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| 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. | 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. | 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. | The latest film from Kiyoshi Kurosawa the hugely acclaimed Japanese director famous for his groundbreaking, existential horror films such as Cure and Kairo [Pulse] set Cannes alight this year with a surprising change of pace to, that staple of Japanese cinema, the family drama. |
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| 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. | If cinema has its equivalents
to the master modernists of music,
painting, or literature, then one of the tradition's foremost
practitioners is undoubtedly Alain Resnais and Muriel, ou le Temps d'un
retour represents one of his
earliest, and greatest, triumphs. In Resnais' two preceding features,
the
master filmmaker pioneered new ways of representing inner reality and
emotion; but with Muriel, he merged the vicissitudes of his characters'
personal pasts, and married them to the traumas of the political
present namely, the French war in Algeria. |
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. | 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. |
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| Brimful with brooding psychological torment, Kokoro is vintage Kon Ichikawa (An Actor's Revenge, The Burmese Harp, Tokyo Olympiad). Based on a novel by celebrated Japanese author Natsume Soseki, the director foregrounds its themes of individual isolation and social estrangement, most notably in a central protagonist stricken by existential demons and stranded by changing times. | 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. |
Detective Bun
(Lau
Ching Wan) was recognised as a talented criminal profiler until he
sliced off his right ear to offer as a gift at his chief's farewell
party. Branded as
'mad' discharged
from the force, he has lived in seclusion with his beloved wife May
(Kelly Lin) ever since. Packed with exclusive features. This was also
our first Blu-Ray release! |
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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| 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. | 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. |
Freddy and Marie are two teenagers with their futures uncertain and their present undefined. They ride motorbikes, they have sex — communication like any other sort. But in their hometown of Bailleul in Flanders, where news from the world-at-large disappears just as quickly as it drifts in, death proves to be inescapable, and decidedly permanent. As the film’s powerful climax unfolds, the viewer will come away with his or her own interpretation of how the life of Christ has figured into the story of Freddy and Marie — a contemplation on the magnitude of mercy. | One of the masterworks of 1960s cinema, La notte (The Night) marked yet another development in the continuous stylistic evolution of its director, Michelangelo Antonioni even as it solidified his reputation as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. La notte is Antonioni's 'Twilight of the Gods' but composed in cinematic terms. |
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| 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. | In 1929, F.W. Murnau invited
leading documentarist Robert Flaherty to collaborate on a film
to
be be shot on location in Tahiti, a Polynesian idyll in which Murnau
imagined a cast of island actors would provide a new form of authentic
drama and offer rare insight into their "primitive" culture. The result
of their collaboration was Tabu,
a film that depicts the details of
indigenous island life to tell a mythical tale that is rich in the
universal themes of desire and loss. |
Famously described by the late Ingmar Bergman as “a work of genius”, Peter Watkins’ multi-faceted masterwork is more than just a biopic of the iconic Norwegian Expressionist painter, it is one of the best films ever made about the artistic process. Focusing initially on Munch’s formative years in late 19th century Kristiania (now Oslo), Watkins uses his trademark style to create a vivid picture of the emotional, political, and social upheavals that would have such an effect on his art. | 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… |
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| 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. | Melville’s cinematic adaptation
– partly shot in Vercors’ own house –
tells the story of a German officer, Werner von Ebrennac who is
billeted to the house of an elderly man and his niece in occupied
France. Resisting
the intruder, the uncle and niece refuse to speak to the German
officer, who warms himself by the fire each evening espousing
idealistic views about the relationship between France and Germany.
