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It's rather a short list, considering that I've seen around half of all Criterion titles. The thing is Criterion is rather expensive, MOC are much cheaper for me in Denmark. Buying habits are hard to explain, but it's a compromise between things I'm interested in seeing and stuff there's out there in good/decent quality. It is more often this forum, rather than the fact that it's a Criterion release, which sparks my interest in a certain film.

Howards End
Nikkatsu Noir Eclipse
The Hit
Larisa Shepitko Eclipse
Empire of Passion
Human Condition
Last Days of Disco
My Dinner With Andre
Schizopolis
White Dog
Revanche
Summer Hours

charliekohller wrote: Which Criterion films in your collection are ones that you probably would have overlooked had Criterion not released them?

If you mean Criterion as opposed to any other generally reliable label, then I can honestly say nil. For instance, it's true I'd never seen any Hiroshi Shimizu films before the Eclipse set, but if say the BFI or MoC had released them first I'd still have bought them (I didn't buy the earlier Japanese issue as for me that would have been a lot more expensive than the Eclipse).

On the other hand, there are many films which I didn't like enough (or didn't want the extras enough) to pay a lot for the Criterions but which I did buy when I could pick up UK releases much more cheaply. Examples are most of the Bunuels, Dassin's Thieves' Highway and Night and the City, plus quite a few British films - Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Third Man, etc. In a few cases, reviews indicated that the UK transfers were actually superior to the Criterions anyway.

As you may gather, I don't consider myself a "Criterion collector". It's simply one of a range of labels I respect.

Jonathan S wrote:As you may gather, I don't consider myself a "Criterion collector". It's simply one of a range of labels I respect.

I think this is true for many of us here, and Mr K might not be taking this into consideration.

I took his question to mean had, I don't know, Kino or Strand done release X would you have been as quickly motivated rather than looking at it saying that might be good, wait until later. Basically would it have been on your radar is how I took the question.

I think for me the initial degree of interest would be the same and I always now check reviews (mainly for transfer quality) before ordering anything, even Criterions. I don't think I investigate Criterion releases more than - to use one of your examples - Kino. Indeed I probably have more Kinos in my collection than Criterions because they've released many more silents. Of course, to go the other extreme, I don't take much notice of Alpha announcements because I assume the quality will be lousy, even if the film interests me.

The thing I would add before I answer this question, and something I've talked about elsewhere on the forum, is that I was introduced to a huge number of films by British television between 1992 and 2001 or so, from the usual Hollywood blockbusters to trashy but fun films like Night of the Comet and Trancers, through to cult films like The She Beast and Jess Franco's eye-popping Female Vampire!

A lot of other UK posters older than I am can talk about the time previous to this when there were probably even more surprising films shown on television (for example I missed many of the early seasons of Moviedrome, and the Cecil B. DeMille or Tarkovsky seasons on Channel 4. Also the little thirty second film at the beginning of the Arena documentary on Mishima's life was the one used to introduce the BBC's early 90s 'Japan season' which showed a number of documentaries and films, notably Kwaidan and Akira for the first time)

I still consider the BBC100 season of a hundred films screened throughout 1995 and the early part of 1996 to celebrate the centenary of cinema as my true 'touchstone' of cinematic knowledge. Beginning with Citizen Kane and ending with the (albeit shorter three hour version) only television showing to date of A Brighter Summers Day, it introduced me to every kind of cinema from all over the world - Stagecoach, On The Town, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Hue and Cry, La Ronde, Weekend, King Kong, The Days, Death In Venice, Billy Liar, Badlands, Fury, Andrei Rublev, Ashes and Diamonds, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Spider's Stratagem, Morocco, Easy Rider, A Farewell To Arms, The Rules of the Game, Written On The Wind, American Gigolo, Aguirre: Wrath Of God, Witchfinder General, The Devils, Claire Denis's Chocolat, Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Sanjuro, The War Is Over, The Spirit of the Beehive, Ran (and A.K.), Scenes From A Marriage....it helped to briefly sketch in a huge amount of cinema that I've then spent the last fifteen years or so enjoyably filling in.

