Hypermodern

The Archives Trilogy - Part Three
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We've reached a stage where we have access to anything we may want... or think we want... without going to other people or other places to get it.

We have moved beyond the age of post-modernism, in which everything is ironic, disconnected, and self-aware. Classical meaning is undermined by the post-modern, and the ability of archives to curate and contextualize is undermined as well, specifically by the audience's disregard for the effort.

Now post-modern meaning has been undermined as well.

We've arrived at what can be described as "hypermodern." Experience is stripped of context, even ironic context, as everything is everywhere and all is available and within reach. Nothing trumps anything else - there is no authority or final word. Only comparison.

We no longer are limited by the burden of the past or of geography. We aren't defined by politics or our access to goods. We travel through the virtual realm of social networks without being social. Online communities that have no tradition and no memory. Political "clouds" that have no force. Because they have no mass. All access, no opinions.

We're alone and by ourselves - together.

The technological advances have lured us away from the comfort and awkwardness of social situations where we go bowling with bosses, or negotiate baby-sitting, or talk face to face about what is wrong, really wrong with "Slumdog Millionare" and can you back that up, mister? We don't go out on dates - we hook-up online, tweet at the club, and bang in the back of the roller disco. We're reduced to our individual i.p. addresses. And there are no consequences.

We are all travelling in the same direction, but in our little boxes. When there is no social ramifications of actions, do actions matter? And if there is no link to tradition or history, there is no reason to preserve or value it. When context no longer has meaning, archives - specifically designed and charged with preserving culture - lose their purpose.

When people are no longer able to access the flow of tradition or the arrow of history, will there be a reason to go back to old films?

Cultural resonance is embedded in what passes before us. Advertisements blend with reality television blends with post-anti-neo-architecture. Fellini and Bogart don't appear in anyone's remixed postings (a cultural force no one's archiving either) as much as Stephen Colbert. Sergio Amadio nowadays makes the cut by virtue of Italian democracy. Or is it Gloria Guida?

Do we fight that or bathe in it?

A post-modern archive may attempt to embrace the new convergent intelligence of the hypermodern, by running into the oncoming traffic of re-mixed media, allowing digital access to non-authorized versions and recreating a social space around the artists rather than the artwork. The archives, unable to name, arrange, control or limit material, must ride the web of meaning, not try to assert a gravity at one end where too many strands have already been unraveled. Everything's free on the digital highway - intellectual property, advice, storage, context, and meaning.

So value travels back to the experience of spectatorship, not the ownership of objects, or the control of the information. Instead, merely a familiarity with it, engendered by YouTube and Bittorrent and delivering a pale ghost of the original impact.

Archives can't be the sole curator of culture anymore. The copyright holders have taken back their property. Culture comes to the people, not the people to the culture.

An attempt to embrace the art-space around the content rather than to limit, drive, or control the content, is how an archive of the future will remain a resource. A move away from the object and to the experience. From static to dynamic.

There will remain a need or desire to repurpose material for whatever the new digital delivery system will be . . . redoing what has already been done, over again, to the extent that our attention and what the finances available will bear.

That work is now to be done by others, unofficially and without authorization, in a vacuum.

For future users of archives, the destination has to be worth the trip.

(Mis(Re))Presentation

As digital projection systems slowly infultrate neighborhood movie theatres, it's worth noting that old-style mechanical systems have been pretty reliable for the last 100 years. That's a big reason why they're still around. 3 years ago when I worked with AMC, there was a digital system in San Francisco that broke down about once every 2 days. Maybe once every 10th showing.

That's a 10% failure rate. That's unacceptable.

I have been in enough movie theatres to be there when the film has broken, in the middle, rather than at the beginning (which strongly suggests user error and that it never got started correctly). I always presumed it had something to do with the shape in which the films came in, but having worked in theatres, I now know that even in the middle, it's more often the fault of what the projectionist did - or didn't - do that's at the bottom of it.

Of course there is no projectionist. Actual trained union-certified projectionists nowadays are a pleasant anachronism, and sure as hell aren't in your local multiplex. The platters installed hold the entire film on one horizontal reel and have allowed one candy girl to run 12 or 16 films at a time, pushing a button and walking away to the next projector. That's why if it's out of focus it stays out of focus. She's over in house 10, or downstairs putting hot dogs on the roller.

