Friday, March 16, 2007

Criterion Melts your Mind with Eastern European Surrealist Sexfilms!!!

Criterion have just updated their website and included among the usual somewhat boring art-house stuff are two of Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev's wild sexually and politically provacative surrealist films WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM and SWEET MOVIE.
We're really looking forward to these!
Here's the insane info:

SWEET MOVIE



Pushing his themes of sexual liberation to their boiling point, Yugoslavian art-house provocateur Dusan Makavejev followed his international sensation WR: Mysteries of the Organism with this full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie-watching. Sweet Movie tackles the limits of personal and political freedom with kaleidoscopic feverishness, shuttling viewers from a gynecological beauty pageant to a grotesque food orgy with scatological, taboo-shattering glee. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema.


DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

*New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Dusan Makavejev

*New video interview with Makavejev

*New interview with Balkan film scholar Dina Iordanova

*Actress Anna Prucnal sings a song featured in the film

*New and improved English subtitle translation


WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM



What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dusan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision WR: Mysteries of the Organism, which begins as an investigation of the life and work of controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich, then explodes into a freeform narrative of a beautiful young Slavic girl's sexual liberation. Banned in the director's former homeland, WR is both whimsical and bold in its intersection of politics and sexuality.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

*New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Dusan Makavejev

*Audio commentary assembled from Raymond Durgnat's 1999 book on the film

*Hole in the Soul, Makavejev's 1994 tragicomic autobiographical short film, originally made for the BBC

*New video interview with Makavejev

*New and improved English subtitle translation

*PLUS: A new essay by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum

What with the Jodorowsky discs and Fantoma Films giving Kenneth Anger's work the deluxe DVD treatment, 2007 is shaping up to be a banner year for world surrealist film!
Join the revolution!
The Worldweird revolution!!

3 comments:

laird said...

To truly make 2007 a banner year for surrealism I will cross my fingers for some US (hopefully Criterion) releases of Bunuel's Mexican work (particularly Exterminating Angel) and Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct.

But so far so good! Viva 2007!

Anonymous said...

I'm loving the cover for WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM

Anonymous said...

Wow, I had to check that this wasn't an April 1st post! Glad to see some more unknown cinema come to the forefront.