DEEP CUTS IN GRAPHIC DESIGN FROM THE CRITERION COLLECTION ARCHIVES.
PIC(S) INFO: Mega spotlight on 2011 All Tomorrow's Parties (ATP) Criterion Cinema movie posters presented in a vintage postcards graphic art style. Artwork/art direction by Eric Skillman, all published September 2011.
Peeping Tom will be released on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray on May 14 via The Criterion Collection. Eric Skillman designed the cover art for the 1960 British horror thriller.
A progenitor of the contemporary slasher, Michael Powell (The Red Shoes) directs from a script by Leo Marks. Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, and Maxine Audley star.
Peeping Tom has been newly restored in 4K with Dolby Vision HDR and uncompressed monaural sound. Special features are listed below.
Special features:
Audio commentary by film scholar Laura Mulvey (new)
Audio commentary by film historian Ian Christie
Introduction by filmmaker Martin Scorsese (new)
Interview with editor Thelma Schoonmaker (new)
Featurette on the film's history with Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker, and actor Carl Boehm (new)
Featurette on the film's restoration (new)
Featurette on screenwriter Leo Marks
Trailer
Booklet with an essay by author Megan Abbott
Armed with his killer camera, photographer and filmmaker Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) unleashes the traumas of his childhood by murdering women and recording their deaths—until he falls for his downstairs neighbor, and finds himself struggling against his dark compulsions. Received with revulsion upon its release only to be reclaimed as a masterpiece, the endlessly analyzed, still-shocking Peeping Tom dares viewers to confront their own relationship to the violence on-screen.
A FACE THAT READS LIKE A MAP OF NEVER-ENDING CONFLICT, FRUSTRATION, AND DISTRESS.
PIC INFO: Spotlight on Criterion booklet artwork of Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, low-level dockworker, failed prizefighter, and pawn in a wharf-side racketeering operation in the American drama film "On the Waterfront" (1954), directed by Elia Kazan.
Artwork by Sean Phillips. Design/art direction by Eric Skillman.
"When he [Marlon] plays those scenes with her, I'm broken up. I break up. That one person should need so much from another person in the way of tenderness and all that. We all do, don't we?"
-- ELIA KAZAN, interviewed by Richard Schickel (quote lifted from the Criterion Collection supplemental DVD booklet)
Sources: http://theartofseanphillips.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-waterfront.html & Facebook (an old post of mine).
Blow Out will be released on 4K Ultra HD (with Blu-ray) on September 6 via via The Criterion Collection. Eric Skillman designed the cover art for the 1981 mystery thriller.
Brian De Palma (Carrie, Scarface) writes and directs, inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blowup. John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, and Dennis Franz star.
Blow Out has been newly restored in 4K, approved by De Palma, with Dolby Vision HDR and 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio. Special features are listed below.
Special features:
Interview with director Brian De Palma by filmmaker Noah Baumbach
Interview with actor Nancy Allen
Interview with Steadicam operator Garrett Brown
Murder à la Mod - 1967 feature directed by Brian De Palma
On-set photographs by Louis Goldman
Trailer
Booklet with an essay by critic Michael Sragow and Pauline Kael’s original New Yorker review of the film
John Travolta gives one of his greatest performances, as a film sound-effects man who believes he has accidentally recorded a political assassination. To uncover the truth, he enlists the help of a possible eyewitness to the crime (Nancy Allen), who may be in danger herself. With its jolting stylistic flourishes, intricate plot, profoundly felt characterizations, and gritty evocation of early-1980s Philadelphia, Blow Out is an American paranoia thriller unlike any other, as well as a devilish reflection on moviemaking.
Pink Flamingos will be released on Blu-ray on June 28 via The Criterion Collection. Eric Skillman designed the new cover art for the 1972 exploitation comedy.
John Waters (Cry-Baby, Hairspray) writes and directs. Divine, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, Danny Mills, and Edith Massey star.
Pink Flamingos has been newly restored in 4K, supervised by Waters, with uncompressed monaural audio. Special features are listed below.