1995 was a particularly excellent year for cinema on British television because there was also a Channel 4 'Century of Cinema' season which screened the Martin Scorsese film on American cinema in three parts along with most of his big films like Mean Streets, Goodfellas and New York, New York, along with many other classics of American cinema (The Iron Horse, Faces, The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks In Another Town, Forty Guns); a Sci-Fi season (The Brother From Another Planet; THX-1138; the Giorgio Moroder Metropolis; Outland; The Man Who Fell To Earth; I Married A Monster From Outer Space); an anime season; a British 'Century of Cinema' to coincide with a screening of the Stephen Frears Typically British documentary (Sunday, Bloody Sunday; Kind Hearts and Coronets; The Killing of Sister George; Local Hero).

Channel 4 also continued their regular season of premieres of foreign language cinema (from memory I think they showed Mediterraneo; Europa, Europa; Story of Qui Ju; Intervista; Cronos and Jamon, Jamon that year) and their Film on 4 series of in-house productions (that year they showed Raining Stones; Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Long Day Closes, Simple Men and Naked). But there were also one off seasons such as the 'Secret Asia' season (The Blue Kite; Beijing Bastards; Minbo no Onna; Rock 'n Roll Cop), the 'Novel Image' season of book to film adaptations (Naked Lunch; Enemies: A Love Story; The Rainbow; Bonfire of the Vanities; Mister Johnson; The Handmaid's Tale), 'Reel Women' of female filmmakers (Point Break, Blue Steel, Little Man Tate, A Man In Love, Making Mr Right, Gas Food Lodging, even Border Radio!), a Pasolini season (basically everything but the Trilogy of Life, Pigsty and Salo, which I had to wait for the BFI and Tartan DVDs to see), and cult horrors such as The Howling and Dust Devil.

The BBC didn't just have their BBC100 season either. They had a number of spin offs from it (sort of the Eclipse sub-seasons to their Criterion Collection 'mainline'!) such as a Jean Renoir season of both the French and American films, including archive Renoir introductions; a New York season to coincide with the premiere of Taxi Driver that screened The Pope of Greenwich Village, Q-The Winged Serpent and After Hours; a 'Forbidden Weekend' of films and documentaries to coincide with the premiere of The Devils which included Performance, Pastor Hall, Bad Taste, the 30s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Beat Girl and The Night Porter; the premiere of Easy Rider was followed by Hells Angels On Wheels; a 'Hollywood, Vietnam' season (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Coming Home, Gardens of Stone, Birdy, The Quiet American), and so on. Plus they concluded the year with Sunrise and Hoop Dreams! There was also an Oscar Wilde season to commemorate the anniversay of his trial (The Trial of Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and the 40s Picture of Dorian Gray) and a Hiroshima memorial season (The Shadow Makers, Rhapsody In August and Channel 4 screened Imamura's Black Rain). They even did a season of Idrissa Ouédraogo films and premiered Glen or Glenda with the 'Look Back In Angora' documentary!

Now, I've since picked up many of these films in much better versions than my recorded from television VHS copies, and I totally understand that 1995 as a 'centenary of cinema' year was a special one but I don't think television now could ever match up to the wider decade of the 1990s either. As my dad is often fond of saying, there are more channels but a less of interest on, and I think I would suggest that the lack of innovative scheduling and curating of an ongoing season of films is to blame for this - now UK television is just one-off items of interest, if they turn up at all, and everything has to fit into a certain slot for a certain demographic of audience. That really has lead to a catastrophic decline in quality over this last decade at least.

I just wonder what would have drawn me to cinema if not for television - would I have jumped to import Criterion Collection discs from abroad? Would Masters of Cinema discs have seemed attractive if there wasn't already 'name brand' recognition of various film titles and directors? Is there the same penetration of these films into the consciousness of an audience who never see even a tiny amount of such material on television any more, except on the 'highbrow' channels, and even then only occasionally with lots of disclaimers made about the film having subtitles?