The theatres got rid of the projectionists in the '70s. Film prints get irreparably ruined about twice a year, and cost the chain $2000- $3000 or so each. The savings for one union projectionist was $45,000 annually. Do the math.

The key variable in that above equation is the word "irreparably." More of that in a second. Also hidden in those savings are the amount of bad will created when a film breaks down and stays broken. If you had an expert up in the booth, the celluloid wrap around the gears and electronic brain would be discovered early and un-done in a minute and the show would go on. As it is, if the noon show of "The Da Vinci Code" goes haywire, you just hand them passes and direct them down the hall to the 1:10 show.

It's showing on 4 screens, and the built-in redundancy lessens the short-term risk.

I remember a guy a couple years back when I worked in theatres who came back with one of those passes and instead went to "Lady In The Water." His anger at this misguided decision was mitigated by the fact that this broke half-way through as well, and he was relieved of the latest M. Night tomfoolery (until "The Happening" of course - more due next year) to go for "The Break-Up" the following week.

That dumped 3/4th of the way through as well, and I directed him to the free-pass line where he would collect another admission ticket that allowed him to see "Miami Vice" the following week.

"Vice" didn't break (at least, I didn't see him the time that it did) (it only seems like it with that cold opening) but he had managed to see at least 5 hours of bad Hollywood cinema on one ticket price, 4 parking fees, and an inordinate amount of bother and anxiety.

That's what going to the movies are about for him now. And I'm not sure he will be so easy to get back once he discovers Netflix.

People respond differently depending upon the movie. If they're enjoying it they'll patiently sit and wait, counting the minutes as the projectionist resplices or rethreads, polite but anxious. But if they've been hating the entire experience ("Crooklyn" comes to mind) the audience will revel in the opportunity to demand, nigh - insist - on their money back; NO they don't want to wait, NO they don't want a free pass... unless it's good for something else too; and when does "Crooklyn" leave? I'll be back one day after that.

When a film breaks or freezes, the frame in the gate melts and burns from the heat of the lamp, creating a spectacular 20-foot mandela onscreen. It's only a frame or 2 and you splice that bit out to put it right. But when the film wraps around the platter "brain" you have to cut through inches of stacked celluloid, wound around the mechanical feeder in the middle (the brain) and then get it feeding back in order.

I once cut chunks out of a print of "Snakes On A Plane" and threw them on the ground trying to free the film from a particularly nasty tangle of machine knotting. I then haphazardly spliced the pieces back together, and the mish-mash of intercutting seemed to go with whatever the hell was happening at that time, in or out of order. No one at least ever mentioned an apparent avant-garde editing strategy during that one portion of the film.

I'm guessing all the pieces were right side up.

These brain wraps tend to reach critical mass late in the films; after they've been slowly wrapping themselves tigher and tighter for an hour, working themselves into a tight ball of acetate plastic around the brain, until the film finally stresses and breaks at the 3rd-act mark, just as the hero has begun to enter the villian's lair. By that time, there's 4 inches of film wrapped around the inner roller-set of the platter, and when it stops it means it. Someone's going to be untangling celluloid for the rest of their shift.

I never saw the last half hour of "The Italian Job" - I presume they got away with the money (or perhaps not - there's a sequel coming). Maybe the next time they'll get it right. But only if the projectionist does.

New Model. Original Parts.

In an amazing marketing move, Universal is selling the new "Fast & Furious" as the old "Fast & Furious" - no Roman numeral 4, no subtitle - not to fool us, though that may not be unintentional, but to remind us of what we think we like about the series.

Vin Diesel has always been the best thing in his films, but that depended in a way on the films being pretty bad. As soon as he moves too close to the camera or up the credit list ("XXX," "A Man Apart") his power diminishes proportionally. But I still remember "discovering" him in "Boiler Room" and "Pitch Black." He was on the sidelines, with more charisma in a look than Spielberg could pull out of Matt Damon with more screentime and 10x the budget.

While audiences may think the "F&F" franchise has drifted with Justin Lin's previous installment, the only thing is to go back and make what's old new again. It helped that Diesel is flirting with straight-to-video films now (an ignoble fate for the guy who stole the original "F&F" from a bunch of really cool car chases) and is exec-producing this one.

