The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?’

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

In October 2022, amid a flurry of media appearances promoting their film “Tàr,” the director Todd Field and the star Cate Blanchett made time to visit a cramped closet in Manhattan. This closet, which has become a sacred space for movie buffs, was once a disused bathroom at the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, a 40-year-old company dedicated to “gathering the greatest films from around the world” and making high-quality editions available to the public on DVD and Blu-ray and, more recently, through its streaming service, the Criterion Channel. Today Criterion uses the closet as its stockroom, housing films by some 600 directors from more than 50 countries — a catalog so synonymous with cinematic achievement that it has come to function as a kind of film Hall of Fame. Through a combination of luck, obsession and good taste, this 55-person company has become the arbiter of what makes a great movie, more so than any Hollywood studio or awards ceremony.

My name is Joshua Hunt, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. This week's Sunday Read is my story for the magazine about the history and enduring cultural influence of the Criterion Collection, a home video company that's been around for 40 years. It started out selling laser discs in the early 1980s. These days, its mission, to highlight what it calls important classic and contemporary films from around the world, is mostly carried out through sales of DVD and Blu-ray discs. Criterion not only survived all these technological shifts in the business of how movies get made and distributed, but it's prospered. Five years ago, it launched a streaming service of its own.

But in an age when our tastes are so algorithmically determined, the Criterion Channel stands out for its reliance on human curation. Every film is handpicked. Nothing gets recommended based on what others are watching or what you've watched before. I first came across Criterion in the late 90s when I became obsessed with its DVD release of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Eventually, I bought every Kurosawa film Criterion released on DVD. And over time,

I developed distrust in the Criterion brand, where I would occasionally buy movies that I knew nothing about. I think it's how a lot of people's relationship with Criterion goes. It starts with movies they know, but eventually they're taking a leap of faith based on the brand and not the filmmaker. Criterion is who they trust to tell them what is good cinema. So, here's my article. Sure, it won an Oscar, but is it Criterion? Read by Sean Taylor Corbett. This week's audio was produced by Jack Disidoro.

The music you'll hear was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. In October 2022, amid a flurry of media appearances promoting their film Tar, the director Todd Field and the star Cate Blanchett made time to visit a cramped closet in Manhattan. This closet, which has become a sacred space for movie buffs, was once a disused bathroom at the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, a 40-year-old company dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and making high-quality editions available to the public on DVD and

Blu-ray and, more recently, through its streaming service, the Criterion Channel. Today, Criterion uses the closet as its stockroom, housing films by some 600 directors from more than 50 countries, a catalogue so synonymous with cinematic achievement that it has come to function as a kind of film hall of fame. Over four decades, through a combination of luck, obsession, and good taste, this 55-person company has become the arbiter of what makes a great movie, more so than any Hollywood studio or awards ceremony. For more than a decade, the Criterion Closet has also served as the backdrop for a popular online video series

in which actors and filmmakers, Nathan Lane, Aubrey Plaza, and Ethan Hawke among them, pick out their favorite Criterion titles to take home. Like other celebrity guests in the Closet Picks series, Field and Blanchett plucked their selections from the neatly ordered shelves and used them as conduits for spontaneous bursts of evangelism. Field praised Raymond Bernard's Wooden Crosses as one of the greatest war movies ever made, while Blanchett singled out Larissa Shepetko's The Ascent

as something that has to be owned by every single human in the world. Neither bothered to mention Tar, the film they were otherwise working so hard to promote. Inside the closet, even the biggest stars are reduced to a state of childlike fandom. There's no cynicism in the closet, Field told me. It's all love. It's all about why people do what they do and how powerful movies are for us. It's all about why people do what they do and how powerful movies are for us.

Each year, Criterion selects 50 or 60 new entrants to add to its catalog, which now includes 1,650 films. Some Hollywood directors campaign relentlessly for their films or their favorite films from the past to make the list. For legions of film fans, Criterion is akin to the Louvre, but with an aura of hip, the writer and director Josh Safdie told me in an email. When Safdie's film, Uncut Gems, which he directed with his brother, Benny, entered the Criterion collection with the spine number 1101, he said they couldn't help feeling as if they had snuck into the museum that they had admired for so long. Being a part of the collection is something that we're both incredibly proud of, Safdie told me. It may sound corny, but it was more meaningful than awards.

