Available from the Edition Filmmuseum HERE 

Part of what’s so special about this particular 2006 release is that it derives from the 1982 rediscovery by the Austrian Film Archives of an Austrian version of the film seven minutes longer than existing Hollywood prints, with somewhat different editing, making it both the oldest and most complete version that we have. A scholarly edition of one of the most entertaining Hollywood features of the late teens, it comes with an effective musical score, a bilingual and illustrated 20-page booklet, and many other features.   

Reviewed by DVDBeaver HERE

(but very out-of-print)

3) Traquenard (Party Girl, Nicholas Ray 1958). This movie was a cause celèbre at Cahiers du Cinéma in 1960, during that magazine’s golden age. A gorgeous period gangster film with a Chicago setting—-the last stateside studio film that Ray would direct, filmed in CinemaScope, and the only film he ever made for glitzy MGM—it was reviled in most of the French press at the same time that it was being passionately and polemically defended by one of its more extreme critics at the time, who later became a distinguished diplomat, the Iranian-born Fereydoun Hoveyda. Throwing down the gauntlet, he wrote, “Party Girl has an idiotic story. So what? If the substratum of cinematic work was made up simply of plot convolutions unraveling on the screen, then we could just annex the Seventh Art to literature, be content with illustrating novels and short stories (which is precisely what happens to a great many films we do not admire), and hand over Cahiers to literary critics.”  But in fact, I regard this movie’s story as far from idiotic. Basically a tragic and touching love story between a showgirl who dances and a crooked lawyer who’s crippled, it costars two of the most wooden actors in 50s Hollywood, Cyd Charisse and Robert Taylor, and Ray manages to get extremely touching and vulnerable performances out of both of them (as well as from costars Lee J. Cobb, John Ireland, and Kent Smith). Unlike the next item on this list, another French PAL release, there are no extras of any kind on this release, so I’m honoring it simply for the sumptuous pleasure afforded by the film’s sounds and images. (A close runner-up—-the Masters of Cinema’s splendid edition of Ray’s The Savage Innocents—-has many wonderful extras.)

4) L’Homme de l’ouest (Man of the West, Anthony Mann, 1958). My favorite Anthony Mann Western in CinemaScope-- intricately plotted and scripted by one of the best writers of TV dramas, Reginald Rose, adapting a Will C. Brown novel--gets a superbly letterboxed mounting on this French DVD, which is reason enough to recommend this 2004 release. It’s true that all three of the extras—-a 13-minute documentary about Mann, a 13-minute recitation and illustration of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 review of the film, and a 21-minute feature in which Mann enthusiasts Pierre Rissient and Bertrand Tavernier discuss the film, all directed by Nicolas Ripoche—-lack any subtitles, and the only clips they use come from Man of the West, so they have to depend on stills and still photographs for everything else. But even if you don’t speak French, these extras offer a fine introduction to the depth and enthusiasm of a certain kind of French criticism about American auteurist cinema. So part of the discussions of Rissient (aptly if strangely identified as a “chausseur des cinéastes,” which literally means a “hunter of filmmakers”) about Mann’s uses of landscape and a theatrical mise en scène and Tavernier (“cinéaste”) about Gary Cooper’s performance may elude you. (One interesting topic that both commentators touch on relates to the fact that Lee J. Cobb, the main villain, who plays a father figure to Cooper’s hero, was actually a full decade younger than Cooper.) But you can easily hunt down Godard’s brilliant essay “Supermann” (one of his best) in English in his book Godard on Godard and use it like a libretto to follow the second bonus mentioned above.

Ritwik Ghatak, 1960). It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call the maverick Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) one of the most neglected major filmmakers in the world—-for starters, none of his films has ever been distributed in the U.S.--though given the extreme overall disorder of his life and career, this probably shouldn’t be too surprising. Fortunately, one of his masterpieces—-arguably, along with his earlier feature Ajantrik (Pathetic Fallacy, 1958), his greatest work--is available on DVD from the British Film Institute in a fine edition.

