Global Discoveries on DVD:
One-Shots, Hybrids, and A Few Footnotes to Film History

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

I One-Shots and/or Definitive Editions

(a) The work of Robert Breer is pretty neat, but my favourite abstract animator is Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), who once rightly said of his work, “Because of its complete originality, this type of film knows no boundaries of time or fashion.” The Center for Visual Music (www.centerforvisualmusic.org/DVD.htm) proves that assertion with Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films, a splendid NTSC, region-free collection with several extras that is the first in a series, and the item in this column that I’ve already spent the most time with. Thirty dollars for one disc (private home use) may sound steep, but the material is so exquisite and so compulsively rewatchable that it feels like a bargain. (For more recent experimental animation—by Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, Jim Trainor, and the Henry-Garon-Ascher collective—check out Anxious Animation, available from www.othercinemaDVD.com.)

The German-born Fischinger, aptly called “cinema’s Kandinsky” by John Canemaker, was employed at various times during his career by Fritz Lang (in 1929, when he was one of the credited cinematographers on Frau im mond, and again circa 1948, when he designed a dream sequence for The Secret Beyond the Door that was never used); by both Paramount Pictures and MGM (in the ‘30s, when they distributed two of his finest shorts, and when he worked without credit on a sequence in The Big Broadcast of 1937); and by Walt Disney (in 1940, when he worked on the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” sequence of Fantasia, again without credit). But the most significant of his famous bosses was undoubtedly Orson Welles, who kept him on the Mercury payroll for most of 1942—effectively subsidizing much of his major work during that period and provisionally assigning him to work on an animated colour sequence to accompany Louis Armstrong’s music in It’s All True, before that sketch-film project got transferred to South America and the history of jazz became the story of the samba. (Two years later, when Fischinger was hired to design the credits for Jane Eyre—another sequence that wasn’t used—one wonders if Welles as that film’s uncredited producer was the one who hired him.)  My point, in any case, is that Fischinger was one of the few early masters of avant-garde cinema who moved naturally in and out of the mainstream throughout his career.

(b) I’m no expert when it comes to the films of John Berry (1917-1999), being especially weak when it comes to his French features (occasioned by his being blacklisted out of Hollywood in the early 50s); the only one I’ve seen so far has been Tamango (1958), an account of a slave revolt with Dorothy Dandridge—and one of the two major widescreen films of his with black actors, along with the wonderful comedy Claudine (1974), that are available only in pan-and-scan versions. But I was fortunate enough to have spent some time with Berry in rather diverse places, including Cannes, Paris, Rotterdam, Taipei, and Vienna, where he had the best stories about working for Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre that I ever heard from anyone. So I’m immensely and personally pleased that thanks to the special efforts of Pierre Rissient and other friends of his, Berry was able to end his life and career with one of his finest films, Boesman & Lena (2000)—another major widescreen film of his with black actors (Danny Glover and Angela Bassett in the title roles), adapted by Berry from a play by South African writer Athol Fugard. And I’m especially happy to report that this film is available letterboxed on DVD, and with wonderful interviews that are actually two conversations—one between Bassett and Glover, the other between Berry and Fugard.

If you’re so inclined, you can also flip this disc over and play a pan-and-scan version of Boesman & Lena, though I can’t imagine why anyone would. (The CinemaScope framing is so quintessentially 50s that it reminds me of Rebel Without a Cause.) Frankly, I was slow to order this DVD because it retails for the same price as the Fischinger DVD listed above. But now that I have it I’m very glad that I do.

(c) Michel Brault’s Pour la suite du monde (1963)—an intimate epic about a fishing village, one of the greatest documentaries ever made—is a prime example of a masterpiece that remains unknown outside most of the Francophone world due to the scarcity of subtitled prints. So the National Film Board of Canada’s release of a comprehensive box set, Michael Brault Oeuvres 1958-1974—including five DVDs and 15 films, all subtitled, and including two extended documentaries about Brault, and a 103-page bilingual book—is just the opportunity needed outside Québec for Brault to finally get some of the recognition he deserves. Go to ww2.nfb.ca/boutique/ for more details. 

(d) The last time I looked at the Internet Movie Database, Miklós Jancsó, now in his mid-80s, had 70-odd films to his credit. I’ve never met anyone who’s seen more than a handful of these, even when his reputation in the West was at his peak (roughly, between the mid-‘60s and the mid-‘70s), but I should add that most of the few I’ve seen have been masterpieces or near-masterpieces—and, along with the cream of Paul Fejos and Béla Tarr, the very best Hungarian films I know. All of them qualify as period pageants, usually violent, with some of the most beautifully choreographed mise en scène and intricate interplay between camera and actors in all of cinema, with lengthy takes featuring almost continuous movement. So it seems like a small miracle that the two greatest of these films that I’ve seen should turn up on DVD around the same time—The Red and the White (1967) and Red Psalm (1972)—in the UK and France, respectively, in excellent transfers and with English subtitles.

