Arrow Academy has announced its February batch of Blu-ray releases. Amongst the new titles are Federico Fellini's
Orchestra Rehearsal (1978), Stéphane Brizé's
A Woman's Life (2016), and Frank Borzage's
Magnificent Doll (1946).
A Woman's Life
A powerful adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's first novel 'Une vie', A Woman's Life is a timeless story of love, betrayal and anguish set in the repressive patriarchal world of early 19th century Normandy.
Jeanne (Judith Chemla) is a young woman full of childish dreams and innocence when she returns home after finishing her schooling in a convent. Yet little by little her illusions are stripped away when she marries a local Viscount, Julien de Lamare (Swann Arlaud), who reveals himself to be a miserly and adulterous partner.
This poignant period drama from French director Stéphane Brizé (The Measure of a Man) has impressed audiences and critics alike with its tragic tone and striking performances. The film competed at the 73rd Venice Film Festival, where it won the Fipresci Prize for Best Film in competition, and now comes to UK audiences in a Blu-ray special edition that includes a selection of fascinating extra features.
Special Features and Specs:
- Original 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio
- Optional English subtitles
- From the Novel to the Film, by Stéphane Brizé, a featurette in which the director talks about adapting Maupassant's work
- Making A Woman's Life, interviews with cinematographer Antoine Litslé, and sound engineer Pascal Jammes
- Stills gallery
- Original trailer
- Reversible sleeve featuring original French poster art and newly commissioned UK artwork
- First pressing only: Illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Margaret Deriaz
UK STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 12.
Magnificent Doll
Following her Best Actress Oscar win in 1940 for Kitty Foyle, Ginger Rogers was able to spend the next decade and beyond balancing dramatic roles with the lighter musical and comedy performances for which she had become known. The RKO films with Fred Astaire behind her, Rogers found herself in a position where she could appear in Tender Comrade, a black-and-white film about wives living on the home front, one year, and lavish Technicolor musical Lady in the Dark, the next. In 1946, she was cast by Frank Borzage (7th Heaven, Street Angel) as one of America's most beloved First Ladies, Dolley Payne Madison, in Magnificent Doll.
Written by Irving Stone, whose popular biographical novels would inspire such films as Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life and Carol Reed's The Agony and Ecstasy, Magnificent Doll traces Madison's journey to the White House from her youth in Virginia at the end of the Revolutionary War to the famed episode in which, during the Battle of Bladensburg, she refused the leave her exalted residence without a portrait of George Washington. In between she is wooed by two great men of American politics, Senator Aaron Burr (David Niven) and his colleague, James Madison (Burgess Meredith).
Lavishly designed, Magnificent Doll boasts cinematography by five-time Academy Award nominee Joseph A. Valentine (Shadow of a Doubt), striking outfits by legendary costume designers Travis Banton (best known for his work on a number of Josef von Sternberg's pictures with Marlene Dietrich) and Vera West (whose credits include Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula and other classic Universal horror pictures), and hats by the celebrated milliner and fashion designer Lilly Daché.
Special Features and Specs:
- Original mono audio (uncompressed LPCM)
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
- Brand new audio commentary by writers and film historians David Del Valle and Sloan De Forest
- Brand new visual essay by film critic and novelist Farran Nehme on the dramatic roles of Ginger Rogers
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Jennifer Dionisio
- First pressing only: Illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Nathalie Morris
UK STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 19.
Orchestra Rehearsal
Made in 1978 for Italian television, Orchestra Rehearsal is possibly Fellini s most satirical and overtly political film.
An allegorical pseudo-documentary, the film depicts an Italian television crew s visit to a dilapidated auditorium (a converted 13th-century church) to meet an orchestra assembling to rehearse under the instruction of a tyrannical conductor. The TV crew interviews the various musicians who each speak lovingly about their chosen instruments. However, as petty squabbles break out amid the different factions of the ensemble, and the conductor berates his musicians, the meeting descends into anarchy and vandalism. A destructive crescendo ensues before the musicians regroup and play together once more in perfect harmony.
Abounding with its director s trademark rich imagery and expressive style, Orchestra Rehearsal marks the last collaboration between Fellini and the legendary composer Nino Rota (due to the latter s death in 1979) who provides one of his most beautiful themes in the film s conclusion.
