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[quote=""Tommaso"]Me too! It seems there is so much to explore, especially if it comes to Japanese movies made before 1950. But apparently many of them are in bad condition due to bad storage or mutilation both by the Japanese censors and (later) by the American censors during the occupation.[/quote]
I don't think one can blame censors for any of the problems one has with the films that survive. (Their unforgivable sin was the outright destruction of films -- and the failure to even document what they destroyed).

Bad storage is one problem -- but the other issue is that studios viewed films as ephemeral consumables. Typically no inter-negatives (or inter-positives) were made. Prints were made from the original negatives -- until the negatives gave out (if the film was popular enough). And theatrical prints were used until _they_ fell apart. So having passable sources is a matter of great good fortune.

PCL (and its successor, Toho) was more careful than the norm (perhaps, because of its history as a photochemical supplier and film processing company). Thus, Naruse's Toho catalog is complete -- and mostly in presentable condition. Other Toho films of the era also look comparatively good. Those of Shochiku usually look a lot worse. (Shochiku also had a fire in the early 50s that destryed some stuff -- including the original negative of Tokyo Story). Much of Nikkatsu's back catalog was destroyed by the 1923 earthquake and then by US bombing (thus almost all of Yamanaka's work and Mizoguchi's early work is lost).

Tommaso wrote: Still, what would I give for a watchable disc of "A Page of Madness"... But let's not complain, the forthcoming Mizoguchis will probably be among MoCs most important releases (at least for the English speaking world)

I look forward to a decent version of Kinugasa's film -- but am more and more convinced that this was simply a lucky fluke for an otherwise undistinguished director. And -- having finally watched Murata's Souls on the Road -- I think a lot (albeit not all) of the experimental aspects Kinugasa is praised for had already been used in Japan.

I hope MOC will have financial success for its Mizoguchi series that is (at least) commensurate with the importance of that series. ;~}

It's probably not possible but I was just thinking how amazing it would be if MOC could release Preston Sturges classic 1944 screwball "Hail The Conquering Hero". Since Criterion put out the majority of Sturges other high profile classics and Universal refuses to do anything with this, possibly his greatest directorial work, and only available as a budget disc in Universal's box set... an MOC release would be perfect! With Paramount's R1 release of Miracle, Universal's budget issue of TPBS and the Criterions, an MOC release of Hail The Conquering Hero would be definitive and allow us to own the majority of Sturges most significant films in at least decent to great presentations. It's also serve as a great broadening example to the lineup with one of cinema's high points in American screwball classics.

What about a release of "City Girl" by Murnau?

Thanks for the answer, David. I just saw this movie one time, at the Portuguese Cinematheque, but I loved it. Almost as powerful as "Sunrise"...

I would LOVE to see it edited by MoC!

What are the chances of more Shohei Imamura entering the series?

I've been longing to see more of his work since Vengeance, top of my list probably being the Insect Woman. Has this one ever been considered?

I don't think she'd mind, so I'll report: Janet told me there is some Borzage/more Murnau in the wind. Something along the lines of the SUNRISE boxed with CITY GIRL, with a couple of films reflecting Murnaus influence at Fox... meaning... obviously... Mister Borz... of whom some solo stuff is apparently forthcoming. Maybe the Ford ...BROTHERS silent shot in the SUNRISE foggy swamp set.

Any chance that MoC would tackle Ivan the Terrible or Alexander Nevsky?

How about his silent work? ...hehe

I'd prefer to have some of his stuff that's unreleased. Then again, I'd prefer to have some stuff from Franju.

Ivan has good enough versions available.

Cinetwist wrote: I'd prefer to have some stuff from Franju.

This might interest you from Cahiers du Cinéma Judex/Nuits Rouge double. No subs however unlike the recent Godard (except for the Refuznik shorts that don't really need it with elementary french knowledge)

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:

Cinetwist wrote: I'd prefer to have some stuff from Franju.

This might interest you from Cahiers du Cinéma Judex/Nuits Rouge double. No subs however unlike the recent Godard (except for the Refuznik shorts that don't really need it with elementary french knowledge)

Thanks! That was completely under my radar. I wonder what the Nuits Rouges transfer is like. Apparently there's only one print and even the CF screened a pretty bad digital copy (I could be misremembering this...).

I'll be picking that up after christmas.

Nick, I wonder, is there any possibility that possible future Naruse releases will be patterned after the current Mizoguchi boxes?

I saw the Cahiers Franju JUDEX DVD on a recent trip to Paris and was wracked with frustration that there were no subtitles. I agree it would be a great addition to the MoC library.

