Most film fans I know have played this game: which movie, if you called the shots over there, would you bring into the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion? While the fun con­ver­sa­tions that result nec­es­sar­i­ly elide all the dif­fi­cul­ties — acquir­ing the rights, find­ing restor­able mate­ri­als, design, dis­tri­b­u­tion — of actu­al­ly get­ting a film onto Cri­te­ri­on’s ros­ter of high-qual­i­ty, fea­ture-inten­sive home video releas­es, they do illu­mi­nate one’s own cin­e­mat­ic val­ues, even if only with idle talk.

Japan-based film­mak­er, artist, design­er, and gal­lerist Robert Nishimu­ra plays the game too, but he does­n’t do it idly. On his blog, he fea­tures the high­ly con­vinc­ing DVD cas­es he’s designed for such dream Cri­te­ri­on releas­es as Kim Ki-young’s The House­maid, Akio Jissoji’s Life of a Court Lady, and Wern­er Her­zog’s Fitz­car­ral­do. He also has a Vimeo chan­nel called For Cri­te­ri­on Con­sid­er­a­tion, where he goes so far as to craft new “trail­ers” of the films he’d like to see in the Col­lec­tion, each offer­ing three rea­sons why they qual­i­fy. His pitch for Bar­ry Son­nen­feld’s 1997 Men in Black cites its sta­tus as a “galac­ti­cal­ly fun­ny block­buster,” visu­als enhanced by “Rick Bak­er’s spe­cial FX,” and a script even more enhanced with “Ed Solomon’s one-lin­ers.”

Evi­dent­ly a lover of less­er-seen Japan­ese pic­tures and the idio­syn­crat­ic qua­si-Hol­ly­wood releas­es of the 1970s (but then again, aren’t all cinephiles?), he’s also made videos argu­ing for films like Hiroshi Teshi­ga­hara’s Kobo Abe nov­el adap­ta­tion The Man With­out a Map (the log­i­cal fol­low-up to Cri­te­ri­on­s’s real box set of Teshi­ga­hara-Abe col­lab­o­ra­tions) and Michael Cimi­no’s faint­ly homo­erot­ic heist pic­ture Thun­der­bolt and Light­foot. And all the way on the oth­er end of the spec­trum from Men in Black, he advo­cates for the likes of Per­fumed Night­mare, Kid­lat Tahimik’s “play­ful cri­tique of Amer­i­can cul­tur­al dom­i­nance,” “exer­cise in mag­i­cal real­ism,” “semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal explo­ration of inno­cence,” and cor­ner­stone of inde­pen­dent Philip­pine cin­e­ma.

Nishimu­ra’s out­put of videos and cov­er designs seems to have slowed in recent years, and I hope for one expla­na­tion and one expla­na­tion only: that he’s spent the time nego­ti­at­ing a healthy salary from peo­ple at Cri­te­ri­on eager to hire him.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

Steve Buscemi’s Top 10 Film Picks (from The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion)

120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

The Art of Restor­ing Clas­sic Films: Cri­te­ri­on Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitch­cock Movies

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Nev­er has the work of so pop­u­lar a film­mak­er felt so dis­tant from the main­stream than in the case of Stan­ley Kubrick. Just think­ing of the man who direct­ed movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shin­ing, Full Met­al Jack­et, and Eyes Wide Shut in the same cul­tur­al con­text as a rom-coms and explo­sion-inten­sive block­busters gets one chuck­ling. But Robert Ryang took it to the next lev­el when he cut togeth­er the trail­er above, which con­verts The Shin­ing, one of the most haunt­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror pic­tures ever made, into Shin­ing, a gar­den-vari­ety feel-good dram­e­dy.

Ryang, then a young edi­tor, pulled off this aston­ish­ing con­ver­sion as his win­ning sub­mis­sion for an Asso­ci­a­tion of Inde­pen­dent Cre­ative Edi­tors con­test, which asked for new trail­ers for exist­ing films that put them into dif­fer­ent gen­res. The Shin­ing trail­er’s suc­cess has spawned many imi­ta­tors, includ­ing quite a few based on Kubrick­’s work alone. Just above, we have 2001 turned into an entire­ly dif­fer­ent kind of sci­ence-fic­tion movie — the kind that try to over­whelm us with their sheer inten­si­ty sum­mer after tir­ing sum­mer.

This trail­er pro­duces anoth­er light­heart­ed Kubrick, this time out of per­haps Kubrick­’s most dark-heart­ed piece, the unre­lent­ing Viet­nam pic­ture Full Met­al Jack­et. Here it plays a lot more like Stripes with­out the satir­i­cal edge. Below, Kubrick­’s fam­i­ly-unfriend­ly Christ­mas film Eyes Wide Shut becomes a fam­i­ly-friend­ly Christ­mas film. Ulti­mate­ly, though, it speaks to the qual­i­ty of the orig­i­nal movies that, try as they might to con­vert them into the bland­est of stan­dard Hol­ly­wood fare, these trail­ers still can’t ful­ly con­ceal the pres­ence of some­thing cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly intrigu­ing indeed. I know I’d still buy a tick­et.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lost Kubrick: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick’s Unfin­ished Films

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Explore the Mas­sive Stan­ley Kubrick Exhib­it at the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When we get deep enough into our enthu­si­asm for film, cinephiles start spec­u­lat­ing in ways that might strike non-cinephiles as, well, unusu­al. The video essay­ist kogana­da, for exam­ple, states in the video above his desire to “build a time machine and trav­el to Italy cir­ca 1952” and “ask Vit­to­rio de Sica to make a film using Hol­ly­wood actors like Mont­gomery Clift and Jen­nifer Jones, and then team de Sica up with a Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­er, the kind that likes to impose his will and sen­si­bil­i­ty onto a film — some­one like David O. Selznick. In bring­ing these two worlds of cin­e­ma togeth­er, I’d hope for a clash in cin­e­ma so great that it would result in two cuts of the same film, one by de Sica and the oth­er by Selznick.”

