With virtually no forewarning, four Robert Altman titles debuted on DVD this year, each in superlative editions on the Criterion label: the atmospheric 3 Women; Secret Honor, an adaptation of a stage play based on a post-Watergate Richard Nixon; the innovative, eleven-episode HBO series Tanner ’88 , which mixes fabricated presidential candidate Jack Tanner seamlessly within the party of actual 1988 presidential candidates; and Altman’s 1992 Short Cuts, a sprawling tableaux of characters and situations based on Raymond Carver’s short fiction. Criterion has favored many directors (Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini are regularly represented), and it’s remarkable to see a living director added to their canon with such devotion and in such a concentrated amount of time.
With the possible exception of Short Cuts (the film is considered a return-to-form after the ’80s proved less fruitful than Altman’s work in the ’70s), none of these titles are regularly mentioned at the top of Altman’s catalogue of work. Nonetheless, they exhibit an exceptional variety and cohesive cinematography exampled in the work of few - if any - of Altman’s contemporaries.
Supplements include commentaries on 3 Women and Secret Honor, communal interviews between Altman and Garry Trudeau and with Tim Robbins, and introductions to each Tanner ’88 episode with the actors in character, shot for the 2004 rebroadcast of the series on the Sundance channel. Secret Honor, notably, contains over an hour of interview footage of Richard Nixon, as well as an interview with Philip Baker Hall whose superlative performance is the only one in the film. Short Cuts is the most robust package, with the making-of documentary Luck, Trust and Ketchup, deleted scenes, and a paperback of Carver’s source stories.
3 Women
The Criterion Collection
Secret Honor
The Criterion Collection
Full Review
Short Cuts
The Criterion Collection
Full Review
Tanner ’88
The Criterion Collection
Full Review
By Rumsey Taylor
On a superficial level, these two late television works from Ingmar Bergman, available in their complete form for the first time in the United States, could not be more distinct. One is a minimalist, almost monochromatic dual-character study, the other a lush, sprawling portrait of an extended, multigenerational family. One is an intense, almost clinical postmortem of a relationship, a brutal stripping away of lies and façades; the other a hearty affirmation of the world of fantasy, the need for diversion, unreality and lies, and a defense against the restrictions of a cruel and apathetic reality. Taken together, however, these two series of films represent the culmination of a long filmmaking career, one that unifies both a satisfied pragmatism and a hard-won (if cautious) hopefulness.
Scenes from a Marriage, with its green-grey colors and flat-featureless interiors, has the quality of one of Johan’s psychological experiments at the “Psychotechnical Institute” (or indeed, one of Dr. Vergéus’ human experiments in The Serpent’s Egg). Its two protagonists, Johan and Marianne, are locked together in the confines of the frame for nearly the entire 300-minute duration of the film, performing what is surely one of Bergman’s most incisive dissections of a human relationship. It is under the cold eye of television and the rhythms of Bergman’s almost diagrammatic editing patterns that the two characters collide and tear apart, but the warmth of Liv Ullmann’s and Erland Josephson’s performances invest the film with a deep sense of pathos and melancholy even in its most violent and wrenching moments. Ultimately, however, after a decade of their alternately excoriating and liberating exchange, Johan and Marianne find some semblance and comfort with each other, “in a dark house in the middle of the night, somewhere in the world,” able to strip away the layers of expectation, bitterness and recrimination that separate them from each other and from a knowledge of themselves.
Where the earlier series struggles to expose its characters’ delusions and find some stable ground upon which they can build a relationship, Fanny and Alexander reaffirms the importance of fantasy and illusion, saving a place for an unreal “little world” inside of and apart from the wider, crueler world without. As Bergman’s “final statement,” the film reasserts the power and necessity of imagination as a defense against the greyness and responsibility of adult life. Unlike Scenes, which excludes children from its presentation of Johan and Marianne’s often regressive dialogue, Fanny and Alexander portrays a child’s world in which fantasy and reality can be indistinguishable, in which imagination’s power can illuminate as well as obscure. Each of the film’s adult characters - the perennially lusty Gustav Adolph, the scarred and sallow bishop, the directionless Emilie, the frustrated and farcically mediocre Carl, even the resigned and melancholy Helena - receives occasional revelations, but it is the children’s capacity for wonder, for credulity, for self-actualization that drives the world forward.
