Deluxe Criterion Blu-ray and DVD collector’s sets include 53 films and a 216-page illustrated book, to be released December 5, 2017!
Features landmark work by Kon Ichikawa, Bud Greenspan, Milos Forman, Leni Reifenstahl, Claude Lelouch, Masahiro Shinoda and many more!
Criterion has just announced that they’re releasing a massive box set spanning 53 movies and 41 editions of the Olympic Summer and Winter Games. A set of this magnitude is pretty groundbreaking and the sort of thing that can serve as the centerpiece for any great film collection.
The project has been more than 20-years in the making. Back in 1996 International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch wanted to begin the process of gathering and preserving the cinematic heritage of the Olympic Games. Everything in the collection has been restored and scanned in either 2k or 4k with the exception of Olympic Glory — the film from Nagano 1998 — which was scanned at 8k.
In addition to the work of Bud Greenspan, the man behind an impressive ten Olympic features, this stirring collective chronicle of triumph and defeat includes such landmarks of the documentary form as Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad, along with lesser- known but captivating contributions by major directors like Claude Lelouch, Carlos Saura, and Milos Forman. It also serves as a fascinating window onto the formal development of cinema itself, as well as the technological progress that has enabled the viewer, over the years, to get ever closer to the action. Traversing continents and decades, and reflecting as well the social, cultural, and political changes that have shaped our recent history, this remarkable marathon of films offers nothing less than a panorama of a hundred years of human endeavor.
BLU-RAY AND DVD SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTOR’S SETS FEATURE
* 53 newly restored films from 41 editions of the Olympic Games, presented together for the first time
* Landmark 4K restorations of Olympia, Tokyo Olympiad, and Visions of Eight, among other titles
* New scores for the silent films, composed by Maud Nelissen, Donald Sosin, and Frido ter Beek
* A lavishly illustrated, 216-page, hardcover book, featuring notes on the films by cinema historian Peter Cowie; a foreword by Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee; a short history of the restoration project by restoration producer Adrian Wood; and hundreds of photographs from a century of Olympic Games
HIGHLIGHTS FROM A CENTURY OF OLYMPIC FILMS
Stockholm 1912
The Games of the V Olympiad Stockholm, 1912 (dir. Adrian Wood)
Berlin 1936
Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations (dir. Leni Riefenstahl)
Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty (dir. Leni Riefenstahl)
Cortina d’Ampezzo 1956
White Vertigo (dir. Giorgio Ferroni)
Tokyo 1964
Tokyo Olympiad (dir. Kon Ichikawa)
Grenoble 1968
13 Days in France (dirs. Claude Lelouch, François Reichenbach)
Sapporo 1972
Sapporo Winter Olympics (dir. Masahiro Shinoda)
Munich 1972
Visions of Eight (dirs. Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa, Claude Lelouch, Yuri Ozerov, Arthur Penn, Michael Pfleghar, John Schlesinger, Mai Zetterling)
Barcelona 1992
Marathon (dir. Carlos Saura)
Beijing 2008
The Everlasting Flame (dir. Gu Jun)