Anyway this self absorbed waffle is to come to the point that very little was exactly new to me about the films Criterion released at the beginning. Criterion interested me mostly because it seemed like they were doing the same thing that I felt UK television was doing in 1995, collecting films together and doing an even better job of it than the BBC and Channel 4 did (for example without Criterion I would never have seen the longer version of Andrei Rublev or the 5 hour version of Scenes From A Marriage). And even now I am a bit more excited about the new areas Criterion might go into now that they have gotten the well known arthouse films out of the way (if I'm being cynical though I'd say that they'll just release them all again on Blu-Ray and that could hold things up!)

To take your Seijun Suzuki example, even Tokyo Drifter (in 1994) and Branded To Kill (in 1999) had been screened on the BBC, the first in a 'Lost and Found' season of rare films and the second in the cult film season, Moviedrome. So those were not exactly unknown qualities to me at the time, though the later Suzuki films (and especially the Nikkatsu Noir box) that Criterion released were and were bought blind due to the interest that the previous films had raised.

So, to my list of films that I saw first through their Criterion release and maybe would not have seen had Criterion not released them: the Olmi's; Cria Cuervos; Quai des Orfevres (which would have been a shame, since it is a great Clouzot!); Variety Lights and The White Shiek; Tout va Bien (and especially Letter To Jane, which I like even more); The Pornographers; the Rene Clair films; Masculin Feminine; Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman's Ball; The Cranes Are Flying and Ballad Of A Soldier; Tokyo Olympiad; the Hiroshi Inagaki Samurai trilogy; the Larisa Shepitko set and I'm sure there would be others beyond these.

Plus Hopscotch and Koko: A Talking Gorilla

There are plenty of films I probably wouldn't have seen were they not released by Criterion, either because I'd never heard of them or because they'd never previously been of any interest to me. In some cases the Criterion branding made me wonder whether there was some greatness there that I'd overlooked, at other it was incipient completism goosed on by a seemingly irresistable bargain (how was I to know that Chasing Amy and Armageddon wouldn't be worth even five bucks apiece?).

And there are some borderline cases, like Crazed Fruit and the Martha Graham films, which I hadn't really been cognizant of until Criterion announced them, but I probably would have been just as interested in had they come out from BFI or Kino.

This strategy hasn't exactly worked out for me, as I've accumulated some real stinkers along with a few unexpected gems - but that's cinephilia in a nutshell.

So a rough tiering would look like this:

UNSUSPECTED GREATS:
A Night to Remember
Fishing with John
The Browning Version
The Horse's Mouth (though it's Pennebaker's Daybreak Express which pushes that disc into 'essential' territory)

GLAD I SAW (or a good package that made it a worthwhile purchase):
Tunes of Glory
Border Radio
Robeson box (way better than the sum of its parts)
Mafioso

INOFFENSIVE INDIFFERENCE:
Fiend without a Face
Big Deal on Madonna Street
The Ruling Class
Schizopolis (though the bizarro commentary almost nudges this up into the previous category)
King of Kings
Koko: A Talking Gorilla
Kicking and Screaming
Monsters and Madmen box
The Two of Us
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
The Naked Prey
Fanfan la Tulipe

GIVE ME BACK MY LIFE:
Armageddon
Chasing Amy
The Rock
Solo con tu pareja

Hitherto unknown films, which happened to be on the shelf at times when the urge was upon me to acquire a new Criterion disc (or two) and which have gone on to become jewels in the crown of my home video collection...

