Estimates in the Mid '80s

Scanning the shelves in a video store (in the old days, meaning about 16 months ago), or browsing through Netflix's seemingly bottomless catalog both emphasize a sense that there is an inconquerable amount of movies to watch. No one could get to it all in a lifetime. Movies you never even heard of starring people you'd never recognize, produced by studios long since bulldozed.

Hundreds of television series are lost to the sands of time, except someone had the master tapes and they've been re-mastered and released to DVD. For those nostalgic fans who still remember, wherever they may be now, when they first saw the show during its short run. And to generate new fans and maybe drum up interest in the Hollywood remake next summer.

Those film masters were stored somewhere and its likely at one point someone wanted to throw them away. They took up valuable space in a vault that was already too full of negatives, dupes, episodes of programs that someone actually were requesting. and as institutions move, are sold or consolidate, the heavy and dusty remnants of its past, embodied in papers, legal files, boxes, media and master tapes, are all expensive afterthoughts. There are stories of Hollywood studios dumping their old negatives into landfills and into Santa Monica Bay rather than pay to store them any longer.

Things sit around in corners and get rediscovered years later, only because they were forgotten and didn't have a chance to meet with misfortune.

Films go through a messy and rather reverse-exponential process of birth. Multiple camera negatives, dupe negatives and interpositives, work prints, optical and magnetic soundtracks, including stereo and foreign-language separations, M&E tracks and other manners of layers are created, duplicated and laid upon one another in the process of ending up with the "master final." All those building blocks are kept in case the producers or creative talent want to go back and redo some iteration.

This process doesn't just occur for union Hollywood productions - every independent short, television program, pilot, news program and industrial creates in its wake the detritus of at best 5 or 10 times the amount of content actually needed for final distribution. By the time they're not useful anymore the people involved have separated and are working on 10 other projects and proper and measured disposal is put off until the final custodian whose garage it ended up in because his name was on the cardboard boxes passed away and the grandkids want it cleared out so they can resell the house in a falling real estate market.

These elements may end up in an archive somewhere, and barring the unlikely event that someone has to reconstruct a film or program from its constituent elements they remain untouched until they deteriorate, asserting their physical uselessness beyond the until then merely philosophical.

Archives are challenged daily when a donation comes in from a family that has prints or elements that haven't been run through a projector in 30 years (and are likely in better shape than the ones in the archive). Inevitably these donations come with boxes of outtakes and unfinished copies no one (including the producing studio) wants, but in order to get the good they accept the whole motley pallet.

The other challenge is that no one can predict what will be valuable or useful in the future. As filmmakers, genres, actors, and modes of representation fall into and out of fashion, those titles that no one seemed interested in in 1990 suddenly gain a new cultural currency in 2010. The public and researchers see something on YouTube in degraded video quality and go searching for the high-quality masters in a curated archive to reclaim it for the greater good.

So libraries and archival institutions whether official or de facto tend to err in the direction of taking in more than they think they want or need, in the interest of expediency and in the interest of being complete. It delays the decision-making process ("What do we actually want in our collection?") from input to some later era ("What are we gonna do with all this stuff?"). You can't predict what will be used in the future anyway, what will turn out to be unique and therefore more valuable, and besides, funding may increase and you can build that new wing.

Very little is ultimately used. In any archive or library, less than 5% of the items generate 90% of the use, and it's estimated that 80% of the items never get requested or viewed at all.

So it sits forgotten, in a curated and protective environment instead of a garage or the bottom of the bay.

Someone's gotta keep it.

Watch Instantly

Netflix isn't just about getting the new hot hits on DVD. The Psychotronic Netflix page on Facebook, post by post, and the increasingly indispensable Rupert Pupkin Speaks blog, in more complete list form, researches and reveals the various obscurities, off-the-radar gems and lost or forgotten films becoming available through Netflix's burgeoning streaming service.

Many of these films have not been available before in any format since VHS, and some never made it to DVD. "The Keep" (Michael Mann), "Citizen's Band" (Johnathan Demme), "92 in the Shade" (Thomas McGuane), "Cul-de-sac" (Roman Polanski), "How I Won The War" (Richard Lester), "Harry In Your Pocket" (Bruce Geller), "Inserts" (John Byrum), "Hickey & Boggs" (Robert Culp), and "Grindhouse" (Rodriguez/Tarantino (the original theatrical hash) are all examples of films I saw in theatres, in some cases travelling many miles past my neighborhood venue, titles not currently available on regular DVD ("Grindhouse" recently escaped on Blu-ray) and can now only be seen by looking at my computer screen by myself, alone.

DVD rights to such titles are murky, undervalued and considered (or actually) not worth pursuing. But these films seem to be part of some out-of-date late '70s-early '80s cable bundles that didn't make it to the DVD publishers during the go-go era of Blockbuster and Erol's, packages that Netflix has purchased to beef up their offerings, from Starz (for a steal, it turns out) or elsewhere.

