Criterion Collection July Titles
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Criterion Collection July Titles
392. Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara SRP: $79.95
The existential ghost story Pitfall, the shocking erotic fable Woman in the Dunes, and the sci-fi–tinged nightmare The Face of Another are three of cinema’s most enduring enigmas and rare treats, from one of its greatest artists. A man of many faces, Hiroshi Teshigahara was not just a Japanese new wave trailblazer, a Kafka of the moving image, but also a painter, sculptor, flower arranger, designer of gardens and tearooms, and director of operas and Noh plays. And these three atmospheric portraits remain the quintessential expressions of his lifelong fascination with the perils of identity and the horrors of isolation.
SPECIAL FOUR-DISC SET FEATURES INCLUDE:
New, restored high-definition digital transfers
Video essays on all three films by critic and festival programmer James Quandt
Four short films by Hiroshi Teshigahara: Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1956), Tokyo 1958 (1958), and Ako/White Morning (1963)
A new documentary about the working relationship beween Teshigahara and Kobo Abe, including interviews with Japanese-film scholars Donald Richie and Tadao Sato
PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by James Quandt, Howard Hampton, Audie Bock, and Peter Grilli and Max Tessier’s 1964 interview with Teshigahara
393. Pitfall
When a miner leaves his employers and treks out with his young son to become a migrant worker, he finds himself moving from one eerie landscape to another, intermittently followed (and photographed) by an enigmatic man in a clean, white suit, and eventually coming face to face with his inescapable destiny. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s debut feature and first collaboration with novelist Kôbô Abe, Pitfall is many things: a mysterious, unsettling ghost story, a portrait of human alienation, and a compellingly surreal critique of soulless industry, shot in elegant black-and-white.
394. The Face of Another
A staggering work of existential science fiction, The Face of Another dissects identity with the sure hand of a surgeon. Okuyama (Yojimbo’s Tatsuya Nakadai), after being burned and disfigured in an industrial accident and estranged from his family and friends, agrees to his psychiatrist’s radical new experiment: a face transplant, created from the mold of a stranger. As Okuyama is thus further alienated from the strange world around him, he finds himself giving in to his darker temptations. With unforgettable imagery, Teshigahara’s film explores both the limits and freedom in acquiring a newfound persona, and questions the notion of individuality itself.
395. Woman in the Dunes
One of the sixties' great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic worldview of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eija Okada plays an entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded by villagers to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kiyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle, for which Teshigahara received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
396. Ivan's Childhood SRP: $29.95
The debut feature from the great Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood is an evocative, poetic journey through the shadows and shards of one boy’s war-torn youth. Moving back and forth between the traumatic realities of WWII and the serene moments of family life before the conflict began, Tarkovsky’s film remains one of the most jarring and unforgettable depictions of the impact of violence on children in wartime.
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Video appreciation of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and Ivan’s Childhood, featuring Vida T. Johnson, coauthor of The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue New video interviews with cinematographer Vadim Yusov and actor Nikolai Burlyaev
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Dina Iordanova and new translations, by Robert Bird, of "Between Two Films," Andrei Tarkovsky’s essay about Ivan’s Childhood, and "Ivan’s Willow," a poem by the director's father, Arseny Tarkovsky
397. Ace in the Hole SRP: $39.95
One of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker, Academy Award–winner Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is legendary for both its cutting social critique and its status as a hard-to-find cult classic. Kirk Douglas gives the fiercest performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper reporter caught in dead-end Albuquerque who happens upon the story of a lifetime—and will do anything to ensure he gets the scoop. Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is an even darker vision, a no-holds-barred exposé that anticipated the rise of the American media circus.
