January 2009, nr 306
"And so this is Christmas" - as John Lennon once sang - and we are back to the moment of (as I called it last year) "lists, lists and more lists": best films of the year, best unreleased films, best films seen on the Film Festival circuit - However, increasingly, there is now another, newer list taking its place alongside these familiar, classic collections: best DVDs of the year. (See, for instance, the latest 'Sight and Sound' survey at http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49501.) And the chief aim of almost every intelligent DVD list appears identical: to celebrate the existence of the US company Criterion, the specialist DVD provider 'par excellence'.
Don't get me wrong. There are other important specialist commercial DVD companies around the world like Intermedio (Spain), Montparnasse (France) Madman (Australia) and Masters of Cinema (UK) - not forgetting the diligent work of state-funded archives like the Austrian Filmmuseum (http://www.filmmuseum.at/), Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne (http://www.pwa.gov.pl/en/index.html), or Danish Film Institute (http://www.dfi.dk/bibliotekogarkiver/Filmarkivet/filmarchive/dvd/dvds.htm). And, like every serious cinephile, I myself have a very full shelf of Criterion DVDs, proudly dusted and maintained in alphabetical order.
But, in cultural terms, Criterion presents a special case. I knew something had changed in my home town of Melbourne when the city's most sophisticated bookshop decided to add a 'Criterion wall'; and when my young nephew, a postgraduate student, expert physicist and budding cinephile, informed me that he and his friends have regular nights that they call not 'film nights' or 'DVD nights', but precisely 'Criterion nights'. It all adds up to what we can call the Criterion Effect.
In market terms, it's a revolution - and a rather benevolent one. But is there something here that should make us pause before we plunge in and buy our next DVD to celebrate New Year 2009? As a company, Criterion has achieved something no film distributor has been able to do since the 1960s: it has turned cinema consumption back into a matter of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once called 'distinction', entailing a certain 'class consciousness', imbibing 'fine cinema' like fine wine.
This is an extraordinary development in global film culture. Despite every attempt, the sellers of literature and music cannot pull off the same trick: most people, if they want to experience Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary' or Beethoven's Symphonies, will get their hands on any available edition, even second-hand: cheap paperback, Naxos CD, whatever. But if a devoted film fan wants a copy of tout va bien, the Honeymoon Killers or fanny and alexander, 'who they gonna call'? Criterion, in short, has done something that, twenty years ago, we might have thought impossible: they have re-introduced 'aura' (as Walter Benjamin described it) into 'the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility'. Which is no mean feat.
All this, I fear, has the whiff of the Museum about it, of High Art ritual, of elevated consumer snobbishness. Back in the unruly, technologically defective days of VHS videotape - to which I truly would not want to return - at least all films seemed equal, in a wildly savage, democratic way: so-called art films dissolved into the amorphous mass of entertainment, genre and exploitation films. Can YouTube now return us to such blissful democracy, free of Distinction? Only time will tell...
Adrian Martin