And in a telling detail, Lin directs again as well. It's not about who's behind the camera but who's in front of it. It won't matter if this is a remake of the original or a new plot taking place in Singapore (as IMDB would have you believe) or in London, as the above (premature) pre-release poster toyed with.

With the original 4 actors together again, they should have gone with a Van Sant shot-for-shot remake. The original's only 8 years old, and no classic - not only is everything old new, everything new is new.

I just hope they don't give Vin too much screen time. Less is more, at least in his case.

Nobody Knows Anything

(The "Jagged Edge" story.)

William Goldman is a famous screenwriter who famously said the title line up there, in reference to Hollywood and the moguls who try to predict what will be successful. But we are not here to talk about William Goldman, the celebrated writer of "Marathon Man," "Absolute Power," "Magic," and "The Ghost and the Darkness."

We are here to talk about Joe Eszterhas, the celebrated writer of "F.I.S.T.," "Sliver," "An Alan Smithee Film," and "Jade."

It's a fact that Eszterhas has never written a quotable line of dialogue, except maybe a couple from the risible "Showgirls," and I'm not sure who's responsible for those drunken binges.

Eszterhas's heyday was in the late '80s, when he was paid a series of increasing rising paydays after being involved in "Flashdance" and "Jagged Edge," getting the (still) astronomical $3 million for "Basic Instinct" (which was beaten 6 months later by Shane Black for "The Long Kiss Goodnight" sold for $3.5m and a producing fee). Eszterhas managed to beat that, in a way, by selling the pitch for "One Night Stand" on the back of a napkin for about $1.7 million. The thinking is that he could expand that to at least 3 or 4 napkins and make the new record.

All of Eszterhas' scripts are similar - a (usually) woman enters into a dangerous yet seductive previously unknown aspect of her own past, and finds out she either loved or had faith in an institution who/which did exactly the opposite of what she expected. She's in love (or had faith in) the morally reprehensible person/thing and sometime during the running time is naked or making love a lot.

In "Jagged Edge" lawyer Glenn Close is defending and falls in love and into bed with the slick and attractively rich Jeff Bridges, accused of murdering his wife. The slimy and unconvincing Peter Coyote tries to tell her not to mix business with pleasure, and at the end hard-scrabble detective Robert Loggia (right out of a b-movie) kills the masked killer who's trying to steal the last bit of evidence that's kept there in Glenn Close's bedroom.

Loggia pulls the mask off the rain-soaked dead killer and reveals, it was, indeed, Jeff Bridges the entire time. Shock, aha, it all makes sense now, "fuck him - he was trash," love sucks, the end.

But - master director Richard Marquand has a shot of Bridges, dead, wet, in shadow, and upside down, that doesn't quite look like him on screen. Many people in the audience "thought" it was him, but felt in a way that the visual confusion of the shot indicated that it wasn't. By not getting a 100% convincing shot of Bridges, dead and in full focus, they took that to mean it wasn't him.

They came out of the theatre (I worked this film) saying, "But who was the killer?"

"Jeff Bridges."

"But it doesn't look like him."

"It was. Who else could it be?"

"It could be no one else. No one else makes sense."

The film takes as its primary mode of pleasure the teasing of us suspecting and deducing that the only possible suspect is Bridges, but tying a series of unlikely alibis to the 1000-watt charm he was capable of generating at the time ("The Big Lebowski" in a way hurt his career in that he made it look too easy. We figured out he's walking through these roles, may very well be high or drunk half the time, and picking roles in which that works as his method.).

The film delivers to the audience exactly what they wanted - but not in the way they wanted it, a solution that's askew and worrisome (and undermined by our own insecurity about the people we love, often for the wrong reasons). Eszterhas in his prime confounded us and teased out an anxiety that was for the most part intellectually satisfying but didn't deliver emotional closure.

Tied to the right director, the texts remained "open."

It's a fine line to walk. Testing and re-shooting the ending to "Sliver" revealed a complete misunderstanding of how audiences engage in these high-trash films.

Once a patron walked in 5 minutes late and asked me what happened in the first couple of minutes. I replied, in spite of myself, that Jeff Bridges had killed his wife, and now Glenn Close, who didn't yet know it, was trying to defend him. The patron thanked me and watched the rest of the film, perhaps enjoying it in a completely different but equally valid way right up to the non-surprise ending.

