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mbalson
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#226 Post by mbalson » Mon Oct 16, 2006 7:52 pm

Being at least partly NFB productions it makes sense that the McLaren set is already available in Canada: HERE

For anyone located in Toronto, Queen Video on Queen already has it for rent.

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Scharphedin2
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#227 Post by Scharphedin2 » Mon Nov 27, 2006 12:14 pm

Looking back through this thread, I do not see any mention of Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story!? I viewed this film last night, and aside from how wonderful the film is in and of itself, I was surprised at the quality of the disc. Beautiful stark black and white images from start to finish with nary a scracth or speckle. Apparently the film was chosen by the American Library of Congress as a National treasure, and fitfully restored. HVe's disc has a bunch of excellent extras in addition, featuring amongst other things discussion with Frances Flaherty as well as Richard Leacock, who both served as cinematographer and associate producer on the film.

This was my first encounter with this particular film, which is an interesting hybrid between documentary and narrative film. Robert Flaherty is of course one of the essential directors, but for some reason I was under the impression that this was not a particularly strong effort. I have seen Nanook and Man of Aran a long time ago in fairly battered prints, and, although I admired and enjoyed those films, this one landed like a punch to my jaw with the pristineness of the presentation, and the beauty of the soundtrack by Virgil Thomson.

The world of the bayou is endlessly fascinating as depicted in this film through the eyes of a young boy exploring the swampland with his pet racoon. There is a scene in which the boy and his 'coon tangle with alligators, and it was one of the more nailbitingly suspenseful sequences that I can remember seeing... well, in a coon's age. Apparently the film was financed by an oil company, and in the latter part of the film, considerable time is spent aboard an oilrig, the machinations of which are rendered with the same grace and childlike fascination by Flaherty, as are the earlier segments in the bayou.

I am not sure that I understand the status of HVe... will the back catalogue titles continue to be available in the label's afterlife? In any event, this is a great disc that I feel lucky that I decided to pick up.

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Le Samouraï
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#228 Post by Le Samouraï » Mon Nov 27, 2006 12:34 pm

Scharphedin2 wrote:Looking back through this thread, I do not see any mention of Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story!?
I believe this was discussed in one of the earlier incarnations of this board. The forum has been through... what?... 5-6 different versions from the beginning till now and actually started as a forum at criteriondvd.com (before that site was closed down and later resurfaced as an e-tailer with their own board). That's pretty much why you won't find much discussion in threads about older releases. These were discussed in elsewhere. You can still dig up some of the older discussions if you use webarchive.org.

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zedz
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#229 Post by zedz » Mon Nov 27, 2006 4:12 pm

Louisiana Story is a great film (I must pick up this disc), and for some time (1950s - 60s) was considered Flaherty's crowning achievement, even making a few prestigious "10 best films of all time" lists. I suspect that its fall from favour has little to do with its quality and everything to do with its pedigree, promotional films commissioned by oil companies being obviously politically unsound to us more enlightened modern folk. The vagaries of fame.

The film is exquisitely lyrical, and is an excellent demonstration of what was so interesting about Flaherty. Although hailed as the father of the documentary, he's really a pre-documentary filmmaker, and hardly any of his projects fall simply into either the documentary or fiction camps. Hence latter-day complaints about the violation of "documentary ethics" in Man of Aran or Nanook always seem beside the point to me. It's like complaining that a 1948 thriller doesn't properly follow the genre rules of film noir - in each case the genre (documentary, noir) is a latter day construct and what the filmmakers were doing was something else entirely.

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Gregory
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#230 Post by Gregory » Mon Nov 27, 2006 11:17 pm

I agree the term 'documentary' can be problematic when applied to films of this kind. Nevertheless, long before Nanook there had been a tradition of using film to document actual, non-staged events, people, and so on, allowing people to view things that they could not otherwise witness. Some of the shorts on The Movies Begin are just the tip of the iceberg in this category. I think Flaherty was aware that viewers would tend to place his work in that category, and that to some degree he consciously maintained this pretense even as he subtly introduced narrative touches. Audience perceptions of the film matter a great deal, I think, and this is something about which I'd be interested to read more. Nanook was clearly entertainment, but nevertheless my understanding was that audiences believed they were watching events recorded as they happened. Many recent audiences, for example watching something such as Lessons or Darkness, probably still maintain some of the same assumptions.