6) Un feu (Ebrahim Golestan, 1961) & La maison est noire (Forough Farrokhzad, 1962). Two Iranian documentary shorts, A Fire and The House is Black--the second of which can be described as the greatest (and in some ways, the most influential) of all Iranian films. The latter—-written, directed, edited, and largely narrated by the great Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967), a mythical figure in Iranian culture who’s widely regarded as both the greatest Persian poet of the 20^th century and the greatest of all Iranian women poets—-is a 22-minute documentary about a leper colony outside Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan, and is the greatest fusion of cinema and poetry that I know. It’s the only significant film Farrokhzad (or Forugh, as Iranians prefer to call her) ever made. (For information about a recently published collection of her poetry in English translation, go HERE) The year before Forugh made it, she trained as a film editor working for her lover Ebrahim Golestan--one of the key filmmakers of the first Iranian New Wave and a notable short story writer who was the first one to translate such writers as Twain, Faulkner, and Hemingway into Persian—-and her most significant editing work was on A Fire. This is an account of a 1958 oil well fire near Ahvaz that lasted over two months until an American fire-fighting crew managed to extinguish it, and although it doesn’t represent Golestan’s filmmaking at its best, it’s none the less a striking piece of work. 

8) Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965) & The Velvet Underground & Nico (Andy Warhol 1966). So far I’ve only sampled the second of the two black and white films on this Italian release (on the Rarovideo label), 67 minutes long--a performance shot by Paul Morrissey which has often been cited, praised, and discussed by ace French critic Nicole Brenez, and which features Warhol superstar Nico with her young child as well as Warhol’s house band. But as with some of the shorts on Their First Films (see above), seeing it all is something I’m looking forward to. And Vinyl, which is only about a minute shorter, was made the year before, and suggests some parallels to the other film in its handling of space, is my favorite among all the Andy Warhol films I have seen. In this particular version, you can see it either in English (with or without Italian subtitles) or dubbed into Italian; the music film needs no translation. This package comes with a helpful 68-page critical book in Italian and English.

Six years before the release of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Warhol paid $3,000 for the rights to Anthony Burgess’s source novel before making this very, very loose adaptation, scripted by Ronald Tavel—-so loose that most viewers of the film won’t recognize any resemblance, much less fidelity, apart from the periodic appearance of various beatings and other S&M rituals, all of which have been rendered as somewhat ridiculous, absurdist, and affectless by the way they’re staged. Even the hero, named Axel in the original, has been renamed Victor, for no apparent reason. Shot in direct sound with music by the Velvet Underground as well as appearances by such Warhol regulars as Gerard Malanga (performing a whip dance, frugging, and beating up at least one so-called “intellectual”), Ondine, and Edie Sedgwick, Vinyl is one of the most painterly and intricately composed of Warhol’s films. Most of it’s shot from the same camera angle, suggesting a kind of stasis in spite of the frenetic activities being shown that’s broken only by a few backward or forward zooms and deploying space that’s so crowded with seemingly autonomous (or at least mutually alienated) activities, sometimes as many as four or five at once, that it periodically suggests a classical painting depicting royalty or aristocracy--albeit one whose various inhabitants are all paradoxically squeezed into one fairly small room.

The most versatile, unpredictable, and iconoclastic of the major Chinese filmmakers, Tian has subsequently directed such features as The Blue Kite (1993), Springtime in a Small Town (2002), and The Go Master (2004), all of which have been much more widely shown, as well as the gorgeous 2004 documentary Delamu (about a spectacular Tibetan trade route, and named after a particular donkey) that has been seen and shown even less than The Horse Thief. For me, Tian is, along with Jia Zhangke, China’s greatest living filmmaker, and The Horse Thief shows you why.  

The Portuguese and French editions of this DVD are virtually identical. Both have optional English, French, and Portuguese subtitles and the same exemplary extras, many of which emphasize the film’s intricate relations to other arts: a trip through Pedro Costa’s “notebook” while working on the film (actually, a fascinating scrapbook of texts and images), accompanied by original music by Raúl Andrade; an interview with French cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel (who has also shot several films by Manoel De Oliveira) that emphasizes his and Costa’s shared musical references while establishing the rhythm of scenes; excellent offscreen commentaries on selected scenes by French critic Serge Kaganski; and trailers for Casa de Lava as well as the Costa films that preceded and followed it, O Sangue (Blood) and Ossos (Bones).

As with the Iranian shorts included with Cinéma 07 (see above), this Portuguese item isn’t available from DVD outlets but only from certain book merchants. (Three online Portuguese sources: HERE, HERE and HERE; the latter is the website of the publisher, Assírio & Alvim.)  In this case, there are optional English, Italian, and Portuguese subtitles, two separate versions of the film (the version shown on French TV and a longer, preferred Costa cut), six fabulous outtakes, and two unreleased short films by Huillet and Straub derived from scenes in the third version of Sicilia! The only thing missing, in fact, is the full version of Sicilia! that Straub-Huillet are seen editing. One full version is available on a separate Portuguese DVD, but I don’t know if it’s the same one, and, alas, this DVD apparently doesn’t have English titles. But you can’t have everything.