And they wouldn't have been confused by that last shot of Bridges on the ground.

Closure. Now that's an ending.

Post Modern

A friend of mine who works tangentially in the animation industry expressed recently how nervous the studios and other "old media" types are about the whole Internet business - about how films and clips should not be put online because people will steal them.

Putting shows, movies, or entire catalog of shorts (the National Film Board of Canada recently put their entire collection up online - here - a boon to researchers and students, but unlikely to drive DVD sales except to those dinosaurs who like to "hold" their films in their hands) on NBC.com or YouTube or Hulu, without figuring out how to get people to pay at least a little each time, is to basically give them away.

It seems somehow irresponsible.

What people that believe this are missing is that we're in a whole new world, with a wholy modern business model. "Things" like copies of films can't meaningfully be sold across the board - we're quickly moving beyond the sell-a-widget part of the industrial revolution. (Those who doubt that the barn not only has open doors but also no more sides may be directed to an earlier entry, about Internet thievery, here.) We've already seen this in the music industry.

There's so much material of all flavors out there now on the Internet, in every corner for every taste, professional and amateur and mixes of both, that for all practical purposes anyone can get (almost) anything they want with a little search and guidance. And because of the digital tools at their disposal, they can often get (exactly) what they want. Including full copies of DVDs, movies currently in your local theatre, any music, and any other object of intellectual property that used to be protected by the nature of the fact that it was a physical object that was sold, one by one, and shipped to you and you alone, to hold and keep in view on your shelf up there. Right up there. I haven't opened it yet. I'll get to it. I didn't want it to go out of print. I've already seen it anyway. I just like to know I have it.

Sure, we all still desire material objects. But intellectual property has been enabled to move easily across physical borders by the digital revolution. The studios and distributors are so worried about people stealing their shows and movies and short clips that they sometimes refuse to even release it (Lorne Michaels continually fights with NBC to keep skits from SNL up on YouTube, trying to generate buzz and activity both short-term and farther down the long tail, but the GE suits get so nervous they end up taking them right down again. Disney is positively feral about protecting their intellectual property from appearing in places they don't authorize and completely control.).

What they fail to realize is that those objects are worthless.

They have no value anymore. It's free out there. When there's no need to pay for it, they might as well give it away. Because the value is no longer in selling items that are too easily available - the value has moved upstream - to the authors.

Many filmmakers're (understandably) concerned that if their films are available "free" online then they can't sell them. But - the objects themselves - the films - are now free. And are by themselves therefore worthless. The value of the intellectual property has moved from the objects themselves, no longer sellable, to the artists, the producers who create the value by creating the thing in the first place.

And frankly that's where the value really resides anyway. The "author" (or producer or musician or re-mixer) is the one who's the creative force, and the objects are merely artifacts - traces and evidence of the author's value as creator.

And if someone tries to copy them, it doesn't matter, because they're "free" and have no value, copy or original - the value resides at the author, my friend, who can not be copied. A copy of a Vermeer is not a Vermeer, it is now a Steinbrenner (or an Artanis). Which creates its own value, separate from the original. (See appropriate episode.)

And if the object is copied and distributed? Folks, that is the beauty (and the curse) of the digital. Things are now infinitely duplicatable - you don't have to build and ship a 2nd item to get it into the hands of one more person, then again a third time for the next, etc. You have the ability to get 1 million "free" copies into the hands of 1 million fans without worrying about value - except that it flows back to you, the author.

A million smart-eggs out there, spreading your message.

Phish can give away their music for free and make fortunes touring live for audiences who will pay to be in the same room as them. Or buy Trent Reznor's signed x-rays.

So an artist may ask herself, if my work is rendered "worthless" once it appears in the wild digital yonder, why create? Besides the obvious phenomenological Saul Bass reasons, the realm of art creation still lives in an economic sphere. Out of all the material available, someone must create it all. Approximately 90% of the people in the 15-to-35 age range visit YouTube, Hulu or some other video site apparently at least once a week, yet do more than 1% of those people actually create content?

It's the lumpen proletariet, the unwashed mob of opiated workers right out of Marx 100 years ago, even more narcotized (still a word) by the tsunami of moving images.

