Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

It’s the season when a lot of things arrive on five. Yesterday Tony, who does authoring for us, brought in gorgeously authored doughnuts from the Doughnut Plant on Grand Street, in flavors like marzipan and pomegranate jelly. John Gudelj, our main subtitler, sent the perfect pastry. It immediately set us arguing over the word to describe it: Raspberry tart? No, cranberry galette. Someone threw in cherry walnut, and the battle was joined. Our favorite printer, Glenn Baken, brought us boxes of “Glenn’s Bacon," which he said was extra-delicious because it came from a farm where the hogs are fed nothing but Oreos for their last two weeks. I should have realized it was all a joke, especially when I saw the gorgeous printing on the package, but I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't catch on until “glenn’s bacon oreos” yielded no documents in a Google search.

At the old office, we were split between two floors. The kitchen was on the fifth floor, and nearly every day there was an "on five" email. People brought things in from all over the world. Mochi balls and green tea cookies; exotic, seasonally flavored Pockys from Tokyo; Mexican treats; absinthe candies from Paris and bourbon balls from Kentucky and chocolates from Belgium by Pierre Marcolini (whose website refers to him as "this creator of happiness"). Chocolate koalas found their way up from down under, maple cookies down from Vermont. We’ve had organic “Moose Munch” from Oregon and kippered buffalo from South Dakota, Scharffen Berger chocolates from San Francisco and macaroons from Fauchon, scary green key lime coconut patties from Florida, halvah with pistachios from Israel, and rugelach from Canter’s in L.A. Some treats come with an education (did you know that the honeybell orange, also known as the Minneola tangelo, is a cross between the Dancy tangerine and the Duncan grapefruit?); others with a personal touch—Julie’s homemade carrot cake, Johanna’s cookies, Jamie’s homemade cheese, Deb’s mom’s chocolate covered almonds, Fumiko’s brownies, and Kim’s banana bread (still gooey in the middle).  

Well, it’s not exactly writer’s block, but it’s related. I’ve been trying to get this blog entry posted since Tuesday afternoon, but there’s always something that takes me away from the task at hand. I’m procrastinating, and I know why: It’s really kind of a momentous occasion. We are launching a new line. The news will be official on Friday when we ship out PDFs of the first sell sheets for Series 1: Early Bergman. For the past couple of days, we’ve been ironing out the last details of the packaging and finalizing the twenty-six words that will appear on the back of every cover: “Eclipse presents a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed films in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.”

There’s something perilous about writing mission statements. Jon mentioned the famous one from Kane in an earlier blog. That one comes up in conversation a lot. It’s hard to walk the line between idealism and practicality, but that is exactly what we are trying to do with this new line. We’re nine years into the DVD market, and there are still hundreds of important films that can only be seen in old VHS versions or, if you’re lucky enough to live in a town with a good repertory theater, a new print might come around once every ten years or so.  

Almost exactly twelve years ago, we were fervently working on the launch of a big website with tons of content called voyagerco.com. This was in the fall of 1994, and if you're wondering how long ago that was in web years, Netscape 1.0 wasn't even released by mid-November of that year.

A bit of history here. The Voyager Company was started in 1983 by Aleen Stein, Bob Stein, and Roger Smith. That year Voyager published the first titles in the Criterion Collection–Citizen Kane and King Kong—on laserdisc. Janus Films got involved the following year when it licensed many of the movies that would become the backbone of the collection over the years, and soon thereafter, Janus became a partner in Voyager. The most important line that the company published was the Criterion Collection, but Voyager had a much larger mission than releasing great movies on laserdisc. In 1989, we started publishing CD-ROMs, and our CD companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is still one of my favorite things we’ve ever published. By 1992, the Internet started to evolve into a viable tool for reaching the world—as a way of selling to our customers, and equally important, delivering content. While basic by today’s standards, the home page that Peter helped develop was driven by content, ease of use and our overall publishing efforts, much as our website is today. Now back to the story . . .  

The Beales are back, and their squalor is making lives brighter all over again! I’ve always worshipped the gals and their strangely powerful fashion choices and nutty but often spot-on philosophies. Having fallen off the society pages and into total ­­­disarray—coexisting with raccoons, cats, and uninvited ghosts in their run-down East Hampton mansion—Edith and Little Edie instantly became my favorite cautionary tale, one that chilled my spine yet still seemed as dangerously inviting as a walk through pre–Rudolph Giuliani Times Square. If I ever had to sink that low and lose everything but the house, I’d want to do it their way, with sass and charisma surviving in the wreckage, at least whenever a camera was on. After going through the biggest social and mental crash landing since the decline of the Romanovs, the Beales came off as daft but somehow zingy, messy but still gorgeous, and always amazing company. Their banter is right out of an Edward Albee play, but just like Albee’s George and Martha, there’s some genuine affection amid all the screechy name-calling and rude finger-pointing. They need each other even more than they needle each other—and years later, it turns out the discerning public still needs them and all the variations on what was obviously the world’s first superbly twisted reality show.

