Eureka offers - Masters of Cinema

Eureka! September Offers - Masters of Cinema

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Shoah is Claude Lanzmann's landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: the geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand.	One of the biggest film events of the century, a “Holy Grail” among film finds, Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi epic can finally be seen — for the first time in 83 years — as the director originally intended and as seen by German cinema-goers in 1927.	Adapted from the renowned novel by Shusaku Endo, Masahiro Shinoda’s 1971 film Silence (Chinmoku, co-written with Endo) explores the violent cultural conflict amid the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century Japan. Shinoda’s excellent direction — coupled with a pensive score by the legendary Toru Takemitsu — gives cinematic expression to inner spiritual paradox, and imbues with religious mystery a landscape that seems already sentient with wind, rain, and light.	With the Nazi terror on the ascent, master filmmaker Max Ophuls fled to Italy in 1934 and made La signora di tutti [Everybody's Lady] — an exuberant, desperate melodrama that, although arriving early in Ophuls' body of work, ranks comfortably alongside Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Earrings of Madame de..., or Lola Montès in the hierarchy of the director's achievements.
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The magical, rarely seen Judex — directed by the great Georges Franju — was largely unappreciated at the time of its release in 1963. This lyrical and dreamlike picture, a putative “remake” of Louis Feuillade’s own 1916 Judex, is as evocative of the silent master’s own works as it is the later films of Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí. A French reviewer wrote in 1963: “The whole of Judex reminds us that film is a privileged medium for the expression of poetic magic”. Also includes Nuits Rouges.	A Heroic Song from a Towering World of Heights” — German filmmaker and doctor Arnold Fanck (1889-1974) made this beautifully photographed Bergfilm, or ‘mountain film’, in 1926. Written in three days and nights — especially for Riefenstahl — The Holy Mountain took over a year to film in the Alps with an entourage of expert skiers and climbers. Ostensibly a love triangle romance — between Riefenstahl’s young dancer and the two explorers she encounters — Fanck relishes the glorious Alpine landscape by filming death-defying climbing, avalanche-dodging, and frenetic downhill ski racing.	Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko — released to great acclaim in 1968 — is a sparse, atmospheric horror story, ascribing to the director’s philosophy of using beauty and purity to evoke emotion. Eccentric and more overtly supernatural than its breakthrough companion piece, Onibaba (1964), Kuroneko revisits similar themes to reveal a haunting meditation on duty, conformity, and love.	Erotically charged and steeped in the symbolism and superstition of its Buddhist and Shinto roots, Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba is in part a modern parable on consumerism, a study of the destructiveness of sexual desire and — filmed within a claustrophobic sea of grass — one of the most striking and unique films of the last century, winning Kiyomi Kuroda the Blue Ribbon Award for Cinematography in 1965. The memorably frenetic drumming soundtrack was scored by long-time Shindo collaborator Hikaru Hayashi.
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The world sometimes seems divided into two camps: those who recall their teenage years as having been an exhilarating dream, and those who remember them as having been an infernal, nightmarish hell. So it might do to describe Passe ton bac d’abord… as Maurice Pialat’s “The Best Years of Our Lives”, while bearing in mind all that such a description might suggest: an unsparing portrait of the era when the words ‘sixteen candles’ still might have first conjured the image of flames.	Jean and Catherine are a couple whose every move charts an advancement deeper into an emotional warzone. Theirs is the classic and the tragic case of an emotional abuse centred around a perplexing, but powerful, interdependency. As the moment approaches wherein the relationship can no longer perpetuate its cycle of weekend holidays, apologies, and submissions, Pialat discloses all the ways in which the future might be at once liberated, and enslaved, by the past.	A cinematic "cry" from one of the most revered of all auteurs, Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni (L'avventura, La notte, Il deserto rosso) depicts a world of heartbreaking alienation, with characters riven by trauma, cast against the stunning backdrop of northern Italy's Po Valley where the director spent his childhood	De Sica’s film depicts the troubled lives of two young boys caught up in the chaos of a world plagued by poverty and unemployment. Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) work on the street, where they shine the shoes of American troops. They dream of a better life, seeking solace in a horse that they ride to escape their harsh reality. When the boys are implicated in a petty crime, they are punished by the society that has robbed them of their innocence, resulting in tragic consequences.
