Something Wicked Awesome This Way Comes

No one works as hard as Gary Tooze, the DVD Beaver, to let the world know about imminent DVD releases, and to help us sort between the wheat and the chaff, down to the finest little decibel of audio quality and the slenderest little margin of image cropping. I'm not as exacting a DVD shopper as Gary, and I wouldn't even begin to know how to be as comprehensive as he is, but so much pure gold has been dropping on the market lately, with even more looming on the horizon, that I felt I needed to say something.

For all of you Barbara Stanwyck fans, or for anyone who wanted to believe my raves about Executive Suite but had no way of verifying them for yourself, Warner Home Video is dropping The Barbara Stanwyck Collection at the end of October. That's a while away—ask any academic, or any student, and we'll scream at you that the beginning of fall is still an eon from now—but it's never too soon to gear up for Barbara. I haven't seen any of the other films in the collection, but Robert Wise's thrillingly tense and sensationally acted boardroom thriller (that's not an oxymoron, if it sounds like one) doesn't pull any punches. Barbara helps, Fredric March is efficiently insidious, June Allyson comes vividly if briefly to life, and Nina Foch actresses at every possible edge, without once making a show of herself. Exquisite.

Even though I dislike their new logo and redesigned packaging (who picked Rancid Mustard for the color on the spines?), I must admit that the Criterion Collection has been exceeding even their own high standards of late. They've honored my three favorite Japanese directors already this summer, with deluxe editions of Mizoguchi's Sanshô the Bailiff (my rhapsodic review here), Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine, and a box-set of Hiroshi Teshigara masterpieces, so I can finally stop cruising used DVD stores in pursuit of the out-of-print Milestone imprint of Woman in the Dunes, one of the greatest films of all time. (Am I supposed to insert a personal qualifier here?) As if this all weren't enough, coming soon from Criterion are Mala Noche, the highly elusive debut of Gus Van Sant, and a director-approved re-release of Days of Heaven (original review and quick tribute after seeing the restoration in 35mm).

Auteur delights, or at least they delighted me: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which scared the bejesus out of me in cinemas all three times I paid to see it, arrives with even more scarifying footage on August 14th; and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (reviewed here) gets the 2-disc treatment it always deserved on October 23rd, as do several other Kubrick titles.

My two favorite films of 2007 so far, Ray Lawrence's unnerving and trenchant Jindabyne and Robinson Devor's courageously and compellingly cryptic Zoo, will both reach wider American audiences on DVD than they ever enjoyed in theaters; Zoo arrives on Sep. 16 and Jindabyne on Oct. 2.

On the other end of the historical spectrum, the archivists and the deep-pocketed among you will be ecstatic to hear that those unbeatable compilations of early-cinema rareties and esoterica, Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, shall be followed in October by the National Film Preservation Foundation's Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. The thematic rubric is new for this series (the other collections are purposefully and wonderfully eclectic), but there's still plenty of variety included in this new package, despite its pointed and fascinating emphasis on politics. I'll study up on How They Rob Men in Chicago, in case history ever repeats itself, but I'll be even more excited for Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl, the entire disc devoted to female suffrage and "The New Woman," and virtually every other snippet, sideshow, epic, and episode. Here are the full contents, and here's where you can pre-order at the greatest savings (though Amazon has a prettier page). The NFPF has already announced that they'll be hosting another theme party for next year's Treasures IV set, which will be devoted to the American Avant-Garde between 1945-85. (On that same page, you can watch selected clips from the first two anthologies; select Disc 1 to see a full minute of Watson & Webber's mindblowing The Fall of the House of Usher, and try to figure out how two amateurs made this in 1928!)

Finally, apologies for burying the lead, but if you've got a multiregion player—or even if you don't, because here's a reason to buy one—Chantal Akerman's legendary feminist opus Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which has never appeared in any home format anywhere in the world, is now available as part of a French-Belgian DVD package called The Chantal Akerman Collection. "A woman in trouble" if ever there were one, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig, of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel and Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) is a Belgian housewife like countless others, preparing breakfast and cleaning her kitchen, and devoting her morning to countless other errands around the apartment...except that Akerman makes us feel the scale of these semi-mindless occupations, their essential fusion of tedium and fascination, by capturing these household tasks in huge 35mm and with unrelenting attention for almost four hours. Three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, in what would feel like three years in the life of the audience if Seyrig weren't so subtly and unpredictably entrancing, and if Akerman's political platform weren't so fully realized within clear, confident, brilliant aesthetics. And I haven't even said anything about the gentleman caller. Or the ———... because I don't want to spoil them.

See Jeanne Dielman... on a big screen if you ever get any opportunity in your whole life to do so; it makes sense, despite the intense frustration, that Akerman has withheld her legendary masterpiece for so long, because the hugeness of her images in relation to their subject is deeply essential to the project. Still, not everyone is going to have that big-screen opportunity, and those of us who have certainly want to revisit Jeanne Dielman... and figure out how Akerman, Seyrig, cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and editor Patricia Canino pulled it off. If I know you love Todd Haynes' Safe, and by his own admission, that film, like so many others, is impossible without this one. I refer you again to my personal list of the greatest films ever made, and I insist (insist!) that, Treasures III and other anthologies aside, The Chantal Akerman Collection, which also includes the deliriously great Rendez-vous d'Anna and three other titles, is the DVD release of the year.

