Keynote of the Great Witness: Peter Becker

It's all about storytelling. If we had to explain the thought of the president of The Criterion Collection, it could be summed up in two words: narrative and collective. 

As every year, the MIFC promotes a personality from the sector and in this year of DVD/Blu-Ray celebration, the market has chosen Peter Becker, president of The Criterion Collection, an emblematic publisher of heritage cinema. And it was in a one-to-one conversation with Gérald Duchaussoy that he told his beautiful story. 

This beautiful story is that of The Criterion Collection, a direct descendant of Janus Films, launched in 1956 by Cyrus Harvey and Bryant Haliday, two students passionate about heritage cinema, and acquired in 1965 by William J. Becker, and Saul J. Turell. With the advent of cinephilia in the United States at that time, the latter decided in 1984 to launch the Criterion label. The first two releases were Citizen Kane and King Kong with the mission, which still remains that of the brand, to share and bring heritage cinema to life. A mission handed down from fathers to sons since the two current directors are none other than Peter Becker, for the editorial part, and Jonathan Turell, for the financial part, even if, as the speaker has assured us, no decision is taken without a common two-headed agreement.  

This sense of storytelling is essential at Criterion. This is even the main criterion. Both to tell the story of this family-oriented company and to explain how they develop their publications. Because it is indeed a question of publication and not distribution, Peter Becker refusing to see his company as a "DVD/Blu-Ray seller" but as a transmission tool which, notably thanks to its bonuses (commentaries, documentaries...) that they were the first to really set up, allows to develop and enrich the film universe and its diffusion. Each work has a story to tell that Criterion strives to find and stage, whether in the way he composes his boxed sets or in the design of his covers. 

To tell these stories, Criterion has two weapons according to Peter Becker: its resources and its audience. First of all, its resources are a prestigious catalogue initiated by Janus Films composed of masterpieces of the 7th art carefully chosen by the different generations passed by the company. It is now up to Peter and Jonathan and their teams, collectively, to flesh it out by taking care of filling certain gaps, particularly among female filmmakers and cinemas from certain regions that have been somewhat left behind in the past, but also by highlighting recent films that, without their intervention, would go unnoticed across the Atlantic, such as Cold War by Pawel Pawlikowski or La Grande Bellezza by Paolo Sorrentino, to name just two. And this with a keen sense of fairness, Bergman not being treated any better than Godzilla: "Every film is exemplary in its field. And each of them has a story to tell and it is up to us to show it," says Peter Becker, always quick to tell the narrative. A now rich collection of more than a thousand carefully numbered titles. Criterion's other main focus is therefore its audience. An audience difficult to grasp really because it is particularly scattered: « Movies are not like shoes, not everyone needs them, so we must make ourselves attractive so that those who are interested can find us, wherever they are". No big ads, no fuss, but an editorialized work that speaks for itself: "It is the quality of our collections and of our work that makes the brand famous". Affirming a company policy that is not very interested in figures, even though it is aware that it must generate income because it is independent, Criterion's priority is to satisfy its public of enthusiasts, demanding and eager to discover, while keeping in mind everyone's available time. There’s a need to federate a community. The counterpart of this esprit de corps is also to attract new members, which is, in part, the other ambition of the new Criterion Channel platform.  

Last occurrence of a desire initiated in 2007 that has suffered many setbacks, Criterion Channel is "the small cinematheque" of the label. By publishing its content through the recommendations of film personalities, through festivals or by its prescriptive and playful aspect, it aims, in addition to satisfying a population increasingly turned towards digital, to offer various entry points to those who would like to learn about cinema or simply to the occasional curious viewer. To lead the budding viewer to discover more and more, pulling the thread of cinema history. 

A story that sometimes has to be revived thanks to restorations financed by Criterion, citing the recent example of Apu's Trilogy, Satyajit Ray's Indian films, which almost disappeared following a fire. Here again the legend takes over, the film burned being kept but almost forgotten for 20 years within the American Film Archives, to finally be saved by the work of Imagine Ritrovata in Bologne, one of the label's partners. Criterion itself having at its disposal on its premises a laboratory for cleaning and digitising those heritage masterpieces. 

During this keynote, the president of the prestigious label recalled that the small story and the history of the 7th art are equally part of the DNA of The Criterion Collection. A tale that Peter Becker, chief narrator, intends to continue to perpetuate, online or on DVD/Blu-Ray.