It is my hope that this article looks out of date as soon as possible. I fear, however, that only a handful of the films mentioned herein will receive a respectable DVD release anytime soon. Six years into the DVD format and many "lost" films are rotting, unrestored and without a release. Why? Simply put - "money".

For a few years now I've been wondering about a number of films unreleased on DVD - who owns them? What shape are they in? Is anyone pushing to release them? This article is an attempt to understand the mechanics of film licensing, ownership and the frustrating problems that surround many of our favourite films.

Simple Extortion

Roughly sketched, it appears that globalisation, the megacorp mergers of the 90s, and shareholder demands have all focused studios' attention on the lowest common denominators, the easy buck, homogenisation and fast profits. The result is, if truth be told, that many companies treat their back catalogues rather shabbily (if they can find the actual films - industry folk have gone on record as saying that sometimes they can't even locate original negatives.) Today, MGM don't own any of their pre-1986 films (they sold them to Turner, now owned by Warners): confusingly, MGM bought Embassy, Orion, Polygram (who own Epic) and United Artists. After all this buying and selling, many films owned by these companies have incestuous lineages and the further down the family tree they are the more difficult it is to sort out the rights for DVD. Add to this the sheer number of films that a megacorp now owns and they start claiming it would be unprofitable to release "minority" films. If this is the case, why own the film at all if no-one's going to get to see it? The answer is simply because it is a license to print money. They guard the ownership of the films with their lives, sit on their behinds and license films to others more willing to do the hard work...

Suits vs. Film Lovers

Enter the independent DVD boutiques such as Criterion, Kino, Image - all companies prepared to cater for the "niche" markets and to release these so called "unprofitable" films.

Film purists (among whom I humbly count myself) have long preached about the sanctity and purity of experiencing film projected at twenty-four frames per second on a huge screen. Admirably, these same purists have also admonished home viewing via videocassette in favour of the arthouse experience. Those who continue to apply the same dogma to DVDs are, I'm afraid, beginning to look foolish. The birth of the DVD format has ushered in a great new phase of cinephilia for the 21st century. World Cinema sales on VHS were a drop in the ocean ten years ago: now, DVDs of World Cinema films have a loyal and rapidly growing fanbase as more people become disenchanted with the multiplex and films made by committees.

A New Era of Cinephilia

The vast majority of people live nowhere near an arthouse cinema nor get the chance to see travelling retrospectives of films. A properly remastered DVD finally offers the chance to view a film, at home, in exceptional clarity, and for the first time it is affordable. Laserdisc laid all the groundwork for this to happen, of course, but the equipment and discs were, at the time, prohibitively expensive. It's easy to forget that during the Laserdisc days, the major studios were never fully behind the format; happy to license their crown jewels (Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Taxi Driver, etc) to independents like the pioneering Criterion Collection. Companies like Criterion (clearly raving cineastes) carved a wonderful niche all their own by licensing films from the studios to create their own original aspect ratio transfers and extras. They pay license fees and royalties to the owners and the resulting discs sell like hotcakes. Now firmly established as the most impressive DVD authors in the world, it's easy to forget all the important work they did in the 80s and 90s on Laserdisc when, for example, they sold only 640 copies of Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. Criterion invented the audio commentary, demanded original aspect ratio (OAR) transfers, and made their own supplementary materials for each release. They engender a kind of format fetishism that is currently stronger than ever - and growing.

As we move into 2004, fans of World Cinema and classic films are in heaven on a monthly basis due to the amount of interesting releases around the world (the MoC DVD OF THE YEAR AWARD results are a taster of the cream of 2003). With the sheer amount of unreleased films languishing in vaults, it's no doubt daunting deciding what to release. Since we started the site, we've wanted to ask interesting folk in the industry what they'd personally like to see on DVD. For this article, the time felt right to ask a wide range of critics, curators, scholars and restorers for their picks and the results are fascinating (see columns to the left and right).

