We'll all be watching HD-DVD or Blu-Ray or some other fancy Hi-Def format soon enough, but let's not forget where it all started. It was DVD that made movies sexy again — and the best DVDs entertain us even as they offer a way of understanding the histories and meanings of cherished films, an entry point into a director's vision or into a body of cinema.
You might say that DVD made being obsessed with movies respectable, creating a consumer mindset where film collecting has become commonplace. Parallels have even been drawn between the urge to own a favorite movie on DVD and the reason a cannibal eats people. After all, everybody's just trying to absorb someone else's essence.
But some films are so elusive they simply can't be possessed, no matter how spectacular the DVD treatment. Case in point: Orson Welles' legendary and, up until now, little seen 1955 production, Mr. Arkadin.
You couldn't hope for a finer showcase than Criterion's new three-disc set of The Complete Mr. Arkadin, but the blessing and the curse of this brilliant DVD edition is that the more we discover about Welles' fascinating, infuriating film, the less we really know.
As with most of Welles' terminally troubled projects, Mr. Arkadin was yanked away from its director before completion and recut without his blessings, only to surface over the years in multiple unauthorized versions. The Criterion DVD gives us no less than three distinctly different versions of Arkadin, none of them claiming to be definitive. Somehow that seems appropriate for what might just be Welles' most maddeningly inscrutable exploration of the truth in flux.
Mr. Arkadin is another Citizen Kane-like investigation into the life of a powerful, controversial recluse, the mysterious millionaire Gregory Arkadin (played by Welles himself with full-on absurdist gusto). Claiming to be suffering from amnesia, the eccentric Arkadin hires an obliging low-life to conduct an inquiry to uncover the secrets of his identity — a curious task that turns out to be unexpectedly difficult when an alarming number of potential eyewitnesses begin turning up dead.
That's about it by way of "plot." The movie, at least in its existing forms, largely plays like a collection of Welles' greatest hits, from its recalling of Kane and its groundbreaking flashback techniques (a structure totally abandoned in at least one of Arkadin's many versions), to a decadent post-war European setting straight out of The Third Man, to the deliriously noirish touches that would blossom a few years later in Touch of Evil.
Mr. Arkadin is richly textured, intoxicatingly odd and almost always a pleasure to watch but, frankly, it's also something of a mess. The movie is sporadically brilliant but it's also full of loose or dead ends that may or may not have been intended, and many of its nuts and bolts seem so blatantly slipshod (cheap effects, bad make-up, and a potpourri of mismatching accents are among its sins) that it's hard to tell if Welles is deliberately drawing our attention to the movie's artifice or if it's simply a hack job.
The Criterion DVD goes a long way toward addressing these questions, presenting us with a wealth of material that unravels Arkadin's mystery even as it deepens it. Stunning transfers of the two most widely seen versions of the film are included — a 99-minute cut licensed for American television and a radically restructured 98-minute version known as Confidential Report — as well as a 105-minute "comprehensive version," newly assembled by the DVD's producers in an effort to hew as closely as possible to Welles' original intentions.
There are lavish extras here as well that painstakingly detail the differences between the various versions, theorizing on what Welles might have been up to and attempting to fill in blanks that may or may not have been meant to be filled in.
The DVD has all the perks of a virtual film school, complete with thoughtful analysis in the form of commentary tracks (that, appropriately enough, occasionally contradict each other), extensive interviews, critical essays, timelines documenting the film's convoluted history, a paperback of the original story, even a trio of episodes from the old Harry Lime radio show (the character who inspired Arkadin).
Whether the film is a butchered masterpiece or an elaborate hat trick, this beautifully produced DVD serves as an eye-opening portrait of one of cinema's great puzzles, created by one of its most magnificently unreliable narrators. From his 1938 hoax radio broadcast of War of the Worlds to his F for Fake swan song, Orson Welles delighted in blurring the lines between what is and what might be, and Mr. Arkadin could be his greatest illusion of all.
Welles isn't the only visionary filmmaker whose work is currently being reappraised thanks to DVD. Peter Watkins — whose unclassifiable and rarely seen films over the years have defied critical understanding, much less commercial success — has recently teamed up with New Yorker Video in an ambitious project to bring his entire body of work to the world, digital-style. Watching these new DVDs, it becomes abundantly clear that Watkins is a filmmaker whose time has come.
His 1976 opus Edvard Munch, the latest release in the New Yorker series, is a film that I just didn't get when I saw it as a young whippersnapper. Seeing it again now, several decades later and in the context of the rest of Watkins' recently re-emerged oeuvre, is nothing less than a revelation.
Technically, the film is yet another portrait of the artist as a young whatever — tortured Expressionist painter Edvard Munch — but what Watkins has created here is anything but a conventional biopic. Best known for his iconic painting "The Scream" (sometimes known as "The Shriek"), Munch was an artist hell-bent on exploring the darkest places in the human psyche, and Edvard Munch's methodology apes its subject's creative process with astonishing depth and precision. For 174 minutes, Watkins plumbs Munch's innermost depths, while simultaneously casting his gaze outward to take in the sweep and subtleties of the 19th-century Norwegian society he inhabited.
Watkins pulls us directly into Munch's world, using non-professional actors (many of whom resemble the people they're portraying to an amazing degree) and shooting in a fly-on-the-wall, documentary-like manner that lends an unprecedented sense of authenticity to the proceedings.
At the same time, the filmmaker periodically makes us painfully aware of the universal applications of what we're watching by having his actors improvise, stare directly into the camera or engage in some other deliberately artificial bit of Brechtian business designed to break the fourth wall.
Watkins boils all of this down into a Joyce-ean stream-of-consciousness stew, fluidly cutting between past and present, interior and exterior worlds, pleasure and pain, the banal and the significant, until time and memory have dovetailed into a flood of images and information. The film is so richly textured that even its most cerebral moments manage to feel sensual, evoking an intensity of feeling in the viewer that's probably pretty close to what Munch himself kept bottled up inside.
You've probably never seen anything quite like this film, and yes, much of it is pretty perplexing. But don't feel put off — the notoriously media-shy Watkins (who refuses to be interviewed) supplies a fascinating, 24-page "self-interview" for the DVD that helps walk us through the experience.
That's about all we get by way of extras on the DVD, but honestly, it's enough. Any way you look at it, it's good to finally have access to Edvard Munch and all those other films by Watkins, Welles and so many other remarkable filmmakers waiting patiently to astonish us.
This article appears in Apr 19-25, 2006.