Re:Voir

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zedz
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Re:Voir

#1 Post by zedz » Sun Dec 28, 2014 3:35 pm

I couldn't find a dedicated thread for this venerable French label (and nor could the search function), so here we are. They've been around forever and have amassed probably the most impressive array of avant garde film on DVD of any label anywhere.

The great news is that they're now offering a subscription for their new releases.

Here's what you get for 99E:
Re:Voir wrote:We treasure the support that our friends and customers have offered us over these last 20 years. Your passion and interest in experimental cinema is what keeps us going. As a special offer, we are giving our valued customers a chance to own all of our new releases at a special subscription price of 119 euros TTC (plus shipping) for 10 of our new releases. This represents a more than 50% savings. The titles you will receive with a subscription are as follows:
1) Boris Lehman - Mes entretiens filmés
2) Stephen Dwoskin - Age Is…
3) Philippe Garrel - Les Hautes Solitudes
4) Christian Lebrat - Vibrations
5) Frédérique Devaux and Michel Armager - Cinéxperimentaux 1-4
6) Frédérique Devaux and Michel Armager - Cinéxperimentaux 5 : Rose Lowder
7) Pip Chodorov - Free Radicals
8) Marcel Hanoun - L'authentique procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung
9) Jürgen Reble - Das Goldene Tor
10) Jürgen Reble - Passion
These titles will be shipped in 3 separate shipments between January and February 2015. Added shipping costs for customers in the EU are 15euros, for all other international customers 24euros.
Happy New Year from RE:VOIR!
Recently, they've been offering extremely attractive pre-order offers via email (I took advantage of the Peter Goldman and Adolpho Arrietta ones), so it pays to subscribe to their emails as well.

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repeat
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Re: Re:Voir

#2 Post by repeat » Mon Dec 29, 2014 6:46 am

Whoa, I need to get my mitts on that Arrietta set, totally missed that one! Thanks for bringing this up - any crucial recommendations from the back catalogue?

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swo17
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Re: Re:Voir

#3 Post by swo17 » Mon Dec 29, 2014 12:07 pm

Fluxfilm Anthology
Jonas Mekas box + The Sixties Quartet + Guns of the Trees
Len Lye: Rhythms
Paul Sharits: Mandala Films
Peter Rose: Analogies
Philippe Garrel: Le Révélateur + Le Lit de la vierge
Rose Lowder: Bouquet d'images
Stan Vanderbeek: Visibles

And I thought they recently reissued some of Martin Arnold's films, but I'm not seeing that on their site at the moment.

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zedz
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Re: Re:Voir

#4 Post by zedz » Mon Dec 29, 2014 3:48 pm

Adding to the swo's recommendations:

Departures - Gunvor Nelson: Pioneering feminist filmmaking from the sixties, including her groundbreaking first film Schmeerguntz and the gorgeous My Name Is Oona.

Dreaminimalist: So-so documentary on the great Tony Conrad, who's primarily known for his music (doing drone work in the early sixties with John Cale, who subsequently took what he learnt with him to the Velvet Underground, later recording with Faust), but worth buying for its bonus inclusion of Conrad's amazing The Flicker.

Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Denis Young) by Wilma Schoen - Michael Snow: The only major film by this major filmmaker to be released on DVD, and they really went to town on it, packaging it in a big box like a board game or jigsaw puzzle. Four and a half hours of avant garde skits and soundtrack antics. Huge book of annotations.

Beat Films - Christopher Maclaine: I find these films a bit dated, but they're an important missing link in the history of US experimental film in the 50s, and it reinforces the links with experiment in other artforms of the time. The magnum opus here, The End, is also available on the American Film Archives avant garde set, so if you have that you'll know if you want more.

Hallelujah the Hills - Adolfas Mekas: Again, not a personal favourite, but a hugely important film historically.

Deux fois - Jackie Raynal: Re: Voir have issued a bunch of films by the Zanzibar group apart from the (absolutely wonderful) early Garrels, but this would be my pick for a follow-up. If you're still curious, head for the Serge Bard films. I find the Zanzibar group one of the most mysterious and intriguing film movements of the late sixties.

