Global Discoveries on DVD:
Experiments, Ethical Issues, and A Few Limit Cases

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

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.

The most impressive recent example that’s come to my attention is www.renardfilms.org, an ambitious non-profit Swiss organization founded about a year-and-a-half ago in Geneva that’s devoted to “the production, distribution, and exploitation of films [of] whatever genre, length, and format, in Switzerland or abroad.” Regarding DVD releases, “Their editorial choices go towards films made by independent filmmakers who generally don't find themselves or have never found themselves in the classical distribution places of cinematographic culture.” Their first release is a beautifully designed and expertly realized five-disc box set, PAL and code-free, devoted to 14 films by the American-born, London-based Steve Dwoskin, made between 1968 and 2003, with French, English, German, and Spanish subtitles. Like the Japanese edition of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, this is packaged like a CD box set; it includes a bilingual booklet in French and English and can be ordered from Les Films du Renard’s site for $116 or 99 Euros plus postage. As someone who’s still woefully unacquainted with much of Dwoskin’s major work—a condition this collection is clearly meant to address—I can’t comment on the individual selections, except to note that my two favourite works of his to date, the 16mm Pain is... (1997) and the video Intoxicated by My Illness (2001), occupy the second disc.

The mouth-watering future releases this company is already planning include all the other films of Dwoskin, a dozen films by Luc Moullet, “part of Boris Lehman's oeuvre,” and three films by Véronique Goël. (The latter name is new to me, but I just learned from her own site, www.titusetcompagnies.net/veroniquegoel, that she’s also based in Geneva.)

Meaanwhile, a couple of other important packages, devoted to Jean-Daniel Pollet and Raul Ruiz, can be ordered from France. Lamentably, Pollet (1936-2004) is still relatively unknown outside France, and the three recent DVDs devoted to his experimental work issued by P.O.M. Films, by virtue of being unsubtitled, aren’t likely to change this situation. You can buy all three in a box set called Tours d’Horizon or as separate discs devoted to (1) Méditerranée (1963), Bassae (1964), and L’ordre (1974), (2) Dieu sait quoi (1994), and (3) Ceux d’un face (2001), his final film, both available from outlets such as FNAC.

I wrote about Pollet in my first “Paris Journal” for Film Comment back in 1971, and 20-odd years later, Peter Scarlet showed some of his work at the San Francisco Film Festival. (There’s also a rather dreamy impressionistic piece by Godard about Méditerranée in his collected criticism, and Pollet is further referenced in Noël Burch’s Theory of Film Practice and Rivette: Texts & Interviews, among other places.) His Rue St.-Denis was one of the six sketches in Paris vus par... (1965); that narrative short starred Claude Melki, a somewhat Harry Langdon-like comic actor Pollet became closely associated with in such later features as L’amour c’est gai, l’amour c’est triste (1971) and L’acrobate (1976). But it’s his experimental work that mainly interests me, especially Méditerranée (1963), Le horla (1966), and Dieu sait quoi (1994)—which is why I bought the first two discs on a recent trip to Paris (and not yet the third, which I haven’t seen), and deeply regret the absence of Le horla—a beautiful, wildly transgressive adaptation of the Guy de Maupassant story about madness that unfolds almost simultaneously in three separate tenses.

Much more satisfying is blaq out’s two-disc Raoul Ruiz: Ses 3 Premiers Films en France, with English and Spanish subtitles, even though the title is a misnomer. Included are fine editions of La Vocation suspendue (1977), L’Hypothèse du table volé (1979), and Les Trois Couronnes du matelot (1983), as well as two probing and surprisingly sombre half-hour biographical interviews with Ruiz by Jérôme Prieur, conducted respectively in France and Chile. But for the record, even if one excludes the 1974 feature Dialogo de exilados (filmed in Paris, spoken in Spanish), Ruiz's first three films in France include the remarkable 18-minute 1977 Le Colloque des chiens as well as The Suspended Vocation and The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting; and something like 18 more French films and videos then intervene after those titles and before The Three Crowns of the Sailor.