Special Features and Specs:
- Brand new 2K restoration from original film elements, produced by Arrow Films exclusively for this release
- Original 1.0 mono sound
- Optional English subtitles
- Richard Dyer on Nino Rota and Orchestra Rehearsal, the film scholar talks about the great composer and his last collaboration with Fellini
- Orchestrating Discord, a visual essay on the film by Fellini biographer John Baxter
- Gallery featuring rare poster and press material on the film from the Felliniana collection of Don Young
- Reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options
- First pressing only: Illustrated collector s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Adrian Martin
U.S. STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 13.
UK STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 12.
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno
In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot, the acclaimed director of thriller masterpieces Les Diaboliques and Wages of Fear, began work on his most ambitious film yet.
Set in a beautiful lake side resort in the Auvergne region of France, L'Enfer (Inferno) was to be a sun scorched elucidation on the dark depths of jealousy starring Romy Schneider as the harassed wife of a controlling hotel manager (Serge Reggiani). However, despite huge expectations, major studio backing and an unlimited budget, after three weeks the production collapsed under the weight of arguments, technical complications and illness.
In this compelling, award-winning documentary Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea present Inferno's incredible expressionistic original rushes, screen tests, and on-location footage, whilst also reconstructing Clouzot's original vision, and shedding light on the ill-fated endeavour through interviews, dramatisations of unfilmed scenes, and Clouzot's own notes.
Special Features and Specs:
- Original 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio
- Optional English subtitles
- Lucy Mazdon on Henri-Georges Clouzot, the French cinema expert and academic talks at length about the films of Clouzot and the troubled production of Inferno
- They Saw Inferno, a featurette including unseen material, providing further insight into the production of Inferno
- Filmed Introduction by Serge Bromberg
- Interview with Serge Bromberg
- Stills gallery
- Original trailer
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Twins of Evil
- First pressing only: Illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Ginette Vincendeau
U.S. STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 6.
UK STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 5.
Jean-Luc Godard + Jean-Pierre Gorin: Five Films, 1968-1971
After finishing his film Weekend in 1967, Jean-Luc Godard shifted gears to embark on engaging more directly with the radical political movements of the era, and thus create a new kind of film, or, as he eventually put it: "new ideas distributed in a new way." This new method in part involved collaborating with the precocious young critic and journalist, Jean-Pierre Gorin. Both as a two-person unit, and as part of the loose collective known as the Groupe Dziga Vertov (named after the early 20th-century Russian filmmaker and theoretician), Godard and Gorin would realize "some political possibilities for the practice of cinema" and craft new frameworks for investigating the relationships between image and sound, spectator and subject, cinema and society.
Included here are five films, all originally shot in 16mm celluloid, that serve as examples of Godard and Gorin's revolutionary project:
Un film comme les autres [A Film Like Any Other]: An analysis of the social upheaval of May 1968 made in the immediate wake of the workers' and students' protests. The picture consists of two parts, each with with identical image tracks, and differing narration.
British Sounds, aka: See You at Mao: An examination of the daily routine at a British auto factory assembly line, set against class-conflict and The Communist Manifesto.
Vent d'est [Wind from the East]: A loosely conceived leftist-western that moves through a series of practical and analytical passages ("an organization of shots," Godard called it) into a finale based around the process of manufacturing homemade weapons.
Lotte in Italia / Luttes en Italie [Struggles in Italy]: Not necessarily a film about the struggles in Italy — largely shot, in fact, in Godard and Anne Wiazemsky's home at the time — this is a discursive reflection on a young Italian woman's shift from political "theory" to political "practice" and, at the same time, a self-questioning of its own practice and theories.
Vladimir et Rosa [Vladimir and Rosa]: A searing and satirical comic-reportage on the trial of the Chicago Eight, featuring Juliet Berto and Godard and Gorin themselves.
These films, long out-of-circulation except in film dupes and bootleg video, here make their Blu-ray debut, providing a crucial glimpse of Godard's radicalization, and of the aesthetic dialogue between him and Gorin that, in essence, served to invent a modern militant cinema. As Godard told an English journalist of the era, film is not a gun — but "a light which helps you check your gun."
Special Features:
- High-definition digital transfer
- Original uncompressed monaural audio Optional English subtitles
- A conversation with JLG - Interview with Jean-Luc Godard from 2010 by Dominique Maillet and Pierre-Henri Gibert
- 60-page full-color book containing English translations for the first time of writing by, and interviews with, Godard and Gorin, and more.
U.S. STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 27.
UK STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 26.