Netflix doesn't want to be in the mail-order business. The more that people stream films over their t.v.s, phones and handhelds, the less they have to manage, ship and replace thousands upon thousands of discs in the mail which are prone like all objects born of atoms to wear, get lost and suffer other misfortunes of human clumsiness. DVDs break and have to be replaced. When films can be streamed over air, the economics of digital delivery manifest themselves.

This is a long-term strategy - the financial benefit won't bear fruit for a while. Netflix may intend to eventually save the estimated $600m a year on snail-mail postage, but the cost of acquiring this content is suddenly astronomical - over $1.2 billion in the next year alone by some estimates.

The math has changed. I've talked about how Hollywood will insist on regaining control of their content online before. Netflix isn't buying savings because Hollywood has decided they want to be paid to let people look.

Netflix is only leasing the films, for increasingly short periods of time. 3 films in my "instant" queue disappeared last month, as deals matured and were not renewed at the old rates. Netflix has some work ahead as it decides whether (and how) to have the best, the widest, the newest or the deepest selections.

For now they have all the eyeballs. Reportedly over 80% of films watched online stream through Netflix, and they're responsible for over 20% of all internet traffic. This is an enviable position they welcome. Netflix has always had a long term strategy - they aren't called "MailDVDs" after all. Reed Hastings always knew the future of movies was online.

New consumer plans going into effect this week prove they would rather give you unlimited movies on the web than helping you arrange that list of DVDs to mail. People have been using their queues as memory aides - you aren't really going to get to all 500 of those films in this lifetime. As of this fall they report that more of their content is delivered online than by mail, in terms of hours watched. It used to be they mailed DVDs, but also streamed some movies too. Now they stream movies but mail them too if you really want.

They hope that adding that extra dollar to each account nudges you in the right direction. It will also help pay the bills.

In the meantime, while only about 20% of their current content is available for streaming some of it is only available that way. It sits there behind a low-res window of laptop watch-instantly tempting us. I could spend months watching these low-rent forgotten '70s and '80s late-night channel 44 fillers, but the majority of viewers won't want to watch "Fast Food" with Michael J. Pollard and Traci Lords. *

If Netflix wants to offer all the new films and latest shows, it will pay dear for the privilege.
_ _ _ _ _ _

*Although I heartily recommend it.

Remembering and Forgetting in Hollywood

Having peeked inside various archives in Los Angeles for the last couple of years and doing time there instead of merely looking over the fences I've become aware of a trend overtaking the curation of films. In the minutia of deadline day-to-day decisions the philosophical dicotomy between digital and analog, invisible to the audience, is inexorably influencing the industry by stealth and infultrating practice; amid short-sighted budgetary edicts the tipping point's been reached where either something is committed to digital or it remains in analog format.

In effect, this assigns assets either to corporate balkanization or to cultural extinction. It has much to do with what is old and with what is new. It will be an irreversable decision as time goes foreward.

The vast majority of content is not only being produced on digital formats now but also being post-manipulated and delivered by digital means. TV shows and "films" - no longer films really; let's call them AV events - are captured and fed directly into computers to be put together virtually, configured for however and whereever the end product might need to be received. The more flexible the basic building blocks of any material are, from aspect ratios and frame-rate formats to language tracks and bit-rates, the easier it is for studios to shake and bake the right-sized product to however the buyer will want it - a digital satellite feed, a cable TV master, a phone-app or uncompressed HD digital cinema package (DCP).

Final analog 35mm prints occupy only one corner of the buffet table. They're increasingly less relevant to the larger mediasphere and no original negative elements are stored to be later referenced, free to be forgotten and one day re-discovered. The suggestion belabors the insult that the rights holders 1) intend to forget their content, and 2) shouldn't have, and have pre-planned for a future in which their own disregard is remade whole, their lack of foresight to (with with foresight can) be ridiculed.

It's either gonna be saved or it's not. The new digital versions arrive clean. They don't involve messy use-once-throw-away chemicals or manifest accidental scratches or unintentional grain, something more and more audience members express they have no tolerance for. Once digital masters are at the point in their lifecycle to be duplicated and delivered to theatre spaces (some of which are indeed still theatres), they're much cheaper to duplicate and deliver, living on proprietary hard drives that are wiped and reused rather than on 160 lb. celluloid prints that become boat anchors or landfill, once a title leaves its initial run.

Digital archival "prints" don't remain in the world to temp pirates. Proprietary drives work only in the intended venue and self-destruct once the run is over or even if it's plugged into the wrong keyed server. These copies aren't vaulted - they have no half-life.

Titles are rebuilt, on demand, at the studio level by digital means. There will be no going back to the negative or having to find masters after many years, which may not be close at hand.

The sense of objects lost and then found will disappear. There will be nothing to be discovered. If it's not there, it's not anywhere.

