Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Michael Boland’s design for Criterion’s special edition release of Vampyr has gotten some special attention of its own, from the prestigious design journal Communications Arts. In the Exhibit section—highlighting “outstanding examples of graphic design and advertising”—of the journal’s website, editors commend the menus and packaging as reflecting the atmosphere and imagery of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spooky 1932 marvel, noting, “The Boland Design Company created a layered, not quite Victorian, not quite modern voice for this great film.” The web feature also calls out Criterion art director Sarah Habibi, and F. Ron Miller for his custom type rendering. See the full, illustrated story here.

Vampyr

Carl Th. Dreyer

1932

73 min

Black and White

1.19:1

While in New York for the premiere of Ashes of Time Redux, Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai and his long-time cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, sat down with Leonard Lopate for the radio host’s daily show. In the course of discussing the restored and re-edited theatrical release of their highly unorthodox 1994 martial-arts epic, the duo also reminisced about their other collaboration that year, Chungking Express (coming out in November in standard and Blu-ray Criterion editions), recounting how that very different, romantic-comic film was made quickly and cheaply while they were on hiatus in Hong Kong from shooting Ashes on the Western desert border of China. The spur-of-the-moment nature of Chungking’s production is perfectly illustrated by Doyle’s account of how they chose the setting for half of the film: his new apartment. “I just moved into the place,” he said, “and we thought, this is a great metaphor for the ideas of the film and the structure of Hong Kong society, the balance between West and East,” since the building was “exactly on the corner of the financial-entertainment district and the most traditional market area of Hong Kong.”

Lopate also interviewed British director Mike Leigh, about his new film Happy-Go-Lucky, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed character study described by Leigh as “anti-miserablist,” and remarkably different in tone from many of the filmmaker's earlier, darker works, such as Vera Drake and Naked. To those who are surprised by this shift, Leigh responds: “Every time I invite you for supper, I don’t want to serve you the same dish!”

Visit the Leonard Lopate Show online to hear both the Wong-Doyle and Leigh interviews.

Chungking Express

Wong Kar-wai

1994

102 min

Color

1.66:1

Naked

Mike Leigh

1993

131 min

Color

1.85:1

Okay, quiz time.

What does the music video for Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” have to do with the Criterion Collection?

Give up?

Well, it was shot by none other than ace director of photography Christopher Doyle, whose work is being brought back into the collection—after our release of In the Mood for Love six years ago—with our forthcoming Chungking Express DVD.

The prospect of producing “yet another disc” of writer-director Wong Kar-wai’s effervescent 1994 pop cinema classic was a little daunting. I myself already owned two different laserdiscs (including the 1997 Criterion/Rolling Thunder edition) as well as two DVDs. To add to the pressure, Chungking was slated to be one of our first Blu-ray editions. Talk about heavy expectations, especially for a movie that’s renowned for its highly influential visual style. What else could be done or said with this new presentation?  

Chungking Express

Wong Kar-wai

1994

102 min

Color

1.66:1

Lola Montès, Max Ophuls’s final film and some would say greatest masterpiece, opened today in New York and Los Angeles in what is being touted as the definitive restoration. Butchered by its producers and a flop on initial release in 1955, the film took a long journey to get in the shape it’s in today. “The most beautiful CinemaScope movie ever made!” raves Phillip Lopate, and he is not alone in his swooning over Ophuls’s only color film (the New York Times’s Dave Kehr calls it “a baroque masterpiece”). See for yourself if you happen to be in Los Angeles or New York this week (L.A.’s Laemmle Royal Theatre pictured below). The restoration will also be screened in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., in November, and other cities after that. For complete release information and the story behind the gorgeous new 35 mm restoration from the Cinémathèque française, visit Rialto Pictures' website.

It seems Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom hasn’t lost any of its horrifying power. “The 1970s was a hotbed of scandalous art cinema, but Salò—unlike such X-rated shockers as Last Tango in Paris or In the Realm of the Senses—has not been tamed by the passage of years,” writes Dennis Lim in a Los Angeles Times review of our new, long-anticipated DVD release of the film. “If anything,” he adds, “there is a cruel, chilling timelessness to both its imagery and its logic.” Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir is also disturbed again: “What remains profoundly upsetting and unsettling about Salò after thirty-three years is that the pornographic and scatological images it depicts emerge in a context of such rigorous formal beauty.”

More surprising than Salò’s continued shock value, however, has been the discovery, thanks to supplemental material included on the special-edition release, that life on the set was often far from grim—indeed was lighthearted at times. Both Bruce Bennett, in the New York Sun, and Time Out New York’s David Fear were particularly taken by an interview with actress Hélène Surgère, who recounts, “Because of all the teenagers, it was like high school,” and that for the less experienced performers, who had to react to the simulated violence and humiliations, “the challenge was to keep from laughing.”