Criterion's commitment to film and filmmakers has helped the company, which began in the 1980s by releasing films on VHS and Laserdisc, a precursor to DVDs, films on VHS and Laserdisc, a precursor to DVDs with a comparatively enormous diameter of 12 inches, to stay relevant and profitable through a series of tech revolutions that have upended the industry. While studios and streaming services chase audiences by producing endless sequels and spinoffs, trying to wring fresh content from old ideas, Criterion has built a brand that audiences trust to lead them, even to the most obscure corners of the film universe. Criterion's success in marketing beautiful, strange, complex movies is the road not taken by most of Hollywood. A steadfast belief in the value of human creativity and curation over the output of any algorithm. One day in the spring of 1992, a year after taking over as director of Criterion, Michael Nash was sitting in his beachfront office in Santa Monica when he got an unexpected phone

call. Like many people who work for years in Hollywood, Nash has a tendency to describe events as if he were reading lines from a screenplay. You're sitting in the office, and on the desk there's the old-style intercom, he told me. The operator takes an incoming call, and then it's like, Michael Nash? David Bowie on line four. Bowie was calling about Nicholas Rogue's 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie starred as an alien visitor who mas film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie starred as an alien visitor who masquerades as human and succumbs to the human condition. Nash remembered seeing the movie years earlier and finding it amazing but difficult to understand.

I was totally confused, he said. The reason audiences couldn't make sense of it, Bowie explained, was that the theatrical release for The Man Who Fell to Earth was missing 18 minutes of film that was cut by the distributor. It got butchered, Nash told me. Years later, its star was hoping that Criterion might consider releasing Rogue's original by the CD-ROM pioneer Bob Stein, along with his wife, Aline Stein, and a former Warner Brothers executive named Roger Smith, to explore the technological possibilities of the Laserdisc, then a novel format that could accommodate multiple audio tracks

and allowed viewers to stop on any frame of a film with no image distortion. Criterion would track down the original negative or best surviving pre-print version, then hire technicians to scan the film, remove blemishes when possible and correct colors that may have faded or turned pink over time. The vision, says Rebecca Odick, who worked as head of design at Criterion from 1991 to 1994, was getting people access to all these great films. Before the emergence of the home video market in the late 1970s, Hollywood studios had little use for films whose theatrical runs had concluded.

They ceased to be commodities and were often destroyed or transferred to public archives where they remained vulnerable to fire, deterioration, and discoloration. Non-profits led the nascent movement to preserve and restore motion pictures until Criterion helped create a market for them. The company's first release was a Laserdisc edition of Citizen Kane that included supplementary materials like a video essay and extensive liner notes on the provenance of the negative from which the restoration was made. Next came King Kong, which featured the first-ever audio commentary track, inspired, as an afterthought, by the stories that the film scholar Ronald Haver told while supervising the tedious process of transferring the film from celluloid.

The novelty of the Laserdisc meant licensing fees cost virtually nothing compared with the dominant VHS tape format. Acquiring the rights to Citizen Kane and King Kong from RKO Pictures cost Criterion around $10,000. Securing the best surviving print of a film often required assiduous detective work. The original negative for Dr. Strangelove was lost, says Morgan Holley, who served as an in-house producer for the Criterion laser disc of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Cold War satire.

There was one print that was struck from the original negative that was somewhere in the world. One of Criterion's editors, Maria Palazzola, tracked it down only to learn that on its journey to the United States, it took a detour through Japan, where strict anti-pornography laws prompted customs officials to order a test screening that would almost certainly have degraded or destroyed Kubrick's sole personal print of the film. It was this battle, Holly told me, but in the end, they persuaded the Japanese authorities to send the print on its way unscreened and unscathed. Criterion sought to restore films not only to pristine condition, but also with the intent of the filmmaker in mind.

letterboxing, or presenting a film in its original aspect ratio by adding black bars at the top and bottom of the screen rather than cropping the image to fit a standard television display. Directors' commentary tracks were another criterion innovation. Some of the earliest were recorded by Martin Scorsese for the Taxi Driver and Raging Bull Laserdiscs, which helped cement his influence on an entire generation of young directors. discs, which helped cement his influence on an entire generation of young directors. I knew from Scorsese, from those commentaries, sometimes, how they were accomplishing those shots, the filmmaker Wes Anderson told me. And I think I got a sense of his approach with actors of trying to get a sort of documentary feeling to certain aspects of those movies.

