On
the Folly of Being a Completist
I recently purchased a set of DVD dividers,
to which I attached the names of directors and actors whose films I seem to be
collecting. There are, of course, the usual names, the established greats,
people like Chaplin, Keaton, Kubrick, Zhang, Ozu, and Kurasawa. There are a few
obscurities – Anna May Wong, Sessue Hayakawa, and Takeshi Kitano – the quality
of whose films wax and wane, sometimes to no fault of their own; and then there
are more recent arrivals to Hollywood, men and women who may one day join that
pantheon of cinematic greats. A few examples of those I’d put in this category
are Ben Affleck and Debra Grank.
I have therefore come to the realization
that I am a bit of a completist, something I suspect that is true of many other
people who still buy physical DVDs and Blu-rays. There’s just something about
having the entire Buster Keaton collection or the entire works of Orson Welles
that just draws a tear to my eye. And this is not the tear of someone mentally
counting how much they have spent on thirteen films that they likely won’t have
time to watch again, or the tears of a less than understanding partner who
wonders just how the two of you will live having to find space for the other
love in your life. No, this is a tear of remembrance - for a life well lived
and the gifts left behind. It is the result of sheer admiration and a tribute
to the impact that he or she has had on you.
My collection is a work in progress. My Hitchcock
collection is not yet complete, not for that matter have I been finished
acquiring the complete works of Charlie Chase, F.W. Murnau, or Fritz Lang, and
there are several Japanese directors from the 1950s whose films I’m just
becoming aware of.
Most of the people I’ve mentioned thus far
have passed away, and so it is probably possible to have a complete collection
if one wishes to look hard enough. (I once had the notion of owning every film
that Toshiro Mifune made, but gave that up after seeing 185 credits under his
name.) However, that is a luxury that future generations of collectors may not
have. Alongside the inevitable death of physical discs and the risk that less
popular films will disappear as a result, there is an additional risk to
would-be collectors. I’m speaking of course of the non-release, that film
helmed by a big-name director or starring a current A-lister or legendary
thespian that never receives a release on home video.
Sadly, it’s already begun. Case in point:
Woody Allen. Up until fairly recently, Allen produced a film a year, and more
often than not they were released on DVD within a few months. This ended with
his six-part series for Amazon, Crisis in
Six Scenes. Made in 2016, the series has yet to be released on physical
media, and with the controversy surrounding Allen currently, that isn’t likely
to change. Perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky. Who knows if Amazon will
ever allow the public to see A Rainy Day
in New York?
This is not an aberration. Apple just
announced they were joining the already crowded field of online content
providers, and Hollywood royalty is already lined up to be part of it. The
appeal is obvious. Established directors give upstart content providers instant
credibility in exchange for both creative freedom and generous funding. This
explains why Alfonso Cuaron had $15 million to make his passion project, Roma. Netflix wanted content, and he wanted
funding. It was a match made in heaven, and yet currently, the film does not
have a release date on DVD or Blu-ray. Fans who have followed Cuaron’s career
over the years and amassed a collection of his films thus far may find
themselves with an increasing number of gaps in their collection.
This is far more likely to be the
rule moving forward, not the exception. Many popular TV shows are unlikely to
ever appear on DVD or Blu-ray, and movies produced by streaming services will
likely remain exclusively available to subscribers. For proof of this, look no
further than Netflix’s Beast of No Nation.
Four years after its debut, the film is still curiously absent on physical
media, meaning that those seeking to collect all of the works of Cary Fukunaga
are out of luck.
Perhaps this is a product of the times we
live in. Consumers want convenience, and streaming services certainly provide
this. Perhaps millennials and the generations that follow them will put less
emphasis on collections. After all, digital content promises a world in which
every movie is at your fingertips, one in which accessing a filmmaker’s
filmography is just a click away. Hypothetically, fans could start with
someone’s first film and work their way to his or her most recent. I say
hypothetically because this is actually not up to the consumer. It is up to content
providers, and thus far, this vision of a streaming Utopia has not emerged.
Instead, almost every week there are lists of movies that are being removed and
added from streaming services, the reasons for which are rarely explained. For
completists, this can be incredibly frustrating.
And yet there are few options. With so many
big name directors and actors turning to streaming services to finance what
traditional studios might not, it seems inevitable that collections will become
increasingly harder to acquire. In fact, one day we may look back and see the
exact time a chasm in someone’s filmography developed. Physcial DVDs of their
work will be available only up to a particular point, and then streamed content
will be the only option. Will completists be content “owning” a director’s
later work in the cloud? Somehow I doubt it. It’s just not the same as looking
over to a wall and seeing, in chronological order, the complete works of one of
the all-time greats. There’s an investment there, a commitment to having and
preserving works that are considered important, a legacy that can be handed
down to the next generation of film enthusiasts. Completists value the whole,
and it is this that streaming services may have rendered a thing of the past.
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