Why Won't They Release Only What I Want?

[SpiderBaby]

Thank you chris for responding in a understandable and informative way without any wisecracks. With that I can understand being annoyed by certain topics (I can't when the response is being kind of a punk to said poster, it just stirs the pot even more I think.).

And the Cover art "bashing" is only harmful to the artists, so it doesn't bother me personally (just used by me as a comparison). The little jabs on other sites is harmless, but does go overboard here and there. No need to blame that on you.

Thank you again for your response and like I said this place is great and filled with wonderful people, just alot of wisecracks and putdowns by some, but it's the internet and to be expected I guess.

[Sloper]

Hardly surprising someone gets a bit upset when the response is not 'we know it's a problem but must we keep talking about it?' but instead 'plenty of South American films have been released'; an unsubstantiated remark, challenged and then followed up with a gratuitous crack on the Lonesome thread, and all from a poster who has no apparent interest either in South American cinema or in silents [edit: correct me if I'm wrong, obviously].

I don't mean that as a criticism, believe it or not, as by many people's standards my own interests are pretty limited. But maybe that's why I don't crash into discussions that I have no interest in to make provocative comments and then pretend they were jokes. Except now, obviously, and this is no doubt destined for the infighting sub-forum. But about 85% of mfunk's posts irresistibly remind me of that Onion column, Come On, Lighten Up, I'm Just Being A Total Asshole. It's frustrating because he isn't quite a troll (or indeed an asshole) and I don't quite want him to leave or be banned or anything (it was nice having a back-and-forth about Drag Me to Hell the other week), but it gets pretty oppressive when every other thread seems to feature him in a prominent role, winding people up [edit: apologies for the exaggeration... 85% may not be a precise figure either...].

[TMDaines]

my point..............(another point is to go back to page 38 and read the responses to the poster "duck duck")

Hey instead of keep posting smart remarks why not reply back to the questioning of your "plenty" statement that me and Gregory responded about.

Really, you're better of ignoring mfunk9876. He pretty much always struggles to contribute anything other than a one line smart arsed remark. It gets on my tits too.

[mfunk9786]

I want that on my tombstone!

[swo17]

A couple points to consider:

1. Established canonical South American films make up, what, 1% of the established world canon? (Obviously these terms are impossible to objectively define, but consider the TSPDT Top 1000--it currently includes nine films at least partly credited to a South American country, one of which is the CCd Orfeu Negro.) So thinking purely in terms of filling quotas, we might expect to see one release from that continent every two years or so, and out of 624 mainline and 35 Eclipse releases, we might expect to find about six such releases in the Collection by now. By this measure, whether or not you count the Camus film, the CC does look lacking. So I think SpiderBaby's point is a valid one to make every so often if a long enough period of time is being considered (perhaps once every couple years). But to hold every month's announcements (of maybe seven new titles) to this standard of quota-filling is ludicrous, and only cheapens the argument by transferring it into an easy punchline.

2. A fundamental flaw with thinking purely in terms of quotas: When Criterion does eventually announce a release from, say, Brazil, in all likelihood, it will be a set devoted to the Brazilian equivalent of Mira Nair.

[MichaelB]

A couple points to consider:

1. Established canonical South American films make up, what, 1% of the established world canon? (Obviously these terms are impossible to objectively define, but consider the TSPDT Top 1000--it currently includes nine films at least partly credited to a South American country, one of which is the CCd Orfeu Negro.) So thinking purely in terms of filling quotas, we might expect to see one release from that continent every two years or so, and out of 624 mainline and 35 Eclipse releases, we might expect to find about six such releases in the Collection by now. By this measure, whether or not you count the Camus film, the CC does look lacking. So I think SpiderBaby's point is a valid one to make every so often if a long enough period of time is being considered (perhaps once every couple years). But to hold every month's announcements (of maybe seven new titles) to this standard of quota-filling is ludicrous, and only cheapens the argument by transferring it into an easy punchline.

2. A fundamental flaw with thinking purely in terms of quotas: When Criterion does eventually announce a release from, say, Brazil, in all likelihood, it will be a set devoted to the Brazilian equivalent of Mira Nair.

3. Given Criterion's upfront commitment to technical quality, I suspect that the reason they've shied away from certain regions is the lack of availability of decent source materials and/or the expense required to bring them up to expected standards versus the number of units they're realistically likely to shift.

