The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
May 16, 2017 — Two decades after its premiere, the groundbreaking IFC Channel show Split Screen celebrated its anniversary with a Criterion Live! event, presented last Wednesday in partnership with the Film Society of Lincoln Center and FilmStruck. Series creator and host John Pierson...
On the Channel
Apr 29, 2017 — With his IFC TV series Split Screen, creator and host John Pierson gave viewers an all-access pass into the idiosyncratic world of independent cinema. Originally aired in 1997, the magazine-format program highlighted America’s most buzzed about young filmmakers and the...
Apr 21, 2017 — Twenty years after it first premiered on the IFC Channel, the pioneering program Split Screen stands as a priceless portrait of America’s wide-ranging, often quirky filmmaking community coming into its own. This irreverent show mixed footage of creator and host...
On the Channel
Mar 18, 2017 — The landscape of late-nineties American film culture found a loving chronicler in John Pierson, whose groundbreaking TV series Split Screen premiered on IFC in 1997 and now has its streaming home on the Criterion Channel. In this excerpt from the...
On the Channel
Feb 3, 2017 — Created, hosted, and written by independent-cinema pioneer John Pierson, the magazine-format TV series Split Screen premiered on IFC in 1997, giving viewers an insider’s look at some of the country’s most exciting young filmmakers and their communities. The first six...
Feb 2, 2017 — In her just-released Sundance hit The Lure, Agnieszka Smoczyńska evokes both the decadence and decrepitude of 1980s Poland through the adventures of Silver and Gold, two man-eating mermaid sisters who decide to go terrestrial and soon become a nightclub singing...
Sneak Peeks
Jan 18, 2017 — Made when he was just twenty-nine, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s twenty-second feature, Fox and His Friends, showcases the New German Cinema icon in front of the camera as a working-class gay man who wins the lottery and falls prey to a...
On the Channel
Dec 11, 2016 — Earlier this week, we shared our interview with John Pierson, creator and host of the TV series Split Screen, which chronicled the emergence of a vibrant American independent film movement at the turn of the century. Almost two decades after...
Sep 9, 2016 — To celebrate the release of this revelatory self-portrait that weaves together footage from Johnson’s twenty-five-year career as a globetrotting documentary cinematographer, we’ve compiled a selection of writing about the film.
Sep 2, 2016 — Returning for its first theatrical run in fifteen years, this ten-part meditation on the Ten Commandments centers on the residents of a housing complex in late-Communist Poland, charting the moral and philosophical dilemmas that arise as their lives intersect.