Criterion and Eclipse

When I moved to this god-forsaken--strike that--garden spot of America, my biggest loss was all the cultural opportunities that a large city like Chicago offers--symphony, opera, theaters (Steppenwolf, Goodman), movies, radio stations. A colleague in the Psychology Department introduced me to the joys--and addictions--of home theater, such as it was at the time, which helped make up some of that loss. Soon he had me buying laserdiscs, and I became familiar with the Criterion imprint, a company that released copies of hard-to-find foreign films (The Seventh Seal, Red Beard), as well as copies of American classics loaded with extras--Welles's The Magnificent Amerbersons with a reconstruction of the ending before Robert Wise and RKO butchered it--and commentary tracks by film critics and experts.

The only problem with these discs was their price. I remember buying myself a birthday present of Criterion's edition of John Woo's Hard-Boiled that cost over $100. Enter the era of the DVD, and Criterion began to rerelease many of its laserdisc successes, much more cheaply, and often improving on them: a three-disc edition of Brazil, consisting of the theatrical edition, the edition that the studio head wanted to release, and Gilliams's director edition--all this for under $50 on sale online. Their recent release of Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff includes the story the movie is based on in a beautifully printed booklet. Heaven! But recently Criterion has done themselves one better.

They've introduced a series of "no-frills" discs, without any extras, but still using the best source prints available, under the Eclipse label. These are multi-disc sets of works of one director that have not been often seen or collected before, such as the first films of Ingmar Bergman, or the early films of Sam Fuller. I am eagerly awaiting their release next month of a set of films by Yasujiro Ozu, a director whose subtle and deeply flowing joys I would have been unaware of if not for Criterion's release of Tokyo Story and other masterworks.

I' ve just worked through the first disc of Eclipse;'s Series 2, "The Documentaries of Louis Malle," which I had never heard of--and they are wonderful. The first one is a short 20-minute film on the Tour de France, Vive Le Tour, which shows that people were complaining about doping in 1962, and shows riders eating, leaping off their bikes to grab bottles of wine or beer from roadside bistros (the owners send the bills to tour organizers after the race), and struggling through the mountain areas. Twenty minutes, and you get more of a feel for the event than if you had watched hours of it on televsion.

At first glance, the title of the second film, Humain, Trop Humain (Human, all too Human) seems ironic, for most of it concerns how a car is made in a Citroen factory in the north of France. (In the middle of the film, Malle cuts to people discussing and buying these cars at an auto show.) But in the end, it is not the machines that we remember, as in Chaplin's Modern Times or Lang's Metropolis; it is the people who are operating these machines--especially the women. The film ends on a freeze frame of a woman doing an exasperatingly repetitive action, as all the workers do, and we are left to confront the question of how human these people are as they perform the same tasks, some simple, some, such as threading wiring, maddeningly complex. No narration: we have to make a narrative in our minds.

The last one is perhaps the best. Place de la Republique is a street in Paris where Malle and his small crew interivew a variety of people over a week or so. At times we can see the camera and microphone; the crew asks people whether they can talk to them; all the devices are in the open, so to speak. By the end of the film, Malle returns to some people who have been interviewed earlier; one of them, a young blonde who bears a slight resemblance to Malle's wife, Candice Bergen, actually conducts a few interviews herself. The final interview is a long diatribe-monologue by a woman talked to earlier, who is is either mentally ill or just a monomaniac nationalist; her tirade fades into the sea of voices at rush hour, and the last image in the film is Malle and his soundman racing after the woman as she pedals away on her bike. By placing their tools in view, they remind us that while this may appear to be a slice of life, it can never be absolutely, as long as people know they are being filmed.

Thank you, Criterion and Eclipse. I'll be reporting on further films in this series as I get to them. But now for some literary classics as seen through the eyes of David O Selznick.