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Net­flix once deliv­ered movies not by stream­ing them over the inter­net, but by lit­er­al­ly deliv­er­ing them: on DVDs, that is, shipped through the postal ser­vice. This tends to come as a sur­prise to the ser­vice’s many users under the age of about 35, or in coun­tries oth­er than the Unit­ed States. What’s more, Net­flix end­ed its DVD ser­vice only this past Sep­tem­ber, after 25 years, occa­sion­ing quite a few trib­utes from the gen­er­a­tion of cinephiles for whom it played a major part in their film edu­ca­tion. In this moment of reflec­tion, many of us have looked around and noticed that some­thing else seems to have gone away: cin­e­ma itself, if not as a medi­um, then at least as a major force in the cul­ture. Who, or what, did away with it?

That’s the ques­tion movie Youtu­ber Patrick Willems inves­ti­gates in his recent video “Who Is Killing Cin­e­ma? — A Mur­der Mys­tery.” Today, he says, “every major hit movie is a $200 mil­lion fran­chise install­ment aimed at thir­teen-year-old boys, but a cou­ple decades ago, right along­side those block­busters were dra­mas and come­dies aimed at dif­fer­ent audi­ences, includ­ing adults, star­ring major movie stars.” Even if a dra­ma like Rain Man — not just the win­ner of Oscars for Best Pic­ture, Best Direc­tor, Best Actor, and Best Orig­i­nal Screen­play, but also the high­est-gross­ing film of the year — got the green light today, “it would be made for a frac­tion of the bud­get it had in the eight­ies, and would prob­a­bly go straight to a stream­ing plat­form with a one-week lim­it­ed the­atri­cal run to qual­i­fy for awards”.

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From behind this sor­ry state of affairs Willems turns up a vari­ety of sus­pects. These include Mar­vel, a synec­doche for the sys­tem of inter­na­tion­al­ly mar­ket­ed fran­chis­es based on known intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty that “put pleas­ing the fans as their top pri­or­i­ty”; “the death of the movie star,” the pres­ence of whom once got audi­ences into the the­aters to see movies for adults; Warn­er Bros. Dis­cov­ery CEO David Zaslav and oth­er high-pow­ered exec­u­tives with no appar­ent inter­est in cin­e­ma per se; and atten­tion-frac­tur­ing enter­tain­ment apps like Tik­tok. Willems’ line­up even includes Net­flix itself, which — despite its fund­ing the work of auteurs up to and includ­ing Orson Welles — he calls “large­ly respon­si­ble for bring­ing the idea of ‘con­tent’ to tra­di­tion­al media, of tak­ing movies and TV and flat­ten­ing them all into an end­less sea of gray sludge they just dump more and more into every day.”

“Have you ever tried to take a moment and reflect on some­thing you’ve just watched on Net­flix, only to have the end cred­its instant­ly min­i­mized in favor of some obnox­ious ad for what to watch next?” Willems asks in the ear­li­er video just above. “That’s con­tent, baby.” The rel­e­vant shift in mind­set occurred as ser­vices like Willems’ own plat­form, Youtube, “start­ed pri­or­i­tiz­ing the steady stream of con­tent over indi­vid­ual videos,” and “when Net­flix start­ed pro­duc­ing their own shows” in a man­ner geared toward binge-watch­ers. Once, “indi­vid­ual movies or TV shows mat­tered”; now, “the con­tent mind­set just drags tra­di­tion­al media down into a giant ugly pit, and it all becomes this homo­ge­neous goop just wait­ing to be half­heart­ed­ly con­sumed and dis­card­ed.” (Wit­ness the now-shab­by rep­u­ta­tion of “Net­flix movies,” no mat­ter how big-bud­get­ed.)

Both of these videos include quotes from no less a cin­e­mat­ic icon than Mar­tin Scors­ese, a high-pro­file crit­ic of the debase­ment of cin­e­ma into “con­tent.” Though he’s been able to do seri­ous work in the stream­ing era, Scors­ese was forged well before, hav­ing emerged in the late six­ties when, as Willems reminds us, “audi­ences had grown tired of overblown big-bud­get stu­dio movies like Doc­tor Doolit­tle” and “a new breed of small­er movies made by younger, inno­v­a­tive, inde­pen­dent artists arrived, led by Bon­nie and Clyde, The Grad­u­ate, and Easy Rid­er,” with the likes of The God­fa­ther, The Deer Hunter, and Scors­ese’s own Taxi Dri­ver to come. “Audi­ences went nuts for them, and they ush­ered in this new gold­en age of Amer­i­can film­mak­ing.” That was the direc­tor-led “new Hol­ly­wood”; dare we twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry cinephiles, now that fran­chise block­busters are show­ing signs of com­mer­cial frailty, hope for a new new Hol­ly­wood?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Decay of Cin­e­ma: Susan Son­tag, Mar­tin Scors­ese & Their Lamen­ta­tions on the Decline of Cin­e­ma Explored in a New Video Essay