Solaris
The Element of Crime
Samurai Rebellion
Coup de Torchon
Il Posto
I Fidanzati
Sword of Doom
Onibaba
Cries and Whispers (my first Bergman and second Criterion)
La Commare Secca
Fists in the Pocket
Eyes without a Face
Salvatore Giuliano
Jubilee (go ahead and jeer, but the film brings me great pleasure)
The Flowers of St. Francis
Touchez Pas au Grisbi
Rififi
Le Cercle Rouge
Insomnia
Mafioso

CC was my gateway into film and while I didn't limit myself to their releases - I picked a few of the MGM Bergmans and cheap-o R1s of whatever film I could find by important director x - it was their label that turned me onto the whole area of international film/film as art. But probably the best thing I took out of the label came from their website which used to have links to a list of releases they had which fit a specific film movement, and those lists structured my whole introduction the most. I looked for any resource I could find, even those Amazon list-o-mania things turned me onto some unknown (to me anyway) treasures - probably google and criterion were the resources of my film education, with the exception of an undergrad class here and there.

That was actually only about four or five years ago, and it's interesting to think back on it since so many of my favorite directors now - Raul Ruiz, Wong, Nick Ray - I discovered not through Criterion, yet the company played a fundamental part in getting me there. So I guess, when it comes to what CC releases I wouldn't have known about were it not for the company, I guess I have to say all of them in a sense.

I think the second question is also going to have a very big disparity between the American and European folks here - as colin's outstanding post above amply illustrates. For all the bleeping channels on American TV, it is damned near impossible to find anything like consistent presentations of classic film - never mind foreign. TCM, for instance is the absolute best channel around for it - but even they relegate foreign film to one slot a week, 2am on Sunday nights! well over half of those they do show are also Janus properties, i'd guess 3 out of 4 easily, so they are already in the collection as it is.

So in contrast to Colin's tremendous opportunities to see a lot of great films in the UK, I don't ever recall even having the option to do so in northern Michigan on cable or broadcast tv. late night movies were never Fellini or Bergman, but some crappy hollywood flick they showed over and over. I could watch Breakfast club nearly every day, but not much else. So if you weren't in New York or LA, then you had to already know about these things from somewhere else...friends, family, whatever...and I never did. I was really oblivious to foreign film in particular until DVDs arrived. I owned about a hundred films on VHS, mostly from the 70s forward with a couple of classics like Hitchcock or something thrown in. I discovered this incredible world through Criterion - it's that simple. My appreciation and outright love for Melville, Clouzot, Oshima, Kurosawa, Powell & Pressburger, and so many others was born of the choices Criterion gave me.

This is another contrast with folks in the UK: They also can readily buy offerings from BFI, MOC and other labels and are more likely to be region free due to the reliance on the US for so much, well, stuff. I remain tied to Region 1, so Criterion happens to have tremendous pull with me personally, as Kino is the only other supplier doing anything like what they do - and I certainly don't hesitate to buy from them either. But sometime around 2002 I bought my first criterion: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and was forever altered somehow. Something shifted inside as I looked through the catalog. what WERE these movies? the internet gave me the power to look them up and read about them...and the rest is history. I got the Hitchcocks, Diabolique, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Rashoman, Le Cercle Rouge, Knife in the Water, Grand Illusion....all incredible films that I would never have bought if Criterion did not exist to market them to a curious consumer who was hooked by their tantalizing bait. Each new dvd was an advertisement for the rest, and as I took chances almost all were rewarded with something close to reverence. Just HOW did I make it to 30 without knowing about Wages of Fear? How on earth had no one ever shown me Coup de Torchon? These films are fucking AMAZING!!!!

So...I don't know if that makes me an exception to the rule or not, but I am a case where I owe my devotion to and love of world cinema to Criterion and Criterion alone. My compulsive collecting gene initially salivated at the spine #s, but it only took 2 or 3 of them to realize there was so much more to it all. And because they have remained the CLEAR #1 option in the U.S., they are who I remain devoted to. In the last 3 years or so I've also branched out, and do own a few of the MOC Blus that are region 0, and assorted foreign fare from the majors and some Kino stuff - but all that stems from what Criterion started, and in the last 2 or 3 years it's only gotten moreso for me personally.

