Masters of Cinema

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Masters of Cinema is a small organisation that produces both a series of DVDs for release in the UK and a website dedicated to the most well-regarded film directors in the world. The website is a resource of news, articles, and links about these directors and their works. The DVD series is a side project that Masters of Cinema started with Eureka Entertainment Ltd. in January 2004, capitalising on the scholarship of Masters of Cinema and the influence and reputation it had acquired as a website, along with the resources and experience of Eureka. The model that the series follows was set by The Criterion Collection, which is to say that it is a series of numbered releases serving as definitive editions of the films, usually involving a restoration of the work, a collection of available scholarly material that can be conveniently packaged with the film, and the commissioning of interviews, essays, and/or commentary tracks. Filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Peter Watkins, Alex Cox, Claude Lanzmann and Abel Ferrara; scholars such as Tony Rayns and Scott Eyman; and critics such as Kent Jones, Phillip Lopate, David Ehrenstein, and Bill Krohn have all created exclusive content for DVD released by the Masters of Cinema Series which so far includes over 50 titles (November 2007).

Masters of Cinema was founded by a diverse international group of like-minded film enthusiasts: Jan Bielawski, a mathematician; Doug Cummings, a graphic artist and freelance critic; Trond Trondsen, a Ph.D. of Space Physics and president of Keo Scientific Ltd.; and Nick Wrigley, a musician. The founders of the group began to bring their individual Websites on the film directors Yasujiro Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Robert Bresson under the heading of Masters of Cinema in 2001 and officially combined them and created the primary Masters of Cinema page in 2003. R. Dixon Smith, a film historian and documentary filmmaker, joined the group at this time.