Global Discoveries on DVD: Perversities

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

For a variety of reasons—and the nuts and bolts involved in writing this column are foremost among them—I’ve never rented a DVD. But friends who do this with some regularity report back to me. Some of their experiences are substantially different from mine because my friends aren’t receiving the same texts that I do along with the movies. Subscribers to Netflix don’t see the same booklets, and some patrons of video stores like Blockbuster don’t even see the same cover copy and cover art.

Not receiving the same cover material seems like a relatively minor drawback, roughly akin to buying a used hardcover book without its original jacket. But in the cases of liner notes found inside the DVD boxes, such as those commonly found in Criterion’s single-disc releases, the differences become more pronounced. Once we get to box sets, the differences are still more pronounced, and not only because members of Netflix tend to rent each disc in a box set separately. There’s an increasing trend to include larger booklets and even books in some of these packages, and speaking as someone who sometimes contributes to these publications, I’m more than a little annoyed that DVD renters never see any of them.

I’ve often written about these accompanying booklets and books in this column, and I started addressing this topic more directly in the Fall 2006 issue, under the subheading “DVDs with (or inside) Books.” If we stick now to offerings of just the current quarter, as of early 2007, there’s a 100-page book included with the Criterion edition of Pandora’s Box (1929) called Reflections on Pandora’s Box that features a new essay by J. Hoberman and reprints of Kenneth Tynan’s famous profile of Louise Brooks as well as Brooks’ own essay about herself and G.W. Pabst. The four-disc set of The Chaplin Mutual Comedies distributed by Image Entertainment includes two separate “brochures”: 28 pages of notes by Jeffrey Vance on the dozen two-reel Chaplin shorts included, which occupy the first two discs, and Richard Patterson’s 20-page “Making The Gentleman Tramp,” about the 75-minute, 1975 documentary on the third disc. (The fourth disc contains Kevin Macdonald’s 52-minute 1996 documentary, Chaplin’s Goliath, about Scottish actor Eric Campbell, the “heavy” in the Mutual two-reelers.)

And Masters of Cinema’s two most recent releases—two three-disc box sets, both on PAL—go even further by including a beautifully illustrated 184-page book in each package. The book with Naruse, Volume One, a set which has Naruse’s Repast (1951), Sound of the Mountain (1954), and Flowing (1956), reprints essays by Audie Bock and Phillip Lopate and offers a preview of Catherine Russell’s forthcoming book The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity that includes a brief introduction and separate essays on the three films in the set. Even more impressive, to my mind, is the similarly designed book that comes with Buster Keaton: The Complete Short Films 1917-1923 and contains not only texts available elsewhere—in this case, excerpts from interviews with Keaton and his autobiography—but two substantial new texts that were generated for this release: a lively 115-page roundtable discussion between Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Dan Sallitt, and Brad Stevens, conducted via email and dealing with all 32 of the shorts included, and an unsigned 12-page feature on Keaton’s Italian villa.

Most importantly, the Keaton volume has been put together like a proper volume more than a grab-bag, with a short intro drawn from Keaton’s My Wonderful World of Slapstick and a brief personal afterword by Bill Krohn. And the importance of this distinction shouldn’t be underestimated. At a time when it’s said that young people don’t like to read, causing much grief to magazines, newspapers, and book publishers—a factoid that isn’t really true once one factors in the huge amounts that get read on the internet—new and different reconfigurations are taking place between sound, image, and the printed word, with the result that both information and criticism wind up getting relocated in unexpected places. Thus, lamentably, the Keaton book probably won’t turn up in any libraries, making it lost to many areas of film research, and subscribers to Netflix won’t be able to access Hoberman’s new essay on Pandora’s Box when they rent the film (even though, thanks to Criterion’s foresight, they’ll have a choice of four separate music tracks to play with it). Conversely, Naruse fans who don’t have Lopate’s 1998 collection of his film pieces, Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, may still wind up reading his essay about Naruse, one of the better pieces in the book—but only if they order the Masters of Cinema Naruse set from abroad, a concept that for many film buffs continues to be about as inconceivable as boarding a rocket ship for Mars.

It’s true that the booklet coming with Martin Arnold: The Cineseizure, my favorite release to date on the Austrian Index label (www.index-dvd.at) (because Arnold manages to turn every piece of Hollywood footage he deconstructs into a geeky nightmare that I can’t shake loose), is only 20 pages long, but these are so jazzy as well as useful that I lament the prospect that members of Netflix wouldn’t see them even if they could rent this PAL/no-regional-code disc. Jazzy: “Arnold’s films, characterized by a semiotic economy of parapraxes [and yes, this word is defined via Freud in a footnote, just as “hauntology” is previously defined via Derrida in a footnote] (symptomatic slips, twitches, spasms, stutters, lapses, and automatic behaviors), constitute a cinema by seizure, a cinema of seizure, a cinema as seizure, a cinema seizure, a cineseizure that short-circuits the conventional language and logics of cinema.” (From the nine-page essay by James Leo Cahill, only in English, which stands to reason—how could one translate such a mimetic description into German?) And useful: five pages of notes on the three films included from diverse critics and sources, some in German, some in English. P.S.: the disc also has four brief “bonustracks” from Arnold.

