Now that April has turned to May, Late Spring has officially arrived. And in honor of our release of Yasujiro Ozu’s early masterwork, we thought we’d try a haiku contest. Modern haiku poets consider any subject matter suitable, as long as it has the traditional three lines. In that spirit, we’d like you to write on a specific topic: your haiku must reflect on Criterion in some way—the company, a particular film, whatever strikes your fancy. The 5-7-5 syllable structure is standard, but we’ll allow some flexibility here!
Send your Criterion haikus to contest@criterionco.com before Monday, May 21. The contest will be judged by Donald Richie, the author of some forty books on Japan, including the definitive works on Kurosawa and Ozu. The winners will receive a DVD of Late Spring or any other title of equal or lesser value released prior to our May lineup. The winning haikus will be published in next month's newsletter and by submitting an entry you have granted us permission to reprint your name and submission.
We’ve also got a special offer for Criterion customers at Amazon.com. Between May 2 and May 18, Amazon is offering 45 percent off a number of Criterion releases, including Grey Gardens, Young Mr. Lincoln, Ugetsu, Short Cuts, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and our acclaimed new box set The Complete “Mr. Arkadin.” Meanwhile, Tower Records is continuing its promotion of Criterion titles by highlighting and discounting a rotating group of thirty-two specially selected films on in-store end caps each month. Check them out.
As always, happy viewing.
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Street date:
5/9 |
When Ozu inaugurated his series of seasonal films with Late Spring, actress Setsuko Hara was right there with him. Here playing a young woman who, closely bonded with her father (Chishu Ryu, another Ozu regular), must come to terms with her inevitable marriage and departure, Hara went on to star in six Ozu films over a twelve-year span, from 1949 to 1961 (including Early Summer and Tokyo Story). In her career, she portrayed an array of women, from the fiercely independent to the quietly conciliatory. And the real Setsuko Hara was ever her own woman. Her decision to retire from acting at the young age of forty-three ignited criticism: she was accused of behaving in an “unwomanly” manner. Yet she simply wanted to assert her own identity. She moved out of the spotlight and was never heard from again. Watching her delicate, masterful work in Late Spring, you’ll see what her fans knew they would miss: the entire world in every gesture and nuance.
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Street date:
5/23
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To help create an atmosphere of authentic desperation for Viridiana’s climactic beggars’ banquet, Buñuel cast an actual beggar in the role of the leper. Once a theater extra, the man had fallen into alcoholism and poverty by the time Buñuel cast him. “The first day at the studio, he urinated behind the set, on a fuse box, causing a short circuit that plunged the set into darkness,” recalled Buñuel. “The technicians were furious.” Even more furious were the censors. Perhaps too authentically degraded, Viridiana was met with pure indignation by the Catholic world. It was seen as anticlerical and vulgar, a mockery of Christian morality. Though it won the Palme d’or at Cannes, Spain disavowed it, and the film was banned there from 1961 to 1977. To this day, its supposedly most blasphemous moment (the beggars’ banquet arranged to resemble the Last Supper) remains its most iconic.
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Street date:
5/23
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For her Academy Award–winning 1976 documentary Harlan County USA, which follows a long and grueling coal miners’ strike in Kentucky, Barbara Kopple was driven to capture every moment of human drama that she possibly could, even when it seemed impossible—or illegal. Strike activist Bessie Parker, whose personal tale is just one of many depicted in Kopple’s compassionate, landmark film, had one of the film’s most dramatic moments—yet Kopple had to perform some special maneuvers to even get it on camera. Arrested for assaulting a police officer who had assaulted her mother, Parker defended herself in a local hearing. Though Kopple wasn’t allowed to shoot inside the courtroom, she hid a microphone on Parker, and then her resourceful cinematographer, Hart Perry, peeked his camera through the slightly opened courthouse door to capture the proceedings. Though low-lit and grainy, the scene remains one of the film’s most compelling and memorable.
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Street date:
5/9
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One of the many gifts of Truffaut’s French new wave trailblazer The 400 Blows was the discovery of the fourteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud. As the iconic little lost boy Antoine Doinel, Léaud brought both intensity and insouciance to the role, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else having pulled it off. It seems as though the part was tailor-made for Léaud’s boyish grit, yet Truffaut auditioned more than sixty children for the role. Our release includes rare audition footage from the time, which you can view by clicking here, featuring Léaud, Patrick Auffay (who would play Doinel’s best friend, René, in the film), and Richard Kanayan, who was cast as one of Doinel’s classmates and would later appear in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. The 400 Blows is now available for individual sale or as part of the deluxe The Adventures of Antoine Doinel box set.
