Compared to the Arte Vidéo boxset from France HERE 

If you want a definitive edition of what some critics have called the purest examples of Keaton’s comedy, look no further. (James Agee, for one, wrote that “for plain hard laughter,” the Keaton shorts are even better than the features.) One of these early shorts--Moonshine (1918), codirected by “Fatty” Arbuckle--is incomplete, but the 31 other restorations are all intact, and they’re a joy to behold. And the accompanying book gives us, along with many illustrations, generous extracts from Keaton’s autobiography and several interviews as well as an extended critical roundtable on Keaton by three top-notch critics, Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Dan Sallitt, and Brad Stevens. Regrettably, I’ve only had room on this list for one set from the superb Masters of Cinema--an English series distributed by Eureka! that also offers essential works by Michelangelo Antonioni, Fritz Lang, Jean-Pierre Melville, Kenji Mizoguchi, F.W. Murnau, Mikio Naruse, G.W. Pabst, Luchino Visconti, and Orson Welles, among many others—-but if you’ve never seen an example of their work, this release should provide an excellent introduction.

Please note that this is the Belgian as opposed to the French set devoted to Chantal Akerman’s most radical period, an edition supervised by the filmmaker herself--which is the only one that has optional English (as well as Flemish) subtitles. The films included, all digitally remastered, are her two earliest shorts, Saute ma ville (1968) and La Chambre (1972), and her first five features--Hotel Monterey (1972), Je Tu Il Elle (1975), Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), News from Home (1976), and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978).

3) The Chelsea Girls: un film di Andy Warhol (Minerva Video, two discs + 66-page bilingual booklet)

The challenge here was how to transport Andy Warhol’s most commercial experimental feature to DVD without losing its most essential aspects. Shot in 16 millimeter between June and September 1966, the film consists of a dozen reels adding up to 394 minutes or about six and a half hours. But, as projected, the film lasts only half that long, 197 minutes, because it’s designed for simultaneous double-screen projection, usually with one reel projected with sound and the other reel projected silently.

4) Coffret Charles Chaplin 10 DVD (mk2 éditions/Warner Video, ten discs)

Why, you may ask, include the French edition of this remarkable package when it’s also available as a region-1 set in the U.S.? Because a great deal of care and attention went into the French set, and the differences count.

Both versions, of course, include all of Chaplin’s features apart from The Countess from Hong Kong (the last and least of them), as well as the seven shorts comprising The Chaplin Revue, and also many remarkable extras, such as commentaries by other directors about individual Chaplin films—-most notably, the Dardenne brothers on Modern Times, Claude Chabrol on Monsieur Verdoux, and Jim Jarmusch on A King in New York. So this is obviously a box set worth having in any form. But it’s more worth having if the packaging allows you to appreciate what’s there.

For me, the most enjoyable movies made by anyone during the teens are the French serials made for Gaumont by Louis Feuillade--especially Fantômas (1913-1914), Les vampires (1915-1916), Judex (1917), and Tih Minh (1919). (Barrabas, which he made just after the teens, in 1920, is also quite wonderful.) Tih Minh, my favorite, hasn’t yet made it onto DVD, even though it’s been restored, but both Les vampires and Judex are available in fine editions in the U.S. Fantômas is available in both France and the U.K., in editions that appear to be similar (the cover design is the same), but I can’t vouch for this, because I have and treasure only the French version. (Artificial Eye, the distributor of the English version, has generally been reluctant to send me review copies of their releases, unlike the British Film Institute, Masters of Cinema, and Second Run. According to English Amazon, their edition has the same running time as the French, but I don’t know if it has all of the same extras.)

6) Histoire(s) du cinema (Gaumont, four discs) (Cinefil Imagica, five discs; www.cinefilimagica.com)

I have two separate editions of Jean-Luc Godard’s intransigent and beautiful magnum opus. The first one that appeared is the second one cited above, and the most expensive box set I’ve ever purchased from anywhere—even though it’s boxed fairly modestly, like a set of CDs. It has better sound and image, and an amazing feature that enables you to reference any moment in this eight-part video with your remote control, leading you to a citation (of the film a clip comes from, the name of an artwork, and perhaps even the source of each verbal quotation). The only glitch, and it’s a major one, is that this feature is all in Japanese, and the only optional subtitles available on this Japanese set are also in Japanese. In fact, I’m not even sure if the URL cited above will take you to this set. (For that, you’re probably better off going to the Japanese branch of Amazon. - Ed. see HERE)