You could almost picture diabolical cable-TV producers having cooked this one up: “Okay, ladies, you’ll live as wacky recluses, without TVs or clocks, and with only an occasional drop-in. You’ve only got each other, some corn, a few articles of clothing that can double as snoods, and a house full of cobwebs and regrets. Now, go!” Of course, this reality show was actually real, making it even more riveting—especially for Peeping Toms like me, who could convince themselves it was a trenchant learning experience about the wicked whims of high society.  

The Beales of Grey Gardens

Albert Maysles and David Maysles

2006

91 min

Color

1.33:1

The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, the sixties counterculture at large, and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.  

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

William Greaves

1968

75 min

Color

1.33:1

I had said that I was going to write about growing up with a projector in my attic, and Peter’s writing about home last week brought back some memories. Movies were cool. In the late sixties, my father would bring home the Films Incorporated catalog (they had new American films), and I got to pick something for him to bring home on 16mm. We screened lots of movies over the years, and several stand out. From Russia with Love—what could be cooler than having Bond in your attic? Here Comes Mr. Jordan—it’s sweet and made me a Claude Rains fan forever. A Night to Remember, which didn’t seem as sad to me as a kid as it does now: I had my first kiss with my high school girlfriend during that movie. The Lady Vanishes was perhaps my favorite of all. I traveled to England with my parents in the early seventies when my dad was meeting with Rank Film Distributors, and I looked for “Froy” on every train window. We screened a new print at the Janus 50th celebration in September for over 400 people. The reaction was wonderful, and seeing it on the big screen with an audience was a treat. I’ve seen each of these dozens of times and always look forward to the next time.

My knowledge from home made me the official audiovisual person at my elementary school. I was called in to thread the projector whenever the school was showing a film. Occasionally I would bring in a movie. It’s been almost forty years, but I remember like it was yesterday the day I brought in Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman. We showed the movie for the entire fourth, fifth and sixth grades, and for the last twenty minutes—the football game—the entire auditorium was on its feet, screaming. It didn't necessarily make me want to get into the business, but it's an experience that firmly etched into my mind the power of the movies. The Freshman is out as part of the Harold Lloyd collection from New Line. Rent it or buy it, and sit down with lots of people (Lloyd really needs an audience) and enjoy.  

We left St-Michel feeling uplifted and took a nice stroll south, past the Closerie des Lilas, the restaurant made famous by Hemingway, and through the Luxembourg gardens, where a film crew was laying dolly tracks and fitting counterweights on a small crane. There were no huge campers or craft-service trucks, no roped-off barricades of orange cones and police tape or PAs with squawking walkie-talkies. Making a film here seems as natural as shopping for bread or training the cascades of chrysanthemums that tumble from urns over the walls of the garden. We kept walking south, down past the cemetery and into the sleepy fourteenth, when we arrived finally at a little street called the rue Daguerre.

This perfectly Parisian enclave, practical and casual and very vividly alive, is the world of Agnès Varda. I had a sense of it from a lovely film she made called Daguerreotypes, but being there brought the film to life for me, much more than the other way around. This self-sufficient one-way street is a neighborhood unto itself, not trendy or hip in the least, just a pleasing mix of traditional French storefronts—the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker—interspersed with a couple of Southeast Asian food shops, a few clothing stores, and a remarkable representation of traditional craftspeople. Here you will find the cobbler and the chair-caning workshop, and over there, in that vitrine, is the neighborhood filmmaker. You will know her by the poster for Le bonheur in the window and the case of DVDs of Cleo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) just inside the door.  

We've been all over the city in the past couple of days, lugging around the fourteen-pound Janus box in a prototype Janus tote, feeling a little like traveling salesmen, but it's okay, because Paris is just so beautiful, even on these gray fall days. Yesterday we were on the Left Bank, starting near the fountain at St-Michel, where, in a small court behind a big carriage door, are the offices of Les Films du Jeudi, the production company of Pierre Braunberger, now run by his smart and charming daughter, Laurence. As we sat and chatted about Renoir, the Hakim brothers, and the mysterious French legal/business conundrum known as "authors’ rights," my eyes kept drifting around the room. There is so much to look at. Off at the far end are full-height back-lit translucent panels checkered with what appear to be frames of old color film. Staged in front of them is Braunberger's collection of antique camera equipment. Everything there is related to film. Drawings, posters, postcards are everywhere. Scattered throughout are the mischievous grinning cats drawn or printed by Laurence's good friend Chris Marker. It is one of those places that oozes a certain kind of comfort, more atelier than office, a genuinely safe place for art and artists.

From the end of the silent era through his death, in 1990, Pierre Braunberger is credited with producing about 100 films by such filmmakers as Godard and Truffaut and Resnais and even Renoir. (His only credit as director is for a little-known film called Bullfight, which has the distinction of being the first film ever released by Janus Films.) One of the things that truly set Braunberger apart is that nearly half of the films he produced were shorts, those works that are often least commercial and most personal or experimental. For an example, see Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick, written by Rohmer and directed by Godard, on our edition of A Woman Is a Woman.