The most interesting experimental work out lately on an English label is a long-unavailable American cinema verité classic, Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), which I hadn’t seen since it premiered at the New York Film Festival almost 40 years ago. Oddly, I’d remembered it only for its documentary rather than its experimental aspects, but the excellent edition of www.secondrundvd.com clarifies and enhances the latter through its judicious choice of supplements—especially a good new essay by Tony Rayns and a sampling of the Love Tapes compiled by Wendy Clarke, Shirley’s daughter (which includes the heart-stopping contribution of her mother).

Here’s the most interesting recent experimental stuff released on labels from the US that I’m aware of: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo (2004) is included as an extra on the Warners release of Eros (otherwise worth having only for Wong Kar-wai’s genuinely erotic The Hand); see www.rouge.com.au/4/antonioni.html for what I find experimental as well as exquisite about it. From Facets Video comes Yutaka Tsuchiya's Peep “TV” Show (2004)—a very strange, low-tech “fiction documentary” video about teenyboppers in Tokyo’s Shibuya that Claire Denis likes even more than I do. Baffling in the best sense—with its characters dressed like erotic fantasies drawn from fairy tales while acting out obscure rituals—this has an uncanny sense of space, with a feeling of confinement conveyed by small cubicles, TV screens, and surveillance cameras offset by the vast reaches of the urban landscape. Imagine Blade Runner restaged inside an elevator, or maybe inside someone’s head.

Also from Facets are two lengthy videos by Aleksandr Sokurov, each released in two-disc packages: his celebrated 340-minute 1995 documentary about Russian soldiers stationed on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Spiritual Voices, and his less celebrated, 210-minute 1998 fictional beefcake cycle about sailors on a Russian battleship cruising the Barents Sea, Confession. (Based on what I’ve sampled from each, the former is far more interesting, at least to me.) Comparing the “production values” of these transfers with three other recent Sokurov releases—Kino Video’s editions of The Second Circle (1990) and Mother and Son (1997), and, in the UK, Artificial Eye’s edition of The Sun (2005)—there’s no question that the latter three are much more impressive. But it’s hard to know how much this is because they are films rather than videos and how much it’s due to Facets being an organization that tends to work cheaply in as many ways as possible, despite the boldness and seriousness of its catalogue—a trait it occasionally shares in some ways with Artificial Eye. (None of the Facets employees whom I’ve spoken to over the years has ever been allowed to have an answering machine, for instance.) Another recent two-disc set of Facets worth noting is Artaud by the aforementioned Jérôme Prieur and Gérard Mordillat. While it isn’t experimental in any ordinary sense, this 1993 double feature provocatively pairs a 90-minute, black-and-white fiction film (My Life and Times with Antonin Artaud) with a 170-minute color documentary (The True Story of Artaud the Momo) by the same filmmakers on the same subject. (I’m more familiar with the fiction film—finding it an often hilarious account of the generosity and tolerance with which French culture often copes with the most demented and unreasonable artists.)

Insofar as The Sun hasn’t yet acquired a US distributor (although it does have one in Canada), I can highly recommend the film as the first Sokurov comedy that I’m aware of as well as the first of his films that may have a great performance (Issey Ogata as the Emperor Hirohito). Less obviously experimental than the other Sokurov titles mentioned above, it actually calls to mind Roberto Rossellini’s Le Prise de Pouvoir de Louis XIV (1966) in its subtle reflections on statecraft and leadership as well as its visual inventiveness in handling certain period details.

