A couple of Sundays ago, New York Times critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, wrote about drastic changes in how we watch movies. What set them off is the move to internet streaming in place of discs, and in particular they worried about a plan to stream just-released movies to people directly, so that they can pay $50 to watch a new film at home instead of sitting in a movie house. Dargis and Scott talked about many of the usual questions. Seeing a movie at home on a small screen – even if it's a big television – is less affecting than seeing it in a theater; at home alone is also a lot different from seeing it in a room full of strangers because movies lose their public-ness.
There are a couple of things they didn't get to, though.
One is that with streaming, much less will be available than before. Some background on that: When movies came out on videotape, followed by laser discs and then DVDs and Blu-Rays, a huge library of film was there for the asking. Films have been available just like books. You can still easily get to a vast collection, ranging from recent pop films to rare silent movies. From a good video store like Boulder's Video Station, you can get – for instance – Jaws, 1922's Nosferatu, Werner Herzog's Aguirre the Wrath of God, James Cameron's Avatar, Jean Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange, Zhang Yimou's early films from the Xi'an studio in China, all of Satyajit Ray's work, a decent selection of Stan Brakhage films, and the first cartoon with sound, Disney's "Steamboat Willie." Many important films have not yet become available, but whatever your tastes or interests, there's still plenty to see.
It's been heavenly.
Before discs, college film classes used 16mm prints that were both of mediocre quality and expensive, so teaching was limited by college budget and availability. Silent films had to be shown silent – which was not the case when those films played in theaters -- because silent films were always shown with live musical accompaniment. It could be excruciating for students to sit in pure silence, no matter how good the film might be.
Now that discs are becoming superfluous, the accessible library of films is beginning to diminish. Aside from the entire Criterion Collection – which is a fabulous group of films – it's demoralizing to see what is not available via streaming. As Manohla Dargis mentioned in the Times article, there's no Douglas Sirk, who made many great melodramas in the 1950s – Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows among them. Foreign language films are starting to become rare, along with silent films, and other non-mainstream films that don't make enough money to satisfy large companies.
The quality of the films also diminishes with streaming. It's fascinating that for decades lovers of both music and films obsessed over finding ever-better sound and picture in recordings, but now many people are satisfied with music coming from their phones and films from the internet.
Convenience apparently trumps fidelity.
It's not just that so many of us are willing to watch movies on small screens; it's that few care if the image is any good. Some of the theater chains are now showing restored older films once a week. The copies are digital, not film, and the quality varies, but you can still see them big and bright. Streamed video does not capture that dramatic excitement. It's like reading a condensed book. Afterward, you might be able to recite for yourself or a friend the basics of the story, but you have not experienced the magnificence of the work. You can't be stunned or overwhelmed or thrilled.
In the 1950 film noir Sunset Boulevard – a dazzling visual experience when shown properly – the old movie queen played by Gloria Swanson intones grandly, "I *am* big. It's the *pictures* that got small."
She's right.