Special features:
Audio commentary by writer-director John Waters from 2001 DVD
Audio commentary by writer-director John Waters from 1997 Laserdisc
A conversation with John Waters and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (new)
Filming location tour by John Waters
Deleted scenes, alternate takes, and on-set footage
Trailer
Booklet featuring an essay by critic Howard Hampton and an excerpt from actress Cookie Mueller’s 1990 book Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black
John Waters made bad taste perversely transcendent with the forever shocking counterculture sensation Pink Flamingos, his most infamous and daring cinematic transgression. Outré diva Divine is iconic as the wanted criminal hiding out with her family of degenerates in a trailer outside Baltimore while reveling in her tabloid notoriety as the “Filthiest Person Alive.” When a pair of sociopaths (Mink Stole and David Lochary) with a habit of kidnapping women in order to impregnate them attempt to challenge her title, Divine resolves to show them and the world the true meaning of the word filthy. Incest, cannibalism, shrimping, and film history’s most legendary gross-out ending—Waters and his merry band of Dreamlanders leave no taboo unsmashed in this gleefully subversive ode to outsiderhood, in which camp spectacle and pitch-black satire are wielded in an all-out assault on respectability.
Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on February 25 via The Criterion Collecttion. The three-disc set includes a trio of films by pioneering Czechoslovak filmmaker Karel Zeman.
1955’s Journey to the Beginning of Time, 1958’s Invention for Destruction (also known as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne), and 1962’s The Fabulous Baron Munchausen are each surreal fantasy/adventure films that combine live action with various animation techniques.
All three pictures have been digitally restored in 4K with uncompressed monaural soundtracks. The 1960 US version of Journey to the Beginning of Time is included, as is the 1961 English dub of Invention for Destruction.
The limited-edition Blu-ray packaging features pop-up art, which is designed by Eric Skillman. Special features are listed below.
Special features:
Featurettes with filmmaker John Stevenson and special-effects artists Phil Tippett and Jim Aupperle discussing director Karel Zeman (new)
Four early short films by Karel Zeman: A Christmas Dream (1946), A Horseshoe for Luck (1946), Inspiration (1949), and King Lavra (1950)
Film Adventurer: Karel Zeman - 2015 documentary about the director, featuring filmmakers Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, illustrator Ludmila Zeman, and more
Short documentaries by the Karel Zeman Museum profiling the director and detailing the production and effects of all three films
Restoration demonstrations and an interview with restoration supervisor James Mockoski
Trailers
Booklet featuring an essay by film critic Michael Atkinson
A beguiling mix of natural history and science fiction, Journey to the Beginning of Time follows four schoolboys on an awe-inspiring expedition back through time, where they behold landscapes and creatures that have long since vanished from the earth. Hewing closely to the scientific knowledge of its era, Journey to the Beginning of Time brings its prehistoric beasts alive through a number of innovative techniques—including stop-motion, puppetry, and life-size models—creating an atmosphere of pure wonderment.
Invention for Destruction is an eye-popping escapade revolves around a scientist and his doomsday machine—and the pirates who will stop at nothing to gain possession of it. Freely adapting the fiction of Jules Verne, and inspired by Victorian line engravings, Karel Zeman surrounds his actors with animated scenery of breathtaking intricacy and complexity, constructing an impossibly vivid proto-steampunk world. Released abroad at the turn of the 1960s, Invention for Destruction went on to become one of the most internationally successful Czechoslovak films of all time.
In The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, Karel Zeman conjures the adventures of the legendary, boastful baron, whose whirlwind exploits take him from the moon to eighteenth-century Turkey to the belly of a whale and beyond. A kaleidoscopic marvel that blends live action with techniques including stop-motion, cutout collage, puppetry, painted backdrops, and antique tinting, Zeman’s film is an exhilarating visual delight and a warmhearted whirl through a bygone age too entrancing to have existed.
I enjoyed Joshua Hunt’s recent New York Times article on the Criterion Collection:
Always in awe of auteurs but never in their thrall, Criterion producers have never been afraid to look beyond the biggest and most marketable names. When Criterion released “Peeping Tom,” a ’60s psychosexual thriller by the English director Michael Powell, the company chose not to ask Scorsese to record the audio…
