The Criterion Collection: June 2013 Releases

[Scottie]

June 11

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Traveling to accept an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg—masterfully played by veteran director Victor Sjöström—is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and make peace with the inevitability of his approaching death. Through flashbacks and fantasies, dreams and nightmares, Wild Strawberries dramatizes one man’s remarkable voyage of self-discovery. This richly humane masterpiece, full of iconic imagery, is a treasure from the golden age of art-house cinema and one of the films that catapulted Ingmar Bergman to international acclaim.

New high-definition digital film transfer
Audio commentary by film scholar Peter Cowie
Introduction by director Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman on Life and Work, a ninety-minute documentary by filmmaker and author Jörn Donner
Behind-the-scenes footage shot by Bergman
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film writer Mark Le Fanu

June 18

Marketa Lazarová (1967)

In its home country, František Vlácil’s Marketa Lazarová has been hailed as the greatest Czech film ever made; for many U.S. viewers, it will be a revelation. Based on a novel by Vladislav Vancura, this stirring and poetic depiction of a feud between two rival medieval clans is a fierce, epic, and meticulously designed evocation of the clashes between Christianity and paganism, humankind and nature, love and violence. Vlácil’s approach was to re-create the textures and mentalities of a long-ago way of life, rather than to make a conventional historical drama, and the result is dazzling. With its inventive widescreen cinematography, editing, and sound design, Marketa Lazarová is an experimental action film.

New high-definition digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
New interviews with actors Magda Vášáryová, Ivan Palúch, and Vlastimil Harapes and costume designer Theodor Pištek
New interviews with film historian Peter Hames and journalist and critic Antonín Liehm
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by film scholar Tom Gunning and author and translator Alex Zucker and a 1969 interview with Vlácil by Liehm
More!

Safety Last! (1923)

The comic genius of silent star Harold Lloyd is eternal. Chaplin was the sweet innocent, Keaton the stoic outsider, but Lloyd—the modern guy striving for success—is us. And with its torrent of perfectly executed gags and astonishing stunts, Safety Last! is the perfect introduction to him. Lloyd plays a small-town bumpkin trying to make it in the big city, who finds employment as a lowly department-store clerk. He comes up with a wild publicity stunt to draw attention to the store, resulting in an incredible feat of derring-do on his part that gets him started on the climb to success. Laugh-out-loud funny and jaw-dropping in equal measure, Safety Last! is a movie experience par excellence, anchored by a genuine legend.

New 2K digital film restoration
Musical score by composer Carl Davis from 1989, synchronized and restored under his supervision and presented in uncompressed stereo on the Blu-ray edition
Alternate score by organist Gaylord Carter from the late 1960s, presented in uncompressed monaural on the Blu-ray edition
Audio commentary featuring film critic Leonard Maltin and director and Harold Lloyd archivist Richard Correll
Introduction by Suzanne Lloyd, Lloyd’s granddaughter and president of Harold Lloyd Entertainment
Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, a 104-minute documentary from 1989
Three newly restored Lloyd shorts: Take a Chance (1918), Young Mr. Jazz (1919), and His Royal Slyness (1920), with commentary by Correll and film writer John Bengtson
Locations and Effects, a new documentary featuring Bengtson and special effects expert Craig Barron
New interview with Davis
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Ed Park

Things To Come (1936)

A landmark collaboration between writer H. G. Wells, producer Alexander Korda, and designer and director William Cameron Menzies, Things to Come is a science fiction film like no other, a prescient political work that predicts a century of turmoil and progress. Skipping through time, Things to Come bears witness to world war, dictatorship, disease, the rise of television, and finally, utopia. Conceived, written, and overseen by Wells himself as an adaptation of his own work, this megabudgeted production, the most ambitious ever from Korda’s London Films, is a triumph of imagination and technical audacity.

New high-definition digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
Audio commentary featuring film historian and writer David Kalat
Interview with writer and cultural historian Christopher Frayling on the film’s design
Film historian Bruce Eder on Arthur Bliss’s musical score
Audio recording from 1936 of a reading from H. G. Wells’s writing about the “wandering sickness,” the plague in Things to Come
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien
More!

June 25

Shoah (1985)

Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:

New high-definition digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
Three additional films by director Claude Lanzmann: A Visitor from the Living (1999, 68 minutes), Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001, 102 minutes), and The Karski Report (2010, 54 minutes)
New conversation between critic Serge Toubiana and Lanzmann
Interview with Lanzmann about A Visitor from the Living and Sobibor
New conversation between associate director of photography Caroline Champetier and filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin
Trailer
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Kent Jones and writings by Lanzmann