The Academy Awards are handed out this Sunday, March 5, and to celebrate, we’ve got a contest for you: More than a dozen Criterion titles have received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Name five of them correctly, and you will be entered in a random drawing to win one of these films or an upcoming April release. Send your entries to contest@criterionco.com.
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Street date:
3/28 |
Remarkably, Luciano De Ambrosis, the young star of Vittorio De Sica’s extraordinary tale of lost innocence, already had considerable life experience to draw on when he was cast in The Children Are Watching Us (1944): he had lost his mother at age four. Shortly thereafter, his father, a laborer in Turin, sent him to try out as a walk-on in a local staging of Luigi Pirandello’s Liolà. The decision, perhaps an odd one, nevertheless proved fortuitous, as it brought together the child and De Sica, who was working on the production. Charmed by the boy’s expressive face and sensitivity, the director realized he had found his Pricò. In a new interview on our DVD release, De Ambrosis speaks of this experience and of the affection with which the director treated him at this difficult time in his life.
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Street date:
3/28
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Last year, the legendary French director Louis Malle received a long-overdue theatrical retrospective that toured more than twenty cities in the U.S. and Canada. With 3 Films by Louis Malle, we are happy to bring his masterworks to the homes of Criterion viewers, releasing Murmur of the Heart (1971), Lacombe, Lucien (1974), and Au revoir les enfants (1987) on DVD for the first time in the U.S. The titles come either in a box set (which features an added disc of supplements) or as individual releases.
Made during the 1970s and 1980s, these films were the apex of an expansive career that began with a bang. Malle started out as a deep-sea diver doing cinematography for Jacques Cousteau, receiving his first feature directing credit for The Silent World (1956), which he codirected with the famous underwater documentarian. The film won the Palme d’or, making Malle, at age 23, the youngest recipient of this honor to date. His first solo feature effort, the seductive thriller Elevator to the Gallows (1957), heralded the emergence of the director’s voice. And at the young age of 25, he had again made film history, using an improvised score by Miles Davis as the soundtrack for Gallows. The result, one of cinema’s sultriest moments, is coming soon to the Criterion Collection, with rare footage from the legendary recording session and an exclusive interview with Jeanne Moreau.
The three titles we present this month are among the director’s most intimate, drawing on his own youth. Murmur of the Heart and Lacombe, Lucien reflected Malle’s first forays into the world of adolescence and formed the stepping stones to his later masterpiece Au revoir les enfants. In a new documentary, featured exclusively as part of the box set, biographer Pierre Billard describes this period in Malle’s life, recounting how he, like Julien in Au revoir les enfants, attended a Catholic boarding school during the Nazi occupation where the headmaster helped to shield four Jewish students from the Gestapo. According to Billard, Malle couldn’t mine such deep and personal wells of experience for decades afterwards. Taken together, these three films form an astonishing trilogy about growing up in wartime and postwar France.
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In honor of our release of Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring in May, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on the tranquil brilliance of this director’s career. Made in 1949, Late Spring was the first of the director’s seasonal films, so called because of the ways in which they captured life’s cycles. (It should be noted, however, that not all of these films had something to do with seasons. The direct translation of his 1962 film An Autumn Afternoon is “The Taste of Mackerel.”) This tale of a widowed father who marries off his only daughter beautifully embodies this sense of transience. Return to his earlier films, such as Tokyo Story, Early Summer, Good Morning, and Floating Weeds, for further meditation.
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The Brooklyn Academy of Music, in conjunction with Janus Films, presents “Man in the Dunes: Discovering Hiroshi Teshigahara,” a new retrospective featuring five films from the great Japanese director, running from February 24 through March 19. From the extraordinary tone poem Antonio Gaudí to the documentary-inspired works Pitfall and Summer Soldiers to the thrilling The Face of Another and his masterpiece, Woman in the Dunes (pictured), Teshigahara has distinguished himself as one of the finest directors inside of Japan and out. For more information, go to www.BAM.org. Look for the films in a city near you this spring and fall.
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© 2006 The Criterion Collection
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Last year, when we released all-new editions of two classic Criterion titles—Fritz Lang’s M and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear—we were gratified by the flood of positive feedback that we received from customers and the press. More recently, subscribers to this newsletter got advance notice of our plans to update three Akira Kurosawa masterpieces: Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Sanjuro. If you’re sensing a pattern here, you’re right. This month it’s been eight full years since we released our first DVDs, and in that time a great deal has changed. Film transfer and digital restoration technology has improved dramatically, we’ve gained access to film elements that were never available to us before, and our archival reach has made supplemental materials available to us that we could never have laid our hands on when we were first starting out. So starting a year and a half ago, we began a highly selective campaign to overhaul some of the most important early releases in the Criterion canon.
While the response to the Kurosawa updates has been staggering, a number of you have written to us with important questions about how and why we choose to revise certain titles. We thought we should take a moment to address those questions here.
First, we want to assure you that from the start each Criterion release has always been the very best product we could make at the time. We would never issue an inferior version of a film, knowing that better source materials or supplements were available, just for the sake of “selling the same title twice” or “taking another whack at the marketplace.” In fact, on many occasions, we’ve done the opposite—held releases, scrapped newly created film masters and started over just prior to release when new film elements were discovered. As many longtime customers know, spine no. 1, Grand Illusion, was actually our fifteenth release, because just as we were about to launch our DVD line, the camera negative, lost since the Second World War, was rediscovered. We held our very first release to give our customers the benefit of that discovery, and that decision has set the tone for all our subsequent work.
In each case, there has to be a compelling reason for us to take a title out of print and reissue it in an all-new edition. Technology is an enormous factor. When we first produced an edition of Seven Samurai, the equipment to do high-definition digital restoration did not exist yet. The tools we had were slow and cumbersome, and despite spending weeks fixing the most egregious film damage, we could not even begin to approach our current standards. This time around, working from a newly struck fine-grain master, we’ve been able to roll through all 200-plus minutes frame by frame, addressing everything from simple tears, splices, and scratches to much more difficult problems, like shaky film movement and flicker. The results are simply stunning, and though we have been working on this new edition for more than a year (and still have a few months to go), we feel it’s been worth every bit of effort. Add in a complete array of new supplements, in addition to the original Mike Jeck commentary, and we are confident that customers who own the existing edition will feel this upgrade is a totally worthwhile investment, and that first-time viewers will be blown away.
A few of you have asked whether we will be offering any special pricing for current owners of discs that are being rereleased, and this is a difficult situation for us to address, for a variety of reasons. The production of these new releases is often more time consuming and more expensive than that of the original discs. We tried a discount price when we released an anamorphic upgrade of Charade, but the participation was quite low, and the entire process was neither time nor cost effective for the participants or for Criterion. Several online retailers were able to offer prices comparable to what we were offering, and we couldn’t reduce our rebate price further without unfairly competing with those retailers. So while we are still experimenting with different models, there are no specific plans for a rebate program at this point.
Finally, we want you to know that you can count on us to give you a heads-up when a new release is in the works. Many of you wrote in to us when we did our very first upgrade—Beauty and the Beast, in 2003—to say that you wished we’d let you know sooner that the title was going out of print for a new edition. Whether it’s for a total overhaul or a simple anamorphic upgrade, you’ll hear about it here first.
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