After months of anticipation, the Criterion Channel went live on the web today. Meanwhile, in the Annex, the last Queen Video store is selling off its stock of DVDs and Blu-rays before shutting its doors at the end of the month.
These two events are not unrelated.
Streaming services have been strangling video stores for the last few years, the demand for physical media shrinking as Netflix and Amazon (and Crave and Apple TV+ and Google Play and Shudder and Sundance Now and YouTube Premium) offer more and more content online.
Criterion’s service is aimed directly at cinephiles, with a mission to provide a more curated selection of features and documentaries, supplementing its own impressive library with titles from major studios and independent distributors.
The Criterion Channel will also offer many of the interactive elements produced for its late, lamented FilmStruck partnership with WarnerMedia, and “constantly refreshed thematic programming” like partnered shorts and features, actor and filmmaker spotlights and the monthly Observations On Film Art master classes.
All of this is very good news for those of us who’ve been hoping to have instant access to the library of gorgeous restorations and bespoke supplements for which Criterion is rightly celebrated.
But it’s still just a sliver of what’s out there – and not even a complete sliver, since Criterion doesn’t hold the Canadian rights for some titles in its library: at a glance, David Cronenberg’s The Brood, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan were available at launch to U.S. customers but not to subscribers up here.
Even if it does get all of Criterion’s active library online, the Criterion Channel can’t offer everything the label’s ever released. Criterion’s lost the rights to dozens of titles over the years, meaning the Criterion editions of John Woo’s The Killer and Hard-Boiled, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, Carol Reed’s The Third Man and Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and Crash, among others, are unlikely to ever reach the service. (New deals are made all the time, and I’m really hoping Warner lets Criterion get Crash back.)
You know where you could find those titles? Video stores. (Well, maybe not Crash – the Criterion edition of that one only exists on LaserDisc.) But all the others were available for rental over the years at Queen Video, though fewer and fewer people were coming to rent them.
“It’s been declining steadily for the past seven or eight years,” says Queen Video owner Howard Levman, who decided to close the Annex store after 19 years in operation. (The original Queen West location, which opened in 1981, shuttered in 2016.)
“I’m guessing it’s just a time lag between now, when the video stores that have everything are closing, to a point when you can stream everything,” Levman says. “It might take 10 years, but there will be a foreign service where you can get every Bergman, every Jarmusch film, everything you want. Let’s put together those people with the owners of the rights it’s just a matter of time.”
That seems a little optimistic. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are more interested in new productions than deep catalogues, thousands of titles have yet to be remastered for HD, and thousands more are just sitting in limbo while the distribution rights are bounced between holding companies.
“A huge swath of horror films and documentaries just aren’t on Netflix,” says Adam Benzine, journalist and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker. “They’re often put out by smaller DVD companies, or they play at film festivals – and when you go into a video shop and look at the shelves, you see them. You come across things you haven’t heard of, obscure, out-of-print titles that persist physically.
“There’s a documentary called The Final Member, about a penis museum in Iceland – Criterion won’t put out a special edition Blu-ray of a film like that,” he laughs. “But you can go to a video shop and you can find it. Documentaries, horror obscure low-budget comedies – it’s really that breadth of genre stuff that you can find there. What you get on Netflix is very mainstream.”
Building a digital library is no guarantee, either: licenses are lost, hard drives crash, files get corrupted and sometimes companies just give up. Last week, Microsoft abruptly closed its ebook store, informing customers that the digital books they’d purchased from the company would no longer be accessible as of July. (Refunds are available, but that’s small consolation.)
You can still find out-of-print discs online – for a premium – or in stores like BMV or Sonic Boom. And, of course, you can still pore over what’s on the shelves at Queen Video, though pickings are getting slim. People know what they’re looking for, and they’re looking hard.
“The first three days of the sale, there were massive crowds,” Levman says. “People want to own these movies forever. They don’t trust the providers to make this stuff available.”
Queen Video’s closure will leave downtown’s Bay Street Video, Bloordale’s Eyesore Cinema and North York’s Videoflicks as the city’s remaining video stores.
“There’s a sense of loss,” Benzine acknowledges. “Are there things that should be preserved in the digital age as loss leaders, because they have cultural value? Just as we’re looking at things like a universal human wage, I wonder if maybe every city should have two video shops that are subsidized – or record shops, or bookshops. They have an intangible value that’s more than the sum of their parts.”
@normwilner
