The Criterion Collection
May 3, 2016 — Last night, HBO premiered British filmmaker Adam Benzine’s Oscar-nominated documentary Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah. In interviews and dug-up footage, Benzine’s film traces the twelve-year production of Shoah, Lanzmann’s groundbreaking nine-hour 1985 Holocaust documentary. Shoah, which eschewed archival images...
Short Takes
Mar 7, 2012 — This clip is the middle section of Hollis Frampton's Surface Tension (1968). In it, we see a sped-up journey from Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park in New York City. Frampton considered the bridge (along with Stonehenge) to be "one of the primary aesthetic experiences...
Mar 17, 2008 — During the Second World War, when Hiroshi Teshigahara was a schoolboy, Japan’s cities—above all his hometown, Tokyo—were mercilessly firebombed. He, and his future associates in countless artistic undertakings, returned to a landscape of bleak ruins. The adolescent Hiroshi was particularly...
May 15, 2000 — Herk Harvey described to me a strange outdoor ballroom he had seen rotting on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. . . and said he’d like to make a film about creatures rising from the lake and doing a...
Jan 22, 2009 — Last fall the Criterion Collection and Janus Films joined forces to acquire a first-run film for theatrical distribution—a rare move for two companies best known for handling the classics of cinema history. Revanche, both an existential thriller and a quiet,...
Feb 10, 2003 — The poet Paul Eluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car. Ordinarily, I would settle for that. However, with so much being written about the film...
Aug 1, 2016 — Back in January, veteran actor Keith Baxter stopped by the Criterion offices for lunch and regaled us with memories of his experience working with Orson Welles.
Apr 26, 2016 — Combining Turner Classic Movies’ programming experience with Criterion’s library of films and supplemental content made all the sense in the world.
The legendary actor and director stopped by for a brief visit to the Criterion Closet, where he shared some of his Italian-cinema favorites and talked about his experience working with Agnès Varda.
The actor returns to the Criterion Closet, where he selects a few movies to watch with his kids, talks about his magical experience viewing Hobson’s Choice, and picks up a new edition of a film by his favorite director, Abbas...