Kubrick Criterion

UK collection that is comprised of musical selections from Kubrick's central masterpieces, complimented by pieces which the director used as 'temp tracks' during the production and by all accounts with every intention of using these in the film, only to decide to replace them late on. In 2001, the scherzo from Felix Mendelssohn's 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (used for scenes of weightlessness) and Vaughan Williams 'Antarctica Suite' (for the Stargate effects and scenes on the moon) were both used in preview showings of the film before being discarded. While on Eyes Wide Shut, Wagner's 'Lieder I'm Triebhaus' ('In the Greenhouse') from Wesendonck Lieder was a significant theme in the production for more than a year before being replaced. We have also assembled the complete vintage ballroom music from The Shining. The final movement from Berlioz's 'Symphonie Fantastique', with it's epic use of the chant from the Roman Catholic Requiem mass, the 'Dies Irae', and a Sibelius piece, 'Valse Triste'. Both were important to the evolution of the film. Finally, as a young man, Stanley Kubrick fell in love with Sergi Prokofiev's score for the Sergei Eisenstein's first sound film, Alexander Nevsky. He played it to death, and it would inspire him later in his own use of dramatic music. From the scintillating recording by Fritz Reiner with the Chicago SO, we include the movement, 'Battle On the Ice'.

Features new remastered editions of five works from the director whose movies crossed new frontiers.

The hugely popular live American television plays of the 1950s have become the stuff of legend. Combining elements of theater, radio, and filmmaking, they were produced at a moment when TV technology was growing more mobile and art was being made accessible to a newly suburban postwar demographic. These astonishingly choreographed, brilliantly acted, and socially progressive “teleplays” constituted an artistic high for the medium, bringing Broadway-quality drama to all of America. The award-winning programs included in this box set – originally curated for PBS in the early 1980s as the series The Golden Age of Television, featuring recollections from key cast and crew members – were conceived by such up-and-comers as Rod Serling and John Frankenheimer and star the likes of Paul Newman, Mickey Rooney, Rod Steiger, Julie Harris, and Piper Laurie.

A young woman (Meiko Kaji), trained from childhood as an assassin and hell-bent on revenge for the murders of her father and brother and the rape of her mother, hacks and slashes her way to gory satisfaction in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Japan. Rampant with inventive violence and spectacularly choreographed swordplay, Toshiya Fujita’s pair of influential cult classics Lady Snowblood and Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance are bloody, beautiful extravaganzas composed of one elegant widescreen composition after another. The first Lady Snowblood was a major inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga, and both of Fujita’s films remain cornerstones of Asian action cinema.

Seized by customs upon entry to the United States, subject of a heated court battle, banned in cities across the United States, Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious - Yellow is one of the most controversial films of all time. This landmark document of Swedish society during the sexual revolution has been declared both obscene and revolutionary. It tells the story of Lena (Lena Nyman), a searching and rebellious young woman, and her personal quest to understand the social and political conditions in 1960s Sweden, as well as her bold exploration of her own sexual identity. Shattering taboos as it freely traverses the lines between fact and fiction, I Am Curious - Yellow is presented here for the first time with its companion piece I Am Curious - Blue, a parallel film featuring the same characters and in which the lines between documentary and fiction are even further blurred.

In the late 1940s, the incandescent Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman found herself so stirred by the revolutionary neorealist films of Roberto Rossellini that she sent the director a letter, introducing herself and offering her talents. The resulting collaboration produced a series of films that are works of both sociopolitical concern and metaphysical melodrama, each starring Bergman as a woman experiencing physical dislocation and psychic torment in postwar Italy. It also famously led to a scandalous affair and eventual marriage between filmmaker and star, and the focus on their personal lives in the press unfortunately overshadowed the extraordinary films they made together. Stromboli, Europe ’51, and Journey to Italy are intensely moving portraits that reveal the director at his most emotional and the glamorous actress at her most anguished, and that capture them and the world around them in transition.