Criterion has also neglected central/eastern Europe, certainly by comparison with Britain and western European titles, but masters from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the former Yugoslavia were notoriously poor until very very recently, and there still aren't acceptable masters available for a huge number of canonical titles (Andrzej Munk's Passenger, for instance). I think it's borderline scandalous that Criterion has ignored Miklós Jancsó when they've released plenty by contemporaries like Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut and even Wajda (and Jancsó was considered fully their equal in the Sixties and Seventies - just dip into any random Sight & Sound from that period) - but it's only been in the last couple of years or so that decent Jancsó masters have started to become available.

[TMDaines]

Hell, even Germany they don't show much interest in. It's literally a skimming of a few canonical directors and films. It probably largely depends on who is beating the drum for certain regions and if no members of staff have a particular interest in any particular time, region or movement then the chance of something getting released is slim-to-none.

[Matt]

Criterion's bread and butter has always been mid-century European art films and Japanese samurai films because that's what Janus Films distributed, and Criterion is an outgrowth of Janus Films. Remember that it took them until spine #332 just to release their first film from Spain, and #489 to release their first film from India, both countries with major film industries.

[Michael Kerpan]

I'm sure Criterion will never tackle the golden era of Philippine film making (Bernal, Brocka et al) -- even for the Eclipse line) -- and I won't blame them a bit. As important (and as good) as some these films are, the source materials all appear to be quite poor. It's a shame -- but it's also simply a fact of life.

[matrixschmatrix]

Which, again, is only a problem if Criterion becomes the arbiter and definition of the canon- it's true that not enough companies put out movies from South America (and I'd argue there would be more canonical South American movies on various lists if those movies were made more available) but there's no particular reason why Criterion should be automatically responsible for filling that void, any more than any particular movie should be responsible for redressing racial or gender imbalances in Hollywood.

Criterion's never been the most experimental or daring R1 label- and if anything, with stuff like Lonesome and the Hollis Frampton set, they've been improving lately. Apart from questions of rights- because of course we never know what movies Criterion would love to be able to release, but can't- it just seems like it's not necessarily Criterion's job.

[MichaelB]

Remember that it took them until spine #332 just to release their first film from Spain, and #489 to release their first film from India, both countries with major film industries.

For the record...

#1 - France (129 French titles total)
#2 - Japan (74)
#3 - UK (69)
#4 - Italy (44)
#8 - Hong Kong (4)
#10 - Australia (3)
#11 - Sweden (26)
#12 - USA (190)
#21 - Canada (4)
#30 - Germany/West Germany (18)
#34 - Russia/USSR (9)
#45 - Iran (2)
#47 - Norway (1)
#80 - Denmark (9)
#83 - Jamaica (1)
#130 - Czechoslovakia (4)
#133 - Netherlands (1)
#165 - Belgium (4)
#215 - Poland (4)
#301 - New Zealand (2)
#339 - Taiwan (1)
#351 - Spain (4)
#353 - Mexico (4)
#389 - Yugoslavia
#422 - China (1)
#436 - Macedonia (1)
#489 - India (2)
#502 - Austria (1)
#509 - Portugal (3)
#576 - South Korea (1)
#619 - Finland (1)

I can't vouch for the absolute accuracy of those figures (especially since my son interrupted me when I was already three figures into the US tally), but at least that gives a sense of the proportions. In addition to anything south of Mexico (unless you count Black Orpheus), major omissions include Hungary (probably the strongest European film-producing nation not represented at all), Africa, the Middle East (bar Iran) and China (the sole entry being The Last Emperor).

But that's pretty much a map of the distribution situation in Britain too - when I worked in rep cinemas in the 1990s, I daresay the stuff I programmed would have produced very similar results: it's not so much Criterion's fault as a very strong general bias in favour of the US, Japan and western Europe that goes back decades and which spans the majority of arthouse distributors. It's only post-2000 that I've had a chance to broaden my horizons really significantly, with the help of labels that either have a far more eclectic acquisition policy or of course which are based in the relevant countries themselves.

[Tribe]

Hell, even Germany they don't show much interest in. It's literally a skimming of a few canonical directors and films.