A whole new world of archiving is being created before our eyes in which IT experts, server management, copyright maintenance and metadata are more important than the old skills of rolling through reels, shot-by-shot comparision, chemistry and detective work. Searching through vaults, often in the side of a mountain somewhere, or digging through 100-year-old show business magazines for release info, deteriorating or off-limits or hidden in a library not sufficiently staffed to allow access, is labor intensive.

The search will become increasingly pointless. Numerous older titles released on VHS in the 1980s, when that format seemed to to revive entire back catalogs in the go-go days, have not made the transition to DVD. They never will now. Most of the classics and cult items that have been mined now comprise the new "cult" canon. There's no financial reason to re-release "The Devils" or "Sonny Boy" or "American Hot Wax" or "Kafka." The Warner Archives program, along with Sony's recent entry to reanimate some of Columbia's forgotten back catalog, are last ditch efforts to skim what remaining cream is left, at inflated prices although on DVD-rs (shelf life: less than 10 years). These feed on the last good will of jaded collectors who will still pay for films as the studios abandon the DVD business.

The 1000s of titles that did made it to DVD won't make the transition to streaming. The real problem is invisible without your long glasses on. So much new content is being readied to be served up online or on your iPad. Those digital masters are being shepharded and under the legal custodianship of the studios. The studios keep everything safe for as long as its apparent financial lifespan. And no longer. These new and future digital masters are digested and reabsorbed into the studios' virtual clouds of content out of sight, out of mind and out of the culture.

The older realm of films already on prints, almost everything made prior to 1999, will remain in the thousands of archives worldwide, unavailable except to those museum and theatre spaces that still show film from film.

They're kept in cool conditions, and with a minimum of fuss they will last another century. They will sit. These two schools, digital vs. analog, move farther apart as theatres, museums, film festivals, free tv, and all the other modes in which film continued to live are slowly replaced.

The "print" people, who work with objects and artifacts and do research in dusty basements, are already irrelevant to the "digital" people who sit in front of computers and scan and code metadata.

Our historical memories will become divided between the sexy shiny 3-D stuff that we look as it goes online (and no longer when it goes offline), and the plastic objects that still exist because they were able to be left behind.

His New Job

The release of the almost complete (33 of the 34) Chaplin Keystone films (all 1914) from Flicker Alley, remastered from the best surviving elements over the course of decades and international boundaries, is cause for celebration, if only to allow a truer tracking of his character and development of film-making techniques. It also allows us to discover what intangible qualities insinuated his nascent tramp character into the cultural consciousness so quickly and so completely early into the century.

Chaplin occupies a unique place in film history, a young but polished stage performer who knew the tricks of pantomime and embodied an everyman underdog persona to early film's limited techniques to full advantage while other blustery, broad and 2-dimensional performers as Ford Sterling and Harry Langdon would end up being mere footnotes in Kevin Brownlow books. Popular film-going had been around for almost 20 years when Chaplin hit the scene. Filmmakers like Mack Sennett had already codified the limits of the common get-rich-quick business model that was ripe for expansion, either by advanced story-telling (soon to be exploited by Griffith), marketing (Zukor's "Famous Players" and Vitagraph's "Broadway Star" series), or more nuanced character work. Here Chaplin stumbled upon, in a self-knowing as likewise likely accidental manner, the assumed and effective traits that even as he built his popularity upon them, often in cahoots with his audience willing to be seduced, he would set an eye to abandon by the coming of sound a decade later.

The Keystone films have been hard to find in clear watchable versions, and their charms are obscured by scratches, random jumpcuts and generations of dupiness. This release allows us to put the beginnings of his career into perspective. Starting quite early in his career he was already starring in short comedies that took place in movie studios, pointedly early in each new contract with a new studio ("A Film Johnnie" at Keystone, 1914; "His New Job" at Essanay, 1915; and "Behind the Screen" at Mutual, 1916). Clearly such a setting was already familiar enough to audiences by 1914, a familiarity with the backstage mechanics of film-making common enough to set Charlie loose with antics to thereby ensue.

The comparisons between them are instructive, each only a year apart with the missing Keystone pieces as ... well, the keystones. Less than a month after he started with Mack Sennett, "A Film Johnnie", taking place at the Sennett studio with cameos by Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Ford Sterling, demonstrates our hero at odds with an establishment that doesn't welcome or appreciate him, oddly enough populated by the very film workers who are making the film we're watching. (Sennett does not make an appearance.)

The film is, for lack of a better term, primitive. Filled with smoking, shoving and smirking, it shows the speed of prevailing slapstick traffic at the time with the fleeting pleasures of showing the Sennett studio in an occasional background shot, between business with rugs, fake backgrounds, a bombastic director and a pretty girl. Chaplin already knows how to play to the camera rather than to his co-actors, his first and best secret from the legit stage, but the wonders of film-making are still situated within the mise-en-scene, particularly in a sequence in which the backdrop is built and changes behind him as he pines over the girl unaware, a surprisingly modernist moment for 1914 and an impulse Chaplin generally avoided.