Having recently caught Paul Morrissey’s master class at the Mar del Plata Film Festival—where he argued at some length that his former boss Andy Warhol wasn’t really an artist or a creative type but just a businessman pursuing the sort of media image accorded to artists—I’m even more grateful for the recent release of my favourite Warhol film, Vinyl (1965), which I’d call the most artistic, certainly the most painterly, of those that I’ve seen. This wasn’t even shot by Morrissey but by Bud Wirtschafter, so maybe Morrissey considers Wirtschafter the auteur—or writer Ronald Tavel (freely adapting Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, before Kubrick did), or Burgess, or the collective superstar cast (including Gerard Malanga, Ondine, and Edie Sedgwick) that’s complexly crammed into the claustrophobic frame. Considering Morrissey’s politique des acteurs aesthetic, he’d probably opt for the latter, at least if he considers Vinyl any kind of art at all. It’s available, in any case, with The Velvet Underground & Nico (1966), which was shot by Morrissey, on a single overpriced (57 Euros), region-free PAL disc issued by www.rarovideo.com, along with a 65-page booklet in English and Italian with essays by Adriano Aprà (the DVD’s producer), Stephen Koch, and Roberto Di Vanni.

                                                     ***

On the same Italian label, on another overpriced (39 Euros), region-free PAL disc, you can find the first DVD release devoted to the legendary Italian enfant terrible of the avant-garde, Carmelo Bene (1937-2002), with two of his earliest films, Nostra Signora dei Turchi (Our Lady of the Turks) and Hermitage (both 1968), offered with optional English subtitles. But I have to confess that I discovered this only after I purchased good DVD-R NTSC transfers of the same films with unremovable English subtitles from www.superhappyfun.com for $13 and $10, respectively. And I hasten to add that I settled on these films, which I still haven’t seen, rather than on the later Bene films that I already know, such as One Hamlet Less (1973) and Salome (my favorite, 1972), because Super Happy Fun gave each of these “quality” ratings of 5 (as opposed to the 9 given to the ones I ordered), which they gloss as follows: “Blurred picture and static with some sound drop-outs and maybe some glitches in spots or shaky but still watchable. Very fuzzy. Very grainy.” It’s a good example of their honest advertising—apart from the highly subjective matter of what “watchable” means, since to my taste even a 7 from them isn’t very easy to sit through. But honest advertising or not, my ordering these dubs for about half as much as the originals obviously raises certain ethical issues.

I’m not claiming that I can resolve such issues here. To parody the usual sort of opposition made to such purchases, one could argue that one has no moral right to watch Edward Yang’s greatest film, A Brighter Summer Day, (also available from Super Happy Fun, and in a good, subtitled copy, for $15) until or unless some pal of Jack Valenti makes it available in your local video store for $30 or $60. And since the odds of this ever happening are just about zero, one has to conclude that one has no moral right to see Yang’s film, period, even for $30. But what about a pretty good letterboxed copy of Douglas Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels (1958) for $20, copied from TV, which I acquired recently from www.cinemacom.com/classic-movie-dvds.html? There’s theoretically a much better chance that this will eventually be issued by Universal—at least if one postulates some informed process of selection going on at that studio about what to release on DVD, which may be unduly optimistic on my part. (Certainly in light of my own brief experience working for Universal as a consultant on the re-edited Touch of Evil, when the woman in charge of foreign sales seemed utterly convinced that no one outside the US had the slightest interest in Orson Welles.)

Some of the other features I purchased from the same online source include letterboxed copies of Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill (1960), Frank Tashlin’s The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956), Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment (1957), and Leo McCarey’s Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! (1958), as well as The Lusty Men (1952), O. Henry’s Full House (1952), Sergeant Rutledge (1960), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Petulia (1968), and Ernst Lubitsch’s version of The Merry Widow (1934)—which raises comparable questions about the selection processes of MGM, Fox, and the other studios involved. Offhand, judging by the current estimations of their commercial ingredients (mainly their stars), one might guess that the Minnelli and McCarey are likely to come out on DVD and the Tashlin and Ritt are unlikely. But how can we be sure that rational considerations will play any part in these decisions? And how long should we wait for legit versions of the last half-dozen titles? (Apparently not long in the case of Petulia, which looked better than ever when I recently rewatched it—due out on Warners Home Video in the US on June 20.)

