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 scénario created by Godard to secure financing for the film, a new video essay by critic Colin MacCabe, new interviews with Huppert and producer Marin Karmitz, two back-to-back 1980 appearances by Godard on The Dick Cavett Show and more.
On February 10 the collection will get Nicolas Roeg‘s Don’t Look Now starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. This is sure to be one of the month’s hottest titles and it’s a movie I’ve only seen once and wasn’t entirely taken with the first time I saw it, which I mostly attribute to the way it was built up for me before I saw it. Should be fun revisiting it.
The features include:
- New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Nicolas Roeg, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New conversation between the film’s editor, Graeme Clifford, and film writer Bobbie O’Steen
- “Don’t Look Now,” Looking Back, a short 2002 documentary featuring Roeg, Clifford, and cinematographer Anthony Richmond
- Death in Venice, a 2006 interview with composer Pino Donaggio
- Something Interesting, a new documentary on the writing and making of the film, featuring interviews with Richmond, actors Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, and coscreenwriter Allan Scott
- Nicolas Roeg: The Enigma of Film, a new documentary on Roeg’s style, featuring interviews with filmmakers Danny Boyle and Steven Soderbergh
- Q&A with Roeg at London’s Ciné Lumière from 2003
- Trailer
- An essay by film critic David Thompson
On February 17, Yasujiro Ozu‘s final film, An Autumn Afternoon will be released via a new 4K digital restoration and accompanied by an audio commentary featuring film scholar David Bordwell, author of “Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema” and excerpts from Yasujiro Ozu and “The Taste of Sake,” a 1978 French television program, featuring critics Michel Ciment and Georges Perec, that looks back on Ozu’s career.
The month will end on February 24 with two releases, the first I believe is one of the rare animated additions to the collection in the form of Martin Rosen‘s Watership Down based on Richard Adams’s classic. The release will come with a new high-definition digital restoration, neww interview with Rosen, new appreciation of the film by director Guillermo del Toro, picture-in-picture storyboard for the entire film on the Blu-ray edition and a “Defining a Style” featurette from 2008 about the film’s aesthetic.
And finally, the title I’m most interested in is Federico Fellini‘s Satyricon because a.) I haven’t seen it and b.) I love Fellini. Criterion describes the film as follows:
Federico Fellini’s career achieved new levels of eccentricity and brilliance with this remarkable, controversial, extremely loose adaptation of Petronius’s classical Roman satire, written during the reign of Nero. An episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence, and eye-catching grotesquerie, Fellini Satyricon follows the exploits of two pansexual young men–the handsome scholar Encolpius and his vulgar, insatiably lusty friend Ascyltus–as they move through a landscape of free-form pagan excess. Creating apparent chaos with exquisite control, Fellini constructs a weird old world that feels like science fiction.
Here’s the list of features:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentary featuring an adaptation of Eileen Lanouette Hughes’s memoir On the Set of “Fellini Satyricon”: A Behind-the-Scenes Diary
- Ciao, Federico!, Gideon Bachmann’s hour-long documentary shot on the set of Fellini Satyricon
- Archival interviews with director Federico Fellini
- New interview with cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno
- New documentary about Fellini’s adaptation of Petronius’s work, featuring interviews with classicists Luca Canali, a consultant on the film, and Joanna Paul
- New interview with photographer Mary Ellen Mark about her experiences on the set and her iconic photographs of Fellini and his film
- Felliniana, a presentation of Fellini Satyricon ephemera from the collection of Don Young
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- An essay by film critic Michael Wood