I'd also recommend ALL of their Jonas Mekas releases. Even the lesser films help complete the picture of this remarkable life's work. It's kind of astonishing that so much of his work is now available on home video. Re:Voir have also released a number of discs by Takahiko Iimura which I still haven't got around to picking up, so I'm reluctant to make specific recommendations.

Do be aware that Re:Voir strive to keep their entire catalogue available, and that they do so by substituting DVD-Rs when their initial print run is exhausted. Personally, I was pleased that I could still get just about everything I wanted from them (and I haven't struck any problems with the couple of DVD-Rs that I ended up with), but if that's a dealbreaker for you then ask them about the titles you want, or order new titles early before the initial printing runs out.

Also be aware that their online and physical store carries lots of other boutique experimental releases from around the world that can be hard to find or punitively expensive from other sources (e.g. the fabled Takashi Ito 2-disc Anthology; CVM's Jordan Belson disc - added bonus there of not having to deal with CVM!)

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AlexHansen
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Re: Re:Voir

#5 Post by AlexHansen » Fri Sep 18, 2015 3:42 pm


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zedz
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Re: Re:Voir

#6 Post by zedz » Sun Mar 06, 2016 9:24 pm

New Marcel Hanoun box set from Re:Voir available for pre-order (at a discount). His work has been pretty hard to see, but it's highly esteemed and what I've seen (e.g. The Authentic Trial of Carl Emmanuel Jung) is formally precise and intellectually rigorous, so this cycle of four features made between 1968 and 1972 is exciting news.

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furbicide
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Re: Re:Voir

#7 Post by furbicide » Mon Mar 07, 2016 9:47 am

Arrrrgggh! You serious? I've been looking for these films forever. :D

Can't see anything on that page about English subs – dare we hope?

Werewolf by Night

Re: Re:Voir

#8 Post by Werewolf by Night » Mon Mar 07, 2016 10:16 am

Click on "Details" : Subtitles - English

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zedz
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Re: Re:Voir

#9 Post by zedz » Mon Mar 07, 2016 2:44 pm

In my experience, every single Re:Voir release has been bilingual, even the books (which are often major feats of scholarship / publishing).

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furbicide
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Re: Re:Voir

#10 Post by furbicide » Mon Mar 07, 2016 7:34 pm

Werewolf by Night wrote:Click on "Details" : Subtitles - English
Fantastic. Thanks for that. :)

In anybody's experience, do Re:Voir's releases usually end up being available for pre-order through Amazon? There's nothing up yet, but I'm tempted to buy it through somewhere else as their only postage option to Australia is just under 30 Euros (compare with Amazon's international shipping, which is like £3.50). I spend enough money on DVDs without forking out AU$50 for express postage...

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swo17
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Re: Re:Voir

#11 Post by swo17 » Mon Mar 07, 2016 7:41 pm

You either need to buy from them directly or from a specialty store like the BFI's.

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zedz
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Re: Re:Voir

#12 Post by zedz » Mon Mar 07, 2016 9:57 pm

furbicide wrote:
Werewolf by Night wrote:Click on "Details" : Subtitles - English
Fantastic. Thanks for that. :)

In anybody's experience, do Re:Voir's releases usually end up being available for pre-order through Amazon? There's nothing up yet, but I'm tempted to buy it through somewhere else as their only postage option to Australia is just under 30 Euros (compare with Amazon's international shipping, which is like £3.50). I spend enough money on DVDs without forking out AU$50 for express postage...
I ordered a heap of stuff from them (seven discs on top of these four) and the shipping to NZ was only 35E, which I thought wasn't bad - it's about the equivalent of the VAT they deducted, which seems to be about the same as you'd get from Amazon - but ordering multiple items always changes the economics.

With the exception of a couple of co-productions (some of the Mekas discs), none of Re:Voir's titles seem to be carried by Amazon.fr, though you can sometimes find waifs and strays available on there from independent sellers, including Re:Voir itself (though you'll end up paying more for the same products ordering from Re:Voir through Amazon).