By comparison, the following year's "His New Job" (which not-too-subtly announces Essanay's success stealing him from Keystone, for an increased salary presumably going from about $150 to $1250 a week) depicts Charlie's persona as social irritant so comfortably developed and acceptable that the plot mostly hinges on bits about extras being pushed through doors and funny costume gags rather than exploring any potential a film studio or Charlie, as an increasingly sympathetic character, lost within it might reveal. It does feature the questionable benefits of Ben Turpin as another job seeker that Charlie steps over (and on), and also includes a couple of moving shots in which the camera rather insistently dollies in when the film-within-a-film is being shot.

This foregrounding of the apparatus of image-making is self-aware and unexpected in an otherwise typical entry. The studio setting is ultimately a throwaway, even as character accents proliferate, such as Charlie's distracted and immodest glances at a half-draped statue, allowing him to show a conflicted chivalry that must have struck a nerve with him or his audience. The turn reappears in "Work" and in "A Night In The Show" and elsewhere, almost making it a leitmotif of characterization through his early period. As an affectation it's slightly vulgar, but it shows Charlie's heart is in the right place.

The Essanay films are simultaneously more competent and less desperate. By the time of "Behind the Screen" (1916) for Mutual, 2 years after beginning in cinema and 50 short films later, Chaplin as a character has been developed enough and his takes, ticks, and turns familiar enough to risk having him kiss Edna Purviance while dressed as a boy on the mouth (claimed by some to be the first American mainstream "gay" joke). That detail and others, including the porcupine he makes of himself with a dozen chairs on his back and the prevalence of outsize but hollow columns, flour sacks and rubber swords, embrace a truly surreal understanding of making films, finally addressed head-on by Chaplin.

The naked statue he can't keep his roving eyes off of also shows up. A creature of habit (personally as well as professionally), Chaplin knew intimately how to create and milk little moments that had power and meaning beyond their apparent triviality on screen. Much of his training on stage taught him how to size and time little moments that most other screen actors of the era had no idea how to finesse.

A most telling premonition of Chaplin's long career capturing the attention of the world is manifest as early as his 2nd film, "Kid Auto Races in Venice" (1914), shot for Sennett one afternoon during a soap-box derby on the streets of Los Angeles. Here Chaplin acquires a tramp outfit for the first time, by accident and presciently similar to the one he would adopt months later, and the bulk of the show (a scant 6 minutes) is his curious and intrusive tramp walking in front of the newsreel cameras trying to film the race. Chaplin mugs, poses, gets pushed out of the way, and keeps vying for our attention, the audience, while the hapless filmmakers turn the camera away, push him aside, and generally pretend he isn't there.

He is magnetized by the camera lens, and he won't get out of the picture. The force of Chaplin's character and his insistence on being seen and recognized as something interesting, as photogenic - as newsworthy - ignites a fuse of recognition, not only of one man's vanity, though he may be clearly down on his luck (a tramp even!) but in the power of cinema to promise something larger than life out of normal everyday events and accidents.

Even in early 1914, Chaplin was injecting his own wry, winking personality into throw-off shorts already aware of a meta-narrative of films about films. Something that illustrated their potential power, even then.



Charlie kisses a "stagehand."

Soylent Green Is Made Of People

More houses used to have libraries. Books used to be objects on every shelf - and heir to decay, tearing, browning at the edges, silver fish and mold.

One collected books in order to become "learned." They manifested a physical amalgam of your own knowledge, souvenirs of previous interests and areas of study, arcane statistics and insights - a kind of memory adjunct. They're there because you need them to look something up every so often - you can't memorize everything and there's comfort in knowing at least what can be found in them, pleasure in knowing where to find something.

Of course you must be familiar with them to be able to get your hands on what you're looking for. Someone famous said, "Who wants a library full of books you've already read?" Well, that is a different kind of library. That's a want list acquired, weighing down and intruding on your future free time.

Now books are moving en masse to digital form, and are acquired by download spontaneously and often at a whim. Formatted files sit on Kindles and Nooks owned by increasing layers of demographic, and are not burdened by the physicality of real books or the potency of having been read and displayed. No, instead they have become lighter than air and are infinitely more portable, especially in numbers.

An electronic device is still useful for reference - it's not very cool to pull out an OED in the bar when a trivia question about past-pluperfect inflections arises (again). If that's your idea of a good time in a bar maybe you're not as cool as you thought - or you're in the wrong bar - or maybe you do want to pull out an OED. Digital books can be taken anyplace. They can be downloaded and searched everywhere and yet are no where. They are files, in the cloud. We rent the ability to view them, through the phosphor screen, rather than getting the thing delivered for us to put on the shelf - to tease us over how much future free time it means.

