Oscilloscope Laboratories is proud to offer the following Milestone Films title. Milestone is a curated selection of great films in the best versions possible. You can purchase both Oscilloscope and Milestone products in the same order.
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The Sorrow and the Pity Dir. Marcel Ophuls
A chronicle of a French city under the occupation. Director Marcel Ophuls combined interviews and archival film footage to explore the reality of the French occupation in one small industrial city, Clermont-Ferrand. He spoke with resistance fighters, collaborators, spies, farmers, government officials, writers, artists and veterans. The result is a shattering portrait of how ordinary people actually conducted themselves under extraordinary circumstances. By turns gripping, horrifying, and inspiring, Academy Award nominee "The Sorrow and the Pity" is a triumph of humanist filmmaking and a testament to the power of cinema. Before "Shoah," "Schindler's List," "The Long Way Home" and "The Last Days," there was "The Sorrow and the Pity."
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DVD
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Araya Dir. Margot Benacerraf
Benacerraf’s tour de force ARAYA explores a day in the lives of three families living in Araya, an arid peninsula in northeastern Venezuela. For centuries, since its discovery by the Spanish, the region’s salt was collected and stacked into radiant white pyramids. Benacerraf captures breathtaking and unforgettable images – from the saliñeros toiling to build the mountains of salt, to fishermen hauling in huge teeming nets, to a young girl and her grandmother laying “flowers” of shells on windswept graves.
Benacerraf's meticulously planned tone poem’s imagery, music, sound, and language create a moving and magical exploration of a desolate place and the remarkable people who lived there.
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DVD
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I Am Cuba: The Ultimate Edition Dir. Mikhail Kalatozov
Started only a week after the Cuban missile crisis and designed to be Cuba's answer to both Sergei Eisenstein's propaganda masterpiece, Potemkin and Jean-Luc Godard's freewheeling romance, Breathless, I Am Cuba turned out to be something quite unique - a wildly schizophrenic celebration of Communist kitsch, mixing Slavic solemnity with Latin sensuality. The plot, or rather plots, feverishly explore the seductive, decadent (and marvelously photogenic) world of Batista's Cuba - deliriously juxtaposing images of rich Americans and bikini-clad beauties sipping cocktails poolside with scenes of ramshackle slums filled with hungry children and gaunt old people. Using wide-angle lenses that distort and magnify and filters that transform palm trees into giant white feathers, Urusevsky's acrobatic camera achieves wild gravity-defying angles as it glides effortlessly through long continuous shots. But I Am Cuba is not just a catalog of bravura technique - it also succeeds in exploring the innermost feelings of the characters and their often desperate situations. Shown unsubtitled at the San Francisco International Film Festival, I Am Cuba received two standing ovations - during the screening. The first movie ever jointly presented by master filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, I Am Cuba is one of the great discoveries in cinema. It will change your view of cinema forever!
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DVD
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Killer of Sheep Dir. Charles Burnett
Killer of Sheep examines the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts in the mid-1970s through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse.
Frustrated by money problems, he finds respite in moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a coffee cup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife in the living room, holding his daughter. The film offers no solutions; it merely presents life — sometimes hauntingly bleak, sometimes filled with transcendent joy and gentle humor.
Killer of Sheep was shot on location in Watts in a series of weekends on a budget of less than $10,000, most of which was grant money. Finished in 1977 and shown sporadically, its reputation grew and grew until it won a prize at the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival.
Since then, the Library of Congress has declared it a national treasure as one of the first fifty on the National Film Registry and the National Society of Film Critics selected it as one of the "100 Essential Films" of all time. However, due to the expense of the music rights, the film was never shown theatrically or made available on video. It has only been seen on poor quality 16mm prints at few and far between museum and festival showings.
Now, thirty years after its debut, the new 35mm print of Killer of Sheep, brilliantly restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive, is ready for its long-awaited international release.
