Don’t get me wrong, I love the Criterion Collection as much as the next guy and probably more than most, but it hurts real bad to shell out $30 - $40 for a single film, no matter how beautifully resorted, supplemented and packaged it is.

So, for the past few years I’ve found a more cost-effective, if less glamorous way, to go about assembling a world-class home cinématheque. I like to call it “Hong Kong Criterion.” If you go to eBay and search for the words “Godard” (or “Bergman” or “Renoir”) and “Collection” together, you’ll find some totally sketched out listings of massive box sets from China comprising the bulk (or sometime the whole) of a foreign or art house director’s ouevre. Since these are auctions, prices often vary, but the average per-disc price hovers between 1-3 dollars. Take, for instance, my most recent acquisition, a 49 DVD set of the near-complete works for Jean-Luc Godard that me back around $60. A super-steal when compared to the $90 I spent last year on a 54 DVD set of Ingmar Bergman.

Wait, you say. There must be a catch if you’re paying peanuts for films that usually sell for much much more.

Here’s what’s going on here. The DVD sets are manufactured in China, where copyright laws appear to be virtually non-existent. Every eBay merchant selling these sets will claim that these are legitimate releases in China. That’s as may be, but they are still bootlegs. The packaging is quite clever, although riddled with labeling mistakes and typos (One of the discs in the Jarmusch set is labeled “Tranger than Paradise”).

Getting to the discs themselves, the quality varies greatly film to film. It seems that the Chinese pirates go to Criterion whenever possible and just present their dupe of the DVD with Chinese menus and optional Chinese subtitles. At other times, it boggles the mind to think where on earth they found such good prints of obscure films (I was highly impressed by the quality of “Until the End of the World” in my 26-disc Wim Wenders set.)

Some of the earlier releases (meaning sets that I purchased 2 summers ago) are a jumble of Region 1 and Region 2 DVDs, which makes viewing them a real pain without a multi-region player. This happened to me with the complete Woody Allen boxset (which nonetheless remains one of my valued treasures). However, with the more recent releases, the Chinese bootleg masters have luckily found a way to make more everything and anything region-free.

The compression of the disc is certainly of inferior quality than most commercial DVDs, but the films are in true DVD quality just the same - no VCD bullshit here. They just are somewhat sloppily done, and hence might skip a bit here and there. Best to play them on a progressive scan DVD player or - even better - on your computer’s DVD drive.

To date, I’ve purchased around a dozen of these sets: Hitchcock, Fellini, Scorsese, Woody Allen, Rohmer, Renoir, Bunuel, Jarmusch, Bertolucci, Godard, Polanski, Wenders and Bergman. Sure, not every single foreign title has English subtitles (most do, though!). That’s over 350 films, for which I probably paid no more that $500. Not bad, eh?

Whenever I see a Criterion release of a film that I have in these boxsets my eyes gaze longingly at it.
I hope sincerely to be able to indulge my fetishic lust someday in the near or distance future. For the time being, however, I’m perfectly happy to have these funny, cheaply made but perfectly adequate replacements.

Living up to Isherwood

A.J. Goldmann

BERLIN

“I recently returned to Berlin to live in a spirit of comfortable frugality and to write. Prior to this trip, I’d only known the city in the summer. I was unprepared for the harshness of winter in Berlin, where the cold itself has a color: gray.

“The gloom outside my window has made me into something of a bookish hermit. On my second night back, I decided it was time: I leaped to my amply-stocked bookshelf and removed my copy of Christopher Isherwood’s “The Berlin Stories,” an unaesthetic edition from the 1960s whose badly cracked spine resembles a broken accordion…”[READ COMPLETE ARTICLE]

—

In fact, “The Berlin Stories” only consistuted a fraction of an impromptu trilogy that I designed during my first weeks here. So, let me tell you about the Berlin-related works that flanked it.

My Improbable Berlin Trilogy

Several days after returning to Berlin, I finished reading Joseph Kanon’s “The Good German.” The mass-market trade paperback fit nicely into the pocket of my pea coat, which had made it a perfect companion while zigzagging around town during my last week in New York, during my delayed flight out of Newark and eventually while struggling with the bad cold that had attacked me as soon as my plane landed at Tegel.

The book had been recommended to me by a German journalist friend almost five years back. Were it not for the slickly-advertised film adaptation that came out last year, I probably would have never remembered to try it out. As it were, the badly received film did nothing to resurrect my interest in the book – in fact, seeing the promotional tie-in copies at Barnes & Noble acted as a deterrent. It was this edition, however, that wound up on the 50-cent rack of the Morningside Branch of the New York Public Library.

