#Criterion collection movie#

Criterion began in the 1980s as a producer of high-end laser discs, and pioneered several special features for that format - letterboxing, director’s commentary tracks, deleted scenes - that would later become industry standards.

#Criterion collection movie#

If there is a cinematic canon even more highbrow than the Oscars, it’s the Criterion Collection, where directors are treated with a level of awe usually afforded to movie stars and a film’s critical reputation outweighs its box office receipts. There are just four African-American directors with feature films in the collection overall, or less than 1 percent.

He is one of only two living Black Americans to have a feature-length film in the collection, which comprises more than 1,000 films by more than 450 directors. The Criterion edition of “To Sleep With Anger” - released less than three years after the meeting with Becker, in 2019 - put Burnett in rarefied company. Would Criterion be interested in becoming the first? Burnett hadn’t come to discuss his own film (he had been asked to record an interview about a film by another director, the Italian Ermanno Olmi), but Koulisis steered the conversation toward “ To Sleep With Anger.” No one had ever produced a DVD or Blu-ray of the film, she told Becker. And Koulisis, who is white, joined him for an appointment with the Criterion Collection, the producer of a revered DVD and Blu-ray line of classic and contemporary films that has existed in various forms since 1984.Īt the company’s office in Gramercy Park, Koulisis found herself face to face with Peter Becker, Criterion’s longtime president and creative lead, who is also white. It was September 2016, and Koulisis, a talent agent and former film producer based in Los Angeles, was in New York for a special screening of Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger,” a critically admired but little-seen film she had worked on in 1990.īurnett, who is African-American, was also in town for the screening.

“The Tree of Wooden Clogs,” Ermanno Olmi, Italy.Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,”