The first of these, in black and white ‘Scope, is issued by the excellent Second Run, moderately priced, and has the advantage of including a booklet containing an extended interview with Jancsó by Andrew James Horton. The second, in colour, my absolute favourite—a sort of leftist musical, called Psaume rouge in French, with a lot of dancing and tunes ranging from “La Marseillaise” in Hungarian to a catchy English folk ballad—is issued by Clavis Films, not so moderately priced, and doesn’t include any sort of booklet, though it does contain extracts from the four other Jancsó films available from Clavis at comparable prices: The Round-Up (1965), My Way Home (1965), The Red and the White (1967), and Silence and Cry (1967). (Meanwhile, Second Run is announcing that it will be releasing several more Jancsó films, and I’ll be surprised if Red Psalm is not among them.) Both DVDs also include the same 54-minute Jancsó documentary, Message of Stones (1994), which I haven’t seen, as a bonus.
(e) Second Run has also recently brought out an excellent edition of Blissfully Yours (2002)—the second feature of Thai wizard Apichatpong Weerasethakal, whose three major features to date are all impressive, remarkably different from one another, and available on separate labels. (The other two can be found from NTSC sources in the US: Mysterious Object at Noon [2000] from Plexifilm, Tropical Malady [2004] from Strand Releasing. I exclude from this reckoning the filmmaker’s less interesting 2003 exploitation effort, The Adventures of Iron Pussy, which doesn’t live up to its title.)

(f) Meanwhile, Ken Jacobs has thoughtfully issued his six-and-a-half-hour magnum opus of political protest, cavorting pals and comrades, and deeply incriminating found footage, Star Spangled to Death, on his own label. Issued in four discs—one for each word of the title, in a package designed to be expanded and collapsed like an accordion—this fabulously indigestible work, which has been percolating and accumulating since the ‘60s, can be ordered, logically enough, at www.starspangledtodeath.com. And if you contact John Zorn’s Tzadik label at www.tzadik.com, you can order Jacobs’ flicker-heavy performance collaborations with Zorn and Ikue Mori on another DVD, entitled Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise.

(g) I’m hesitant about calling any homemade and unlicensed DVD-Rs definitive. But when so much conscientious work, love, and intelligence go into their production—evident in everything from their menus to their letterboxed transfers to their English subtitles—I can only hope that the “professional” versions of the same films with subtitles, if and when they appear, can live up to comparable standards. So make a beeline to www.japanesenewwave.com for first-rate editions of Hani Susumu’s Inferno of First Love (1968) and five Oshima Nagisa features—Death by Hanging and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (both 1968), Boy (1969), The Man Who Left His Will On Film (1970), and The Ceremony (1971). Many more titles, including others by Oshima and Imamura Shohei, are announced as forthcoming.

(h) One of my favorites among neglected Hollywood masterpieces since my youth is William A. Wellman’s Track of the Cat, (1954), which I tend to regard as the American Ordet (though it was released a year before Dreyer’s masterpiece)—a dysfunctional family drama that also might be regarded as a western, an allegory, and a claustrophobic stage piece, even though it’s adapted from a novel and is in CinemaScope and stereo sound. The singular cast includes Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright, Beulah Bondi, Diana Lynn, Tab Hunter, Philip Tonge, William Hopper, and Carl Switzer (who once played Alfalfa in the Our Gang comedies.) The fact that this unabashed art movie and probable commercial flop was produced by John Wayne isn’t widely known, and this is bound to make any studio DVD hem and haw a bit about its special qualities, as this one does, despite its many extras (which include a commentary by William Wellman Jr., Tab Hunter, and Frank Thompson). It seems that Wayne was so grateful to Wellman for directing him in their big money-maker The High and the Mighty (which looks like a potboiler now, though it was packed with Oscar prestige in 1954) that he gave him carte blanche on this film, enabling Wellman to fulfill a longtime dream of designing a film in black and white but shooting it in color (and meanwhile adapting another novel by William Van Tilburg Clark, the author of The Ox-Bow Incident). A.I. Bezzerides, the underrated screenwriter (Thieves Highway, Kiss Me Deadly), complained later that his script needed another draft, and I’ve never heard a peep about what Wayne himself thought of it. It’s probably better not to ask.

