronet, sits outside at the Café de Flore, facing the boulevard, and facing his first drink in months.)

Upstairs at the Lipp, surrounded by original nineteenth-century crystal sconces and wall-length mirrors, cameraman André Bonzel, audio recordist Sylvain Ripaud, camera assistant Juraj Krasnohorsky, and I were setting up the shot for a video interview with the major darling of the nouvelle vague, Anna Karina. The maître d’ told us that she preferred to sit by the window. “It would be a nice-looking shot,” he said, with the refined wood molding and metal detailing. “It will look very French.” “But it doesn’t sparkle enough,” I responded, “like this room sparkles and like Anna Karina sparkles.” The interview was to accompany our special edition of Pierrot le fou. And after a publicized marriage to Godard, a few suicide attempts, a miscarriage of her child with Godard, and her ultimate divorce from him, Karina still manages to sparkle in Pierrot.

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9Jan08

Designing Berlin Alexanderplatz BY ERIC SKILLMAN

Appropriately for Fassbinder’s fifteen-hour masterpiece, the process of coming up with a design for Berlin Alexanderplatz was epic. With a monumental film like this, there’s obviously no shortage of possible concepts, but the biggest challenge is finding a design that can speak not just to one aspect but to the film as a whole. At first I didn’t really have much conceptual grounding beyond a sense of the color scheme I wanted (the particular browns of the film). The obvious solution was to focus on the main character, Franz Biberkopf, so that was where I started.

This was probably the best simple portrait image we had, but I was having trouble finding a compelling way to present it:

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1980

940 min

Color

1.33:1

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3Jan08

Final Cut BY KIM HENDRICKSON

We’ve received a number of letters recently inquiring about the various versions of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. I’ve been immersed in the film for several months now and wanted to clarify a few misconceptions.

When I started working on the project, I began with the assumption that we would be releasing both versions of the film—the original theatrical version (165 minutes, on the NTSC version) and the “director’s cut” (218 minutes, NTSC). Knowing that mastering would be the first step in the process, I reached out to the cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, as we wanted him to be involved in a new HD transfer of the film for our release. He wrote back right away, mentioning that he had supervised a 2K transfer of the film in Rome a year or so back. I had accumulated the various European DVD releases of the film—all of which featured both versions—so I asked him which version he had transferred. His response was surprising. He said that the director-approved version of the film (and the one he supervised) was the one we all knew from seeing it screened in theaters in 1987—the 165-minute version.

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Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Lipp Service BY ABBEY LUSTGARTEN

Designing Berlin Alexanderplatz BY ERIC SKILLMAN

Final Cut BY KIM HENDRICKSON

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