Criterion Reflections is David Blakeslee’s ongoing project to watch all of the films included in the Criterion Collection in chronological order of their original release. Each episode features panel conversations and 1:1 interviews offering insights on movies that premiered in a particular season of a year in the past, which were destined to eventually bear the Criterion imprint. In this episode, David is joined by Jordan Essoe, Trevor Berrett, Keith Enright, John Laubinger, and Robert Taylor to discuss five titles from the Spring of 1969: Ingmar Bergman’s The Rite, Louis Malle’s Calcutta, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy.
Episode Time Markers: Introduction: 0:00:00 – 0:11:00 The Rite: 0:11:01 – 0:45:20 Calcutta: 0:45:21 – 1:02:12 Easy Rider: 1:02:13 – 2:00:17 Double Suicide: 2:00:18 – 2:33:06 Midnight Cowboy: 2:33:...
Episode Time Markers: Introduction: 0:00:00 – 0:11:00 The Rite: 0:11:01 – 0:45:20 Calcutta: 0:45:21 – 1:02:12 Easy Rider: 1:02:13 – 2:00:17 Double Suicide: 2:00:18 – 2:33:06 Midnight Cowboy: 2:33:...
- 10/11/2017
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor are joined by Keith Enright to discuss Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle.
About the films:
Over the course of a nearly forty-year career, Louis Malle forged a reputation as one of the world’s most versatile cinematic storytellers, with such widely acclaimed, and wide-ranging, masterpieces as Elevator to the Gallows, My Dinner with Andre, and Au revoir les enfants. At the same time, however, with less fanfare, Malle was creating a parallel, even more personal body of work as a documentary filmmaker. With the discerning eye of a true artist and the investigatory skills of a great journalist, Malle takes us from a street corner in Paris to...
About the films:
Over the course of a nearly forty-year career, Louis Malle forged a reputation as one of the world’s most versatile cinematic storytellers, with such widely acclaimed, and wide-ranging, masterpieces as Elevator to the Gallows, My Dinner with Andre, and Au revoir les enfants. At the same time, however, with less fanfare, Malle was creating a parallel, even more personal body of work as a documentary filmmaker. With the discerning eye of a true artist and the investigatory skills of a great journalist, Malle takes us from a street corner in Paris to...
- 12/17/2016
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
David’s Quick Take for the Tl;Dr Media Consumer:
The resume is solid and the references check out: Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim each shouldering a directorial third of the project, with talented crews working at their behest to create visually elegant environments to support the stories they tell. Top shelf recruits from leading “beautiful people” actors of their generation: Brigitte Bardot. Alain Delon. Jane Fonda. Peter Fonda. And then there’s Terence Stamp, probably less renowned than the preceding quartet, is roguishly seductive as a disheveled blond wastrel with a suicidal bent. Source material drawn and freely adapted from short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Ray Charles contributes to the soundtrack. A goosebump inducing first person Pov midnight dash through the streets and alleyways of Rome in a vintage 1964 Ferrari Lmb Fantuzzi just adds extra sprinkles on top. Though the overall impact of the film makes it...
The resume is solid and the references check out: Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim each shouldering a directorial third of the project, with talented crews working at their behest to create visually elegant environments to support the stories they tell. Top shelf recruits from leading “beautiful people” actors of their generation: Brigitte Bardot. Alain Delon. Jane Fonda. Peter Fonda. And then there’s Terence Stamp, probably less renowned than the preceding quartet, is roguishly seductive as a disheveled blond wastrel with a suicidal bent. Source material drawn and freely adapted from short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Ray Charles contributes to the soundtrack. A goosebump inducing first person Pov midnight dash through the streets and alleyways of Rome in a vintage 1964 Ferrari Lmb Fantuzzi just adds extra sprinkles on top. Though the overall impact of the film makes it...
- 12/4/2016
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
Few things are more exciting for hardcore cinephiles than the semi-annual Barnes and Noble Criterion sale. For a few precious weeks a year, super high-quality Blu-Rays of obscure and influential classic films are on the relative cheap. Most noteworthy: they look really, Really pretty.