These propagandised illusions are shattered, however, when a trip to
Paris reveals the truth of what is really going on. |
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]. | Reality and artifice, truths and lies, the means and the ends — these are the poles traversed by Orson Welles in his landmark examination of the nature of authenticity and artistic essence: F for Fake. Described by Welles as “a new kind of film,”? F for Fake — a.k.a. Fake!, a.k.a. About Fakes, a.k.a. ?Question Mark”?) — is a prism of a movie, a kaleidoscope in which fiction, documentary, and the poetic essay interlock, fragment, and recombine to form one of the most entertaining and profound works in all of cinema. |
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| 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. | With its mixture of purely
narrative sequences and documentary footage, Funeral Parade of Roses
comes to us from a moment when cinema set itself to test, and even
eradicate, the boundaries between fiction and reality, desire and
experience; consequently, the film shares a kinship with such other
1969 works as Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide and Ingmar Bergman’s A
Passion [The Passion of Anna]. Yet Matsumoto achieves a zig-zag
modulation between pathos and hilarity that makes his picture utterly
unique: a filmic howl in the face of social, moral, and artistic
convention. |
FW Murnau's 1926 Faust represents a step up from his better-known Nosferatu. Oddly, Faust is a less familiar film than the vampire quickie and this release affords fans a chance to see what Murnau can do with an equally major fantasy story. Adapted neither from Marlowe's play Dr Faustus nor Goethe's verse drama, the script scrambles various elements of the legend and presents a Faust driven to summon the Devil by despair as a plague rages through the town, desperate to gain enough learning to help his neighbours. | Financed by Marcel Pagnol’s production company, Jean Renoir’s Toni is a landmark in French filmmaking. Based on a police dossier concerning a provincial crime of passion, it was lensed by Claude Renoir on location in the small town of Les Martigues where the actual events occurred. The use of directly-recorded sound, authentic patois, lack of make-up, a large ensemble cast of local citizens in supporting roles, and Renoir’s steadfast desire to avoid melodrama lead to Toni often being labeled “the first ‘neorealist’ film”. |
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| Based on the true-life case of the incarceration of Dr. Samuel Mudd (Oscar-winning Warner Baxter), The Prisoner of Shark Island is a stirring account of the victimization of a simple man. This fast-moving and gripping drama — rarely seen and remarkably timeless — follows Mudd through a calamitous series of brutal encounters. Driven by selfless integrity and his honourable commitment to duty, Mudd exemplifies the quintessential Ford hero who has become, unwittingly, an enemy of the people. | Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four
Eyes is one of Japan’s most beloved films. In 1999 it was picked by
Japanese critics as one of the ten best Japanese films of all time.
Both a huge commercial and critical success, this deeply affecting
anti-war film has, according to the critic Sato Tadao, “wrung more
tears out of Japanese audiences than any other post-war film”. |
Assassination marked Masahiro Shinoda’s first attempt at a period film, and is widely considered to be his finest achievement. Previously gaining fame and status alongside Nagisa Oshima and Kiju Yoshida, challenging established Japanese cinema with tales of reckless youth. Shinoda graduated from Shochiku, where, like Shohei Imamura, his grounding was working as an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu. | 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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| Akira Kurosawa’s Scandal — as relevant now as when made — is a pointed attack on the rising power of the press and their practices in the newly-Americanised postwar Japan of 1950. Kurosawa was outraged by the gutter press’ actions, where “personal privacy is never respected”, and by how the public’s voyeuristic tendency to delve deeper into the lives of celebrities only encouraged this disrespect. Stirred to broaden his film’s scope, Kurosawa made the film a study of personal honour, one which highlights the need for ordinary individuals to speak out against injustice and corruption. | Tyrone Power, cast against type
— at his own insistence — gives the
performance of his lifetime as handsome scumbag / carnival barker /
con-man Stanton Carlisle. He seduces fellow sideshow artiste
Mademoiselle Zeena to learn the secret of the
once-lucrative mind-reading act she performed with her alcoholic
husband. Carlisle, a “born mentalist”, secures the secret
method and sets off with his new carnie wife, Molly to
milk the bigtime as a spiritualist in Chicago. As Carlisle’s success
grows, it’s only a matter of time before his greed brings his world
crashing down around him. |
NOW DISCONTINUED, VERY LIMITED
STOCK. René Laloux, created Gandahar, his final animated feature film, in 1988. Based on an original story by Jean-Pierre Andrevon, and a huge hit in France at the time of its release, it combines Laloux’s famous imagination with that of animation designer Philippe Caza. |
Both controversial and relentless in its depiction of suppression and brutality, Punishment Park was heavily attacked by the mainstream press and permitted only the barest of releases in 1971. Peter Watkins’ film has established itself as one of the key, yet rarely seen, radical films of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Giving voice to the disaffected youth of America that had lived through the campus riots at Berkeley, the trial of the Chicago Seven and who were witnessing the escalation of the Vietnam War, Punishment Park was named by Rolling Stone as one of their top ten films of 1971. |
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| 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. | 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.
