The spine number on a Criterion Collection case carries weight that no algorithm can replicate. Owning spine #1 (Citizen Kane) or spine #2 (King Kong) signals something beyond mere fandom: it marks membership in a club where the film canonA body of works accepted as authentic, essential, or authoritative within a particular field or tradition. is treated as sacred text. But who writes that text? The answer reveals uncomfortable truths about taste, power, and the cultural gatekeeping that shapes what future generations will consider essential cinema.
The Criterion Stamp: A Seal of Cinematic Approval
Founded in 1984, the Criterion Collection began as a LaserDisc company with an audacious mission: to restore and distribute “important classic and contemporary films.”[s] Four decades later, the company has grown into a cultural institution with titles from hundreds of directors representing dozens of countries.[s] Each year, Criterion adds 50 to 60 films to its catalog, and each addition carries the implicit declaration: this film matters.
That declaration carries real cultural weight. “Criterion is akin to the Louvre, but with an aura of hip,” filmmaker Josh Safdie has observed.[s] Professor Todd Boyd, who holds the chair for the study of race and popular culture at USC, puts it more directly: “It’s like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. It’s a stamp of cultural and filmmaking relevance.”[s]
The Selection Process: Shrouded in Secrecy
Behind Criterion’s monolithic “C” logo lies a selection process “shrouded in as much secrecy as the Oscars.”[s] The films anointed for inclusion are chosen by a tight-knit team of cinephilesA serious film enthusiast or scholar with deep knowledge of cinema history and theory., archivists, and guest curators whose criteria go beyond obvious “greatness” to embrace the overlooked, the subversive, and the morally challenging.
But this flexibility has a shadow side. When you concentrate the power to define the film canon in a small group, their blind spots become cinema’s blind spots. And those blind spots can be glaring.
The Diversity Reckoning
In 2020, The New York Times published a piece titled “How the Criterion Collection Crops Out African-American Directors.” The numbers were damning: among more than 1,000 films from over 450 directors, only four African-American filmmakers were represented. More directors in the Collection shared the last name Anderson than the entire count of Black American directors.[s]
Criterion president Peter Becker acknowledged his “blind spots.”[s] One blind spot had a name: Julie Dash. Becker had the chance to include her 1991 film Daughters of the Dust, the first feature directed by an African-American woman to receive theatrical distributionThe release of films in movie theaters, as opposed to direct-to-video, television, or streaming platforms. in the United States.[s] He passed. “I didn’t understand what I was looking at,” he later admitted. “I didn’t understand it for what it was. And I wasn’t talking with people who were going to help me.”[s]
The film was later selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”[s] The government recognized what the canon-makers initially could not.
Director Ava DuVernay diagnosed the problem: “There are all these gates that are closed to Black filmmakers. It’s a minimizing of the Black film canon. But also it’s a minimizing of the audience, to think that they wouldn’t be interested.”[s]
The Sight and Sound Earthquake of 2022
The film canon debates erupted into full view when Sight and Sound magazine, published by the British Film Institute, released its decennial greatest films poll in 2022. For the first time in the poll’s 70-year history, a film directed by a woman topped the critics’ list: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.[s]
The reaction split along predictable lines. Filmmaker Paul Schrader took a critical view, writing that the result “undermines the S&S poll’s credibility” and represents “a politically correct rejiggering.”[s]
The methodology had changed. The voting pool expanded from 846 participants in 2012 to 1,639 in 2022. Bloggers, academics, and festival programmers joined the critics from legacy print outlets.[s] Different voters, unsurprisingly, produced different results.
What the Debate Reveals
The film canon has never been a neutral record of cinematic achievement. It reflects the tastes, priorities, and access of whoever gets to vote. When the voters were predominantly white men working at traditional publications, the canon reflected their preferences. When the pool diversified, the canon shifted.
Neither canon is “wrong.” Both reveal something true about what different communities value. The question is whether any single list can claim universal authority, or whether the very idea of a definitive film canon was always a convenient fiction.
Critics, scholars, filmmakers, film festivals, and institutions like Criterion all contribute to canon formation. Their collective judgments become self-reinforcing: inclusion in the canon increases a film’s visibility, which increases its influence, which strengthens its canonical status. The gate doesn’t just keep films out; it amplifies the films it lets in.
The stakes are real. Films outside the canon fade from view. Prints deteriorate. Streaming rights expire. Without institutional champions, even significant works can disappear from cultural memory. The gatekeepers don’t just decide what counts as art. They decide what survives.
The Criterion Collection spine number functions as a form of cultural currency that circulates through cinephileA serious film enthusiast or scholar with deep knowledge of cinema history and theory. communities with remarkable consistency. Possession of spine #1 (Citizen Kane) or spine #2 (King Kong) confers status beyond simple ownership; it signals fluency in a shared symbolic system where the film canonA body of works accepted as authentic, essential, or authoritative within a particular field or tradition. operates as both sacred text and social marker. But the mechanisms by which that canon is constructed reveal tensions between aesthetic judgment, institutional power, and the sociology of taste that Pierre Bourdieu would find immediately recognizable.
Criterion and Cultural CapitalKnowledge, skills, education, and tastes that signal social status and facilitate class mobility.
