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Street date: 9/20
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An Angel at My Table proved to be a pivotal film in the life of nearly every person who worked on it. Though not director Jane Campion’s first feature film (that would be Sweetie), it was the film that launched her to worldwide acclaim. Stuart Dryburgh, in his debut as a feature DP, would go on to work with Campion on The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady, as well as on Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors and John Sayles’s Lone Star, among many other films. Angel production designer Grant Major later won an Oscar for his work as Peter Jackson’s PD on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and star Kerry Fox, in her first film role, has since worked with such prominent film directors as Danny Boyle and Michael Winterbottom. |
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Street date: 9/20
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In a new video interview on this disc, Masculin féminin star Chantal Goya recounts that she received copious praise for her acting skills after the release of the film, even though she had never acted before. In particular, her friends praised her ability to appear interested and moved by the erotic Swedish film that she and Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) go to see. In the interview, Goya reveals that, to achieve the necessary reaction from her, director Jean-Luc Godard told her that her character, Madeleine, was watching Gone with the Wind. |
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Street date: 9/20
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Perhaps the most memorable scene in Mike Leigh’s searing Naked is the now famous “bar code” speech, in which the volcanic millenarian Johnny (played by the incomparable David Thewlis) prophesizes the imminent apocalypse while taking shelter in an empty office building. In an audio commentary on the DVD, Thewlis tells of how the initial inspiration for the pivotal scene came from a leaflet describing the bar code as the mark of the beast, which was handed to him by a Christian fundamentalist proselytizer in Piccadilly Circus! |
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Street date: 9/27
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Upon its release, in 1980, Nicolas Roeg’s controversial tale of sexual obsession proved shocking not only to audiences but also to the film’s distributor. In a video interview on the DVD, producer Jeremy Thomas tells of how Rank—the venerable studio responsible for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic films, among many others—removed the company’s famous logo of Bombadier Billy striking a gong from the head of the film, because of its provocative content. In the same interview, Roeg reports that a member of the Rank Organization declared it “a sick film for sick people by sick people.” Criterion's release of Bad Timing is the sick film’s first appearance on home video in the U.S. |
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Street date: 9/27
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In his audio commentary on this release, David Bowie reveals that somewhere in the rich creative ferment created by the unholy union of himself, Nic Roeg, Walter Tevis, Rip Torn, and Buck Henry while making The Man Who Fell to Earth, the wan rocker fell under the impression that the filmmakers wanted him to write the music for the film. After months of scraping together bits and pieces, it dawned on him that he had never been asked to write a soundtrack at all. So, rather than put the music in the film, Bowie used the new material as the basis for a different project—his now classic LP Low. |
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One of the great cult horror films of all time, Herk Harvey’s chilling Carnival of Souls languished in the murky world of bootlegs and late-night TV for decades. When Criterion decided to give this long-sought-after film its due, we found more than just a legendary piece of B horror. We discovered the fascinating legacy of the Centron Corporation, the Lawrence, Kansas–based producer of industrial and educational films, where director Harvey and screenwriter John Clifford worked for decades and learned their crafts (excerpts from a number of expertly made Centron films appear on the DVD). Carnival was made on a meager budget, but Harvey and Clifford nevertheless had high aspirations, striving to merge horror with European art film stylistics (the “look of a Bergman” and “feel of Cocteau”). Amazingly, they succeeded. And, although they never made another feature, Harvey had no regrets, recounting in an interview, “People always ask, ‘How come you made only one film?’ And I say, ‘Hell, I’ve made over four hundred!’”
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Answer the following questions correctly and you could win one of our September releases!
* From which Criterion film was director Martin Scorsese fired?
* Which composer has scored the most Criterion films?
* Which Criterion filmmaker has directed Nicholas Ray, Norman Mailer, Tina Turner, and Carly Simon on-screen?
E-mail your answers to contest@criterionco.com.
Three winners will be drawn at random from the correct entries, and each will receive one September Criterion release of their choice. The answers will be posted in next month’s newsletter.
No purchase required. U.S. and Canadian addresses only. |
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Fans of Japanese swordplay are in for a treat with "Summer Samurai", a collection of classic chanbara films—including Harakiri, Samurai Rebellion, The Sword of Doom, and Kill!—currently running at New York’s Film Forum. Films from this series will continue across the country throughout the fall and winter, hitting Minneapolis’s Oak Street Cinema in September and Los Angeles’s American Cinematheque in October and November.
If you prefer continental asceticism and transcendence over bloodshed and carnage, be sure to check out Robert Bresson’s breathtaking Pickpocket at the Pacific Film Archive, in Berkeley, California, and the Detroit Institute of Arts in the first week of September and at New York’s Film Forum and Toronto’s Cinematheque Ontario in October.
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In honor of her introduction to the collection this month, with An Angel at My Table, we asked director Jane Campion to contribute a list of Criterion films that are on her mind at the moment:
Seven Samurai
The Night Porter
The Fireman’s Ball
That Obscure Object of Desire
Contempt
Tokyo Story
La strada
Scenes from a Marriage
Samurai I – Musashi Miyamoto
For Campion’s comments on these films, click here.
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Pickpocket
Robert Bresson, 1959
Ran
Akira Kurosawa, 1985
The Tales of Hoffmann
Powell & Pressburger, 1951
Ugetsu
Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953 |
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©2005 The Criterion Collection
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