With such a large and habitualized audience, there's always need for new content. The investors, advertisers, and CEOs love when more traffic is generated by their content, and anyone who can create buzz, traffic, comments, or controversy with their work, their voice, their unique insight or raw talent will be paid. Handsomely.

Just because the millions of viewers a day are not paying any money to watch your video doesn't mean that money isn't changing hands.

What "authors" need to do is not be part of the 99% that consume, of which there is a surplus; but be part of the 1% that creates, of which there is a scarcity, which means there is value - and where there is value, there is possibly a swimming pool in your future.

As well as having created art that is not gathering dust in the bottom of your closet (or up there on the shelf, next to the unopened DVDs), but out in the world, accessible to all.

Rather than signaling the "death" of the author, as Barthes may have claimed in a post-modern, pre-videotape '70s, the Internet portends a rebirth of the author.

At least, a redefinition of her. As a producer of intellectual property - without property to stand in the way.

It's positively Marxist.

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(Related: see also Time article here.)

Alone, Or With People

The Archives Trilogy - Part Two
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There's a social network that surrounds the showing of films. The coming together of people into a dark and cavernous place, anonymously and at the mercy of a loud and oppressive spectacle, shaping what you will feel emotionally for 2 full hours. It's a bit ominous.

There's waiting in line and eavesdropping on other conversations, eating and drinking before and after - if you're lucky there's something to talk about. And someone to talk about it with.

And of course, there is the battlefield in the parking structure, where patrons jockey for position and prestige, capital investments are parked or scratched, or fights break out - substances are consumed. Sometimes girlfriends are found. Or lost.

That social sphere was very much a part of finding and seeing a film, sometimes miles away, sometimes once a decade. There was a physical, financial, and temporal commitment. It helped to be able to talk your friends into it. Don't you want to come with, see if this thing is any good? I don't want to go by myself.

These modes of consumption has been taken over by the Internet. The social network that surrounded film-going has moved away from theatres, and from archives, which now remain stranded as the last bastion of curatorship for our cultural filmed heritage.

The old purpose of museums were to create a space in which archival behavior was kept and displayed for the edification of the public and scholars. It was a public trust, and a social space grew around them. It might involve Q & As with filmmakers, entire programs surrounding themes to create context and expert meaning. Sitting around coffee, ice cream, tuna melts or wine while talking about the film you'd just seen (often with strangers you met in the lobby, people who had worked on the film sometimes (they were there to see it again one more time as well), or even that cocky know-it-all usher) is a social network all itself, centered around that shared experience, shared together.

Such networking created an emotional context around and beyond the film itself. It was a community. And it added meaning.

But the shift to the www has moved these social behaviors away from brick-and-mortar coffee-hutches. Out of the bookstore alcove. What museum-spaces traditionally used to do - that is, collect and present the detritus and leavings of society, for a new and motivated audience to research - they're doing alone and empty.

They've found their role as arbiter of cultural memory, as the privileged altars of higher learning, stolen by the allure of online social interaction, easier, quicker, shallower but more far-reaching.

No one's in their playground anymore. The idea of being a gatekeeper has been blown off the hinges. There is no more gate, there is no need for a keeper.

The digital realm houses the new social fabric surrounding the presentation of moving images.

Without the social sphere to support it, any institution is doomed to deteriorate.

I'm An Oilman

It's been a year since Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" was released, and it seems it's aging well in only that short a time. It's nice to be so far from of the maelstrom of the hype. I now find it much better than the Coen Brothers' "No Country For Old Men," the other end-of-year "western" that it was so aggressively compared to during awards season and found wanting.

"Blood" is appearing on the UK best-of-the-year lists since they got it in early in 2008 - and I've revisited it recently. I think it's fairly brilliant, more so than I thought the first time (my experience was unique - because it was close to 3 hours and I worked at a theatre where it played, I ended up seeing it in sequential 30-minute segments, which only emphasized the (perhaps) intentionally baroque tonal shifts as the plot lumbered along, not least of which was the bowling alley non-ending. (Or is it?)).

12 months later the difficulty with that ending as well as the hate heaped on the soundtrack seems so completely misplaced. Jonny Greenwood's electronic (but not atonal) foreboding (but not industrial) underscore is as appropriate and conservative as "Atmospheres" seems during the final trip in "2001" nowadays.

