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Welcome to The Queue — your every day distraction of curated video content material sourced from throughout the net. Today, we’re watching a video essay concerning the cult-like attraction of the Criterion Collection.
These days, if you’d like one thing, odds are you’ll be capable of purchase it on-line. And in a panorama outlined by comfort and selection, many retailers have positioned their deal with branding. If you purchase a pleasant tea kettle you clearly need it to work, however who made that kettle and what they stand for may need had an influence on the way you finally spend your cash.
A lifetime in the past, I wrote a chunk about why film theaters are going to outlive the rise of streaming. I didn’t issue within the ongoing international pandemic (how may I?). But I feel the core argument I made is related right here, so I’m going to rehash it.
Basically (as You’ve Got Mail tells us), when big-box bookstores arrived on the scene, everybody confidently declared that smaller retailers weren’t going to make it. Then, in a scrumptious twist, Amazon confirmed up and took over what these large bookstores had been actually promoting: comfort. And, actually, unbiased bookstores weren’t simply promoting books both. They had been promoting an expertise. And the expertise they had been promoting—of going into your native indie bookstore to purchase a bodily e-book—isn’t one thing yow will discover on the web.
The Criterion Collection operates, survives, and thrives for precisely this motive. Yeah, positive, you would discover a DVD of Godzilla on Amazon. But shopping for a Criterion backbone isn’t nearly shopping for a movie. It’s about all of the peripheral issues that outline Criterion as a model: the status, the ephemera, the field artwork, the sense of belonging to an (admittedly cult-like) group.
As the video essay under explains, the vitality round Criterion is obsessive, loyal, and sure, nonetheless consumerism. But it’s additionally a main instance of why the narrative of bodily media’s decline doesn’t fairly work.
Watch “The Cult of the Criterion Collection”:
Who made this?
This video essay is by the Texas-based Royal Ocean Film Society, which is run by Andrew Saladino. You can browse their again catalog of movies on their Vimeo account right here. If Vimeo isn’t your velocity, you can provide them a observe on YouTube right here.
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