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Julian 🕶️'s avatar

“The future of film culture can be built by all of us, one intentional choice at a time”

Love this and thx for the shout out 🙏

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Unknown Soldier's avatar

So many thanks for this Swabreen and Ted. I suspect — or find myself, in part, willing into existence — the notion that film will indeed have its ‘vinyl’ moment, either through a resurgence in DVD and Blu-ray or some other yet unknown robust format to satisfy the best of all worlds at a fair price — something we can own, with nary a fear of losing digital access in sight.

Case in point: I wanted to watch Pope Of Greenwich Village the other night — hadn’t seen it since it came out, and had a hankering for some early Eric Roberts / Mickey Roarke magic. That’s the blessing of streaming. However, only after viewing did I discover my instinct must’ve somehow been coincidentally if not mystically motivated, given the film was about to leave Amazon (for good?) 3hrs later.

Alongside this, lately I’ve found myself feeling about cinema the way I did about vinyl: I want to hold it in my hands. I want to explore the cover art. The hidden layers and meanings. I want to be able to watch it when I want down the road, without feeling beholden to some arbitrary algorithm / bean counter boardroom decision to pull it off my digital shelf just when I finally want to do so. With projectors generally cheap and ‘good enough’ to help us suspend our disbelief that we’re watching a MOVIE on our walls or pull-down screens, there is currently no excuse for most of us to jump into that value (if indeed it is a ‘value’ for you) other than current Blu-ray price points. But canny distributors looking for the exit as Hollywood 2.0 collapses will see the wisdom to re-create if not re-educate fans, as you rightly say, starting with easy (read: affordable) accessibility to these films if they know what’s good for them.

I also love the idea of the slow-watch movement; in Molise the slow food movement abounds and is similarly a practice where every next morsel is meant to be savored as much as the last. And what was once considered a fringe food movement is also quietly (albeit effectively) edging toward the mainstream. Same thing will happen with film I predict — as long as the aforementioned players who emerge from Hollywood 2.0’s shakeout glean enough good sense to rally behind: a) the inevitable (re)emerging ‘blue ocean’ market of tangible assets that could in theory form the second pillar of: b) a better, if not more popularized (read: less pricey / bourgeois) price-fluctuated ‘RyanAir’- type exhibition model, we might just have the ticket(s) and film-lined shelves many of us have been waiting for.

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