Thirty Pages Nobody Read: The Criterion Essay Booklets Collecting Dust Inside Their Own Cases

There's a particular kind of guilt that lives inside a Criterion case. You know the feeling. You crack it open, you slide out the booklet, you read the first paragraph — the one where some professor from a school you've heard of explains what Bergman was really doing with light in a particular scene — and then you put the booklet back, hit play, and never think about it again.

Nobody talks about this. But everybody does it.

The Invisible Audience Problem

Criterion has been commissioning serious scholarly writing since the early days of the laserdisc era, back when the whole premise was that film deserved the same curatorial weight as literature or classical music. The booklets that come with their releases aren't liner notes. They're essays — sometimes thirty, forty, even fifty pages — written by people with terminal degrees and real publication records, who spent weeks or months building an argument about a film that most buyers are going to watch once and shelve.

The gap between those two realities is enormous, and almost nobody in the collector community wants to say it out loud.

Talk to enough Criterion people and a pattern emerges. The booklet comes out of the case exactly twice: once when the package arrives, and once when someone notices the disc is scratched and needs to check if the case has a replacement policy. The essay itself? It's basically furniture. Nicely designed furniture, sure, but furniture.

This isn't a knock on collectors. It's more of an honest accounting of what these objects actually are versus what they were designed to be.

What the Scholars Actually Think

Film academics who've written for Criterion occupy a strange professional position. On one hand, it's genuinely prestigious — the kind of credit that looks good on a CV and signals that someone in the wider culture took your work seriously enough to put it inside a physical object. On the other hand, there's a quiet, rarely-voiced suspicion that the readership is essentially zero.

One film studies professor who contributed an essay to a mid-catalog Criterion release described the experience as writing into a very elegant void. The commission was real, the editorial process was rigorous, the pay was fair. But the audience? Genuinely unclear. "I've had colleagues tell me they own the disc," she said. "None of them mentioned reading the essay. A few of them didn't know there was an essay."

That's the loop. Criterion commissions serious writing because serious writing is part of the brand identity. Scholars accept those commissions because the brand identity reflects well on them. Collectors buy the releases because the brand identity signals quality. And somewhere in that chain, the actual content of the booklet becomes almost incidental.

The Ones That Actually Got Read

It would be unfair to say none of the essays ever find an audience. A few have developed genuine reputations in film circles — the kind of thing that gets passed around in graduate seminars or cited in other essays. The writing on certain canonical releases, particularly the ones that arrived before the internet made film criticism freely abundant, occasionally filled a real gap. If you wanted serious analysis of a specific foreign film in 1994, that booklet might have been one of the only places to get it in English.

But the internet happened. And now the same depth of analysis — or something close to it — is available for free, searchable, and written by people whose prose style isn't constrained by academic convention. The contextual function the essays once served has largely been absorbed by film blogs, YouTube essays, Letterboxd threads, and the kind of long-form criticism that lives on sites that don't require you to own a $40 disc to access.

What's left is the physical artifact. The booklet as object. And for a lot of collectors, that's genuinely enough.

The Collector Confession Corner

Spend any time in Criterion collector spaces — the subreddits, the Discord servers, the comment sections of enthusiast YouTube channels — and you'll occasionally catch people being honest about this. Someone will ask which booklet essays are worth reading, and the responses are illuminating not for what they recommend but for how they hedge.

"I've started a few." "I read the first couple pages." "I keep meaning to get to it." "I mostly just look at the photos."

The photos, incidentally, are often excellent. Criterion's booklet design is genuinely beautiful — film stills, behind-the-scenes shots, production documents — and for a lot of buyers, that visual layer is the actual value proposition. The essay is the thing that gives the photos a reason to exist, intellectually speaking. But the photos are what people actually look at.

There's also a category of collector who uses the booklets as a kind of reading list they fully intend to get to eventually. The booklet for a film they haven't seen yet stays unread because they don't want spoilers. The booklet for a film they loved stays unread because they're worried the analysis will somehow complicate their relationship with it. The booklet for a film they found challenging stays unread because engaging with it seriously feels like homework.

Eventually, "eventually" becomes never. The booklets age in their cases. The spines fade on the shelf. The essays wait.

What It Says About the Object Itself

There's something genuinely interesting happening here, and it's not really about whether Criterion collectors are intellectually lazy or whether film scholars are writing for the wrong audience. It's about what kind of object a Criterion release actually is.

It's not a textbook. It's not a magazine. It's not a streaming library. It's a totemic object — something you own in a way that confers meaning before you engage with any specific part of it. The essay is part of that totemic function. It signals that this film was taken seriously enough to warrant serious writing. You don't necessarily have to read it for it to do that work.

Which is a little absurd, and also kind of beautiful, depending on your tolerance for that kind of thing.

The scholar spent three months writing an argument about mise-en-scène and historical context. The collector spent forty dollars acquiring the object that contains that argument. Both parties got something real out of the transaction. The essay just isn't what either of them is primarily thinking about.

The Booklets Worth Cracking Open

For the genuinely curious — and they do exist — some booklets really are worth the time. Essays accompanying releases like The Passion of Joan of Arc, Tokyo Story, and various Cassavetes entries have been praised even by people who don't normally engage with academic film writing. They're less interested in proving a thesis than in opening a door.

The best ones read less like journal articles and more like long conversations with someone who's watched the film more carefully than you have. They don't demand that you agree. They just offer a way in.

But you have to actually open the booklet.

And that's the whole thing, really. The essays are there. They're waiting. They've been waiting for years inside their little perfect cases on shelves all across America. Some of them are genuinely great. None of them are going anywhere.

At least the design is nice.