We certainly can't copy or move them from device to device. And every so often we are reminded that someone else controls the content as when Amazon deaccessioned all the digital copies of 1984 from afar, an unfortunate irony and strangely prescient considering the title. Google Books only allows you to look at one page at a time based on your search term, rather than let you view an entire copyrighted work. They don't give it all to you for free online - and they shouldn't. They're protecting content by denying you the ability to refer to it meaningfully - but there you go.

And your digital files won't move to any other device, and will eventually become technologically obsolete.

We are awash in cultural artifacts but we simply don't see anyone's books anymore. We can't keep them or hold them. We can't check the dude out by what books he's got - or by what LPs are on the turntable. Books are no longer valued as objects with impact, as objects worth seeing. Owning. Having. Newspapers are already gone, and magazines are next, and that iPad subscription to Sports Illustrated won't keep you warm at night in 5 years. Even on BART, if someone's reading Gibbon's Decline of the Roman Empire on their iTouch, you'd assume they were FourSquaring (must everything become its own verb?). Proponents insist that there's no room for the 10,000 books available and now in your back pocket on a Kindle. You can pull them out anywhere. There's no room on any shelf for that many. No room in a house, or 2 houses. Break the tyranny of the dusty page.

I say we make room. Make room to display the value books assert in their very existence - heavy and aging at the expense of something else. That is what gives them value. To make room is to admit their worth and that a decision was made. That they are here instead of some other object. These books are here because I read them and I know what's in them and they represent who I am.

If they're in the air and they're infinite and they are all around us, and invisible, they're like a watered down soup. Just filler and not worth the space they take up.

The Kiss of A Spider Woman

Perhaps you heard the New York Times have reported that the owners of all the original materials of the film "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (1985, directed by Hector Babenco) are up for auction - not as a film or even as an archival collection manifesting some larger meaning or artistic importance by its breadth and depth of materials and provenance. The lot includes scripts, 35mm outtakes, camera negatives, papers, and the rights themselves.

They're not selling this to some cultural institution, like the MOMA (who's not interested and doesn't know how to do such things anyway) or the UCLA Film Archives (who as a public entity only takes donations, thank you very much). They're selling this instead as a "work of art."

The collection of film isn't being sold as a cultural entity so much as a physical pile of objects. A beautiful one. The idea is that the whole amalgamation is its own artistic statement.

The move is audacious and smacks of performance art. The film, no slouch itself and a major art-house hit for the time, snuck up on me on cable years later when I wasn't sure what I was in for. It had its own pedigree, co-written by Paul Schrader's brother Leonard ("Blue Collar") and novelist Manuel Puig and starring William Hurt in a game of chicken with his career poised after the avant-garde hipness of "The Big Chill" (1983) and before the cold and depressive "Accidental Tourist" years (1988-present). Raul Julia, who did his best to fight against type-casting his whole career yet ended up cast (perfectly) as Gomez Addams and in "Street Fighter" movies right before his death, is his cellmate who becomes obsessed with the spectre of the Spider Woman in the films of Hurt's dreams.

Get this straight. They are auctioning off a collection of raw and production elements, wishing to declare, position, and profit from the larger idea of detritus as cultural value, an evidence of unique process important and illuminating. Hollywood doesn't appreciate its own products, David Weisman, one of the original producers, suggests, and thinks the art world may appreciate the "object" more properly. This stretches the concept of what is actually art (here we go again), which ultimately will be in the eye of the holder.

Will the new purchaser re-release the film with new sequences never before seen, envisioned, or even scripted? Will the outtakes be digitized and turned into a 360-degree museum installation without beginning or end? How much value does the "asset" still have? The film made about $17 million and went on to generate more interest after a Broadway version. It's not like the collection can be displayed in a Manhattan summer house above the divan, not easily, and it will have storage issues to sort out as well. But so do original canvases by Picasso and Modigliani.

And yet, neither can any actual film, artifacts manifesting the most successful artform of the 20th century, be displayed easily for casual and immediate appreciation and critique. Analog though they be, they must be projected on an arcane projection device, with a lens, bright light, seats and a blank white wall. They don't reveal their secrets to the naked eye and visual inspection. You must "present" them.

Cinema is the only artform in which you turn your back on the object and look at a shadow of the original, shone and reflected against the opposite wall. Which is the source of its power, a caress we stare at of movement and images, light and sound, carefully worked and seducing us to get closer to something we can never seize, never possess. Film only reveals its secrets by proxy, entraping us without us knowing what hit us or exactly how it did it - this collection of frames and shots.

How do these objects possess us and make us obsess over how they were built up; manufactured? Cast their unique spell when we give over to their charms? The quoditian objects created around the production of "Kiss" have been re-conceived as an objet d'art, but may serve better as archival summary to be mined by some future historian. Perhaps by keeping the panoply whole and identifying it as a "work of art" with value all its own, some one some day may get to the bottom of it.

Who's Cow Is It Anyway?

