Disc World

Play it again, Sam

by Sam Adams

TAKE A CHANCE ON ME: Shirley MacLaine and Peter Sellers star in the classic Being There, which benefits from the Blu-ray treatment.

Like an underachieving high school student, chances are your flat-screen TV hasn't been living up to its potential. DVDs are the cat's meow, but if you've ever researched the format, you know they don't have the resolution to exploit the full range of that plasma you broke the piggy bank for, which is why even the greatest of celluloid treasures can't measure up, spec-wise, to a hi-def episode of CSI: Miami.

The jump from DVD to Blu-ray isn't as dramatic as the move from VHS; it's an increase in quality rather than a quantum leap. But the results can still be spectacular. Watching Warner Bros.' Blu-ray of Being There, I was mesmerized by the inky black and chestnut browns of Caleb Deschanel's cinematography, far deeper and richer than anything I've seen in standard def. The big-box sales displays may flaunt the sharp-edged purity of action movies and special effects extravaganzas, but it's every bit as dramatic when applied to a pre-digital source.

That's not to say it can't deliver on more recent material. Universal's Bourne Trilogy, with its silvery tones and fast-cut camera work, went down like a glass of cold, clear water. The Bourne Ultimatum's Waterloo Station sequence is a master class in whiplash precision that puts The International's generic gunplay to shame.

Of course, as with the aforementioned CSI: Miami, Blu-ray's eye-candy appeal may suck you in to movies you have no business watching (I'm looking at you, Eagle Eye). But it's worth it to get another belated crack at Speed Racer, a misunderstood piece of eye-searing pop art whose opening sequence whips through time and space with dazzling clarity and impeccable logic.

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The National Film Preservation Board's Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film 1947-1986 may be standard def, but there's nothing ordinary about its two-disc compendium of experimental filmmakers. Featuring one film apiece from Stan Brakhage (The Riddle of Lumen), Andy Warhol (Mario Banana No. 1) and two dozen others, the Treasures set unearths one-hit wonders like Christopher Maclaine's The End, a nuke-inflected contemplation of suicide and self-destruction, and garde touchstones like Hollis Frampton's (nostalgia). Joseph Cornell's By Night with Torch and Spear, a contemplation of uncreation based around inverted footage of an industrial steel forge, was discovered, complete and untitled, only after Cornell's death. Like its three predecessors, Treasures IV is accompanied by brief but illuminating notes on each film, and also features several new scores by John Zorn.

Although he made common cause with the surrealists, Luis Buñuel's best films mixed the avant-garde with the mundane, especially during his cash-strapped Mexican period, of which The Exterminating Angel, newly released by the Criterion Collection, is a prime example. The simplicity of the film's premise only makes it more disorienting: A group of wealthy dinner guests inexplicably find themselves unable to leave. The rapidity with which the assembled A-listers turn on each other has often led to the movie being classed as satire, but like Buñuel's early, more overtly surreal works, Angel deliberately defies interpretation, as if mocking the very idea that the lives of these self-involved swells could produce any kind of meaning.

Simon of the Desert, a truncated feature that became a 45-minute short when Buñuel's producer ran out of funds, is on its surface a straightforward attack on organized religion. Simon (Claudio Brook) is hailed as a spiritual avatar for standing atop a pillar for years on end, as if living a few dozen feet in the air would bring him closer to God. But Buñuel indulges the iconography of his Catholic upbringing as much as he undermines it, sending a devil in the agreeable form of Silvia Pinal to tempt Simon off his perch. Rather than try to paper over the halt in production, Buñuel enhanced it, filming a new ending that abruptly whisks Simon and his buxom temptress away to a present-day disco, where the erstwhile saint now looks like a sour-faced beatnik. In the modern world, his asceticism looks not only absurd but irrelevant. So much for self-sacrifice.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)