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zedz
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#231 Post by zedz » Mon Nov 27, 2006 11:50 pm

I agree that Flaherty was working in (and bouncing off of) the tradition of 'actualities', but his innovation - the catalyst that kickstarted the genre - was the addition of an extended character-based narrative structure - i.e. a borrowing from fiction filmmaking. It seems unfair to beat him up so many years after the fact for borrowing too much from fiction filmmaking (e.g. staging, scripting, characterisation, humour). And I think it's important to remember that in these films he's nevertheless striving for a kind of truth - I doubt he considered his staging as falsifying.

It's interesting to compare Nanook with other longform non-fiction films of the time, such as the Antarctic films of Hurley or Ponting. They're even more awkward amalgamations of narrative (of the newsreel kind) and actualities. South is gripping for most of its length before drifting off into off-topic natural history footage that's far less astonishing now than it must have been at the time.

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Lemmy Caution
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#232 Post by Lemmy Caution » Tue Dec 19, 2006 2:41 am

Not sure if this film has been discussed before.
The accompanying documentary shares attributes with Flaherty:


Black and White in Color won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1977. It's a fun film and a clever satire on the inanities of war and patriotism. A very small French outpost in West Africa belatedly learns of WWI, 6 months after its start. Misguidedly, they decide that it is their duty to attack the even smaller nearby German settlement which they have previously been friendly with. The first skirmish goes badly and then fear and farce meet up. This African war mimics the stupidity and selfishness of the real war in Europe. There's a light touch to most of the film, and the film has a nice pace and rhythm to it.

This DVd was a complete blind buy for me. And a very nice surprise was the inclusion of the full length (93 minute) documentary The Sky Above, the Mud Below (1961). It's the record of an expedition across Papua New Guinea/Irian Jaya from south to north. Takes them 7 months, the death of 3 porters, and airdrops of food ... not to mention encounters with headhunters, leeches, and malaria.

Occasionally there are some dated aspects to the narration, which mostly provides a straight-forward commentary on the proceedings (complete with liberal use of the word "savages"). I really got wrapped up in this film. The tribal rituals and fashions are amazing to watch. A good amount of the footage appears to be staged re-creations, somewhat in the tradition of Robert Flaherty. But it's a real expedition of uncharted territory, meeting unknown tribes, the record of a primitive world and unexplored nature of the sort that has essentially ceased to exist.

A lovely two-fer; I'd definitely recommend seeking out this disc.
Last edited by Lemmy Caution on Tue Dec 19, 2006 10:18 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Gregory
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#233 Post by Gregory » Tue Dec 19, 2006 6:11 am

Much of that film was most definitely staged and rehearsed, and disparate footage edited together to create coherent "episodes." The filmmakers demonstrated a real ignorance of the ethnography as well as a lack of interest in learning from the people or documenting anything real about their culture, even though they were there under the pretenses of an expedition. Worse, they didn't bother to learn how to live in those conditions, so the lives of the three porters who died were a pointless waste.
This serves as a good example of why, as in the Flaherty case, reception is key to discussions of whether or not this kind of filmmaking is responsible. It's easy to defend this kind of film now by saying it wasn't intended to be accurate and should not have been assumed to be such. But that was a predictable enough result. The New York Times review shows how the reviewer, Bosley Crowther, unquestioningly swallowed it as a factual document in spite of the stagings and ethnographic deficiencies, calling it "authentic and overwhelmingly real."

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Lemmy Caution
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#234 Post by Lemmy Caution » Tue Dec 19, 2006 10:15 am

G: thanks for the link to the review. I haven't gotten to it yet, but will soon.
The filmmakers demonstrated a real ignorance of the ethnography as well as a lack of interest in learning from the people or documenting anything real about their culture, even though they were there under the pretenses of an expedition.
I agree with your assessment, but it was an expedition in the sense of a handful of Europeans trying to conquer, or in this case cross, a stretch of jungle and mountain because it was there/largely unknown. It was an adventure for them, and they weren't overly interested in the language, customs, etc of the peoples they met.

If you are looking at it with 21st Century eyes, alot of their behavior is ignorant, neglectful, perhaps unacceptable. But the context is that this was the early stages of the end of colonialism (a greedy and shameful chapter in man's continuing inhumanity to man), and their thinking and mindset is probably liberal for its time.

I thought HVE did a wonderful job of contextualizing this rather staged documentary by juxtaposing it with the film B&W in C. In the feature film, we see all of the foolishness of the Europeans and their disdain and lack of interest in the natives.

