Don’t get me wrong, I love the Criterion Collection as much as the next guy and probably more than most, but it hurts real bad to shell out $30 - $40 for a single film, no matter how beautifully resorted, supplemented and packaged it is.

So, for the past few years I’ve found a more cost-effective, if less glamorous way, to go about assembling a world-class home cinématheque. I like to call it “Hong Kong Criterion.” If you go to eBay and search for the words “Godard” (or “Bergman” or “Renoir”) and “Collection” together, you’ll find some totally sketched out listings of massive box sets from China comprising the bulk (or sometime the whole) of a foreign or art house director’s ouevre. Since these are auctions, prices often vary, but the average per-disc price hovers between 1-3 dollars. Take, for instance, my most recent acquisition, a 49 DVD set of the near-complete works for Jean-Luc Godard that me back around $60. A super-steal when compared to the $90 I spent last year on a 54 DVD set of Ingmar Bergman.

Wait, you say. There must be a catch if you’re paying peanuts for films that usually sell for much much more.

Here’s what’s going on here. The DVD sets are manufactured in China, where copyright laws appear to be virtually non-existent. Every eBay merchant selling these sets will claim that these are legitimate releases in China. That’s as may be, but they are still bootlegs. The packaging is quite clever, although riddled with labeling mistakes and typos (One of the discs in the Jarmusch set is labeled “Tranger than Paradise”).

Getting to the discs themselves, the quality varies greatly film to film. It seems that the Chinese pirates go to Criterion whenever possible and just present their dupe of the DVD with Chinese menus and optional Chinese subtitles. At other times, it boggles the mind to think where on earth they found such good prints of obscure films (I was highly impressed by the quality of “Until the End of the World” in my 26-disc Wim Wenders set.)

Some of the earlier releases (meaning sets that I purchased 2 summers ago) are a jumble of Region 1 and Region 2 DVDs, which makes viewing them a real pain without a multi-region player. This happened to me with the complete Woody Allen boxset (which nonetheless remains one of my valued treasures). However, with the more recent releases, the Chinese bootleg masters have luckily found a way to make more everything and anything region-free.

The compression of the disc is certainly of inferior quality than most commercial DVDs, but the films are in true DVD quality just the same - no VCD bullshit here. They just are somewhat sloppily done, and hence might skip a bit here and there. Best to play them on a progressive scan DVD player or - even better - on your computer’s DVD drive.

To date, I’ve purchased around a dozen of these sets: Hitchcock, Fellini, Scorsese, Woody Allen, Rohmer, Renoir, Bunuel, Jarmusch, Bertolucci, Godard, Polanski, Wenders and Bergman. Sure, not every single foreign title has English subtitles (most do, though!). That’s over 350 films, for which I probably paid no more that $500. Not bad, eh?

Whenever I see a Criterion release of a film that I have in these boxsets my eyes gaze longingly at it.
I hope sincerely to be able to indulge my fetishic lust someday in the near or distance future. For the time being, however, I’m perfectly happy to have these funny, cheaply made but perfectly adequate replacements.