By contrast, "No Country For Old Men" in retrospect seems only ultimately to be about a haircut, and a couple of shots that they seemed to have left out in an effort to make us fume about the ending... or lack thereof. I haven't read the original book, but it now seems obvious that Josh Brolin's character got away with the money - the scene in the hotel room and the open grate isn't about something so mundane as who is or isn't behind what door, or whether evil is everywhere or nowhere... it's trying to tell us that Chirgurh hasn't found all the cash. Moss still has it, and that shot of him upside down "dead" on the carpet isn't Josh Brolin. It's another guy in his place - he bought 2 shirts after all. Oops, I guess I probably should have had a spoiler warning on this.

(But maybe I'm reading too much into what's just bad shot composition, or the perverse lack of a CU when he's laying on the slab in the morgue (as Jones tries to recognize him). It reminds me all of the meta-excitement around the ending shot of "Jagged Edge" back in 1985 - remind me to tell you that story sometime. And why else add 3 codas that seem to be just character beats, outside the narrative. The Coens usually know better.)

All in a row, "Blood" unfurls with a level assuredness we don't associate with Anderson. While he ultimately resorts to various baroque convulsions of plot, they don't seem unmotivated, just unexpected; his themes are judiciously and deliciously fingered, and simmer in a measured way he wouldn't have pulled off if he didn't construct this as such an arid and linear setpiece and have Daniel Day-Lewis to tease every nuance from an otherwise hidden subtext. (I half-think the film would have worked as well as a 95-minute thriller.) There's a thousand minuscule decisions that reinforce rather than confound its relentless progression. It's ridiculous and unnecessary to ask why he does what he does. It's too enjoyable and fated to doubt.

And as for the ending, I love when Sunday/Dano returns, looking the same age (only now completely different). They needed each other and both fell to ruin out of each other's influence. The meat, the repeating of lines, the bowling pins and the water/blood/oil/milkshake merged metaphor all give the film a physicality that, after Plainview's intangible drift away from his own salvation, grounds it in our own mortal world.

I guess I should have had a spoiler warning on that as well. The film's apparent sparseness, love for long takes and quiet mise-en-scene fooled some observers into invoking Kubrick (right down to the last-act mannerism). But Anderson, as in "Boogie Nights," even in "Magnolia" and his early "Hard Eight" (with its absent exposition), is primarily concerned with family and teasing out the ramifications of an extended - or absent - one.  Regardless of how broken.

Anderson is really a sentimentalist. And his trust in letting the small details carry the weight of the story reveals him to be less arrogant, more curious, and increasingly more masterful than he has revealed ever before.

Rep

I miss the film repertory houses that I spent so much time in during my formative movie-going years. It was my film school, and the curriculum was created very much haphazardly. I was pretty much on my own to see what I chose.

It's not just the films, which for the most part are now available through Netflix or online (although a healthy percent are still MIA). That is part of it - getting them at the exact (or near) moment you find out about them isn't the same as going to a repertory theatre, where what they program may be something you know about or have an idea of what to expect, but can't entirely be sure of. You had a change to find out once a year, if you were lucky.

You were at the mercy of the programmers and the program, and if it was on that calendar (issued 9 times a year - or less) there was probably a reason. It was up to you to make the trip if you dared.

The setting was just as important. They were usually dingy single-screens on their last legs, made obsolete by television in the '60s, and now playing old artistic or foreign fare for the college 2 miles down whose cinema department still supported the theatre. The first runs were all in malls now (3 theatres, under one roof!). These old prints sitting in the exchanges were more than happy to rotate out the films that television generally weren't interested in; the foreign, the racy, the difficult or the academic. Repertory would get them at reduced or flat rental rates, an early example of an attempt to generate income down the long tail.

They'd show Fellini double bills, and early Altman. Woody Allen and science fiction. Bergman one night, Ed Wood the next. Most of the films you'd never heard of, and you'd only plan on seeing a couple. But after reading about "Deep End" or "Solaris," you started to wonder. What are those films like? Was I missing something? When "King of Hearts" kept showing up once every 3 months, it was a powerful motivator. You couldn't look it up on IMDB back then. Film magazines were so much more important then. To study, keep, and pour over. I would fall in love with stills, right out of "Day For Night." My love affair with Nathalie Baye started with a still.