One nice scene occurs when the two missionary priests are being carried on sedan chairs by the natives, who are singing as they trudge along. The priests are literally elevated above the natives and a burden to them, and yet remain comfortably oblivious to all of this, as well as to the native language. So the priests enjoy the work song which, as we learn from subtitles, is really full of mockery and abuse towards them.

And of course in the farcical war, the Africans are enlisted as pawns to do the white man's bidding, and it's the Africans who suffer. Not hard to find real-life parallels with the expedition in Sky Above, Mud Below.

It's a great disc, and Sky/Mud has alot to offer if you look at what's on film, and then poke into the cracks a little.

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Lemmy Caution
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#235 Post by Lemmy Caution » Tue Dec 19, 2006 1:22 pm

The New York Times review shows how the reviewer, Bosley Crowther, unquestioningly swallowed it as a factual document in spite of the stagings and ethnographic deficiencies, calling it "authentic and overwhelmingly real."
I didn't have too much trouble with that review. He does toss around the word "anthropological" a bit loosely, as though he was aware of Margaret Mead, but hadn't heard of Malinowski. [aside: was this guy Crowther British, as it sures sounds it in his tone and attitude]
From the review:
There are also exciting illustrations of arduous bridge-buildings and crossings of dangerous streams, difficult climbs up rain-washed mountains and vital provisioning from an airplane flying over them from Hollandia. Two or three critical episodes, such as meetings with tribes and gatherings, appear to have been staged or re-enacted, but that is all right and understandable. The film as a whole is authentic and overwhelmingly real.
I wasn't sure what to make of his repeated use of the word "illustrations." It seemed to echo his acceptance that this wasn't a pure documentary. The people and the land of New Guinea is real and authentic, the film somewhat less so.

One thing missing from the film (unless I missed it) was how the "savages" reacted to the camera (or understood its role). We did see how they reacted to hearing music over the radio, and witnessing a plane swoop low overhead. But it would have been interesting to see what impression the camera itself had.

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Gregory
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#236 Post by Gregory » Tue Dec 19, 2006 2:22 pm

Lemmy Caution wrote:It was an adventure for them, and they weren't overly interested in the language, customs, etc of the peoples they met.
That was apparently true, but my point was just that they seemed to have much more gradiose intentions about producing, in some sense, the final word on this area and its people. For example in the companion book they make the arrogant claim that prior to their journey, "everything remained to be discovered" and that their expedition would be "the last to collect any really new information." Since they claimed this I think the standards to which they should be held are different than if they had gone just to make the journey for the sake of adventure.
[aside: was this guy Crowther British, as it sures sounds it in his tone and attitude]
No, he was from the United States. He was also pretty far from being one of the brightest or most revolutionary reviewers or critics, so that may make his reaction a little useful to surmise how mainstream audiences received the film and its value as a cultural document.

Greathinker

#237 Post by Greathinker » Sun Jan 28, 2007 11:10 pm

Has anyone checked out the release of Steppenwolf? I'm curious about the dvd, but more so about the actual film.

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colinr0380
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#238 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Sep 07, 2007 12:15 pm

DVD Talk review of Darwin's Nightmare.

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Ashirg
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#239 Post by Ashirg » Fri Sep 07, 2007 2:29 pm

HVE will release 2 titles in December - Chameleon Street and Whisky Romeo Zulu.

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Cronenfly
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#240 Post by Cronenfly » Sun Dec 16, 2007 10:11 pm

Beaver review of Chameleon Street.

Good to see our friend Armond White on the commentary and doing the liner notes. Let's hope that he's more effective in praising this film than in trashing Lumet.

An interesting bit on Youtube regarding Will Smith's relation to the film (he was slated to star in a remake that never happened) and his repeated ripping off of a scene in the film involving a Rubik's Cube.

I'm looking forward to this release. I knew nothing about the film before, but it looks like one of the better American indies of the late '80s/early'90s (here's a decent review of the film, which is, sadly, Harris' only to date). Not only that, but it looks more akin quality-wise to the HVE releases before the Image takeover (i.e. progressive, substantial bonus features).

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Via_Chicago
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#241 Post by Via_Chicago » Sun Dec 16, 2007 10:45 pm

Cronenfly wrote:Beaver review of Chameleon Street.

Good to see our friend Armond White on the commentary and doing the liner notes. Let's hope that he's more effective in praising this film than in trashing Lumet.

