Not just DVDs, they're objets d'art

Despite the Criterion Collection's experimentation with online content, I'm still resisting the urge to purge

- ADAM NAYMAN

There are plenty of cinephiles who worship at the altar of the Criterion Collection; I wonder how many of them owe their marriages to the company's products.

Back in the early 2000s, when I was a film student at the University of Toronto, I placed an order for Criterion's DVD edition of Lars von Trier's 1984 thriller "The Element of Crime" at a local independent video store. One of their employees - a girl I had met a few weeks earlier at my own tape-slinging gig at Blockbuster Video - used that transaction to track down my phone number and set up a coffee date. The rest, as they say, is history.

While my partner and I have shared countless movie dates over the years, I don't think she's seen "The Element of Crime," which is just as well: it's slow, obscure and surpassingly uncomfortable, a malevolent, depressive tour-de-force by a director whose name has become a gold standard for cinematic provocation. It could be an avataror a parody for the sort of highend film-buff bait whose target demographic Criterion has spent 40 years servicing as North America (and, arguably, the world's) reigning boutique home video distribution company.

Criterion's narrative is long and complex, encompassing industrial, technological and artistic developments in both filmmaking and the home video market.