QuÈbecois actor, and film and theatre writer/director Robert Lepage (US audiences may remember him for his role in Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal) has built a reputation over the last ten years as a maker of intelligent and offbeat productions that explore inner human themes amid larger technological or historical contexts. And although he has inspired two book-length studies devoted to his work, his last two films (at least) were never distributed in the US, theatrically or on video. This is a shame because the SF thriller Possible Worlds (2000) and the dreamlike drama The Far Side of the Moon (La Face cachÈe de la lune) (2003) are beautifully-constructed meditations on the modern world and humanity’s place in it. Fortunately, the Canadian distributor Alliance Atlantis has recently released both of these films on DVD in Canada; US viewers can view the discs even without a multi-region player.

The Far Side of the Moon, more literally and thematically translated as The Hidden Face of the Moon, is based on a theatrical one-man show Lepage wrote and performed for three years on the international stage. It’s about two brothers (both played by Lepage) living in Quebec who must come to terms with their mother’s death as well as their own troubled relationship. Phillipe is a floundering graduate student working on his thesis regarding the role of narcissism in space exploration and AndrÈ is a more lively but opportunistic weatherman who seems perennially flustered–both characters suffer from oversensitivity to personal criticism. Phillipe’s contemporary study of the American-Russian space race and its troubled competition and cooperation during the ’60s mirrors the relationship between the brothers and provides a potent metaphor for emotional weight versus transcendent uplift.

The Far Side of the Moon‘s use of circular motifs–cellestial bodies, fishbowls, and washing machines–provides a visual expression of the characters’ endless searching and self-directed gaze. As is mentioned in the film’s striking opening sequence (a mixture of CGI, found footage, and creative sound effects), ancient people on Earth imagined the moon was a large mirror that merely reflected the earth’s mountains and oceans on its murky surface. Modern satellites, however, revealed the moon to be a spherical rock with a side facing perpetually away from the earth, and the first images of our planet rising from the lunar horizon astounded viewers. The film asks whether space exploration, then, is an act of self-projection or self-observation in the same way that it presents its characters in a constant state of projection and introspection–a worthy theme seized upon by SF works, perhaps most notably in Stanislav Lem’s Solaris and Tarkovsky’s thematically-inverted film adaptation.

To further develop this theme, Lepage works in a subplot about a SETI project to collect home videos from the population and launch them into space, an idea that appeals to Phillipe, who begins randomly filming his apartment and musing on the significance of his life, another confluence of inward soul-searching and outward reach. (AndrÈ sarcastically quips that Phillipe always complains that no one listens to him so it’s only appropriate that the whole universe becomes his listener.)

In addition to the film’s many layers of interconnected meanings, a formal one persists: while Phillipe wanders around his house shooting his first video production, The Far Side of the Moon was Lepage’s first venture into digital video filmmaking. Shot in something like fifteen days, the meditative, carefully lit, and complex visual style of the film belies the medium’s reputation for harsh, handheld productions. Like Lepage’s previous work, he pays special attention to crafting refined visual transitions between scenes, using a variety of match dissolves: a circular washing machine window slowly becomes the portal of a spaceship in a following scene, a man walking on snow becomes a figure on a moonscape, etc., crafting a fluid merging of reality and fantasy that is comical, inventive, and thought-provoking.

The DVD contains an audio commentary in French by Lepage and reminds me how much I wish DVD companies would subtitle commentaries according to the languages options included with the feature. It also provides a very informative featurette on the film’s use of digital video and the way so many of its effects were generated in real time, which allowed for instant feedback and improvisation. As visually striking as the film is, most viewers will still be amazed to discover just how many “ordinary” shots have been digitally manipulated in subtle ways.

A minor complaint: purists will decry the DVD’s subtle PAL-to-NTSC ghosting effect, a particularly odd technical flaw from a digital video production released in NTSC-friendly Canada. Ideally the film should have been transferred directly from its digital source in order to preserve the full quality of the image, but Alliance unfortunately doesn’t have the best technical track record in this regard. Still, this is a small price to pay for such a creative, inspiring film that fully deserves a wider exposure.