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Fritz Lang returned to Germany on the eve of the 1960s to direct this enchanted penultimate work. Although no encapsulating title was lent at the time of release to what is, effectively, a single 3-hour-plus film split in two, the work that has come to be referred to in modern times as “the Indian epic” (consisting of Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das indische Grabmal) proved to be one of the legendary director’s most adventurous achievements. It was also one of the most popular successes Lang was to experience in his native land.	The first sound-film by one of the greatest of all filmmakers, Vampyr offers a sensual immediacy that few, if any, works of cinema can claim to match. Legendary director Carl Theodor Dreyer leads the viewer, as though guided in a trance, through a realm akin to a waking-dream, a zone positioned somewhere between reality and the supernatural. Deemed by Alfred Hitchcock 'the only film worth watching… twice'.	A masterwork of the German silent cinema whose reputation has only increased over time, Diary of a Lost Girl [Tagebuch einer Verlorenen] traces the journey of a young woman from the pit of despair to the moment of personal awakening. Directed with virtuoso flair by the great G. W. Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl represents the final pairing of the filmmaker with screen icon Louise Brooks, mere months after their first collaboration in the now-legendary Pandora’s Box [Die Büchse der Pandora].	Kwaidan features four nightmarish tales adapted from Lafcadio Hearn’s classic Japanese ghost stories. For this lavish, ‘scope production, Kobayashi drew extensively on his own training as a student of painting and the fine arts. Indeed, the breadth of the film’s poetic expression is unmatched in all of Japanese cinema: breathtakingly photographed on handpainted sets, the film is at once a miniature writ large, and an abstract wash of luminescent colours that seem to hail from another world.
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Disregarded and neglected by his family, executive toy manufacturer Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray) is unexpectedly reunited with his former co-worker Norma Miller (Barbara Stanwyck). As the old friends catch up on lost time, his children’s suspicions and hostility to the new relationship threaten to push their father away permanently and throw into disarray the lives of all concerned.	Out in East Hampton, behind a cloud of overgrown foliage and weeds, there is a large decaying mansion which is home to Edith Bouvier Beale and her grown-up daughter Little Edie. Big and Little Edie are the aunt and first cousin of Jacquelyn Kennedy Onassis, and this documentary is a portrait of their unusual life together. A stirring portrait by the pioneers of documentary filmmaking, the Maysles Brothers.	Murnau's film depicts the tale of an elderly hotel doorman (played by the inimitable Emil Jannings) whose superiors have come to deem his station as transitory as the revolving doors through which he has ushered guests in and out, day upon day, decade after decade. Reduced to polishing tiles beneath a sink in the gents’ lavatory and towelling the hands of Berlin’s most-vulgar barons, the doorman soon uncovers the ironical underside of old-world hospitality. And then — one day — his fate suddenly changes…	In one of the astonishing film debuts, Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne, a free spirit and the vessel for an almost Brontëan choler. She’s 16, and men exist — diverse lovers, an overbearing brother, and the father portrayed by Pialat himself in an unforgettable turn that displays the full magnitude of the cinema giant’s tenderness, force-of-will, and presence of being.
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Positioned somewhere between Bresson’s immortal Journal d’un curé de campagne and Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, Maurice Pialat’s staggering Sous le soleil de Satan [Under the Sun of Satan] addresses the torrent of spiritual and intellectual turmoil unloosed among the denizens of a little country parish. It is a film by turns calm and violent, buoyant upon the tears of mercy and gurgling with the blood of the Lamb.	The 1924 blockbuster that launched John Ford into Hollywood's emerging A-list of directors, The Iron Horse is an epic mythification of the American railroad's birth: a rambunctious blend of historical drama and Western actioner, revenge story and saloon comedy, noble biopic and all-bets-off tall tale. Neighbour to the pre-presidential Abe Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, young Davy Brandon accompanies his father westward to realise the elder's dream of a rail line bridging the ends of the continent.	NOW DISCONTINUED - LAST FEW REMAINING Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari [Tales of the Rain and Moon] is a highly acclaimed masterwork of Japanese cinema. Based on a pair of 18th century ghost stories by Ueda Akinari, the film’s release continued Mizoguchi’s introduction to the West, where it was nominated for an Oscar (for Best Costume Design) and won the the Venice Film Festival Silver Lion award (for Best Direction). Also includes Oyu-Sama.	NOW DISCONTINUED - LAST FEW REMAINING Filmed shortly before the Japanese government’s introduction of an anti-prostitution bill, Akasen Chitai is a compelling study of women torn between financial necessity and questions of conscience. It was nominated for the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and inspired French critic Jean Douchet to proclaim: “For me, along with Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu, the greatest film in the history of cinema”. Also Includes Yokihi.
