Press Release Criterion Press Release: Brief Encounters / The Long Farewell: Two Films by Kira Muratova (Blu-ray) (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

​

Nobody made films like Kira Muratova. Uncompromising and uncategorizable, the Ukrainian iconoclast withstood decades of censorship to realize her singular vision in hypnotically beautiful, expressionistically heightened films that remain unique in their ability to evoke complex interior worlds. Her first two solo features, Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell, are fascinatingly fragmented portraits of women navigating work, romance, and family life with a mix of deep yearning and playful pragmatism. Long suppressed by Soviet authorities, these films became legendary—along with their maker—and they now make for a revelatory introduction to this most fearlessly original of artists.

FILM INFO​

• Spine #1229

FILMS IN THIS SET​

• • 
    Brief Encounters
    
    1967
    Kira Muratova’s first solo feature already displays her sui generis approach to cinema, in an impressionistic portrait of women at work and in love. Through an intricate play of flashbacks and shifting perspectives, Brief Encounters reveals the tangled romantic triangle that connects a hard-nosed city planner (played by Muratova herself), her free-spirited geologist husband (legendary Soviet protest singer Vladimir Vysotskiy), and the young woman from the countryside (Nina Ruslanova) whom she hires as her housekeeper. Blending observational realism with striking New Wave–style experimentation, Muratova crafts a wryly perceptive study of two very different women bound by chance and each navigating her own career, dreams, and disappointments.
  
  
  • 
    The Long Farewell
    
    1971
    With its daring formalist freedom, Kira Muratova’s pointillist family portrait so perplexed and unnerved Soviet censors that it effectively halted her career for years afterward. A kind of psychological breakup movie, The Long Farewell traces the growing rift that develops between an emotionally impulsive single mother (stage legend Zinaida Sharko, transcendent in one of her first film roles) and her increasingly resentful teenage son (Oleg Vladimirsky), who upends her world when he announces that he wishes to live with his faraway father. The seemingly simple premise is rendered anything but by Muratova’s dreamy, drifting style, with off-kilter framing, editing, and dialogue continually pushing cinema’s aesthetic and expressive boundaries outward.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES​

• New 4K digital restorations, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-ray edition
• Interviews with scholars Elena Gorfinkel and Isabel Jacobs
• Archival interview with director Kira Muratova
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Jessica Kiang
  
  New cover by La Moutique
  
  August 13, 2024

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[Martin_Teller]

The Long Farewell is very good.

 

[titch]

I'll hand it to Criterion: thanks to them, I'm seeing great films I've never heard of, from great directors, I've never heard of. Never understood why I should only fill my library with films I'm already familiar with.

 

[david hare]

These were both released last year in Region “B” territory by Canal. Both discs are beautifully mastered and contain copious extras. Both are fine but Long Farewell has a completely staggering piano score which sounds like it’s being played on an old upright. It’s devastating and so beautifully wraps into the seemingly artisanal way the movie is shot, staged, edited and acted. Muratova is a major rediscovery in world cinema.

 

[david hare]

Kuratova, my BAD!! Here's a sequence of the score running under the trailer for last year's CInema Reborn.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Thank you for supporting HTF when you preorder using the link below. As an Amazon Associate HTF earns from qualifying purchases. If you are using an adblocker you will not see link.

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