How I discovered and fell for classic cinema
As a young teen with limited funds, unofficial links became the gateway to exploring the history of cinema and built the foundation for my love of film
In 2006 YouTube launched and I was on the cusp of turning 13. I had just started getting really into cinema and would sometimes rent DVDs from my local video shop for a few quid over the weekend. You couldn’t buy videos that easily anymore and DVDs were really expensive, so renting was the more affordable option. However, I was wanting to get a few films out at a time and my parents couldn’t really afford to supplement that habit regularly, so either I got lucky with something that had come on tele, or I’d go onto the family computer and see what I could find on YouTube.
Of course, now, YouTube is the home of hugely successful channels, shows, podcast recordings, vlogs and much, much more. And that tends to take centre stage over it being a resource to find archive film which is what I have primarily used it for since I was a young teen.
Back then you could only upload videos of about 10 minutes, so films were uploaded in short segments. That’s how I first watched The Godfather. Well, actually, a couple of years prior it had been on tele and I’d walked in a the bit with the horse’s head and quickly left the room. Obviously, it had stuck in my mind and years later I typed it in and there it was: “The Godfather Part 1/19”. And that was it. The internet was my go to place to find films I couldn’t buy or was too young to rent. You couldn’t really get new releases, you’d have to torrent for that and that was too rich for my blood, but it was a great place to find repertory and archive film.
Obviously and understandably, unofficial links and torrenting in the film industry is a taboo subject. And why wouldn’t you want to discourage something that can be seen to harm cinemas and diminish cinema going audiences? But something that I really don’t think is spoken about enough is actually how beneficial and important piracy was for film culture and cinephilia for people who could not afford to pay for regular cinema tickets, or didn’t live near a cinema, or weren’t regularly buying DVDs. The internet was - and is - a great way to get around this and open up the world of repertory and archive film to an audience who were - and continue to be - priced out.
So much in the history of cinema is still inaccessible. Either it’s in archives, or if DVDs have been reissued then they’re at an inaccessible price point for a lot of people, or simply it’s lost and out of circulation, or it’s not on any streaming sites. Recently I’ve been doing some research into 1950s and 1960s Eastern Bloc animation - I’m not sure what I’ll do with it yet but it’s fun just to dig - and those films are not easy to find. And while MUBI does have a programme of Hungarian animated shorts available, it’s really difficult to find anything else. But as it turns out there’s a big collection of films from filmmakers like Jiří Trnka and Karel Zeman on YouTube. And as a programmer, I have to constantly be watching and digging to broaden my own knowledge of film history and paying for numerous streaming subscriptions or buying DVDs or renting online, is expensive.
The audience that is digging to find rare Japanese anime, Bollywood classics, old Hollywood westerns, 1960s Swedish cinema is not the audience that cinemas are losing; this is the core cinema going audience. In my experience, being able to find a plethora of interesting and exciting films online for free via unofficial links meant that I developed a bigger drive for seeing new releases and especially rereleases on the big screen due to my engagement with film culture. You cannot have cinemas without film culture, and video piracy was so important for a generation of people to explore what’s out there that isn’t easily accessible.
This year is the 50th anniversary of The Godfather and it is being rereleased into cinemas this March in a glorious 4k restoration. You bet I’ll be going to see it at my local cinema as a way to repent for my sins of watching it in 10 minute segments, on a 9inch screen, with no subtitles. I’d still do it again, though.