Criterion's respect for creators was what caught Bowie's attention. On the phone with Nash, he offered to record an audio commentary for the Criterion edition of The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was released on Laserdisc in March 1993 and quickly became a cult classic. The thing about The Man Who Fell to Earth and so many of the other projects is you've got films whose greatness was squelched somewhat by the process of taking them to market. Where the people who had the projects didn't understand them and would recut them for commercial release, Nash told me. His priority was to help make Criterion an enterprise that would restore the director's vision and get the film right for posterity. When Terry Gilliam's dystopian classic Brazil entered the collection as a special edition box set in 1996,

the director told me that he seized the opportunity to invite viewers to take sides on his well-publicized feud with the head of Universal Pictures, Sidney Sheinberg. They had cut almost all the fantasy sequences out, Gilliam said. They were making a different film. They were making Sid's film, which was ultimately missing 20 minutes of footage. Gilliam told me he insisted that Criterion include both his own cut and Sheinberg's version in its release, so people could decide for themselves, was I the idiot, or was the studio?

Always in awe of auteurs, but never in their thrall, Criterion producers have never been afraid to look beyond the biggest and most marketable names. When Criterion released Peeping Tom, a 60s psychosexual thriller by the English director Michael Powell, the company chose not to ask Scorsese to record the audio commentary, though he would have been the obvious candidate, having done them for other Criterion editions of Powell films. The job instead went to a feminist scholar, Laura Mulvey, the author of the influential essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,

which brought forward the concept of the male gaze. Over the years, such decisions added up to an editorial voice that became influential, even authoritative, transforming a mere distributor of films into a creator of film culture. As time passed and its catalog grew, so too did a sense among Criterion leaders that the collection could become more than a mere archive, that it should have something to say about contemporary cinema too. During his brief stint at the helm of the company, Nash focused on acquiring newer movies that he found both commercially interesting and culturally important, like Short Cuts by Robert Altman and Katsuhiro Otomo's dystopian anime masterpiece Akira.

He also made Criterion an early proponent of the new wave of African-American cinema by releasing laser-disc editions of films by young directors like John Singleton, Boys in the Hood, and the Hughes brothers, Menace to Society. The year after Nash left the company, it released a Laserdisc for Do the Right Thing, the first of three Spike Lee films to join the collection. Criterion's staff was fewer than 50 employees,

each with different interests and tastes, and they were soon forced to confront a question that film buffs argue about to this day. What makes a film worthy of inclusion in the Criterion Collection? In 1989, the company's most controversial choice was Ghostbusters, a comedy starring Bill Murray that grossed more than $200 million at the box office. It was important, but in a different way than the other films in the collection were. You know, the Bergman films and the Kurosawa films, Holly told me. It was an important film because a lot of people watched it.

Some of Holly's colleagues nevertheless disagreed vehemently with the decision. There was one producer, I won't name his name, but he wrote this ten-page internal memo about why we should not do Ghostbusters, he told me. That was one of many attempts Criterion made to curb its stuffy image, among them The Rock and Armageddon by Michael Bay. Those are frequently cited as outliers in the collection, a former Criterion producer, Issa Club, told me. And yet, he said, they serve as examples of what was once

a very important genre of Hollywood blockbusters built around big budgets and big movie stars, which has been supplanted by franchise properties. A shift Bay played a prominent role in as the director of the first five films in the Transformers franchise. In September, when I called Michael Bay at his home in Miami, he seemed blissfully unaware that many cinephiles don't think his films belong in the collection. He was also unaware of Criterion's continued existence,

but told me quite earnestly how cool it was that they were still around. His enthusiasm for its Laserd laser discs was palpable, as he described washing cars for the cash to buy them, just as he did to afford the best stereo equipment. I just remember it being the pinnacle, Bay said of the brand. Bay also gamely entertained my questions about the most infamous feature of Criterion's commentary track for Armageddon, in which the movie's star track for Armageddon,

in which the movie's star, Ben Affleck, mentions an on-set spat with Bay over the plot. Why, Affleck wondered, would it be easier to prepare oil rig workers for outer space travel than to train NASA astronauts how to drill into and then destroy an asteroid on a collision course with Earth? I told him to shut the f*** up, they said. Ben has a wry personality, so you just have to come back at him with that same type of personality. In the late 90s, as Criterion shifted to DVD, the company had a tried and true template, but also a desire to keep growing.