Image Entertainment and Milestone Films recently released the complete extant works of Winsor McCay on DVD, Winsor McCay: The Master Edition, totaling ten short films from 1911-1922. It’s a direct transfer of the region 2 DVD, so some PAL-to-NTSC ghosting occurs, but should only upset the purists. McCay, who was a respected New York Herald cartoonist, is considered to have been the first real master of animation, creating extended motion films with great detail and a surprisingly offbeat sense of humor. From large animals who devour everything in sight (a dragon, Gertie the dinosaur, a growing monster) to a huge mosquito and a flying house, McCay’s animation is both charmingly whimsical and slightly subversive.

Watching the DVD, it shouldn’t have surprised me that 1914′s Gertie the Dinosaur, McCay’s most popular and enduring creation, was probably the most mundane film of the lot. Its popularity resided in its function in a vaudeville act McCay would perform by talking to his projected film and asking Gertie to do a number of tricks, to which the animated dinosaur would appear to enthusiastically respond. Thus, the film largely consists of a smiling dinosaur raising its left leg or its right leg or bowing to the audience. Not that the film isn’t without its historical importance or creative skill, especially when one notices the shimmering background has been painstakingly redrawn in each frame–at this point in time, McCay used rice paper, not layers of celluloid, and personally inked thousands of individual sketches.

Another interesting aspect of McCay’s animation is its incorporation of live-action framing stories that emphasize the novelty of the animated medium. For his first film, 1911′s Little Nemo, based on his popular comic strip, he begins with a placard that somewhat exaggeratedly reads, “The first artist to attempt drawing pictures that will move,” and follows it with another card that announces “How the proposition was received by his artist friends.” Live-action footage then reveals McCay playing a game of poker with several men, who burst out in guffaws when McCay speaks. They incredulously motion others to join them. No, no, McCay insists, and he proceeds to rapidly sketch his creations. This is followed by his promise to make 4,000 more drawings in a month’s time, which is followed by more footage of assistants comically wheeling in barrels of ink and large slabs of stacked paper to his office, a source of later slapstick when the piles of drawings fall over and become disordered. Eventually, the animated film is shown, but McCay clearly enjoyed foregrounding the process as much as the product and would use this device of a live-action “bet” or a “challenge” repeatedly.

Aesthetically speaking, the piece that impressed me the most was The Sinking of the ‘Lusitania’ (1918), which was unfortunately a propaganda film used to incite American war fever against the Germans for their famed U-boat attack. (“The man who fired the shot was decorated for it by the Kaiser!” the end title card reads. “AND YET THEY TELL US NOT TO HATE THE HUN.”) But aside from this inflammatory statement, the twelve-minute piece is a profoundly moving meditation on violent tragedy, drawn with astonishing realism by McCay based on a model of the ocean liner that was provided to him. The explosions are vibrant and shocking and the liner gradually descends into the depths with aching slowness as life boats are lowered and hundreds of “dots” fall from its deck. McCay works wonders with the steam billowing from the boat’s smokestacks, undulating like snakes in the throes of death.

The Sinking of the ‘Lusitania’ is by far the most sober film in McCay’s oeuvre, which includes such gems as the macabre How a Mosquito Operates (1912). The film details the actions of a mosquito the size of a man’s head as it inserts its syringe-like beak deep into various portions of the man’s face as he attempts to sleep, a film that is as unnerving to watch as it sounds and yet manages to play as a comedy, largely due to its timing. The disc ends with The Flying House (c. 1921), an exhilarating short film involving a couple’s dream of flying their propellered house away from the earth and into space in order to escape from their creditors. The flying sequences and aerial views could easily stand alongside Miyazaki’s work 65 years later in their grace and detail.

The disc contains a sensitive piano score by Gabriel Thibaudeau and a supremely informative commentary by animator and scholar, John Canemaker. Despite its moments of great popular acceptance, McCay never made a significant living off of his animation, and his employer, William Randolf Hearst, insisted he focus on making newspaper comic strips–and increasingly editorial cartoons–so McCay eventually stopped making films altogether, leaving the genre for other pioneers. Luckily for us, his work can still be seen.

