On the day their gorgeous Agnès Varda box set arrives, The Criterion Collection has announced details on their next director collection. In celebration of his 100th birthday this year, Federico Fellini will be receiving a 15-disc box set featuring fourteen of his films, set for a release on November 24, 2020.
Titled Essential Fellini, the release features new restorations of the theatrical features, as well as short and full-length documentaries about Fellini’s life and work, archival interviews with his friends and collaborators, commentaries on six of the films, video essays, the director’s 1968 short Toby Dammit, and much more. It also includes two illustrated books with hundreds of pages of notes and essays on the films by writers and filmmakers, plus memorabilia. Check out a list of films and special features below.
List of Films
Variety Lights (1950)The White Sheik (1952)I Vitelloni (1953)LA Strada (1954)Il Bidone (1955)Nights Of Cabiria (1957)LA Dolce Vita...
Titled Essential Fellini, the release features new restorations of the theatrical features, as well as short and full-length documentaries about Fellini’s life and work, archival interviews with his friends and collaborators, commentaries on six of the films, video essays, the director’s 1968 short Toby Dammit, and much more. It also includes two illustrated books with hundreds of pages of notes and essays on the films by writers and filmmakers, plus memorabilia. Check out a list of films and special features below.
List of Films
Variety Lights (1950)The White Sheik (1952)I Vitelloni (1953)LA Strada (1954)Il Bidone (1955)Nights Of Cabiria (1957)LA Dolce Vita...
- 8/11/2020
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
The 55th New York Film Festival brought together cinematographers Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, Apocalypse Now) and Ed Lachman (Carol, The Limey) for a master class on the occasion of both having films in the fest’s main slate. Lachman lensed Todd Haynes’ Centerpiece film Wonderstruck and Storaro did Woody Allen’s Closing Night film Wonder Wheel.
Festival director Kent Jones hosted the two at the Walter Reade Theater on October 11 for an all-encompassing talk of their cinematic philosophies and the cinematographers’ 40-year friendship.
Storaro and Lachman showed clips from films that inspire them and clips of their own work. The clips were a launching pad to discuss the difficult-to-pin cinematic language of photographic storytelling. We’ve included key quotes from their talk and the complete video of masterclass below.
Lachman on Storaro
Vittorio has done more in the last 50 years for the recognition and esteem of cinematography than anybody.
Becoming...
Festival director Kent Jones hosted the two at the Walter Reade Theater on October 11 for an all-encompassing talk of their cinematic philosophies and the cinematographers’ 40-year friendship.
Storaro and Lachman showed clips from films that inspire them and clips of their own work. The clips were a launching pad to discuss the difficult-to-pin cinematic language of photographic storytelling. We’ve included key quotes from their talk and the complete video of masterclass below.
Lachman on Storaro
Vittorio has done more in the last 50 years for the recognition and esteem of cinematography than anybody.
Becoming...
- 11/1/2017
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
Take a look at the roots of American campaign image consciousness, and the then-new techniques of cinéma vérité to bring a new 'reality' for film documentaries. Four groundbreaking films cover the Kennedy-Humphrey presidential primary, and put us in the Oval Office for a showdown against Alabama governor George Wallace. The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates Blu-ray Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, Faces of November The Criterion Collection 808 1960 -1964 / B&W / 1:33 flat full frame / 53, 52, 53, 12 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 26, 2016 / 39.95 Starring John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Drew, Hubert H. Humphrey, McGeorge Bundy, John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Goodwin, Albert Gore Sr., Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Pierre Salinger, Haile Selassie, John Steinbeck, George Wallace, Vivian Malone, Burke Marshall, Nicholas Katzenbach, John Dore, Jack Greenberg; Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy Jr., Caroline Kennedy, Peter Lawford. Cinematography Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker,...
- 4/15/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
“The President’S Reality Show”
By Raymond Benson
Robert Drew was a pioneer who changed the way we think about the documentary film. As first a writer/editor at Life Magazine in the 1950s, and then the head of a unit that produced short documentaries for Time Inc., Drew knew how to tell a story visually. When he formed his own company, Robert Drew & Associates, he was the guiding force for other talented (and later, more well-known) filmmakers such as D. A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop), Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter), and Richard Leacock, among others. Together they invented a novel way to present a documentary film, something historians coined “direct cinema.”
