Why Everyone Wants to Get Into the Criterion Closet
Last fall, the mobile version of the Criterion Closet, a retrofitted truck containing the boutique home-video label’s collection of DVDs, Blu-rays, and 4Ks, parked itself outside Lincoln Center over two weekends at the New York Film Festival. The original closet, the one housed at the company’s offices not far from Union Square, has over the years become a regular stop for filmmakers and other luminaries to score free discs and record videos ruminating about the movies that have shaped their lives. Now, to celebrate Criterion’s 40th anniversary, ordinary viewers could spend a few minutes inside a traveling edition of the collection, record their observations about the films, and pick up to three discs to purchase at a hefty discount. Interest turned out to be so high that there was already a two-hour wait before the Criterion Mobile Closet (in reality, a well-used and decommissioned MT45 Freightliner delivery truck) pulled up outside Alice Tully Hall on day one. It was also raining incessantly. Even so, the line grew exponentially, and wait times quickly blew past five, six, seven hours.
Film critic Francisco “Fico” Cangiano had flown in from Puerto Rico earlier that day and headed straight to Alice Tully Hall from the airport. He had to cover the premiere of Pablo Larraín’s Maria at the festival that evening, but he also wanted to experience the Criterion Closet and figured he had some time. The wait was already a few hours long by the time he arrived. Pretty soon, he was soaked. Film at Lincoln Center volunteers found him a spot where he could change into dry clothes, and they also helped him get his Maria tickets from will call. Still, it looked like he might miss his screening if he stayed on line. “I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he says. “Any fan of Criterion who hasn’t wished, hoped, or dreamt about being inside the closet is straight-up lying.”
To many observers, the idea of waiting for hours to get into a van full of discounted Blu-rays — some of which you could buy at the Barnes & Noble a few blocks up the street, and all of which you could certainly find online — might seem absurd. But the Criterion Closet is its own thing, and to most of these folks, it was worth the wait. Criterion producer Valeria Rotella, who regularly works on the company’s celebrity Closet Picks videos, was stationed at the truck, managing traffic, taking photos, and helping people find the movies they were looking for. She likens their experience to “the drop” of a roller coaster after its lengthy windup. “People might have waited in line for hours, but they fully embraced the thrill once they got inside.”
These people were also reenacting a ritual that has become part of the fabric of modern cinephilia over the past decade and a half. The company’s Closet Picks videos started in 2010 when Criterion’s social-media team had the idea of filming Guillermo del Toro as he perused the collection. Visitors to the offices had often been invited into the closet to take films as parting gifts, but there was some thought that regular viewers might also be interested in watching del Toro make his selections. 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.
The clip proved popular, and the glimpse into the closet in particular excited fans. (“That has to be the most sadistic video I’ve ever watched,” one commented jokingly.) Further videos came slowly at first. “We were pretty sparing about it,” Becker says. “Guillermo’s been a great friend and he’s collaborated on a number of projects with us, but we didn’t really like to ask people to do these videos — we thought they were doing us a bit of a favor, so we didn’t make them that frequently.” Now, the Closet Picks are more slickly produced, and they’ve become a regular part of a New York promotional tour, whether you’re a star like Ben Affleck or Janelle Monáe or an auteur like Mike Leigh or Jia Zhangke (whose latest, Caught by the Tides, is being released by Criterion’s theatrical distribution arm, Sideshow/Janus). But a certain purity still shines through. These directors and actors and musicians might be in the middle of a press run, but they’re not in promo mode when they’re in the Criterion Closet. They’re talking about other people’s work and reminiscing about the movies that made them who they are. The videos are a reflection of their own interests and obsessions. “The Closet works on the principle that everybody is an expert in their own taste,” Becker says. “You don’t need to be an expert in all of cinema. You just have to know what you love and why you love it and what impact it had on you.”
That contributes to the personal, unrehearsed quality of these videos. It also connects these people — regardless of their stature — to a shared love of the medium. 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.
