One of the world’s first film directors has been receiving some much-deserved attention lately, due to the 2018 documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968). Here is a list of just over 100 of her films that you can find pretty easily today on DVD or Blu-ray disc.
It’s been more than 20 years since we’ve seen a home video release of the inventors of cinema, Auguste and Louis Lumière. Their catalogue was produced between 1895 and 1905, so what could have changed in the past 20 years? In 2015, the Institut Lumière led an effort to release many of their films through new 4K scans (nearly 4 times the detail of Blu-ray, and 24 times the detail of DVD), now that the technology is more affordable. The fruits of their effort has finally come to Amazon Prime streaming (in 1080p), with English subtitles for the commentary. Simply entitled Lumière!
UPDATE: See notes at the end of this post about the unprecedented 2019 Rhino collection. It renders some of my statements in this 2017 post obsolete.*
I’ve spent the last couple of months obsessively researching recordings from the 1969 “Woodstock Music & Art Fair.” The spreadsheet here is primarily for people wondering which compilation release(s) they can purchase to hear or watch specific Woodstock performances – and to the best of my knowledge I’ve listed individual-artist releases in the Notes column. Download Woodstock 1969 Official Compilation Releases (2017).xlsx 33 KB.
