Chris Pfaff of the Producer’s Guild of America interviews with Peter Becker, CEO of Criterion Collection, at the Core Club in NYC.
The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films, is dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements. Criterion began with a mission to pull the treasures of world cinema out of the film vaults and put them in the hands of collectors. All of the films published under the Criterion banner represent cinema at its finest. In seventeen years, a lot of things have changed, but one thing has remained constant: Criterion’s commitment to publishing the defining moments of cinema in the world’s best digital editions.
The foundation of the collection is the work of such masters of cinema as Renoir, Godard, Kurosawa, Cocteau, Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, Fuller, Lean, Kubrick, Lang, Sturges, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Ozu, Sirk, Buuel, Powell and Pressburger. Each film is presented uncut, in its original aspect ratio, as its maker intended it to be seen. For every disc, Criterion tracks down the best available film elements in the world, uses state-of-the-art telecine equipment and a select few colorists capable of meeting Criterion’s rigorous standards, and takes time during the film-to-video digital transfer to create the most pristine possible image and sound.
Whenever possible, Criterion works with directors and cinematographers to assure that the look of its releases does justice to their intentions. Supplements enable viewers to appreciate Criterion films in context, through audio commentaries by filmmakers and scholars, restored director’s cuts, deleted scenes, documentaries, shooting scripts, early shorts, and storyboards. To date, more than 35 filmmakers have made Criterion’s Director Approved library of laserdiscs and DVDs the most significant archive of contemporary filmmaking available to the home viewer.