The Criterion Collection has presented these two series of films in exemplary (and nicely packaged) editions, capturing the gritty, pallid grain of Scenes and the lush, ecstatic color palette of Fanny and Alexander in both their full-length and attenuated theatrical versions. Interestingly, it would appear that Scenes from a Marriage, with its sense of a hermetically sealed relationship, suffers more from this abridgement than Fanny and Alexander and its seemingly boundless magnanimity and imagination. The three-hour cut of Scenes seems more like a greatest hits (no pun intended), whereas the world of Fanny and Alexander already feels so large that it cannot be contained in a single film. Nonetheless, both films form the resolute, compassionate, and essentially optimistic center of Bergman’s later work, affirming the unity of art and life and the possibility of true understanding of oneself and others.
Fanny and Alexander
The Criterion Collection
Scenes from a Marriage
The Criterion Collection
By Leo Goldsmith
The films of John Cassavetes are as awkward and frustrating as anything in real life. The rough, handheld style of his best work captures the harrowing weirdness of reality, alternately shocking, familiar and hilarious in its rawness: Gena Rowlands’ descent into madness in A Woman Under the Influence, Seymour Cassel’s violent and absurd resuscitation of a suicidal Lynn Carlin in Faces, or Ben Gazzara’s desperate run from his debts in The Killing of a Chinese. At his peak, Cassavetes is often able to construct compelling narratives from what seems an endless grab-bag of masterfully acted, improvisatory scenes with his stable of favorite actors: Rowlands, Gazzara, Cassel, and Peter Falk, amongst others.
Like Bergman, Cassavetes is concerned with the relationship between life and performance, and how the characters’ realities comprise a series of roles to enact for one another. But instead of probing his characters’ desires through the revelatory, dialectical processes of dialogue, Cassavetes emphasizes the interplay of surfaces and the ways in which the characters’ hardened, blustery exteriors subtly (or, often, unsubtly) convey their interior lives. (There’s also a lot more drinking in a Cassavetes film.) In this way, his films are punctuated by illuminating moments of awkwardness and ambiguity: Cosmo Vitelli micro-managing the theatrical integrity of his burlesque show from a pay phone with a bullet in his gut; old friends Dickie and Freddie drunkenly entertaining a prostitute with old gags and dance routines in her living room; Ben and his gang arguing the broader points of modern art in the (old) sculpture garden of MoMA.
Criterion’s eight-disc box set of five of Cassavetes’ films presents a substantial portion of the director’s career, including an original cut of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a disc of supplements solely for Faces, and Charles Kiselyak’s extensive documentary, A Constant Forge. From his freeform portrayals of thuglife in Shadows and Chinese Bookie to the brutal disintegrations of married and family life in Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes’ work constructs a world of constant combat and passion, fueled by alcohol, desperation, and desire.
John Cassavetes: Five Films
The Criterion Collection
By Leo Goldsmith
Prior to August 31, 2004, the late British director Alan Clarke was almost a complete unknown in the United States. After that date, he is still unknown, but now there is no more excuse for him to be as Blue Underground, a DVD label known more for releasing classic and not-so-classic entries in the zombie genre and the more obscure works in the oeuvre of Christopher Lee, quietly issued a boxed set including four of Clarke’s best films: Scum, The Firm, Made in Britain, and Elephant. Because these films were made for British television and not released theatrically (with the exception of Scum, which was remade specifically for release in theaters, albeit not in the United States), they remained virtually unseen except by those fortunate enough to catch their original airings or to see them in other off-hand manners. Although the release of the films alone on DVD would have been enough to warrant inclusion on this list, the package Blue Underground assembled for the boxed set is highly commendable. Included with the films (which are presented with all the grain inherent in 16 millimeter film beautifully intact) are commentaries by the producers and writers of the films as well as by actors featured in the films (including Ray Winstone and Tim Roth, whose careers Clarke launched), interviews with other cast and crew, and an hour-long documentary on Clarke that is more full of solid information than its short running time would indicate. This is no Laurent Bouzereau puff piece.
