What will we miss with a streaming future?
Friday, September 4, 2020 at 4:00PM 
All of the talk these last few months about getting back into cinemas has focused on movies like Christopher Nolan’s time-bending Tenet or superhero extravaganzas like Wonder Woman 1984. And it’s not hard to see why. The thrill of watching the biggest movie in the world in a packed cinema with an audience that is eager to go on that ride can be a real buzz.
Many people’s favourite film memories are those rooted in the shared experience of seeing dinosaurs for the first time in Jurassic Park, discovering Darth Vader is Luke’s father or that Bruce Willis was dead all along, watching the Titanic sink or any number of other iconic pop culture moments surrounded by hordes of moviegoers in equal rapture. I may be a bit of an ol’ stick in the mud these days when it comes to American blockbusters, but even I can admit that watching Hollywood do what it does best(?) on a screen the size of a house can add half a star or more to a film’s enjoyment.
For me, however, the largest impact of shut down cinemas hasn’t been felt in the mainstream blockbusters...
After all, I grew up in the ‘90s watching a good percentage of new American releases on VHS and that didn’t stop them going on to become favourites well into adulthood. It’s not exactly foreign to watch explosions and shootouts on a small screen.
No, the experiences I am dreading missing the most are the smaller films. The indie sensations, the festival hits, the foreign worlds. ‘Arthouse’ films and the businesses that exhibit them were already in a precarious situation, but it has become harder and harder to imagine things will return to the state they were even as recently as February when Weathering with You, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and the 2020 Oscar Nominated Short Films were the leading limited releases for the year. With streaming and VOD (including ‘virtual’ theaters) booming throughout the pandemic, it’s likely only going to become harder and harder to convince people to leave the house and pay for ‘adult’ fare. While that may be a convenient advancement for some, it a worrying trend for others.
What are we going to miss if we (the collective we, not necessarily TFE readers) begin treating independent, foreign and festival films as strictly couch movies, only venturing out for the big stuff or those with a director rock star name attached like Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch? We’ll miss much the same things as we would not seeing Tenet or Wonder Woman 1984, actually. The rumble of the bass, the eye candy, the sensory phenomena, the commune of cinema. I have felt this acutely these past six months with many of the films I have been discovering. Films like Brian Welsh’s Beats (out on disc and VOD on September 8).
Just from the look of it, you may think this black-and-white Scottish quasi coming of age film would fit right at home. What could it really offer that requires a cinema? It’s clearly got lineage to the so-called 'kitchen sink' dramas with its two leads falling in and out of strife with local cops as their paths through the class system begin to splinter. But Beats is also about their discovery of the rave scene set against Thatcher’s reign with a truly pumping soundtrack of acid, house and techno from The Prodigy, Orbital, LFO, Outlander and more that deserves to be heard so loud your eardrums throb. As these boys take ecstasy, the film opens up into a kaleidoscopic trip of colour and light and molecular transformation. The thumping soundtrack booms and the characters descend into vibrating euphoria before reality comes storming back with a very different kind of deafening thud.
For these reasons, it’s a thrilling film especially if you miss dancing the night away to the pulse of a darkened club just as much as you miss going to the cinema. That it will likely never see the figurative light of day inside a cinema ever again after its 2019 festival run is a shame.
Film festivals have had to reckon with this new reality very abruptly, too. Those that didn’t cancel altogether, have more or less succeeded by stripping down programming and finding little things here and there to make the virtual experience just a bit more special. They’ve almost been too successful in some regards, with the online nature of 2020 film festivals allowing more people from around the country to participate (and around the world, too, if you have a VPN, a personal saviour of my lockdown experience). They’ve also allowed audiences to experience festivals who may have otherwise not been able to attend due to the more rigid scheduling of titles. That’s all a win, in my book.
But while there is definitely wriggle room moving forward for festivals to incorporate virtual spaces in their festivals, I recently engaged with Melbourne International Film Festival’s 68½ fest and found myself missing the opportunity to truly soak in the all-consuming State Funeral (a five-star masterpiece says me) or the avant-garde Polish animation Kill It and Leave This Town, and laugh in unison with a crowd discovering Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Senegalese classic Hyenas for the first time with its beautiful restoration. And, yes, that includes being lulled into a mid-film nap, one of the low-key treasures of watching slow cinema in a warm theatre.