While arguably, the digital cat is out of the analog bag, Hulu which streams the most amount of television shows online (legally) announced they were going to start charging for much of their premium content. You could still get some of the old stuff for free, but in order to sate your appetite for "Gossip Girl" or "30 Rock" you'd have to $10 a month to get it on your iPad. And that's still with the forced salad dressing commercials. (All of "Rockford Files" and "Banacek" are still available. I guess a new generation doesn't consider them "iPad"y.) 

In the shift to online-only editions, Time Magazine is also moving to a paywall strategy - the newest issue's articles are shortened and only older (and less relevant) news is available for free. This is an effort to protect its content from freeloaders on the web, who don't pay their way and cost relatively little to deliver to, but are troublesome in that they demand more and more content in real time, something print-based magazines are still having a hard time figuring out how to do. Paywalls are confusing and controversial. But it seems the last way to save the dying print industry, in a race with music to the bottom and without deep-pocket patrons to soften the fall. 

20th Century Fox has snuck a pay-subscription model by us for mobile phones (called Bitbop) without fanfare to test the pay-for-tv model in your pocket. They will offer the same t.v. shows as Hulu and soon full-length motion pictures. You kids can go make your lol videos, we're going to stream stuff you want to pay for. Because it's actually scarce. 

Turns out it costs to create content, in time and in money. Ipads and iPhones have changed how we get this stuff; now people would rather watch once than own and store what they have to hide when polite company comes over. Why the hell do you have a copy of "Beverly Hills Cop 3"? Apple, famously open in the beginning and increasingly more closed, is turning into the best friend of content providers. If the pipeline is singular and controlled (and works through an already-in-place payment system, like, say, the one for iTunes) paying for content just might work. 

Now it's a contest to get as much out there as possible. Simply start limiting access moving forward and let the old stuff remain open, languishing in its diminished "free" ghetto. Things are changing, folks. The internet is omnivorous. They're praying the long tail model wags the new stuff into a tsunami of micropayments. There may be less value in the back catalog, unless of course producers try to charge for that as well. After all, it's first run till you've seen it. Disney for one knows you don't want to buy DVDs anymore, and intends to start supplying their content in the future through internet access that we pay for, without ever delivering actual discs, files or copies to us. Their old stuff will be handled this way as well - you'll be paying for "Dumbo" and "Hannah Montana" for the rest of your life. Their plan is called "Keychest," and they will supply access to their shows and their movies for a fee and hold the keys, as well as information of our renting and buying habits to sell to other providers. 

That's one way to have your cake and get hit in the face with it as well. Why do I have the feeling I'm on the wrong end of the baked goods?

Friction

One of the most film-geeky sequence in Truffaut's "Day For Night" in the one in which the young Jean-Pierre Leaud steals a still of "Citizen Kane," his fetishistic totem to a mode of American studio movie productions, and a purloined souvenir from the unobtainable mysteries of film appreciation in an age (1973) when you had to watch everything at a local repertory house or late at night on t.v. when the local station happened to program it.

Series of books were released in the late '60s and '70s that discussed film and produced goldfish-scale black-and-white stills, miserly and like manna, such as the breadcrust-size A. S. Barnes series that revealed Bunuel, French cinema, Dreyer, or the Marx Brothers. The "Focus On" series, also defunct, edited by Donald McCaffrey focused on Chaplin, Welles, science fiction, D.W. Griffith, Bonnie and Clyde, the western or Blow-Up.

Where did such enthusiasm for publishing go? Did we really have a cultural hunger and imperative to read about such seemingly generic or specific topics? Playboy published "Sex In The Cinema" issues every November, using the excuse of grabbing stills of cinematic transgressions with naked people to suggest the mysteries popular films really held. "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea" (1976) was about much more than Sarah Miles with no clothes on.

Films had a limited availability, not easily viewable after they disappeared from theatres. An entire subculture centered around stalking and tracking down elusive showings, late at night or at conventions, or unannounced on the bottom of double bills. The stills and second-hand reviews that were published had the power of discovered evidence, skeletal relics outlining the details of the bodies of the texts, the nuances of the photography and players, the sensual pleasures held within the time spent with the actual film, unspooling in real time, one time only, a late night rendezvous.

They were poured over like a Maxwell Demon gatefold, being undecoded as best they could until we could unlock the mysteries the films ourselves, in person, face to face. Until then, we had to take Baxter's or Clarens' or Hoberman's word for it. I read every word Kael wrote in the '60s and '70s, in part to ensure myself that I could trust her.

The days of discovering films through all these secondary ephemeral stills and critiques is over. It used to be hard. Movies are so easily accessible through the Internet through streaming or bit-torrenting under the radar, or from video-on-demand from the studios themselves, often before theatrical release, which is suicide, that they have lost their aura as events.

Films have lost their aura as important. Any title is available almost anyway you want, almost as soon as you want it. Television distributors have already given up trying to get us to make appointments to drive us to their product. They'd much rather throw it at us any way and place we might pay attention, an act of desperation and promiscuity. We have Hulu and Netflix and NBC.com and YouTube, and soon Sezmi and Zillion.tv.

