"The American title — Big Deal on Madonna Street — must be the worst of the international variants for Mario Monicelli’s brilliant incompetent-caper comedy, said to be the absurd version of Rififi. The direct translation — Persons Unknown — used elsewhere, seems funnier once you’ve seen the film; the Spanish distributor had the wit to call it Rufufu and there it’s a treasured classic. The shooting style — the great use of the so-called “curtain effect” — has also been something we always try to put to use."

"Of all the titles in the Collection, this may be the one whose content is most radically altered by the shift from film to video, projection to electronic display. What’s lost in translation—flicker, physicality, the sheer thingness of a Brakhage film flung through space—is made up for by our ability to study the intricate compositions, structures, and rhythms in detail. Taken frame by frame, it’s like owning a Brakhage monograph with 350,000 plates. Is Commingled Containers the most beautiful of all films? Yes."

"I was tempted to include the complete works of Shakespeare, but I'll instead cite a great play that echos with “The Odyssey.” “Coriolanus,” is Shakespeare's most sustained depiction of a war veteran, which presents a brutal and heart-breaking portrait of ultra-masculinity and how it can break a man. There’s also “The Tempest,” about islands, magic, the sea, power, exile and colonialism, whose rich, vivid descriptions of nature were very much in my mind when I was working on my translation of “The Odyssey.”"