Documentaries had previously been scripted, usually shot to order, and more often than not, were textbook dull. Drew and his colleagues developed the you-are-there style of following subjects around as they did their business,...
By Raymond Benson
Robert Drew was a pioneer who changed the way we think about the documentary film. As first a writer/editor at Life Magazine in the 1950s, and then the head of a unit that produced short documentaries for Time Inc., Drew knew how to tell a story visually. When he formed his own company, Robert Drew & Associates, he was the guiding force for other talented (and later, more well-known) filmmakers such as D. A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop), Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter), and Richard Leacock, among others. Together they invented a novel way to present a documentary film, something historians coined “direct cinema.”
Documentaries had previously been scripted, usually shot to order, and more often than not, were textbook dull. Drew and his colleagues developed the you-are-there style of following subjects around as they did their business,...
- 4/9/2016
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Just before the start of reel 5 of Lost Lost Lost, Jonas Mekas‘ memoiric rumination on the memorial tolls of immigrant exile, he explains in simple terms his artistic propulsion – “It’s my nature now to record. To try to keep everything I’m passing. To keep, at least, bits of it. I have lost too much. So now, I have these bits that I have passed through.” Having escaped the clutches of the world war encroaching upon his mother country of Lithuania in 1944 only to have been stopped midway through Germany and imprisoned in a labor camp with his brother, Adolfas, until their eventual escape months later, one can only image how deeply ingrained this sentiment truly is for the filmmaker. Having endured so much in this brief period before he and his brother emigrated to America in 1949, it is a wonder that his art, and particularly the avant-garde diary...
- 12/1/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
“Songs Of Humanity”
By Raymond Benson
I’ll bet many of you cinephiles out there have heard of Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s acclaimed trilogy of films from the 1950s (Pather Panchali, aka Song of the Little Road, 1955; Aparajito, aka The Unvanquished, 1956; and Apur Sansar, aka The World of Apu, 1959), but have never actually seen them. Here is your chance to rectify that egregious error. Quite simply put, anyone interested in film history needs to have this trio of motion pictures under the belt.
Satyajit Ray, who received an Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1992, began his career as an illustrator of books. One of these was Pather Panchali, a classic of Bengali literature (1928) written by Bibhutibushan Bandyopadhyay, and its sequel, Aparajito (1932). They comprise the story of the growth of a boy from infancy to adulthood over the course of twenty-five years or so (from the 1910s to the 1930s...
By Raymond Benson
I’ll bet many of you cinephiles out there have heard of Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s acclaimed trilogy of films from the 1950s (Pather Panchali, aka Song of the Little Road, 1955; Aparajito, aka The Unvanquished, 1956; and Apur Sansar, aka The World of Apu, 1959), but have never actually seen them. Here is your chance to rectify that egregious error. Quite simply put, anyone interested in film history needs to have this trio of motion pictures under the belt.
Satyajit Ray, who received an Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1992, began his career as an illustrator of books. One of these was Pather Panchali, a classic of Bengali literature (1928) written by Bibhutibushan Bandyopadhyay, and its sequel, Aparajito (1932). They comprise the story of the growth of a boy from infancy to adulthood over the course of twenty-five years or so (from the 1910s to the 1930s...
- 11/28/2015
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
I'm a huge fan of Federico Fellini's films, films that have essentially become part of the the fabric of cinema history. This largely refers to La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, La Strada, The Nights of Cabiria and Amarcord. Of course, I've also seen and enjoyed I Vitelloni and Juliet of the Spirits while also not particularly loving The White Sheik or Ginger & Fred. I mention this only as a note that I will pretty much devour whatever Fellini feature is placed in front of me, and as much as I was ready to delve into this new Criterion release of his 1969 feature Fellini Satyricon, I can't say the trip was an enjoyable one. Admittedly, Criterion always manages to deliver something intriguing with their releases and this new Blu-ray edition of Fellini Satyricon is no different, but not for the film itself, more for the supplemental material that makes you start to...