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René Laloux, the director of Fantastic Planet, created Les Maîtres du temps, his penultimate animated feature film, in 1982. On planet Perdide, an attack of giant hornets leaves Piel – a young boy – alone in a wrecked car with his dying father. A mayday message reaches their friend Jaffar, an adventurer travelling through space. On board Jaffar’s shuttle are the renegade Prince Matton, his fiancée, and Silbad who knows the planet Perdide well. Thus begins an incredible race across space to save Piel…	Two Films by F.W. Murnau (Phantom and The Grand Dukes Finances). After filming the landmark Nosferatu, the silent cinema's master innovator F. W. Murnau demonstrated the reach of his genre versatility with a pair of films that explored the dimensions of the psychodrama and the adventure-programmer. All the Murnau characteristics are present: a vibrant naturalism, exquisite imagery, passages of dreamlike revery, and an atmosphere redolent with romantic longing.	One of the earth-shaking feature debuts in the history of cinema, Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance-nue [Naked-Childhood] provides a perspective on growing-up that rejects both sentimentality and modish cynicism. Its unflinching, but also warmly accommodating, outlook on childhood attracted François Truffaut to take on the role as co-producer of Pialat’s film — which, ironically, exists as much as a response to Truffaut’s own debut The 400 Blows as that film was to the ‘cinema of childhood’ that came before the New Wave	Maurice Pialat’s Police delivers on the raw promise of its title, insofar as much of its action qualifies as an insistently ‘procedural’ descent into the Paris drugs underworld. But the hyper-real route that the film takes to arrive there, before veering into a zone of dangerous emotional play, contributes to a disorienting, adventurous, and ultimately tremendously exciting experience unlike any ‘police-thriller’ ever before conceived.
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Before he arrived in Hollywood to leave his indelible (and inimitable) mark on timeless comedies like Trouble in Paradise and The Shop Around the Corner, Ernst Lubitsch created an expansive body of work in Germany that proved to be as varied in its tone as it was sophisticated in its measure of man and woman. This box set collects six recently restored works from the silent phase of Lubitsch's career, and casts new light on the director both as a fully-formed comic master, and as a virtuoso of cinematographic technique.	Douglas Sirk the master of the Hollywood melodrama turns back to his native Germany at the time of the Second World War for the film that would stand as his penultimate American feature. A CinemaScope production staged on a grand scale, Sirk's picture nevertheless pulsates with an intimacy that has known longing for too long, and seethes with the repression of emotions poised to explode like bombs.	Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini lovingly render the very spirit of Franciscan teaching in this extraordinarily fresh and simple film which was unappreciated at the time of its release, but now regarded as one of his greatest. Shot in a neorealist manner with non-professional actors it avoids the pious clichés of haloed movie saints with an economy of expression and a touching, human quality.	An intense study of the clash between medical ideals, the first full-length work from Georges Franju (Les yeux sans visage, Judex) is a gripping examination of postwar psychiatric care, boasting a memorable cast including Pierre Brasseur, Anouk Aimée, Charles Aznavour, Paul Meurisse, and Jean-Pierre Mocky.
