Physical Media in the Age of Streaming: a View from the Film Studies Classroom
In January of 2020, I revamped my general education “International Cinema” class from a fully in-person class to a “flipped” hybrid format. The traditional flipped classroom brings one-directional lecture-based learning to an online modality. For instance, lectures can be pre-recorded and posted online, reserving class time for multi-directional and feedback-driven learning like discussion or group activities. Film studies classes, of course, also include film screenings. I considered moving required films online as well, but I couldn’t pull the trigger. If we are serious about studying film as a popular art in terms of visual scale and spectacle, communal audiences, and the secret pleasures of the dark, we need to present it as such. Admittedly, much of this is nostalgia: my bias for pre-televisual versions of filmgoing and my old-timer anxiety that students now think cinema is a laptop experience.[1]
The pandemic changed everything
Of course, two months later, the pandemic changed everything. In many ways, I wasn’t just adapting to a pedagogical emergency, I was catching up with the times. If students understand film as a tab on a browser, in competition with other mundane distractions, with buttons to pause, rewind, and watch in double speed, perhaps I should meet them there. After all, the goal of film studies is to impact actual media literacy, appreciation, and citizenship, not just to study film on a 20-foot petri dish.
When the lockdown happened, I had seven weeks remaining. Six of those weeks included a required feature film, and the seventh week included three required short films. All would have to be delivered via streaming. It’s worth noting that none of these films were available on Kanopy, the much-discussed “Netflix-style” educational streaming service, or Swank, the platform preferred by Hollywood studios for university screenings.[2] Would I need to change my required films? A key theme of my International Cinema class is that the global circulation of film is grossly asymmetric and biased by Euro-American tastes, with U.S. distributors a major culprit in this inequality. But suddenly I was beholden to that very distribution system for class screenings. For an in-person class, I have access to DVDs collected through my international research, through eBay purchases, through second-generation DVD-R copies. I’m not limited to films that are in-print or whose streaming licenses haven’t yet expired. Even the great majority of independent or foreign films made as recently as 2000 are “orphaned” in the sense that their 10- or 15-year licensing agreements with distributors would have lapsed. For such films, I may still have the out-of-print DVD, but no streaming service, whether TVOD or SVOD, would likely be carrying it.[3]
Here’s what I was left with:
Luckily, one of the six feature films on my syllabus was on Netflix with English subtitles. A poll of my students confirmed that all students had access to Netflix, whether they were paying for it or not.[4]
Another feature, a Chilean film from the 1960s, was available via the educational streaming platform Alexander Street, which our university subscribes to, albeit in the wrong aspect ratio, an unfortunate wrinkle in a week dedicated to analyzing a “cinema of imperfection.”
The other four features were unavailable anywhere through education platforms. One, a mainstream blockbuster from China, was available for $3.99 on Amazon, iTunes, and the usual rental sites, which I hope was a small price for students to pay.
I ended up swapping out two films: one to something students could access via Netflix, and another to a film available on Alexander Street.
That left one more feature and three short films. The feature was a TV documentary from Thailand, and the short films were, well, short films. These are not formats that receive US distribution in any form. If I swap those out, my class will have completely capitulated to domestic market forces. And so I did the deed: I ripped the files and posted them on a restricted Google Drive.
What it means to be “thinking globally”
Like many universities, ours holds “thinking globally” as a core tenet, and this G.E. class is a key vessel for that internationalization. I don’t believe that being international is just checking off a list of diverse countries. It’s about studying creative practices and modes of entertainment that reveal the limitations of thinking in an U.S.-centric framework. In Fall 2020, realizing that I was increasingly relying on Netflix for online film classes, I was compelled to add a new unit to study Netflix as a U.S.-based multinational corporation actively disrupting, even colonizing, production, distribution, and exhibition practices in all but a handful of countries around the world.[5] Students need to understand that streaming is not a neutral delivery system transcending national borders and corporate power. Educators, libraries, and universities need to realize this as well. Do libraries need to subscribe to ever more streaming platforms to get as close as possible to adequate representation? Do universities need to be more lax about letting instructors rip DVDs and securely stream them? Do libraries need to reinvest in building an archive of hard-to-find DVDs?