I do want to add that I most certainly buy or even want to buy everything. not even close. in a perfect world, it would be neat I guess, but there are well over a hundred of the line-up as it stands that I have zero interest in owning for one reason or another. Some stuff just ain't my bag....but that's what is so great about it. At least I know that now! Today I know I can trust the Criterion brand and have only very rarely regretted a blind buy - which a good majority of mine are. Indeed, I can't really even think of one off hand. So I will continue to buy from them solely on the brand name - but it's not the spine #...it's the films and knowing that at the very least I'm going to see something i've never seen before that has contributed to the panoply of cinema, most often in amazing ways. I can read reviews and watch the chatter here to gauge whether it's for me or not, and then feel no qualms whatsoever in buying new releases without having seen them, and even now perhaps never really knowing they existed otherwise.

That's the beauty of the company and the brand they have cultivated. as a customer I TRUST them. I don't think there's another I can really say that about. What they offer is the chance to further sate my desire for new experiences while also catering to my need to have familiar ones rejuvenated in the best possible way. So whether it's something I already loved - Say, Walkabout - or something I had never heard of but came to love - say, le Trou - it's a win win. I don't see it as craven consumerism at all...but as I flowered as a true lover of films, they are my dealer of choice who offer me the greatest variety of premium dope. Why go to the whore on the corner when I can deal with the big man in the penthouse?

Murdoch wrote:CC was my gateway into film and while I didn't limit myself to their releases - I picked a few of the MGM Bergmans and cheap-o R1s of whatever film I could find by important director x - it was their label that turned me onto the whole area of international film/film as art. But probably the best thing I took out of the label came from their website which used to have links to a list of releases they had which fit a specific film movement, and those lists structured my whole introduction the most. I looked for any resource I could find, even those Amazon list-o-mania things turned me onto some unknown (to me anyway) treasures - probably google and criterion were the resources of my film education, with the exception of an undergrad class here and there.

That was actually only about four or five years ago, and it's interesting to think back on it since so many of my favorite directors now - Raul Ruiz, Wong, Nick Ray - I discovered not through Criterion, yet the company played a fundamental part in getting me there. So I guess, when it comes to what CC releases I wouldn't have known about were it not for the company, I guess I have to say all of them in a sense.

Exactly.....for those of us who were not fortunate to know this world before DVD existed and/or live in a metropolitan area where they could actually be seen, Criterion is essentially our gateway drug. They are the most obvious place to start, help nurture you along with new and amazing discoveries, and at some point sending you out into the world to expand your horizons further with others, but of course always knowing where home really is.

And there are some borderline cases, like Crazed Fruit and the Martha Graham films, which I hadn't really been cognizant of until Criterion announced them, but I probably would have been just as interested in had they come out from BFI or Kino.

I'm roughly in this category as zedz nicely put it, from my understanding it would be that I was somewhat unaware of the films altogether until criterion had announced them (they make damn good synopsis and descriptions!) and from there I began to read up what I could about it but I wouldn't be particular about this only happening in Criterion and would easily be just the same with BFI, MoC, or Kino. Though criterion, well more of my teacher, did introduce me to world cinema through my first film Yi Yi the subsequent viewings and purchases I had were not criterion (they were second sight & Optimum). To be honest my real blind buys are mostly second run.

Miss Julie
A Night to Remember
The Browning Version
The Spirit of the Beehive
Scenes from a Marriage
Playtime
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
Eclipse Series 4: Raymond Bernard

colinr0380 wrote:A lot of other UK posters older than I am can talk about the time previous to this when there were probably even more surprising films shown on television

I'm afraid you're getting me started again on my favourite topic, but yes, for me the golden age of films on UK TV was the 1980s, starting a few months earlier with the massive 1979 Renoir retrospective which went on for months, causing jokes in the national press like "Tonight a rare treat on BBC2 - a film NOT directed by Jean Renoir." (There were only three channels, so each had a much higher profile.) Then in the early months of 1980 came the first run - on prime-time ITV! - of the 13-part Hollywood, prompting BBC2 to run an early evening season of silent films and a Christmas of Harold Lloyd features. ITV also showed, late at night, The Amazing Years of Cinema, devoted to world cinema before WW1. BBC2's three-hour Welles interview was accompanied by broadcasts of all twelve of his major released films - quite a feat given the rights complications at the time and I still have a recording from then of the now suppressed, pre-Beatrice Othello. I also remember a season of obscure foreign films, including Chinese classics of the 1930s & 40s, on Sunday mornings!