While the fact that the films are available only in this $100 box will no doubt discourage those unacquainted with Clarke’s work from making the purchase, I could not recommend it more strongly. Clarke’s films, particularly the ones in this set, are raw and blisteringly tough (the eighteen killings in quick succession in Elephant are more than even the strongest of constitutions can bear), but they are possessed of a fierce intelligence and a currency that will not soon weaken.
The Alan Clarke Collection
Blue Underground
Screening Log: Elephant, Scum
By Matt Bailey
Freaks and Geeks, the now-beloved television series from the 1999-2000 season that was killed by NBC through schedule changes, pre-emptions, and lack of support, had a long gestation period between cancellation and arrival on DVD. Because of the perceived small audience to which a pricey boxed set of all of the episodes would appeal and the enormous cost of clearing the home video rights to the dozens of ’70s and ’80s tunes often essential to the storylines, even the most devoted fans had to admit to themselves that they might never see a legitimate video release of the show. This year, fans not only got what they had been wishing for, but vastly more than they could ever have hoped. From Shout! Factory, a group of defectors from Rhino, came a six-disc collection of every episode of the show (including three that never aired during the show’s initial network run) accompanied by commentaries from nearly everyone who had anything to do with the show (including former NBC executives, parents of the cast, and fans of the show), deleted scenes, outtakes, auditions, commercials, and other behind-the-scenes footage—a total of more than forty hours of extra material. As a special bonus to fans, however, a limited number of “Deluxe Collector’s Editions” were made available that included everything in the retail set, plus two additional discs of extras, packaged in an eighty-page “yearbook.” It may have cost more than the DVD player to view it on, but it was a small price to pay for one of the best television shows never given the chance it deserved.
Freaks and Geeks: The Complete Series
Shout! Factory
By Matt Bailey
Beginning with Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, released in February of 2003, Criterion began reissuing titles from their catalogue in improved editions. The 400 Blows followed, and this year came their most improved reissue, Fritz Lang’s M.
The package spans two discs and is replete with new supplements—my favorite is A Physical History of M, which details the film’s multiple versions (Peter Lorre re-enacted his title role in French), its domestic banning in Germany, and manipulation in Nazi propaganda films. The most notable aspect of the reissue is the film’s restoration. A restored print of M was used for the Eureka! R2 edition of the film (highlighted in this article at mastersofcinema.org), released in 2003, but it is the subsequent Criterion edition that is arguably the finest visual incarnation of the film, with noticeably softer contrast. The film is over seventy years old, and its stark images are unnecessarily resonant and fresh.
Fritz Lang’s 1933 sequel to Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler is perhaps not as well-known as M, but like the earlier film, it too represents the core of Lang’s social, political and stylistic conscience. A strange cocktail, mixing the hyper-real, carefully delineated Berlin of M with the near-psychedelia of his early Expressionist films, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse neatly prefigures a Germany on the verge mass-delusion and insanity, with a sinister proto-Hitler (or even proto-bin Laden) lurking in the shadows, ready to seduce the world into his “Empire of Crime.” Like Louis Feuillade’s insidious gangsters and underworld syndicates, Mabuse’s empire is an invisible and incomprehensible network of ambiguous forces and aims, orchestrated by the disembodied voice of a man dead to the world, whose only discernable goal is chaos and terror.