Unique needs for each area of study
Some of my concerns are unique to the film studies curriculum. A history class that relies on history documentaries, for instance, can probably swap one Civil War documentary out for another, however reluctantly. But cinema studies relies on film examples, not to deliver content but to illustrate the work of institutions, artists, and industries, much of which is not easily substitutable. For instance, if I teach fiction filmmaking of the Vietnamese diaspora, none of which is served by any streaming services, I’m out of luck and I need to focus on different kinds of filmmakers. If I’m teaching an experimental film made before the age of Vimeo, forget about it. The truth is, most educational streaming platforms like Docuseek, Alexander Street, or New Day Films cater to disciplines other than film studies. They may include hard-to-find documentaries of interest to sociology, history, or language classes, but they do not primarily serve film students.
Consequences of the canon
As it turned out, far more troubling than my fear of students fast-forwarding through required films on their phones was the reality that my film studies classes were now beholden to a canon. Few concepts irk contemporary humanities more than the canon, which upholds the male gaze and Euro-American tastes, values, and standards. Most educators work against the canon, researching films and readings outside their comfort zones, assigning texts different from what they learned in graduate school. This is an imperative far older than streaming media, and will always persist as a challenge that will take effort and resources. For instance, before we relied on Netflix or Kanopy, we were at the mercy of DVD, VHS, or even 16mm distributors, all of which acquired films based on what a previous generation of scholars had written about or taught in classes. But those formats are international: a 16mm print from Argentina can be played on an American-made projector. Thanks to region-free DVD players, discs from around the world could be shown in American classrooms. Streaming for online classes may have widened the pool of legally-distributed films to choose from, but geoblocking resulting from territory-based licensing agreements has in fact cut off the availability of everything else, much of which existed previously in a shadow economy, the realm of not just pirates but also immigrant networks, visiting scholars, and independent filmmakers too strange, too political, too queer, too underground, or too risky for a commercial system.
Streaming is here to stay
Online streaming in film studies classes is here to stay and that’s largely a good thing, so long as we see it as a supplement to physical media, whether shown in the classroom or ripped for virtual delivery. More choices will always be better than fewer. Physical media will continue to provide access to older films that did not make the leap to streaming, or that are not able to get through American distribution gatekeepers. The real question is about the present and future. Fewer and fewer new films are released on physical discs, especially independent films. What happens when their streaming licenses expire? How do we teach films that don’t leave a trace? The actual orphan films will be the ones of today.
[1] Sarah Keller describes well the relationship between new technologies, nostalgia, and cinephilia in Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
[2] On the (non-free) trials and tribulations of Kanopy, see Chris Cagle, “Kanopy: Not Just Like Netflix, and Not Free,” Film Quarterly – Quorum (May 3, 2019) https://filmquarterly.org/2019/05/03/kanopy-not-just-like-netflix-and-not-free/.
[3] For instance, if I were relying solely on streaming and wanted to teach Asian art cinema of the 2000s, a wave that had huge influence on slow cinema around the world and that exemplified the tastemaking power of international film festivals, what would I show? Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, first released by Strand Releasing in the U.S., is not streaming anywhere. The films of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang (Millennium Mambo, Café Lumiere, What Time is it There?) were released by now-defunct DVD distributors Palm Pictures and Wellspring, and are not available via streaming either. The films may be in distribution limbo now, but my old out-of-print DVDs still work.
[4] Netflix recently signaled a crackdown on password-sharing, which may further limit the accessibility of the service amongst students who may not be able to pay for their own subscriptions. Wendy Lee, “Why Netflix and other streamers are cracking down on password sharing,” Los Angeles Times (April 14, 2022) https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2022-04-14/password-sharing-netflix-apple-amazon-piracy
[5] I assign students chapters from Ramon Lobato, Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution (New York: NYU Press, 2019). See also Lobato and Amanda D. Lotz’s special “In Focus: Global Netflix” section in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 3 (Spring 2020): 132-61. https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.cmstudies.org/resource/resmgr/59.3_infocus__1_.pdf.