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Widely regarded as Yamanaka’s greatest achievement, Humanity and Paper Balloons [Ninjo kami fusen] was, tragically, his last film, and only one of three that survive today. In a short, six year, 22 film career Yamanaka quickly earned a reputation for exceptionally fluid editing and a beautiful visual form likened to the paintings of Japanese masters. | Filmed on the virtually deserted Setonaikai archipelago in south-west Japan, The Naked Island was made — in the words of its director — “as a ‘cinematic poem’ to try and capture the life of human beings struggling like ants against the forces of nature”. Kaneto Shindo, director of Onibaba and Kuroneko, made the film with his own production company, Kindaï Eiga Kyokai, who were facing financial ruin at the time. Using one-tenth of the average budget, Shindo took one last impassioned risk to make this film. |
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| 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. | Fritz Lang’s penultimate silent
film, Spione [Spies], is a flawlessly constructed labyrinthine spy
thriller. Hugely influential, Lang’s famous passion for meticulous
detail combines with masterful storytelling and editing skills to form
a relentless story of intrigue, espionage, and blackmail. An
international spy ring, headed by Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), uses
technology, threats, and murder to obtain government secrets. As master
spy, president of a bank, and music hall clown, Haghi leads several
lives using instruments of modern technology to spearhead a mad rush
for secrets — secrets that assert his power over others. |
Teshigahara’s debut feature, Pitfall [Otoshiana], was the first of his collaborations with novelist/playwright Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu. Beautifully filmed in an abandoned, postwar coal-mining town in Western Japan, it is part social-realist critique, part unsettling ghost fable. Examining themes of alienation, workers’ rights, and identity, Teshigahara and Abe’s exotically strange film evokes the cinema of Antonioni, Resnais, the writing of Kafka, Beckett, Carroll, and the French existentialists. | Following Woman of the Dunes [Suna no onna] in 1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara continued his collaboration with avant-garde novelist/playwright Kobo Abe and experimental composer Toru Takemitsu for The Face of Another [Tanin no kao]. Starring Tatsuya Nakadai (Yojimbo, Kagemusha) as a man “buried alive behind eyes without a face”, the film addresses the illusive nature of identity and the agony of its absence. |
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| F. W. Murnau made this film adaptation of Molière’s satire for UFA early in 1925 and it was released the following year, shortly followed by Faust. By presenting the play as a film-within-a-film, Murnau takes the opportunity to place the material in a contemporary setting, sandwiched inside a morality lesson about greed and hypocrisy. A devious housekeeper convinces her master to cut his worthy grandson out of his will and to leave the riches to her instead. The grandson, disguised as the projectionist of a travelling cinema show, flatters his way into the home to project a film of Tartuffe in an attempt to open his grandfather’s eyes. Emil Jannings plays Tartuffe with creepy panache in a tour-de-force turn alongside Lil Dagover and Werner Krauss. | NOW DISCONTINUED, VERY LIMITED
STOCK. Nicholas Ray’s epic 1959 film about Eskimo life was unfairly victimised on release, censored at the UK cinema, and neglected by both TV and home video for decades. The Savage Innocents continued Ray’s fascination with alternative lifestyles — examining the life of Eskimos and their remoteness from “civilised” values. It represents Ray’s first and most ambitious attempt to break free from Hollywood and forge his own route. |
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. | Three of Naruse's most highly regarded films presented in a lavish 3 DVD box set along with an accompanying book containing essays, director biography, and detailed discussion of each film. Special faetures include: Full length audio commentary on SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN by Kent Jones and Phillip Lopate with audio discussions on REPAST and FLOWING. |
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