The calendars were the primers on what had been culturally important in previous decades. Quotes from dinosaurs named Crowther and Gilliatt, Reed or Williamson. Everyone has stories of the brilliant double bills and magical discoveries they made on accident at the local movie house. I saw "Nashville" years late and was underwhelmed, while "Rancho Deluxe," the second feature I knew nothing about, changed my life. (I still think the link had to do with Rip Torn, who's in neither film. I'm sticking with that story. And what book are you going to read that in?)

There was a seemingly endless catalog of unknown and vaguely familiar gems. There must be some arcane and invisible art to creating such a wide selection for such a limited audience. The programmers for these theatres would create clever or playful double bills, using the familiar matched with the unknown or transgressive to generate conflict, curiosity and a sense of elitist purpose and rebellion. The right program, or the unexpected choice, would create an urgency to see (and try to deduce why it was there). (I grew up in Southern California, so the nascent Landmark theatre chain was an important part of this, but there was also the Academy, the Capri, and the Fine Arts. All demolished now.).

A rep house was where I finally saw Stacy Keach in "The Travelling Executioner," a t.v. movie that still isn't available anywhere. John Byrum's "Inserts" was worth it alone for seeing Jessica Harper in one of her few post "Phantom of the Paradise" appearances (and I wouldn't recommend it except to Harper, Byrum, or Dreyfuss completists - and you know who you are). It was doubled with "The Day of the Locust," which is enough to cure anyone of wanting to be in show business.

I learned about Truffaut's oeuvre from the calendars as well, although ironically I never went to see any of them. I went to "Slaughterhouse-Five" for Valerie Perrine and left a fan of Vonnegut. An evocative image from Makavejev's "WR- The Mysteries of the Organism" stayed in my mind for 20 years before I finally caught up with that one. OMG. That was worth the wait.

But people's habits were hard to predict. They'd show up for "In A Lonely Place" but leave 5 minutes into "Casablanca". They'd sit through "200 Motels" but leave from "Casino Royale" (the first one, but why?). The age of TNT, Bravo, and TMC was upon us, where most of it was ending up, until DVD exploded and completely sated the appetite for old classics and new, rendering the repertory theatres obsolete. The last gasp of money seemed to be made on the Asian martial arts films, coming into vogue in the early '90s and still not quite widely available through mainstream channels.

Things like Schroeder's "The Valley," Perry's "Diary of a Mad Housewife," and Haines' "Steppenwolf," all from in the heady age of the '70s were revived, if only for a night, in the '80s; now they've all come to DVD in the 21st century. The bigger hits with the bigger stars always seem to be available, but when I happen to notice that one of these more obscure films have been released, I realize - I've actually heard of it. I remember them because they were at the rep houses, listed with a small inch-by-inch image and a 100-word write-up.

Those repertory house may not have generated much income for the films that showed (less than 100 people a night, at only $6.00 apiece paying back maybe 60%?), but they helped save the films from oblivion. By being in circulation and on that calender, they remained in the canon. I was directed, unintentionally, to so many more films I could never discover on Netflix, never even consider if I saw in a video store, and would probably not drive the half-mile to see down at the 8-plex.

I often think the infinite availability of stuff on the Internet isn't doing us any favors.

The Pointlessness of Authenticity

The famous "Surgeon's Photo" of the Loch Ness Monster, from 1934, revealed to be a hoax over 60 years later. By that time the image has become well-known and evocative of something wonderful and mysterious.

It was better than real. The "shared" memory of the creature was so prevelant and widespread that it had become a cultural lynchpin, an event of history... not of something so quodition as a prehistoric creature in the water, but of a larger happening everyone appreciated, valued, and "remembered."

There were (and are) over 500 reported sightings of Nessie since and thousands of snapshots to go with many of them. There's nothing like photographic evidence to back up your claim.

In 1995, found alien autopsy footage, along with some reconstructions, was aired on Fox, produced by the famously suspect Ray Santilli. The show was broadcast in 30 countries, and half a dozen television and cable specials followed in its wake, analyzing and investigating the veracity of the footage and visits by aliens. I was able to find 20 websites specifically devoted to the original footage. Millions of viewers have seen and chimed in on this show, special effects experts and film archivists alike.