I was coming out of a months’-long ordeal of slogging through a long contemporary work set in Japan (and recommended to me by numerous friends) and was looking for a change of scenery and pace. I was also bound for Berlin in a week’s time and could use something to help reacclimatize me to life in the Hauptstadt.

At the center of the grim, noir-colored world of this carefully plotted neo-pulp tome is an American newspaperman who returns to Berlin in 1944, shortly after the Soviets stick a red flag on the Reichstag. He is searching for his lover amid the lies, secrets and rubble of the incinerated capital. Kanon’s knowledge of the city is dead on, and one of the book’s greatest pleasures for me was tailing the characters mentally as they wound their way around the sprawling wasteland: Mehringdamm, Hallesches Tor, Wittenbergplatz, Grünewald – these are places that I know only in their present-day incarnations.

Less convincing that the geographical precision is the climax of stock high-octave devices: a tense showdown during a parade followed by a lengthy car chase.

Somewhat let down by this chaotic finale to a lengthy, involved crime-drama, I wasted no time in choosing what next to tackle: “The Berlin Stories” (see above).

—

My idiosyncratic trilogy came to an end on Christmas Day with a screening of “The Serpent’s Egg,” set in an even older Berlin of 1923. This was Ingmar Bergman’s sole English-language effort, a Hollywood production he embarked on with Dino De Laurentiis while evading the Swedish tax authorities in 1977.

Shot on location in West Berlin, this puzzling film stars David Carridine as a thoroughly unappealing out-of-work acrobat in Berlin during the inflation crisis. His character, Abel Rosenberg, is interrogated by the police after his brother’s suicide. It seems that the police commissioner suspects him of committing a string of homicides. Rosenberg, who has witnessed police men walk calmly by as SA men beat Jews, chalks the commissioner’s suspicions up to anti-Semitism. He resorts to boozing and violence to cope with his depression and paranoia, and repeatedly abandons his brother’s ex-wife (Liv Ullman), a nightclub singer who is the only person who cares about him.

The film is full of wildly twisted and surreal touches: kinky cabaret numbers, horrific Nazi violence, evil Aryan doctors, coked-up prostitutes and an Orwellian dénouement. But the nightmarish noir promised by all these elements never takes full form. The script is full of loose threads and the ambiguous ending seems an act of desperation. Stylistically and thematically, it also seems to lack Bergman’s imprimatur. One of the only indications comes in a scene where an American priest asks a fearful suffering Liv Ullman to forgive him for his apathy. Are we expected for forgive Bergman for this same fault?

How to mourn the passing of greatest film artist of our time

A.J. Goldmann

On Monday morning, the world mourned the passing of its greatest living filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman. His death comes as less of a tragedy and more of a shock, a jarring reminder of the frailty of human existence. Bergman outlived virtually every other cinema great of his generation – most notably, Federico Fellini (who died in 1993) and Akira Kurosawa (who died in 1998). And unlike those directors, Bergman seemed to be working constantly up until near the end. His last film, “Saraband” – a sequel-of-sorts to Scenes from a Marriage - was screened at the 2004 New York Film Festival.

Bergman also granted numerous interviews in his last years. In these, he projected a wizened and robust personality that showed no sign of letting up. For a while, it just seemed to me that Bergman would hang on for the next decade or so. Because of Bergman’s steady activity and ubiquitous interview presence, his death seems very sudden and unreal. There will never be another Bergman Film. The world has lost one of its greatest visionaries. But he left us a legacy of nearly 50 films. Together, they constitute a rich portrait of the human comedy every bit as persuasive and artful as Shakespeare, Dickens and Henry James.

Though much of Bergman has made it onto DVD- largely thanks to the Criterion Collection – there are still several titles that have yet to surface, notably The Magician, Face to Face, After the Rehearsal and From the Lives of the Marionettes. Last night, I held a screening of The Virgin Spring – Bergman’s first Foreign-Film Oscar – and invited a couple of friends over. I thought it best to celebrate his life and work, rather than mourn. Immerse yourself in Bergman’s confident and tragic-comic world. Discover or rediscover the poetry of his filmmaking. It will be more than apparent that no grave will ever be able to fully contain him.

Here are some viewing suggestions:

Early Bergman – Eclipse Series no. 1

Some months back, the Criterion Collection debuted a new line of DVDs. The Eclipse Series showcases lesser-known works by major directors, unadorned by the special features that have become Criterion’s hallmark. For their first set, they elected five early Ingmar Bergman films.

