Word to the wise: Don't get too attached to all those fancy bells and whistles that seem almost standard on many DVDs these days.
In case you haven't heard, Hollywood's most high-profile Austrian bodybuilder-turned-neo-fascist-action-star recently demanded a $75,000 fee for recording an audio commentary for the new Special Edition DVD of Total Recall. Now $75,000 may not mean a whole lot to the Schwarzenegger household, but the fact that any sort of monetary fee was demanded — and, more importantly, paid — will almost certainly have major significance to pretty much everybody remotely connected with the world of DVDs. That includes us consumers, Bucko.
It's pretty much a no-brainer that other Hollywood personalities will feel obliged to follow Arnie's lead and will soon start requiring cash for participating in the special features on DVDs — services that up till now have been completely gratis. When that happens, we can expect the prices of DVDs to go up, or — more likely — the amount of bonus materials to go down.
Don't start sobbing just yet, though. The movies are still what matter, frills or no frills, and those movies will continue to look great on DVD. For that matter, the DVD floodgates will continue to regularly pour forth an amazing and eclectic assortment of filmic goodness, much of which offers a perfect antidote to all things Schwarzeneggerian.
The hardcore among us might consider making themselves feel better by simply boycotting Arnold's latest bid for our bucks, opening next week at the megaplexes. If that action's a little too extreme for your tastes, take heart in the following sampling of so-called cult DVDs. They couldn't be further from Collateral Damage if they tried.
The Beast. Based on the same legend that inspired The Brotherhood of the Wolf, Walerian Borowczyk's The Beast (La Bete) is quite simply one of the most outrageous and controversial films ever released. The enigmatic Borowczyk began his career as an acclaimed avant-garde filmmaker and wound up decades later churning out exploitation garbage such as Emmanuelle 5.
In between, there was The Beast. A film both transitional and pivotal in the Polish-born filmmaker's strange oeuvre, The Beast is a prime example of Borowczyk the artist, as well as Borowczyk the iconoclast and Borowczyk the trash-monger. The essence of the film is an extended fantasy in which a young women is pursued and violated by the title creature (an absurdly endowed monster, as grotesque as he is comical). Borowczyk layers in an elaborate framing device involving a series of greedy, sexually destructive characters, and films the whole thing in an elegant but deliberately flat, constricted way that emphasizes both the exotic beauty and unpleasantness of what he's showing us. Long available only as a heavily censored, grade-Z video bootleg, The Beast has finally been released on DVD by the appropriately named Cult Epics. There are no extras to speak of on the DVD, but the film is uncut, the widescreen image quality is fine, and it's unlikely we'll ever see a better version of this legendary bit of incendiary filmmaking.
Two by Rivette. With Jacques Rivette's wonderful Va Savoir showing on the art film circuit, what better time to check out some other gems by this revered French director? The vast majority of Rivette's most acclaimed works are not yet available on DVD (or even on video), but a handful of the director's lesser-known titles have popped up over the past few months and are well worth investigating.
Of the three Rivette films recently released on DVD by Image Entertainment, Gang of Four is the best and most typical of the director's unique sensibility. The film is ostensibly a thriller about a mystery man searching for an ever changing something in a house shared by four equally enigmatic student actresses. It's a perfect canvas for the director's ongoing preoccupations with the creative process, the symbiotic relationship between life and art, and the notion that our lives are basically a series of performances. "Acting is not lying," says the one of the characters, "It's searching for the truth." "That's debatable," retorts her companion, and that debate is the sly, cosmic joke at the heart of Gang of Four.
A much different, more austere side of Rivette is on display in the two-part, four-hour Joan the Maid, recently released on DVD by Facets Video. Rivette's film ranks right up there with Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc and Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc in the pantheon of great Joan films. Joan the Maid is a deliberately paced, thoroughly personal anti-epic more concerned with thoughtful insight and intimate human details than with grand historical flourishes and cinematic cheese (even the big battles and the trial itself are handled in a surprisingly matter-of-fact manner).
Rivette generally avoids sentiment or psychology, choosing instead to locate his heroine in a naturalistic, often plain setting and focusing on the characters around her in order to imply much about Joan's place as a woman in a medieval world. As with Gang of Four, Joan the Maid is filled with Rivette's graceful but non-obtrusive camerawork. Both DVDs offer solid if not exactly spectacular image quality (the Image disc being slightly superior). The Facets DVD provides a handful of text essays on Rivette and the history of Joan of Arc on screen, as well as a detailed historical timeline.
Blind Beast. Although it's equal parts The Collector (both the John Fowles novel and the William Wyler movie) and an adaptation of a story by noted Japanese mystery writer Rampo Edogawa, Blind Beast (no relation to Borowczyk's film) is definitely its own animal. Director Yasuzo Masumura fuses lurid Gothic horror, ultra-groovy 1969 pop art designs and oodles of Freudian psychology in his tale of a blind sculptor who abducts a young girl and makes her his oddly willing prisoner. The film is a virtual two-character piece, alternately brutal and lyrical, and always incredibly surreal — largely owing to the fact that it's almost entirely set in an enormous artist's studio adorned with gigantic fetish objects/sculptures of disembodied body parts. This is quite simply one of the most effective — and certainly most disturbing — movies ever made about the art of looking and the primacy of the image. The only extras on the Fantoma DVD are a photo gallery and director's bio, but the digital, widescreen picture is sharp, sensuous and perfectly suited to the subject matter.
Diary of a Girl Lost. Kino on Video continues to display its dedication to the art of silent film with a long-awaited DVD starring one of the most electrifying female presences to ever appear on screen: Louise Brooks. Outside of the astonishing Pandora's Box (still unavailable on DVD), Diary of a Lost Girl is Brooks' finest moment on screen — heck, outside of Pandora's Box, it's just about Brooks' only moment on screen (she only acted in a few other movies, all of them unremarkable at best).
Diary of a Lost Girl is a treasure that no self-respecting film buff should be without. Directed by the great G.W. Pabst, 1929's Diary is a powerful, spot-on study of Weimar Germany as well as being a deeply haunting portrait of innocence lost, perverted and finally decimated. Brooks stars as Thymian, a sweet young thing who gets knocked up by a bounder and then finds herself a prisoner of society's conventions and expectations — first at home, then in a creepy, concentration camp-like reform school, and then in the vivid excesses of a big city brothel.
Brooks' understated, weirdly modern performance is the perfect foil to the lurid subject matter and to Pabst's passionate and often excessive direction, giving the film an edge that easily compensates for its more dated, melodramatic elements. The newly remastered version of Diary Kino used for this DVD has its share of scratches, speckles and other age-related damage but displays surprisingly well-defined contrasts and, frankly, looks as good as any print I've ever seen of this film. There's only one extra here, but it's a doozy: a rare, 18-minute early talkie from 1930 called Windy Goes Hollywood, featuring a choice bit by Brooks and directed by none other than Fatty Arbuckle. It's a frivolous but genuinely funny short and makes a nice companion piece to the in-your-face intensity of Diary of a Lost Girl.
Contact Lance Goldenberg at 813-248-8888, ext. 157, or lance.golden berg@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jan 31 – Feb 6, 2002.