The Criterion Collection Newsletter

Monterey Pop on the big screen

Austin’s South by Southwest festival, which kicked off last weekend, is featuring a special screening of D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop to mark the fortieth anniversary of the legendary Monterey Pop Music Festival. If you happen to be around those parts on March 17, don’t miss the show, at the legendary Paramount Theater. Special guests scheduled to appear include Michelle Phillips, Lou Adler, and Andrew Oldham.

And there are lots of other great events going on all across the country, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Shohei Imamura retrospective and the ongoing Janus fiftieth-anniversary traveling road show, currently playing at Los Angeles’s American Cinematheque; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York; and the Seattle International Film Festival.

Last month, in anticipation of the Oscars (hooray, Martin Scorsese, whose The Last Temptation of Christ is a collection highlight!), we asked you to name five actors who appear in Criterion releases and have also won Academy Awards in the best-actor category. The winner, who will receive a free single-disc Criterion DVD, is Robin Imhof. And the four runners-up, who will receive Criterion T-shirts, are Matthew Weisman, Chris Leidig, Eric Robert Wilkinson, and Larry Lee. Click here to see the winning answers. Congratulations, everyone!

Overlord
Brute Force
La haine

And Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle


March is here, spring is on its way, and Eclipse has finally arrived. On March 27, Criterion debuts the first edition of Eclipse, a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed films in simple, affordable editions. For our first series, we present *Early Bergman, which includes five of the Swedish master’s lesser-known works of the forties, searing psychological dramas that, after this month, can no longer officially be called “buried treasures.” And Bergman’s just the tip of the iceberg: Louis Malle, Yasujiro Ozu, and so many more follow right on its heels—more info about Early Bergman* will soon be coming to you in a newsletter devoted exclusively to Eclipse. And, of course, another great selection of long-awaited Criterion titles arrives this month, as well. Happy viewing!		Monterey Pop on the big screen Austin’s South by Southwest festival, which kicked off last weekend, is featuring a special screening of D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop to mark the fortieth anniversary of the legendary Monterey Pop Music Festival. If you happen to be around those parts on March 17, don’t miss the show, at the legendary Paramount Theater. Special guests scheduled to appear include Michelle Phillips, Lou Adler, and Andrew Oldham. And there are lots of other great events going on all across the country, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Shohei Imamura retrospective and the ongoing Janus fiftieth-anniversary traveling road show, currently playing at Los Angeles’s American Cinematheque; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York; and the Seattle International Film Festival. Last month, in anticipation of the Oscars (hooray, Martin Scorsese, whose The Last Temptation of Christ is a collection highlight!), we asked you to name five actors who appear in Criterion releases and have also won Academy Awards in the best-actor category. The winner, who will receive a free single-disc Criterion DVD, is Robin Imhof. And the four runners-up, who will receive Criterion T-shirts, are Matthew Weisman, Chris Leidig, Eric Robert Wilkinson, and Larry Lee. Click here to see the winning answers. Congratulations, everyone! Overlord Brute Force La haine And Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle

STREET DATE: 3/13	One of Kon Ichikawa’s best-loved films, The Burmese Harp, like so much of his work, would not have been possible without the collaboration of his cherished wife and screenwriter, Natto Wada. In an interview on our new special-edition release of the film, actor Rentaro Mikuni reveals just what an influence and inspiration she was for her husband’s filmmaking. Very concerned with how Ichikawa shot her script, she would accompany the director for hours in the editing room to watch the daily rushes, while others weren’t allowed in. “And there were always reshoots after she watched the rushes,” recalls Mikuni. “In that sense, I think Ichikawa owed her a great deal in every respect while she was alive.”
STREET DATE: 3/13	Though Ichikawa’s devastating evocations of the grim realities of World War II anchor his breakthrough success *Fires on the Plain, the director himself did not serve in the war, in part because of a fortuitously timed appendicitis. During the war, Ichikawa worked as an assistant director in Tokyo. It was a difficult time and place to shoot, Ichikawa recalls in an interview recorded for Criterion: “We’d hear air-raid alarms go off, even during the day. Being the assistant director, I’d have to lead the actors to safety. Then, when it was over, we’d all exit the shelter and resume shooting.” Such memories would fuel Fires on the Plain* years later.
STREET DATE: 3/20	The Naked City’s claim to fame is the vivid realism of its setting: the mean streets of New York City. The first sound film shot primarily on location in New York, Jules Dassin’s film has a quasi-documentary style that screenwriter Malvin Wald reports, in his commentary for the disc, was actually quite hard-won, not to mention exacting. After a screening he went to congratulate Dassin and commented on the scene in which the killer tries to evade police capture by climbing the Williamsburg Bridge—two hundred feet below, you can just make out people leisurely playing tennis, standing out vividly in their white clothing. “Boy,” Wald said, “you were lucky to have those people in white clothing playing below the bridge.” “Lucky!” snorted Dassin indignantly. “I planted those tennis players there—they’re extras!”

	Sixty-eight-year-old Czech filmmaker Jirí Menzel is still going strong: his latest film, I Served the King of England, was selected for the main competition at last month’s Berlin International Film Festival. To brush up on your Czech new wave, check out Menzel’s breakthrough, the 1966 dark comedy of politics and sexual awakening Closely Watched Trains, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
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