Some of my choices here are partly inflected by the degree to which some box sets qualify as beautiful objects. This is certainly the case with this gorgeous and compact collection from Hong Kong, containing The Boys from Fengkuei (1983), A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984), A Time to Live A Time to Die (1985), and Dust in the Wind (1984)—to quote the four titles just as they’re written on the box encasing the elegant fold-out container. All these films are impeccably letterboxed and furnished with optional English subtitles, so I couldn’t care less that the menus, apart from the films’ English titles, are all in Chinese. This is still very user-friendly, and the booklet attached to the foldout container, like the color illustrations on the discs themselves, is a pleasure even when one can’t read the words.

Macbeth may be my least favorite among Orson Welles’ three feature-length Shakespeare films, with neither the mystery of his Othello nor the human majesty of his Chimes at Midnight. But when it comes to a definitive DVD edition of any Welles film, I don’t think there’s any contest. This has everything you’d ever want to have: both versions of the film (released respectively in 1948 at 114 minutes and in 1950 at 85 minutes; both, one should stress, are Welles cuts, even though the second one was occasioned by Republic Pictures asking him for a redubbed and shortened version); a newsreel recording of the last four minutes of Welles’ 1936 “Voodoo” Macbeth, staged in Harlem (which is the only sound-film record that we have of any Welles stage production); and the full 78-minute audio version of the play done for 78 RPM records in 1940, with a cast of Mercury Theatre players and a Bernard Herrmann score)—all of which is impeccably restored. Then there’s more than an hour of additional extras that are in unsubtitled French, although the illustrations in some cases are likely to hold your interest. Most of these are discussions done separately by Jean-Pierre Berthomé and François Thomas, the two foremost French Welles scholars--whose excellent and very up-to-date book, Orson Welles at Work, which they wrote together, was published in English translation earlier this year.

This is surely the most obscure item here, but it’s such a lovely film—-made in Belgium in 1972--and it receives so much loving care from the friends of the late writer-director André Delvaux that it deserves to be much better known. For one thing, it’s surely one of the most erotic films ever made, featuring both Anna Karina and Bulle Ogier at their most attractive. For another, it’s steeped in nostalgia for more or less the same era when Louis Feuillade’s serials were being made.

Try to imagine a quiet blend of Jules and Jim and Gertrud filmed in color (the cinematographer is the great Ghislain Cloquet, who also did superb work for Demy, Bresson, Polanski, and Penn)and you’ll start to get some idea of the mood of this adaptation of a novella by post-surrealist writer Julien Gracq. Most of it charts a mysterious night in 1917 spent by a Luxembourgian pianist and music journalist (Mathieu Carrière) who’s been summoned by a friend, a soldier and composer (Roger van Hool), to his house in a Paris suburb. The friend inexplicably never appears, but the woman (Karina) who prepares dinner, whose identity is never clarified, eventually takes him to bed. There are also several flashbacks involving the two friends as well as the soldier’s girlfriend (Oger), a character who doesn’t exist in Gracq’s story.

Most of this box set, an exquisite labor of love, is in French, Flemish/Dutch, and English-—prepared with Delvaux’s input just a few weeks before his death. Philippe Raynaert’s graceful 24-minute intro spells out the contents, designed to show Delvaux’s close involvements with painting, music, literature, and cinema. All of these are evident in the feature, explicated in Raynaert’s lecture, and further represented, respectively, by Delvaux’s half-hour With Dieric Bouts (1975); his 20-minute Moviola (1985) about Frédéric Devresse (a composer he often collaborated with) plus a CD with music (including Brahms and Franck) and dialogue from the film; the Gracq story, published with a preface by Gracq about Delvaux; and Delvaux’s seven-minute 1001 Films (1989), dedicated to Jacques Ledoux, the former director of the Belgian Cinémathèque. (Delvaux used to perform piano accompaniments to silent films there—-as the hero of Rendez-vous is seen doing in one of the flashbacks, at a commercial screening of Fantômas, no less.) There are also a couple of TV documentaries about the film’s production from the 70s.

