Earlier this year, Daniel, a filmmaker from England, wanted to watch Béla Tarr’s take on Macbeth, a TV movie by the Hungarian auteur that had aired in 1982 on the Magyar Televízió network. On arthouse subreddits like /ObscureMedia and /Criterion, the film had become the subject of intrigue. It’s composed of just two takes, the first five minutes long, the second 57 minutes. The famous three witches are all played by men.
But in an era of supposedly infinite choices, Béla Tarr’s Macbeth is impossible to find.
No streaming service hosts the film, even the specialist ones, and a DVD that included it as a bonus feature is long out of print. But, like many a determined cinephile, Daniel did some digging, found an illegal stream on a “a random archive website” and let himself be flooded by Tarr’s existential universe.
For anyone interested in movies and their history, breaking the law is a common situation. If it’s not on iTunes, or Amazon, or any of the big streamers, niche streamers, or the scrappy upstarts like the ad-supported B-movie haven Tubi, what else is there to do? For every Atlantics (2019) or All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) – festival hits that got splashy streaming deals with Netflix – there are films from visionary, award-winning directors, like Hong Sang-soo, Vivian Qu and Xavier Dolan, which never got official US or UK releases.
In other parts of the world, access is even more restricted. “The kinds of movies that get mainstream distribution in India are super limited,” says the Chennai-based filmmaker Ashwin Arvind. His discovery of arthouse cinema coincided with the realisation that Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s films had no Indian distribution, so he streamed them illegally instead. “With India’s censor board there’s no way that we were getting any films with any graphic content uncut.”
Pre-2010 arthouse is even more scarce. The transition from physical media to streaming in the late 00s led to the quiet loss of a slew of films that had previously been available from specialist companies like Tartan, Artificial Eye et al. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours won the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard prize back in 2002 and is not legally viewable anywhere. Federico Fellini’s rare circus documentary I Clowns (1970) was re-released a decade ago, only for its distribution deal to expire. The Falls (1980), the abstract three-hour debut movie of Peter Greenaway, known best for The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), has fallen into the abyss.
A slew of sites – most of them legally dubious – are making these forgotten films available to everyone. Rarefilmm is a curated online archive of hundreds of niche, hard-to-find movies, often lifted from their original film print, from 1910s silent films about New York starlets to Nicaraguan coming-of-age dramas from the 1980s. A regularly updated list on Letterboxd includes every film they feature, and an online chatroom sees visitors share recommendations based on what they’ve watched. Similarly, a collection of sites specialise in doing the same thing, organising films by their area of origin: be it Soviet, Eastern European or Asian. Beyond these platforms, users on reddit regularly point people towards other sites, like archive.org, through which a quick search can uncover a hard to find film uploaded illegally online, if poorly signposted, years ago. Since May, the Rarefilmm following on X has nearly doubled.
“I send my film to people all the time”
crystal moselle
Of course, cinephiles have been torrenting and sharing hard-to-find movies for two decades and change, but it’s occured mostly via private communities like Karagarga, where users share links to barely-seen films and add subtitles to unsubtitled foreign language features. But a new boom in interest in those films, perhaps fuelled by Letterboxd’s rise to prominence, has created a greater appetite for the stuff that’s trickier to find.
Some filmmakers are all for it. “I send my film to people all the time,” says the director Crystal Moselle (The Black Sea, HBO’s Betty). She won’t say which one. “There’s people that don’t have it in their countries, and spreading the word of the work to me is more important [than adhering to distribution rules].” Moselle says that pirated material was key to honing her craft. When she was in her early 20s, she would buy bootleg VHS copies of Grey Gardens and movies by Wong Kar-wai from vendors on the New York City sidewalk. The former, she says, was “the kind of film that really inspired me to make documentaries [that were] fly on the wall and voyeuristic.”
Filmmakers are moulded versions of their influences, so if the budding ones are only able to access whatever surfaces on VOD, then the possibility of making art that pushes against that standard becomes near-impossible. Examples like All Quiet… and Atlantics are the anomaly; for the most part, Netflix isn‘t prioritising arthouse and foreign language film. Streaming services operate in the world of media for mass consumption, subject to the same strict distribution rules as every other competitor. As a result, films fall out of their hands, or they can choose to remove a project – or sell off the rights of their projects to other services – should they choose. Their guiding principle is distribution, not preservation.
Master of scuzzy and distasteful American comedy John Waters has an allergy towards these new media behemoths. If filmmakers are more concerned with their film existing forever over the money it will make them in the short term, “don’t sell to Netflix,” is his advice. “It’s called show business, not show art.”
But even with his underground heritage, Waters equally represents the mixed feelings many filmmakers have towards the illegitimate way their work is seen. On one hand, he wants audiences to have access to the films that he makes. Simultaneously, he wants to ensure that he retains control over what those titles are.
Waters‘ early work, so salacious it has routinely been destroyed by the censorship boards asked to grade it, has become arthouse catnip: films that young cinephiles once had to scourge for on shared VHS tapes are now find on digital clouds and drives. Films like Eat Your Makeup (1968), his 16mm comedy about a kidnapping nanny, and his Divine-starring short The Diane Linkletter Story (1970), have never been officially released, but have found cult audiences online via pirated streams. The source? “Don’t ask me!” he says.
Waters keeps an eye on what leaks online from his unreleased catalogue and files a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) request for it to be removed when he spots something. “If you don’t watch over it and you allow it, you lose your copyright,” he says. While he accepts that the ones that have been officially released have been pirated and shared already, he really doesn’t want you to watch the unreleased ones illegally. “I don’t sign them at book signings. Some of those films I don’t want in distribution. They’re too old.” Even so, he appreciates the curated platforms that specialise in vintage films. “When I was starting, the only place you could ever see rare films was college film series,” he says. “Now you can look at every scene and every cut.”
Even so, no archive is perfect, and that’s where the global community of extremely online cinephiles come in. This June, Rarefilmm’s Whitehead posted a download of Four Letter Word, Sean Baker’s offbeat early comedy from 2000. After posting it, Baker himself reached out, asking Whitehead to delete it as well as sharing the news that the film’s 4K restoration would be coming soon. And, later this month, Béla Tarr’s Macbeth will finally receive an official release in the UK, via Curzon.
In the 15 years since Tarr’s Macbeth was last available to purchase, the illegal downloads and streams have helped quell the desires of those who were desperate to watch it, its legacy kept alive by some intrepid internet-literate cinephiles. The work that survives, it turns out, is the work that is out there to be seen.
