Always Look Directly at an Eclipse Box Set
Ongoing Reflections on Physical Media, Part 2.
As the solar eclipse travels across North America today, I thought it would be fun to write a brief sequel to one of my favorite pieces of my own writing — Steel This Book: Criterion, Arrow, and the Golden Age of Home Video Packaging — focusing on Criterion’s Eclipse sub-label, which they themselves have put on sale for the past few days in honor of the same-named celestial phenomenon.
Criterion describes Eclipse as follows:
Eclipse is a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief, cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.
The collections that comprise Eclipse are contained within some sort of logic: an auteur, a time period, a studio, a wave, a subject matter, a genre, etc, often more than one of the above. Eclipse sets include Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys (Series 29), When Horror Came To Shochiku (Series 37), Pearls of the Czech New Wave (Series 32), Basil Dearden’s London Underground (Series 25), Late Ozu (Series 3), and Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr. (Series 33).
The Eclipse label, in other words, is a showcase of cinematic back alleys and dark corners. While each one is generally tangentially related to Criterion’s high-art approach to film, these are the films within those categories that are typically obscured from the beaten path of cinephilia.
What I love about Eclipse is that it resists the kind of canonization that’s fundamental to the modern Criterion Collection. Eclipse is often precisely about films that don’t make it into the main collection, so to speak, where films are elevated and each individual release towers above non-Criterion discs. The Criterion Collection label is supposed to mean something, and it does mean a lot, for better or for worse.
Eclipse, compared to Criterion-branded films and sets, is a less pretentious and less individualistic way of visiting cinema history. While the groupings of Eclipse box sets predict the ever-shifting collections available on Criterion’s streaming channel, they also form natural areas for analysis and examination while remaining more or less free from the baggage of the main label. The Eclipse sets are excellent ways to get a self-driven film history education and support physical media.
So in honor of the eclipse, and in honor of Eclipse, take the time to check out some of the more obscure titles that come across your path. You won’t regret it.