DVD Features include:

1) Two audio commentaries  by Professor Joseph Frank.
2) Full-Length Commentary with Gary Walkow and Henry Czerny, and more!


Joseph Frank is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature Emeritus at Stanford University, and of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is considered one of the foremost authorities on Dostoevsky's work, having published an extensive, widely celebrated five-volume biography of the writer, as well as a book of essays entitled Through the Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture, about the molding and re-shaping of ideas and symbolisms that has occurred historically between Russia and the West.

Joseph Frank's Lecture Commentary

Joseph Frank's lecture commentary and accompanying slide presentation brilliantly integrate the film and its themes by placing them into historical and philosophical context—the context of Dostoevsky's original work, Notes from Underground. Professor Frank provides the audience with a lucid portrait of the Underground Man as one beholden to a multitude of inner conflicts and contradictions desperately seeking to reconcile them by videotaping his confessions, thereby acknowledging his invisible and ever-present “audience”. Professor Frank's presentation elucidates the many similarities between Dostoevsky's social environment and our own; we find that the forces that compel such deliberate, self-conscious struggle with one's own chaotic impulses and emotions have changed very little since the publication of the original text, making Gary Walkow's cinematic interpretation all the more relevant as an unflinching, unafraid examination of our own society.
     Professor Frank's insight into the historical circumstance and prevailing philosophical and ideological discourse of Dostoevsky's world allows the audience to make its own critical assessment of the similarities between both portrayals of the Underground Man—a man who recognizes his illness but is prevented from a cure by his own pervasive, vacuous self-consciousness and perceived powerlessness.

Joseph Frank's Full-length Commentary

Joseph Frank's full-length audio-commentary that complements the feature provides useful background into the themes of both Walkow's film and Dostoevsky's original text. Professor Frank explains, scene by scene, many of the subtle—yet crucial—similarities between the film and the text, allowing the audience to fully appreciate Walkow's work as a faithful rendering of Dostoevsky's masterpiece. These added insights further help the audience to grasp many of the less-than-obvious nuances that contribute to the Underground Man's misery, as he brutally uses Others to validate his compulsions while at the same time being completely dominated by his own shame and guilt for having insincerely undertaken this sado-masochistic endeavor.