Criterion Blog

[criterionmaster]

www.criterionco.com/blog/index.html

Some good stuff on it.

[ie]

Yeah. Look at the most recent post:

She told me sumthin about John!! lol its really sweet!!! Trust me!!! She kept talkin about him over the phone it wuz kinda annoyin ( no offence to john) but one of the things she said wuz .......she feels like the luckiest girl on earth being with him!!! every1 "awwwww" lol true story!! im no lyin!!! She realllyyy luvs John!!! ALOT!! Trust a girl who knowz and heres about it each day!! lol Johns a lucky duck!! U other single guys missed out! AND NOW U CANT HAVE HER CUZ SHES GETTIN MARRIED IN 3 DAYZ!!! WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE hahhahaaaha GOOD LUCK GIRLY!!! I LUV YA!!!
BYE BYE
XOXO

Posted by teh Crit3rion Collecton!!!11 lol!!! at 5:34 PM







Um, you wouldn't believe how many shitty Xanga websites I had to wade through in order to find that piece of blogging gold. Some of it was so bad it went from good back to bad again.

[criterionmaster]

HAHA!

[criterionmaster]

Plate o' Shrimp

[criterionmaster]

Sundance Summer Camp

[criterionmaster]

Designs on Dassin

Please read that, don't be lazy, it is really interesting. At least look at it.

also, an older one:

Blogged Down

[ie]

Nice. I didn't really read the first two, but I really liked the Designs on Dassin one, because it went through the evolution of the cover design for the DVDs.

Its like people at Criterion actually care about how their DVD covers look; they know someone won't spend $30+ for DVD with a shitty cover, I guess.

[criterionmaster]

I think they care the most with their releases, each cover probably goes through many designs. Yeah, the second one I posted under the one you read is also a good read.

[criterionmaster]

The Other Side of the Tracks
From Criterion executive producer Kim Hendrickson:

"At Criterion, producers spend a lot of time talking about each DVD release—from cover art and liner notes to the special features we present. In the case of the latter, we have a pretty elaborate system in place. We start out discussing the title with each other, hashing out what we think the release should be. Then we go to the archives and reach out to our friends in the film community for materials and more insight. In the case of our upcoming rerelease of The Third Man, producer Susan Arosteguy had assembled a treasure trove of new material related to Carol Reed, Graham Greene, and the production of the film. What we all wanted was a filmmaker’s perspective.

I knew that Steven Soderbergh was a big fan of The Third Man—I had heard him mention Robert Krasker’s cinematography in interviews, and more recently he had talked about watching the film during prep for The Good German. I also know he’s one of the best when it comes to DVD commentaries. I worked with him during the production of our release of Traffic, and then again on Schizopolis, and I realized he’s about as good as they get. He knows film history and all aspects of the process. For those of you who aren’t aware, Steven has shot all of his films since Traffic. Along the way, he’s often written, edited, and produced many of his own projects as well.

People often talk about Criterion releases as “film school in a box,” and that term also basically describes a Soderbergh commentary track. He talks about film stocks, camera lenses, films he’s ripped off, production difficulties, editing woes, and working with actors. Sometimes you even get a fight. If you’ve never heard his conversation with Lem Dobbs for The Limey, have a listen. Dobbs wasn’t happy with Soderbergh’s take on his script and goes head-to-head with him during the recording. It’s about as close to the process as you can get.

He’s also quite generous. He sat down with us for a conversation about The Battle of Algiers; recorded a commentary with Lodge Kerrigan for Clean, Shaven; and suggested we look at William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One—a film we decided to pick up. I asked if he’d help out on this project, and he agreed.

Steven is notoriously punctual, and the day of his recording was no exception. He had asked his friend Tony Gilroy (writer of The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, among other films, and the director of the upcoming film Michael Clayton) to join him in the conversation. Gilroy is also quick on his feet and, like Soderbergh, knows his films. Being at a recording session is one of the highlights of producing. It’s often the place I’m most inspired about filmmaking. We hear cynical stories about the business all the time, but here are two guys working in the thick of the studio system, and they can talk craft and history. The lucky break can help, but so does doing your homework.

Steven brought with him Charles Drazin’s In Search of "The Third Man," a book recounting the complicated history of the film’s production. I don’t think he bought this in preparation for the recording; I’m quite sure it’s part of his library and that he took it down and reviewed it again before the session. As I mentioned, it’s also a film that he watched repeatedly when making The Good German, so he’s thought about it a lot. From every angle. And if you haven’t seen the film of late, it’s got quite a literal slant to it.

It’s fascinating to see how other directors view films—in this case, from character development and casting to the tilted camera work of Reed/Krasker. Steven and Tony talked about how to sketch a scene, what makes good dialogue, and how casting alone can make a good script into a great film. Of course, they touched on Orson Welles’s performance as Harry Lime, which amounts to arguably the most important eight minutes of an actor on-screen. This is one of those rare films where film history intervenes: When Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) meets Harry for the first time, we never doubt that Cotten and Welles are old friends. We’ve been here before. It’s this kind of detail that makes a great film a classic.

And given that Graham Greene wrote the screenplay, they spent a lot of time talking about writing. The Third Man is a unique case because it didn’t start out as a Greene novel. He wrote a novella in preparation for writing the screenplay, but it was never intended as a stand-alone work, like his other novels. This audio clip features Soderbergh and Gilroy taking up this question: what’s the difference between things that are envisioned as movies and things that aren’t—in essence, what should film set out to do? Soderbergh is the first speaker here. It’s a brief bit from a rich and often hilarious track.

Soderbergh had another track to record later that day. He was sitting down with Mike Nichols in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Nichols’s The Graduate (no, not for Criterion). As you can imagine, Susan and I were bummed to have to return to work."

