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

《星期日泰晤士报》上写道:当然,它赢得了奥斯卡奖。但这是Critarion吗?

The Daily

2024-03-17

29 分钟
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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.
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  • 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.

  • Criteria 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 hand picked.

  • Nothing gets recommended based on what others are watching or what you've watched before.

  • I first came across Criterion in the late nineties, 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.