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Re: Re:Voir

#13 Post by Gaddis » Mon Mar 07, 2016 10:49 pm

Moskwood Media have a selection of Re:Voir titles, and the shipping works out five euros for the Garrel, also to NZ. I've ordered Bartas films from them and their service is very good. They don't seem to be carrying much at the moment though.

Actually, DaaVeeDee might be worth a shot also.

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furbicide
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Re: Re:Voir

#14 Post by furbicide » Tue Mar 08, 2016 7:30 am

I sent them an email asking about the postage and received this response:
Unfortunately, for this boxset the colissimo express postage option is the most affordable method to ship this package. The French postal service, la poste, changed their shipping rules for small packages in 2015. All packages that have a width greater than 3cm must be shipped by colissimo shipping service. There is no standard shipping service for this boxset as it is 4.5cm wide.

I realize that this is adversely affecting our sales to customers based far from Paris, and I am looking into all options. I'm currently updating our European shipping options, but this does not help your situation much.

We are always looking for re-sellers around the world, so if you might know of a bookstore or DVD shop in your area that might be interested in selling some of our titles, maybe they would carry this boxset and save you the trouble of paying shipping. This is the only work-around I can think of at this time. I will be looking into other shipping options for your region.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Best Regards,

Jim Stickel
Head of Sales
RE:VOIR
In an age of form emails and one-sentence replies, that's some pretty impressive customer service.

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Re: Re:Voir

#15 Post by kubelkind » Tue Mar 08, 2016 8:51 am

Re:Voir are just the best. A few years ago they were giving away all their stock of VHS tapes (including quite a few titles that never made it to DVD). I got a huge box of stuff and only had to pay postage. Their customer service is beyond the call of duty and they constantly dig out completely uncommercial obscurities and give them top notch presentation.
Don't forget their other recent releases. I've been after the Serge Bard and the Underground USA documentary for years.

http://blog.re-voir.com/2016/02/dvd-rel ... vrier.html

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furbicide
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Re: Re:Voir

#16 Post by furbicide » Fri Apr 22, 2016 8:23 am

Not sure if I'm the only one here who has pre-ordered the Hanoun set, but it's coming out in a bit over a week. Here's a review of the release in French:

http://www.culturopoing.com/cinema/marc ... s/20160414" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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zedz
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Re: Re:Voir

#17 Post by zedz » Sun May 08, 2016 8:11 pm

I watched all four films in Hanoun's tetralogy Les Saisons yesterday, and was extremely impressed. This is certainly a major work of French cinema.

Hanoun's career runs directly parallel to the Nouvelle Vague, but he's not really a part of it, and his films were by and large more austere and experimental than any by the NV directors, but you can see some intriguing cross-fertilisation in these four films, particularly with regard to Godard's later career. With L'ete, Hanoun was effectively making 'late period Godard' films as early as 1968.

There's a strong auteurial signature to all four films, particularly in terms of playfully disjunctive editing, extensive use of quotation and deliberately problematic image-to-soundtrack relationships, but each of these films has its own distinct identity. I'll give brief impressions of them in seasonal order (not the same as release order).

Le Printemps - Possibly the most straightforward example of Hanoun's dialectical style among the four films. Black-and-white shots of Michael Lonsdale fleeing something across the countryside are intercut with colour footage of the everyday activities of a young girl who lives with her grandmother. There's an implied relationship between the two strands of the film that never completely resolves at a narrative level, though there's an interesting (and, for me, satisfying) symbolic resolution of the two at the end of the film. The visual demarcation of the two strands (black and white vs. colour) is almost immediately complicated by Hanoun's typically devious editing style, in which traditional film syntax suggests that inserted colour footage represents what Lonsdale can see, or other colour inserts (tracking dogs, helicopter shots) are implicitly associated with Lonsdale's narrative. However, these are films that consistently frustrate traditional film syntax in original and provocative ways, so every cut is haunted by ambiguity. The young girl's experience takes in visions that seem to be daydreams or projections (sometimes in black and white), so we're also invited to consider the entire other half of the film as being of a similar order. The text of the film largely consists of recitations and quotations (a nonsense song, schoolyard rhymes, poems read aloud, fairy tales recalled): there's almost no regular dialogue. It's a film that demands active engagement and is very rewarding on those terms. The stripped-down chase narrative is viscerally involving, and the child's story is beautifully shot and nicely observed, and throughout the film you're trying to piece the two together and figure out how any additional material might relate to one or other or both strands.