My heart about stopped because this guy started a new thread with the title "Andy Warhol" in the section for announced and released MoC discs. I thought Nick had accomplished the impossible and was going to release a set of Warhol fims.

JonDambacher wrote:Between the fifties to sixties, Hollywood's Production Codes and Studio systems were on their way out. The Golden Age was over. With some like Welles, Kazan, Kubrick, Penn, and finally Cassavetes a new reality was hitting the screens. With war taking up America's newspapers and attention for the past three decades the need for human emotion and relationship became imperative. The need for artistic/sexual expression came along with this as well. We're all familiar with what Vietnam did for us, good and bad, here in the US. Art flourished, politics were up in flames, riots and marches broke our fears of standing tall for what we believed in. New doors were being shoved open by discovery and evolution.

In this time, Pop art became very robust.
Wikipedia writes on Pop Art, "Pop art is one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them."

Andy Warhol is certainly the most well known from the period. What's not so well known are the sixty some-odd films he directed/produced.

Mostly working with New York artists, off beat celebrities, and total strangers to create an unusual world of love, sex, art, drugs, boredom, commercialism, consumerism, and religion.

Some of his films are simple encounters: BLOW JOB, made in 1963, a voyeuristic perspective of one receiving oral sex. Or EMPIRE, made in 1964, a giant look from a giant's perspective, the Empire State Building, in it's most quiet of states: 8:00 pm to 2:45 am.

Some of his films are complex voyeuristic attempts at personal human relationships: RESTAURANT, made in 1965, which follows restaurant patrons Bibbe Hansen and Edie Sedgwick through the glorified moments of dinning in a corner diner. Examining spoons, plates, food arrangement, glasses, elbows on the table, and chatter from all around us. CHELSEA GIRLS, made in 1966, the legendary split-screen extravaganza. Following a large group non-actors in numerous different story lines throughout conversation, drugs, sex, and endless phone calls. The split-screen acts as Father Time, separating each person from the person they're encountering, giving us each perspective from as many perspectives as you can perceive. LONESOME COWBOY, made in 1966, gives us a homosexual cowboy revenge western. Where as Warhol's last dive into filmmaking, BLUE MOVIE, was arguably his most coherent attempt at connecting to his time and place in the world. BLUE MOVIE, made in 1969, examines a couple in an apartment discussing current affairs, relationships, and open sex. One the most interesting shots in Warhol's career is in BLUE MOVIE's final scene where the young lady finally address the camera and asks, "Is it on?"

A Warhol collection would fit nicely between some of Criterion's socially minded Avant-garde material such as the Maysles' "Salesman" or "Grey Gardens," or Vilgot Sjöman's "I Am Curious" set, and obviously the work of Paul Morrissey.

-- Jon Dambacher

Is there any chance at all of an MoC edition of Shinya Tsukamoto's first two (short) films: The Phantom of Regular Size (Futsu saizu no kaijin, 1986) and The Adventures of Denchu Kozo (Denchu Kozo no boken, 1987)?

It would be incredible to see them released on DVD. There's surely a demand for these films, and they'd be a good fit with the other Japanese/experimental films that MoC have put out so far. I'd even bet that Tony Rayns would be willing to contribute to possible special features.

Peerpee?

I'll echo an emphatic "Please!" to the Franju/Judex discussion above.

Also in the wishlist category - I think I'm finally fed up with the utter lack of representation, anywhere as near as I can tell, of Victor Saville's Jessie Matthews vehicles. The couple that I've seen in the past were nothing life changing but certainly entertaining. More to the point, I thought these were fairly well-remembered and something like beloved history in Britain - am I wholly wrong? I'm surprised there just seems to be nothing available, and remember the Criterion laser of Evergreen with fondness. I probably should have bought it back in the day, not just rented it. No idea what the rights situation is, but MoC seems like a reasonable place to at least partly tackle the situation. Do it for Old Blighty!

starmanof51 wrote:Also in the wishlist category - I think I'm finally fed up with the utter lack of representation, anywhere as near as I can tell, of Victor Saville's Jessie Matthews vehicles. The couple that I've seen in the past were nothing life changing but certainly entertaining. More to the point, I thought these were fairly well-remembered and something like beloved history in Britain - am I wholly wrong? I'm surprised there just seems to be nothing available, and remember the Criterion laser of Evergreen with fondness. I probably should have bought it back in the day, not just rented it. No idea what the rights situation is, but MoC seems like a reasonable place to at least partly tackle the situation. Do it for Old Blighty!