(Image from Jeanne Dielman c/o this Finnish-language bio of Chantal Akerman)

A Boy in Trouble

There is nothing clever, euphemistic, or hyperbolic about this admission: I have never been so scared in any movie as I was during the last half-hour or so of INLAND EMPIRE. The rough, scraping atmosphere of dread that permeates the whole film—alleviated but also somehow intensified by the elusive plot and the surreal cutaways to talking rabbits and Locomotion enthusiasts—culminates in a devastating thirty minutes, comprising a terrible death unfolding against an absurd, indifferent conversation between two strangers, and then a vaporizing of the reality/illusion boundary even as the movie purports to reinstate it, and then a preeminently Lynchian prowl around dirty corners in underlit hallways, at the end of which Laura Dern's "character" has a horrific encounter with a grotesque distortion of herself. I was just terrified, by the ambience and psychic logic of these scenes even more than by the action they depicted. Then I walked for ten minutes in the semi-dark, boarded a city bus, and cried most of the way home with my eyes wide open. INLAND EMPIRE made me insane, and intensely bereft. I'm barely more coherent or less bereft as I write this.

I'll have much to say about INLAND EMPIRE in the coming days, weeks, months, but to begin with the most frivolous and inconsequential frame of reference, I sure am glad I waited: the Best of 2006 feature will require some serious reshuffling to accommodate this film. Meanwhile, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu suddenly has a potent rival for its previously uncontested claim as the best movie of the year. A dying man and a woman dismantled now emerge as the king and queen of a morbid, frustrating, but finally surprising year at the movies. Stay tuned...

Picked Flick #72: Eraserhead

I conjectured further down on this list that Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man would be the hardest entry to write about, but having now arrived at Eraserhead, David Lynch's roomy and surreal yet utterly cohesive debut feature, I realize that I was wrong. How many times has a David Lynch movie proved somebody wrong? He proved beyond question, and to the chagrin of many more timid artists, that you can hop from a first feature this singularly bizarre to the basically conventional Elephant Man, a film that remains distinctive and troublingly irreal even as it parlays so comfortably into narrative paradigms and popular favor. That you can reframe comfy, Eisenhower-era iconography within the savage, huffing, sadomasochistic framework of Blue Velvet and still galvanize a core of fans who will journey to the outer, saturnine limits of your own obsessive images. That you can suavely oscillate between film and TV projects, even before such a thing was fashionable for our auteurs, and without the protective auspice of a paid-cable channel. That you can court incoherence in Fire Walk with Me and honor the simplest classical traditions in The Straight Story all in the same decade. That you can alchemize a rejected television pilot into the ranking apotheosis of your own feature-film career, and maybe of postmodernism more generally in the American cinema.

Lynch keeps daring us and daring himself, and the film world tenses with anticipation at each new step he takes—which, more than four years after the trip down Mulholland Drive, could hardly appear a moment too soon. There is no question in my mind that Mulholland is Lynch's best and richest movie, but if that masterwork is missing anything, it's the daft, piquant riskiness of a film like Eraserhead, which reflects not the trained professionalism that comes with decades in the business and a cohort of frequent collaborators, but from a pure will to test the on-screen viability of an almost id-level sensibility. Lynch is the credited director, writer, editor, composer, production designer, special effects technician, and sound-effects editor on Eraserhead, and I suppose I feel, with no particular justification, that assigning any more chefs to this dada dish could only have diluted the flavor. Though quite evidently a workshop for sonic concepts, experiments in framing, and poker-faced acting styles that would later be redrawn in finer detail, Eraserhead works marvelously on its own terms. A dreamscape to equal Un chien andalou, the film also traces a clear narrative line through nervous courtship, an excruciatingly anxious paternity, and a kind of fantasy life that isn't so much stifled as it is genetically rearranged by an oppressive, penurious existence in a post-industrial no man's land.

I'm sure all of Eraserhead's fans have their own favorite moments. Unquestionably, one of mine is the non-diegetic soundtrack of whines and slurping sounds beneath Jack Nance's first painful meeting with his girlfriend's parents, belatedly linked to a dog suckling her litter in the same room. Close behind that is the Tod Browning shot of Charlotte Stewart's strained expressions as her head rests on the foot of a mattress, only tangentially indicating that below the sightline of the frame, she is reaching for a suitcase beneath the bed. All of the scenes of the titular and pustulent dino-baby are unforgettable, as is that famous shot of Nance's startled grimace and his backlit pile of wiry curls while the spores released from his baby's abdomen fill the air around him. What does any of it mean? Please don't make me guess. I haven't even tried to delve into the connotations and integrated resonances of Eraserhead because the pleasures it imparts as pure collage are so profound, so inexpressibly funny, and so relatably sad. And I cop to finding enjoyment in the fact that Eraserhead is, for all its notoriety and the prestige of its director, so totemistically difficult to locate, making the movie rare in every sense—uncommon, exquisite, and served up all but raw. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)