Cinema Guild has announced the acquisition of U.S. distribution rights to four renowned films – never before released on home video or digital – by filmmaker Thom Andersen, including his landmark documentary
Los Angeles Plays Itself. The label will release
Los Angeles Plays Itself on Blu-ray on September 30th.
Originally released in 2003,
Los Angeles Plays Itself is Andersen's fascinating film essay on the tangled relationship between the movies and their fabled hometown. Kenneth Turan, writing in the LA Times, has called it "the best documentary ever made about Los Angeles." This remastered and re-edited version will be released on home video and across all digital platforms in the fall.
"Red Hollywood" (1996), also newly remastered and restored, will receive its theatrical premiere – nearly 20 years after it was made – on August 15, 2014 in New York at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, followed by a home video and digital release. Working from extensive original research, this revelatory documentary reconsiders the films produced by the victims of the Hollywood blacklist between the 1930s and 1950s.
Andersen's classic early film, "Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer" (1975) is at once a biography of Muybridge, a re-animation of his historic sequential photographs, and an inspired examination of their implications on film and media. A restored 40th anniversary edition will be released on home video and digital platforms in 2015.
"Reconversão" (2012), Thom Andersen's latest film, is a captivating documentary exploring the work of the often-controversial Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura—winner of the 2011 Pritzker Prize. It will be released digitally in 2015.
The deal was negotiated by Ryan Krivoshey of Cinema Guild with director Thom Andersen.
The Cinema Guild is a distributor of independent, foreign and documentary films, whose recent releases include Lav Diaz' "Norte, The End of History, Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's "Manakamana" and Jem Cohen's "Museum Hours." Upcoming releases include Joaquim Pinto's "What Now? Remind Me," Tsai Ming-liang's "Stray Dogs," Corneliu Porumboiu's "When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism" and Sergei Loznitsa's "Maidan."