Demon (Marcin Wrona, 2015)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Demon.

Adapted from Piotr Rowicki’s 2008 play Adherence, Marcin Wrona’s Demon is a horrifyingly comic and darkly atmospheric exploration of suppressed histories and dissolving minds. Set at a crumbling Polish country house, Polish-Brit Piotr is set to marry his fiancée Zaneta and meet for the first time her appearance-conscious parents. But as the ceremony proceeds, Piotr begins to come undone, and a dybbuk, an iconic ancient figure from Jewish folklore, takes hold of the groom and the entire celebration. Combining horror movie possession with unearthed national traumas and frivolous consumption, Demon is a modern art-horror classic.

Disc Features:

• 2K digital transfer with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Almonds and Raisins, new interviews with actors Itay Tiran, Agnieszka Zulewska, and producer Olga Szymanska
• Theatrical trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film critic J. Hoberman

White, White Storks (Ali Khamraev, 1966)

In an isolated and conservatively traditional Muslim village in Uzbekistan, a married woman, Malika, falls in love with a soft-spoken foreigner, Kayum, who has brought liberal Soviet attitudes and principles to the community, sometimes setting himself against the subordination of the town’s women by their male counterparts. Tensions rise as Kayum and Malika openly grow closer, raising the ire of Malika’s father and her husband as well as among those interested in maintaining the village’s old ways. A breakthrough film for Ali Khamraev, White, White Storks is a beautifully rendered docudrama that combines the textured honesty of Italian Neorealism, the family dynamics and tragedies of Yasujiro Ozu, and the poetry of Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying.

The Rugged Odysseys of Ali Khamraev

Eclipse is a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.

An artist of rock-solid humanism and amazing expressive power, Ali Khamraev is a giant who sits astride the history of Uzbek cinema. A graduate of Moscow’s Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in 1961, he went on to make more than thirty documentaries and twenty feature films – criss-crossing between romantic comedies, Western adventures, political dramas, TV mini-series, and art cinema. Through them all, Khamraev engages in the unveiling of traditional Muslim Uzbekistan and expresses a faith in the modernizing influence of Soviet values and technology. A wizard with landscapes and an instinctual expert of social dynamics, Ali Khamraev is truly an underappreciated master of world cinema.

White, White Storks (Belye, belye aisty)

Influenced by Mikhail Kalatozov’s black-and-white classic The Cranes Are Flying, the Italian Neorealist movement, and the interpersonal dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, Ali Khamraev traces the impossible romance of a married woman and an unconventional outsider in a small, traditional Uzbek village called “White Storks.”

The Seventh Bullet (Sedmaya pulya)

Set during the Central Asian revolts of the 1920s, a Red Army commander allows himself to be captured by a Basmachi warlord to reunite with his imprisoned battalion and lead them to victory in this Western-inspired adventure in the Soviet frontier.

The Bodyguard (Telokhranitel)

A grizzled mountain trapper and a conscientious revolutionary are tasked by a Red Army unit with the difficult task of transporting a captured sultan, along with his daughter and his loyal servant, through a harsh mountain landscape to a neighbouring province while pursued by a ruthless Bashmachi warrior.

Triptych (Triptikh)

This modernist political melodrama set in a small northern town in 1946 follows three women struggling with the social constraints of post-World War II Uzbekistan: an illiterate girl who wants to build a house on her own, a school teacher aiming to bring progressive ideas to the villagers, and an old woman kidnapped in her youth by a poor peasant and forced into marriage.

I Remember You (Ya tebya pomnyu)

In this semi-autobiographical meditation on the past, an adult son’s journey from Samarkand across Russia to find the grave of his father becomes a poetic voyage into his subconscious memory and an exploration of intersecting Uzbek and Russian traditions.

With notes by Kent Jones

The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents The Devils.

Banned, censored, and suppressed for years, the director’s cut of Ken Russell’s infamous masterpiece depicts the rise and fall of 17th century French priest Urbain Grandier, tried and executed for a series of possessions in Loudon, France.  Masterful performances by Oliver Reed as Grandier and Vanessa Redgrave as Sister Jeanne, Urbain’s hunchbacked nemesis, are matched by Russell’s audacious direction and contributions by Derek Jarman, David Watkin, and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.  Mixing political and religious commentary with transgressive, cinematic spectacle, The Devils is proudly presented here, for the first time for home viewing, as Russell originally intended, restored with previously cut footage and uncompromised by past controversies.

Disc Features:

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New audio commentary featuring filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and film critic Richard Crouse
• New audio commentary featuring film critic Mark Kermode and editor Mike Bradsell
• Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of The Devils, Paul Joyce’s hour-long, 2002 documentary made for TV and presented by Mark Kermode
• New interviews with actresses Vanessa Redgrave and Gemma Jones and actors Murray Melvin and Dudley Sutton on the filming of The Devils
• New interview with composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies on the music of The Devils
• Video appreciations by David Cronenberg, Alex Cox, Guillermo del Toro, Terry Gilliam, John Landis, Joe Dante, Lloyd Kaufman, and Mitch Davis
• Excerpts from Saskia Baron’s 1995 made-for-TV documentary, Empire of the Censors
• Original theatrical trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring selected reviews from The Devils‘ release and a new essay by Russell biographer Joseph Lanza