The Most Wanted

A few titles come up time and time again. Almost everybody I know wants to see Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating on DVD and it's not surprising to see it picked so often; Rivette's Out 1 is also another popular desire, along with Leo McCarey's sublime masterpiece Make Way For Tomorrow (1937). The direct inspiration for Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), McCarey's film details the impossibly sad last few years of an elderly couple who lose their house to a bank. Truly one of the most unusual and heartfelt Hollywood films of the era, it richly deserves a fine DVD. McCarey won an Oscar in 1937 - Best Director for The Awful Truth - the other film he made that year. On receiving his award he said that the Academy were rewarding him for the wrong film.

It's not just obscure World Cinema or ancient silent titles that make up these lists, many of the picks are lesser-known Hollywood films. Indeed, there are gaping holes in every area of interest. So many missing Sirk, both Rays (Satyajit and Nicholas), Siodmak, Lang, Murnau, Pabst films, and as Martin Koerber points out, many of the film restorations for these titles have already been done.

Mountains Of Work

Many highly desired foreign films are being delayed because the rightsholders (owners of the best materials) just haven't done any of the costly restoration work that's needed to get a nice DVD made. The Japanese are strangely uninterested in their own rich film heritage. Although Asmik Ace have released exceptional Hiroshi Teshigahara and Kaneto Shindo boxsets (75% subs), and Shochiku have released a number of Ozu boxsets (no subs), the Japanese have yet to restore and release anything on DVD by Kenji Mizoguchi or Mikio Naruse. Large companies like Shochiku and Toho have little idea that their films might sell 500% more if they were to add English subtitles. Toho actually prevented their licensee Asmik Ace from including English subtitles on one of the films in the Teshigahara boxset (The Man Without A Map). In a recent interview, Donald Richie (the famous Japanophile) spoke of his dismay at Shochiku for not bothering with subs on their recent Ozu DVD boxsets,"You idiots! What are you doing!", he told the company, "You could sell this all over the world."

It's worth stating (even though plainly obvious) that at this moment in time there are more films in existence than there have ever been. There are also more completely lost films from the first half of the 20th century than ever before. The majority of restoration and preservation work for world cinema and classic films is being carried out by various government sponsored institutes around the world, as well as a handful of lone maverick restorers. Thanks to collaborations between the British Film Institute, Fox and the Criterion Collection we will see a proper restoration of Luchino Visconti's The Leopard in 2004 (from original 70mm elements no less). This amount of effort and money will certainly not be spent on more than a handful of the films adorning the sides of this article. What will happen to those films over the next 100 years?

-----------------------------------------------------


For what it's worth, here is the combined list of the four MoC editors:

everything by Kenji Mizoguchi

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (Leo McCarey, 1937)

LES ANGES DU PECHE (Robert Bresson, 1943)

STROMBOLI (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

EUROPA 51 (Roberto Rossellini, 1951)

THE WRONG MAN (Hitchcock, 1956)

PLAYTIME (Tati, 1967) full length complete version - 3 hours

CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (Jacques Rivette, 1974)

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (Terence Davies, 1988)

DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE (Kieslowski, 1992)

SATANTANGO (Bela Tarr, 1994)

BEST INTENTIONS (Bille August, 1992)

A box of selected documentaries by Kieslowski

Norman McLaren Complete Works


So many more... Mikio Naruse; the other Bressons; the other Erice films; Miklos Jancso; unreleased Dreyer; so much European cinema; Indian (so many Satyajit Ray films!); so much in Asia; Sjöstrom; Straub/Huillet; classic animation: Starewicz, Norstein, Trnka, Avery, etc; - more Renoir; where on earth is Max Ophuls? - the list is endless of course...

[Footnote: I had to laugh as I put the finishing touches to this piece - here we are bemoaning the lack of hundreds of rich film classics on DVD whilst others are popping champagne corks at the recently announced 7 x disc Police Academy DVD boxset.]