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kekid wrote:Thanks, Matt. I meant the Tartan trilogy (Benny's Video, etc.). Given these are older films I was wondering if the difference in quality from Kino is significant. I have not seen any reviews of the Tartan set.

Lino wrote:DVDTimes reviews the recently released Michael Haneke Collection.

The Michael Haneke Collection boxset collecting these four films is released in the UK by Artificial Eye. The films are each presented on a dual-layer disc in PAL format and encoded for Region 2. The content and the quality of the discs is identical to previously released DVD editions, but they are repackaged here with new covers in slimline cases and held within a slipcase.

Nice.

iW: What's your take on the adaptation process, because "The Piano Teacher," like your earlier film of Kafka's "The Castle," is a distinctly personal interpretation that nevertheless remains quite faithful to the events of the source material.

Haneke: I would draw a definite line between "The Castle" and "The Piano Teacher," because "The Castle" was made for television, and I'm very clear about the distinction between a TV version and a movie. Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations. I would not have dared to turn "The Castle" into a movie for the big screen; on TV, it's OK, because it has different objectives. But with "The Piano Teacher," if you compare the structure of the novel to the structure of the film, it's really quite different, and I feel I've been dealing very freely with the novel and the way it was written. I would say that my version of looking at the story is pretty distanced and cool, while the novel itself is almost angry and very emotional. The novel is much more subjective and the film is much more objective.

Jeff wrote:upcoming seven-disc R1 set

Rich Malloy wrote:

Jeff wrote:upcoming seven-disc R1 set

7 discs = 7 films? Which films does Kino have the rights to?

Rich Malloy wrote:

Jeff wrote:upcoming seven-disc R1 set

7 discs = 7 films? Which films does Kino have the rights to?

ptmd wrote:It's available separately

NEW YORK, August 13, 2007--The Museum of Modern Art presents a full retrospective of the feature films of Michael Haneke, one of contemporary cinema's most provocative and incisive filmmakers.

Michael Haneke, the most comprehensive exhibition of his work ever screened in North America, is presented October 3 through 15, 2007, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1. The series includes eight of Haneke's celebrated theatrical features, several of which have won top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including The Piano Teacher (2001) and Caché (2005), both triple award-winners at Cannes, and the North American premieres of eight of Haneke's Austrian-German television productions from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s.

The retrospective precedes Warner Independent Pictures' October 26 release of the director's 2007 remake of Funny Games, starring Naomi Watts and Michael Pitt. Haneke will be present to introduce the screenings of Code Unknown (2000) on Saturday, October 13, at 8:30 p.m., and the original Funny Games (1997) on Monday, October 15, at 7:00 p.m., both of which are followed by question-and-answer sessions with the director.

This series is based on the originating exhibition Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation, curated by Roy Grundmann, Film Studies professor at Boston University, with additional assistance from Karin Oehlenschläger of the Goethe-Institut Boston, and Brigitte Bouvier from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Boston. That exhibition will be presented at Harvard Film Archive and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from October 11 through November 3, 2007.

Born in 1942 in Germany, and raised in his current home of Austria, Haneke studied philosophy, psychology, and drama at the University of Vienna before becoming a screenwriter and director of opera, theater, and film. Much of his early work in television was based on his own writing, or adapted from modernist and postmodern literature by Franz Kafka (The Castle, 1997), Joseph Roth (The Rebellion, 1993), Ingeborg Bachmann (Three Paths to the Lake, 1976), Peter Rosei (Who Was Edgar Allan?, 1984), and others. These revelatory works anticipate Haneke's later work for the cinema, centering on the historical amnesia of Old Europe and its wartime past, and on the loss of identity and individuality, whether during the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (The Rebellion, 1993), in the decade following World War II (Lemmings - Part 1- Arcadia, 1979, and Fraulein, 1986), or in the present day (Three Paths to the Lake, 1976; Lemmings - Part Two - Injuries, 1979; Variation, 1983; and Who Was Edgar Allan?, 1984).

blindside8zao wrote:no, I keep hearing about all kinds of great stuff happening in New York. The Berlin in Lights festival, the Pasolini retrospective, this, and really just the MET in general. I live in North Carolina so there aren't too many opportunities to see Haneke or Pasolini anywhere but on my small TV set. I guess that will change with the Naomi Watts version of Funny Games.

soma wrote:I've checked the recent R4 releases of Funny Games, The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video and the picture quality / transfers of all are superb. I own the Director's Suite editions of Cache, Funny Games, Time Of The Wolf, The Seventh Continent and The Piano Teacher. The best editions out there as far as US / UK / Australia is concerned.

s.j. bagley wrote:so would it be silly to ask for a definitive list of the best editions of haneke dvds?

malcolm1980 wrote:It would be nice for Criterion to get a hold of at least a few of Haneke's works.