(i) It’s been very satisfying to see proper editions of the films of Peter Watkins, the virtual godfather of the pseudodocumentary, finally being issued. And few have been more satisfying than New Yorker Video’s recent DVD devoted to Watkins’ first two major works, Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965), which offer the template for most of his subsequent works. 

(j) I’m far from sure what a definitive edition of Mommie Dearest (1981) would be like, but I can think of at least two prerequisites: John Waters would do the commentary, and there would be a detailed glossing of the horror-story opening of the film, in which Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford ghoulishly creeps out in the dead of night, remaining offscreen for the first several minutes as if she were a monster on the prowl. The “Hollywood Royalty Edition” on Paramount fulfills the first requirement, and I guess that’s enough. Think of what a better place America would be if Waters was the regular host of The Tonight Show, or even of A Prairie Home Companion. The name of this edition implies that Paramount was hoping for some standard-issue camp appreciation, but what Waters offers is a lot better and more useful than that: a detailed, astute critical account of what’s good about the film (and Dunaway in particular) and why—clearly more than they bargained on.
                                                            ***
II A Few Not-So-Definitive Editions

a) Is there any reason to suspect that Gaumont’s four-disc French edition of Les Vampires, Louis Feuillade’s great 399-minute, ten-chapter serial of 1915-1916, might be better than David Shepard’s US edition (on only one two-sided disc), released eight years ago on Image Entertainment? Recalling Gaumont’s exquisite edition of Feuillade’s earlier Fantomas, one of the best box sets any company has ever released, I thought there was. But I was wrong and I’m afraid my money was wasted. Quite apart from the absence of subtitles, and excepting the bonuses not included in the US version (four Feuillade shorts from 1908-11, one of which jammed on my copy; a half-hour TV documentary from 1963), the American edition is flat-out superior in almost every respect, including price and design. It’s true that the Gaumont box set includes a handsome 34-page brochure summarizing all the episodes and reprinting a Louis Aragon text, plus a new, beautifully and lavishly illustrated 128-page paperback by Patrice Gauthier and the indispensable Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, Maître de Cinéma Populaire. But you can also order the paperback separately, forget about the rest, and save a lot of money.

(b) There’s nothing remotely definitive about the DVD of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) recently put out in the UK by Universal, which suggests you should be patient and hold out for the much-delayed US edition. But the two extras are still worth noting: a subtitled interview with American critic Bill Krohn speaking in French, shot by Gary Graver and no doubt imported from the Cahiers du Cinéma DVD of Ambersons, which offers a succinct production history that’s in some ways better and more accurate than any account in print, and the film’s routine trailer, offering a very fleeting glimpse of Welles’ original ending for the film, which RKO elected to delete and destroy.

(c) Given how scarce the films of the singular Indian director Ritwik Ghatak are in the west, apart from the good BFI DVDs of his masterpiece The Cloud-Capped Star (1960) and his later and lesser A River Called Titas (1973), even less than ideal editions of the others are extremely welcome. So it was exciting to learn from Yoo Un-seong, who programmed a Ghatak retrospective last spring at the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea, that all of Ghatak’s features are now available in subtitled DVD and VCD copies from www.calcuttaweb.com. (Many Satyajit Ray films can be ordered from the same source, including Devi and Days and Nights in the Forest; for the latter, look for the title Aranyer Dinratri.) The prints and the English subtitles aren’t ideal, but the unique capacity of Ghatak to reinvent the cinema at virtually every instant—especially in the ways that he reformulates and “reshoots” every sequence when he records the sound, including the music—comes through loud and clear. My current favorites after The Cloud-Capped Star are Ajantrik (1958) and E-Flat (The Pathetic Fallacy, 1961).
                                                            ***
III DVDs with (or inside) Books

(a) Among the more ephemeral and elusive DVDs currently circulating are those included inside books, journals, and magazines. Quite apart from the sometimes knotty issues of how one shelves such items, these hybrids sometimes provoke other basic difficulties when it comes to acquiring them. As this column goes to press, I’m still awaiting a Portuguese book-with-DVD that I ordered over six weeks ago, devoted to Pedro Costa’s amazing French documentary about Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet editing Sicilia!, Où Gît Votre Sourire Enfoui? (2001), which I’m told also includes some Costa shorts and English subtitles. The problem is, if you don’t know Portuguese and are trying to order Onde jaz o teu sorriso? over the Internet, you may give up trying to follow the confusing prompts on Portuguese web sites as I did and opt instead for ordering the book and DVD from a German web site that handles Portuguese books. (Not that I know German either, but in this case I found the prompts easier to follow.) So at the moment I’m still waiting for the package to reach Germany so that it can be mailed to me from there. 
          