The earliest addition to the set is 1944’s Torment, directed by Alf Sjöberg (best known for his 1951 version of Miss Julie), to which Bergman contributed an original screenplay, based loosely on his own hellish schoolboy experiences. This first dip into movies also provided Bergman an unlikely directing debut: he unexpectedly shot the film’s final scenes himself, after being requested to alter the bleak ending he had originally written.

Bergman’s proper directorial debut, Crisis (1946), is also the most overtly melodramatic tearjerker in the collection. This story of a country girl dragged from her foster mother by an extravagant aunt (who turns out to be the woman who birthed her) suffers from stilted narration and overly theatrical dialogue. As seen often in Bergman’s other works, characters soliloquize about life rather eloquently. At this stage in his career, though, Bergman hasn’t yet found a way to successfully integrate such raw psychological content into a narrative film.

Port of Call (1948) was Bergman’s first collaboration with cinematographer Gunnar Fischer. Fischer would remain Bergman’s cinematographer throughout the 1950s and go on to photograph Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. He brings a gritty, Rossellini-eque sensibility to this dark and sexually frank love story.

It is somewhat ironic that Port of Call, written by Olle Lansberg, is the most striking work in the box set as the only film that Bergman didn’t author alone. Perhaps at this early stage in his career, he benefited from the remove that directing somebody else’s screenplay allowed him. Of the films included in the set, it is the least theatrical. Bergman employs distancing techniques, such as multiple (sometimes confusing) narratives told in flashback, to present this story of a disintegrating marriage. The opening sequence is remarkable for its stillness, and points the way to his later forays into quiet desperation (see The Silence and Cries and Whispers).

The final film in the collection, To Joy (1949), stars Stig Olin (the irascible and charming star of Crisis) as a second-rate violinist unable to accept his own mediocrity. It features an incredibly mobile and fluid camera (courtesy, again, of Fischer) and is remarkable for how Bergman uses music-a crucial element in many of his later films.

Winter Light / the Silence / Through a Glass Darkly – Criterion Collection

The filming of the Trilogy marked a new era in Bergman’s career, when the director moved away from the expressionism of films like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries and evolved a paired-down, more theatrical and minimalist film art. Keeping the films’ more subdued character in mind, it is perhaps appropriate that Criterion has resisted the urge to load this box set with thousands of special features. Film historian Peter Cowie (who provided wonderful and insightful commentary for Criterion’s releases of Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal) introduces each film with a 10-minute discussion of the film’s symbolism and how Bergman’s evolving sensibilities mark both the content and style of the Trilogy, as well as his later films. Brief as these video introductions are, they are highly informative and serve as suitable replacement for garrulous audio commentaries.

The Magic Flute – The Criterion Collection

Though Bergman was famed for his opera productions (notably his staging of The Rake’s Progess), he only made one opera-movie in his career, 1954’s “The Magic Flute.”
Bergman frames his Magic Flute as a theatrical performance playing to a live audience. The production he recreates on a movie set is meant to evoke the original production of 1791 at the Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna. The film ushers us onto the stage and into the opera, cutting between the audience and the quaint production and gradually leading us deeper and deeper into the opera.
While we are given a proscenium arch, his film feels far from stagy. Slowly, the action moves further and further backstage until the stage has become the world. Bergman uses arresting close-ups and profile shots of his singer-actors, often training the camera on characters who react rather than act (The Queen of the Night aria is a terrifying example of both devices).
There is a fair amount of spoken dialogue in Mozart’s Singspiel, which Bergman makes his singer-actors whisper in a way that both slows things down and reminds of film’s power to capturing subtle human psychology. That Bergman marries this potential to opera’s searing emotionalism is part of what makes his Magic Flute one of the finest of all Film-Operas.

Fanny and Alexander – Criterion Collection

Though Bergman is often associated with Sturm und Drang explorations of existential despair and marital discord, it would be limiting to view Bergman as a purely sinister filmmaker. Made in 1982 and intended to be his swan song, Fanny and Alexander is the director’s most optimistic and humanistic film. It also ranks among his most visually lavish and dramatically rich. At once epic and intimate, the film recounts a year in the life of an aristocratic theatrical family living in early 20th-century Sweden. Through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander, the audience follows the family through their trials and triumphs, witnessing a dizzying spectrum of human experience which includes love, death, suffering, the supernatural, and the transcendent power of art.

Criterion’s beautiful five-disc box set more than does justice to what is arguably Bergman’s greatest achievement. It contains restored transfers of the standard three-hour theatrical version and, for the first time on American video, the uncut five-hour version Bergman made for Swedish television.

There will never be another. A grateful world bids farewell to you. Thanks Ingmar, for sharing your vision with us.