Seeing films used to be work - you had to pay attention, pour over the listings and be aware of the rep houses who might have a quirk in their scheduling that would schedule "Transatlantic Tunnel" (1935) or "The Wild Party" (1975) because the bookers read the same articles in Cinefantastique you did. ("Tunnel" showed with "Phase IV" in a mad programming strategy.) Now they show up without announcement or explanation. Who rented "Anti-Christ" (2009) from Time-Warner Cable thinking it was an "Exorcist" rip-off from Italy? Films will be delivered digitally to all 3 of your screens and they will be in bite-size pieces and ubiquitous.

No longer sacred or special objects that we must travel to in order to enjoy. We don't have to leave our couch, and so they are no longer objects to be revered. To have access at your fingertips is to not feel the need to steal those stills from behind the grate, to decide what is worth the risk of getting slapped.

It used to be hard to publish opinions about films as well. Even writing zines required patience, a certain design sense - or specific lack of one - explicitly applied, and pages and staples to be lined up. Photos to be chosen from the delicious few available for your lustful duplication.

Now there's no more friction. Now all is instant, ubiquitous and promiscuous. We've lost the need and the value of having to wait to see what the secrets are to be revealed by films, carefully and in their own time. Even if they are worth working for. It devalues not only the work in making them but in the work in viewing and enjoying them as well.

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The author acknowledges the contributions to this discussion of Bruce Fletcher, of Dead Channels and of SF Film Club, which we don't talk about.

Arbitrary Walter Benjamin Reference

After Cannes last week, Mahnola Dargis, Roger Ebert and then even Cinematical piped in on whether or not the august film festival should be showing films digitally, whether or not we can tell the difference, whether the filmmakers care, and what if anything, exactly is lost by this.

It is a conversation fraught with anxiety, nostalgia, knee-jerk conservatism, and nerdy one-up-manship. There's a sense in the air that the age of film is dying before our eyes. Buyers aren't buying at the festival, and sellers aren't coming anymore. There were no US films there except for "Robin Hood," which doesn't even seem to have a presence in America. It's not even really made by Americans. Godard, Ebert reports, is now finally and culturally irrelevant.

I think they're really nostalgic for a community that was worldwide and was dependent upon meeting face to face to see art and discuss marketing and sales. Do people really still care about watching films on film? Doesn't it scratch? Wear? Fade? How high is hi-resolution? Isn't everything already done digitally nowadays anyway?

The question should be reframed. To engage in the question of the value of a film print as a unique format for art to be preserved and shown in its native state is not a question that has anything to do with the filmmaker's motive or intent. The vast majority of the production and industrial habits and processes are ingrained in the capitalistic infrastructure and the artist has no input into the end result. We read about and discuss outliers like Spielberg, who may insist on cutting on film with a flatbed because he likes the "feel" of the cuts, and is allowed to because he's rich enough to be this eccentric, but even he can't stop "Raiders 4" from being digitally projected in most venues (or prevent the analog stunts in "Raiders 3" from looking fake). Fincher insists he can fix it all in post, because his post started 2 years before filming, but that freedom (and distraction) is the worst thing that happened to him. His grosses are a lot lower but the studios are more than happy to have him experiment on making Brad Pitt younger, on-the-job research for when the real Brad Pitt isn't around anymore and they still want to make Brad Pitt movies.

And yet Fincher's upcoming remake of "Reincarnation of Peter Proud" will be struck to film and projected at the local Galaxy theatre, possibly out of focus. Digital effects be damned.

Nor should we accuse poor film showing environments as damning of the medium en toto. Too many times proponents of digital point out that it doesn't scratch. Yet digital fails unexpectedly in different ways, and it's presumed divorcement from the mortal coil of physicality only replaces the problems of inertia, dust and time; it does not make it invincible. Every venue and every showing is different - film will scratch and bulbs will dim and hard drives will skip and the white balance won't be properly recalibrated. Not to mention human error.

To decide that film or film theatres suck because we had a bad experience when a showing of "Sex and the City" broke 2 years ago is to confuse effect with cause. Theatres haven't had union projectionist in their booths for 10 years - those new fancy digital projectors will manifest the same inability to keep going without constant and expensive upkeep soon enough.

Instead we should consider the nature of film projection vs. the nature of digital delivery in a utopian and ideal environment and what the medium, or should I say "format," conveys phenomologically rather than anecdotally. It's a question of reception rather than in the transmission contingencies in the first place.