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When scandalous Parisian playboy Pierre Martel (Pierre Richard-Willm) is forced by his family to leave France and his adored lover Florence (Marie Bell), he begins a new life in the Foreign Legion as Pierre Muller. Drowning his regrets in camaraderie, whores, and hell-raising, he is astonished at meeting Irma (also Marie Bell), a prostitute with an uncanny resemblance to his beloved, and begins a fitful scheme to allow her escape.	From Luchino Visconti the master director of such classics as La terra trema, Bellissima, and The Leopard comes this epic study of family, sex, and betrayal. Alongside Fellini's La dolce vita and Antonioni's L'avventura, Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers ushered Italian cinema into a new era, one unafraid to confront head-on the hypocrisies of the ruling class, the squalor in urban living, and the collision between generations.	Few filmmakers could rival Maurice Pialat's facility for transforming autobiographical material into the stuff of Art, La Gueule ouverte stands as one of the director's most intensely personal and most lacerating works. It is a film about illness: a condition of the body, and a name for the capacity to injure the ones who love us most. Monique Mélinand portrays a woman in the late stages of terminal illness.	Capturing Keaton’s first steps in front of a camera this box set charts his early association with ex-Keystone Kop Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle through to starring in, headlining, and directing his own box office smash hits. Using Chaplin’s old Hollywood studios in 1920, Keaton’s sophisticated technical inventiveness coupled with his haunted-yet-handsome ‘Stone Face’ persona, created a succession of the most timeless, classic comedy shorts ever realised.
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A morality tale for the ages, émigré Hollywood director William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster (aka All That Money Can Buy) combines European expressionism with quintessential Americana. Based on a short story by celebrated author Stephen Vincent Benét, it offers a study in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in which patriotism is cast in dramatic conflict with servitude to greed and materialism.	A powerful hymn to the human spirit, Alone Across the Pacific by renowned Japanese director Kon Ichikawa (An Actor's Revenge, The Burmese Harp, Tokyo Olympiad) tells the extraordinary real-life story of one man's obsessive quest to break free from the strictures of society. In 1962, Kenichi Horie (Yujiro Ishihara) embarks on a heroic attempt to sail single-handed across the Pacific Ocean.	An iconic film of the German expressionist cinema, and one of the most famous of all silent movies, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror continues to haunt and terrify modern audiences with the unshakable power of its images. By teasing a host of occult atmospherics out of dilapidated set–pieces and innocuous real-world locations alike, Murnau captured on celluloid the deeply–rooted elements of a waking nightmare.	Akira Kurosawa's The Idiot, his only adaptation of a Fyodor Dostoevsky novel, was a cherished project on which it is claimed he expended more effort than on any other film. A darkly ambitious exploration of the depths of human emotion, it combines the talents of two of the greatest Japanese actors of their generation — Toshiro Mifune (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo) and Setsuko Hara (Tokyo Story, Late Spring). The Idiot is perhaps the most contemplative of all Kurosawa's works.
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When casting children's roles, director Luchino Visconti is said to have been besieged by clamouring mothers, each trying to attract his attention to their child with cries of "Bellissima!". In his film of the same name, Visconti turned his experiences into art, in the form of a satire on the motivations and machinations at work in the film industry, with the famous Cinecittà studios as a backdrop.	Adapted from Émile Zola’s novel of the same name, Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Argent [Money] is an opulent classic of late silent-era cinema. Filmed in part on location at the Paris stock exchange, it reveals a world of intrigue, greed, decadence, and ultimately corruption and scandal when business dealings and amorous deceit combine.	The culmination of one of the greatest careers in film history, F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise blends a story of fable-like simplicity with unparalleled visual imagination and technical ingenuity. Invited to Hollywood by William Fox and given total artistic freedom on any project he wished, Murnau’s tale of the idyllic marriage of a peasant couple (George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor) threatened by a Machiavellian seductress from the city (Margaret Livingston) created a milestone of film expressionism.	An unforgettable mixture of bubblegum teen melodrama and grisly phantasmagoria, Obayashi’s deranged fairy tale House is one of Japanese cinema’s wildest supernatural ventures and a truly startling debut feature. A rollercoaster ride without brakes, House is by turns sinister, hilarious and curiously touching, with ceaseless cinematic invention and a satirical, full-blooded approach to the horror genre. A gigantic smash upon its original release in Japan.
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