As Tom Gunning has noted, the film’s world presents a profusion of signs and meanings (clues for Inspector Lohmann, directives for Mabuse’s minions), lost, garbled, or misconstrued through the channels of recording technologies, interrupted phone conversations, and the graphomaniacal ramblings of madmen. Echoing these messages and signals, Lang’s narration is ever-present in his bold use of sound and editing, bridging sequences with sounds, fragments of dialogue, and matching compositions that contrast, rhyme with and parody each other. Mabuse’s messages are continually subject to interpretation and reinterpretation from one perspective or another, like the forensic evidence at the crime lab or the asylum art on the walls of Professor Baum’s office. Lang’s film presents a modern world in which the mechanisms of the mass media can be manipulated (or, as in the film’s final image, erased) by the destructive powers of crime and disorder, a world in which stable, tangible meaning is ever fading at the end of a telephone line or receding behind a curtain.
M
The Criterion Collection
Full Review
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
The Criterion Collection
By Leo Goldsmith and Rumsey Taylor
For seven years of DVD, one of the most-desired releases of a classic film would have to have been John Ford’s My Darling Clementine. A decent transfer and a reasonable price would have been the answer to hundreds of prayers, but Fox kept fans waiting and waiting. Finally, through the Fox Studio Classics series, fans were rewarded for their patience with a disc featuring both cuts of the film—Ford’s original cut and the final release version, a short documentary explaining the differences between and reasons for the two cuts, and a commentary by Scott Eyman (one of the best commentarians in the business) with Wyatt Earp III—all for under fifteen dollars. I’ve gone on record on this site already with my unabashed love for this film, so I won’t go on further with the praise except to intimate that it is downright un-American not to own this disc.
My Darling Clementine
Fox Studio Classics
Full Review
By Matt Bailey
Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion was chosen to head The Criterion Collection’s library on DVD (it is spine #1 in a growing catalogue of over 250), but debuted after over 50 titles were released. The delay proved fruitful, as the film was introduced with a restored transfer and supplements previously unavailable on the Criterion laserdisc. Such precedence enforces the significance of this film; its spine number is a figurative ranking that introduces a collection of films that regulates cinema to many (if not most) of its cornerstone repertory titles.
In 2004, Renoir’s The Rules of the Game was given a similar yet more thorough treatment, debuting on the Criterion label in an elaborately-designed two-disc set after a history of absence, neglect, and abandon. The Rules of the Game was banned in the weeks following its 1939 release in France—a notorious incident that resulted in subsequently shorter versions of the film, none of which garnered any appeal in French audiences. Shortly after this began the Second World War. Nazis burned existent prints of the film, and the original negatives were destroyed when the Paris warehouse containing them was dismantled by Allied bombers.
Some twenty years later film enthusiasts Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand amassed what footage of the film they could find, reconstructing it according to Renoir’s notes and the film’s original script. The result was absent one of the original scenes at the Paris debut, but included an additional fifteen minutes. This new version debuted at the Venice Film Festival, and subsequently for to international audiences. In 1965, The Rules of the Game was exhibited to acceptant French audiences for the first time.
It is possible to justify this neglect, as the film brims with obscenity. In its most famous sequence the deaths of rabbits and pheasants amount in rapid succession; the number becomes nearly uncountable. One of the principle characters is an active infidel, and everyone is robustly selfish or dishonest. Yet, the film is totally sincere. These contradictions have even been noted Renoir’s own comments on the film, and this should illustrate - more so than any other example - the disparate interpretations the film encounters, if not encourages. At its very least, The Rules of the Game is an incomparably rich viewing experience. The Criterion edition - the most extensive incarnation of the film on video - is to be considered a gesture of necessary reverence to a masterpiece that was very nearly lost by its disparagement.
The Rules of the Game
The Criterion Collection
By Rumsey Taylor
When I saw my first Béla Tarr film, I was convinced that the filmmaker was playing a cruel joke on art film audiences around the world. With their grim, moody, black and white images, a minimum of portentous dialogue, and pacing that could lull the most patient of souls into a deep slumber, Tarr’s films seemed to have all the makings of a film snob’s wet dream.
