Oscar's Cinema Journal 2005

[arsaib4]

Originally posted by oscar jubis
Any alternatives to spending close to $30 each for Lady of Musashino and Life of Oharu and $40 for Au Hasard Balthazar on UK dvd? Any chance of them being released here or in Asia?

I wish I had a better answer for you but unfortunately not too many other options are available right now. Criterion released Life of Oharu on LD so I am assuming that they still own its rights. Same is probably true for Musashino. I've heard that Criterion will release Balthazar later this year now that it's out in the U.K. but then similar things were said last year. Simply put: Criterion needs to drop everything else from their slate and start releasing all the films they can from Bresson and Mizoguchi.

Surprisingly, the Chinese haven't performed those "port jobs" on the Artificial-Eye released discs of Mizoguchi films where they simply add Chinese script to the box and dvd changing nothing else. (How official are those DVDs? I'm not sure since they aren't available anywhere else online outside of Ebay. Do I care? Nope--I bought the "Chinese" AE released The Apu Trilogy for $15, great quality.)

Of course almost everthing from Mizoguchi is available in France. Heck, even the Spanish have released much of his work. Life of Oharu is available for about 12 eur, not to mention couple of box-sets consisting of 5 films each.

http://www.dvdgo.com/product.asp?cat...+Life+Of+Oharu