Earlier this month at the New York Film Festival, reports surface of people in line for up to 10 hours. The twist is that they weren’t waiting to see a movie. They were waiting to spend a few precious minutes in the mobile Criterion Closet, a new, traveling version of the home-video distribution company’s famous stockroom that has gone viral in the film community. For years, Criterion has published videos of famous filmmakers selecting a few free titles from the closet and explaining to the camera what makes them great. The mobile closet offered fans a chance to do the same, except the films were available at a steep discount rather than free of charge.
The enthusiasm on display in New York reflects the growing space that physical media occupies in film culture. By the numbers, there is little to indicate a revival for DVDs and Blu-Rays amid the streaming revolution. Overall sales of physical media continue to decline. Last year, Best Buy stopped selling DVDs. Redbox just went out of business. But if you spend any time with cinephiles, or listen to any film-related podcasts, it’s clear that physical media is having a moment. Those of us who came of age listening to director’s commentaries and watching behind-the-scenes documentaries now find ourselves in a veritable paradise where we can gorge on exciting new releases of classic films, while sharing our excitement in a community of fellow physical media aficionados.
Criterion Collection may be the most famous distributor of high-end physical film media, but there are numerous boutique distributors that fill their own niches in the market. Many focus on cult classics or rare films, including Arrow Video or Vinegar Syndrome. If you like B-movie horror, these are the distributors for you. Shout Factory does horror, too, but they also specialize in martial arts films, Studio Ghibli (the iconic Japanese animation studio), and classic TV. When you buy a disc from any of these distributors, you can expect expert-level restorations, plus educational extra features and a booklet essay written by a prominent film critic (Full disclosure: I wrote a booklet for an upcoming Vinegar Syndrome release).
Although movie buffs have been building collections since the days of VHS and Laserdisc, something has changed in the last decade. Podcasts have propelled the art of physical media collecting, as hosts, who always need more content, can spend time pontificating on their hobby in between discussing new releases or the Oscar race. Advances in home viewing technology have also helped, making pricey Blu-rays an entertainment option worth investing in. And it certainly feels as if the first year of the COVID pandemic, when we were all trapped in our homes, left cinephiles wishing for a way to make the home viewing experience even more special. When we couldn’t congregate at the movie theater, we spent time on X, formerly known as Twitter, and Facebook talking about what classic film we had taken off the shelf that night.
But the rise in cultural power of physical media has a more metaphysical cause. In the age of streaming, many cinephiles have grown concerned about ephemerality. If a streaming service drops a film, there is no guarantee another will pick it up. The risk of losing films altogether seems higher than ever. A nonprofit organization called “Missing Movies” has even sprung up to save movies from the dustbin of history, but it’s hardly enough to stop the steamrolling of our movie memories that the Hollywood machine is slowly propagating. Buying physical media creates a sense of comfort. When you own a movie, it cannot be taken away from you.
Still, I can’t help but wonder how healthy this mindset is. Video stores gave us the illusion of permanence, but many of us forget that before the 1980s, films that ran their course in theaters were rarely seen again. Only a small percentage of movies were ever re-released in theaters and on television. The Library of Congress didn’t begin preserving films until 1988. Before then, it was up to the studios to determine which movies survived and which were destroyed, and poor storage and the occasional studio fire destroyed a great many works. This scenario forced us to accept the ephemerality of art and, perhaps by extension, of life itself. Maybe we were happier cinephiles without the expectation that film lasts forever. I can’t help but wonder what great movies we could be watching while we wait in line for a few minutes inside a closet.