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Audio commentary by film scholar Neil Sinyard
Portrait of a "60% Perfect Man": Billy Wilder, a 1980 documentary featuring in-depth interviews with Wilder by film critic Michel Ciment
Excerpts from a 1986 appearance by Wilder at the American Film Institute
Excerpts from an audio interview with co-screenwriter Walter Newman
Theatrical trailer
PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by film critic Molly Haskell and filmmaker Guy Maddin
398. Les Enfants terribles SRP: $39.95
Writer Jean Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville joined forces for this elegant adaptation of Cocteau’s immensely popular, wicked novel about the wholly unholy relationship between a teenage brother and sister. Elisabeth (a remarkable Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Edouard Dermithe) close themselves off from the world by playing an increasingly intense series of mind games with the people who dare enter their clandestine world—until romance and jealousy intrude. Melville’s operatic camera movements and Cocteau’s perverse, poetic approach to character merge in Les enfants terribles to create one of French cinema's greatest, and most surprising, meetings of the minds.
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Audio commentary by writer, film critic, and journalist Gilbert Adair
Interviews with producer Carole Weisweiller, actors Nicole Stéphane and Jacques eBrnard, and assistant director Claude Pinoteau
Around Jean Cocteau (2003), a short video by filmmaker discussing Cocteau and Melville's working relationship
Theatrical trailer
Gallery of behind-the-scenes stills
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Gary Indiana and an excerpt from Rui Nogueira’s Melville on Melville
The existential ghost story Pitfall, the shocking erotic fable Woman in the Dunes, and the sci-fi–tinged nightmare The Face of Another are three of cinema’s most enduring enigmas and rare treats, from one of its greatest artists. A man of many faces, Hiroshi Teshigahara was not just a Japanese new wave trailblazer, a Kafka of the moving image, but also a painter, sculptor, flower arranger, designer of gardens and tearooms, and director of operas and Noh plays. And these three atmospheric portraits remain the quintessential expressions of his lifelong fascination with the perils of identity and the horrors of isolation.
SPECIAL FOUR-DISC SET FEATURES INCLUDE:
New, restored high-definition digital transfers
Video essays on all three films by critic and festival programmer James Quandt
Four short films by Hiroshi Teshigahara: Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1956), Tokyo 1958 (1958), and Ako/White Morning (1963)
A new documentary about the working relationship beween Teshigahara and Kobo Abe, including interviews with Japanese-film scholars Donald Richie and Tadao Sato
PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by James Quandt, Howard Hampton, Audie Bock, and Peter Grilli and Max Tessier’s 1964 interview with Teshigahara
393. Pitfall
When a miner leaves his employers and treks out with his young son to become a migrant worker, he finds himself moving from one eerie landscape to another, intermittently followed (and photographed) by an enigmatic man in a clean, white suit, and eventually coming face to face with his inescapable destiny. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s debut feature and first collaboration with novelist Kôbô Abe, Pitfall is many things: a mysterious, unsettling ghost story, a portrait of human alienation, and a compellingly surreal critique of soulless industry, shot in elegant black-and-white.
394. The Face of Another
A staggering work of existential science fiction, The Face of Another dissects identity with the sure hand of a surgeon. Okuyama (Yojimbo’s Tatsuya Nakadai), after being burned and disfigured in an industrial accident and estranged from his family and friends, agrees to his psychiatrist’s radical new experiment: a face transplant, created from the mold of a stranger. As Okuyama is thus further alienated from the strange world around him, he finds himself giving in to his darker temptations. With unforgettable imagery, Teshigahara’s film explores both the limits and freedom in acquiring a newfound persona, and questions the notion of individuality itself.
395. Woman in the Dunes
One of the sixties' great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic worldview of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eija Okada plays an entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded by villagers to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kiyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle, for which Teshigahara received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
396. Ivan's Childhood SRP: $29.95
The debut feature from the great Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood is an evocative, poetic journey through the shadows and shards of one boy’s war-torn youth. Moving back and forth between the traumatic realities of WWII and the serene moments of family life before the conflict began, Tarkovsky’s film remains one of the most jarring and unforgettable depictions of the impact of violence on children in wartime.
