🟧 Livestream Classic Cinema – One thing

Chris Erik Thomas: As I set down my coffee cup and usual bowl of oatmeal on my desk in Berlin on an inconspicuous Friday morning in August, I was suddenly dropped into the criminal underworld of early 2000s Hong Kong. The time machine? Criterion24/7an ingenious, always-on live stream that was quietly added to The Criterion Collection‘s streaming platform on April 10. For those criminally unaware of Criterion, imagine forty years of the most luxurious films from around the world licensed, restored, and redistributed online. And now there was a livestream offering a glimpse into the world they had so carefully cultivated. On this particular Friday morning, the livestream was halfway through Home Affairs IIa pulpy crime drama directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. The score swelled, the pulp oozed, and the men looked at each other with tense, concerned looks (as one does in the criminal underworld). I could have cut the tension with a knife, but alas all I had was a spoon – and I quickly realized that watching rival gangs wage wars was a bit too much action for 9.30am.

A few weeks (and about 5,797 miles) later, I opened the livestream again in California while carefully folding a wedding outfit. This time I found myself in the final moments of Paris, Texas. “I knew these people…” Travis begins, sitting with his back to the one-way mirror that separates him from his lost love, Jane. “These two people. They were in love with each other. The girl was very young, about 17 or 18 years old, I think. And the man was a lot older. He was a bit ragged and wild. And she was very beautiful, you know. And together they turned it into a kind of adventure.” Let me just say that it’s very difficult to pack clothes neatly – and without crying – as Wim Wenders’ 1984 neo-Western masterpiece reaches its quietly devastating conclusion. After the credits rolled, a tastier film began: Olivier Assayas’ vibrant film, criminally underrated Personal shopper (2016), starring Kristen Stewart, aggressive text messages and some not-so-friendly ghosts. Still solidly high-brow, but just atmospheric enough to look at while folding clothes. Finally I had (mostly) my version of the “atmospheric TVphenomena that Kyle had written about in 2020. My attempts over the years to put on a show or movie as background noise always left me feeling demonically possessed by an angry, guilty Catholic: just passively paying attention to what was happening on screen felt like a mortal sin.

Somehow Criterion24/7 unleashed something in me that allowed me to finally, mercilessly, turn off my brain and be nourished by whatever was being served. Ironically, this shiny new livestream is more of a relic than anything else. It’s a throwback to the old days, when we depended on that thing called “cable TV” for entertainment, mindlessly flipping through the channels to see what was on and hoping that something better was lurking around the corner. If Criterion 24/7 had to be compared to anything, it would be a channel like HBO (literally an acronym for Home Box Office) or Turner Classic Movies (or, as I like to call it, “the channel my grandpa used to go to and back browsed between football matches”).

Like ectoplasmic ghosts haunting the effortlessly chic Stewart as she rides a scooter through Paris, these two trips to Criterion24/7 have stuck with me. Maybe that was the point, at least initially. For its first few days online, Criterion24/7 had an almost comical lack of information; the movie currently streaming had no name and no way to know when it had started or would end. It was like walking into a dark movie theater, feeling around the walls and looking at the sights on the screen for clues as to what was going on. As one distraught Redditor grieved on launch day: “I love the new 24/7 channel, but no options for me to find the movie title. I want to restart it so I can watch from the beginning, but I don’t know what it’s called! It’s about a grocery store employee who starts a relationship with this agent. Music is great with cranberries etc.” Ironically, the film was by Wong Kar Wai Chungking Expressa cult classic that is often stripped of its richness when plastered onto internet mood boards.

In the months since launch, Criterion24/7 has added a link that takes you to the page of every movie it’s currently streaming, and added a countdown to the next movie. That would be enough for the casual viewer, but this is The Criterion Collection. You can’t just build a niche art film distribution service that’s been around for four decades, introduce an always-on livestream for your rabid fanbase, and not expect a handful of technologically adept film buffs to build a bone to follow it and Mailbox list to archive it. What may have just been relegated to a fun, slightly gimmicky throwback to 24-hour movie channels of the past has now become the source code for an ever-expanding movie history playlist.

“I was up (the Metropolis discorda movie-focused chatroom) a few hours after the 24/7 feature started,” Puffinsays a substitute teacher in “very rural” Newfoundland, who maintains the Letterboxd list. “I mentioned that it would be cool to have a list of the movies shown. With that original idea, a handful of users came together to help make it a reality.” “Puffin asked on the server if anyone had a list of the first few movies played so far, and I sent him a list made by my friend (adum_g) from another server,” he adds crooklynna university student studying biological sciences who became a key player in the early days of the archive. “I was just the catalyst for making the list.”

An ad hoc system emerged, with users watching the livestream in shifts for the first few days, manually noting the films until a user named Triales entered the chat like a knight in shining celluloid. “(trials) appeared in the comments on my list a few days later, after I had already created the app that kept track of which movies were showing,” Puffin explains. “Thanks to their bot, we don’t have to monitor the films in real time as much.” In the five months since Criterion24/7 went online, the breadth of its film offerings has surprised even its chief architect, Puffin. “There are things they showed that I probably would never have made time for otherwise, which is a nice reminder of how much great art exists outside of what we expect to be interesting or even what we’ve heard of in the first place. “

It wasn’t always so easy to mine the vast depths of cinema. As Crooklynn reminisced about his burgeoning interest in film as a child, he recalls the golden age of physical media, when Hollywood Video and Blockbuster and a constellation of local video stores dictated what we watched. “I would also pretend that I knew all the big adult titles as a kid,” he says. “I didn’t get serious about film until high school, when I started exploring ‘more serious’ works because I wanted to be exposed to backgrounds other than my own.” In a land far away in Canada, Puffin found solace in the DVD dollar bins, where discovering anything semi-decent was a game of finding a needle in a haystack. Although they lived different lives, both eventually ended up at The Criterion Collection through their early digs; they cited old Chaplin films and stoner comedy Dazed and confusedAnd Fantastic Mr. Fox and the 1996 Muhammad Ali documentary When we were kingsas their entry points respectively.

When I hear about their early adventures in Criterion’s metaphysical cabinet of wonders, I feel a twinge of jealousy that I didn’t discover The Criterion Collection until well into my twenties. Growing up in the dusty desert of Nevada, the concept of a “foreign film” was foreign to me. My benchmark was the small two-screen movie theater in my hometown where I worked when I was just 13 years old (child labor laws be damned). My 24/7 was the movies we received and I watched everything. For a handful of years, film was the basis of my cinematic education – and sometimes, in the case of bleach-blond twink Max Thieriot in The pacifierthe fodder for my sexual awakening.

No one needs to be reminded that we’re in a hyperactive streaming age, where decision fatigue means we spend more time choosing movies than actually watching them. That’s part of why Criterion24/7 feels like a soothing balm, but it goes deeper. For decades, the Criterion Channel has provided invaluable film education and a sense of community to aspiring and seasoned cinephiles; the livestream is just a window into that world. Whether you’re ready to look inside or not, don’t stress. Thanks to a Discord server, a bot and a friendship forged through film, we can always go to Letterboxd and browse the views.

Chris Erik Thomas is a Berlin-based writer and editor whose work highlights trends and talent in fashion, art and culture. They have previously worked as digital editors for Art Düsseldorf and their words have appeared in Highsnobiety, ARTnews, The Face, BBC, Out Magazine, Paper and more.

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