Film, rather famously, is indexical; that is, it is a one-to-one representation of what the makers created, a print off the negative which was cut/edited from actual strips of film in a camera that was on the set in front of the famous (or infamous) actors there. The line of provenance from object to object is clear and possesses a tangible value as an artifact of a specific time, a place, a method by which it was worked, and its travel through space to arrive behind you as you sit. Light bounced off Ringo Starr and landed on the emulsion in the camera in 1965, in which negatives were printed from. Those negatives were the actual source of the 100s of prints that were sent to theatres. The light shines through it and you see the shadow of those grains of chemical, a kind of apparition of history rewritten on the wall in the glance of light 24 times a second.

The one-to-one-to-one direct lineage is perhaps more important philosophically than cognitively. But the sense that you're watching the same film that has been seen by thousands of others when you see a distressed print of "Help" gives one pause. It creates an awareness of the extra-narrative context over time.

Digital delivery packages, conversely, are translated information from data and output electronically. It is not indexical and has no one-to-one provenance from the original event. It is an electronic construct, and re-constructed. Digital files capture images and events by math. Not by chemical proximity. This material shift from object to data may mean the image is as perfect or as degraded as it has been programed to be. It can be smooth, and has a creaminess that film with its 24-frames-a-second grain can't duplicate. It doesn't manifest scratches. It glows and "feels" perfect.

It doesn't age with experience. Each showing is a new event, a unique performance without previous history.

We respond differently to the flicker of film, some people suggesting it creates a dreamlike fugue state in which the dark between the frames, upwards of 70% of the time, lulls us into a more forgiving right-brain epileptic engagement. Digital streams at 60 or double that frames a second, and commands our attention like a shining inheritance. It's a florescence compared to film's incandescent shimmer, exciting our senses without rest.

Our minds process and get tired watching digital. Certain films work much better that way, insistent and quirky and of the surface. That image up there, the film-strip dress, will not keep her warm at night. It's something else - it looks tactile and has a visual pleasure that barely hides as much as it reveals. It only suggests, promising what it can deliver. The question is whether or not we prefer the shot to be clear and even. Or do we like the evidence of those 24 frames? Does that comfort us, or do we want an image entirely and continually as smooth as milk?

Red Dessert

Like R. Knight, I too have a thing for Monica Vitti and the surreal and alienating wonders that Antonioni has managed to slip into the culture, unseen and now inoperable. Criterion is releasing "The Red Desert" (Il deserto rosso (1964)) in blu-ray and it seems too little too late, especially when we read that sales of DVDs are down 30% more this year from last year's already alarming 30%.

People aren't buying catalog titles anymore, and they're barely buying the new stuff ("Avatar" is an exception and an outlier, and should be discounted for more than one reason. What are you people thinking?). What does a 45-year old art-house avant-garde visual tone-poem, Antonioni's first color film that so aggressively fucks with the palette to make it seem more finger-painted than choreographed, corrupted rather than blooming, have to offer a generation raised on perfect and digital hi-def hi-res imagery?

"Rosso" is poised between the hip and minimalist "Blowup" (1966) and the stoic and elitist (and to my mind perfect) "L'eclisse" (1962). Circling around a popular mode of film-making after overly existential narratives influenced but never embracing the populism (or socialism) of neo-realism, Antonioni seemed genuinely hurt by "L'avventura"'s critical drubbing in 1960 at Cannes. It's a tough movie. Not of this time, and I'm not sure of any time. Conceptually more fun to talk about than to watch, I think very few people have given it a chance, really, at least until the (seemingly) only camera move in the whole film, that slow push-in on the empty street showing us... nothing. It's indulgent, arrogant, yet transcendent. It opens up the film ontologically as well as metaphysically. Yet it happens a good hour in, and trying to explain that to anyone is a fool's errand, like telling someone to hang with Warhol's "Empire" - a bird flies by in hour 6.

Ergo, "Rosso." Antonioni seemed insistent in making an art piece. That looked and felt like art-capital-A. Reportedly set decorators painted walls red and leaves green to give the film a palette more impressionistic than realist. The acting, as was the speed of prevailing traffic in Europe at the time, is conveyed mostly with words spoken to the table rather than at the people in the room, looks out windows and walking across the industrial sets to strike a pose, framed within and sometimes dwarfed by the manipulated (if intentionally) ugly sets.

It displays the best things about Antonioni, as well as the worst. It's too much and yet not enough, a recipe of elements that don't quite bake together. The existential ennui drowns the narrative momentum in a manner that points ultimately to the explosive and resonant failures of "Zabriskie Point" (1970). More gesture than contact. Vitti, game if done, finally becomes what had never happened before, a decorative detail, a directorial flourish, just an undigested element in the set design, caught between existential malaise and the director's obsessive blindness.

I can't wait. "Rosso" had a sub-standard DVD release in 1999 that didn't properly master or balance the color or aspect ratio. I'm guessing the Criterion DVD blu-ray will, at the least, go back to original reference materials to make it look as close to the original release as possible, regardless of how out-of-date and stale it might be to current audiences. It's the missing link in Antonioni's 1960s oeuvre. It's like a cake that's a little too dry to go down, but you can't stop nibbling at.