10 Years Of Rialto Pictures (DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

Every year around October, the floodgates open wide and a torrent of special edition DVDs and massive boxed sets fills store shelves as well as the mailboxes of hard-working, unpaid and devilishly handsome film critics. In this current of product, it´s quite a challenge for a quality release to distinguish itself from the flotsam and jetsam that populates the top-seller lists. Oh look, I think I see another 2-disc edition of ´Transformers" bobbing past.

In the bastardized home video market place, something as extraordinary as the "10 Years of Rialto Pictures" set may seem like an instance of casting pearls before swine. But the ongoing success of upper-tier labels like the Criterion Collection, Zeitgeist, Milestone and others proves that there is a market for quality films. The potential audience may be relatively small but as long as studios can target this audience effectively, these releases can survive and even thrive.

Unfortunately, the problem is exacerbated by publishers and reviewers who beg for the privilege of providing free publicity to the juggernaut studios can most afford to pay for it while denying attention to the very ones that need promotion the most. The problem is even worse in print journalism than on the ´net, but somehow it´s more depressing to watch online sites spiral into the gravity well of the black hole of Hollywood marketing if only because the potential to serve as a corrective force is so great.

Complaints aside (and I have many more), you are vastly more likely to read about a set like "10 Years of Rialto Pictures" online than you are in any print source outside of "Cineaste" or "Film Comment" (at least in America), and this is a very good thing even if you´re going to have to search hard for the tiny review beneath the large-print headline reviews for dreck that drive all-important "traffic."

Complaints aside (for real this time, at least for the moment), it´s time to get to the considerable meat inside this remarkable set. Rialto Pictures is one of the wonders of modern cinema culture. Founded in 1997 by Bruce Goldstein, Rialto dedicated itself to a mission that seemed doomed to failure in a world where repertory theaters shutter their doors on a monthly basis. For the past 11 years, Rialto has re-issued, in gorgeously restored prints, some of the greatest works of cinema of the past sixty years, mostly, though not exclusive, non-English language films.

How the hell they have stayed in business I have no idea, but once again, their success proves that there is an audience out there for quality film. You just have to make sure they know that you exist even though you have no hope of receiving any attention from the mainstream media or most of its adjuncts.

Rialto´s list of successful re-issues is considerable, and this boxed set presents only a portion of them but, my, what a heaping portion. Of the ten films in this set, I count four of them among the greatest films I have ever seen: "Au hasard Balthazar" (1966, Bresson), "Band of Outsiders" (1964, Godard), "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972, Buñuel), and "Rififi" (1955, Dassin).

Three other films in the set could easily be argued to deserve equal or even greater praise: "The Third Man" (1949, Reed), "Army of Shadows" (1969, Melville), and "Touchez pas au grisbi" (1954, Becker).