Max Ophuls’s Le Plaisir (1952) has been out of circulation for much too long. It has at last reemerged on DVD, a fine release from Criterion now joining Second Sight’s U.K. edition. Its appearance ends a deprivation and is an occasion of joy.

Imamura, Chinese Independent Documentaries, The Films of Peter Thompson, and L.A.’s Hipster Cinema

READ: Against Nature, The Avant Garde Archive Online, The Future in Labor, Le Plaisir

Eric Rohmer’s films are undervalued. Certain objections recur in the sparse English-language commentary: repetitive, socially conservative, cerebral, uneventful, religiously inclined, reliant on the arcane twists and turns of well-heeled conversation, visually unimaginative.

“You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, ‘cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that’s it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren’t in, when it’s all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for …”

The Internet may have finally delivered avant-garde filmmakers the audience they always claimed they wanted. With experimentation rejected by the moving-image industry, and moving image shunned by commercial art galleries until the 1970s, film and video artists in the twentieth century relied on film festivals, grassroots film clubs, artist-run co-operatives, and art school curricula as channels of distribution.