(b) I’ve already mentioned more than once in this column the wonderful French journal Cinéma that appears every spring and fall and that ever since its fifth issue (Cinéma 06) has included one DVD per issue. None of the films selected so far has been subtitled in any language but French when subtitles are needed (in half of the DVDs to date, devoted to silent films by Mizoguchi and Ford and two sound shorts by Forough Farrokhzad), but the interactive nature of the discs and texts in each issue has been as exemplary as the prints used.

(c) Still more prone to fall between the cracks is the English language DVD magazine “of rare and unseen short films,” Wholphin, launched last year by McSweeney’s and packaged and sold as a book in bookstores (though the printed matter chiefly consists of liner notes). In its two issues to date, both worth having, it hasn’t succeeded in fulfilling its initial brief to come out quarterly, but its second issue is priced more moderately than the first ($15.95 US, $19.00 CAN versus $22 US, $30 CAN) while actually containing more material. The best reason for buying the second is in fact the bonus disc containing the entire first part of Adam Curtis’ brilliant and audacious three-part BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares (2004), which in the US is otherwise available only if you download it (for free) from the Internet. (My only major beef is that, as with David O. Russell’s also politically controversial Soldier’s Pay, included in the first issue, the billing on the box doesn’t specify that what you’re getting isn’t complete.) Other oddities include a personal documentary by Spike Jonze about Al Gore and a short written by Miranda July in No. 1, Errol Morris interviewing Donald Trump about Citizen Kane and shorts by Bill Morrison, Steven Soderbergh, and Jessica Yu in No. 2, and, in both issues, diverse found objects, including an exotic sitcom (Turkish in #1, Japanese in #2) outfitted with alternative sets of subtitles (one accurate and the others invented à la What’s Up, Tiger Lily?).

(d) If you purchase Isabella Rossellini’s book In the Name of the Father, the Daughter and the Holy Spirits: Remembering Roberto Rossellini (Schirmer/Mosel), the quirky and fascinating 16-minute film directed by Guy Maddin which she wrote and stars in, My Dad Is 100 Years Old, is included as a “bonus DVD” (not to be confused with a DVD bonus).

(e) A still stronger case could be made for Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Four Short Films, an extremely elegant, trilingual book-with-NTSC-and-region-free-DVD issued by the record label ECM, containing English and German subtitle options as well as the printed spoken texts of the films in English, French and German to go with the handsome frame enlargements. (The films included are De l’origine du XXIe siècle [2000, 16 min.], The Old Place [1998, 46 min.], Liberté et Patrie [2002, 22 min.], and Je vous salue, Sarajevo [1993, 2 min.])

(f) It’s also worth knowing that a supplementary DVD, unsubtitled, is part of a much larger and pricier book—Godard: Documents, an invaluable collection issued by the Centre Pompidou, coedited by Nicole Brenez and Michael Witt. (For the record, I’m one of the many contributors.) I would describe most if not all of the works on this DVD as more ephemeral than those in the ECM package: Lettre à Freddy Buache (1982, 11 min.), Meetin’ WA (also known as Meeting Woody Allen, 1986, 26 min.), Closed Jeans (1987, ten TV ad spots for M+F Girbaud), Closed (1988, seven TV ad spots for M+F Girbaud), Metamorphojean (1990, five TV ad spots for M+F Girbaud), and On s’est tous défilé (1987, 11 min.) But the documentation here is much more complete: one of my few complaints about the ECM package is that it doesn’t bother to give the dates of its own films, all of which I drew from Godard: Documents. (The latter book, on the other hand, is so “complete” that it offers two separate dates for On s’est tous défilé—1987 in the filmography, 1988 on the disc itself.)
                                                            ***
IV A Few Footnotes to Film History

(a) One of the worst casualties of the attacks, invasions, and occupations that have been devastating the Middle East over the past five years, and North Africa a few decades earlier—I’m reluctant to dignify some of them by misdescribing them as wars—has been the way that so many people who’ve been slaughtered have been deceptively identified with the countries where they’ve been unlucky enough to have been born. It becomes all too easy to elide the multicultural populations of Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Algeria, or at least dismiss them as part of the collateral damage and forget that they represent or are represented by their respective countries about as much as most of the Yankee readers of this sentence represent or are represented by George W. Bush. And among those people and cultures being misrepresented are not only a good many ethnicities but also experimental films and filmmakers. 