L'Ete - Possibly the best film I've seen about May'68, and it was made right on top of those events. A woman escapes from a fraught Paris to a friend's house in Normandy, and the whole film basically inhabits her consciousness as she potters around the estate and reflects on her experiences. This is a real anticipation of 90s and 00s Godard, with its bucolic beauty, copious visual and literary quotations, interrogation of photographs and extremely complex soundtrack. It's a film where you can't take for granted the connection between any two contiguous shots, or between image and soundtrack, so again, it's a film that will keep you continually on your toes if you engage with it. It's also formally and thematically playful and briskly paced.

L'Automne - The most stylistically austere of the four films, and the one I liked the least, though it's still a fascinating object. The sole focus is on a director (Lonsdale, possibly playing the same character as he did in the earlier L'Hiver) editing a film with his new assistant (Tamia). The film is quite literally a Steenbeck's eye view of the editing process. So most of the sequences involve the actors staring into the lens / screen while they discuss the film or watch playback (which we can't see but can hear). In places it's almost a proto-Shirin, watching close-ups of faces watching a film. When the characters have to leave the editing table (to answer the telephone, say) the screen goes black, but we can hear them talking. After the halfway mark, things start to get a little screwy (we get brief flashes of the characters naked, for example, or Tamia starts to trace their own outlines on the camera lens / Steenbeck screen / movie screen, turning the movie screen into a window), and eventually the rigorous schema breaks down completely and we seem to end up in the film that they are making (we even, eventually, get a privileged glimpse of ourselves / the Steenbeck). As you'd expect there's a fair bit of talk about the nature of cinema. My initial impression is that the film was either not diverse enough or too diverse: the minimalism of the main part of the film became a bit of a chore, but the way it opened up late in the piece wasn't as satisfying or revelatory as it felt like it should have been.

L'Hiver - A magnificent accomplishment that synthesizes most of what Hanoun is boldly attempting in these films while being consistently engaging and inventive at the basic level of filmmaking. Lonsdale is a director making a documentary about Bruges, and we follow him on location scouting and shooting with his cameraman (cue lots of drop-dead gorgeous sequences of characters navigating the city's waterways). He falls in love with the place and wants to shoot a feature there instead. Meanwhile, his producer arrives and attempts to seduce him away to a cliched commercial feature, and his wife arrives, dissatisfied and hoping for something to seduce her away, which she kind of finds in the person of a painter who starts following her around. There's a solid, conventional relationship drama at the heart of this film, but it's decked out in audacious formal invention and copious supplementary material. There's a wealth of documentary footage of the city's religious art and architecture (implicitly from the short the filmmakers are working on), extensive quotations from literary texts (including a couple that the director is thinking of adapting), loads of jarring and mysterious edits (a marital argument could be interrupted by a split-second glimpse of the Bruges documentary, for example), vertiginously impossible - even sarcastic - shot-reverse shot constructions that call into question every other edit, and a complicated, layered and radically disjunctive soundtrack that can slip in and out of sync with the image (as when a shot of a character is overlaid with their dialogue, suggesting an internal monologue, an impression which is immediately undercut when they begin saying the words 'for real' - even while the alternative dialogue take continues on the soundtrack). There are small stylistic inventions that I find delightful, even though they're just passing ornaments, as when characters vanish from a scene via jumpcut a moment before the shot actually ends. The film's final shot occurs three times in a row, in increasingly self-reflexive and playful variations.

L'Hiver was the stand-out film of the bunch, but they're all worthwhile and add up to a major work by a major filmmaker. The restorations are excellent. There's no supplementary material on the discs but the hefty book is well up to Re:Voir's lofty standard. Here's hoping that there's more Hanoun in their pipeline.