Now with the long-awaited first appearance of Tarr’s films on DVD in Artificial Eye’s twofer, the Hungarian filmmaker’s work can be seen as something quite a bit greater and more rewarding than a parody of long-take stylistics and dreary existentialism. Like so many contemporary filmmakers (Hou, Wenders, and Kiarostami come to mind), Tarr emphasizes the unity and integrity of the enframed image with his impossibly lengthy tracking shots, often photographing whole ten-minute sequences in single takes that capture both the imprint of temporality and the minute details of performance.
Damnation, with its strangely nourish scenario, meditatively follows its protagonist’s disintegration from lovelorn divorcé to animalistic criminal. But the film seems not so much concerned with the events of its story than with its flat, alienating landscape, its surfaces and textures, and its interplay of motion and sound. Story information is conveyed in off-hand comments and actions, often viewed at a distance or through a thick downpour, and what the audience is left with is an obscure and ambiguous impression of human emotion and weakness.
Tarr’s most recent film, Werckmeister Harmonies, adapts László Krasznahorkai’s verbose novel, The Melancholy of Resistance (itself something of literary prank), translating the novelist’s acrobatic, page-long sentences into a mere 39 long-takes. Where Krasznahorkai’s novel details its story of a village idiot named Valuska and his confrontation with a deluded, rampaging mob in absurdly minute narrational detail, Tarr and his collaborators depict the story in skeletal form, extracting a similar amount of detail from only a handful of sequences. The effect brilliantly contrasts a post-modern resignation to nihilism (represented by the mob’s destructive impulse and by the relativity and disorder of the universe to which the film’s title alludes) with a detailed and immediately present real world, preserved on film in all of its spatial and temporal continuity.
Artificial Eye’s release provides the occasion to examine Tarr’s murky worlds in all of their gritty, grey detail. And with the disc’s inclusion of a fascinating, if deceptive interview with the comically dismissive Tarr, one can begin to penetrate a rich body of work that might otherwise remain oblique. That is, unless the joke’s on us.
The Werckmeister Harmonies / Damnation
Artificial Eye (R2)
By Leo Goldsmith
The Criterion Collection has always been very kind to David Cronenberg. Always more of a cult figure than even his Oscar-nominated fellow-traveler David Lynch, Criterion honored the Canadian director in 1996 with a lavish three-laserdisc edition of Dead Ringers. A $125 box for a film that made less than $10 million in its initial release and was already eight years removed from theaters must have been a hard sell to the Criterion brass, but it eventually became one of their most highly-regarded laserdisc sets, justifying a re-print with fewer features and a much lower price. When the Criterion DVD of the original laserdisc edition went out of print due to rights issues a few years ago, Cronenberg was left without representation in the venerable Criterion Collection. This was soon rectified by a fine-if-not-great two-disc set of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch in 2003, but the greater atonement came this summer when Criterion quietly announced via their website that they would be releasing a two-disc edition of what is perhaps Cronenberg’s most definitive film, Videodrome. No film-and-EPK hack job this, Criterion’s DVD of the film features two equally superb commentaries (one by the director and his cinematographer, Mark Irwin, and another by stars James Woods and Deborah Harry); stills galleries with literally hundreds of images of the production, the effects, and the marketing; an extensive documentary on the film’s plentiful special effects; a 1982 discussion with Cronenberg, John Carpenter, and John Landis; and a remarkable short film, Camera, that Cronenberg made in 2000 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival (the same occasion that resulted in Guy Maddin’s spectacular short, The Heart of the World, and Michael Snow’s Prelude). Best of all is what the DVD set does not feature: there is no external critical or scholarly framework that attempts to steer the viewer toward a single interpretation of or reaction to the film’s dense array of textual and subtextual messages. All of the supplementary material gathered for the film, including the commentaries and the disc’s ingenious package design, are concerned with providing a film-historical context for the movie, not with attempting to provide an explanation for it. That, thankfully, is left to the viewer.
Videodrome
The Criterion Collection
Full Review
By Matt Bailey
Matt Bailey, Leo Goldsmith, and Rumsey Taylor | © 2004 notcoming.com