Tod Browning is probably best remembered for directing BÈla Lugosi in Dracula (1931), but of the handful of his films I’ve seen, his most extraordinary are The Unknown (1927) and Freaks (1932), two movies that use the auspices of the horror convention to reveal complex notions about physical and social “normalcy.” Both films have been released as excellent DVDs in the US, Freaks just this week by Warner Home Video.

Browning was a Hollywood eccentric to be sure, a filmmaker who delved artfully into themes no other mainstream filmmaker seemed to touch, issues that were rooted in his past: at 16, he ran away from home and joined the circus. According to Elliott Stein’s 1980 essay in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Browning worked for many years as a tent builder, a “barker,” a clown (with the Ringling Brothers), a contortionist, and even appeared in a riverboat act as “The Living Hypnotic Corpse.”

Browning later became one of D.W. Griffith’s stock performers and gradually moved behind the camera, signing a contract to direct films for Universal. After the studio’s hugely successful series of horror films of the early ’30s, and for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear, MGM–the studio most renowned for its glitzy musicals and glamour–hired Browning to make “the ultimate horror film.” He based it on Tod Robbins’ novel Spurs, set within the world of the circus and cast real developmentally and physically disabled veterans of circus “freak shows” that were then at the height of popularity.

Freaks, however, is far from an exploitative picture. Critic Andrew Sarris wrote that it is “one of the most compassionate films ever made” in its depiction of severely malformed people (a pair of Siamese twins, microcephalics, armless and legless folks, dwarves, a bearded lady, and others) and their backstage camaraderie. There are no shock cuts in the film and the actors’ physical disabilities are never used to generate gasps, but to present real people marginalized by Hollywood’s typical adulatory gaze.

The film begins with a sideshow circus announcer shamelessly tantalizing his audience with the promise of unveiled shocks. “But for the accident of birth, you might be as they are,” he darkly muses, but Browning takes such a sentiment seriously, so the rest of the film addresses the performers offstage rather than onstage, thus undermining a potential source of exhibitionism. It’s part of the film’s brilliance that the lines between normal and abnormal, us and them, and even morality and immorality, are constantly blurred and reversed, establishing an unpredictable interpretive pattern that challenges age-old stereotypes about health and beauty, deformities and evil.

Browning also understands that the gateway to social judgment and scandal lies fully within the moral implications of one’s gaze, both in the circus and in the movies. In an early scene that could serve as a master shot of this theme (pictured above), a beautiful (but cruel) trapeze woman sneaks a look through backstage curtains, gazing at a circus audience beyond, while a dwarf, Hans (Harry Earles), admires her figure. Additionally, the camera represents the subjective view of Hans’ fiancÈe, Frieda (Daisy Earles), who, it is revealed in a subsequent reverse shot, gazes sadly in pained jealousy. And we–the film’s audience–gaze at all three, judging and appraising, empathizing and peeping.

The film’s narrative revolves around a murder plot by the trapeze artist and the circus strongman and their efforts to steal Hans’ wealth. But before the viewer can adopt any easy moral interpretations, the circus performers themselves devise their own brand of cruelty and revenge.

Freaks was immediately shelved by MGM for several decades and few managed to actually see the film–it was even banned overseas in a display of censorship that suggested more about the assumptions of the censors than the content of the film. (Many critics suggest it was precisely the film’s empathy toward its subject and ambiguous moral structure that enflamed its critics the most.) But it experienced a revival at the 1962 Venice Film Festival and has steadily been embraced as a remarkable aberration in Hollywood’s Golden Age, a film that has lost little of its impact and relevance in the 75 years since it was made.

The Warners DVD offers an exceptional transfer with a mixed bag of extras. Although it claims to include three alternate endings, they’re merely three alternate cuts of the extant footage, and the documentary and commentary overlap a lot of information on the actors and their individual histories. It would have been nice to include an analysis that critiqued the film thematically or aesthetically, but the commentary largely focuses on historical facts. Nevertheless, this is a film cinephiles have long awaited on DVD, and it’s great to finally have it.