To return to the thorny question of what is and isn’t watchable, which is strictly a matter of individual taste (though it may also have some generational inflections), consider the case of Don Weis’ campy, sexy, beautiful, and downright wonderful The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1954), a particular favourite of mine that I ordered from the same source, knowing in advance that the TV copy of this particular Fox CinemaScope film, however crisp, most likely wouldn’t be letterboxed. And apart from the pre-credits and credits sequences, it wasn’t. A cultish favorite in some Parisian circles for its mise en scène—see the excellent and appreciative account of Jean-Pierre Coursodon in the second volume of his American Directors, which also gives Weis’ equally special I Love Melvin (1953) its rarely received due—Hajji Baba is so esoteric for most American cinephiles that the odds of its appearing on DVD in any form is strictly up to the whims of fate, so one may decide to settle for any version of it, whenever and however one finds it. That’s what I did, and as regretful I am about the barbarous losses, I’m still more happy than upset about the tradeoff. Just hearing Nat “King” Cole sing the theme song over and over in mantra-like fashion every few minutes and watching Elaine Stewart and all those vivid colour combinations was enough to make up the difference.

But would opting for this kind of tradeoff always be a wise policy? I thought I felt this way about another lost favorite, Georges Franju’s feature-length homage to the serials of Louis Feuillade, Judex (1963), which I’ve been concluding lately that Criterion or Kino might never get around to releasing. So I finally tracked down a DVD-R source, ordered a copy from www.BijouFlix.com (whose motto is “the cult in culture”), and then confronted the gruesome results—a horrible dub of an even more horrible print, outfitted with such tacky packaging and such an ugly menu that I wound up feeling as if I had just dragged one of my best friends through a river of mud. (Consider the menu, which comes in no less than six parts: (1) “Intro” [a geeky logo], (2) “Also available” [another geeky logo], (3) “Nosferatu Redux preview” [offering clips with one of the worst prints of the Murnau film I’ve ever seen, with intertitles removed and subtitles pasted over the shots], (4) “Feature presentation” [a third stupid logo], (5) Judex, and (6) “Finale” [a repeat of #1, this time with a URL added so that you can find other terrible stuff to order]). So in this case, in a film where visual texture is essential to its very meaning, I can easily conclude that no version of Georges Franju’s Judex is considerably better than this one.

To turn next to some intermediate examples—neither as bearable as the panned-and-scanned Adventures of Hajji Baba nor as unbearable as the BijouFlix DVD of Judex—let me cite seven rare features that I’ve ordered from www.artcinemaclub.com, which offers a somewhat bigger stock on eBay, and seems to get much of its stuff from Spanish-language sources via Miami or Buenos Aires: Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (1924), with music and Spanish titles; Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command, with music and English titles, and The Docks of New York (the only Sternberg film Manny Farber has ever admitted liking, to my knowledge), with music and (mainly) Spanish titles (both 1928); Mario Peixoto’s silent, avant-garde Brazilian masterpiece Limite (1931), with no subtitles; Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s Les visiteurs du soir (1942), with semi-legible, yellow English subtitles; and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s La casa del angel (1957), with English subtitles. The prints and transfers are mediocre in every case, but not impossible; I’d put them on the outer limits of the watchable.

My final example has to be semi-anonymous in order to avoid potential libel. Let’s just say that I now own two versions of a seedy noir by a famous atmospheric filmmaker whom I’ve cited above, a film much beloved by the Surrealists and by me. One of these versions is a pirated DVD-R from a URL listed in one of my previous columns, whose print source is undisclosed but is most likely cable TV. The other is a DVD from a reputable mainstream label, whose print source is the collection of one of the infamous robber barons among film distributors, a man who was smart enough to hire some sharp lawyers—even though, if memory serves, he also once spent some time in prison. The DVD-R version is luscious and lustrous; the DVD is blotchy, shaky, and full of dust particles. So tell me: is it more ethical to pay for the lousier version? Ask your heart.
                                               

***

Some Definitive, Near-Definitive, and Not-So-Definitive Editions:

Ever since I saw it in Cannes in 1971 and wrote about it in the Village Voice, the collectively and anonymously made Winter Soldier has always seemed to me the most valuable and powerful film document we have about the Vietnam war, which has made its lack of visibility since that era all the more lamentable. Now that it’s finally out on DVD, in a fine edition being distributed by Milestone, with welcome supplements (including some very touching recollections by some of the people who worked on it), it should be seen by everybody.