- 2/24/2015
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
Considered amongst the few surviving ancient novels as one of the best depictions of the wild debauchery that seized early Roman society, Petronius’s episodically fractured text The Satyricon tells the tale of Encolpius and his friend and occasional lover Ascyltus, a pair of former gladiators, as they venture through a society rife with overindulgence, sexual proclivity and flippant violence, rotating in form and tone from serious to silly, poetic narrative prose to lyrical verse throughout. Fellini Satyricon, Federico Fellini’s extremely loose adaptation of Petronius’s novel, takes this already loose narrative form and applies the structure as a lens for interpreting the history of antiquity itself – vividly alien, wholly broken and humanly detached from our own worldly norms. The result is a film that, in its unleashed inhibitions, leaves us as an audience in awe of its cinematic freedom, yet at odds with the tale as an empathetic journey through time.
- 2/24/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
If you're reading this you're likely a fan of the Criterion Collection, which also means as much as you may be interested to know what new titles are coming to the collection in February 2015, if you aren't yet aware, Barnes & Noble is currently having their 50% of Criterion sale right now, click here for more on that. However, if you're already hip to the sale, let's have a look at the new titles that were just announced. The month will begin on February 3 with a new film from Jean-Luc Godard, his 1980 feature Every Man for Himself starring Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye and Isabelle Huppert. It's a film Godard refers to as a second debut and is described as an examination of sexual relationships, in which three protagonists interact in different combinations. The release includes a new high-definition digital restoration, a short video titled Le scenario created by Godard to secure financing for the film,...
- 11/17/2014
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
“The most miserable life is better, believe me, than an existence protected by a society where everything’s organized and planned for and perfect,” says Steiner (Alain Cuny), Marcello’s (Marcello Mastroianni) only friend with seemingly any moral fiber or family values in the Rome of upper-class debauchery in which they surf throughout Federico Fellini’s groundbreaking critical masterpiece on the vacuous Roman high-life of the late 50s, La Dolce Vita. Steiner’s fleeting suggestion stands as an epiphanic thesis of Marcello’s own internal struggle to find love and stability while carrying out a career in journalism that takes him gallivanting with royalty and movie stars throughout all the ancient and newly minted quarters of Rome. The final frames of the film featuring Paola’s (Valeria Ciangottini) subtle glance to the audience suggest that in this new hodge-podge of old and evolving culture, only the innocence of youth has...
- 10/21/2014
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Oct. 21, 2014
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg take a dip in the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita.
The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, 1960’s La Dolce Vita rocketed Federico Fellini (The Clowns) to international mainstream success—ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom.
A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Rome’s rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist—played by a sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni (The 10th Victim)—during a hectic week spent on the peripheries of the spotlight.
La Dolce Vita was an incisive commentary on the deepening decadence of the European 1960s, and it provided a prescient glimpse of just how gossip- and fame-obsessed our society would become.
Presented in Italian with English subtitles, Criterion’s Blu-ray and DVD editions contain the...
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg take a dip in the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita.
The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, 1960’s La Dolce Vita rocketed Federico Fellini (The Clowns) to international mainstream success—ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom.
A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Rome’s rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist—played by a sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni (The 10th Victim)—during a hectic week spent on the peripheries of the spotlight.
La Dolce Vita was an incisive commentary on the deepening decadence of the European 1960s, and it provided a prescient glimpse of just how gossip- and fame-obsessed our society would become.
Presented in Italian with English subtitles, Criterion’s Blu-ray and DVD editions contain the...
- 7/22/2014
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
The first entry into my "Best Movies" section was Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (read my essay here) and after rights to the film were finally decided I speculated as to whether or not Criterion will finally get their hands on the absolute classics. The answer is a resounding Yes as the Blu-ray release of the film has just been announced for October 21 with the following features: New 4K digital restoration by the Film Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray New visual essay by : : kogonada New interview with filmmaker Lina Wertmuller, who worked as assistant director on the film Scholar David Forgacs discusses the period in Italy's history when the film was made New interview with Italian film journalist Antonello Sarno about the outlandish fashions seen in the film Audio interview with actor Marcello Mastroianni from the early 1960s, conducted by film historian Gideon Bachmann Felliniana,...
- 7/15/2014
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
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