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Pier Paolo Pasolini

1975

112 min

Color

1.85:1

It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le doulos hews to that quasi convention with a particularly grim ferocity. (I’ll further note that this essay won’t be giving away too many specifics.)

This 1962 film, Melville’s seventh feature, was his first true foray into the post–film noir, so-called Série noire crime genre in which he would subsequently forge some of his most celebrated works: Le samouraï, Le cercle rouge, and Le deuxième souffle. Yes, Melville’s 1956 Bob le flambeur told the tale (eventually!) of a casino heist, and his 1959 Deux hommes dans Manhattan has its eponymous two men undertake a missing-persons case. But both films are discursive, rambling affairs, often concentrating on the charms of their respective settings (the fairy-tale sleaze of Bob’s Montmartre/Pigalle, the Broadway bright lights of Deux hommes), and ending things reasonably well for their heroes (Bob le flambeur, in particular, is one of the greatest shaggy-dog stories ever put on film). In Le doulos, Melville makes his genre move with a vengeance; for all its atmospheric touches, it has a relentless forward movement unprecedented in any of his prior films. Which is at least slightly paradoxical, as all of Le doulos’ characters are living in the past.  

Le doulos

Jean-Pierre Melville

1962

109 min

Black and White

1.66:1

Le deuxième souffle, Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth and to that point most commercially successful feature in France, was an important watershed in the director’s career. It points back to the somewhat abstract, elemental, and iconographically precise hypermasculine gangster milieu of Bob le flambeur (1956) and Le doulos (1962) and forward to the more expansive, rarefied, and philosophically circumspect works—such as Le samouraï (1967) and Le cercle rouge (1970)—that followed. It was also Melville’s last film to be shot in black and white, pushing the tonal qualities and gray scale of the image to new levels. Despite its troubled production history—it was shot in two stages in Melville’s studio and various Marseille and Paris locations—it is a masterful work that ultimately brought to a close what Melville himself described as a period of several years “in the wilderness.” Still, despite the importance of Le deuxième souffle to understanding Melville’s career, it has remained one of his most underrated, and least examined, films.

As Ginette Vincendeau has argued, Le deuxième souffle marked the consolidation of Melville’s commercial and mainstream critical reputation in France, while also almost violently pushing him further away from his critic and filmmaker “colleagues” in the nouvelle vague. In some ways, the film’s preoccupation with issues of loyalty, heightened professionalism, solitude, and betrayal resonates clearly with Melville’s own status as an egotistical, reticent, fringe-dwelling figure in French cinema, who in spite of his success never really claimed membership or complicity in any established movement or “wave” of filmmaking. Melville’s subsequent critical reputation has suffered from the schisms caused by shifts in these perspectives and allegiances, as well as from a suspicion about his professional and personal indulgence in the forms and archetypes of American cinema, and it is only in the last fifteen years or so that he has once again been championed as one of the great French directors.  

Le deuxième souffle

Jean-Pierre Melville

1966

144 min

Black and White

1.66:1

9 August 2008: I go to the neighborhood theater to see Snow Trail (a.k.a. To the End of the Silver Mountains, a.k.a. Ginrei no haté), a 1946 Senkichi Taniguchi film now revived because it was Toshiro Mifune’s second film.

Revived now because in these days of falling film attendance, distributors will try anything. This is part of a weeklong package featuring the early work of Shintaro Katsu, Yujiro Ishihara, and Mifune—all major stars, all petrified into legend, all dead.

I sit and watch the twenty-five-year-old actor in this sixty-two-year-old film. Mifune plays a tough ex-con with a foul mouth and violent ways, a role he would continue for a time—Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948) and Rashomon (1950).

And as I sit and watch this melodrama unreel, I remember how different Mifune himself was. Far from violent, he always wanted to do the right thing, in a world that was plainly wrong. He always tried to be the nice guy—his depreciating laugh, his big, wide, embracing smile, his concern for whatever you were talking about, and when talking about himself, that reasoned, guarded tone that some men use when talking about their sons.

But the world does not like nice guys—it prefers punks like in this picture. We say that nice guys finish last, and Japan thinks so too. Nice guys, like Mifune, are charming, fun to be with, absolutely trustworthy, and so what? So says the world.

So Mifune became the consummate actor (we never realized how good he was when he was alive) and impersonated all those people he wasn’t. Oh, he had a self. He would raise his eyebrows and spread his fingers when he spoke of his career, then sigh—as though it were not his own. He was not taken in by this self. He was not vain, regarded his accomplishment seriously, but not too seriously, was quite willing to consider himself just another person, someone like, well, you and me. He was the nicest man I ever met.

And here he is the cavorting punk up on the silver screen, and in thirty-some years he will be dead—seventy-seven, suffering dementia, organ failure. And here, right in front of me, he is so young, so alive, so vital. The world is plainly wrong.

Rashomon

Akira Kurosawa

1950

88 min

Black and White

1.33:1