To get a glimpse of some of the kind of sensibilities and works that are being elided by all this ideological shorthand, check out the exciting DVD released by www.lowave.com called Resistance[s] and including eight “experimental films from the Middle East and North Africa,” along with supporting interviews with each of the filmmakers, and furnished with subtitles in Arabic, English, French, and German. One side of the disc is PAL, the other side NTSC, increasing the already wide access. As the title suggests, all the films can be regarded as political and ideological in one way or another, but the range is extremely broad, from Usama Alshaibi’s Iraqi-American animation Allahu Akbar to Waël Nourredine’s Lebanese-French documentary agitprop Ça sera beau. From Beyrouth with Love.

(b) Throughout the history of cinema, there’s rarely been much correlation between knowing something about a given subject and having the public profile of an expert, regardless of whether you happen to be in the mainstream or in academia. Consequently, any number of respectable, tenured academics continue to spread such thoroughly disproven myths as the ones about Robert Flaherty codirecting Tabu and Herman J. Mankiewicz writing all or almost all of the Citizen Kane script.

Given such a state of affairs, which isn’t likely to change anytime soon, I rather like the fact that at least two of the experts heard on Masters of Cinema’s superb new two-disc edition of F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926)—and I willingly use the term “experts” without the irony of quotation marks—contradict one another. Bill Krohn, providing an excellent commentary to the recently discovered (and ravishing) “domestic” version of the film along with David Ehrenstein, quotes Herman G. Weinberg at the beginning to the effect that Gerhart Hauptmann wrote the intertitles of this version; but Tony Rayns, speaking authoritatively on the other disc (which also contains the better-known “export” version of the film), insists that Hans Kyser wrote the intertitles of both versions and that Haupmann’s intertitles, rejected by UFA, were handed out in a brochure at the film’s premiere. Furthermore, Rayns scoffs at the notion that Kyser’s script is indebted to Goethe, finding the very idea “farcical” and maintaining that Christopher Marlowe’s play is a more important source, whereas Krohn, while talking note of several departures from Goethe, contends that his Faust and not Marlowe’s is the dominant influence. 

Feeling myself unqualified to speak to these issues, I can only record my unverifiable impression that Rayns seems to have a better grasp of German while Krohn, who cites both parts of the Goethe play on many occasions, seems more familiar with the text. (The only conclusive correction I can make to either commentator would be to Rayns’ description of Murnau biographer Lotte H. Eisner as a “friend” of the filmmaker; as a one-time friend of Eisner, I’m sure she never met the man—a fact she also states in the Preface to the English edition of her biography.)  

My point, in any case, is that both Rayns and Krohn have a lot of interesting things to say about Faust, even if their orientations and sources are strikingly different, and both deserve to be heard at length, so it isn’t really the job of Nick Wrigley, the producer of this excellent edition, to choose between their separate interpretations and versions of the facts. This is our job and dilemma, at least if we choose to take them on.

(c) To get the maximal amount of pleasure from Carlotta’s nifty French box set of Samuel Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets (1951), Hell and High Water (1954), and House of Bamboo (1955), you should first check out pages 307-308 in Fuller’s autobiography A Third Face, where he describes J. Edgar Hoover calling a lunch meeting with him and Darryl F. Zanuck, held at Romanoff’s. If you believe the myth that Fuller was an extreme right-winger (popular only among those who didn’t know him), you should be advised that this wasn’t a friendly social visit. According to Fuller, Hoover said that he didn’t like either The Steel Helmet (1951) or Fixed Bayonets; he was particularly incensed by Pickup on South Street (1953), and wanted Fox to either cut or reshoot the line of dialogue in which a pickpocket played by Richard Widmark replies to an FBI agent’s request for cooperation by asking, “Are you waving the flag at me?” 

Zanuck backed up Fuller and refused to make any changes, saying, “Mr. Hoover, you don’t know movies.” And one way Fuller expressed his gratitude was by agreeing to shoot Hell and High Water—another anti-Communist movie that, unlike Pickup, wasn’t a personal project (though it’s better than I remembered)—on the condition that he be allowed to rewrite the script. With this back story in mind, note that Richard Widmark stars in this picture as well, as a mercenary hired to command a submarine on a dangerous mission. And, at one point in an early scene, Fuller has him virtually repeat the same line of dialogue that Hoover hated: “Are you waving the flag at me?”

Articles in this Section

Editor's Note
By Mark Peranson

Global Discoveries on DVD
By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Film/Art: Josef Dabernig
By Andréa Picard

Web Only

Festivals: Locarno
By Jerry White

and in the magazine..

DVD: Barbara Loden’s Wanda by Jason McBride

Books Around
By Olaf Möller

Back Page: Eugène Green’s Les Signes
By Scott Foundas