But the floodgates really opened in 1982 with the advent of Channel 4 and film buyer Leslie Halliwell's proclamation that it would become "a National Film Theatre of the airwaves". It's true that his tastes were very middlebrow and geared (like my own) to older films but I doubt that anyone else in the UK would have programmed, say, almost all the Keaton silents, an afternoon season of Douglas Fairbanks Senior or most of James Whale's non-horror films of the 30s (the horror classics too of course), and the evenings were often devoted to then recent foreign films by the likes of Fassbinder, while late nights brought the first UK TV screenings of "controversial" films by Derek Jarman and others (Jarman talked to me about how they were shown in "ascending order of controversy"!) C4 was often showing 5 or 6 films a day, many of them UK TV premieres of classics, including the Photoplay silent film restorations. Meanwhile, BBC2 countered with almost every film RKO ever made (I read most of these prints were later lost to a leaky film library roof), including obscure shorts, and with seasons like weekday afternoons of 30s & 40s French films - I especially treasure Duvivier's La fin du jour from those. If I hadn't been a VCR owner there was no way I could have kept up with it all, and even then it was difficult. Fortunately, I was an audio-visual technician for part of the 80s and could record, or even watch, a lot of the daytime stuff at work.

In comparison to all this, I found the BBC's 1995 "100" season quite disappointing, especially their decision to start at 1930, avoiding silents. But I don't see it all with rosy-tinted nostalgia: almost all widescreen/Scope films were shown open-matte or (far worse) panned & scanned, colour was often terrible, prints were sometimes obviously 16mm and deriving from ancient TV packages like Columbia Screen Gems, nothing was restored to the level we often see today and even older films would sometimes be shown in censored or abridged reissue versions. We have a great deal to be thankful for in the last decade of DVDs and I'm certain I'll look back on the 2000s decade as the golden age of films on disc in the same way the 1980s was (for me) the golden age of films on TV.

tojoed wrote:

Jonathan S wrote:As you may gather, I don't consider myself a "Criterion collector". It's simply one of a range of labels I respect.

I think this is true for many of us here, and Mr K might not be taking this into consideration.

Ditto these two, and moreover, for me at least, I'd rather see the films that I may be interested in released by other labels as they offer a much better price for a similar product (BFI, MOC, RHV etc) - this is even ignoring the costs of shipping and importing.

Lindsay Anderson would agree with you about that rare screening of La Fin du Jour!

It does seem in retrospect that the BBC100 season was the end of something rather than the beginning (plus maybe a way of getting one last airing out of their back catalogue of licensed films, most of which have not turned up again to date), but it still seems better than the BBC's one halfhearted attempt at a film season since that time - the Summer of British Cinema back in 2007 which ran an atrocious looking pan and scan version of The Long Duel and an embarrassing associated documentary series even while partially redeeming itself by showing A Cottage On Dartmoor and rarities like The Whisperers and The Pumpkin Eater for the first time in decades.

I can only agree that getting a film in its correct aspect ratio without question is one of the great bonuses of DVD (television was maddeningly inconsistent with this - I have versions of Andrei Rublev, The Man Who Fell To Earth and Solaris in their correct ratios from their television screenings but most other films pan and scanned. And I'm glad that we seemed to have moved beyond the 'European Union 16:9 Action Plan' era of widescreen films which cut every 2.35:1 ratio film down to a 'compromise ratio' of 1.85:1! Luckily THX-1138 was in its correct ratio and I'm still glad to hang on to it as the only evidence I have of the more intimate 'non-special edition' version of the film that was released before the extra jarring CGI inserts to 'open out the world' were added for the film's DVD release), along with the extra features, removable subtitles, as well as better technical quality of picture and sound, but I do wonder how many people would be inspired to spend cash to collect films on better formats if they had not been regularly exposed to at least some of them through television?

