Global Discoveries on DVD

Hyperproductive filmcritic JONATHAN ROSENBAUM writes an extensive column for cinema scope about global discoveries on DVD for already some years now. He discovered a huge amount of rare, bizarre and wonderful stuff from all over the world, but also reflects on booklets, specials, film history, availability and lately Prices: »A certain confession-cum-apology regarding this column is in order. Because I have a legitimate reason for deducting the costs of the DVDs I buy from my taxes, and a no less legitimate way of requesting and receiving review copies from many DVD labels, I haven’t always been as attentive as I could be about consumer prices, especially when it comes to ordering certain things from abroad. So, by way of partial compensation, this will be a column focusing on prices...« Find below the list of his columns and the respective links.

Perversities
For a variety of reasons—and the nuts and bolts involved in writing this column are foremost among them—I’ve never rented a DVD. But friends who do this with some regularity report back to me. Some of their experiences are substantially different from mine because my friends aren’t receiving the same texts that I do along with the movies. Subscribers to Netflix don’t see the same booklets, and some patrons of video stores like Blockbuster don’t even see the same cover copy and cover art...

Perversities
The elegantly designed, beautifully produced multizone box set “6 Films by Luc Moullet” that’s available from blaq out (www.blaqout.com) actually consists of seven long films by Moullet—Brigitte et Brigitte (1966), Les contrebandières (The Smugglers, 1967), Une aventure de Billy le Kid (A Girl Is a Gun, 1970), Anatomie d’un rapport (Anatomy of a Relationship, 1975), Genèse d’un repas (Origins of a Meal, 1978), Les sièges de l’Alcazar (The Sieges of the Alcazar, 1989), and Parpaillon (Up and Down, 1992)—and one long documentary about Moullet, Gérard Courant’s L’homme des Roubines (The Man of the Badlands, 2001). All of these have optional English subtitles except for A Girl Is a Gun—and in this case, blaq out has rightly included the wonderful English-dubbed version of this loony Surrealist French western with Jean-Pierre Léaud, which essentially reconfigures King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) as a low-budget farce.
The selection of films is irreproachable. My only minor misgivings are that (1) no Moullet shorts are included, and (2) La Comédie du travail (The Comedy of Work, 1988), arguably the only major Moullet feature missing from this batch, is already available from blaq out (albeit without subtitles), with one of Moullet’s better shorts (the 1984 Barres) and an interview with Moullet also included. As for (1), the equally ambitious www.renardfilms.org, whose awesome box set of 14 Steve Dwoskin films I wrote about two columns back, has announced among its future releases a dozen Moullet films, so let’s hope that (a) what they (mainly or exclusively) have in mind are the best Moullet shorts, and (b) that this saintly Swiss company survives long enough to realize such an exemplary project. (I hear that sales of their Dwoskin box set have so far been disappointing, so let me urge you to invest in this gorgeous package immediately—not only for its own sake, which is reason enough, but also as an investment in future releases such as the Moullet.)

One-Shots, Hybrids, and A Few Footnotes to Film History
(a) The work of Robert Breer is pretty neat, but my favourite abstract animator is Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), who once rightly said of his work, “Because of its complete originality, this type of film knows no boundaries of time or fashion.” The Center for Visual Music (www.centerforvisualmusic.org/DVD.htm) proves that assertion with Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films, a splendid NTSC, region-free collection with several extras that is the first in a series, and the item in this column that I’ve already spent the most time with. Thirty dollars for one disc (private home use) may sound steep, but the material is so exquisite and so compulsively rewatchable that it feels like a bargain. (For more recent experimental animation—by Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, Jim Trainor, and the Henry-Garon-Ascher collective—check out Anxious Animation, available from www.othercinemaDVD.com.)

Experiments, Ethical Issues, and A Few Limit Cases
We seem to be entering an exceptionally rich period when long-unavailable experimental films are finally coming to light on DVD. Apart from Criterion’s celebrated and commercially successful Stan Brakhage box set in 2003 and Image Entertainment’s well-publicized Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde 1894-1941 last year, this has mainly been a phenomenon of small, out-of-the-way labels that deserve our full recognition and support...

Weird Stuff From All Over
From Austria: Technically precise and somewhat austere in packaging, two ambitious new DVD labels from Vienna command attention. Österreichisches Filmmuseum’s edition of Dziga Vertov’s 1930 Entuziazm(Simfonja Donbassa)—or Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass—is a two-disc set giving us Vertov’s first sound film before and after Peter Kubelka resynchronized much of the sound and image in 1976, under the conviction that the then-existing Russian prints had unwittingly screwed all this up. And the main event on the second disc is Kubelka at an editing table in 2005 offering a point-by-point argument and defense of his controversial restoration—a painstaking demonstration that significantly has the same running time as Vertov’s wacky film, 65 minutes, and draws upon the same theoretical notion of cinema replicating the human head that informed Kubelka’s design of the “Invisible Cinema” at the original headquarters of Anthology Film Archives at New York’s Public Theater...

