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Why Everyone Wants to Get Into the Criterion Closet
The ritual has become part of the fabric of modern cinephilia over the past decade and a half.
In the smudged, lo-res, two-minute video that was initially posted to Facebook (recorded on Criterion president Peter Becker’s own phone, as he recalls), the Mexican filmmaker looks around inside what was then an extremely tight space and grabs a bunch of titles, joking that he’s enacted “a very small robbery” as he holds up his haul. To a film buff, watching Anna Kendrick talk about crying her way through a theatrical screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc or Barry Jenkins recall trying to procure an early copy of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog on eBay, we feel close to them in a way that we probably wouldn’t within a more structured interview. Many of us of a certain age will remember that the Criterion Collection initially began as a rather highbrow affair, a series of pricey laser discs for cinephiles already familiar with the canon and willing to splurge extra to hear Martin Scorsese wax rhapsodic about Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus.
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