No interest or are the rights unavailable, etc? I'd like to see more German cinema as well....but I doubt that not having more than the "few canonical" movies is because of any particular in house prejudice.

[swo17]

I would say I did this because I was bored, but none of you would believe me...I've taken MichaelB's numbers listed above and compared them to the composition of the TSPDT Top 1000 list by country, as can be seen below. The last three graphs are zoomed in so that the small percentages can be seen more clearly. The blue bars represent the TSPDT "canon" and the red are Criterion. These results actually indicate that films from the US are rather underrepresented (as are films from Russia, India, and Taiwan) while France, Japan, the UK, and Denmark are a bit overrepresented. I say all of this of course in acknowledgment that the canon is ever shifting, impossible to define, and does not exist.

[TMDaines]

Hell, even Germany they don't show much interest in. It's literally a skimming of a few canonical directors and films.

No interest or are the rights unavailable, etc? I'd like to see more German cinema as well....but I doubt that not having more than the "few canonical" movies is because of any particular in house prejudice.

I doubt it's a problem with rights as there's relatively little released in the States between the 30s and the 70s - apart from a few canonical titles. German film doesn't have the richest history in these decades but there's still a lot of good stuff though if you shift through the chaff.

[SpiderBaby]

Fair question, the ones who make this list of TSPDT, have they actually seen every single film ever made? I mean it's just going in circles to say not too much South American films are in a "top" films list when you haven't even seen them. And of course a problem with that is no one releases them. What will come first, the egg or the chicken on this?

[MichaelB]

Fair question, the ones who make this list of TSPDT, have they actually seen every single film ever made? I mean it's just going in circles to say not too much South American films are in a "top" films list when you haven't even seen them. And of course a problem with that is no one releases them. What will come first, the egg or the chicken on this?

In order to lobby successfully on behalf of a particular national cinema, you need enthusiasts prepared to do the ground work, and who also have sufficient connections (even if only via a blog at first) to raise awareness.

For instance, I watch dozens of Polish films every year, both trying to keep up with new releases (over the last ten days, I watched eighteen 2011-12 releases, or about a third of the annual output) and fill in the gaps in my knowledge of the national canon - and that accumulated knowledge is then tapped by a range of people including Sight & Sound magazine, the Second Run and Arrow Academy DVD labels and the UK-based Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, plus assorted one-off commissions.

The downside is that a fair number of the films that I watch, to put it politely, aren't exactly masterpieces - but they have to be sifted through in order to dig up the gems, which often come completely out of left field. I certainly wasn't expecting Jan Komasa's The Suicide Room to be one of the strongest debuts I'd seen in years, since it looked like a teen movie at first glance, and I discovered Wojciech Smarzowski's work in similarly unpromising circumstances (any random scene from either The Wedding or The Dark House could easily pass for a gross-out comedy, but he uses ultra-black humour to make very pointed satirical comments on Poland in both the communist and capitalist eras). But at the moment I doubt non-Poles or non-specialists will have heard of either filmmaker - as far as I'm aware, none of their work has been picked up for international distribution in an English-speaking territory, which is of course the next stage and the hardest to negotiate since it involves someone being prepared to pay four or five figures for the rights.

And it's only after that that they get a chance of being accepted as part of a widely-recognised canon, which can easily take decades - Mike Atkinson's piece in the current Sight & Sound cites František Vláčil's Marketa Lazarová as a film that's long been revered at home but which has been almost entirely ignored outside the Czech Republic until it was past its 40th birthday, and would probably be ignored to this day if it hadn't been for the passionate advocacy of people like Second Run in the UK and Malavida in France, both of whose DVD releases predated the first official Czech one by several years. And then from that you gradually build up an awareness of Vláčil's work - Second Run put out two more of his films and a box set, and the Czech Centre in London sponsored a near-complete big-screen retrospective that played on both sides of the Atlantic - but it can be a glacially slow process that's driven more by enthusiasm than money.

And with very few exceptions, the kind of films that get picked up by Criterion are ones that have already got past all these stages and which have been accepted as canonical - which is much easier to achieve if you're American, British, French, Italian or Japanese because the spotlight has been turned onto those five countries for decades. Whereas Hungary is still largely terra incognita (especially if you venture beyond Miklós Jancsó and István Szabó), and Romania is still a comparative newcomer - though one that's had so much attention that I wouldn't be at all surprised if Criterion picked up a Romanian title in the not too distant future.