This may sound like the spec­u­la­tion of a fan­boy, albeit a high­brow fan­boy, but you can hard­ly call it idle spec­u­la­tion. This video essay, as you can see, actu­al­ly man­ages to screen, side-by-side, scenes from what real­ly do look like two dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the same ear­ly-1950s film, one cut in the clas­sic Hol­ly­wood style, and one cut in the Ital­ian neo­re­al­ist style. This “exper­i­ment” in cin­e­ma illu­mi­nates the rhythms, emphases, and val­ues of both kinds of film­mak­ing, adding nuance to the con­cep­tion of one as clear-eyed, method­i­cal, and uncom­pro­mis­ing, and the oth­er as ide­al­ized, flam­boy­ant, and crowd-pleas­ing.

So has kog­o­na­da actu­al­ly built this time machine and com­mis­sioned two cuts of the same pic­ture from the direc­tor of Bicy­cle Thieves and the pro­duc­er of Gone with the Wind? Not quite, but film his­to­ry has pro­vid­ed him with the next best thing: 1954’s Ter­mi­nal Sta­tion and The Indis­cre­tion of an Amer­i­can Wife. De Sica “was one of the world’s most cel­e­brat­ed film­mak­ers when David O. Selznick com­mis­sioned Ter­mi­nal Sta­tion from him and his screen­writ­ing part­ner, Cesare Zavat­ti­ni,” writes crit­ic Dave Kehr in a Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion essay. But the pro­duc­tion soon hit some seri­ous snags. Cri­te­ri­on goes on to add:

The trou­bled col­lab­o­ra­tion between direc­tor Vit­to­rio De Sica and pro­duc­er David O. Selznick result­ed in two cuts of the same film. De Sica’s ver­sion, Ter­mi­nal Sta­tion, was screened at a length of one-and-a-half hours, but after dis­ap­point­ing pre­views, Selznick severe­ly re-edit­ed it and changed the title to Indis­cre­tion of an Amer­i­can Wife with­out De Sica’s per­mis­sion.

Though Kehr finds de Sica’s take on the mate­r­i­al “immea­sur­ably supe­ri­or” to Selznick­’s, he adds that “both have quite dis­tinct emo­tion­al and dra­mat­ic qual­i­ties, and it is fas­ci­nat­ing to see how iden­ti­cal mate­r­i­al can be pushed and pulled, whol­ly through the post­pro­duc­tion process, in two rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tions.” Even casu­al cinephiles stand to learn a lot from a back-to-back view­ing of Ter­mi­nal Sta­tion and The Indis­cre­tion of an Amer­i­can Wife, but only in this video essay’s five min­utes can we see them so care­ful­ly com­pared and con­trast­ed side-by-side. Briefly but dense­ly, it reveals to us the nature of both clas­sic Hol­ly­wood and Ital­ian neo­re­al­ism — no time trav­el required.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Crit­ics Pick the Top 100 Movies of All Time in the Pages of Cahiers du Ciné­ma

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Last month, we fea­tured Every Frame a Paint­ing, Tony Zhou’s series of video essays exam­in­ing the film­mak­ing tech­niques of direc­tors like Mar­tin Scors­ese, Edgar Wright, Steven Spiel­berg, and David Finch­er. His newest piece looks at just one ele­ment of just one scene, but one direct­ed by one of the high­est fig­ures, if not the high­est fig­ure, in the cin­e­mat­ic pan­theon: Aki­ra Kuro­sawa. Zhou, as any cinephile might expect, has a full-length exam­i­na­tion of “the Emper­or” of Japan­ese film in the works, but for now he’s put out a short video essay on the geom­e­try of a cou­ple min­utes from The Bad Sleep Well (1960).

That 1960 release, a non-peri­od piece not quite as well known as Kuro­sawa films like Sev­en Samu­rai, Rashomon, and Kage­musha, tells a Ham­let-like tale against the cul­tur­al back­drop of post­war Japan­ese cor­po­rate cor­rup­tion.

Despite its non-epic nature, it has drawn my own atten­tion again and again over the years, just as it seems to have drawn Zhou’s. Here, he uses it to illus­trate Kuro­sawa’s pen­chant for con­struct­ing scenes not out of, as Hitch­cock once put it, “pho­tographs of peo­ple talk­ing” — a dull prac­tice that more than per­sists on screens today — but out of geo­met­ri­cal shapes.

You might like to com­pare this brief study of Kuro­sawa’s geom­e­try with video essay­ist Kog­o­na­da’s look at the geom­e­try of Wes Ander­son­’s movies. Just as you can’t watch the Every Frame a Paint­ing mini-episode on The Bad Sleep Well with­out look­ing for shapes in the next Kuro­sawa pic­tures you watch, you can’t watch “Cen­tered” with­out draw­ing a men­tal line down the cen­ter of your next screen­ing of Bot­tle Rock­et, Rush­more, The Roy­al Tenen­baums, or their Ander­son­ian suc­ces­sors. Zhou says he feels bored when sub­ject­ed to the undis­ci­plined visu­al com­po­si­tion in most major films, but here we have two film­mak­ers one can always rely on for the anti­dote.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

Watch 7 New Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rush­more, The Roy­al Tenen­baums & More

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.