New web­site Miss­ing Movies is com­pil­ing a list­ing of non-stream­ing classics

Democ­ra­ti­za­tion was sup­posed to be the whole point of the shift to Inter­net-first dig­i­tal media over the past cou­ple of decades, the idea being that instan­ta­neous access to the whole of cin­e­ma could lift the obscure out of the shad­ows. In prac­tice, quite the oppo­site has been true, with algo­rithms rec­om­mend­ing the same hand­ful of pop­u­lar titles while the stream­ing stu­dios large­ly ignore old­er prop­er­ties to focus their efforts on pro­duc­ing orig­i­nal content.

A cot­tage indus­try of rec­om­men­da­tion lis­ti­cles has sprung out of the stream­ers’ ten­den­cy to bury their most inter­est­ing offer­ings, but what of those films that can’t even get that far? A large frac­tion of movie his­to­ry has no pres­ence online what­so­ev­er, left to gath­er dust due to legal issues with long-since-shut­tered com­pa­nies or a per­ceived lack of mar­ket demand – a lam­en­ta­ble state of affairs that the new site Miss­ing Movies hopes to change.

As the non-profit’s man­i­festo explains, a hand­ful of cinephiles, preser­va­tion­ists, and indus­try pro­fes­sion­als (includ­ing film­mak­ers Mary Har­ron and Mira Nair) have band­ed togeth­er on this project that’s part data­base and part archival effort. More than just a list of films that have yet to make the jump into cyber­space, the site will offer resources to film­mak­ers hop­ing to get their work off the shelf and into the pub­lic consciousness.

The web page, which wel­comes user con­tri­bu­tions to round out its cur­rent­ly incom­plete list­ing of off-line films, makes spe­cif­ic note that these gaps in avail­abil­i­ty dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly affect titles direct­ed by women and peo­ple of col­or. There’s an activist dimen­sion to their set of over­all goals, which focus­es on con­crete action: name­ly, cre­at­ing a guide that will act as a how-to for any­one look­ing to shed some light on an under-rec­og­nized, mar­gin­al­ized film.

It’s a noble under­tak­ing, expo­nen­tial­ly more­so once you real­ize how much is at stake. With DVDs and oth­er phys­i­cal media still unavail­able on many titles, who knows when we’ll be able to see Elaine May​‘s rom­com clas­sic The Heart­break Kid. Or the queer jail­house dra­ma Kiss of the Spi­der-Woman. Or Titus, Julie Tay­mor​‘s max­i­mal­ist rework of Titus Andron­i­cus. The list, sad­ly, goes on and on.