Criterion today revealed the latest additions to Blu-ray Collection, scheduled for release this June. Joining the elite Criterion Collection are Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) and Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad.
The Seventh Seal: Disillusioned and exhausted after a decade of battling in the Crusades, a knight encounters Death on a desolate beach and challenges him to a fateful game of chess. Much studied, imitated, even parodied, but never outdone, Bergman’s stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning was one of the benchmark foreign imports of America’s 1950s art house heyday, pushing cinema’s boundaries and ushering in a new era of moviegoing.
Release date: 6/16/09
Bonus features include:
– New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
– Introduction by Ingmar Bergman, recorded in 2003
– Audio commentary by Bergman expert Peter Cowie
– A new afterword to the commentary by Cowie
РBergman Island (2006), an 83-minute documentary on Bergman by Marie Nyrer̦d, featuring in-depth and revealing interviews with the director
– Archival audio interview with Max von Sydow
– A 1998 tribute to Bergman by filmmaker Woody Allen
– Theatrical trailer
– Bergman 101, a selected filmography tracing Bergman’s career, narrated by Cowie
– Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
– New and improved English subtitle translation
– PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Gary Giddins
Last Year at Marienbad: Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal visual poem has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. A surreal fever dream, or perhaps a nightmare, Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad), written by the radical master of the New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-bedecked château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details and haunting scope, Resnais’ investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story.
Release date: 6/23/09
Bonus features include:
– New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Alain Resnais (with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
– New audio interview with Resnais
– New documentary on the making of Last Year at Marienbad, featuring interviews with many of Resnais’ collaborators
– New video interview with film scholar Ginette Vincendeau on the history of the film and its many mysteries
РTwo short documentaries by Resnais: Toute la m̩moire du monde (1956) and Le chant du styr̬ne (1958)
– Theatrical trailer
– Optional original, unrestored French soundtrack
– New and improved subtitle translation
– PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critic Mark Polizzotti and film scholar François Thomas, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s introduction to the published screenplay and comments on the film