The Criterion Collection Presents...and Bergmania

This month at theauteurs.com, the Criterion Collection presents: "Discoveries from Eclipse." If you tuned in to the site last month, the theme was "Cruel Stories of Youth." The only film I've seen among this month's batch is Samuel Fuller's I Shot Jesse James (1949), which is a far better retelling of the Jesse James/Robert Ford story than 2007's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

photo by Gunnar Seijbold
I am a huge (HUGE!) Bergman fan so I am excited to see Thirst in this month's offerings. It is one of the Swedish filmmaker's earliest films.

I've seen (studied, really) more than half of Bergman's forty films (including Saraband), and his made-for-television drama, Brink of Life--nearly all of them more than twice (which is unusual for me as I do not subscribe to the Quentin Tarantino school of film appreciation). I read Bergman's autobiography, The Magic Lantern when I was eighteen and it set me in a new direction. It is one of my favorite books. His other non-fiction book, Images, in which he comments on the writing/filmmaking process of his films is a must-read for Bergman fans.

This summer, I saw A Lesson In Love at the IFC in NYC and had the good fortune of finding high-quality, bootleg (not an oxymoron in this case!) DVD's of hard-to-find Bergman titles at a bookstore in New York's Chinatown. I bought The Devil's Eye, To Joy (available via Tartan) and Prison along with Mikio Naruse's Thunder of the Mountain at this unlikely corner of cinephile heaven for only $16! (Side note: New York has the most bootleg media this side of Russia that I've ever seen [I've never been to Russia, but you know what I mean]. At Bleecker Bob's in the West Village, you can find just about every good recording of Prince's concert performances, including the one he did with Miles Davis for sale. In Flushing, bootleggers brazenly hawk DVD's of movies that haven't even been released in U.S. theatres yet in broad daylight. There are so many of them sometimes that unless you can dodge nimbly between old Chinese ladies waving copies of Apocalypto at you and people distributing fliers for English classes as though you were haphazardly thrust into an obstacle course, you'd never make it to the Subway station.)

When Bergman died last summer, it was a major disappointment for me for one unselfless reason: when he was alive, it was still possible (though the likelihood of it happening was zilch) to think that I would get to meet him someday. Now, I can't even entertain that dream. I hope he was wrong about death.

Discoveries from Eclipse:

Watch Thirst (Ingmar Bergman, 1949)
Watch God's Country (Louis Malle, 1985)
Watch Equinox Flower (Yasujiro Ozu, 1958)
Watch Wooden Crosses (Raymond Bernard, 1932)
Watch I Shot Jesse James (Samuel Fuller, 1949)
Watch Blood Wedding (Carlos Saura, 1981)

Criterion Collection Online Cinematheque

The Criterion Collection's site has been revamped to bring art-house to your house.

One of the most respected purveyors of timeless films, Criterion now allows cinephiles and casual filmgoers alike to access their extensive archive of essays, watch films for free in their monthly, online film festival, and rent selected titles (chosen by Criterion) from their collection for $5 (which will go toward the purchase of a DVD of the same title).

Cinephiles now also have another watering hole/hub on the web at theauteurs.com, at which to discuss the epilogue to Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, who's better: Truffaut or Godard?, Werner Herzog's protagonist-heroes, Stanley Kubrick's oeuvre, and many such topics in a spirit that I imagine is akin to the way film buffs in the '60's and '70's used to converse/spar with each other (minus the insults and fisticuffs and drugs...).

This month's film festival includes: Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, Catherine Breillat's (The Last Mistress) Fat Girl, Louis Malle's (Murmurs of the Heart, My Dinner With Andre, Elevator to the Gallows) Au Revoir Les Enfants, Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies, Lynne Ramsey's (Morvern Callar) Ratcatcher, and Jane Campion's (The Piano) Sweetie.


If you haven't seen it yet, don't miss Au Revoir Les Enfants. I think Louis Malle is egregiously underrated (perhaps because he doesn't seem to conform to the auteur theory) in America. Each of his films are remarkably consistent in quality, but look as though they were made by different people.

Lynne Ramsey's Ratcatcher is another spectacular film.

I would say, "happy viewing", but these aren't particularly happy films. This film series is titled "cruel stories of youth."

Speaking of cruel stories of youth, I finally got around to watching Slumdog Millionaire today. It's a very enjoyable movie with superb acting, soundtrack and cinematography. It's one of the best looking movies (among this year's releases) that I've seen. At times, it brought to mind Christopher Doyle's work with Wong Kar-Wai.