By contrast, the 20-page booklet accompanying my other favorite Austrian DVD of the quarter—the Austrian Film Museum’s edition of the tinted, Austrian-release version of Blind Husbands (1919), Erich von Stroheim’s first feature, identified as the longest and oldest surviving version—is sober and useful: two comprehensive and responsible pieces of historiography, both given in German and English. (For more details and ordering, go to www.edition-filmmuseum.de)

                                                            ***
Textual extras aren’t always just a matter of printed texts. In order to appreciate the very special kinds of artifice employed by Abbas Kiarostami on his very different The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) and Five (2003), you have to acquire the excellent MK2 DVDs of those two films from France, both of them equipped with English subtitles, where two Japanese documentaries about the shooting of the former and Kiarostami’s own hour-long 2005 documentary about the shooting of the latter spell out the rather startling facts in fascinating detail. In the case of The Wind Will Carry Us, the subterfuges involve not only fake “Kuleshov effects” contriving to create imaginary dialogues that never took place, but also constructing portions of sets to supplement the “real” locations and/or tampering with those locations in other ways.

And in the case of Five—a contemplative film whose ideal venue is in fact on a DVD player at home, with a good sound system, not in a movie theatre or a museum, where being part of an audience only becomes a distraction—this isn’t a matter of Kiarostami showing us how he directs ducks (which isn’t exactly startling information). It’s Kiarostami showing or at least describing the kinds of deception employed in the fifth, longest, and most interesting segment—a sequence that, like pivotal sequences in Taste of Cherry (1997), The Wind Will Carry Us, and ABC Africa (2001), transpires in murky semidarkness.

Another interesting aspect of Kiarostami’s About Five is the curious fact that it begins with the same soccer match in Tehran that Jafar Panahi’s exquisite Offside (now available in a bare-bones edition from Artificial Eye in the UK) is concerned with—the one at which Iran qualified for the World Cup. Considering that Kiarostami made Five near Panahi’s house on the Caspian Sea while he was scripting Crimson Gold (2003), and that we periodically catch glimpses of Panahi later in the same documentary, this can hardly be a coincidence, yet what Kiarostami means by it remains a bit obscure. (He does confess that soccer doesn’t interest him, despite the role a climactic Tehran soccer match played in 1974’s The Traveller, his first feature.)

For the working methods of Bresson—one of the filmmakers Kiarostami cites in About Five—Criterion’s fine edition of Mouchette (1967), which features a Tony Rayns commentary, also includes two “Making of” documentaries, never before seen in North America, that give us a far more intimate look at Bresson’s directing, including his work with actors and cameraman, than anything else I’ve seen.
                         ***
Fans of Adrian Martin, the best Australian film critic, will be happy to know that he’s provided excellent commentaries to four recent subtitled DVD releases of Madman Films that can be ordered from www.madman.com.au, which has plenty of other worthy items, for about $35 Australian each plus postage (which translates by the latest conversion rates into about $27 US). The four releases are three by Jean-Luc Godard—Vivre sa vie (1962), Masculin féminin (1966), 2 ou 3 Choses que je sais d’elle (1967, nicely letterboxed)—and Buñuel’s late, semi-great Mexican feature The Exterminating Angel (1962). Based on what I’ve sampled, the transfers are also good. Martin’s remarks are handicapped at times by the usual commentary problem—the weaving in and out of direct relevance to what’s happening at any given moment in the film, which periodically raises the question of whether an audio commentary is the best vehicle for what’s being imparted. But given the wealth of information Martin has to impart, this is a clearly a small price to pay.

On the more general question of the legitimacy of audio commentaries, James Naremore and I were certainly flattered to discover that our joint commentary in Criterion’s Mr. Arkadin box set came in second in DVD Beaver’s “Best DVD of 2006” awards. Yet the fact that first place, with 16% of the vote, went to “I don’t listen to commentaries” is surely telling. And a particular glitch that crops up in Martin’s commentary for The Exterminating Angel, through no fault of his own, helps to highlight both the dislocations of information cited above and the strange consequences that can sometimes ensue from this.  

