Rather than offering a subscription to a platform, why not discover, or rediscover, the work of a filmmaker by giving away a DVD set?
Roger Corman, Edgar Allan Poe
The one who was one of the most tireless producer-directors of low-budget exploitation films in the 1950s embarked, from 1960, on a series of transpositions for the big screen of short stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe. Eight titles which invented a cinema of poetic terror marked by the genius and Shakespearian histrionics of Vincent Price. A splendid and copious DVD/Blu-ray box set now allows you to discover or rediscover the eight titles in the series. Often made with the same collaborators, the cinematographer Floyd Crosby, the writers Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont, the decorator Daniel Haller, these films contributed to shaping, with reduced means and brilliant colors, a fantastic Gothic very different from what is was filming, at the same time, in Great Britain or Italy. Behind a kind of irony camp, the films expressed a certain melancholy. Undigested mourning, the fatal influence of the dead on the living, the lethal force of guilt irrigated a work strongly influenced by psychoanalysis. The extras are plentiful and feature some of Corman’s top film experts. A booklet containing the conditions of realization of the saga and signed by Marc Toullec accompanies the box.
Friedrich W. Murnau, “Nosferatu”
Here at last is an edition commensurate with this authentic silent masterpiece which seems to contain all cinema in its power. Unofficial adaptation (lack of rights at the time) of the Dracula by Bram Stoker Nosferatu forges for the big screen the figure of the vampire in the person of Count Orlok, a tall rod with sharp claws whose mere presence scrambles the data of space-time, made unforgettable by Max Schreck’s hallucinatory performance. Nothing has dried up in this century-old film resembling an Orphic tale: neither the plastic splendor, nor the immediate mythography, nor the thematic luxuriance, nor the quivering emotion, largely linked to the fundamental conflicts of shadow and light. Here, the supernatural designates nothing other than a paroxysmal stage of nature: the inversion of the reigns, the reversal of the cycles. Star of the night, prince of metamorphoses, Nosferatu swept like the black plague over a small corner of Germany in the classical age. A well-known motif of the contagion of evil which, under the Weimar Republic, will experience a certain metaphorical fortune.
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