When the Criterion Collection was founded in 1984, it established what would become a dominant institution in cinematic canon formation. Today the company holds titles from hundreds of directors representing dozens of countries, adding 50 to 60 films annually to a catalog that functions as a de facto curriculum for serious film study.[s]
Film scholar Diane Burgess, drawing on Bourdieu’s framework, notes that “festivals function as gateways to cultural legitimization” and that cultural capital in film is “associated with knowledge and taste,” while symbolic capitalPrestige, honor, and recognition that confer authority and influence within social fields. connects to prestige.[s] Criterion operates analogously: the company’s accumulated prestige functions as what Bourdieu would call a “symbolic banker,” its selections securing value through institutional endorsement.[s]
Filmmaker Josh Safdie captures this dynamic when he observes that “Criterion is akin to the Louvre, but with an aura of hip.”[s] The “hip” qualifier is significant: Criterion has managed to accumulate institutional authority while maintaining subcultural credibility, a combination that amplifies its gatekeeping power.
The Opacity of Selection
Criterion’s selection process remains “shrouded in as much secrecy as the Oscars,” with anointed films chosen by “a tight-knit team of cinephiles, archivists, and guest curators.”[s] This opacity is structurally significant. Unlike the Sight and Sound poll, which discloses its methodology and participants, Criterion’s curatorial decisions emerge from what amounts to a black box.
The consequences of concentrated gatekeeping became visible in 2020 when The New York Times documented the near-total absence of African-American directors from the Collection. Among over 1,000 films from 450 directors, only four African-American filmmakers appeared. There were more directors named Anderson than Black American directors total.[s]
President Peter Becker’s admission regarding Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust illustrates how blind spots in the film canon reproduce themselves: “I didn’t understand what I was looking at. I didn’t understand it for what it was. And I wasn’t talking with people who were going to help me.”[s] The film, the first feature directed by an African-American woman to receive U.S. theatrical distributionThe release of films in movie theaters, as opposed to direct-to-video, television, or streaming platforms., would later be preserved by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”[s]
Ava DuVernay diagnosed the structural problem: “There are all these gates that are closed to Black filmmakers. It’s a minimizing of the Black film canon. But also it’s a minimizing of the audience.”[s]
The 2022 Sight and Sound Reconfiguration
The broader film canon debates crystallized when the 2022 Sight and Sound poll placed Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman at the top of the critics’ list, the first woman-directed film to hold that position in the poll’s 70-year history.[s] The methodological shift was substantial: the voting pool expanded from 846 to 1,639 participants, incorporating bloggers, academics, and festival programmers alongside legacy critics.[s]
Paul Schrader, whose 2006 essay “Canon Fodder” had laid out explicit criteria for canonical films (Beauty, Strangeness, Uniformity of Form and Content, Tradition, Repeatability, and Viewer Engagement[s]), argued that the result reflected “not a historical continuum but a politically correct rejiggering” and would mark Akerman’s film as “a landmark of distorted woke reappraisal.”[s]
Scholar Girish Shambu, one of the consultants who helped expand the voting pool, offered a counter-argument: “Why ON EARTH would one assume that a significantly more diverse voting pool would produce THE SAME film choices as canonical favorites from past polls? How ARROGANT it would be of us to assume that Casablanca or the films of Ingmar Bergman would be held in the same god-like reverence by all women, by all Black people, by all queer folks.”[s]
Geographic and Demographic Distortions
The 2022 poll’s claim to global representation warrants scrutiny. The BFI recruited 88 advisers to build an invite list of nearly 4,000 voters, yet only 17 percent came from Asia, Latin America, and Africa.[s] While films from outside Europe and North America rose from 13 to 19 in the top 100, 574 new voters were added from Europe and North America, including 236 from the UK alone.[s]
Perhaps the most striking anomaly: no Japanese title received more than one vote from Japanese critics, though seven Japanese films made the top 100.[s] This suggests that the global film canon may be primarily an export product: constructed by and for audiences outside the films’ originating cultures.
The Structural Function of Canon
Schrader articulated an explicitly “elitist” approach to canon formation in his 2006 essay: “Following the Harold Bloom model I decided it should be an elitist canon, not populist, raising the bar so high that only a handful of films would pass over.”[s] This framing treats the film canon as a quality filter, separating lasting achievement from ephemeral popularity.
The alternative view holds that canons are inevitably social constructs, reflecting the priorities and access of whoever participates in their formation. Neither position is empirically falsifiable; both describe real functions that canonical lists serve.
What the debates obscure is that canons also determine survival. Films outside the canon fade from circulation, their prints deteriorating, their streaming rights expiring without renewal. The gatekeepers don’t merely determine what counts as art. They determine what continues to exist. Canon formation is, in this sense, a form of triage with permanent consequences for cultural memory.
The question of authority in the film canon cannot be resolved by expanding voting pools or diversifying curatorial teams, though both may improve outcomes. The deeper issue is whether centralized canon-making institutions can ever adequately represent the full range of cinematic value, or whether the very project of ranking films against each other obscures more than it reveals about cinema’s varied functions and meanings across different communities.
