Criterion News and Discussion

[Chest Rockwell]

As cool as it is, all I'm seeing is people's hopes being crushed every time they mention a movie that they don't end up releasing.

[gob]

I'm heavily considering this for Christmas...

To anyone that owns it, is there enough to justify multiple double dipping? I've got 8 of the films already but it's so enticing...

[squints]

The book that comes along is a great read with awesome photography, I only previously owned two or three so i think it was worth it, but...the lack of special features is shitty.

[MacGuffin]

To anyone that owns it, is there enough to justify multiple double dipping? I've got 8 of the films already but it's so enticing...

Most films in the set are available separately in Criterion editions. The "Essential Art House" versions are just the movies, though, without the audio commentaries, background documentaries and other extras in the elaborate Criterion releases.

"We didn't make it for the true Criterion fan. It wasn't our goal for the people who had 80 percent of the films to make them buy this to get the other 20 percent," Turell said.

Criterion will continue to release its own editions of films in the "Essential Art House" set, Turell said. The set was created for cinema lovers who want an instant collection of some of the world's greatest films, Turell and Becker said.

[gob]

Might just get the book and then get the dvds of these movies as and when as I'm a whore for special features.

[Gold Trumpet]

They finally jump on the blog bandwagon:

http://www.criterionco.com/blog/index.html

And (so far) it's a good blog. They promise updates twice a week and recently did a great entry on the battle between HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray Disc and why Criterion stays out of the battle. The posts are candid and thoughtful and try to deal with the questions Jon Mulvaney ignores.

[edison]

From criterionforum.com -

At a lecture last Friday evening on Cinema Nova, Udigrudi and Tropicalia, NYU Professor Robert Stam mentioned that Criterion will be releasing Macunaíma, the 1969 Cinema Novo classic by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. He showed clips from a beautifully restored DVD copy of the film that he said was given to him by the family of the filmmaker.

Stam is a reliable source as he has provided commentaries for the Criterion edition of Contempt and an interview for Jules and Jim. He mentioned that every time he's worked with Criterion he's pressured them to release Macunaíma, and it looks as if they've come around.

[A Matter Of Chance]

From criterionforum.com -

At a lecture last Friday evening on Cinema Nova, Udigrudi and Tropicalia, NYU Professor Robert Stam mentioned that Criterion will be releasing Macunaíma, the 1969 Cinema Novo classic by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. He showed clips from a beautifully restored DVD copy of the film that he said was given to him by the family of the filmmaker.

Stam is a reliable source as he has provided commentaries for the Criterion edition of Contempt and an interview for Jules and Jim. He mentioned that every time he's worked with Criterion he's pressured them to release Macunaíma, and it looks as if they've come around.

This makes me very happy. Now all they have to do is release 'Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol' and all will be well.

[MacGuffin]

New DVDs: Formidable 50: A DVD Collection Drawn From the Janus Vaults
Source: New York Times

In 1909 P. F. Collier & Son published a 50-volume set of the world's great literature as chosen by Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard. For the ambitious, go-getting Americans of the time, always eager to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the collection became an immediate success, and Mr. Eliot's "five-foot shelf" found a place in countless American homes as it was published and republished over much of the 20th century.

Almost 100 years later, the Criterion Collection has issued a parallel compilation, "Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films." Though it requires significantly less shelf space (about three and a half inches), this collection is just as useful as Mr. Eliot's for cinematically curious Americans. Packaged in a brown fabric binder, the set includes an album of 50 DVDs drawn from the holdings of Janus Films, the distinguished distribution company founded in 1956, as well as a 240-page book of notes, credits and stills on all 50 titles.

Janus Films does not have quite the clout of Harvard, but it says a lot about the central role Janus has played in American film culture that the selections made by a modestly staffed for-profit distribution house have come to assume almost as much canonical authority as Mr. Eliot's choices. Jean Renoir ("The Rules of the Game") may have replaced Jean Racine, and Ingmar Bergman ("The Seventh Seal") may have stepped in for Martin Luther, but it's hard to argue with the artistic significance and historical importance of the great majority of the movies in this volume, an amazing number of which continue to figure on critics' polls of the best films of all time.

