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CRITERION GOES BLU

The Criterion Collection has announced its first 13 Blu-ray Disc releases. Including classics like The Third Man, The 400 Blows, and Contempt, and more recent movies like Bottle Rocket and The Last Emperor (shown above), the first titles are due in October. Al Griffin talked to Criterion president Peter Becker about the company's Blu-ray plans.

Criterion took its time in announcing its first high-def disc releases. Was this intentional? We're a small company, we think hard about everything we do, and it took quite a while for this market to shake itself out. But once the smoke cleared, we decided to start addressing the considerable number of customers who have been clamoring for us to get into the HD field.

At what pace do you plan to release films on Blu-ray? It's going to be more in the realm of one or two a month, rather than the four or five releases per month we're capable of putting out on DVD.

Is there significant value for the average Criterion fan to having films made available in high-def? Absolutely. There's a luminous quality to real film, and HD resolution captures that. I particularly love black-and-white [films] in HD. They're gorgeous, and that's one of the big secrets of Blu-ray: how good black-and-white movies look.

What sort of extras will we be seeing? In many cases, the supplemental features will be the same ones as on the DVD. We don't have any more to say now about Seven Samurai than we did when we put out the three-DVD set. One big difference with Blu-ray is that the menu space exists in the movie space. Now there's a pop-up menu, which means our navigation is intruding into the world of film. And we've got very strong feelings about how one ought to behave in a theater! The interior of the movie theater is a sacred space, and we want our pop-up menu treatments to be respectful of that.

Does Criterion plan to use Blu-ray's BD-Live features or Bonus View PIP capability for commentary tracks? Our idea has always been that the content needs to be well produced and well served. Where the bells and whistles of the medium help us to do that, we'll use them. We're interested in some of the ways Blu-ray offers us to annotate the movies and to update our releases. The online component is very interesting to us, but beyond that, there's nothing that has caused a eureka moment with these first editions.