There’s a lot wrong with Art School Confidential, but one nagging detail is Ethan Suplee’s fat, slovenly FilmThreat.com-reading character. Halfway through the movie, he shows his student film on an AVID machine. Much ‘student film’ humor commences, as a bucket of chocolate syrup is dumped into an empty swimming pool. Two mixed metaphors, maybe mixed clichés, but what’s truly annoying is that if you want to give a real look at snobbery as it operates today, you need a new straw man. Postmodernism lives and dies in odd ways: Quentin Tarantino isn’t guest-hosting SNL anymore. Film students aren’t obsessed with gore, blaxploitation and Kurosawa. Nor are they into Expressionist horror (Yet if anything, they want to be the next Joss Whedon).

Every generation gets the film brat it deserves, and we are entering a strange new instant of the high modern, the limit case of the narrative film. People care about Ingmar Bergman again, and say things like “minor Truffaut.” Yet with the resurgence of 50s and 60s modernism, there is an annihilation of its attendant social space. We watch movies alone in our climate-controlled studio apartments, ticking off the ratings on our Netflix queues. We do not go to the movies, but use them to outfit our digital lives. And no one is more deeply connected to this shift in high culture than those soi disant archivists of high film culture behind the Criterion Collection.

A thirty-dollar tale

The Collection is more than its title: it is a mission, taken on with holy dignity. Well, according to Criterion, at least. Economically, Criterion is in the business of re-releasing films that it owns the rights to, digitally restored, with a lot of attendant “special features.” In the mid-1980s, Criterion had not yet become a lifeporn peddler, and was known for its ‘definitive’ releases on VHS and Laserdisc of old chestnuts like Citizen Kane and The Red Shoes. The Collection is, in fact, the inventor of what we now take for granted on DVDs-special features, deleted scenes, and running director commentaries. Much of this can be traced to their 1987 Laserdisc of Blade Runner (one of the first videos to feature letterboxing), though it persisted through their first DVD release in 1999. Surveying the collection, some of it is brilliant, illuminating stuff: the repackaging of Contempt is two discs in almost pure scholarship, and the restoration of Hiroshima Mon Amour is stunning. But what is a repackaging but just more packaging? I am hesitant to condemn well-intentioned, if superfluous, cultural production, but do we really need 1000 words from Luc Sante on Metropolitan? It’s value-added marketing in the guise of erudition. I say guise, because if anything the Criterion Collection is not the least bit about the love of film, or even films. Here’s a question: would you pay $30 for a DVD with a single 20-minute film on it? Analytically, there is something ridiculous about this spending spree. It’s doubly ridiculous if you consider that it’s The Bakery Girl of Monçeau, the first in the recently released box set of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, a heterogenous series of films composed of shorts and full length features. In a technical sense, one could package these films on a more parsimonious scale-four, possibly five discs. Of course, Criterion does not. It is on six separate discs. This is what the Criterion Collection is about-excess and consumption in the name of verisimilitude. One does not buy Criterion films out of love, one buys them to build a library, a never ending archive of good taste. Criterion even allows you to make a partial archive, and gives you cheeky genre-related mini-libraries (“Marital discord,” “Films of faith,” “Kill, Baby, Kill!”) on its website. But the goal is that someday, you will collect all the discs (Each marked with an ‘individual’ spine number), you will own them all, you will have at your fingertips the essence of true great taste. Criterion’s great taste. Cinema may be the most useless thing in the world, but it’s not Pokemon.

CAN YOU SPELL WEST?

