If we’re honest, being famous mostly looks pretty awful. Still, it does have its perks—like getting to do one of those Criterion Collection videos where you’re granted admission to the legendary Criterion closet, rummage around a bit, and take a few of your favorite films. (Unless you’re Slavoj Žižek, that is, in which case you pocket half the collection.)
If you’ve ever wished you were important enough to get an invite to the Criterion closet, here’s the next best thing: a virtual online version featuring 1,247 titles from which to choose. The site, simply called “The Closet”, provides a pretty decent approximation of the experience of browsing the real thing—the films are all shelved by spine number, and while you can turn toward the “door” to access a search function, it’s more fun just rooting around to see what you find. Look, here at #328 is Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart, which our boy Slavoj described as “one of those nice gentle French films where you have incest!” Here’s #170, Trouble in Paradise, “the best critique of capitalism and a wonderful reversal of the usual logic of transgression.” And so on.
All in all, it’s a nice interface for finding something to stream on the Criterion Channel, a service that’s thoughtfully curated with themed collections but can be a bit of a pain if you just want to browse the whole selection.
Still, if the whole virtual reality thing is a bit too much to handle, you can switch over to List View, in which case you get a nice comprehensive grid of all 1,247 titles, along with a search bar and filters for decade of release, country of origin, language, and director. It’s better than Criterion’s own search page, to be honest, and both the virtual closet and the search page would sit nicely on the official site. Developer Oli Evans, who created The Closet, might be getting a phone call from Criterion soon.
With all that said, there’s one mystery about The Closet: there’s the occasional title missing, and it’s not entirely clear why. At first, we figured that was because the missing titles were unavailable to stream, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Take #387, for instance, which was nowhere to be found when we had a look through the closet. According to IMDb, that space should have been filled by a single-disc edition of Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Sans Soleil—both of which do seem to be available to watch on the Criterion site.
This could just be a glitch that will be worked out in a future version of the site, or it could be that there are byzantine rights issues of which we’re not aware. The most likely answer, however, is that Slavoj Žižek has absconded with the missing titles and is refusing to give them back. Case closed.
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