C’est fini
The sad loss of classic films in a digital age
The film world rallies in mourning when a major star or director dies. But for the first time, this week’s outpourings went instead to a streaming service. Launched in 2016, FilmStruck gave subscribers across the world access to hundreds of classic films, dating back to the silent era, which are otherwise practically impossible to see. Both the U.S. and international versions of the service are due to be shut down at the end of November, as parent company WarnerMedia gears up to launch its own competitor to Netflix.
Netflix has never been anyone’s friend when it comes to back catalogue. The streaming giant dominates the marketplace right now, but obsessively pimps out all things shiny and new, neglecting vast swaths of viewing possibilities from further back in time.
So when the news of FilmStruck’s demise came, the howls of online dismay were immediate. More than 11,000 people signed a petition entitled “Keep FilmStruck Alive” while Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro pledged to “find a way to bring it back”.
Edgar Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver, summed up the despair: “Friends are bemused by me still buying DVDs ... but these streaming libraries can be gone in a flash.”
The general tenor was doom and gloom, as film buffs began to face the very real possibility that some of the finest movies ever made — the likes of Seven Samurai, or Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights — could disappear from view. If a resource as widely appreciated as FilmStruck couldn’t survive in the increasingly cut-throat film-streaming environment, what on Earth could?
I’m feeling the bereavement sharply. I spent a day last year fiddling with private network settings to gain subscription access on my TV to the most tempting range of world cinema titles I’ve ever been able to find in one place on the internet. The bounty, for a paltry US$10.99 per month, was enormous. And now that all this is being whipped away, my main regret is not feasting on the banquet more hungrily when I had the chance. As things stand, my “watch next” queue has more than 100 films left on it, from early Eric Rohmer shorts to The Cincinnati Kid to a Taiwanese debut from 1992, Rebels of the Neon God. In the time remaining before FilmStruck snuffs it, I might manage to watch a few of these, but there are reams more I’ll undoubtedly be forced to squander. Hence the “catch it before it goes” mentality that now sees subscribers, like yours truly, panic bingeing.
True, Amazon Prime Video has a heap of stuff, especially from Golden Age Hollywood. MUBI is another, much more limited, alternative. FilmStruck was the one, though. The irony of its collapse in a Netflix competition war is that it put Netflix to shame, especially when it came to intellectually nourishing films that happened to be not in English, or anything made before about 2007.
If you’ve seen the BBC’s new poll of the 100 greatest foreign-language films, and fancied ticking off the likes of Rashomon or Bicycle Thieves, good luck. Even scrolling through a current article called The Best Classic Films on Netflix is a fast-track to depression. Popping up first are the martial arts flick Ip Man, and Scott Pilgrim vs the World, both dating back to the Jurassic mists of 2010. With all due respect to Edgar Wright, who directed the latter, whose idea of classic cinema is that?
The same article listed just one film from before 1950 (Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) and eight from before 1990. FilmStruck posed no threat to the Netflix supremacy — au contraire, WarnerMedia axed it precisely for being too “niche,” which is profoundly short-sighted. Netflix will carry on doing its thing, but we vitally need something like FilmStruck to coexist with it, keeping the flag flying for great films we’ve already seen, or have never got around to seeing, or may one day want to see again. Without preserving cinema’s past online, its future will be dusty DVDs of Casablanca.