Less than five minutes into the film, Buñuel deliberately repeats a brief scene of guests arriving at a dinner party at the same time that a couple of servants are leaving and the host is calling for his butler, showing this scene a second time from different camera angles. It’s one of the most striking examples of Buñuel’s Surrealist mischief in subverting narrative continuity—something that can be traced all the way back to the “Once upon a time...” intertitle beginning Un chien andalou (1929), continues in such later European films as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and, to my mind, shows the likely impact on The Exterminating Angel of Last Year at Marienbad, released the previous year. Martin’s commentary deals at some length with this repetition and its significance—quoting Buñuel’s own comments in his autobiography about several deliberate repetitions in the film, including this one. According to Buñuel, this particular repetition was even misunderstood by his chief cameraman while the film was being edited, believing it to be a technical error despite the fact that he had shot both versions of the scene himself.
But through an absurd technical error on the DVD, attributable to someone having arrived at the same erroneous conclusion as the cameraman, the scene’s repetition has been deleted—even though Martin, who was watching a more complete print while giving his “one-take” commentary, discusses it at some length. (“It turns out,” Martin wrote me, “that the cut is the result of a very ‘normative’ English distributor some years back, who interpreted the scene as an editing mistake, and thought he would help out by correcting it to the Hollywood classical standard!”) So ironically, it might be concluded that one Surrealist non sequitur, quite deliberate, was replaced by another one, completely accidental, to anyone following Martin’s commentary. In both cases, the viewer is apt to be puzzled by and perhaps a little incredulous about what he has just seen and heard.
                                                   ***
Another textual issue is raised by that very neglected subgenre, the thoughtful literary adaptation that also manages to be highly cinematic. A prime example is offered by The Innocents (1961), just brought out in a lovely BFI edition: Jack Clayton’s terrific and genuinely scary adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw with Deborah Kerr, scripted by William Archibald, Truman Capote, and John Mortimer. (Capote, according to Christopher Frayling’s comprehensive filmed introduction, played the dominant role, especially in his ingenious ways of integrating various Southern Gothic elements—making portions of this movie almost a kissing English cousin of Other Voices, Other Rooms, his first novel).

If memory serves, the last time I saw The Innocents was when I was a teenager, shortly after it came out and spurred by Pauline Kael’s thoughtful rave in Film Quarterly. I liked it then, and I must say that, if anything, it’s only gotten better in the interim. Now it suggests Val Lewton in black-and-white CinemaScope, as rethought by a stylist of sound and image far more baroque than Jacques Tourneur. It also recalls to me why William Friedkin was so unsuitable a choice for the commentary to Lewton and Tourneur’s The Leopard Man (1943), as the over-explicitness of the horrors in The Exorcist (1973) are the precise opposite of the suggestive hints of the earlier film, as well as The Innocents. I still haven’t checked out Clayton’s 1955 short The Bespoke Overcoat on the same DVD, but this feature alone, perhaps his best, suggests he’s overdue for some sort of rediscovery.
                                                            ***
It seems like an obvious idea to include the silent and sound versions of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) on the same DVD, but for some reason, it appears that the only label that’s done this is a German one, Arthaus, which I ordered from xploitedcinema.com. The only thing to object to here is that the silent version is filed away as a “special feature,” which seems unjust for those who consider it the better version. Another extra is an amusing if brief sound test with Hitchcock teasing his leading lady, Anny Ondra.
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In many ways, the principal value of two recent box sets devoted to TV interviews—Edward R. Murrow: The Best of Person to Person (three discs) on Koch Entertainment and The Dick Cavett Show: Hollywood Greats (four discs) on Shout Factory—is the concise history lessons they provide about American culture and manners in the ‘50s and ‘70s, respectively. What’s especially striking about the Murrow show is how readily and unselfconsciously Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Marlon Brando, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Gene Kelly, and Jerry Lewis, among others—not to mention Liberace, Robert Kennedy, Norman Rockwell, Eleanor Roosevelt, Esther Williams—admitted Murrow into, around, and through their homes as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Some of their offhand manner may have been rehearsed, but if so, they sure did a convincing job of it.

Brando and Douglas also turn up on Cavett’s show, along with Robert Altman, Fred Astaire, Peter Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Frank Capra, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Groucho Marx, Robert Mitchum, Debbie Reynolds, and Orson Welles. But here the would-be casualness manifested in a TV studio set with a live audience seems far more trumped up and calculated—even though I was touched by how much Hitchcock actually seems to bond with Cavett, enough at least to let his customary mask drop a little. On the other hand, I was disappointed to see Welles play directly (and, I suspect, a mite insincerely) into Cavett’s scorn for Jerry Lewis, as if this were the surest way of pleasing his host—reminding me of that telling moment in Cavett’s interview with Jean-Luc Godard (an interview lamentably missing here) when he asked him why the French were so crazy about Lewis and then wouldn’t allow Godard to give a proper answer. And as long as I’m bringing up lacunae, the most disappointing one for me in the Murrow collection is Welles, whom Murrow interviewed for the show in a New York hotel suite on November 25, 1955, shortly after returning from a long stint abroad. I’ve always wanted to see that segment and wonder if it still exists.
                                                ***
On the DVD of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005), Cronenberg points out that he went to the unprecedented trouble of “completing” the deleted scene that’s featured on the disc—a brief dream sequence in which Viggo Mortensen at the diner blasts Ed Harris with a shotgun, who posthumously retaliates. The scene has been colour-corrected, looped, and scored because Cronenberg admits he likes it even though it didn’t belong in the film, a decision with which I fully agree. This is far more interesting, in any case, than pointing out and lingering over a couple of dollops of extra gross-out violence that’s missing in the US version.

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Editor’s Note

DVD:
Global Discoveries on DVD
By Jonathan Rosenbaum

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