An interesting bit on Youtube regarding Will Smith's relation to the film (he was slated to star in a remake that never happened) and his repeated ripping off of a scene in the film involving a Rubik's Cube.

I'm looking forward to this release. I knew nothing about the film before, but it looks like one of the better American indies of the late '80s/early'90s (here's a decent review of the film, which is, sadly, Harris' only to date). Not only that, but it looks more akin quality-wise to the HVE releases before the Image takeover (i.e. progressive, substantial bonus features).
Yes, it looks like a good release and I look forward to having the chance to see the film (which I would have never heard of had it not been for Armond White).

That Smith clip is pretty great, mostly because it demonstrates how much Smith misinterpreted the scene in the original film, and uses it in a totally different context in both Fresh Prince and in The Pursuit of Happyness. He ultimately gives it a completely different meaning; transforming it from sly social commentary about the plight of black-American workers, into a total cliche.

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Cronenfly
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#242 Post by Cronenfly » Sun Dec 16, 2007 11:14 pm

Via_Chicago wrote:Yes, it looks like a good release and I look forward to having the chance to see the film (which I would have never heard of had it not been for Armond White).
Didn't mean to trash White too much. It's great that he's championed (and continues to champion) this film; whatever I or anybody else may think of him otherwise, for that he must be commended.

It's a shame the movie got buried like it did, but hopefully the DVD release will raise its profile; if nothing else it'll make it possible for people to see the film outside of VHS.

Bang on about the Smith clip; makes one glad the remake starring him never got off the ground.

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Galen Young
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Emile de Antonio box set

#243 Post by Galen Young » Mon May 05, 2008 1:18 pm

Couldn't find a mention of this here (sorry if it has been) -- but this almost flew under the radar: Emile de Antonio: Radical Saint, a box set of four films coming in June. Too bad it doesn't include Rush to Judgment, but I've been wanting to see Millhouse, Underground and Mr. Hoover & I, like forever... :D

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jesus the mexican boi
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Re: Emile de Antonio box set

#244 Post by jesus the mexican boi » Mon May 05, 2008 2:23 pm

Galen Young wrote:Couldn't find a mention of this here (sorry if it has been) -- but this almost flew under the radar: Emile de Antonio: Radical Saint, a box set of four films coming in June. Too bad it doesn't include Rush to Judgment, but I've been wanting to see Millhouse, Underground and Mr. Hoover & I, like forever... :D
Yay! Millhouse is marvelous. I thought these were coming from Ron Mann's company, but I'm glad HVE is putting them out.

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domino harvey
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#245 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 05, 2008 3:18 pm

And this wasn't an Eclipse set why

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The Fanciful Norwegian
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#246 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Mon May 05, 2008 7:00 pm

Maybe it was disqualified because In the Year of the Pig has actual extras. Hey, it doesn't have to be a good reason...

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Tribe
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#247 Post by Tribe » Mon May 05, 2008 7:38 pm

domino harvey wrote:And this wasn't an Eclipse set why
Probably because Year of the Pig came out under the HVE label. The days when HVE and Criterion were joined at the hip are well over. These days HVE doesn't even have a regular release schedule.

I'd bet (purely speculation) that HVE is gonna disappear in the next few years. At this point there's nothing to distinguish the releases from other things that Image releases, aside from the red HVE letters on the spine of the DVDs.

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Matt
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:58 pm

#248 Post by Matt » Sun Oct 05, 2008 12:46 pm

Some early HVE DVDs appear to be going out of print: Drôle de Drame and Kristin Lavransdatter.

Perkins Cobb
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Re: Home Vision Entertainment

#249 Post by Perkins Cobb » Fri Jan 16, 2009 4:42 pm

More for the "Image are douchebags" file:
Originally set for release by DVD label Home Vision Cinema, Chameleon Street was placed on the back burner when Home Vision was acquired by Image Entertainment, which forced Harris to pay the film’s restoration costs (and the DVD packaging) himself — expenses, he says, that just about bankrupted his company. [Wendell] Harris also claims that Image sent out a total of 60 preview DVDs and press kits before announcing it had maxed out the Chameleon Street marketing budget, calling to mind the old riddle: If an unknown indie movie falls in the Netflix forest ...

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domino harvey
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Re: Home Vision Entertainment

#250 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jan 16, 2009 5:29 pm

Makes me want to buy a copy in sympathy, despite our mutual fiend being on the commentary track

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