Inside Criterion

When I was a kid, my siblings and I used to build forts out of our VHS cassettes. We’d line them up with bricklayers’ precision in the living room, stacking The Rescuers on top of Ghostbusters on top of Notting Hill, until a prefecture just large enough to house a single crouching preteen was erected. This was a pastime for many happy years – at least until the advent of DVDs, which were expensive, and made for poorer building materials. I didn’t come from a family who loved films – I was the anomaly, and my interest in cinema was fuelled by obsessively browsing the internet and renting DVDs from my local library for the princely sum of L1 a week per title.

I thought about the VHS igloos of my childhood more than once during a recent trip to New York,.