Now it has a life as a historical event that reverberates through popular culture. The authenticity of the original is not important - the effects of that broadcast continue to be felt in the culture at large, in the dialogue we have with documentaries and with "reality" television shows. Is it real? Is it entertaining? Are other people talking about it? Should I know about it?

The existence of discourse out in the mediasphere, where reporters, bloggers, or citizens are talking about popular culture events, creates as much content as hard facts about who won the Grammy or got kicked off the island. (And their level of authenticity is as much in doubt as ever.) "Buzz" is enough to create meaning for events that are not technically "historic" - simply popular. It is easier to pretend to be important nowadays because on the Internet it is so easy to merely exist.

The binary relationship between document and mockument has been diffused, both by the inability to discern the nuance between them and a frank lack of concern about the difference.

With the infinite duplications possible in the digital realm, there is no more original anyway. There is no need to revert to the original source when there's copies everywhere. And nowadays, what people adopt as their folksonomies is creating a forceful authenticity all its own.

It doesn't matter that it's "fake."

We all just want to enjoy the ride.

Panic Hardware

The Archive Trilogy - Part One
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You can find almost anything on the Internet. You can find a friend that loves just that one janky Darin Morgan episode of "The X-Files" only you appreciated among your classmates. Even though she lives in Indonesia, you've now found a soulmate.

You can find the answers to tomorrow's test. The teacher didn't know how to protect her usenet account. You can find the secret to true happiness. (And Oprah will sell you the book if you like.)

You can find clips of the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup." It's not being streamed on MGM.com - they want you to buy it. It is available on DVD but someone's illegally ripped it and uploaded it to YouTube and elsewhere. They were able to find and take down only the most obvious infringers. Hint, don't name your file "Duck Soup" - or "illegal rip."

You can do whatever you want with it as well. You can edit it down, cut new shots in, play it backwards, or change the music and the dialogue.

It's the new avant-garde. New media is being fueled by appropriation of somebody else's intellectual property. It's the wild wild west, all right, but the robbers are using laptops instead of horses and pistoleros.

And then they post their crimes right up again, for a million people to enjoy and comment on what they've done.

The Internet is different than radio, or television, or even satellite. It's more than an infinitely larger distribution stream for all kinds of media. It's 2-way. All the previous modes to deliver content were controlled and fed by big companies, which depended upon managing access to their assets. The public had to go get it, and paid for the privilege.

Once a film had exhausted its theatrical run, the film traditionally (that is, until about 2 years ago) travelled through the various ancillary streams, from cable to home video to network t.v., a dollar or 2 changing hands every time, eventually ending up on the schedule of a rep house or in an archive, for when someone wanted to do a retrospective. Or a paper. Or a remake.

The Internet and the digital age has changed all that. Now there's a rend in the chainlink fence - that hardware on the exit doors is broken, and letting hundreds if not millions into the back door of the theatre. And the digital tools at our disposal now allow us to grab and re-use the content. I'm not just talking about re-mixing "The Simpsons" with "Scarface" dialogue. It also engenders much more innocent and appropriate uses.

Like watching "Gossip Girl" on my phone. Or studying mid-period Sergio Amadio for that paper that's due in Italian Film next week. Or old "Burke's Law" episodes.

Maybe I'll lay the Christian Bale soundtrack over my home videos of our family picnic.

Access to the material is becoming increasingly valuable and desirable, because its use has skyrocketed. Infinite access is a powerful seducer. So is infinite adaptability.

The archives are online. On YouTube, through BitTorrents, or on the online Moving Image Archive. It's the site of artistic, uncontrolled, academic and downright transgressive behavior. It is unregulated and unregulatable. And that's why it's exciting.

While the traditional archives were concerned with whether or not they should move their old film holdings to some kind of digital format to create access copies, anxious that these weren't the high quality traditional scholars or historians might like, suspicious that digital stripped the originals of their priviledged and ritualized modes of presentation (and in hushed tones), the rest of the world was quietly uploading everything of interest and streaming it.

Shortening it or cutting it into clips. Adding music and adding commentary. Sending, uploading, downloading, copying - stealing the clips to share, study, and rework.

Archives, as physical buildings housing materials, are becoming obsolete. The materials that are culturally relevant today - the researchers and artists - aren't there anymore. In large part because what's relevant needs to be outside. Not behind lock and key.

What's culturally relevant is now in the hands of the public. Along with the tools to appreciate it.