Well, it turns out cinephile Christmas is arriving early this year. The long-awaited masterpiece “The Dekalog” from polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski is finally joining the Criterion Collection in an elaborate box-set.
A 10-part series that originally aired on Polish TV, “The Dekalog” is essentially ten hour long films (Kieslowski eventually lengthened entries “A Short Film About Killing” and “A Short Film About Love” to feature-length size and they will be included in this package) loosely based on the Ten Commandments, and set among a Warsaw housing project. Criterion calls it “one of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements in visual storytelling” and personally, I couldn’t agree more (it’s all-time top 10’er for me). Stanley Kubrick wasn’t one to hand out praise, but made an exception for Kieslowski and “The Dekalog” (also known as “The Decalogue”). He wrote the foreword to the published screenplay and enthused, “I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work, [but]… you don’t realize until much later how profoundly [the film and screenwriters] have reached your heart.”
The box set would be enough for a killer month for Criterion, but the boutique cinephile DVD/Blu-Ray label has other goodies this month including: “Valley Of The Dolls”; its outrageous parody, not-a-sequel follow-up, the Russ Meyer directed, Roger Ebert written, “Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls“; Jacques Tourneur‘s horror frightener “Cat People” ; Japanese auteur Kenji Mizoguchi‘s “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum” and the Coen Brothers‘ crime classic debut, “Blood Simple.”
Also coming to Criterion as upgrades in September: a Blu-Ray of Carol Reed‘s “Night Train To Munich” and the massive collector’s box-set “Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman” on Blu-Ray featuring all 25 films. Break out your wallets; we’re all going to be poor when summer is over.
