Arthur Cohn Presents…

Winner of an astounding six Oscars, 65-year-old producer Arthur Cohn's films--10 of which are collected on nine discs in this first-ever “producer's” DVD box set--vary widely in subject and style: from Barbara Kopple's American Dream (VL Online-12/93), the outstanding 1991 Oscar-winning account of the personal costs of a protracted Hormel meatpackers' strike launched in Austin, MN, in 1984, to James Foley's 1995 Two Bits (VL-7/96), a moving story chronicling one day in the life of a boy and his dying grandfather (Al Pacino). Yet, if there is a single unifying thread that runs throughout this collection it's the concern for how we treat each other as human beings: both on an individual level (as in Walter Salles' Golden Globe-winning 1998 Central Station [VL Online-7/99], in which a lonely, hardhearted older woman (Oscar-nominated Fernanda Montenegro) rediscovers her humanity in the company of a vulnerable child) and as groups (such as Kevin Macdonald's 1999 One Day in September [VL Online-5/01], the Oscar-winning harrowing account of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, where Palestinian terrorists took 11 members of the Israeli team hostage). We see this theme again and again in Cohn's films: Salles' 2001 Behind the Sun (VL-9/02) charts the Hatfield-McCoy-like blood feud over land between two early-20th century Brazilian families; Vittorio De Sica's Oscar-winning 1971 The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (VL-9/01) chronicles the tragically slow stripping of, first, privilege, then custom, and finally basic human rights amongst a naïve Jewish-Italian family living under Mussolini's fascist regime; and Jean-Jacques Annaud's Oscar-winning 1976 Black and White in Color (VL Online-10/03), which pokes pointed fun at a self-righteous colonial French community on Africa's Ivory Coast (circa 1915) that spends most of its time foisting Western religious and cultural beliefs on the native population--eventually leading them into an ill-fated local war against a German outpost. The remaining three films are the 1961 Oscar-winning documentary The Sky Above, The Mud Below (included on the Black and White in Color disc), De Sica's 1973 A Brief Vacation (inspired by Apollinaire's observation that “sickness is the vacation of the poor”), and Richard Dembo's 1984 Cold War chess thriller Dangerous Moves. An unprecedented collaboration between Columbia TriStar, Buena Vista, Janus Films, Miramax, Paramount, Universal, and Home Vision, this handsome boxed set features mostly pristine transfers and a handful of solid extras, including interviews with Arthur Cohn and Jean-Jacques Annaud (Black and White in Color), audio commentary on Central Station, excerpts from Woman Times Seven (starring Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine) on A Brief Vacation, the powerful Holocaust short Children of the Night on American Dream, and an interesting (and uncredited on the DVD jacket) text guide to chess notation on Dangerous Moves. Purchased individually, these titles would run $237.75; at $199.95, Arthur Cohn Presents…is a bargain--a collection of films about humanity struggling against inhumanity that couldn't be timelier. Highly recommended. (R. Pitman)