Hopefully DVD labels branding themselves as kinds of 'commercial home cinematheques' can inspire someone (with the cash to buy of course, which can be the big sticking point) to jump from Throne of Blood to Jubilee to Coup de Grace and be open to the experience each different kind of film can provide. (Even The Rock has its place as a representative of a particular kind of cinema. I draw the line at Armageddon though!)

That is perhaps why I'm not so upset about people rabidly collecting films just to be 'spine number completists' - if that may cause them to be exposed to such a wide variety of films and possibly have their horizons and idea of cinema broadened by it, then I don't particularly mind if they initially approached the collection with a "gotta catch 'em all!" mentality.

charliekohller wrote:Which Criterion films in your collection are ones that you probably would have overlooked had Criterion not released them? List as many titles as you feel apply.

I Fidanzati
Il Posto
An Angel at My Table
The Browning Version
Twenty-Four Eyes
Miss Julie
The Cranes Are Flying
By Brakhage
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm *
For All Mankind *
George Washington *
Antonio Gaudi *

* not currently in my collection, but I'm really glad Criterion introduced me to them

Even though i do have some hundreds of DVDs and tons of VHS (many of them bought) i do not own a single criterion dvd to this day. This company had zero effect on my love for the Cinema (seriously, no offense intended!). Maybe its Euroland and/or living in a city...

The responses to the last question have been very interesting. I really appreciate everyone's carefully considered and in-depth comments.

New Question: Which is the purer cinephilic experience: watching a classic film in a cinema but in a compromised print (faded, scratched etc.) or watching a digitally clean copy of the same film at home which has been produced to the Criterion (or MOC) standard? Pick the statement below which best fits your philosophy, which best expresses your opinion in this matter.

A. Cinema is still at its best in the actual darkened cinema amongst a group of people. No matter if the print is in rough shape.
B. No, I think watching a restored Criterion style presentation of a film at home is preferable.

Thanks again.

charliekohller wrote:New Question: Which is the purer cinephilic experience: watching a classic film in a cinema but in a compromised print (faded, scratched etc.) or watching a digitally clean copy of the same film at home which has been produced to the Criterion (or MOC) standard? Pick the statement below which best fits your philosophy, which best expresses your opinion in this matter.

A. Cinema is still at its best in the actual darkened cinema amongst a group of people. No matter if the print is in rough shape.
B. No, I think watching a restored Criterion style presentation of a film at home is preferable.

Well B should be as close to A as possible. Ideally I want my Criterion's and MOC releases to be as respectful to the print as possible and to be "hands-off" in their approach to the digital clean up. It's hard to beat A, but a high quality DVD or Blu-ray can come close that is for sure.

A - There is still something magical about light projected through celluloid on a big screen, and something to be said for the communal experience as well. I'll take an imperfect 35mm print over high-quality digital at home any day. While I spend a lot more time doing 'B', I'm really just trying to come as close as I can to replicating 'A'.

Jeff wrote:A - There is still something magical about light projected through celluloid on a big screen, and something to be said for the communal experience as well. I'll take an imperfect 35mm print over high-quality digital at home any day. While I spend a lot more time doing 'B', I'm really just trying to come as close as I can to replicating 'A'.

Seconded, heartily.

Same as above : A.

The experience of going to a theater is completely different to going to my living room.
In fact, what is HD coming to except trying to replicate the Theater experience anyway ? (like Jeff wrote)

There are so many movies I'm too young for having seen it in theater (2001, Once Upon A Time In West...), but anytime I see there are some re runs in theaters but never close to where I live, it just makes me think I've never really seen these movies. Even if their DVDs are really excellent.

no contest,

A

No question about it,

A. Cinema is still at its best in the actual darkened cinema amongst a group of people. No matter if the print is in rough shape.

People are assholes.

B.