A few more long-overdue New Yorker releases: Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s primal Vidas Secas (1963), the founding gesture of Cinema Novo, delivered to us with the respect and care it deserves; two Peter Watkins features—The Gladiators (1969) and a digitally remastered version of the 174-minute version of Edvard Munch (1976), both made with Watkins’ cooperation and approval. Based on years-old memories, I much prefer the latter to the former, but it’s good to see both of them available, and I’m still holding out hopes for a proper release of the long-neglected Privilege (1967).

Luchino Visconti never regarded Bellissima (1951), his third feature, as one of his personal favourites. I suspect this is because the true auteurs of this masterpiece about a nurse (Anna Magnani) fanatically determined to get her little girl cast in a movie are Magnani and the writer Cesare Zavattini, who make beautiful music together. But whoever’s responsible, this is still one of my favorite Visconti films, and the subtitled PAL edition I acquired via www.xploitedcinema.com does the film proud, even if the extras aren’t subtitled.

From France, the splendid three-disc set devoted to Orson Welles’ Macbeth available from Les Introuvables has Welles’ original 114-minute 1948 cut on the first disc and his 85-minute 1950 cut (ordered by Republic, but done by Welles all the same) on the second. The third disc, making this box set as completist as one can currently hope for, includes the last four minutes of Welles’ 1936 Voodoo Macbeth staged in Harlem (drawn from a newsreel, and as far as I know, the only film record we still have of a Welles stage production) and the terrific 78-minute 1940 Mercury production of the play recorded for 78 RPM records (to accompany the Mercury edition of the play that Welles and Roger Hill published around the same time). There are also untranslated French analyses and commentaries by two exceptional Welles scholars, François Thomas and Jean-Pierre Berthomé, an interview with stage director Stuart Seide, and an 80-page book by Jean-François Buiré.

I’m not a particular fan of the Free Cinema British documentaries in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, but as far as I can tell, the BFI’s three-disc box set, Free Cinema, is nothing if not definitive. Here are all the shorts and featurettes in the movement that I’ve ever heard of, and then some, by Lindsay Anderson, Claude Goretta, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Alain Tanner, and Robert Vas, among others, plus a substantial documentary and a comprehensive catalog.

I was moved to give four stars to Edgar Reitz's 13-part, nearly 26-hour The Second Heimat (1992) when I reviewed it for the Chicago Reader a dozen years ago, and I quickly discovered afterwards that almost none of my colleagues agreed with me. Now that Facets Video has released it in a seven-disc box set, you can decide for yourself. A vast, novelistic meditation on young artists in Munich, mainly classical musicians and filmmakers, between 1960 and 1970, it offers the kind of all-enveloping experience that certain lengthy novels and endless serials bring, so that the very act of attending to it might be said to duplicate certain aspects of a “‘60s experience.” One's ordinary life is significantly disrupted—even unhinged—by the process of taking it all in. I’m also fairly sure that some of my customary critical reflexes were altered, because the experience of duration changes everything.

Having already written about a Spanish DVD of Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents five columns back, I’d like to now draw attention to the even better and more complete Masters of Cinema edition, also on PAL, with a wonderful commentary by critics David Ehrenstein and Bill Krohn that manages to be both loose and energetic, and a 24-page booklet consisting mainly of original press book material.