By far the heftiest piece of merchandise being considered here, this is a big box containing no less than nine features on eight discs, which is all the more remarkable when one considers that writer-director-actor-personality Sacha Guitry-yet another celebrity who turns up in the silent Camille included in the Chaplin box set--made all these films between 1938 and 1939! I haven't yet been able to determine whether he was also doing any theater during the same two-year stretch, but even if he wasn't, one certainly couldn't fault him for being unproductive.

For the record, the nine features included here, all provided with optional English subtitles, are Le Nouveau Testament, Le Roman d’un tricheur (many critics’ favorite), Mon Père avait raison, Faisons un Rêve, Les Perles de la Couronne (my own favorite, at least among those I’ve seen so far, and, as a trilingual wonder that unfolds almost simultaneously in French, English, and Italian, a genuine tour de force), Le Mot de Cambronne, Désiré, Quadrille, and Remontons les Champs-Elysées. There are also loads of extras, all unsubtitled, including interviews with such filmmakers as Olivier Assayas, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and François Truffaut.

Luc Moullet remains one of the great, undiscovered glories of French comic cinema as well as one of the key Cahiers du Cinéma critics who became a filmmaker (and, unlike virtually all his colleagues, is still a film critic today). But he’s always stood apart from his fellow critics as well as his fellow filmmakers—-as a left-wing anarchist, proud of his working-class and rural background (and still keenly interested in some Hollywood directors associated with the right, such as Cecil B. De Mille, Josef von Sternberg, and King Vidor); as the only Cahiers critic who defended Luis Buñuel in the 50s, before he became fashionable; as a minimalist director whose aesthetics, economics, and ethics have always been closely interrelated; and as an occasional deadpan actor in his own post-Keaton, post-Tati comedies. It’s typical of what might be called his radical modesty that even the title of this director-approved collection is inexact; there are actually eight films here, at least if one counts the two short features comprising the fourth disc, both counted as bonuses—-Moullet’s The Sieges of the Alcazar (1989) and Gérard Courant’s The Man of the Badlands (2001) a documentary about Moullet.

The official six are Brigitte et Brigitte (1966), Les contrebandières (1967), Une Aventure de Billy le Kid (1970), Anatomie d’un rapport (1975), Genèse d’un repas (1978), and Parpaillon (1992). All eight of these have optional English subtitles except for Billy le Kid--a crazed western starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and seemingly inspired by both A Duel in the Sun and a fever dream—-and in that case, Moullet includes his own English version of the film, A Girl is a Gun.

These are just about all of Moullet’s major features. (The sole exception is his 1987 La Comédie du travail—already released separately by Blaqout, unfortunately without any subtitles.) They include even his best noncomedy, his 1978 Origins of a Meal, a powerful political documentary that tells you where three simple food staples come from. An even more ideal box set would include Moullet’s best shorts--three of which are available elsewhere on DVD (at least if you look very hard), in separate collections, again without subtitles; and, to cite Agee on Keaton, “for plain hard laughter,” these are even better than the features. But this collection is still a nearly perfect introduction to his work. (If you want to explore some of these films separately, Facets Video has issued them in pairs on single region-1 discs. Ed. see HERE)

I’d recommend starting out not with Courant’s documentary but with The Sieges of the Alcazar--a sweet and hilarious tale of a sexual grudge match in the 50s between a male Cahiers du Cinéma critic and a female leftist critic for the rival magazine Positif, which takes place at a small neighborhood cinema playing a Vittorio Cottafavi retrospective. You might even call it a A Duel in the Sun writ small. Apart from offering loads of badly dubbed clips and the theme song from Rio Bravo over the credits, this appears to be a near-definitive account of the rituals and agonies of French cinephilia during that period.

Here’s something else you can readily find in the U.S.; New Yorker Video offers a ho-hum version of it. But I’m mainly listing this French double-disc edition of my favorite Abbas Kiarostami feature (1999), his last to date to be shot on 35-millimeter, with optional English subtitles on everything, because of the two documentaries it includes on the second disc—A Film Lesson by Abbas Kiarostami, 52 minutes long, and, even more, Yuji Mohara’s 90-minute A Week with Kiarostami, which in some ways is the most informative and revealing “making of” documentary I’ve ever seen. And this two-disc set is the only place I’m aware of where you can find it.