Mar 2012
Pasolini's ACCATTONE
Available on 26th March, 2012: Accattone, the legendary debut from the martyr of Italian cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini.
By turns ragged and graceful, sacred and profane, Accattone charts the rise-and-fall destiny of Franco Citti’s eponymous street pimp, heroically resilient, tragically reliant on the fortunes of a prize whore and the general art of the scrounge.
Our Dual Format (Blu-ray + DVD) edition presents Pasolini’s film (referenced by Morrissey’s 2006 single “You Have Killed Me” — clip viewable here) in a luminous restored HD transfer. It is accompanied by the director’s 1965 feature-length essay documentary Comizi d’amore [Love Meetings], an exploration of Italian attitudes towards sex. Both films sport newly translated optional English subtitles, and are supplemented with their original theatrical trailers; a new feature-length audio commentary by Tony Rayns on Accattone rounds out the discs. The release’s 36-page booklet features a translation of Pasolini’s 1958 poem “To a Pope”; excerpts from a 1969 interview with Pasolini by Oswald Stack about both films; a 1975 essay on Accattone by the director; Pasolini’s original 1964 treatment for Comizi d’amore; and rare archival imagery.
Out simultaneously: our new Dual Format edition of Pasolini’s masterpiece The Gospel According to Matthew, which will be highlighted in this space soon. Look for more Pasolini from The Masters of Cinema Series in the months ahead…
Mar 2012
REPO MAN's Always Intense
Available NOW exclusively on a special director-approved Blu-ray in limited-edition ‘regular’ and SteelBook variations: Repo Man.
Alex Cox’s gonzo po-mo cult classic debuted in 1984 — the perfect year to drop a schizoid, Pynchon-parallel freakout that’s as deft with offering up classical cinematic technique as it is weaving together time-machines, UFOs, and DIY punk ethics into a singular “lattice of coincidence”.
Blanks might get the job done too, but our release comes loaded and live: a new high-definition master of the feature in its original aspect ratio (with the original mono soundtrack in DTS-HD Master Audio, and optional English SDH subtitles) is accompanied by an audio commentary with Alex Cox and executive producer (of early fame with The Monkees) Michael Nesmith, casting director Victoria Thomas, and actors Sy Richardson, Zander Schloss, and Del Zamora; an all-new 2012 video piece directed by Cox offering further thoughts on the film; the legendary and complete “TV version” of the film as prepared by Cox for network television in the 1980s which incorporates deleted material and surreal overdubs in place of profanity; a retrospective video piece on the making of the film with Cox, producers, and actors; a roundtable viewing of deleted scenes from the film with Cox, Nesmith, real-life neutron bomb inventor Sam Cohen, and character “J. Frank Parnell”; an extended video interview with the great actor Harry Dean Stanton; and the original theatrical trailer. To top the package off, this limited edition includes a mind-blowing full-colour 44-page booklet called The Repo Code specially created by Cox for this release, incorporating all manner of hand-drawn Repo ephemera; we think it’s one of our finest booklets ever.
In late March, something completely different: two classic Pasolini features on Dual Format (Blu-ray + DVD) editions…