Winter Clearance -
(with thanks and apologies to James Agee)
Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism . A book, not a DVD—one of two recent James Agee volumes edited by Michael Sragow for the Library of America and a costly collectible like some of the DVDs covered below (see The Val Lewton Horror Collection, La maman et la putain, A Donald Richie Box Set, Unseen Cinema, and Written and Directed by Preston Sturges), raising similar spiky issues. LOA is widely regarded as the Criterion or Kino of US literary publishing, or the Yank equivalent to Gallimard, so its edition of Agee is bound to be viewed by many as definitive. Personally, I’m already a tad suspicious of a series that casually omits Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, and the Beats from the pantheon of American Lit, but maybe there are logistical obstacles to including them that I know nothing about. Similarly, Sragow may have good reasons for omitting from both volumes (1) all of Agee’s poetry (which is perfectly OK with me), (2) my favourite of all of Agee’s essays unrelated to film apart from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (“America, Look at Your Shame!”—a searing 1943 memoir about racism and his own cowardice on a Manhattan bus that first surfaced, posthumously, in the January-February 2003 issue of The Oxford American, and has already been reprinted in at least three other collections), and (3) a good many of the uncollected movie reviews Agee wrote for Time that I’ve been wanting for years to read, such as the one of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Did Sragow decide that Agee’s extended reflections about US commercial orchids, cockfighting, Ingrid Bergman, Deborah Kerr, and Gregory Peck, all included, would all be more important to future generations than his responses to racism and Orson Welles? Or were there other issues at stake? I’m grateful for the review of “an early beatnik satire Salome Where She Danced (1945)” cited by Manny Farber in Negative Space. But it’s also hard to avoid a tinge of regret about what’s been exiled from the canon for the foreseeable future...

All that Avant Garde
For the second year in a row, Il Cinema Ritrovato, a festival devoted to archival restorations put on in early July by the Cineteca di Bologna, presented a series of DVD awards, and I was again privileged to serve on the jury. My fellow jurors this year were Peter von Bagh, the festival’s artistic director; Hervé Dumont, director of the Cinémathèque Suisse; David Meeker, former archivist of the British Film Institute (who masterminded the formidable BFI Classics book series); and Italian film critic Paolo Mereghetti...

Tips for Landlocked Yanks and Monolinguists
As an avid collector of Hollywood musicals, I’ve recently been checking out which items in my collection with optional French dialogue also have French versions of the songs. My father used to teach himself foreign languages by reading translations of some of his favourite English and American novels (e.g., Light in August in German). It’s recently occurred to me that watching favourite Anglo-American movies with foreign subtitles—something closer to reading a bilingual text—might also be helpful, though watching a foreign-dubbed version undoubtedly helps even more when it comes to improving one’s speaking knowledge of a particular language. This is one of the many resources afforded by DVDs that most people ignore, myself included. Just as it never occurs to most North American DVD watchers to spend the minimal amounts of time and money needed to acquire a multiregional player and order DVDs from abroad, the linguistic extras available on a good many DVDs slip past most people because taking advantage of them lies outside their usual habit patterns...

Anomalies and Experiments
With the exception of a few film buffs at some of the more discerning labels, and still fewer at the major studios, decisions about what older films to release on DVD, as well as when or why, are often capricious to the point of absurdity. So asking why some things are readily available and some things aren’t is a bit like asking an illiterate about his or her reading taste. Some time ago, I was contacted about contributing to the extras of an ambitious DVD being planned for Elaine May’s infamous and underappreciated Ishtar (1987)—a project developed with loving care by some maverick film buffs at Columbia/Tristar over many months, eventually soliciting the unprecedented cooperation and input of May herself...

Ambiguous Legalities, Gambles, Lucky Breaks, and Box Sets
My most fruitful recent discovery for ordering rare films on DVD is www.superhappyfun.com—a mysterious U.S. company whose name sounds oddly Japanese and who makes its own Region 0 DVD-Rs (“a movie that’s been ported over from VHS, tweaked with a time-based corrector, and recorded onto a consumer-grade DVD”), packed in envelopes rather than boxes to save costs and usually priced at $13 apiece. The prints used vary in quality and are ranked in their catalogue entries between 10 (best) and 4 (worst); I’ve found so far that anything below 7 borders on the dubious (such as my blotchy albeit subtitled copy of Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient [1960], assigned a 6)...

Misnomers and Displacements
ONE OF THE MOST FLAGRANT omissions in most jazz films is the spectacle of musicians listening to each other. Back in the early 60s, when I was frequenting a lot of downtown Manhattan jazz clubs, some of my biggest thrills came from visiting spots where many of the best and most attentive listeners were those on the bandstand—not only the classic John Coltrane Quartet at the now defunct Half Note, where McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones, and the serene leader were all meditating on one another’s solos in a kind of trance, but Lennie Tristano at the same club taping his own sets with Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz and then playing them back in the wee hours, while he sat alone at the bar. Sitting a few seats away from him one night, I felt I was getting an education in listening by observing this prodigious blind pianist’s highly physical responses, both positive and negative, to his own solos...