The solu­tion to cinema’s cura­tion conun­drum? More, more, more

Those unfor­tu­nate souls masochis­tic enough to fol­low the doings of film crit­ics pro­fes­sion­al and ama­teur on Twit­ter may have noticed a pecu­liar uptick in view­ing micro-trends over the past cou­ple of years. All of a sud­den, it seems like everyone’s check­ing out Ken Russell’s rep­til­ian freak­show The Lair of the White Worm, or Kathryn Bigelow’s future pan­ic noir epic Strange Days, or the Hal Hartley/​Isabelle Hup­pert team-up Amateur.

It’s not in your head — the afore­men­tioned films have all been thrust into the spot­light by their pro­gram­ming on the Cri­te­ri­on Chan­nel, which has rapid­ly become one of the most influ­en­tial shapers of cinephilic diets in North Amer­i­ca (if you want to watch from any­where else in the world, you’ll need, ahem, cer­tain meth­ods). The phe­nom­e­non can be explained sim­ply enough, a dig­i­tal update of the old-fash­ioned word of mouth that com­pels con­sumers to get in on the things they see their friends talk­ing about. Back when we had a mono­cul­ture, this was how cult movies were born, and it hap­pened all the time.

But if there’s any­thing to be learned from social media, it’s that each and every obser­va­tion can be made into a debate between two fer­vent­ly impas­sioned ide­o­log­i­cal camps. And so a recent spike in view­ings of the Michelle Yeoh-star­ring mar­tial arts extrav­a­gan­za Yes, Madam! gave way to a day’s dis­course on the chan­nels of access to art film. All things said, there are worse ways to kill the cursed block of time between lunch and the end of the workday.

One fac­tion posit­ed, not incor­rect­ly, that allow­ing our watch­ing habits to be dic­tat­ed by a for-prof­it com­pa­ny through stream­ing chan­nels that pre­clude own­er­ship of media will result in a more pre­car­i­ous, restrict­ed cin­e­mat­ic land­scape. The oth­er coun­tered that Cri­te­ri­on, MUBI, and oth­er cura­to­r­i­al ser­vices have done com­mend­able work bring­ing films off the beat­en path to audi­ences with­out reper­to­ry the­aters or the tech­no­log­i­cal abil­i­ty and relaxed rela­tion­ship to the law required for tor­rent­ing. (And those who do enjoy those priv­i­leges won’t aban­don them just because Yeoh-mania has gripped the States. Explo­ration breeds fur­ther exploration.)

As is the case with near­ly all low-stakes argu­ments, the path for­ward goes through the mid­dle. The solu­tion isn’t to tear down the walls of cura­to­r­i­al insti­tu­tions — there’s a whole big galaxy of mov­ing pic­tures out there, and we need mech­a­nisms to sift through it — but to mul­ti­ply them past any anx­i­ety about monop­o­lies. View­ers ought to treat stream­ing ser­vices like read­ers treat crit­ics: you find one gen­er­al­ly in sync with your pref­er­ences, but also do the work of har­vest­ing intel­li­gent input from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives, then tri­an­gu­late your own taste between them.

Don’t hate the play­er (bou­tique stream­ing ser­vices); hate the game (the pro­hib­i­tive costs of a siloed online movie econ­o­my). On dol­lars and cents alone, one gets more bang for their buck by tap­ping into an exis­tent stream­ing library on a month-to-month basis than build­ing one of their own from indi­vid­ual disc pur­chas­es, though mul­ti­ple sub­scrip­tions can add up quick­ly, and all come with their own lim­its dic­tat­ed by the bank of IP already owned by a con­glom­er­ate. And there are untold thou­sands of movies that nev­er made it online at all, many of them in the exact sweet spot of obscure excel­lence that mer­its greater recognition.

To what­ev­er extent our lim­it­ed per­son­al enter­tain­ment bud­gets allow, film lovers best serve them­selves by spread­ing the wealth. Hor­ror-cen­tric hub Shud­der has a deep library, as well as orig­i­nal series like the glo­ri­ous­ly grotesque drag com­pe­ti­tion The Boulet Broth­ers’ Drag­u­la, and the plat­form gained trac­tion with some atten­tion-grab­bing acqui­si­tions last year includ­ing Mad God and Resurrection.

To each genre fetishist, a sub­scrip­tion accom­mo­dat­ing their needs: kung fu addicts new­ly con­vert­ed by Michelle Yeoh can get their fix on Hi-YAH, while blax­ploita­tion afi­ciona­dos can get down with ​’70s-focused Brown Sug­ar. For those with lean­ings clos­er to the art­house, small­er out­fits have sprung up to cham­pi­on world cin­e­ma both clas­sic (the Mar­tin Scors­ese-front­ed Film Foun­da­tion offers up one of their restora­tions for free every month) and con­tem­po­rary (Film Move­ment has a ser­vice of their own with an eclec­tic selection).

The longer a per­son spends look­ing, the more options they’ll find, with vast untold troves of movies wait­ing to be dis­cov­ered. And so even as indus­try dynam­ics and meth­ods of dis­tri­b­u­tion change, the curios­i­ty and moti­va­tion that fuels the per­verse addic­tion to the sev­enth art will per­sist. They can take our video stores with their know-it-all clerk sages, but they can nev­er take the quixot­ic human need to actu­al­ly know it all. It falls to all of us to ensure that the appre­ci­a­tion of cin­e­ma remains a force of search­ing expan­sion, open­ing up the array of what’s seen and dis­cussed rather than con­fin­ing it.