Peter Green­away Looks at the Day Cin­e­ma Died — and What Comes Next

When Andy Warhol Made a Bat­man Super­hero Movie (1964)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Last year, the British Film Insti­tute’s Sight and Sound mag­a­zine con­duct­ed its once-a-decade poll to deter­mine the great­est films of all time. As usu­al, the results were divid­ed into two sec­tions: one for the crit­ics’ votes, and the oth­er for the film­mak­ers’. The lat­ter put Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at the top, dis­plac­ing Yasu­jirō Ozu’s Tokyo Sto­ry, which itself had dis­placed Orson Welles’ Cit­i­zen Kane. The for­mer had their own reign of Kane, which came to an end in 2012 with the rise of Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Ver­ti­go. All these pic­tures are well-known clas­sics of cin­e­ma, and even if you haven’t seen them, you may feel as if you have. But did you have the same reac­tion to Chan­tal Aker­man’s Jeanne Diel­man, 23, quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles when it came out num­ber one in the crit­ics poll last year?

This month, the BFI pub­lished a new list of 101 films that make Jeanne Diel­man look like Home Alone. Léontine’s Elec­tric Bat­tery, My Sur­vival as an Abo­rig­i­nal, The 8 Dia­gram Pole Fight­er, Qabyo 2, and all the rest of these “hid­den gems” received just one vote in the lat­est S&S poll, mean­ing that just one par­tic­i­pat­ing crit­ic or film­mak­er ranks it among the ten best films ever made.

“Hail­ing from every con­ti­nent but Antarc­ti­ca and span­ning more than 120 years, this selec­tion is, in its way, as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the rich­es of cin­e­ma his­to­ry as that oth­er list we released at the end of last year,” writes con­trib­u­tor Thomas Flew. “Fic­tion rubs shoul­ders with non­fic­tion, films made by col­lec­tives sit along­side hand-craft­ed ani­ma­tion, and a healthy dose of com­e­dy sidles up to heart­break­ing dra­ma — and then there are the films that defy all cat­e­go­riza­tion.”

On this list you’ll find less­er-known works from brand-name direc­tors like Oliv­er Assayas, whose Cold Water is to cin­e­ma “what The Catch­er in the Rye is to lit­er­a­ture,” or Kathryn Bigelow, whose The Love­less, “set in a gener­ic 1950s Amer­i­cana land­scape, is sat­u­rat­ed with libido, can­did charm and for­mal inven­tion.” Oth­er films come rec­om­mend­ed by major auteurs: Apichat­pong Weerasethakul describes Bruce Bail­lie’s Quick Bil­ly as “Muybridge’s horse res­ur­rect­ed, expe­ri­enc­ing death, rebirth and death once more”; Guy Maddin picks Desire Me, which had four dif­fer­ent direc­tors, and “all of them were fool­ish enough to take their names off this thing because it’s pret­ty wild”; the late Ter­ence Davies prais­es Cur­tis Bern­hardt’s Pos­sessed as a film in which “Amer­i­ca has nev­er seemed bleak­er or less roman­tic.”

Per­haps you’re the type of cinephile who can imag­ine no more com­pelling rec­om­men­da­tion than “David Lynch cites it as the first movie he remem­bers watch­ing,” which Beat­rice Loy­aza writes of Hen­ry King’s Wait till the Sun Shines, Nel­lie. Or per­haps you’re more intrigued by Hen­ry Blake’s endorse­ment of Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bub­by: “If you can get past the incest and vio­lence in the first 45 min­utes of this film, it is an aching­ly pow­er­ful sto­ry about love and it urges the audi­ence to nev­er give up on any­one.” This is not to say that all of the BFI’s hid­den gems are har­row­ing spec­ta­cles, though it’s a safe bet that none of them offer a view­ing expe­ri­ence quite like any you’ve ever had before — except, per­haps, the ear­li­est one, Le chat qui joue by cin­e­ma pio­neers Auguste and Louis Lumière, a “cat video” avant la let­tre.

Explore the BFI’s list of hid­den gems here.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

480 Film­mak­ers Reveal the 100 Great­est Movies in the World

The 100 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 1,639 Film Crit­ics & 480 Direc­tors: See the Results of the Once-a-Decade Sight and Sound Poll

The Nine Great­est Films You’ve Nev­er Seen

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.