[swo17]

Fair question, the ones who make this list of TSPDT, have they actually seen every single film ever made? I mean it's just going in circles to say not too much South American films are in a "top" films list when you haven't even seen them. And of course a problem with that is no one releases them. What will come first, the egg or the chicken on this?

You can see whose lists TSPDT considers here. The intent is to aggregate the results of every credible poll of critics or filmmakers in the world. Obviously it's going to be something of a feedback loop though.

[MichaelB]

Obviously it's going to be something of a feedback loop though.

Yeah, that's the problem - to expand on the Marketa Lazarová example above, it's achieved its present status at least as much because the Czechs themselves have already canonised it as for any other reason. And if you're delving into a national cinema for the first time, or for the first time in any systematic depth, lists like the Czech critics' poll are clearly an invaluable orientation guide but can also be a straitjacket.

[TMDaines]

Fair question, the ones who make this list of TSPDT, have they actually seen every single film ever made? I mean it's just going in circles to say not too much South American films are in a "top" films list when you haven't even seen them. And of course a problem with that is no one releases them. What will come first, the egg or the chicken on this?

You can see whose lists TSPDT considers here. The intent is to aggregate the results of every credible poll of critics or filmmakers in the world. Obviously it's going to be something of a feedback loop though.

They actually do perceive their project as having faults though but at the same time I think their project is as good as a consensus as you'll ever get in terms of aggregating people's views on what the best/most important films of all time are.

[Tommaso]

Hell, even Germany they don't show much interest in. It's literally a skimming of a few canonical directors and films.

No interest or are the rights unavailable, etc? I'd like to see more German cinema as well....but I doubt that not having more than the "few canonical" movies is because of any particular in house prejudice.

I doubt it's a problem with rights as there's relatively little released in the States between the 30s and the 70s - apart from a few canonical titles. German film doesn't have the richest history in these decades but there's still a lot of good stuff though if you shift through the chaff.

I guess it has a lot to do with promotion, or lack thereof if it comes to the rightsholders. For many of the major German productions of the 20s and 30s this means FWMS. One doesn't have to begin with something as controversial as the films of Veit Harlan; but just imagine a set with the German productions of Robert Siodmak: a man whose name is known in the US, and who in his early career in Germany made a handful of truly impressive films that I believe could easily be marketed to those who are interested in European cinema of the decade in general. Or think of Billy Wilder: he scripted a lot of excellent Weimar comedies before he too was forced to leave the country. One would need just a little bit of imagination to come up with a catchy title for an Eclipse set. And films like "Ihre Hoheit befiehlt" and "Ein blonder Traum" would really be worth it.

[Drucker]

To add on, TSPDT put together this Ain't Nobody's Blues section to give a home to more obscure films (like Alambrista!) that have been knocked off their list as the lists they draw from become a bit more predictable.

[zedz]

#301 - New Zealand (2)

Two NZ films? Unless I'm forgetting something, there's only An Angel at My Table. If you're including Sweetie, that's Australian.

[SpiderBaby]

^yeah they have Sweetie under New Zealand on the site. Atleast it isn't bad a Criterion's Hulu page (which says they have 3 Brazilian films, 5 from Iran, a huge 16 from Mexico, etc).

[zedz]

^yeah they have Sweetie under New Zealand on the site. Atleast it isn't bad a Criterion's Hulu page (which says they have 3 Brazilian films, 5 from Iran, a huge 16 from Mexico, etc).

Oh well, in that case it looks like Michael B will also have to reclassify Ace in the Hole as German, Cleo from 5 to 7 as Belgian, and Lonesome and The Four Feathers as Hungarian. Well, that's one way to increase the Hungarian contingent, anyway. (Hey, not to mention half of all those Powell-Pressburger titles!)

[Tribe]

^yeah they have Sweetie under New Zealand on the site. Atleast it isn't bad a Criterion's Hulu page (which says they have 3 Brazilian films, 5 from Iran, a huge 16 from Mexico, etc).

You do realize Criterion/Janus has rights to movies that have not been released on DVD yet? I haven't checked the Hulu site in a while, so I'm not sure what you are referring to.