The timing for a week-long workshop on film preservation in Chennai couldn’t have been more ironic. A strike had prevented the release of new films in the State, leaving theatres deserted for weeks, even as the Film Heritage Foundation organised this workshop aimed to preserve India’s cinematic heritage.
Even more ironically, I met the technical heads of The Criterion Collection, a home video distributor of world classics, at a time when the Tamil industry has become synonymous with video piracy. All along the drive to Prasad Studio, you could see how easy it would be to get a bootlegged DVD.
Curiously, the folks from Criterion weren’t too alarmed about this. For a company that essentially sells DVDs and Blu-rays, it’s a miracle it has survived the advent of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon. And despite starting their own film streaming service called Filmstruck, Lee Kline, the company’s technical head, said Criterion films were best enjoyed on Blu-ray.
“Criterion’s audience does not just want to watch a film,” Kline told me. “When they buy Criterion, they want to study the film. Streaming, with fluctuating Internet speeds and compressed formats, might not be the perfect place for that study. But as a film distributor, we need to be where the audience wants us to be.”
Patience pays
What marks out Criterion, said Kline, is patience. And the company can afford to be patient because of its loyal customer base — film aficionados who’re willing to wait longer or pay extra for quality. “When I master the sound for a film, I know I cater to an audience that will actually listen and think about the work that went in it to make it sound good,” said Ryan Hullings, head of Criterion’s audio department.
A still from ‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937).
So what really makes their customers so loyal? “To many, we’re their gateway to art cinema,” said Kline. “A lot of American universities have our collections in their libraries, so a lot of students first get into serious cinema through Criterion.”
This loyalty even becomes an obsession for a few. “I think numbering our CDs was the smartest thing we did. That suddenly made our films a collectible — a must-have. So even when we released controversial films like the Beastie Boys Anthology (2000), we had people who bought it just because they had to complete their collection.”
Besides, the Criterion Collection has always been open to change. From Laser Discs to DVDs, from Blu-rays to streaming, the company’s light-footedness has kept it alive when mammoths like Blockbuster Video have perished.
The selection criteria for the Criterion catalogue has always aroused curiosity, with a film’s ‘status’ being linked to the catalogue. “To get the rights to Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, we also needed to get the rights of a few other Japanese films in a bundled deal. Do these other films have the same status of Seven Samurai ? Maybe not, but they’re certainly important enough to be included,” said Kline.
Finding the films
At other times, filmmakers recommend a selection. The president of the company, Peter Becker, keeps a list of films with him and when a title is mentioned a few times, he begins pursuing it. “It was director Alexander Payne who brought a small film like The Man in the Moon to our notice,” said Kline. “He also persuaded us to get a 1930s film called Make Way for Tomorrow, claiming Orson Welles had called it a film that could make a rock cry.”
It’s this relationship with filmmakers that has set the philosophy of the company. Criterion pioneered Letterboxing, a practice where a film shot on widescreen format is transferred to the standard format while preserving the film’s original aspect ratio.
It also began including commentary soundtracks, special editions and definitive versions. “The effort is to show the film to the audience the way the director intended it to be seen,” said Hullings. “So we keep interacting with the makers even if it’s to fix small details in colour and sound.”
Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’.
This relationship, in essence, has made the difference in this age of media saturation. “It’s a romantic way of looking at cinema, isn’t it,” asks Hullings. “Even our art department follows this approach. The covers of our CDs too are approached like a work of art. It’s not just beautiful, it is also reflective of the movie in a meaningful way.”
India disappoints
But what’s disappointing is how few Indian films feature in their catalogue. With its widespread reach and client base, a selection in Criterion could have been a shot in the arm to India’s art cinema. “India has been an extremely difficult market for us to penetrate,” said Kline. “We have meetings upon meetings with the corporates of Bollywood but nothing comes out of it. A lot of people think it was a breeze for us to get TheApu Trilogy . But we had to pursue those films for 15 years before we got them.”
Currently in the process of adding a few of Guru Dutt’s films to the collection the duo is confident that India is taking significant steps to preserve its cinematic heritage. “A lot of other countries too were late in preserving their cinema but what makes it so difficult here is the climate. With its heat and humidity, India is the worst for preserving old reels.”
But the essence of the job is in the pleasure of bringing a film alive. There’s nothing called a lost film any more and that keeps them hopeful. “Take Renoir’s The Grand Illusion, for instance. For decades all we had were terrible copies of the film until several prints of it were discovered in some obscure place in Russia, bringing the film alive. We can hope for such miracles to happen with Indian films as well,” said Kline.