Most notably, I’d quickly take up the chance to re-watch Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Atlantis on a big screen more than, oh I don’t know, The Old Guard. Moments into this Ukrainian futuristic post-war drama—a winner at last year’s Venice Film Festival and surely a contender for Ukraine’s international film submission—I was enraptured by the writer-director’s own cinematography. His compelling compositions playing not just with light and perspective in interesting ways, but color, too. Most notably in an early factory scene that surprises with two silhoutted figures against deep blues and reds, an image that is later inversed in its stunning closing sequences.
But this is a film made predominantly out of long unmoving takes as characters deal with PTSD, suicide, grief and the desire for connection in the face of a country ravaged and literally poisoned by war. Body bags and mass graves. Grim stuff. As comfy as my couch can be in trackies and uggs, it doesn’t quite allow one to immerse themselves in the film’s vision. It’s easy to mock Christopher Nolan for his insistence that his movies are made for a big screen, but in some cases I have to agree. I will praise Atlantis until I’m blue in the face, but I will always wonder about seeing this projected 30 feet high.
Another film that I watched as a part of MIFF was Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document (Single Channel), which is not an easy film to talk about. Despite this, it has a potent message for today and, because of that, I was especially happy to see the festival offer this as a free viewing option. Gary’s weaving of film sources including sequences of avant-garde digital visual art, vox-pox interviews on celluloid, cell-phone video, with flourishes of what look like etched and over-exposed animation and archival footage of a performing Nina Simone is as lyrical as it is ambiguous, and as effective in its assumed simplicity as it is ambitious.
This film won LAFCA’s experimental film and video award as well as a prize at Locarno and is the sort of film that I can picture carving out a niche for itself in a place like the Anthology Film Archives or Maysles Documentary Center, audiences huddling outside in the cold afterwards to discuss its themes of female autonomy. What does it mean, and what does it have to say? Virtual releases do allow a film like this to be opened up to more potential viewers if those viewers are willing to look, but I know I certainly missed the unique thrill of a post-film debrief with friends and strangers alike, maybe over a glass of red or just on the tram ride home.
Shutting down the browser window and opening Twitter to throw 280 characters into the (potential) void of Twitter just doesn’t have the same vibe, you know? And it’s certainly not a film conducive to review in any traditional form outside of academia.
Yes, it would be nice to see Niki Caro’s Mulan on a big screen, but we will have plenty of opportunities for that and others like it in the future. I genuinely don’t know how much of an opportunity there will be to watch the sort of films I’ve written about here (and plenty more where they came from). I am lucky to live in a relatively culturally aware city that I can’t quite picture (yet) without an annual roster of film festivals, but so many aren’t as lucky. And so while many are rightly gauging just how the industry will rebound after 2020, be prepared to potentially see a whole lot fewer titles on our screens if there isn’t an impetus for distributors to acquire them and exhibitors to screen them.
Reader Comments (12)
My favorite movie-going experience was watching Kung Fu Hustle on the big screen. The explosively delighted crowd made that zany movie even better. I saw it at an arthouse theater; it never made it to my local big chain theaters.
Glenn -- i totally feel this piece. This is why i love film festivals so much. There is something so thrilling about seeing challenging art films on huge screens with full audiences. It's so unlike the normal moviegoing experience. But just as rewarding.
and recently I think about PARASITE. Would that have taken off the way it did if it were only streaming? Hell no. Cuz it was a blast to watch it with a crowd given the tension, surprises, and humor.
The last movie I saw in cinemas was Portrait of a Lady on Fire in February. If that is the last one I ever see in a cinema I'm glad because it was quite an experience for me.
I miss going out and watching movies with others but right now I just want every one to be safe. I don't want any of you getting sick! I don't like this situation but I'll stay home longer if it means the pandemic gets under control.