Would it be improper for me to describe the five-year-old Dreyer box set issued by Criterion (containing Day of Wrath, Ordet, Gertrud, and Carl Th. Dreyer—My Métier) as definitive? It probably would, for at least a couple of reasons: (1) Conflict of interest—I forgot to mention in the bibliography of my liner notes appended to my last column that I also furnished notes for Day of Wrath in this collection. (2) The BFI’s just-issued, separate PAL/Region 2 DVDs of 1925’s Master of the House (perhaps Dreyer’s major silent film apart from The Passion of Joan of Arc, and up to now unavailable on DVD), Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud might be said to raise the bar a bit. It’s grammatically incorrect to describe anything as “more definitive,” but the extras on the first DVD include Carl Th. Dreyer—My Métier and two Dreyer shorts; on the second are two more Dreyer shorts plus a commentary on Day of Wrath by Dreyer scholar Casper Tybjerg that can either be heard or—an alternative I heartily applaud—accessed in subtitles, along with the film’s subtitles; on the third are two more shorts and a half-hour, 2001 documentary about cinematographer Henning Bendtsen and the making of Ordet; and, on the fourth, another short plus a half-hour 1994 documentary about the making of Gertrud. As for the transfers, www.DVDBeaver.com has already made detailed comparisons of the separate editions of the last three features, so I’ll add only that in the cases of Ordet and Gertrud, the BFI transfers look a whole lot better than the poorly reproduced stills that are inexplicably used on their boxes.

When I finally caught up with Louis Malle’s first feature, Elevator to the Gallows (1957), during its recent theatrical re-release, I was mainly disappointed by its overall conventionality. So ordinarily I’d say that Criterion’s elaborate two-disc job gives it more than it deserves. But I have to admit that I’m grateful to have such varied materials as Malle’s odd 1954 student film inspired by the Theater of the Absurd, Crazeologie (a misspelling of the Charlie Parker tune, which figures prominently at the end); a detailed interview with Malle, done for Canadian TV around the time of his Black Moon (1975), where the interviewer appears to be the late, great Positif critic Robert Benayoun; and a lot of interesting material about the Miles Davis score. Two minor gripes, however: when Malle tells Benayoun or his lookalike that Gallows both was and wasn’t political, the English subtitler has him say that it both was and wasn’t a crime film; and the fascinating discussion of the score by jazz critic Gary Giddins and trumpeter Jon Faddis is handicapped by their ignorance of the fact that Malle’s decision not to use music while the hero is picking his way out of a stuck elevator can be traced directly to Bresson’s A Man Escaped, which Malle worked on as an assistant. The latter imitation in fact epitomizes what disappointed me about the film: Malle academically copies the manner of Bresson without respecting the values that motivate it.

Finally, when it comes to not-so-definitive editions, I’m obliged to point out that, as grateful as I am for Cahiers du Cinéma issuing Passion (1981) and Nouvelle Vague (1990)—for me, the two greatest “late” features of Godard, not counting all the great stuff he’s done on video—with removable English subtitles in a two-disc package, I have a couple of skeptical questions. Minor: Why omit Godard’s superb, 54-minute Scenario du Film “Passion” from the first disc as an ideal bonus? Major: Why is the soundtrack of Nouvelle Vague rendered in tinny mono, with none of the exquisite channel separations, whereas the two-CD set of the same soundtrack issued by ECM is in glorious stereo? Is the latter the product of the same kind of indifference that led Gaumont to slime the beautiful sound of Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma on video (unlike the Japanese DVD set) by issuing it in mono? If so, it’s just as ruinous, and let’s hope Gaumont does something more acceptable on the forthcoming DVDs of Histoire(s), even if they don’t bother to subtitle them.

                                                               ***  

Department of Apology and Correction: Regarding my last column, Erik Holst writes from Sweden, “You say that a Spanish DVD seems to be the only version of I Was Born, But... available on a Western DVD. Actually this is not quite true. A few years ago Arte Video released a French Ozu DVD box set called Yasujiro Ozu, 5 films en couleurs. In addition to the five color films mentioned in this title the box includes I Was Born, But... (Gosses de Tokyo) with French subtitles, but unfortunately without any kind of musical accompaniment.”

Articles in this Section

Editor’s Note (Latest Issue)
By Mark Peranson

Global Discoveries on DVD b
By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Film/Art: JLG in Paris b
By Andréa Picard

and in the magazine..

Film/Art: Candice Breitz by Jon Davies

DVD: Winter Soldier by Andrew Tracy