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Video appreciation of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and Ivan’s Childhood, featuring Vida T. Johnson, coauthor of The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue New video interviews with cinematographer Vadim Yusov and actor Nikolai Burlyaev
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Dina Iordanova and new translations, by Robert Bird, of "Between Two Films," Andrei Tarkovsky’s essay about Ivan’s Childhood, and "Ivan’s Willow," a poem by the director's father, Arseny Tarkovsky
397. Ace in the Hole SRP: $39.95
One of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker, Academy Award–winner Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is legendary for both its cutting social critique and its status as a hard-to-find cult classic. Kirk Douglas gives the fiercest performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper reporter caught in dead-end Albuquerque who happens upon the story of a lifetime—and will do anything to ensure he gets the scoop. Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is an even darker vision, a no-holds-barred exposé that anticipated the rise of the American media circus.
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Audio commentary by film scholar Neil Sinyard
Portrait of a "60% Perfect Man": Billy Wilder, a 1980 documentary featuring in-depth interviews with Wilder by film critic Michel Ciment
Excerpts from a 1986 appearance by Wilder at the American Film Institute
Excerpts from an audio interview with co-screenwriter Walter Newman
Theatrical trailer
PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by film critic Molly Haskell and filmmaker Guy Maddin
398. Les Enfants terribles SRP: $39.95
Writer Jean Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville joined forces for this elegant adaptation of Cocteau’s immensely popular, wicked novel about the wholly unholy relationship between a teenage brother and sister. Elisabeth (a remarkable Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Edouard Dermithe) close themselves off from the world by playing an increasingly intense series of mind games with the people who dare enter their clandestine world—until romance and jealousy intrude. Melville’s operatic camera movements and Cocteau’s perverse, poetic approach to character merge in Les enfants terribles to create one of French cinema's greatest, and most surprising, meetings of the minds.
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Audio commentary by writer, film critic, and journalist Gilbert Adair
Interviews with producer Carole Weisweiller, actors Nicole Stéphane and Jacques eBrnard, and assistant director Claude Pinoteau
Around Jean Cocteau (2003), a short video by filmmaker discussing Cocteau and Melville's working relationship
Theatrical trailer
Gallery of behind-the-scenes stills
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Gary Indiana and an excerpt from Rui Nogueira’s Melville on Melville
Last edited by starecase; 04-16-07 at 05:36 PM.
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Originally Posted by Shagrath
I've never seen a Teshigahara film, but they sound damn interesting.
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WOWWWWWWW!!!!!
Woman in the Dunes!!!! FINALLY!!!!! And Criterion to boot! THANK YOU GOD!
I haven't seen this film since college and it is my favorite book as well. When I saw it in college (projected) it was so dark it was almost unwatchable. What an absolute treat!
Thrilled about Ivan's Childhood and more Cocteau as well. WHAT A GREAT DAY!
Woman in the Dunes!!!! FINALLY!!!!! And Criterion to boot! THANK YOU GOD!
I haven't seen this film since college and it is my favorite book as well. When I saw it in college (projected) it was so dark it was almost unwatchable. What an absolute treat!
Thrilled about Ivan's Childhood and more Cocteau as well. WHAT A GREAT DAY!
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I've been waiting SO long to see "Ace," I had no idea it was going to be a Criterion. This is one of the big Billy Wilder films I've never seen.
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Umm...wow.
My wallet hates Criterion. All of these are must-haves. This even tops the upcoming May release list. What a great year.
I bet Roger Ebert is excited about Woman in the Dunes, as it's one of his all-time favorite films.
The cover design for the Tarkovsky is fantastic. And Billy Wilder finally in the Criterion collection - awesome!
My wallet hates Criterion. All of these are must-haves. This even tops the upcoming May release list. What a great year.
I bet Roger Ebert is excited about Woman in the Dunes, as it's one of his all-time favorite films.
The cover design for the Tarkovsky is fantastic. And Billy Wilder finally in the Criterion collection - awesome!
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