The BFI have today announced a wide range of titles for September to December release on Blu-ray and DVD, with acclaimed classics of world cinema, including Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, a Pier Paulo Pasolini Blu-ray collection, film noir masterpieces by Otto Preminger and Jules Dassin, celebrated British TV documentaries and a selection of recent theatrical releases.

SEPTEMBER

September kicks off with the Otto Preminger Film Noir Collection (1945-50) on Limited Edition Blu-ray, a three-disc box set featuring Fallen Angel, Whirlpool and Where the Sidewalk Ends. The film noir theme continues with Night and the City (1950), Jules Dassin’s London-set baroque masterpiece of crime and corruption.

2015 marks the centenary of the controversial, yet extremely significant silent drama, The Birth of a Nation (1915) by D.W. Griffith. This re-mastered release follows the Griffith summer season at BFI Southbank.

We celebrate Halloween with DVD re-releases of chilling titles Sleepwalker (Saxon Logan, 1984), The Black Panther (Ian Merrick, 1977), BBC TV’s Schalcken the Painter (1979) and on Blu-ray is Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922), the much imitated adaptation of Dracula.

OCTOBER

This autumn is the 40th anniversary of the untimely death of controversial writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. To mark the occasion the BFI is re-releasing six of Pasolini’s most widely renowned films together in the Pasolini Blu-ray Collection (1968-1975) – Medea, Theorem, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom and his Trilogy of Life (Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights). The BFI has also announced the release of Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini (2014), starring Willem Dafoe, on both Blu-ray and DVD, following its theatrical release on 11th September.

Also out in October is the DVD premiere of The Children’s Film Foundation Sci-Fi drama Masters of Venus (1962); the Richard Hawley scored Love is All (2014), director Kim Longinotto’s collage of a hundred years of love and courtship on the silver screen, and Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl / Borom Sarret (1966), one of the founding works of African cinema.

NOVEMBER

November sees the release of Murder in the Cathedral (1952), George Hoellering’s film adaptation of the classic verse drama by T.S. Eliot featuring music by László Lajtha and the voice of the writer himself, and Make More Noise! Suffragettes in Silent Film (1899-1917). Released to complement Sarah Gavron’s forthcoming feature film Suffragette (2015), the collection compiles over 20 silent films from the BFI National Archive, combining gloriously anarchic comedies, newsreels and documentaries with a specially commissioned score by Lillian Henley. It presents a fascinating insight into the early 20th Century struggle for women’s suffrage.

The month also sees the releases of Luchino Visconti’s neorealist classic Rocco and His Brothers (1960), featuring a young Claudia Cardinale and an acclaimed score by composer Nino Rota (The Godfather, The Leopard) and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s nail-biting thriller The Wages of Fear (1954), on Limited Edition Dual-Format.

To coincide with the BFI Southbank TV Documentaries season, we will release two collections of documentaries from the BBC and ITV. Visions of Change Volume One: The BBC (1951-67) and Visions of Change Volume Two: ITV (1958-1967), bringing together the work of renowned film-makers including Ken Russell and Peter Morley, to give an insight into the rapidly changing British culture of the time.