You'd be far better off lobbying Network, as they presumably have the DVD rights as part of their deal with Granada (who inherited the old Gainsborough/Gaumont-British library a few years ago when they merged with Carlton)..

In general, the vast majority of "golden age" British titles will probably be owned by either Network/Granada or Optimum/Canal - independent outfits like MoC rarely get a look-in.

Of the Gainsborough Pictures catalogue there hasn't been very much released but I would like to see more of these. Especially Jassy which I saw a bit of a few years ago and never got to see the whole thing. Gainsborough produceda lot of films and not many of them seem to be on DVD. Of the Golden Age British pictures Optimum seem to be starting slowly though only titles with a particular star appeal like Ealing or Dirk Bogarde and releasing them in those horrible box sets (Ealing excluded).

FSimeoni wrote:Of the Gainsborough Pictures catalogue there hasn't been very much released but I would like to see more of these. Especially Jassy which I saw a bit of a few years ago and never got to see the whole thing.

That's probably a mercy, as it's not very good.

Gainsborough produceda lot of films and not many of them seem to be on DVD.

Network owns the entire Gainsborough catalogue - I would have thought a box set of the notorious 1940s melodramas would be worth attempting. Especially as The Wicked Lady is still in the all-time British box-office top ten (if calculated by the number of tickets sold instead of the amount of cash raised). As is The Seventh Veil, which wasn't an official Gainsborough melodrama, but was made in exactly the same style as an explicit cash-in (and Network owns that one too).

MichaelB wrote:That's probably a mercy, as it's not very good.

I wasn't thinking it was a masterpiece when I watched that bit, but a friend of mine watched a whole load of Gainsborough films and said that they were actually quite good despite their looking cheesy and dated. There's something about it that makes me want to watch it even if it isn't good, in fact because it isn't good!

Back on topic is there anything that MoC could release from the British archives? I expect almost everything is already owned by other distributors?

FSimeoni wrote:

MichaelB wrote:That's probably a mercy, as it's not very good.

I wasn't thinking it was a masterpiece when I watched that bit, but a friend of mine watched a whole load of Gainsborough films and said that they were actually quite good despite their looking cheesy and dated. There's something about it that makes me want to watch it even if it isn't good, in fact because it isn't good!

An admirable position to take - but I have to say that Jassy is pretty rubbish even by Gainsborough standards. I watched pretty much every Gainsborough melodrama a few years ago, and I'd rank them as follows (the links are to my Screenonline pieces, which are much more detailed):

1943 - The Man in Grey - the film that started the melodrama cycle and introduced its major stars (Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger as the goodies; James Mason and Margaret Lockwood as the baddies, both fab); still stands up fairly well by comparison with the later titles. And Granger gets to play Othello in blackface.

1944 - Fanny By Gaslight - for all the melodramatic trappings, this is actually a surprisingly complex and serious look at the British class system. I suspect the fact that it's the only Gainsborough melodrama by a heavyweight director (Anthony Asquith) played a part.

Madonna of the Seven Moons - the weirdest Gainsborough melodrama by some distance, with Phyllis Calvert as an Italian housewife who shares a split personality with a bandit's moll. Stewart Granger plays the bandit, which is good for a laugh or several.

Love Story - There's a famous story about this film in which Stewart Granger is travelling down to the Cornish location by train and starts chatting to a man in the compartment. The man sees that Granger is reading a script and asks about it. Granger says "it's the worst piece of crap I've ever read in my life". The man was Leslie Arliss, the writer-director. Whoops. (Granger was right, though)

1945 - They Were Sisters - Along with Fanny by Gaslight, probably the most socially interesting Gainsborough melodrama, in which three very different sisters make a series of disastrous marriages. One, inevitably, is to James Mason, who's at his most gloriously vile - he hated the script, got blind drunk every night to blot it out, and so he's acting with a raging hangover which helps his performance no end.

The Wicked Lady - the definitive Gainsborough melodrama, and startlingly racy even today. It was decades ahead of its time in its portrayal of a woman who will stop at nothing to achieve her aims, be they social, financial or sexual, and the mainly female audiences of 1945 lapped it up.

The Seventh Veil - not technically a Gainsborough melodrama, but the most successful of many independent rip-offs - and it has arguably the definitive 'Gainsborough' scene, in which James Mason's fanatically jealous guardian smashes his cane on the piano-playing fingers of his ward Ann Todd.

1946 - Caravan - Rousing Boys' Own adventure with Stewart Granger, with only a few authentic Gainsborough moments, though the bizarre scene in which the evil Dennis Price invites a load of prostitutes to his wife's dinner party is worth watching the rest of the film for.