They started to push the boundaries, Peter Becker, Criterion's president, told me. They started to push the boundaries, Peter Becker, Criterion's president, told me. They released films like a collection of music videos by the Beastie Boys and the experimental films of Stan Brakhage. The brand's cultural cachet had grown to such an extent that being selected for inclusion in the collection could boost a young filmmaker's sales as well as reputation. Kelly Reichardt, whose films Certain Women and Old Joy did not enter the collection until much later, explained that, at the time, the criterion in premature meant getting the equivalent of dedicated shelf space in video stores alongside big-name male directors.

Back in the video store days, it was really hard to get a shelf if you were a woman, Reichardt told me. They have all the dudes, stocked by director, with their entire catalog in one place, and my stuff would be all spread throughout the store. Over time, Becker told me, there was a creeping awareness that, little by little, somewhat accidentally, we had supported and propped up a canon that was largely white and male. In August 2020, after the New York Times published the article, How the Criterion Collection Crops Out African American Directors, Becker took responsibility for what he called his blind spots. Subsequently, and in response to the murder of George Floyd, he said, the company set out to correct course.

Since then, it has released additional films by Steve McQueen and Ousmane Sombin, and added, among others, Marlon Riggs and Cheryl Dunier, whose 1996 romantic comedy, The Watermelon Woman, is a landmark of the 90s indie renaissance and of queer black cinema. It's a film that is so genuine and connects with audiences so beautifully, Becker told me. Adding it to the collection was a no-brainer once the rights became available. Dunier told me that she was proud of its inclusion and happy to have made something that enriches the global storytelling that Criterion represents.

Securing the rights to films remains a defining factor in determining what ends up in the collection. Licensing often starts with a wish list submitted to various Hollywood studios. What goes on that list is often a result of conversations and meetings among technical staff, producers and editors, and, of course, Becker and the chief executive of Criterion, Jonathan Turrell. I've seen more movies than a lot of my friends, Becker said. I certainly haven't seen more movies than all of my colleagues put together. Occasionally,

high-powered interlopers have their say by lobbying Becker. For a few years, I kept asking him about this film by Dino Risi, Il Sorpasso, says Jim Jarmusch, director of Down by Law, Ghost Dog, and other Criterion titles. And he says, damn it, Jim, it's you and Marty Scorsese. You guys are calling me every month or so about this damn film. Becker didn't remember those calls. He said Antonio Monda, an Italian writer and filmmaker, was its major calls. He said Antonio Monda, an Italian writer and filmmaker, was its major champion. But one way or another, El Sorpaso entered the collection in 2014.

Criterion has shaped generations of filmmakers who grew up under its influence. Josh Safdie told me that he watched countless Criterion releases in high school, starting with Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Fritz Lang's M. He got his first glimpse of the directing process from a behind-the-scenes documentary included with a Criterion DVD for Wes Anderson's film Rushmore. Among the supplementary features for the Criterion DVD of Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, he recalled seeing his first glimpse of an actor's audition tape. Back then, you were lucky to get a theatrical trailer as an extra on a DVD, he said.

Getting a look into Truffaut's process was really special, which in turn made the disc a really special object. The extra touches that made them special objects also meant they were more expensive than standard DVD releases. So Safdie and his brother Benny would make illicit copies of the Criterion discs they rented by mail through Netflix. Benny would make his own Criterion DVD inserts, Safdie said. He would do this by mimicking the unifying aesthetic features of each Criterion DVD.

A catalog number on the spine designating its place in the collection and drawn across the top of its cover, a thin line, above which distinctive text with extra wide kerning spelled out the Criterion Collection. Criterion's distinctive visual language began to emerge in the early 90s when Otik, the former head of design, started building up its art staff with an aim to really show the power of these films through the cover designs, she told me. To do that, it was sometimes necessary to go through every frame of film in search of the perfect image.

Other times, images alone were not enough. For the cover of RoboCop, we had an actual aluminum cast letterpress plate made and then photographed the plate with a 4x5 camera, Odick says. It took days, she told me, but using a physical piece of metal gave it a feeling of aesthetic truth. When Wes Anderson started working with Criterion on DVD releases of his films, the cover designers incorporated illustrations that his brother Eric Chase Anderson had made as part of the pre-production process. Anderson, who asked that verbal tics like uh and um not be excised from his quotes, told me that he had always admired how Criterion covers tended to be more adventurous than what a movie studio would be inclined to go with. The work being done by its art department, he said, was on par creatively with the famously

impressionistic movie poster designers of Soviet-era Poland. They invent their own posters, he said, their own imagery to go with the movie. Their own posters, he said. Their own imagery to go with the movie. Anderson was equally eager to work with specialists like the mastering supervisor Lee Klein, who inherited from his mentor, Maria Palazzola, a rigorous approach to editing that begins with preserving the intent of the filmmaker rather than the results they achieved. If some technical limitation had made the film look a certain way,