Milestone's premiere of the restored Killer of Sheep was at the 2007 Berlinale Film Festival and the theatrical release begins in Spring of this year.
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DVD
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The Exiles Dir. Kent Mackenzie
Selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival, The Exiles (1961) is an incredible feature film by Kent MacKenzie chronicling a day in the life of a group of twenty-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the district of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California. Bunker Hill was then a blighted residential locality of decayed Victorian mansions, sometimes featured in the writings of Raymond Chandler, John Fante and Charles Bukowski. The structure of the film is that of a narrative feature, the script pieced together from interviews with the documentary subjects.
The film features Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, and Tommy Reynolds. The film shares a curious number of surface similarities with Charles Burnett's legendary Killer of Sheep: they were both gritty, frills-free depictions of marginalized Los Angeles communities made within about a decade from each other by young filmmakers who were both compared to John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica, they both have existed for decades without theatrical release, they both have been featured in Thom Andersen's film Los Angeles Plays Itself, they both have been restored by Ross Lipman at the UCLA Film & Television Archives and they both are Milestone Film & Video releases.
One of the significant distinctions between The Exiles and Killer of Sheep is that MacKenzie (unlike Burnett) was a definitive outsider to the community he was filming--he was a well-to-do white man from the East coast amongst Native Americans, Mexicans and Filipinos in a low-income L.A. community. Regardless, his sensitivity and his genuinely penetrating interest in attempting to understand the people in his film via filming them shines through (he, like Burnett, involved the stars of the film in the writing and filming process), curbing the tendencies towards sentimentalism and fetishization that often emerge in attempts to represent "the other." Despite (or because of) the fact that no other films at the time were (and still very few now are) depicting Native American peoples (aside from the overblown stereotypes in Westerns) let alone urban Native Americans, The Exiles could not find a distributor willing to risk putting it out theatrically, and so over the years it fell into obscurity, known and loved by cinephiles and admired for its originality and honesty by such Native American filmmakers as Chris Eyres (Smoke Signals, 1998) and Ben-alex Dupris (experimental filmmaker and writer) but remaining largely unseen to the public, including communities like the ones depicted in the film. The 2008 theatrical release will provide the opportunity to redeem this fact.
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DVD
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On the Bowery - The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Vol. 1 Dir. Lionel Rogosin
For songwriter Woody Guthrie, his guitar was a machine that “kills fascists.” For Lionel Rogosin, the weapon of choice was a movie camera, and his first battle was waged on the streets of New York City.
Exploring the underworld of the city’s skid row, Rogosin developed his signature style. After months drinking with men he met on the Bowery, Rogosin worked with his buddies to write a screenplay that reflected their lives— and then cast them as themselves. This technique of making films “from the inside” allowed Rogosin to film ordinary people caught up in universal problems. His films explored alcoholism, homelessness, racial discrimination, war, labor conflict, and poverty with great compassion and honesty.
ON THE BOWERY chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row. When the film opened it 1956, it exploded on the screen, burning away years of Hollywood artifice, jump-starting the post-war American independent film movement and earning an Oscar nomination. Now gloriously restored by the Cineteca di Bologna, ON THE BOWERY is both an incredible document of a bygone era and a vivid and devastating portrait of addiction that resonates today just as it did when it was made.
GOOD TIMES, WONDERFUL TIMES was Rogosin’s powerful response to militarism and fascism. For two years, Rogosin traveled to twelve countries, amassing footage of war atrocities from national archives. He then interspersed these harrowing images with scenes of a London cocktail party’s inane chatter. The juxtaposition satirizes the tragic irresponsibility of modern man. Good Times, Wonderful Times, released at the height of the Vietnam conflict, became one of the great antiwar films of the era.
OUT, a documentary by Rogosin made for the United Nations, tells the plight of Hungarian refugees fleeing to Austria in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
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BLU-RAY
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Beyond the Rocks Dir. Sam Wood
Beyond the Rocks, the silent romance starring film legends Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino was long considered one of the great "lost" films from the Hollywood golden age, only a one-minute fragment was known to exist in the Nederlands Filmmuseum.
