How the Criterion Collection Crops Out African-American Directors

The prestigious line is coveted by cinephiles and taught in film schools. The company’s president blames his “blind spots” for largely shutting out Black Americans.

Becker said that the lack of African-American films in the collection is in part a reflection of his personal “blind spots.” These were at play, for example, in his initial reaction to Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), the first theatrically released film directed by an African-American woman.

In 1992, Dash, who studied the Criterion Collection as a graduate film student at the AFI Conservatory and the University of California, Los Angeles, sent Becker a copy of “Daughters” via her distributor, Donald Krim of Kino International. The film, praised by critics for its dreamlike, multigenerational portrayal of a Gullah community on Georgia’s St. Simons Island, is often cited as an influence for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” But Becker turned it down.

“I didn’t understand what I was looking at,” he said, reflecting on the decision. “I didn’t understand it for what it was. And I wasn’t talking with people who were going to help me.”

At the time, Dash said, she had assumed that Criterion simply didn’t “get” her movie. But she later reconsidered. “It’s more than ‘They don’t get it,’” she said. “It has to do with worldview. They don’t care to get it. They’re not interested.”

Though “Daughters” never appeared in the Criterion Collection (in 2016, it was reissued in a digitally restored special edition by another company, the Cohen Film Collection), it was added to the Criterion Channel, the company’s streaming service, this spring. In June, following the global protests prompted by the police killing of George Floyd, the film was made available for free on the service, and featured prominently on its home page as part of a special “Black Lives” package.

For Dash, the about-face was a welcome surprise. “What a change, after 30 years,” she said.

Criterion’s blind spots have extended to the most recent generation of African-American filmmakers. Though the collection features the directorial debuts of multiple generations of white auteurs — including Gus Van Sant, Noah Baumbach, David Gordon Green and Lena Dunham — it has no African-American directors born after 1957.

One who potentially could have been included is Barry Jenkins, who directed the best-picture winner “Moonlight” (2016). Jenkins’s influential debut feature, “Medicine for Melancholy” (2009), is distributed by IFC, which has enjoyed a long-running relationship with the Criterion Collection. Other IFC films, including Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture” (2010) and Dano’s “Wildlife” (2018), received Criterion editions within two years of their release.

But Becker, who said he hoped to add “Medicine” to the collection in the near future, acknowledged that he had only recently seen the film: “I will admit that I didn’t know ‘Medicine for Melancholy’ when it came out.” He first reached out to Jenkins about acquiring distribution rights in 2018.

The director Ava DuVernay, who founded a distribution company, ARRAY, focused on the work of people of color and women, said that Criterion had contributed to “cinema segregation in the art-house circuit.”

“There are all these gates that are closed to Black filmmakers,” she said. “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 in Haile Gerima’s ‘Sankofa,’ or ‘Ashes and Embers,’ or would not want to see all the work of Julie Dash, or Kathleen Collins, or Charles Burnett, and on and on.”

DuVernay said that Criterion had passed on her own film, “Middle of Nowhere” (2012), for which she became the first Black filmmaker to win the directing prize at Sundance. “There wasn’t any rights issue,” said DuVernay, who owns the movie. “It was just a pass.” In an emailed statement, Becker said he had no record or memory of this, and offered to release “Middle of Nowhere” on Blu-ray.

“If Ava would want to work on a special edition with us, we would be honored and would just need her help to get Lionsgate to say yes,” he wrote, referring to the film’s current distributor.

The Criterion Collection wasn’t always quite as white as it is now. In the early 1990s, it put out several acclaimed films by Black directors on laser disc, including Melvin Van Peebles’s “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood,” Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It,” and the Hughes brothers films “Menace II Society” and “Dead Presidents.” But none of those titles survived the transition, in 1998, to DVD.

Becker said they had initially been lost because of rights issues. “In the beginnings of a marketplace, things are less available,” he said. But a significant majority of Criterion’s laser discs did migrate to the newer formats eventually, and Becker acknowledged that he could have done more over the years to reintroduce those by Black filmmakers.

“I know where those rights are, and I can go seek out those rights, and I will,” he said. “We’ve done second Blu-ray editions of other things; we should go do second Blu-ray editions of those, too.”

For the Hughes brothers, who said that they had been honored to be included in the collection in the 1990s, the damage has already been done. “How dare that be an oversight?” Albert Hughes said. “You should know better.”

Becker said his company began trying to address the racial and gender disparities in its catalog around five years ago. That had been one of the objectives of FilmStruck, the now defunct streaming service that Criterion started in partnership with Turner Classic Movies in 2016.

“We looked up, looked around, and went, ‘Oh my God, we have to actually really deal with the fact that, one edition at a time, we’ve knit together something that is almost all male and predominantly white,’” Becker said.