[criterionmaster]

Here, There, and Everywhere
Source: www.criterion.com/blog/2007_06_01_archive.html#8784528112576738418

Over the past month or so, it seems as though glancing references to Criterion are popping up everywhere. This morning, I saw Bob Stein, one of the original founders of Criterion, in New York magazine, being interviewed for his fashion sense. And the other night, both actresses in the stage musical of Grey Gardens (spine no. 123), Mary Louise Wilson and Christine Ebersole, won Tony Awards for their performances. As Little Edie, Ebersole won for best leading actress in a musical, beating out Donna Murphy, who plays Lotte Lenya in LoveMusik, which concerns the love affair between Lenya and composer Kurt Weill. Their shared breakthrough came with Bertolt Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera. Pabst's film of Threepenny, featuring Lenya, is soon to be spine no. 405 in the Criterion collection. And last week, Middlesex author Jeffrey Eugenides wrote a beautiful piece in the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue about his mother taking him to see Walkabout (Spine no. 10) as a kid, neither of them having any idea what they were going to see.

And, of course, there was the Cannes sixtieth-anniversary tribute film, Chacun son cinéma, for which thirty-three filmmakers each contributed a three-minute short evoking something essential about cinema. The film was stuffed with references to the warhorses of world cinema, so there were plenty of spine numbers in evidence, but no reference came as a bigger surprise than the presence, in the Coen brothers' segment, of not one but two posters for the Essential Art House retrospective that has been going around as a celebration of Janus Films’ fiftieth anniversary. One features Jules and Jim (spine no. 281), the other The Seventh Seal (spine no. 11). Both are clearly visible through most of the film, as a cowboy who doesn't know his way around art-house cinema chooses between The Rules of the Game (spine no. 216) and a Turkish film called Climates that Zeitgeist brought out this year. No one could have been prouder than we—except maybe Zeitgeist. Spoiler alert: the cowboy picks Climates!

End.

[criterionmaster]

WWRWFD?
june 20th

One of the blessings (and curses) of working at Criterion is that every film we put out inspires a passionate response from someone, somewhere. Knowing how deeply people feel about a movie as I’m producing the DVD leads to some very nervous moments, and usually a sleepless night or two, before the disc hits the shelves. I’m always worried about the possibility of a technical error, in addition to wondering if the disc’s special features tell the whole story, or if the cast list might have someone’s name wrong.

So I suppose it’s something of a relief to have a controversy crop up before I even have to have menu text in to the editorial department. As many of you already know, Criterion has obtained the DVD rights to the restoration of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s monumental 1980 epic Berlin Alexanderplatz, which premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. We plan to release it this fall.

Recently there has been quite a dispute surrounding this restoration, specifically regarding whether the film has been rendered too bright. A site I read every day, Greencine Daily, has devoted several posts to the topic, mostly laying out the case for the plaintiff, as it were. As a result, many of you have written in to ask about our plans for the DVDs.

One of the bedrock principles to which we have always tried to adhere is that the primary arbiters of how a film should look are the people who made it. It’s why we always try to get the filmmakers involved in our transfers. Absent the director, we generally feel that the best judge of how a film should look is the director of photography. Last Thursday, June 17, Xaver Schwarzenberger gave an interview to Susan Vahabzadeh of the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper to articulate his views on the restoration. Our colleague Robert Fischer translated it and sent it along to us.


The Only Witness:
Schwarzenberger on the Restored Alexanderplatz

SZ: What is your reaction to the attacks on the restoration of Berlin Alexanderplatz? No one else but you can know more about the desired degree of brightness, and you were also instrumental in the restoration process.

XS: I don’t even know what the people who now criticize the brightness saw way back when the film was first shown. The technical possibilities of television broadcasting simply weren’t advanced enough at the time to accommodate the material we had shot. So the 16 mm negative wasn’t even used for the original TV transfer—they used a positive instead, which means that another generation was added between the original film footage and the broadcast tape. Sadly, the negative hasn’t survived in its entirety. In our restoration we have tried to eliminate these problems, and the result is the very best possible solution. There are still shortcomings—the crossfades were done with duplicates at the time, and the original material doesn’t exist anymore, so in these instances you can still see a large amount of grain and color shifts. In parts I find this almost pointillistic. But we simply couldn’t do anything about that. The rest is exactly how it was meant at the time.

SZ: And how it was meant was decided upon between you and Fassbinder.

XS: Yes, of course! Nobody else was present, and when I hear these comments now, by people I have never heard of and who had nothing to do with the project, I am more than a little surprised. These are people who weren’t around Fassbinder anymore by the time I worked with him. They may have played their part in Fassbinder’s early time, and that’s perfectly okay, but when I was working with him—between 1979 and 1982—none of them were there. In my opinion these people have no reason and no right to interfere in such an amateurish way. This is pathetic.

SZ: How much were you involved in the restoration?

XS: Juliane Lorenz and Bavaria Film called on me because I was clearly the only one who could supervise this project, as it was I who was responsible at the time. So of course I accepted full responsibility. And whoever says something against this solution says something against me.

SZ: So you did supervise the restoration from the very beginning?

XS: From the first minute until the last. This was a long, winding, and complex task. It was a lot of work, and the people at the lab at Arri did a wonderful job—and it worked out to perfection. This is the result, which I can endorse from the bottom of my heart. If someone has a different opinion, he’s entitled to that—but then his or her vision has nothing to do with the film as we shot it and as it was meant to be.

SZ: Isn’t it a very rare and wonderful situation for a restoration when the original director of photography is personally involved in it?

XS: I should think so. The restoration of The Leopard, for example, was supervised at the time by Giuseppe Rotunno, and I do assume that is how Visconti would have wanted it.

www.criterion.com/blog/2007_06_01_archive.html#7712967158458298556

end of article.