Lost for over eighty years, film cataloguers at the Nederlands Filmmuseum were amazed to find the first two nitrate reels of Beyond the Rocks when inventorying a vast collection of nitrate bequeathed to them by a film collector from Haarlem, they were amazed. The Filmmuseum staff then searched for many tense months until they found and identified all the missing reels of the film. Beyond the Rocks has been restored under the auspices of Filmmuseum archivists Mark-Paul Meyer and Giovanna Fossati, with lab work by Haghefilm Conservation. The film premieres with a brand-new score by the well-known Dutch composer Henny Vrienten.
When Paramount approached Swanson to star with Valentino, the studio intended the assignment to be "punishment" for her demands for greater control. Swanson never let on that the two actors often rode horses together in the Hollywood hills and that she was actually delighted to costar with such a close friend.
For their project, Paramount chose a well-loved novel by popular author Elinor Glyn whose romantic pot-boilers often featured strong women and virile men in exotic locales. (She also was the author of It, which made Clara Bow an international sensation.) Sam Wood, was assigned to direct the production. Wood went on to have a long and respected career that included such superior films as Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Devil and Miss Jones, Kings Row, Pride of the Yankees and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
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The Big Animal Dir. Jerzy Stuhr
The Big Animal (Duze Zwierze), scripted by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski and shot in shimmering black-and-white by cinematographer Pawel Edelman (Academy Award® nominee for Roman Polanski's The Pianist) is a lovely, small film that exposes greed and pettiness while celebrating the most beautiful human themes: Love, friendship and tolerance.
When the circus leaves town, Zygmunt Sawicki and his wife Marysia unwittingly adopt a camel into their family. The couple quickly forms a close bond with the nameless camel. At first the townspeople, too, are enthralled with the giant animal, since it is a welcome distraction from their everyday routine. As the bond between the couple and their camel grows stronger, the town-people suddenly begin to ostracize them...
Renowned filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski (The Decalogue, Three Colors Trilogy) wrote the screenplay (based on the novel, Wielblad, by Kazimierz Orlos) in the 1970s, at the height of political oppression and social upheaval during the Communist era. This hothouse environment cultivated Poland's Cinema of Moral Anxiety and subversive criticism through the arts when it was difficult to speak openly. Mr. Kieslowki's friend Elzbieta Scotti safeguarded the script of The Big Animal and after his death, returned it to his widow.
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Bon Voyage & Aventure Malgache Dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Two tales of espionage, suspense and murder by the Master of Suspense himself: BON VOYAGE and AVENTURE MALGACHE. Made in 1944 to aid the war effort, they were considered inflammatory by the British government and locked away to be forgotten. Now, more than 50 years later, Hitchcock fans can rediscover these lost classics.
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DVD
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Two Friends Dir. Jane Campion
TWO FRIENDS, the first feature film by Academy Award® winner Jane Campion (Sweetie, An Angel at My Table and The Piano). When TWO FRIENDS was shown at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival along with her three shorts, the film world heralded the brave new feminist voice of the extraordinary New Zealand director.
TWO FRIENDS was written by renowned Australian novelist Helen Garner and the film’s screenplay is articulate, assured and enthralling. The film begins in the present, when teenage girlfriends, Louise and Kelly, once inseparable, have already grown apart. Louise is in high school, gets good grades, and has a typical love-hate relationship with her divorced mother. Kelly, in bleached hair and punk gear, lives with friends at the beach and is experimenting with drugs and casual relationships. Two Friends then moves backwards in time over the past year in the girls’ friendship. In five episodes, the film reveals the subtle changes that sent the two on their different paths. With the humor, fierce honesty and passionate sense of humanity that are the hallmarks of Campion’s best work, she tells a story of missed opportunities and minor traumas that take on profound new meaning with the passage of time.
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