TIL “Barb Wire” is in the Criterion Collection.

So, with the ongoing enshittification of gestures broadly at everything I finally bit the bullet to purchase a 4k bluray player. I intend on resuming my collection of physical media. In service of that, and also because I wanted to put my new toy through its paces, I went to Criterions website and selected all the titles that I might like to have some day. Nearly $5000 of cart additions later, I realized that perhaps my eyes are a touch bigger than my pocketbook. However, I just want to take a moment to be thankful that Criterion exists and has 5 grand worth of movies that I would happily own if money were no object. Their efforts in the service of film are incredible and the model that so many new, boutique publishing brands have modeled themselves off of. Now, to secure my financial independence so I can afford all the movies I want…

This is the best summary I could come up with:

They ceased to be commodities and were often destroyed or transferred to public archives where they remained vulnerable to fire, deterioration and discoloration; nonprofits led the nascent movement to preserve and restore motion pictures until Criterion helped create a market for them.

When Terry Gilliam’s dystopian classic “Brazil” entered the collection as a “special edition” box set, in 1996, the director told me that he seized the opportunity to invite viewers to take sides on his well-publicized feud with the head of Universal Pictures, Sidney Sheinberg.

During his brief stint at the helm of the company, Nash focused on acquiring newer movies that he found both “commercially interesting and culturally important,” like “Short Cuts,” by Robert Altman, and Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian anime masterpiece “Akira.” He also made Criterion an early proponent of the new wave of African American cinema by releasing LaserDisc editions of films by young directors like John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”) and the Hughes brothers (“Menace II Society”).

Kelly Reichardt, whose films “Certain Women” and “Old Joy” did not enter the collection until much later, explained that, at the time, the Criterion imprimatur meant getting the equivalent of dedicated shelf space in video stores alongside big-name male directors.

Since then it has released additional films by Steve McQueen and Ousmane Sembène and added, among others, Marlon Riggs and Cheryl Dunye, whose 1996 romantic comedy “The Watermelon Woman” is a landmark of the ’90s indie renaissance and of queer Black cinema.

For weeks afterward, I did the same, often stopping between daylong Ozu matinees to reflect on what Todd Field had called “the messiness of our own narrative,” which is to say the process by which friends, lovers and strangers guide us toward movies that end up changing our lives.

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