When this is over (hopefully next year) I bet Mulan gets shown in cinemas like it was originally intended.
I totally agree with Nathaniel that PARASITE would've not have had taken off the same way if it was only streaming. As I was reading the article, I was also thinking films like GET OUT. Sure Jordan Peele is a "name" now, but the movie would've totally skipped theaters and we'd all be lesser for it.
I think most people who read this site would agree it’s better to watch everything at the cinema, even art house festival movies. But who knows what will happen in the future. This could go on for years..
Tom, oh don't get me wrong - i am all for autonomy on how and when people go back to the cinema. I just worry that if people don't, not only will we lose these experiences, but (and I only briefly touched upon this in the piece because I don't have the time or the energy to really dig into it) I worry that movies like PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE might not even be acquired if there's no business in it for distributors. How much would Neon have made with PORTRAIT if it just got uploaded to, oh i dunno, Amazon? Would that have justified the time and money spent on acquiring and marketing? I don't know...
Mulan will be an interesting case because I imagine many don't have Disney+ and some who do won't pay the premium for it (although I read it's going to be a regular streamable title around December? Peak gift membership/awards watching period). America doesn't seem to talk a lot about film piracy so I'm not sure what the numbers could be there, but it's already up and available for people to illegally find so I don't know about a substantial release.
Nat, PARASITE? No way. So much of that film was that sensation of discovery. Watching with a crowd and being shocked in unisen. Plenty of people enjoyed it from the comfort of their couch, definitely, but at least in those early buzz-building days the talk was all around don't talk to anybody just go in and experience it and people loved doing so with a crowd together.
Cash, yup, I remember seeing stuff like HOUSE OF 1000 DAGGERS and CROUCHING TIGER in theatres with western audiences who really just had never experienced stuff like that before. Imagine that on your tele at home while you do the dishes? :/
Streaming/VOD is the future. Live it, learn it, love it. Covid just exposed the ugly truth of the matter much faster, like it did for practically everything else. I'll watch "Tenet" when it premieres on HBO in summer 2021. Christopher Nolan ain't worth DEATH! The indies will find their respective audiences one way or another too.
Thank you so much for writing this love letter to independent cinema experiences, Glenn.
Like most readers here I have some wonderful memories of seeing experimental movies in theatres and long to return to see them again. One thing that does give me hope is that audience numbers for less mainstream titles may be much easier to adapt to social distancing.
I live in NYC so my only hope is that there will always be a film culture here, always be art houses and indie theaters and retrospectives. I’m not as much into the “festival” culture but love knowing that, if it’s a film coming out, it will at least have a brief release in NYC theaters before streaming, even if it’s Netflix. The beauty of being in NYC is I can watch all those Netflix films in theaters without worrying about which streaming service to download, etc. I hope that doesn’t go away.
Begin treating these movies as couch movies? I don't know what to tell you but that beginning began a long time ago. These kind of movies (independent, foreign, festival) simply don't play on any big screens beyond the city centers of very select cities. And when they do play, you have to make the financial decision to spend the big bucks on seeing them.
My dream has always been to retire somewhere that I can see these kind of movies on the big screen, but if I can't afford to retire in downtown Manhattan or Paris, I'm kind of out of luck. So I'm sort of hopeful that I can find a cheaper city with some colleges with cinema societies that allow in outsiders. That is about as niche as "adult" bigscreen movie watching has gotten.
Heck, I'd probably settle for four good friends who would watch movies with me in their living rooms, but even that is hard to find unless you want to watch superhero movies or something. I wish I was exaggerating.
I vividly remember watching What's Love Got To Do With It on a military base on Guam (yeah, that happens) and being amazed and thrilled at the absolute eruption that occurred in the theater when Angela Bassett starting fighting back. Everyone (but me) was on their feet screaming back at the movie screen. Try duplicating that experience from your sofa!
I agree with Nathaniel. Watching "Parasite" in a full-packed theater was an amazing experience. When the credits rolled at my showing, you could overhear how much everyone loved the movie. I overheard a girl say how that was her first foreign movie she watched and was surprised how much she liked it.
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