They'd better update their "Nostalghia" first.....

Play.com has the deal on Les Vampires.

Special Features

* Louis Feuillade at Work
* Short films by Louis Feuillade: Une Dame Vraiment Bien, La Legende de la Fileuse, C'est pour les Orphelines, L'Orgie Romaine

A legendary early masterpiece of French cinema, 'Les Vampires' follows the exploits of a nefarious band of master criminals led by the seductive femme fatale Irma Vep, alluringly played by Musidora. Holding Paris in the grip of terror, the underworld gang are pursued across the city by heroic journalist Philippe Guerande and his sidekick Mazamette. Reflecting the mood of fear and anxiety in World War I era France, this meticulously restored ten-part silent serial from film pioneer Louis Feuillade - creator of the acclaimed Fantômas serials - is a hugely influential and engrossing crime drama from cinema's golden age. Musical accompaniment composed by Eric Le Guen and Chateau Flight.

Feuillade shorts! Sweeeeet!

crazy-cheap pre-order of Les Vampires at DVD.co.uk, only £13.95
(RRP elsewere is £29.99, but they've got it down as £19.99)

I pre-ordered mine at Amazon when it was at the crazy cheap price.

Has anyone seen these short films? I understand that some of them are on the R1 disc.

Can anyone tell me how Play.com handle their preorders? I preordered Les Vampires when it was announced for 23 euro, and now the price is up to 37 euro. My preorder price is still 23 euro! Is Play known to change preordered prices?

Les Vampires cover art

OH MAN YES that is simply beautiful

Why the blood-red background? Are AE hoping for some mis-purchases from horror fans?

They'd be barking mad if they weren't - that market's several orders of magnitude bigger than the one for WWI-era silent serials!

(I was involved with a marketing campaign for a revival of Belle de Jour in the early 1990s that all but rebadged it as a soft porn film - if I remember rightly, the tagline itself was "the Rolls-Royce of sex films". Our reasoning, which I'd defend to this day, was that people who were already familiar with the film wouldn't care - or rather, they might hem and haw at the vulgarity of the advertising, but they'd still pay to go and see it - and people who didn't might be intrigued. Since it broke the house records at both the cinemas it opened in, we must have been doing something right!)

Wouldn't it cause some unintended comparisons to be made though? "Deneuve was excellent but she was no Sylvia Kristel" and so on?

A little like playing up Å vankmajer's Alice as an update of the Disney version. Sure it means it will get a bigger audience but...!

Though I can sympathise with the difficulties in promoting unusual films to unsuspecting audiences without making them run away in terror from subtitles! (or subtleties?)

Sometimes great films do well because they're great-- it happens.

Film Forum in NYC broke all previous records with the original revival of Rififi because... people just couldn't believe how fucking good this film was, and word of mouth spread.

Certainly different from the typical AE cover art designs.

They should be applauded for the originality and boldness of the design (especially for a silent film), but i'm not actually sure i like it that much, it looks kind of cartoony and amateurish.

Provided they bought a ticket, I'm not the slightest bit bothered about what they thought of it!


Actually, that's exactly how the US distributors of Alice DID pitch it - or at least they used the Miloš Forman quote "Buñuel + Disney = Švankmajer" on the poster.


The time-honoured technique is to hide any evidence that the film might not be in English in either the trailer or any other advertising. I worked for the UK distributor of Delicatessen, and that particular trick worked brilliantly - it grossed over a million quid, which is mega-blockbuster status for an early-1990s independently-distributed film.

Artificial Eye to release three Bresson films on April 21: the already-mentioned the Devil, Probably along with A Man Escaped and Lancelot du lac!

This is GREAT!!! Thanks!

Well it's not like some kind of cartoon that AE designed just for the cover. It has been used before.

Awesome news. Those New Yorker discs are getting the heave-ho.

I hope these Bressons are in a box. It'd be one of the best releases of the year.

A box would be great, hopefully with at least some minimal extras (we can't expect too much from AE) the documentary The Road to Bresson would be lovely.

As would the 'Cineaste de notre temps' episode on Bresson

DVD Times reviews of Fassbinder Volume I & II - both appear to be excellent releases.

Maybe my memory is wrong, but I think somebody posted in this thread (or another) that the upcoming AE LES VAMPIRES would only run to about five hours, unlike the approx. 8-hour Image disc runtime. How long does the Gaumont run? Hopefully AE hasn´t decided to speed up the video!
Please comment on this if anybody wants to!

The Gaumont is 6h30 (according to the box); the Image is 6h39 (according to this review).

The AE will presumably be the same as the Gaumont, as was the case with Fantômas.