The Magic Bow - ridiculous biopic of Paganini starring Stewart Granger that's worth seeing for some very impressive technical sleight of hand. It really does look as though he's a virtuoso violinist, though the hands belong to two professionals (one bowing, one fingering), and the sound is courtesy of Yehudi Menuhin.

1947 - Jassy - Gainsborough's only Technicolor melodrama looks gorgeous, but dramatically it's a pale shadow of its predecessors, largely because Margaret Lockwood's character is bizarrely unfocused: it's very hard to work out what makes her tick, which absolutely wasn't the problem with her earlier roles. And the courtroom climax is very dull.

Back on topic is there anything that MoC could release from the British archives? I expect almost everything is already owned by other distributors?

The world rights to most of the mainstream catalogues from the 1920s to the 1980s - Rank, Gainsborough, Gaumont-British, Associated-British, British Lion, Ealing, EMI and many others - are owned by either Granada or Studio Canal, who have exclusive DVD deals with Network and Optimum respectively.

In the past, they used to licence some of their less commercial stuff to independent labels like the BFI (which distributed Launder and Gilliat titles on VHS, for instance), but I think Network and Optimum now have exclusive deals.

This doesn't mean that an independent label can't get its hands on any British films, but in practice the overwhelming majority of mainstream "golden age" titles are off limits for the time being. Which explains why the British titles in the BFI's DVD catalogue tend to come from much further off the beaten track, with lots of non-fiction, experimental and other unconventional titles.

I wasn't asking about Golden Age stuff but anything British in general. Any thoughts on this? It'd be nice to see MoC tackle something British.

Thanks for your thoughts on the Gainsboroughs love that Love Story anecdote!

FSimeoni wrote:Thanks for your thoughts on the Gainsboroughs love that Love Story anecdote!

...which I've just realised doesn't make sense, as Granger would certainly have recognised Leslie Arliss, on account of being directed by him in The Man in Grey the previous year!

(They didn't get on - in fact, the Gainsborough directors generally weren't liked much by the actors, being either hacks like Arliss or former cinematographers like Arthur Crabtree and Bernard Knowles, who generally ignored the actors in favour of the visual elements. As a result, the actors usually rehearsed and directed themselves)

Anyway, the story is largely correct, in that the film was definitely Love Story, the man definitely Stewart Granger and his travelling companion definitely had something to do with the script, but it must have been someone else.

FSimeoni wrote:I wasn't asking about Golden Age stuff but anything British in general. Any thoughts on this? It'd be nice to see MoC tackle something British.

You're probably right to say that almost anything British is owned by other producers/companies, but then, this goes for practically everything else, too. MoC would have to get a licence from the rightsholders. The situation described by Michael about Granada/Network seems discouraging, but I still have to say it: if Network isn't interested, the greatest British addition to the MoC catalogue would be the missing Powells: either some of his pre-Pressburger films ("The Phantom Light", for instance), or, dare I say it: "The Elusive Pimpernel" and "Rosalinda". PLEAAASE!
It's totally beyond me why no company worldwide seems to want to put them out, given the fact that both films were shown in retrospectives not too long ago and are apparently in presentable shape. P&P should be a no-brainer for anyone.

Tommaso wrote:You're probably right to say that almost anything British is owned by other producers/companies, but then, this goes for practically everything else, too. MoC would have to get a licence from the rightsholders.

They would, but they'd have a better chance with some companies than others. In a great many cases, the rightsholder may have no interest in releasing a DVD themselves (indeed, the rightsholder may no longer be a going concern as a company), whereas in the case of Granada and Canal the DVD rights to their entire catalogues (as far as I'm aware) are already tied up.

If Network isn't interested, the greatest British addition to the MoC catalogue would be the missing Powells: either some of his pre-Pressburger films ("The Phantom Light", for instance), or, dare I say it: "The Elusive Pimpernel" and "Rosalinda". PLEAAASE!
It's totally beyond me why no company worldwide seems to want to put them out, given the fact that both films were shown in retrospectives not too long ago and are apparently in presentable shape. P&P should be a no-brainer for anyone.

The Phantom Light is a Gainsborough production (so Network have the British DVD rights), but Pimpernel and Rosalinda are both Canal-owned, so Optimum would be the company to lobby. But they did a very decent job on Peeping Tom a year or so ago, so they're clearly not ignorant of Powell's work (or, presumably, what they have in their own vaults).

There was an excellent 35mm restoration of Oh!! Rosalinda in the 1990s - I can't believe it would have deteriorated that much since.