just a quick post to set up my next one -
Although I plan on trying to do the Criterion Releases in order, I'm also including the Eclipse Releases, and those not necessarily in order - part of the reason is the fact that these are some great lesser-known films - (the first 9 films of Akira Kurosawa for example) and because they're only released on DVD, they are very accessible and affordable and also on Filmstruck The other reason is sometimes, it's nice to take a break genre-wise with some Nikkatsu Noir or Documentaries, and I'll throw them in as they come to my attention or my library request queue
To that end, One of my favorite links is the Eclipse Viewer Podcast on Criterioncast - not only does each episode include a number of links to other materials, but you get two great film guys talking about the films - Sometimes what I'll do is listen to the part up to the discussion of the films to get the backstory, and then come back after going thru them.
To that end, I had a second project I was wrapping up as I was starting this one - I have been watching the films of Satyajit Ray in Chronological order, and 3 of his last 4 films are part of an Eclipse Series - (I do not know why the 4th wasn't included) - but for that reason, since I was going to have to go thru this boxed set to complete my viewings, I felt it was time to throw an Eclipse Boxed Set in here. If you live in the Midwest US, you'd know we've had a cold snap of -20 degrees F, and that is conductive to staying indoors and watching movies if everyone else in the house is asleep.
One final point - although some of Satyajit's films have been unreleased here in the States, a large number of the unreleased ones are available on Youtube and in poor quality (illegal, I suppose) bittorrent downloads. Most are, if not always decently subtitled, but as part of this quest I've watched some cruddy quality films, with no restoration and often subtitles from the opensubtitles.org website that didn't sync up. My favorite headache is having a lower quality copy of "Hirak Rajar Deshe" but a higher quality YouTube stream BUT one that dropped the Subtitles for Bengal Karaoke lines during the songs - so I flipped back and forth about a dozen times.
I also had a Netflix DVD for "The Elephant God" where something broke in Subtitle encoding and I had to burn the disk to a file and find my own subtitles because somehow the DVD was broke.
We tend to forget what a great time we live in to get great quality restorations with in sync subtitles (that can be turned off - many subtitles have been embedded in the prints.) When trying to find these unreleased films, many of which have suffered physical damage - (See The Song of the Little Road, an excellent if slightly out of date documentary about preservation of Ray's legacy) - you might find some films that don't look great blown up on a 55 inch screen, but it's a great opportunity to watch all of a Director's films chronologically, and I hope to do that with other directors that stick out to me during this blog -
Up next - Eclipse 40 - Late Ray
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