The Penalty - BLU-RAY

Just as the film industry was converting to sound, two of the silent era's most visionary artists fled to the South Seas to collaborate on a work of pure visual beauty untainted by Hollywood's latest technical obsession. F.W. Murnau was a supreme stylist who had crafted dreamlike fables both in Germany (Faust) and the U.S. (Sunrise). Robert J. Flaherty was a groundbreaking documentarian whose Nanook of the North and Moana defined the ethnographic film movement. Over the course of nine months, they immersed themselves in Tahitian culture. Drawing inspiration from the topography and people of the surrounding islands, they (with Murnau at the helm) fashioned an emotionally rich story of the flowering romance between a young man and woman, as the shadow of civilization begins to fall upon their island paradise. Initially released in the U.S. by Paramount in a shortened and censored form, this restoration (produced by Luciano Berriatua for the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung) represents Murnau's approved version, and is presented in the historically correct 1.15 1 aspect ratio.

In a role that established him as one of the most dynamically terrifying performers of the silent screen, Lon Chaney stars in the Penalty, a grotesque thriller form director Wallace Worsley (The Hunchback of Notre Dame). When an incompetent doctor amputates the legs of a young boy, he has no idea that the youth will grow up to be the immoral and embittered Blizzard, a criminal mastermind who orchestrates a bizarre and heinous plot to avenge himself upon his malefactor. The Penalty teems with irony and sexual menace as Blizzard befriends the surgeon's daughter and serves as an artist's model for her sculptural rendition of Satan, waiting for his moment to show the depth of his demonic desires. In playing the devious Blizzard, Chaney tightly harnessed his legs within a pair of leather stumps, flawlessly rendering the physical disfigurement that so profoundly echoes the misshapen mind that drives this sadistic character toward his violent destiny. As Chaney biographer Michael Blake says, InchOne has to wonder if the intensity Lon brought to this role might have been due in part to the pain produced by his harness.Inch This special Kino on Video edition is loaded with supplemental features which better one's understanding of the Penalty, Lon Chaney and the great lengths to which he went to craft such a feverishly villainous performances.

The legendary Jean-Luc Godard (La Chinoise, Goodbye to Language) adds to his influential, iconoclastic legacy with this provocative collage film essay, a vast ontological inquiry into the history of the moving image and a commentary on the contemporary world. Winner of the first Special Palme d'Or to be awarded in the history of the Cannes Film Festival, The Image Book is another extraordinary addition to the French master's filmography.