My dissatisfaction with the collection hinges on the increasing atomization of all art, but also a more traditional, whinier, PC 90s criticism. The Collection likes to toot its own horn about preserving only the best films and includes a list in its mission statement of the Great Auteurs it chooses to preserve-a laundry list of Godards, Fellinis, Eisensteins and Dreyers. Notably though, there are no women on that list. There are also only two non-white people (Ozu and Kurosawa). This list is notably separate from the Collection itself, which includes Agnes Varda, Jane Campion and Spike Lee, but that this list of ‘influential’ names comprises the Collection’s mission statement perhaps explains the otherwise sorry presence of women, non-white filmmakers and national cinemas other than the United States, Hong Kong, Europe and Japan. But even more than this, the Collection as a whole has a certain whitebread, European art film air that I’ve taken to describing as “farty.” This includes the selections from outside European film. Another example: Kar Wai Wong is represented in the Criterion Collection with his lovely, mannered In The Mood For Love. I’m fine with this, but it’s a choice uncharacteristic of his oeuvre, and contrary to the Collection’s supposed commitment to public service. Kar Wai Wong has had only minimal problems with United States distribution since Chungking Express was recut and released by Quentin Tarantino’s Miramax imprint. Gay romance Happy Together, and gangster comedy Fallen Angels both have in-print releases via Kino Video, a company like Criterion with a far more international worldview. (Notably, Happy Together features some of the best DVD extras I have seen on any DVD or Laserdisc and costs half as much as the average Criterion release). Why is In The Mood For Love the one film that gets to represent all of Hong Kong cinema? It’s a Hong Kong movie that bears little resemblance to the hyperkinetic action work one typically associates with the nation, and a film that frankly bears little resemblance to past Kar Wai Wong. (This action work is notably represented by a few early John Woo films, selected and released after his triumph in the United States with Broken Arrow and Face/Off. At least one of those films is out of print.) But it is a film that is more connected to Western narrative than other films of its era. The same can be said for the other non-Western films in the canon, few though there are. There is Tokyo Drifter, one of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie’s many crib sheets; there are countless samurai flicks; and there is little else. Like many tastemakers and curators in Western art, the Criterion Collection takes a great interest in work outside the nation, so long as the work is willing to shut up and allow itself to be cannibalized. In light of this insulting attempt at diversity, the Collection’s obvious lacks are more hardly felt. Alfonso Cuarón’s (Y Tu Mamá También, the forthcoming Children of Men) debut feature, Solo con Tu Pareja was recently released for the first time to American audiences. It is another notable first for Criterion-the first Latin American film in their collection. Ever. This does not include the release of Black Orpheus, an imperial, fetishistic take on the “tropics” (Brazil, specifically) by French direction Marcel Camus that qualifies as Latin American cinema the way a Choco Taco qualifies as rustic Oaxacan cuisine. As art film, the collection fails just as badly-Soviet film is represented by a handful of Eisensteins, with no mention of Dziga Vertov or attendant 1920s Soviet filmmakers, commonly held as Jean-Luc Godard’s main influence. And what rarefied purveyor of art film puts out special editions of The Rock?

MY BACK SEAT, AND OTHER FINAL FRONTIERS

I guess the Collection’s attitude toward non-Western film isn’t completely surprising, as the Criterion Corporation was founded by the children of the founders of Janus Films. Janus was a famous distributor operating during the 50s and 60s, and is rightly held as responsible for the introduction of European and Japanese art cinema into the urban American consciousness. These are the movies our parents fell in love to-A Man and a Woman, Ikiru, Stolen Kisses. What is surprising is that while Criterion has retained its parents’ rather staid taste in film, it has forgotten why people so willingly sat through often challenging, baffling films. It’s because at one time, people still believed in the movies as a social space, as something to talk about with friends. I am not crying that the sky is falling-box office receipts, while down, are still huge, but the world is moving into a deeper and more padded living room. Criterion has somehow become financially solvent as a corporation by offering glossy, fetishistic repackagings of film that have hastened the same shift away from social cinema that drove Janus Films to insolvency. Perhaps we cannot blame Criterion for the first blows at privatization of cinema, or for that matter, American disinterest in lives and artists outside the national borders. But they play a part. They have made money replacing the love of the space of movies with the fetish of consumption.

On the other hand, a counter-example: my car was broken into last week, and I lost my copy of The Last Days of Disco, one of my absolute favorite and absolutely out of print movies. I scored it at Amoeba Music in Berkeley one summer for $15. I checked on Amazon and Ebay to find another copy, and found that the value had increased to nearly $80.

Jean-Luc Godard ended Weekend with the cryptic title card that reads “End Of Cinema.” I may hate the Criterion Collection, but it leaves us with an ugly choice: do we appreciate cinema only as a way to decorate our apartments, or do we give up art altogether? I would hope there could be a middle ground, but as of now, Criterion provides us only the route to the Ikea of the mind.