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Re: Re:Voir

#18 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun May 08, 2016 9:25 pm

Does Saisons have subs?

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zedz
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Re: Re:Voir

#19 Post by zedz » Mon May 09, 2016 12:34 am

Yes, everything is subbed, and the book is bilingual. I can't recall any Re:Voir releases that have been English-unfriendly.

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furbicide
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Re: Re:Voir

#20 Post by furbicide » Mon May 09, 2016 5:46 am

Thanks for the in-depth analysis, zedz! I just got my boxset in the mail this morning and started on Le Printemps and L'Hiver, both of which are great (and I think the Godard comparisons are spot on). Interestingly, Le Printemps was co-written and (at least according to the opening titles) co-'auteured' by Catherine Binet, whose only feature work as a director is the little-known but brilliant The Games of Countess Dolingen, which I wrote about here.

The two films have a few parallels here and there (not least in the enigmatic presence of Michael Lonsdale, the young girl as central figure, etc.), but I was kind of startled to see a prop from Dolingen show up in Le Printemps too – a fragment of a mask which the girl holds up to her face in the attic. Must have held some significance for Binet, I can only imagine.

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zedz
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Re: Re:Voir

#21 Post by zedz » Mon May 09, 2016 4:04 pm

furbicide wrote:Thanks for the in-depth analysis, zedz! I just got my boxset in the mail this morning and started on Le Printemps and L'Hiver, both of which are great (and I think the Godard comparisons are spot on). Interestingly, Le Printemps was co-written and (at least according to the opening titles) co-'auteured' by Catherine Binet, whose only feature work as a director is the little-known but brilliant The Games of Countess Dolingen, which I wrote about here.

The two films have a few parallels here and there (not least in the enigmatic presence of Michael Lonsdale, the young girl as central figure, etc.), but I was kind of startled to see a prop from Dolingen show up in Le Printemps too – a fragment of a mask which the girl holds up to her face in the attic. Must have held some significance for Binet, I can only imagine.
Binet takes part in the great period interview included in the booklet, where they talk a little bit about their working relationship as director / editor. It seems that Hanoun ceded a lot of creative authority to Binet (though he claims that she did exactly what he would have done, which is an amusingly ambivalent way of crediting a collaborator).

Checking out her slender imdb credits reveals that she also edited Patrick Bokanowski's documentary La part du hasard, which I coincidentally received in the same shipment from Re:Voir. She also directed a film about Georges Perec, and I had been thinking about Bernard Queysanne's fascinating film of Perec's Un Homme qui dort while I was watching these films, in the context of that entire non-New Wave cohort of adventurous French-language filmmakers that were around in the 70s: Hanoun, Duras, Garrel, Akerman, Queysanne, and maybe Allio (I don't know if his other films are as interesting as I, Pierre Riviere). And there are a couple of late-flowering associates of the New Wave in the form of Eustache and Pialat who probably fit more comfortably in this oddball group.

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furbicide
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Re: Re:Voir

#22 Post by furbicide » Mon May 09, 2016 11:11 pm

Speaking of Bokanowski, Garrel, Akerman et al, I found this collection of clips on an old torrent of Binet's film. Quite a fascinating snapshot of '80s Francophone cinema, with some very obscure and bizarre titles included:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBKJ1tpYIuU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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xrt
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Re: Re:Voir

#23 Post by xrt » Mon May 16, 2016 12:46 pm

...hopefully Hanoun's "Une Simple Histoire" will be properly restored & released one day...it's up there with Bresson.
A copy of it is on youtube for preview, but the original soundtrack is 'spoiled' by a commentary voice-over...

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Re: Re:Voir

#24 Post by rockysds » Thu Sep 21, 2017 9:19 am

From Instagram :
Stan Brakhage's ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT, our first Blu-Ray&DVD combo with an extensive 60 pages booklet. #comingsoon

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swo17
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Re: Re:Voir

#25 Post by swo17 » Thu Sep 21, 2017 10:11 am

The mind reels at the possibilities...

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