In a world where we’re constantly reminded that physical media is dead — that the future is just algorithms stomping our faces, forever — the fact that the Criterion Closet has gone viral suggests that all is not lost. 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. When they initially pivoted to DVDs in the late 1990s, the prices did get lower, but the reputation remained. So the company’s emergence as a popular brand over the years has come as a delightful development — especially since it’s achieved this without diluting its curatorial authority. Joke all you want about the fact that Criterion once released an edition of Michael Bay’s The Rock (a masterpiece, by the way); it hasn’t had to pander to popular tastes to raise its profile. Yes, it put out a wonderfully thorough collection of Godzilla movies several years ago, but it also released Agnès Varda, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ousmane Sembène boxed sets.
I’m not exactly an outside observer in this matter. I’ve written my share of essays for Criterion releases, and I’ve known Becker and many of his colleagues for years. And when I had a chance to step into the closet a few years ago, I drew a total blank. Here was a dream come true, and yet I had no idea where to look or what films to pick. (I eventually made it out with Costa-Gavras’s The Confession and State of Siege, two titles I hadn’t even realized were in the collection.) That disorientation is not uncommon. The movies in the closet are not organized by title or director or year or genre. Rather, they’re organized in the rough order in which they entered the Criterion Collection, which means the first titles the company released — classics like Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion or Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil — are along one wall, while later releases — like Sean Baker’s Anora or Dee Rees’s Pariah or Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us — are along the opposite wall. As your eye travels from one side of the closet to the other, you go on a journey through the history of cinephilia, with the movies becoming more diverse and more broadly international as you move forward. “We’ve taken a pretty active role in trying to engage with a broader array of voices than when we started, when we were more a part of the received canon of film culture,” says Becker.
He says that there’s a very simple reason for why the closet isn’t in a more recognizable order. “Practically speaking, it is our active product closet that we use when we get stuff, and it’s easiest when we can just put the most recent thing we’ve worked on at the end,” he says. “It would be a pain in the ass to re-alphabetize the closet every time.” But he also cites the sweet delirium of entering the space and being confronted with an order that doesn’t initially make any sense. “For example, in a bookstore, when you look in the fiction section and you start scanning across the A’s, you naturally gravitate towards the names you recognize, and you tune out the things you don’t,” Becker says. “The closet causes you to pay attention to everything you’re looking at. You’re orienting yourself among all of these great films. You can’t just be like, ‘Oh, I’m in the A’s, I’m going to look for Wes Anderson.’ You have to take it on its own terms. I think it’s part of what’s enjoyable about it, and why it’s able to spark thoughts and memories. You sort of stumble on things, and that puts you in a more receptive, perceptive frame of mind.” Maybe that’s why, in his Closet Picks video, a clearly emotional Andrew Garfield exclaims that the place is like “a confessional booth.”
Immediately following the NYFF, the Criterion Mobile Closet traveled to Brooklyn. This past March, it visited SXSW and then headed to Los Angeles, where it will return June 6 and 7 to coincide with the American Cinematheque’s “Bleak Week” programming series (which will include such Criterion titles as Funny Games, Come and See, and Beau Travail). The lines remain strong. Sometimes they’re even longer than they were during the NYFF.
During that first weekend at Lincoln Center, Becker says he made a point of perching himself at a spot he jokingly called “the Slough of Despond,” a term from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. That was the point in line where the wait would still be around 70 or 80 minutes and visitors had waited a few hours already. Becker worried this might be when a lot of them gave up, so he decided to stay there and greet them. This was also within earshot of the truck itself. Sometime in the early evening, he heard a loud roar go up. He wondered if another celebrity had dropped by, and he took a look to see what was going on.
It was Fico Cangiano, who had finally made his way into the closet after waiting all day. He had picked his titles (Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, and Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers) and shot his video, and as he emerged into the light outside, his fellow cinephiles had greeted him with a burst of applause and cheers. He briefly basked in the moment, thanked his new pals, and rushed inside Alice Tully Hall to see Maria.