There isn't enough space here to catalog every title in "Essential Art House" (a complete list, along with a discount price on the set, can be found at the Criterion Collection Store, at store01.prostores.com/servlet/criterionco/Detail?no=31). Suffice it to say that if you attended a repertory theater in the 1960s or '70s, took a film course in college or have seen more than one movie by Woody Allen, you have been exposed to at least some of the films in this collection: films like Michelangelo Antonioni's "Avventura," François Truffaut's "400 Blows," Fritz Lang's "M," Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" and Luis Buñuel's "Viridiana," along with dozens of others that constitute the backbone of the art house tradition.

These are movies to be returned to again and again — justification enough for owning Janus's three-and-a-half-inch shelf, even with its breathtaking suggested retail price of $850. (In fairness, that breaks down to $17 a title, about half of what Criterion's releases generally go for — though the discs in this collection don't include the commentaries and other supplementary materials that give the Criterion discs their extra value.)

Janus Films was formed in Boston by Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey. They were friends from Harvard who had acquired the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and the 55th Street Playhouse in Manhattan but were having trouble filling their schedules with the small number of films available from early specialized distributors like Walter Reade and Richard Davis.

Janus's first acquisition was Pierre Braunberger's documentary "Bullfight," followed by two early films by an unknown Italian director named Federico Fellini, "The White Sheik" and "I Vitelloni." All of them lost money (though "The White Sheik" is still part of the Janus library and is in the current set). Janus's first hit came in 1958 in the unlikely form of "The Seventh Seal," with its indelible image of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) engaged in a chess game with Death (Bengt Ekerot).

Other Bergman films followed — "Wild Strawberries" and "The Virgin Spring" are also part of the set — and then critical successes like Sergei Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible, Part II," "The 400 Blows" and "L'Avventura." But actual profits remained elusive.

For help, Mr. Haliday and Mr. Harvey turned to an old Harvard friend, William Becker, who in turn contacted an acquaintance of his own: Saul J. Turell, a documentary filmmaker who had been working in acquisitions for Walter Reade. "I asked Saul if he wanted to join me in taking over Janus Films," said Mr. Becker, speaking from Los Angeles, where he was searching for new acquisitions at the American Film Market. "And he said yes, and that's how it all happened."

Janus might have remained just another independent distribution company, but its new owners had a eureka moment. The landscape was littered with important European films that had never been distributed in the United States or had had their original licensing deals expire. With new public television outlets and revival theaters springing up around the country, these films seemed unlikely to lose their value over the years. At a time when rights to a foreign film in the United States could be had for less than $50,000, Mr. Becker and Mr. Turell (who died in 1986) set about systematically acquiring the most prestigious films available, including some Hollywood classics.

"We made a deal with RKO for a few little films like 'Citizen Kane,' 'King Kong' and 'Top Hat,' " Mr. Becker recalled. "The principal buyer was me, but we all put our heads together."

Armed with its formidable library, Janus no longer had to depend on theatrical bookings to do business: the 16-millimeter, nontheatrical business — aimed at colleges and local film societies — exploded as the 60s gave way to the 70s. In the 1980s, when the nontheatrical business collapsed in the face of competition from home video, Janus was ready again. In 1983 it formed a partnership with a start-up laser disc company, the Criterion Collection, and pioneered the use of supplementary materials and filmmakers' commentaries. By the time Jonathan Turell and Peter Becker, sons of the founders, joined Janus in 1993, DVDs were about to take off, and Criterion, thanks to its experience in laser discs, was already ahead of the game.

Peter Becker, who became the president of Criterion in 1997 and helped to introduce the DVD line a year later, credits his forebears with the company's success. "The whole Criterion idea is a direct outgrowth of the philosophy that Janus developed" over its history, he said from his New York office. "Janus had the insight that, much like the Penguin Classics or the Modern Library, there is a place for a curated collection of classic films — that cinema art is there to be collected like any other art."

"The reason we created this 50-disc set was as much for ourselves as anything else," Mr. Becker said. "We felt that we needed to create an appropriate and substantial milestone for this legacy. There aren't a lot of small, independent companies, especially in the media business, that get to be 50 years old at all."

[grand theft sparrow]

From the latest newsletter:

[edison]

Dassin's The Naked City?

[Ravi]

The complete works of Kevin Bacon?

[edison]

Feburary Criterion's are up:







No covers for these:
Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel
Paul Robeson 4 disc set with 8 films


     

[modage]

whoa!  Bicycle Thieves?!  first, i'd never heard it called that so i had to look it up to make sure it wasnt like a sequel or something!   i'm glad i held off buying this for so long.  i didnt even realize they were planning to release this.

[The Perineum Falcon]

Whoa , those are great. And the last one is ESPECIALLY gorgeous.