The Criterion Collection has announced four titles for Blu-ray release in November. On November 6th, the independent studio will release
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950). A week later, on November 13th, it will release
Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) and
Trilogy of Life (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971-74). On November 20th, it will release
Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980).
Technical specs and special features include:
Rashomon
A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice, Rashomon is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife, which director Akira Kurosawa (
Seven Samurai) presents with striking imagery and an ingenious use of flashbacks. This eloquent masterwork and international sensation revolutionized film language and introduced Japanese cinema - and a commanding new star by the name of Toshiro Mifune (
Yojimbo) - to the Western world.
Special Features:
- New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- Audio commentary by Japanese-film historian Donald Richie
- Video introduction by director Robert Altman
- Excerpts from The World of Kazuo Miyagawa, a documentary on Rashomon's cinematographer
- A Testimony as an Image, a sixty-eight-minute documentary featuring interviews with cast and crew
- Archival audio interview with actor Takashi Shimura
- Original and rerelease trailers
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film historian Stephen Prince; an excerpt from director Akira Kurosawa's Something Like an Autobiography; and reprints of Rashomon's two source stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, "Rashomon" and "In a Grove"
Weekend
This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard (
Breathless) is one of cinema's great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. Featuring a justly famous centerpiece sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam, and rich with historical and literary references, Weekend is a surreally funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society retreating to savagery, and - according to the credits - the end of cinema itself.
Special Features:
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- New video essay by film critic Kent Jones
- Archival interviews with actors Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne and assistant director Claude Miller
- Excerpt from a French television program on director Jean-Luc Godard, featuring on-set footage of Weekend shot by filmmaker Philippe Garrel
- Trailers
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic and novelist Gary Indiana
Trilogy of Life
In the early 1970s, the great Italian poet, philosopher, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (
Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom) brought to the screen a trio of masterpieces of premodern world literature - Giovanni Boccaccio's
The Decameron, Geoffrey Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales, and
The Thousand and One Nights (often known as
The Arabian Nights) - and in doing so created his most uninhibited and extravagant work, which he titled his Trilogy of Life. In this brazen and bawdy triptych, the director set out to challenge consumer capitalism and celebrate the uncorrupted human body while commenting on contemporary sexual and religious mores and hypocrisies. His scatological humor and rough-hewn sensuality leave all modern standards of decency behind; these are physical, provocative, and wildly entertaining films, all extraordinarily designed by Dante Ferretti (
Hugo) and featuring evocative music by Ennio Morricone (
Days of Heaven).
Special Edition Collector's Set Features:
- New high-definition digital restorations of all three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-ray editions
- New visual essays by film scholars Patrick Rumble and Tony Rayns on The Decameron and Arabian Nights, respectively
- New interviews with art director Dante Ferretti and composer Ennio Morricone about their work with Pasolini, and with film scholar Sam Rohdie on The Canterbury Tales
- The Lost Body of Alibech (2005), a forty-five-minute documentary by Roberto Chiesi about a lost sequence from The Decameron
- The Secret Humiliation of Chaucer (2006), a forty-seven-minute documentary by Chiesi about The Canterbury Tales
- Via Pasolini, a documentary in which Pasolini discusses his views on language, film, and modern society
- Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Form of the City (1974), a sixteen-minute documentary by Pasolini and Paolo Burnatto about the ancient Italian cities Orte and Sabaudia
- Deleted scenes from Arabian Nights, with transcriptions of pages from the original script
- Pasolini-approved English-dubbed track for The Canterbury Tales
- Trailers
- New English subtitle translations
- PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critic Colin MacCabe; Pasolini's 1975 article "Trilogy of Life Rejected"; excerpts from Pasolini's Berlin Film Festival press conference for The Canterbury Tales; and a report from the set of Arabian Nights by critic Gideon Bachmann
Heaven's Gate
A visionary critique of American expansionism,
Heaven's Gate, directed by Oscar winner Michael Cimino (
The Deer Hunter), is among Hollywood's most ambitious and unorthodox epics. Kris Kristofferson (
Lone Star) brings his weathered sensuality to the role of a Harvard graduate who has relocated all the way to Wyoming as a federal marshal; there, he learns of a government-sanctioned plot by rich cattle barons to kill the area's European settlers for their land. The resulting skirmish is based on the real-life bloody Johnson County War of 1892. Also starring Isabelle Huppert (
White Material) and Christopher Walken (
King of New York),
Heaven's Gate is a savage and ravishingly shot demystification of western movie lore. This is the full director's cut, letting viewers today see Cimino's potent original vision.
Special Features:
- New, restored transfer of director Michael Cimino's cut of the film, supervised by Cimino
- New restoration of the 5.1 surround soundtrack, supervised by Cimino, in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray edition
- New illustrated audio interview with Cimino and producer Joann Carelli
- New interviews with actor Kris Kristofferson, soundtrack arranger and performer David Mansfield, and second assistant director Michael Stevenson
- The Johnson County War, a video interview with historian Bill O'Neal about the real-life conflict that inspired the film, and its resonance in popular culture
- Trailer and TV spots
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic and programmer Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan