Anybody who has known me well, only slightly, or just by invidious word of mouth will know that since around the time I was preparing the release of my record Yevgenia, which was released almost exactly four years ago in August of 2022, I began to feverishly acquire vinyl like that shit was going out of style, having previously been an adamant dyed-in-the-wool compact disk man. My defence remains that I needed a really dope collection wherein my own record might feel at home, the proverbial new kid on the block. In actual fact, the only reason I bought a turntable was so I could listen to the test pressing of Yevgenia. My oh my, how these things can get away from us. I am no longer allowed to have physical possession of my credit card, and I’m afraid it’s definitely for the best. Heh heh.
Naturally, as a recovering film scholar and former film programmer for Calgary Cinematheque, it is more or less my responsibility to keep abreast of new and significant releases on Blu-ray, watching as much of that stuff as I can muster without passing out and drooling all over myself. Anybody who has given time and energy over to these matters for the last three years will have been watching while up-and-comer Radiance, supplying the goods to the UK and North America in kind, has quickly and definitively surpassed the Criterion crew, I would surmise most of all because they don't go in for any populist crowd-pleasers or catalogue filler. Radiance has definitely done a good job of bringing us important films by established masters: Robert Bresson, Jacques Rivette, Luchino Visconti, Georges Franju. They even released Czech director Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way, which is the best American film of the 70s made in the 80s...if that makes any sense. I love that film enough that I already owned the Twilight Time Blu-ray. I din't feel like I needed to take on the expense. My favourite disk from Radiance so far contains the three-and-three-quarter hour extended cut of Rivette's Va savoir, one of the few films by this most beloved of masters that I got to see in a theatre first run (in the manageable/commercial shortened form), which over the past few years was the one thing I was most hoping to see come out on a home-viewing format of some kind. 🙏. Radiance's high def transfer of Bresson's gorgeous colour downer Une femme douce is so superior to any other version of that film I've ever seen that it made me weep.
One area where Radiance most especially excels is in the field of gonzo out-of-bounds Japanese genre cinema. Have you ever noticed that fancy Japanese art movies are usually much more logical and easy to follow than the genre movies, which are very often convoluted and prone to sprees of mayhem? It's not unusual to see a fight involving ten or twelve people and I can't usually remember any of their names. For shame, Weird Bach! Well, sometimes that's exactly what I'm in the mood for. 1977's The Boxer by Shuji Terayama, released earlier this year, is the best boxing film since Robet Wise's 1949 gem The Set-Up. Scorsese and Paul Schrader should get on their knees and bow in shame-faced reverence. Terayama was a genuine artist of the underground who figured he'd tackle a genre picture as a madcapped lark.
Anybody who knows about my semi-secret list of the top 69 movies of all time may recall having seen featured on it—in 47th place—Shōhei Imamura's 1966 first-phase-pinnacle-moment The Pornographers, which definitely is an art film no matter what that blousy title may tend to indicate. Criterion put out a then-decent DVD of the film many years ago, but this summer Radiance released a sublime Blu-ray featuring a terrific, super lengthy, and deliciously thorough overview from A #1 Asian cinema Übermensch Tony Rayns. This disk is a must for anybody who is into any kind of cool shit whatsoever!
Having released Takashi Miike's meandering, novelistic, and intermittently harrowing Agitator earlier this year, Radiance is set by all accounts to bring us this spry and indefatigable auteur's certified 2001 masterpiece/classic Visitor Q this forthcoming October. Visitor Q is a no-budget shot-on-video update of Pasolini's Teorema, which it surpasses a hundredfold and with illusory ease; I can assure you that you'll get your rocks off if you like your cinema of transgression smart as hell and transgressive as fuck. Cheers, baby.
While we're on a good run celebrating Japanese cineaction and some of its newly accessible fruits, from days more bygone or less so, and since I had the gall to take the wind out of the Criterion Collection sails when we all know that the Criterion Collection saves each of our lives two or three times a goldarn week, let me point out that a week from tomorrow, under the banner of their seriously rad Eclipse imprint, that entrenched New York-based institution is dropping on the broad general public what I suspect might very well prove to be the physical media release of 2026. In any medium. Ahem:
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