Ozu, Sirk, Campion & More Coming to The Criterion Collection in August 2019
May 15th, 2019 by Aaron Neuwirth
This August, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Koker Trilogy, an eye-opening triptych of playful films that blend fiction and reality, will join The Criterion Collection, bringing three of the Iranian master’s most sought-after works to Blu-ray for the first time. The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, Yasujiro Ozu’s beautifully observed study of a marriage on the rocks, will appear in an edition that also features Ozu’s 1937 film What Did the Lady Forget? Lucille Carra’s The Inland Sea, a poetic and insightful meditation on tradition and self-discovery, based on Donald Richie’s renowned travelogue on Japan, will come out in a new, restored 4K digital transfer. And that’s not all: Jane Campion’s revelatory biopic An Angel at My Table and Douglas Sirk’s delirious melodrama Magnificent Obsession will appear on Blu-ray.
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An Angel at My Table
With An Angel at My Table, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Jane Campion brought to the screen the harrowing autobiography of Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most distinguished author. Three actors in turn take on the lead role (including Kerry Fox in a marvelous performance as the adult Frame), as the film describes a journey from an impoverished childhood marked by tragedy to a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia resulting in electroshock therapy and a narrowly escaped lobotomy to, finally, international literary fame. Unobtrusively capturing the beauty and power of the New Zealand landscape while maintaining the film’s focus on the figure at its center, Campion broke new ground for female filmmakers everywhere and earned a sweep of her country’s film awards, along with the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* High-definition digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Stuart Dryburgh and approved by director Jane Campion, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
* Audio commentary featuring Campion, Dryburgh, and actor Kerry Fox
* Short documentary from 2002 about the making of the film
* Six deleted scenes
* Audio interview with author Janet Frame from 1983
* Trailer
* Stills gallery
* PLUS: An essay by film critic Amy Taubin and excerpts from Frame’s autobiography, on which Campion based her film
1990 * 158 minutes * Color * 5.1 surround * 1.78:1 aspect ratio
Available August 6, 2019
The Inland Sea
In 1971, author and film scholar Donald Richie published a poetic travelogue about his explorations of the islands of Japan’s Inland Sea, recording his search for traces of a traditional way of life as well as his own journey of self-discovery. Twenty years later, filmmaker Lucille Carra undertook a parallel trip inspired by Richie’s by-then-classic book, capturing images of hushed beauty and meeting people who still carried on the fading customs that Richie had observed. Interspersed with surprising detours-a visit to a Frank Sinatra-loving monk, a leper colony, an ersatz temple of plywood and plaster-and woven together by Richie’s narration as well as a score by celebrated composer Toru Takemitsu, The Inland Sea is an eye-opening voyage and a profound meditation on what it means to be a foreigner.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by cinematographer Hiro Narita, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* New interview with director Lucille Carra
* New conversation between filmmaker Paul Schrader and cultural critic Ian Buruma on author Donald Richie
* Interview with Richie from 1991
* New English subtitle translation
* PLUS: An essay by scholar Arturo Silva
1991 * 56 minutes * Color/Black & White * Stereo * In English and Japanese with English subtitles * 1.66:1 aspect ratio
Available August 13, 2019
Magnificent Obsession
Reckless playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson, in his breakthrough role) crashes his speedboat, requiring emergency attention from the town’s only resuscitator-at the very moment that a beloved local doctor has a heart attack and dies waiting for the lifesaving device. Thus begins one of Douglas Sirk’s most flamboyant master classes in melodrama, a delirious Technicolor mix of the sudsy and the spiritual in which Bob and the doctor’s widow, Helen (Jane Wyman), find themselves inextricably linked amid a series of increasingly wild twists, turns, trials, and tribulations.
BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
* Audio commentary from 2008 featuring film scholar Thomas Doherty
* Magnificent Obsession, John M. Stahl’s 1935 adaptation of the same novel, newly restored
* From UFA to Hollywood: Douglas Sirk Remembers (1991), a documentary by German filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt
* Interviews from 2008 with filmmakers Allison Anders and Kathryn Bigelow, in which they pay tribute to Sirk
* Theatrical trailer
* PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien
1954 * 108 minutes * Color * Monaural * 2.00:1 aspect ratio
Available August 20, 2019
The Koker Trilogy
Abbas Kiarostami first came to international attention for this wondrous, slyly self-referential series of films set in the rural northern-Iranian town of Koker. Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, comedy and tragedy, the lyrical fables in The Koker Trilogy exemplify both the gentle humanism and playful sleight of hand that define the director’s sensibility. With each successive film, Kiarostami takes us deeper into the behind-the-scenes “reality” of the film that preceded it, heightening our understanding of the complex network of human relationships that sustain both a movie set and a village. The result is a gradual outward zoom that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 2K digital restorations of all three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-rays
* New audio commentary on And Life Goes On featuring Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, co-authors of Abbas Kiarostami
* Abbas Kiarostami: Truths and Dreams, a 1994 documentary
* New interview with Abbas Kiarostami’s son Ahmad Kiarostami
* New conversation between Iranian-film scholar Jamsheed Akrami and film critic Godfrey Cheshire
* Conversation from 2015 between Kiarostami and film-festival programmer Peter Scarlet
* New English subtitle translations
* More!
* PLUS: An essay by critic Godfrey Cheshire
Where Is the Friend’s House?
The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing Koker Trilogy takes a simple premise-a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken-and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of the everyday. As our young hero zigzags determinedly across two towns, aided (and sometimes misdirected) by those he encounters, his quest becomes both a revealing portrait of rural Iranian society in all its richness and complexity and a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility. Sensitive and profound, Where Is the Friend’s House? is shot through with all the beauty, tension, and wonder a single day can contain.
1987 * 83 minutes * Color * Monaural * In Persian with English subtitles * 1.66:1 aspect ratio
And Life Goes On
In the aftermath of a 1990 earthquake that left at least thirty thousand dead, Abbas Kiarostami returned to Koker, where his camera surveys not only devastation but also the teeming life in its wake. Blending fiction and reality into a playful, poignant road movie, And Life Goes On follows a film director who, along with his son, makes the trek to the region in hopes of finding out if the young star of Where Is the Friend’s House? is among the survivors, and discovers a resilient community pressing on in the face of tragedy. Finding beauty in the bleakest of circumstances, Kiarostami crafts a quietly majestic ode to the best of the human spirit.
1992 * 95 minutes * Color * Monaural * In Persian with English subtitles * 1.66:1 aspect ratio
Through the Olive Trees
Abbas Kiarostami takes meta-narrative gamesmanship to masterful new heights in the final installment of The Koker Trilogy. Unfolding “behind the scenes” of And Life Goes On, this film traces the complications that arise when the romantic misfortune of one of the actors-a young man who pines for the woman cast as his wife, even though, in real life, she will have nothing to do with him-creates turmoil on set and leaves the hapless director caught in the middle. An ineffably lovely, gentle human comedy steeped in the folkways of Iranian village life, Through the Olive Treespeels away layer after layer of artifice as it investigates the elusive, alchemical relationship between cinema and reality.
1994 * 103 minutes * Color * Monaural * In Persian with English subtitles * 1.66:1 aspect ratio
Available August 27, 2019
The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice
One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is a subtly piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship of a childless, middle-aged couple, as the wife’s city-bred sophistication bumps up against the husband’s small-town simplicity, and a generational sea change-in the form of their headstrong, modern niece-sweeps over their household. The director’s abiding concern with family dynamics receives one of its most spirited treatments, with a wry, tender humor and buoyant expansiveness that moves the action from the home into the baseball stadiums, pachinko parlors, and ramen shops of postwar Tokyo.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* What Did the Lady Forget?, a 1937 feature by director Yasujiro Ozu
* New interview with film scholar David Bordwell
* Ozu & Noda: Tateshina Diaries, a new documentary by Daniel Raim on Ozu’s relationship with longtime screenwriter Kogo Noda
* New English subtitle translation
* PLUS: An essay by scholar Junji Yoshida
1952 * 116 minutes * Black & White * Monaural * In Japanese with English subtitles * 1.37:1 aspect ratio
Available August 27, 2019
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