Most Criterion-heads are lining up to pick up A Hard Day’s Night, Red River, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and other newer (fiction) releases—as they should because they’re all awesome releases. But how about a little love for the documentary?
Maybe you don’t think docs have a ton of rewatch value, and maybe you’re right in some cases. Criterion’s A+ supplements and video quality—not to mention the timelessness of the films they choose—ought to be enough to sway you in the right direction. But if they aren’t, we’re diving a little deeper into ten of the best Criterion documentaries ever.
Most Criterion-heads are lining up to pick up A Hard Day’s Night, Red River, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and other newer (fiction) releases—as they should because they’re all awesome releases. But how about a little love for the documentary?
Maybe you don’t think docs have a ton of rewatch value, and maybe you’re right in some cases. Criterion’s A+ supplements and video quality—not to mention the timelessness of the films they choose—ought to be enough to sway you in the right direction. But if they aren’t, we’re diving a little deeper into ten of the best Criterion documentaries ever.
- 7/12/2014
- by John Gilpatrick
- SoundOnSight
"Although most film festivals are consecrated to glamorous premieres and the newsworthy new, [To Save and Project: The Ninth Moma International Festival of Film Preservation, opening tomorrow and running through November 19,] treasures the rediscovered and dusted-off," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Like browsing a used bookstore in an unfamiliar city — another endangered pleasure — parsing Tsap's lineup, you're never sure what will turn up. This year's attractions range from a restored color version of Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (the Star Wars of 1902) and the first Soviet stereo-vision feature, Robinzon Kruso (1947), to new prints of Roger Corman's anti-segregationist screen-scorcher The Intruder (the most alarming B-movie of 1962), Louis Malle's 1969 doc Calcutta (showing with Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad's lyrical portrait of a leper colony, The House Is Black), Alberto Lattuada's 1952 neorealist adaptation of Gogol's The Overcoat, and Elaine May's 1976 black comedy Mikey and Nicky (the best movie John Cassavetes never made), as well as the preserved work of the late downtown performance artist Stuart Sherman.
- 10/13/2011
- MUBI
With Criterion’s long-awaited addition of India’s Satyajit Ray to their pantheon of all-time great directors about to be made official tomorrow with the release of The Music Room, my thoughts inexorably turned to India as I contemplated my next entry for this column. Given that Louis Malle himself has had two of his films (Zazie dans le Metro and Black Moon) recently published by Criterion, and that Ray was a Bengali who based his films in the northeastern corner of that great subcontinent, it make perfect sense that our Journey through the Eclipse Series takes a passage to India, landing in Calcutta, from Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle.
Like the fabled city itself, Malle’s Calcutta is a sprawling, vast, messy and barely fathomable explosion of humanity at its rawest and most visceral, at least to the extent that a documentary film can convey that raw viscerality.
Like the fabled city itself, Malle’s Calcutta is a sprawling, vast, messy and barely fathomable explosion of humanity at its rawest and most visceral, at least to the extent that a documentary film can convey that raw viscerality.
- 7/18/2011
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
There are Tons of new releases this past week, and as my co-host and friend Travis George said, it was going to be a hell of a time to write these up for all of you people out there who want to know about Criterion’s blossoming Hulu Plus page. And as usual, I’m elated to tell you all about these films, especially if you want to join up to the service, which helps us keep this weekly article series going. I mean, come on, there’s an Ingmar Bergman film that’s not in the collection yet! More on that at the end of the article. So let’s get right to it then.
The epic film The Human Condition (1959) has been put up, separated into three videos. Parts 1 & 2, Parts 3 & 4 and Parts 5 & 6 are there for your ease of watching, so if you have 574 minutes to kill watching the...
The epic film The Human Condition (1959) has been put up, separated into three videos. Parts 1 & 2, Parts 3 & 4 and Parts 5 & 6 are there for your ease of watching, so if you have 574 minutes to kill watching the...
- 6/12/2011
- by James McCormick
- CriterionCast
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