Catalog Search Results
Series
Criterion collection volume 287
Summary
Walter Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo is the story of one man's attempt to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle. Filmmaker Les Blank captured the production, made perilous by Herzog's determination not to use models or special effects.
For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career--Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man's attempt to build an opera...
Series
Criterion collection volume 334
Formats
Summary
Chronicles the 1973 Harlan County, Kentucky coal miners' strike against the operators of the Brookside mine and the Duke Power Company, which resulted from the company's refusal to honor the national contract of the United Mine Workers of America when the miners joined the union.
3) Shoah
Series
Criterion collection volume 663
Summary
Over a decade in the making, this monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Claude Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, and other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait...
4) Burroughs
Series
Criterion collection volume 789
Summary
Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years, Howard Brookner's 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch) was for decades mainly the stuff of legend; that changed when Aaron Brookner, the late director's nephew, discovered a print of it in 2011 and spearheaded a restoration. Includes on-screen appearances by Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Terry Southern, and Lucien Carr....
5) Cameraperson
Series
Criterion collection volume 853
Summary
A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home with the director: Kirsten Johnson weaves these scenes and others into her film, a tapestry of footage captured over her twenty-five-year career as a documentary cinematographer.
Series
Criterion collection volume 895
Summary
An absorbing portrait of the artist, as well as an intimate encounter with the man himself. From the privacy of his home and painting studio in the Hollywood Hills, a candid Lynch conjures people and places from his past, from his boyhood in Idaho and Virginia to his experiences at art school in Boston and Philadelphia to the beginnings of his filmmaking career in Los Angeles, in stories that unfold like scenes from his movies.
Series
Criterion collection volume 998
Summary
"In 1974, Leon Gast traveled to Africa to film Zaire 74, a music festival planned to accompany an unprecedented sports spectacle: the Rumble in the Jungle, in which late-career underdog Muhammad Ali would contend with the younger powerhouse George Foreman for the boxing heavyweight championship title--'a fight between two blacks in a black nation, organized by blacks,' as a Kinshasa billboard put it. When the main event was delayed, extending Ali's...
Series
Summary
Streetwise: A documentary on runaway, homeless teens living on the streets of Seattle, who survive by hustling, panhandling, and dumpster diving, at the center of which is 14-year-old Erin Blackwell, a.k.a. Tiny.
Tiny: Catches up with Erin Blackwell, a.k.a. Tiny, the central figure of the documentary "Streetwise", now a mother of ten, struggling with addiction and regret.
Series
Criterion collection volume 1081
Summary
"In Munich in 1972, eight renowned filmmakers each brought their singular artistry to the spectacle of the Olympic Games, capturing the joy and pain of competition and the kinetic thrill of bodies in motion for an aesthetically adventurous sports film unlike any other. Made to document the Olympic Summer Games--an event that was ultimately overshadowed by the tragedy of a terrorist attack--Visions of Eight features conributions from Miloš Forman,...