Criterion announced four titles (in pairs) last week for release in July. That announcement radically changed how I plan on spending a significant chunk of the next three months on this column. Don't get me wrong, the 15th of the Month announcements every 30 or so days are always a reason for excitement and re-budgeting things, but these resulted in my pulling a couple of grand plans out of cold storage.
(l.) Yasujiro Ozu and (r.) Powell & Pressburger
Starting this week, I'm beginning work on a pair of extremely ambitious series. One will focus on the career of Yasujiro Ozu, and the other, on that of Powell & Pressburger. The primary focus of both series will be their films available from The Criterion Collection (also the only ones available in the USA). Short and long articles will be posted as a part of each over the next three months, timed to tie in to the release of Criterion's The Only Son/There Was a Father DVD double-set and Blu-rays of The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. It is a huge event for cinema historians to finally have Ozu's first talkie on DVD in the US as well as newly-restored and pristine versions of Shoes & Narcissus.
Articles will trickle out at first, but grow in frequency as time goes on and I have a chance to watch things. The Powell & Pressburger series will start much later than the Ozu, and will be less in-depth; however, I have inserted a gimmick into it that I think you'll enjoy. Perhaps I should include some backstory here, since I've actually planned to do both of these features for over a year now.
A while ago, I wanted to start running a regular series on cinema classics that aren't as well-traveled as Bad Boys 2 by my contemporaries. I'd go into why one particular film (Citizen Kane, Grand Illusion, and so on) was a big deal, why they are a big deal, what prominent critics have said for and against, how I relate to them, and it would have all ended up kind of like a college paper no one would ever grade me on.
In short, it'd have been the "who gives a rat's ass?" series. There's lots of impenetrable, unreadable stuff like that out there. I should clarify that I'm not referring to anyone's specific column or feature here, just the style of writing that's overly-academic and, well...too long for people to readily hook into in the age of the internet.
I decided that a more interesting approach would be focusing on an individual artist and running a protracted series of shorter, more digestible pieces that follow their career chronologically. Directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, you name it, I'd cover them if they interest me and I felt I knew enough about them. I had a list of seven or eight artists and/or teams and was ready to go, but it was just too much to balance with the regular demands of the column.
I don't pretend to be an authority among cinema scholars, or even the most knowledgeable on a particular subject. What I do feel I can offer is my perspective on some artists that are important to me: those whose work I've studied, admired, and dreamed about.
You, dear reader, may be a casual admirer of theirs or have their complete filmography on your "I know I'm supposed to watch this some day" list. This is my effort toward recommending some subconscious part of your mind add Floating Weeds to your Netflix queue before Step Brothers. If you want to read a book about them or all the Criterion booklets, that's up to you and hopefully what I'll move you toward doing.
The Ozu introduction will post later today and Powell/Pressburger sometime in June. Few things have gotten me so truly fired up in months and months, so I hope you enjoy the ride. I haven't come up with a name for this...thing, but I'm sure I'll come up with something and append it to the relevant posts somewhere in the process. Here goes.