Masters of Cinema - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Masters of Cinema organization began as a website dedicated to the most well-regarded film directors in the world. Founded by a diverse international group of like-minded film enthusiasts: Jan Bielawski, a mathematician; Doug Cummings, a graphic artist and freelance critic; Trond Trondsen, a Ph.D. of Space Physics and president of Keo Scientific Ltd.; and Nick Wrigley, a musician and filmmaker. The founders of the group began to bring their individual Websites on the film directors Yasujirō Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu

was a prominent Japanese film director and script writer. He is known for his distinctive technical style, developed during the silent era. Marriage and family, especially the relationships between the generations, are among the most persistent themes in his body of work...

, Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky was a Soviet and Russian filmmaker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director, widely regarded as one of the finest filmmakers of the 20th century....

, Carl Theodor Dreyer

Carl Theodor Dreyer

Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jr. was a Danish film director. He is regarded by many critics and filmmakers as one of the greatest directors in cinema.-Life:Dreyer was born illegitimate in Copenhagen, Denmark...

and Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson

-Life and career:Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life and the year of his birth, 1901 or 1907, varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and...

under the heading of Masters of Cinema in 2001 and officially combined them and created the primary Masters of Cinema page in 2003. R. Dixon Smith, a film historian and documentary filmmaker, joined the group at this time. The website was a resource of news, articles, and links about these directors and their works.

The Masters of Cinema Series of DVDs is a side project that Masters of Cinema started with Eureka Entertainment Ltd. in January 2004, capitalising on the scholarship of Masters of Cinema and the influence and reputation it had acquired as a website, along with the resources and experience of Eureka. The model that the series follows was set by The Criterion Collection

The Criterion Collection

The Criterion Collection is a video-distribution company selling "important classic and contemporary films" to film aficionados. The Criterion series is noted for helping to standardize the letterbox format for home video, bonus features, and special editions...

, which is to say that it is a series of numbered releases intended as definitive editions of the films, usually involving a restoration of the work, a collection of available scholarly material that can be conveniently packaged with the film, and the commissioning of interviews, essays, and/or commentary tracks. Filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro

Guillermo del Toro

Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director, producer, screenwriter, novelist and designer. He is mostly known for his acclaimed films, Blade II, Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy film franchise. He is a frequent collaborator with Ron Perlman, Federico Luppi and Doug Jones...

, Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese

Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...

, Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins is an English film and television director. He was born in Norbiton, Surrey, lived in Sweden, Canada and Lithuania for many years, and now lives in France. He is one of the pioneers of docudrama. His movies, pacifist and radical, strongly review the limit of classic documentary and...

, Luc Moullet

Luc Moullet

Luc Moullet is a French film critic and filmmaker, and a member of the Nouvelle Vague or French New Wave. Moullet's films are known for their humor, anti-authoritarian leanings and rigorously primitive aesthetic, which is heavily influenced by his love of American B-movies.Though such influential...

, Alex Cox

Alex Cox

Alexander Cox is a British film director, screenwriter, nonfiction author and sometime actor, notable for his idiosyncratic style and approach to scripts...

, Claude Lanzmann

Claude Lanzmann

Claude Lanzmann is a French filmmaker and professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.-Biography:Lanzmann attended the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. He joined the French resistance at the age of 18 and fought in Auvergne...

and Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara is an American film screenwriter and director. He is best known as an independent filmmaker of such films as The Driller Killer , Ms. 45 , King of New York , Bad Lieutenant and The Funeral .-Early life:Ferrara was born in the Bronx of Italian and Irish descent...

; scholars such as Tony Rayns

Tony Rayns

Antony Rayns is a British writer, commentator, film festival programmer and screenwriter. Much inspired in his youth by the films of Kenneth Anger, he wrote for the underground publication Cinema Rising before contributing to the Monthly Film Bulletin from the December 1970 issue until its demise...

, Tag Gallagher, David Bordwell

David Bordwell

David Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film , Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema , Making Meaning , and On the...

, and Scott Eyman

Scott Eyman

Scott Eyman is an American author and book editor of the Palm Beach Post and contributor for The New York Observer. His books specialize in the Golden Age of Hollywood. He is the author of Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille, , Louis B...

; and critics such as Kent Jones

Kent Jones

Thomas Kenton "Kent" Jones is a writer and performer on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, airing live M-F at 9 p.m. Eastern time...

, Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate

Doctor Phillip Lopate is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher. He is the younger brother of radio host Leonard Lopate.-Early life and education:...

, Emmanuel Burdeau, Dan Sallitt, Adrian Martin

Adrian Martin

Dr. Adrian Martin is an Australian film and arts critic from Melbourne. Dr. Martin is Associate Professor, Co-Director of the Research Unit in Film Culture and Theory and Head of Film and Television Studies at Monash University...

, Jonathan Rosenbaum

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, when he retired at the age of 65...

, David Ehrenstein

David Ehrenstein

David Ehrenstein is an American critic who focuses primarily on issues of homosexuality in cinema.-Life and career:Ehrenstein was born in New York City. His father was a secular Jew with Polish ancestors, and his mother was of African American and Irish descent. His mother raised him in her...

, Bill Krohn, Geoffrey O'Brien

Geoffrey O'Brien

Geoffrey O'Brien is an American poet, editor, book and film critic, translator, and cultural historian. In 1992, he joined the staff of the Library of America as Executive Editor, becoming Editor-in-Chief in 1998.-Biography:...

, and David Cairns

David Cairns

David Cairns may refer to:*David Cairns , British politician*David Cairns , rugby league footballer*David Cairns , music critic and writer...

have all created exclusive content for DVDs released by the Masters of Cinema Series which so far includes over 100 films (February 2009).

In late 2008, Eureka Entertainment Ltd. consolidated their investment in the Masters of Cinema Series by acquiring the Masters of Cinema organisation outright. The Masters of Cinema Series is now a wholly owned label of Eureka Entertainment Ltd, London. The MoC production team have been in place for 5 years and the same personnel continue to produce the DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

s and Blu-ray Disc

Blu-ray Disc

Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...

s. The MoC team consists of Nick Wrigley, Craig Keller, Jon Robertson, Jess Fulton, and Andrew Utterson.

External links

www.mastersofcinema.org — the Masters of Cinema Website
www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc — The Masters of Cinema Series DVD label website
nostalghia.com — The Masters of Cinema Andrei Tarkovsky site
robert-bresson.com — The Masters of Cinema Robert Bresson site
carldreyer.com — The Masters of Cinema Carl Th. Dreyer site
The Masters of Cinema Yasujiro Ozu resource

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See also

External links