A.T. & T., the new corporate overlord of Warner Bros. Digital Networks and Turner, will be shutting down FilmStruck, the streaming service that launched in November, 2016. The site, established by TCM, the indispensable classic-movie cable channel, draws the core of its offerings from the Criterion cornucopia of DVD and Blu-ray releases of world cinema, as well as related movies that are yet unreleased on disk. Recently, Hollywood classics from the TCM roster were added to the FilmStruck offerings.
The site isn’t accepting any new subscribers, and it’s a good bet that it won’t be adding films, either. In the year and a half that I’ve been offering recommendations here of movies to stream, FilmStruck titles have featured prominently. One could keep busy, happy, and cinematically sustained for a long time on the sole basis of FilmStruck movies, and all the more so with the inclusion of movies from TCM. (The movie diet wouldn’t be an entirely balanced one: the site does poorly with such domains as American independent filmmaking, African cinema, and the past forty years of film history. Its over-all flaw is its reliance on recognized classics: the programming of the site is more responsive than it is proactive, and it might have been improved by more personalized, idiosyncratic selections that would have made it more like a permanent online film festival.)
The site instead offered various modes of promotional outreach. Some, such as essays, and some home-produced videos, were significant works in themselves, but the site over all diluted its offerings with a home page of diversions and distractions that felt like a tawdry sampling of multiplex ballyhoo raising an unwelcome racket amid the art-house tranquillity.
That conspicuously commercial waiting room to the classic-cinema library suggests the culture clash at the heart of the enterprise, the one that arises from its odd original fusion of Criterion with TCM, which was then a part of Time Warner—and which foreshadowed its doom. That air of doom arises from more than the inherent conflicts of the high-culture outpost and the mass-market colossus. It’s born of another conflict, between the ownership of physical media and the mere purchase of access to data—between the permanent and the revocable, between the onetime purchase and the monthly subscription forever. Whatever’s worth revisiting over the years is worth owning—whether in physical media or at least a digital file.
The physical-media equivalent of subscription-forever is called going to the movies: a viewer buys access to each screening and never owns anything except the memories. That’s why the best analogy for, and the best use of, streaming video is as a supplement to new releases, particularly of films that aren’t likely to get wide theatrical distribution. Streaming puts the low-budget, independent, or foreign film on the same footing of wide availability as a studio tentpole film. But when it comes to classics, the era of streaming is as the days of repertory theatres—with the difference that, then, the limits were technical as well as financial. Film prints and projectors are costly and cumbersome. Now the limits are those of manufactured scarcity in the guise of abundance, manufactured dependence marketed as freedom. Consumers have been weaned off disks with the promise of convenience, of weightlessness, spacelessness, infinite portability, and a large (but unstable) library of offerings. In exchange, they’re tethered to the mothership for good.
Sourse: newyorker.com
