DVD Supplements: A Commentary on Commentaries

In the past decade, as graduate seminars have explored the postmodern heuristics of the "death of the author," DVD editions have popularized a range of audio and print supplements that have, directly or indirectly, expanded films' authorial halo. The notion of the commentary is, of course, nothing new to the academy: consider the multiple annotated editions of literary classics. But its material extension to the home theater "experience" has had peculiar cultural and economic consequences. As value-adding paratexts, audio and printed commentaries can turn film texts into critical or luxury editions, to be marketed to different levels of cinephilic and commercial consumption.¹

Introduced in 1984 by Criterion Collection (then part of the Voyager Company) for a niche market of laser disc buyers, Ronald Haver's audio commentary on King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, 1933) ultimately inaugurated this trend. Since the late 1990s, most DVD editions of classic, critically rediscovered, and new films have made the audio commentary a key component of an ever-growing menu of special features—including entire director's cuts, deleted scenes, making-of documentaries, exclusive or vintage interviews with the film's makers or celebrated critics, video essays, professional biographies, and photographic essays. Criterion's success in this area is widely acknowledged, and their releases with commentaries are not limited to art or classic films: the company's best-selling DVD is the hyper-commented Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998; Criterion DVD, 2003).²

Specially written essays (often referred to as liner notes and derived from recording industry practices) have also become a familiar fixture in the marketing of authorially ambitious DVD releases. They are particularly common as inserts with box sets or special two-disc editions, when they may even take the form of elegant booklets that share the size, cover, and layout of the box set and of its DVD cases. Even though materially extrinsic to the DVD content, accompanying essays affect the appeal of many DVD editions as they too, when accessed, mediate consumers' overall experiences—as film instructors (and their students) know all too well.³ Because they are cheaper to produce, written materials are sometimes added in place of audio commentaries. As Jason Viteritti, Director of DVD Production at Koch Lorber, a division of E1 Entertainment, recounted in an interview with the authors, this was the rationale in the production of the eight-disc box set, The Marco Ferreri Collection (2008), which includes a documentary on Ferreri's films, a vintage filmed interview with the director, and a booklet—but no audio commentary.⁴

Two types of commentaries dominate the market: those made by directors and individuals variously involved in the making of the film (cinematographers, screenwriters, actors, producers, and even sound designers); and those made by critics and scholars solicited if filmmakers are foreign (Wong Kar-Wai), permanently unwilling or unavailable (Godard), excessively loquacious (Tarantino), or deceased (Lang, Truffaut, Fellini). There are also subscenarios or exceptions: when the critic-scholar in question was actually present during the filming, as in the case of British critic-photographer Gideon Bachmann, who comments on Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963; Criterion DVD, 2001); or when filmmakers express their opinions as critics of a film made by someone else, as director Steven Soderbergh and writer/director Tony Gilroy did for the Criterion edition of The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949; Critierion DVD, 2007).

When soliciting an audio commentary or an essay, DVD production companies take several factors into consideration. The identification of the contributor generally reveals the desire for an established authorial or a balanced critical competence capable of attracting an audience of cinephiles, or an added "plus" for the average consumer, which in turn leads to multiple film viewings. Commentaries vary a great deal in quality, as every viewer knows. They can paraphrase the obvious in an all-too-close analysis or get lost in the vagaries of anecdotes or historical contextualizations. Although audio commentaries (as well as written essays) tend to provide "suggested readings" that often crystallize established critical interpretations, for teaching purposes we particularly appreciate...