CC40: Beautiful, Pointless
Ongoing Reflections on Physical Media, Part 4
Late last year the Criterion Collection celebrated its forty years of existence with what else but an enormous box set: forty films in a giant edition spanning 49 discs. CC40 is approximately the size of their previous Ingmar Bergman collection or a large cereal box (or, if you prefer, Arrow's Herschell Gordon Lewis box set made to look like a cereal box): a literal tower of a set that eclipses most other physical media around it.
I eagerly cracked open the disc section and popped in one of my favorite films in the set, Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law, as something to help me write. It's a great movie but also indicative of the eclectic nature of the set. Notably missing are iconic extant Criterion releases like Seven Samurai (Spine #2) or The Seventh Seal (Spine #11), recent big tickets like Citizen Kane (Spine #1104) and Inland Empire (Spine #1175), or the return of desperately needed out-of-print titles like Grand Illusion (Spine #1) and Schizopolis (Spine #199). (There isn't even an homage to the era when Criterion released films like RoboCop (Spine #23) and Armageddon (Spine #40).)
It's not to say that the collection doesn't contain vital and iconic titles, from Do the Right Thing (Spine #97) to Bicycle Thieves (Spine #374) to A Woman Under the Influence (Spine #253), but this is emphatically not a best-of. As Criterion describes the set, it is "neither a historical survey nor a top-forty compilation".
Instead, the collection is culled from the choices of visitors to the Criterion Closet (recently gone mobile). The end result is a delightful mix of films that screams out for viewing experimentation: I suspect that no matter the bent(s) of a person's cinephilia, they will find something new in this collection, so long as they are willing to explore it. Even more so, the potential for riveting and unexpected double features abounds here, again, so long as the viewer chooses it. I could pair Down By Law (Spine #166) with anything from Barry Lyndon (Spine #897) to Being There (Spine #864).
That's all if you can even wrap your head around the box set's exorbitant price tag. It's fair to say nothing else in my physical media collection comes even close to this set's MSRP of $799.95 (a direct purchase from the Criterion website will run, as of this writing, $639.96), so even if you catch it during a frequent Criterion or Barnes & Noble half-off sale, it will run $400 plus, which puts it out of the realm of many if not most cinephiles and collectors. This is a massive flex of Criterion's muscle that almost feels designed for the people who, ironically, may already own every film in the set.
That's because, unlike a conventional box set, almost every film in this collection is currently available as a standalone release from Criterion. As far as I could tell, only Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 is not available on its own (although it is available in three different compendiums, including this one). Compared to other (more affordable) box sets from boutique labels, and many by Criterion as well, the redundancy in the inclusions will likely be seen as a disappointment to many. So in a very real sense, CC40 is preaching to the choir: it's lovely and all, but ultimately it's unnecessary.