🟧 Livestreaming classic cinema

The archivists cataloguing Criterion24/7.

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Chris Erik Thomas: As I set my coffee cup and habitual bowl of oatmeal down at my desk in Berlin on a nondescript Friday morning in August, I was suddenly dropped into the criminal underworld of early-2000s Hong Kong. The time machine? Criterion24/7, an ingenious, always-on livestream that was quietly added to The Criterion Collection’s streaming platform on April 10. For those criminally unaware of Criterion, just imagine forty years of the most sumptuous films from around the world, licensed, restored and redistributed online. And now here was a livestream offering a window into the world they’d so carefully cultivated. On this particular Friday morning, the livestream was midway through Internal Affairs II, a pulpy crime drama directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. The score swelled, the pulpiness oozed, and the men looked at each other with tense, worried glances (as one does in the criminal underworld). I could’ve cut the tension with a knife, but unfortunately, I only had a spoon — and I quickly realized watching rival gangs fight turf wars was a bit too much action for 9:30 am. 

A few weeks (and approximately 5,797 miles) later, I opened the livestream again in California as I carefully folded away a wedding outfit. This time, I’d dropped into the final moments of Paris, Texas. “I knew these people…” Travis begins, sitting with his back to the one-way mirror that separates him from his lost love, Jane. “These two people. They were in love with each other. The girl was very young, about 17 or 18, I guess. And the guy was quite a bit older. He was kind of raggedy and wild. And she was very beautiful, you know. And together, they turned everything into a kind of adventure.” Let me just say that it’s very tough to pack up clothes neatly — and without crying — when Wim Wenders’ 1984 neo-Western masterpiece reaches its quietly devastating conclusion. After the credits rolled, a more palatable film began: Olivier Assayas’s vibey, criminally underrated Personal Shopper (2016), starring Kristen Stewart, aggressive text messages, and some not-so-friendly ghosts. Still firmly high-brow but just ambient enough to glance at while you fold clothes. At long last, I’d (mostly) found my version of the “ambient TV” phenomena that Kyle had written about in 2020. My attempts over the years to put on a show or a film as background noise always left me feeling demonically possessed by an enraged, guilty Catholic: only passively paying attention to what was happening on screen felt like a mortal sin.

Somehow, Criterion24/7 unlocked something in me that finally, mercilessly, let me switch my brain off and get fed whatever was being served. Ironically, this shiny new livestream is more a relic than anything. It’s a throwback back to the olden days when we relied on that thing called “cable television” for entertainment, mindlessly flipping through channels to see what was on and hoping something better was right around the corner. If Criterion 24/7 were to be compared to anything, it would be a channel like HBO (literally an acronym for Home Box Office) or Turner Classic Movies (or, as I like to call it, “the station my grandpa flipped to between football games”).

Archiving the archive

Like ectoplasmic spirits haunting the effortlessly chic Stewart as she zips around Paris on a motor scooter, these two forays onto Criterion24/7 have lingered with me. Maybe that was the point, at least initially. In its first few days online, Criterion24/7 had an almost comical lack of information; the film currently streaming wasn’t named, and there was no way of knowing when it had begun or would end. It was as if you’d wandered into a dark movie theater, felt along the walls, and watched the sights on screen for clues about what was happening. As one distraught Redditor griped on launch day: “Loving the new 24/7 channel but no options for me to find the title of the film. I want to restart it so I can watch from beginning but I don’t know what the name is! It’s about a food shop worker striking up a relationship with this cop. Music is amazing with cranberries etc.” Ironically, the film was Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express, a cult classic often stripped of its richness as it's plastered onto internet moodboards. 

In the months since its launch, Criterion24/7 has added a link that punts you to the page of any film it's currently streaming and added a countdown to the next film. For the casual observer, that would be enough, but this is The Criterion Collection. You can’t just build a niche, highbrow art film distribution service that’s been around for four decades, introduce an always-on livestream to your rabid fanbase, and not expect a handful of technologically adept film buffs to build a bot to track it and Letterboxd list to archive it. What may have just been relegated to being a fun, slightly gimmicky throwback to 24-hour movie channels of the past has now become the source code for an ever-expanding playlist of film history. 

some recent films on the Criterion24/7 Letterboxd archive

“I was on [the Metropolis Discord, a film-focused chatroom] a few hours after the 24/7 feature started,” Puffin, a substitute teacher in “deeeeeply rural” Newfoundland, who maintains the Letterboxd list, tells me. “I brought up how it would be cool to have a list of the films screened. With that initial idea, a handful of users came together to help make it a reality.” “Puffin was asking in the server if anyone had a list of the first few films that played so far, and I sent him a list created by my friend [adum_g] from another server,” adds crooklynn, a university student studying biological sciences who became a key player in the archive’s early days. “I was just the catalyst for the list creation.”

An ad-hoc system began, with users taking shifts watching the livestream for the first few days and manually noting down the films until a user named triales entered the chat like a knight in shining celluloid. “[triales] showed up in the comments of my list a few days later, having already made the app that kept track of the films screened,” explains Puffin. “Thanks to their bot, we don't have to monitor the films as much in real-time.” In the five months since Criterion24/7 went online, the breadth of its cinematic range has surprised even its key architect, Puffin. “There's some stuff they showed that I likely never would have made time for otherwise, which is a cool reminder of how much great art exists outside of what we expect to be interesting or even what we've heard of in the first place.”

It wasn’t always so easy to mine the expansive depths of cinema. As crooklynn reminisced about his budding childhood interest in film, he recalls the golden age of physical media, where Hollywood Video and Blockbuster and a constellation of local video rental stores dictated what we watched. “I would also pretend that I knew of all the big, adult titles as a kid,” he says. “I didn't get seriously into film until high school, when I started to explore more ‘serious’ works because I wanted to be exposed to different backgrounds than mine.” A country away in Canada, Puffin found solace in the DVD dollar bins, where discovering something semi-decent was a game of finding a needle in a haystack. Though they’d lived disparate lives, both eventually came upon The Criterion Collection through their early digging; they cited old Chaplin films and the stoner comedy Dazed and Confused, and Fantastic Mr. Fox and the 1996 Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings, respectively, as their entry points. 

Hearing about their early adventures in Criterion’s metaphysical closet of wonders, I feel a tinge of envy run through me about only discovering The Criterion Collection well into my late 20s. Growing up in the dusty Nevada desert, the concept of a “foreign film” was, well, foreign to me. My Criterion was the small, two-screen movie theater in my hometown that I worked at when I was just 13 years old (child labor laws be damned). My 24/7 was whatever films we received, and I watched everything. For a handful of years, film was the bedrock of my cinematic education — and, sometimes, in the case of bleach-blonde twink Max Thieriot in The Pacifier, the fodder for my sexual awakening.

Nobody needs reminding that we exist in a hyperactive streaming era, where decision fatigue leaves us spending more time trying to pick movies than actually watching them. That’s part of why Criterion24/7 feels like such a soothing balm, but it goes deeper. For decades, the Criterion Channel has provided invaluable cinematic education and a sense of community to budding and hardened cinephiles; the livestream is just a window into that world. Whether you’re ready to peer inside or not, no stress. Thanks to a Discord server, a bot, and a friendship forged by film, we can always head to Letterboxd and browse the views.

Chris Erik Thomas is a Berlin-based writer and editor whose work spotlights trends and talent in the realms of fashion, art, and culture. They've previously worked as the digital editor for Art Düsseldorf, and their words have appeared in Highsnobiety, ARTnews, The Face, BBC, Out Magazine, Paper, and more. 

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