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Alida Valli, the enigmatically beautiful Italian actress who would become something of an inadvertent horror icon after her appearance in such films as Lisa and the Devil and Suspiria, died on April 22, at age 85. One of her most striking early roles was in Georges Franju’s nightmarish and surreal Eyes Without a Face, an exquisite tale of terror that remains as harrowing today as it was upon its 1959 release. This chiller, about a surgeon who, with the help of his assistant (played by Valli), kidnaps young girls for a fiendish skin-grafting experiment, was released at a time when horror films were becoming bolder and more daring—from the U.S. (Hitchcock’s Psycho) to England (Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom) to Japan (Nobu Nakagawa’s Jigoku).
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© 2006 The Criterion Collection
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3 Films by Louis Malle
“This Criterion Collection package brings together (with the usual fabulous extras) three mini-masterpieces . . . Malle is matched only by François Truffaut as a memorializer of youth in all its enthralling achiness.”
—Time
“This new Criterion box, 3 Films by Louis Malle, as well as the company’s April release of Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, finally makes some of his most important films available for home viewing.”
—New York Observer
“Few directors have been able to portray the agonies and joys of growing up with such a mix of poetry, heart, and artistry.”
—Metro Source
The Children Are Watching Us
“One of the greatest depictions of the loss of innocence in cinematic memory.”
—The Leader
“This fine transfer highlights, in its excellent contrast and sharp resolution, the great stylistic contribution of De Sica’s early work.”
—New York Times
“A most welcome addition to the Criterion catalogue and a film that is still heart-wrenching and powerful, without ever descending into easy sentimentality.”
—Turner Classic Movies
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Selected by Neil LaBute
Neil LaBute has directed five films, including In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, and Nurse Betty. He has contributed supplemental interviews to two Criterion DVD editions: Mike Leigh's Naked and Eric Rohmer's Love in the Afternoon, the latter part of our upcoming deluxe box-set edition of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales.
1. Salesman / Grey Gardens—The brothers Maysles offer up two of their most stunning documentaries, and, frankly, I can’t choose between them. Beautiful essays on what it is to be American and, more importantly, human; visually hypnotic and oddly life affirming. Did I mention that they’re also, by turns, hilarious and heartbreaking?
2. Loves of a Blonde—One of my favorite films by Milos Forman and so bittersweet as to leave an aftertaste. Glorious in black and white and poignant as hell, it’s one of those films that reminds you why you fell in love with cinema in the first place.
3. Scenes from a Marriage—Quite simply the best there is: Ingmar Bergman at the height of his powers and two of the fiercest performances captured on camera. This offers one the chance to compare the theatrical and television versions—two chances to be completely blown away. It’s unmissable.
4. Floating Weeds / A Story of Floating Weeds—Ozu in stunning color and black and white. One of the many great Criterion packages that offer two films together for the viewer to admire. The theatrical aspects of this set appealed to me, but I was ultimately won over by the heartbreaking simplicity of Ozu’s aesthetic.
5. I vitelloni—A film that continues to grow in my estimation every time I see it, and one that laid the bedrock for the Fellini explosion that was about to take place. So alive and spilling over with character and incident, it feels like a peek into the filmmaker’s own diary. It also features an amazing Nino Rota score and performances to die for.
6. Eyes Without a Face—Georges Franju created a one-of-a-kind horror film that moves you more than it scares you. It has some of cinema’s most potent images and a score that haunts you for days. The Criterion extra of his short documentary Blood of the Beasts is spectacular beyond words—beautiful and disturbing in equal measure.
7. Mamma Roma—A great picture by Pasolini that really swept me away. I remain a passionate admirer of his Accatone!, but I was unprepared for the ferocity of Anna Magnani’s performance here: it’s like watching the birth of something that is actually new and completely wild, right before your eyes. A stunner.
8. Contempt—I can’t get enough of this film, and it is so cleanly presented here that the famously malcontented Godard himself must be proud of the results. The great film about film, this disc is perfect, from the amazing cover art to the short documentaries that show the difficulties of shooting a film with an icon like Bardot in tow. And if you aren’t swept away by the Georges Delerue score, you really need to check your pulse.
9. Black Narcissus—The most purely beautiful film I can think of and done up in a pristine transfer here; the fact that the film was shot at Shepperton Studios, in England, actually blows the mind. The acting is impeccable, and the fevered colors and close-ups are as close to a cinematic wet dream as I ever need to have. Pressburger & Powell in the throes of a most singular cinematic vision.
10. Kind Hearts and Coronets—A perfect black comedy with one of the most underappreciated central performances in film history, by Dennis Price (and a handful of genius ones by Alec Guinness). Truly funny and as dark as sin, this is a film that still feels ahead of its time. The attached “American” ending helps remind us just how annoyingly safe and predictable American tastes can be—did we really need to be reminded?
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