Klein might try, within reason, to help them get closer to their vision than they had the first time around. Across three decades at the company, Klein told me, his actual duties on any given project have varied wildly depending on the filmmaker and the source material. Michael Mann, for example, wants the digital copies of his films to be faithful to the 35mm print. John Waters makes the most of Klein's ability to improve the look of films

that were originally shot for very little money. He's a guy who wants to make the movies look as good as they can, and everyone always thinks he would probably want to make them look as bad as they can, Klein said of the Pink Flamingos director. It's just the opposite. He wants them to look like Bergman films. Klein sometimes works for years on a restoration project,

as in the case of Satyajit Ray's Pothir Panchali, Aporazito, and Opur Shancher, three films from the second half of the 1950s that are collectively known as the Apu Trilogy. The late Indian filmmaker was beloved by other great masters of cinema. Scorsese saw Pothar Panchali as a young boy, and Kurosawa once compared never seeing a ray film to never having seen the sun or the moon. But he was not very well known even among cinephiles. Changing that through the release of a Criterion box set required the restoration of sections of the films from the trilogy that had been badly damaged in a fire by the time Klein started working on them. Klein repaired what he could, found other sources to replace what he couldn't,

and digitally married them in such a way that they matched. The undertaking was a source of great pressure, he told me. You feel the cinematic weight of the world on your shoulders when you're dealing with those classics, he said. One wrong move and the print might be damaged irreparably, another great film lost to history. In 2019, after the sudden demise of its popular streaming partnership with TCM, called Filmstruck, Criterion started its standalone subscription-based streaming service, which features a broader range of films than just those in the collection. Getting the Criterion channel off the ground was hugely energizing, Jason Altman, a producer at Criterion, said, because it was ours. We weren't partnering with anybody.

The abrupt shuddering of Filmstruck was the work of Warner Brothers bosses, several Criterion staff members told me, and there was a sense of relief to be free of such relationships. It was a tremendous opportunity, I think, from an aesthetic standpoint, a content standpoint, for Criterion to have our own space and our own place in this kind of new streaming world, Altman said. Criterion made a conscious decision, Becker told me, to use the architecture of streaming technology differently from the way others have. Instead of an algorithm, viewers are guided to Thank you. Some as straightforward as retrospectives celebrating specific filmmakers, others as niche as collections dedicated to obscure genres like gaslight noir and gothic noir, between which, Becker assures me, there is a difference.

They're not algorithmic by nature, Becker said of the major streaming services. They're algorithmic by intention. The workload associated with keeping the service going, however, can be immense. The strain was particularly acute after Criterion laid off 20% of its staff near the end of 2022. A reorganization, as Becker called it, from which many staff members have since been brought back to the company as its financial situation improved. Altman, who was among those temporarily laid off and brought back on a freelance basis, nevertheless felt that doing things the hard way was still the correct path forward for the Criterion channel.

Just as it had been for the brand's Laserdiscs and DVDs. You know all those streaming channels. It's all the content war, right? Altman said. I mean, it's like, who has the most content? It's not necessarily the best content. That's the challenge for Criterion. The benefit of this curation, Kelly Reichardt told me, was that you don't feel like you've entered a mall and you're going to exhaust yourself. With some other streaming services, she told me, she often gives up before settling on anything to watch. When we spoke, she was preparing for a talk she was invited to give in Tokyo on what would have been the director Yoshijiro Ozu's 120th birthday by watching as many of the 40 or so films of his that are available on the Criterion channel.

For weeks afterward, I did the same, often stopping between day-long Ozu matinees to reflect on what Todd Field had called the messiness of our own narrative, which is to say the process by which friends, lovers, and strangers guide us toward movies that end up changing our lives. Field told me a story about waiting tables at a Manhattan restaurant in 1984 and being shoved across the street to see a film festival at Lincoln Center. He saw films by Victor Nunez, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, and Wim Wenders, he said. But that's just because somebody pushed me across the street. For Field, that's what Criterion represents. Not an algorithm saying, this will turn you on,

but the gift of being shoved toward great cinema.