The Criterion Collection is constantly curating and adding the best and brightest of cinema to its collection, but its April 2024 is pretty stellar and adds two classic films that haven’t been in the collection previously that really deserved to be there.
The first film added to the collection in April is notable because of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. While Tarr is a giant of international cinema, specifically what’s often referred to as “slow cinema,” the addition of Tarr’s 2000 classic, “Werckmeister Harmonies,” is actually the first of the filmmaker’s movies ever added to the Collection (at least on DVD/Blu-Ray and not counting the Criterion Channel). The disc also includes “Family Nest” (1979), Tarr’s first feature film, so that’s actually two films for the price of one.
“Werckmeister Harmonies” is a hypnotizing film in the vein of Andrei Tarkovsky, and it is only composed of thirty-nine languidly paced shots that run over nearly 2.5 hours. The mesmerizing black-and-white film centers on a naive young man who witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.
Also coming to the Criterion Collection in April is “I Am Cuba,” a 1964 Cuban-Soviet political drama anthology film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. “I Am Cuba” is legendary for its elaborate tracking shots, mise en scene, and inventive camera work. Martin Scorsese was one of its biggest champions, and he began a campaign to restore the film in the early 1990s. Kalatozov is also known for the Soviet-era movie, “The Cranes Are Flying,” which won the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival and is also part of the Criterion Collection.
Also new to the Collection in April is the 1991 coming-of-age film, “Dogfight” starring River Phoenix, directed by Nancy Savoca (1989’s “True Love”).
Other films joining the Criterion Collection include the previously released mysteriously haunting 1975 classic, “Picture At Hanging Rock” by filmmaker Peter Weir,” and 1995’s “La Haine,” the sophomore feature by French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz, which also featured one of the first on-screen appearances performance by Vincent Cassel (who debuted in Kassovitz’s 1983 debut “Métisse”).
Details on each title are below.
WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES
This mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens that builds inexorably toward violence. In thirty-nine hypnotic long takes engraved in ghostly black and white, auteur Béla Tarr and codirector-editor Ágnes Hranitzky conjure an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
· New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Béla Tarr, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the 4K UHD disc and the Blu-ray
· In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
· Family Nest (1979), Tarr’s first feature film
· New interview with Tarr by film critic Scott Foundas
· New English subtitle translation
· PLUS: An essay by film programmer and critic Dennis Lim
I AM CUBA
Both a landmark of radical political cinema and one of the most visually ravishing films ever made, this legendary hymn to revolution shimmers across the screen like a fever dream of rebellion. The result of an extraordinarily ambitious collaboration between the Soviet and Cuban film industries, director Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba unfolds in four explosive vignettes that capture Cuban life on the brink of transformation, as crushing economic exploitation and inequality give way to a working-class uprising. Backed by Carlos Fariñas’s stirring score, the dazzling camera work by Sergei Urusevsky—an inspiration for generations of filmmakers to follow—gives flight to the movie’s message of liberation.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
· New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
· In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
· “I Am Cuba,” the Siberian Mammoth, a 2004 documentary on the making of the film featuring key participants
· Interview from 2003 with filmmaker Martin Scorsese
· New appreciation of the film by cinematographer Bradford Young
· Trailer
· Alternate Russian-dubbed soundtrack
· New English subtitle translation
· PLUS: An essay by film critic Juan Antonio García Borrero
DOGFIGHT
An ineffably bittersweet portrait of youth in the 1960s, Nancy Savoca’s funny, sensitive tale of love and war etches two vividly alive characters: aspiring San Francisco folk singer Rose (Lili Taylor) and hotheaded, Vietnam-bound marine Eddie (River Phoenix), who meet on the occasion of a cruelly misogynistic party where men compete to bring the most unattractive dates they can find. But what begins as a night to forget unexpectedly develops into something far more meaningful. Featuring music by folk legends Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger, Dogfight captures the miracle of human connection while gracefully subverting ideas surrounding machismo, patriotic duty, and the very meaning of America itself.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
· New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Nancy Savoca, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
· Audio commentary featuring Savoca and producer Richard Guay
· New interview with Savoca and actor Lili Taylor conducted by filmmaker Mary Harron
· New interviews with cinematographer Bobby Bukowski, production designer Lester Cohen, script supervisor Mary Cybulski, music supervisor Jeff Kimball, supervising sound editor Tim Squyres, and editor John Tintori
· Trailer
· English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
· PLUS: An essay by film critic Christina Newland
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
· New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Peter Weir and director of photography Russell Boyd, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
· One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
· Interview with Weir
· Program on the making of the film, featuring interviews with executive producer Patricia Lovell, producers Hal McElroy and Jim McElroy, and cast members
· Introduction by film scholar David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
· On-set documentary hosted by Lovell and featuring interviews with Weir, actor Rachel Roberts, and source-novel author Joan Lindsay
· Homesdale (1971), a black comedy by Weir
· Trailer
· English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
· PLUS: An essay by author Megan Abbott and an excerpt from film scholar Marek Haltof’s 1996 book Peter Weir: When Cultures Collide
LA HAINE
Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—Jewish, African, and Arab, respectively—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of 1990s French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
· New 4K digital master, supervised by director of photography Pierre Aïm and approved by director Mathieu Kassovitz, with 2.0 and 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
· One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
· Audio commentary by Kassovitz
· Introduction by actor Jodie Foster
· Ten Years of “La haine,” a documentary featuring cast and crew members
· Featurette on the film’s banlieue setting
· Production footage
· Deleted and extended scenes, with an afterword by Kassovitz
· Behind-the-scenes photos
· Trailers
· PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau and a 2006 appreciation by filmmaker Costa-Gavras
