The prestigious DVD company The Criterion Collection recently announced that they will be re-releasing what they consider to be the unimpeachable cinema classics of the 20th century — or the six foreign black-and-white masterworks that won’t put you to sleep (Criterion does not guarantee nor endorse this assertion). Due Sept 9, The “Essential Art House” Collection consists of six films from such legends as Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Peter Brook, Jean Cocteau and Jean Renoir. All will be offered separately (each DVD costing $19.95) or in a box set (costing $99.95). It is expensive, and lacks the extras and doo-dads cinephiles have come to expect from the achingly tasteful revival DVD company, but when one considers the regular price of Criterion discs (between $30 and $40), it might just be the ticket for the budding young film shut-in normally alienated by the inherent homoeroticism found in all comic-book films.
The “Essential Art House” box set can not only save you cash, it can partly save you the experience of having to tolerate the pretentious blathering of those nutty film professors spouting comically obtuse film idioms like the apparatus and the diegesis, and the stupid kid in the corner wearing a bowler hat (or, in our case, the kid who wore his pyjama top and ate cereal out of the box in class). Now, here is a look at the best and least-annoying education $100 can buy.
Rashomon
Kurosawa’s landmark subjectivity of truth masterpiece — almost too popular to be enjoyed by film snobs — examined faith and the weakness in humanity via the multiple point-of-views of four self-serving witnesses to a rape and murder; including a cowardly Samurai, a pitifully shrill bride, a plebe woodcutter and an odiously pathetic bandit. The opaque drama introduced Western audiences to Japanese cinema, thus beginning the longstanding tradition of Western filmmakers stealing from the East, and the lesser (but no less amusing) ritual of watching far less skilled filmmakers fumble with the acuity needed to negotiate multi-part P-O-V stories.
Beauty and the Beast
Jean Cocteau reinvented the fairy tale for the cinema. Naturally, Cocteau’s Beast is significantly more French — as he grovels at Belle’s feet, desperately begging her to marry him every night — than Disney’s animated, Americanized Beast, who would never have sunk that low.
Grand Illusion
Jean Renoir’s futility-of-war statement about French WWI prisoners of war held captive by the Germans is an “anti-war” film insofar as it lacked any real depiction of battle, and illustrated the destruction that war wrought via civilized proto-Hogan’s Heroes gentlemanly imprisonment. Despite its bleak setting and heroically, action-less scenes, the picture went on to be one of the most iconic examples of the 1930s poetic realistic movement and earned the distinction of being the first foreign film deigned worthy of consideration for an Oscar Best Picture.
Glacially paced art-house depressive Ingmar Bergman brought us seminal story about a pedantic, judgmental professor emeritus who embarks on a drive outside Stockholm to receive a lifetime achievement award only to fall prey to the existentialist mortality questions most pretentious Europeans were given to at the time. Accompanied by his candid daughter-in-law, during the nostalgic trip he is flooded with memories and forced — by way of nightmares, daydreams, his impending death and an annoyingly shrill couple — to re-evaluate his life and come to terms with how much of a cold, callous asshole he’s been all these years. The original thinking man’s road film, it is to film students what “Road Trip” is to frat boys.
Roman Polanski’s minimalist feature debut about a macho-prick husband, a comely adulterous wife, a whiny, callow drifter and a knife adrift on a sail boating trip from hell is a tightly wound triangle where jealousy, sexual boundaries and male emasculation are pushed to almost ridiculous limits.
Peter Brook’s adaptation of William Golding’s “might is right” allegory about a plane wreck leaving young boys stranded on a remote island exposed the glaring misconception that young, seemingly genteel British boys could govern themselves in a civilized manner. The film’s naturalistic and reality-based portrait of poncey-children-turned-savage-lunks convinced many a prep school marms that some of their students were capable of casual murder, so many a cruel headmaster dispensed with casual lashings forthwith.
Along with Essential Art House, this fall Criterion will finally release three films from the German-born French film master Max Ophüls on September 16. An early pioneer and frequent user of the horizontal tracking shot, Ophüls often used obstructions between camera and actor to emphasis emotional schisms and to mask his axis-of-action deficiencies. His techniques (and their similar directorial lapses) can be seen today in the films of Robert Altman (See: “M.A.S.H.”, “McCabe and Miss Miller”) and Paul Thomas Anderson. Criterion will be releasing Ophuls’s “La Ronde“, “Le plaisir” and “The Earrings of Madame de…” come September.
Also coming to Criterion in September (9.30) is the pathologically minimalist Japanese master, Yasujiro Ozu’s final work “An Autumn Afternoon.” Suffused with the floor-angled, precise mise en scene prone to giving pompous film intellectuals boners, it is another perfect gift for the young student who can’t afford to waste an education (and tuition) spent half-awake through ponderous foreign films (Eclipse series volume 12 is the proletariat trilogy by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki on 9.30).