Inside Chronically Online: a big-screen celebration of small-screen curiosities

Here’s a film that you might be familiar with: two small children sit together in an armchair, when one decides to suddenly bite into the finger of the other. The older of the boys reprimands the younger, laughs a little, then intentionally sticks his finger in the younger’s mouth again, who bites down hard. The boys giggle. The audience giggles in turn. The film, of course, is the mega-viral YouTube sensation ​‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ (2007, 56 secs), and, for one night only, this is big-screen entertainment.

Chronically Online – an evening exhibiting online viral video and reflecting on its cultural canonisation – can be attributed to two organising bodies, one perhaps more likely than the other. The likely half is the Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend. Founded by Orla Smith and Kimia Ipakchi in 2024, the CNFW was born from the desire to create a ​“collective, communal event” which presents works that exist on the border between documentary and fiction. The duo began to consider what they could programme to attract everyday audiences to their events. Online videos from YouTube and Newgrounds occupied a uniquely ubiquitous position in the cultural landscape. ​“We wanted to show films that anyone off the street could enjoy,” says Smith. ​“These videos are accessible, while also being formally interesting and inventive. Online video is the most widely-consumed form of moving image in the world – and it’s also how young people are learning the language of cinema”.

The British Film Institute was following a similar trail of hyperlinks. Kitty Robertson, an assistant curator at the BFI National Archive, has been part of a two-year heritage project supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, which has acquired online moving image work at a major scale. ​“We’ve brought in over 400 online videos, covering work from the last 30 years produced in the UK, to the national collection to be preserved for future generations,” explains Robertson. ​“One of the guiding lines we had from the beginning came from our senior curator of non-fiction, Patrick Russell. He underlined that we’re now as far away from the beginnings of online moving image as we were from the beginnings of cinema when the BFI National Archive was founded in 1935. Think of all the works of early cinema that have been lost, and what we have preserved tells us about storytelling, ingenuity and ways of seeing the world. Works of online video have already been lost – the internet is not forever. We’d be doing ourselves a huge disservice if we didn’t try to capture this distinctive, diverse form of moving image.”

At a house party one night in London, Smith and Robertson crossed paths. ​“I talked with [Robertson] about her job, and she said, ​“Yeah, we’ve just acquired ​‘Charlie Bit My Finger’,” says Smith. ​“And I was like: ​“Wow, I was just watching that the other day – it’s cinematically interesting, because it’s slower than a lot of viral videos now – it takes time for the punchlines to pay off”. I found myself trying to break down why I find ​‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ so cinematic. We’re watching this stuff all the time, but we’re not stopping to give it the attention that you would a film. If you put something like that in a cinema, would it be boring?”.

That was the question that would evolve into a partnership between the CNFW and the BFI. The CNFW had been planning a programme of online video as part of their festival, and reframing online video aligned with how Robertson had been coming to understand it as ​“requiring its own collection and preservation paradigm”. The first Chronically Online programme at the Rio Cinema last June incorporated the BFI’s archive along with CNFW’s own picks, stringing together YouTube hits such as David Firth’s ​‘Salad Fingers’, Cyriak’s ​‘cows & cows & cows’, and longer videos such as an episode of mockumentary series HoodDocumentary.

Off the back of this successful pilot programme, a touring format was born, visiting Belfast, Bristol, and Brighton this year, and collaborating with local young curators to probe personal canons – for an hour-long setlist that includes six of their picks alongside ten from the CNFW. ​“It’s all British online moving image from the entirety of internet history,” explains Smith. ​“We wanted it to feel like the whiplash you get when you’re scrolling through social media, and encompass everything people can use the internet to do – with a range of tones, styles, and lengths. We try to rhyme themes – we end with several political videos, leading up to the auto-tuned Nick Clegg apology song”.

But simply screening a bunch of YouTube videos on a cinema screen can only get us so far in unpacking our relationships with online video. Enter Paul Weedon. A journalist in his own right (for this very publication even), Weedon hit viral fame in 2007 with ​‘I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This’, a 12-second video in which he monologues to camera before getting unexpectedly hit in the face by a mate, to whom he nonchalantly (and very Britishly) understates ​“Ah, fuck. I can’t believe you’ve done this”. Like its finger-biting contemporary, the video derives humour from sudden, ultimately harmless violence. Weedon’s video went on to accumulate over 12 million views, and has followed him throughout his adult life. The BFI decided it was important enough to acquire – much to Weedon’s bemusement and delight. ​“I remember when I said yes to the BFI,” says Weedon over Zoom. ​“I said, if you ever get an opportunity to do a panel or something… It’s not a side of popular culture that you really get an opportunity to talk about”.

Weedon appeared as a Q&A guest for three Chronically Online events. Despite having an existing viewership in the millions, he found it surreal to watch his video with an audience. ​“I think it lends it a degree of importance that feels completely unwarranted; it suggests that there was intent behind it, which there wasn’t,” he reflects. ​“It’s ridiculous that a video that I made when I was 16 years old has managed to worm its way into an archive and be recognised by the BFI. I studied Film at university the year after it went viral, and I remember not wanting to draw attention to it. I’d gone to uni to be a filmmaker, and at that point, internet culture was throwaway. The immediacy of social media now has completely altered that. I imagine that a 16-year-old making a piece of stupid content like this now is doing it with intentionality in the hope that it will be a moment. But that was never a thing back then”.

The Q&A guest at Chronically Online’s Brighton engagement last week was Harry Davies-Carr, better known as the boy whose finger was bitten by the eponymous Charlie. He was pleased to see himself programmed alongside other videos he’s a fan of, such as ​‘Don’t Hug me I’m Scared’. In fact, despite over 888 million views, it was the first time he’d spoken about the film in a public event setting. Now 22, his viral stardom is transformed. ​“Just like Weedon, the real Davies-Carr isn’t recognisable from the online image of him,” reflects Smith. ​“He has the power to disclose, whenever he chooses, that he’s one of the most famous people in the world”.