COLLECTIVE: UNCONSCIOUS
Torrenting: the new distribution
The film industry is increasingly becoming subject to a predatory approach by studios to profit by making films disappear, either before anyone’s had a chance to see them, or after they’ve landed on streaming services. Last year Warner Bros. made headlines for cancelling Coyote vs. Acme; even though the early response was positive, it was more financially beneficial for the company to simply delete a piece of art from existence. The year before, it was Batgirl. Since their HBO merger, they’ve been removing content from HBO Max for the same reason, meaning there’s no longer a way to watch certain shows that never had a physical release and the copyright owner has placed it back in the vault. Corporations don’t have cinephiles’ interests at heart; they only have a bottom line to reconcile. In light of this, a new form of distribution and archiving is needed, one that can’t be influenced by profit-loss ratios – a collectively-run approach to film preservation and sharing. The answer is torrenting.
What is known now as ‘torrenting’ originated in the BitTorrent protocol; originally developed to speed up downloading large files from different sources, it facilitated obtaining files of all different types, from feature length films to entire seasons of television. The technology relying on multiple users piecing the file together from separate uploads makes torrenting a systemically communal activity, democratising the process of acquiring files since anyone with internet access can download them.
Communities of cinephiles online seek out underseen or lost films in private trackers – servers that require registration or an invitation to access – to preserve, restore, and distribute through a communal effort. This is a level of commitment one step further even than simply using one’s hard drive as personal collection. Whereas harbouring your own collection of films is a solitary pursuit, these trackers realise a shared goal of creating an archive that will last and be passed on through generations of new registrants. Although there is a ‘moral’ question of piracy, torrenting is not just a way to watch otherwise inaccessible cinema. It promotes an archival mindset in a generation of cinephiles living in a theatrical landscape dominated by studios churning out disposable IP that risks arbitrary deletion from existence (or as we’ve seen, never being released in the first place).
BitTorrent protocol’s development had audiences flocking to the internet to find films that were not otherwise available. Cineaste observed in 2008, less than a decade after the introduction of BitTorrent, that “between Netflix, bittorrent, TCM, and international Amazon, any reasonably motivated person can probably track down almost any extant title in the world in less than a few weeks.” I still remember the anti-piracy adverts on my Disney VHS tapes that focused on the low quality of pirated media. The advent of streaming has now resulted in digital copies that are indistinguishable from the originals in terms of audiovisual quality; after Aquaman (2018) was released on iTunes, then the only platform providing a 4K release of the film, a version was uploaded to BitTorrent sites. Such torrents are now ubiquitous, and the increasingly shorter window between theatrical and digital release means that anyone can watch most films in their intended quality within a few weeks of its release. Even without a studio taking a nefarious route to tax write offs, there’s also the question of copyright suddenly changing hands. Shortly before Aquaman brought on 4K torrents, a number of iTunes users received media attention when they found films they purchased digitally could be removed from their library at random if Apple lost the content rights for the user’s geographic region. Even digitally purchasing a film legally is not a way of permanently owning a piece of media; it essentially becomes a rental for an uncertain period. In this case, the primary form of digital archiving is piracy.
While the most popular torrented films on public torrent sites are blockbusters, critical successes, and box office hits produced in the US and the UK, there remains a loyal audience for arthouse and experimental cinema, which are much less likely to receive global distribution. Werner Herzog observed, when confronted with Ukrainian producer Illia Gladshtein’s comment that he could only access Herzog’s films through illegal torrent sites in Ukraine, that ‘piracy has been the most successful form of distribution world wide.’
Internet users have collectivised in order to access more obscure films that are unobtainable through traditional means, no matter what country they are in. One extensive instance of such a collective effort is Karagarga. Members of Karagarga describe themselves as ‘a private BitTorrent community specialising in art-house, alternative, cult and classic movies.’ A file sharing forum dedicated to obscure cinema that is almost impossible to find elsewhere, it is ‘accessible by exclusive invitation alone.’ There is a very conscious community-driven spirit to the Karagarga community, with rigorous criteria for the films uploaded. The relationship between the members is reciprocal, as you must maintain a healthy upload ratio; you can’t ‘hit and run’ (downloading a torrent and then not re-seeding it for other members to download). Blockbusters and mainstream films are banned from the site. There is a restorative mindset; members are encouraged to find higher quality versions of existing films where available, and work on more accurate translations for subtitled films, in some cases even creating subtitles from scratch. The archival work of such a community is pre-eminent, it being estimated that Karagarga is home to one of the ‘most exhaustive libraries of classic, foreign and arthouse films in the world […] the archive has accumulated hundreds of thousands of films, a great many of them unavailable by any other means.’ These communities are doing demonstrably important work in archiving cinema, fostering a passion for rare and under valued titles. There is a conscious direction and preconceived structure for how this restoration will be done and the ways they encourage members to participate in this collective cinephilic mission. Many of the collections that the communities work to restore are decades old, or the films were never distributed in the first place; it’s therefore hard to see a downside to such an impressive undertaking.
Torrenting itself is not an inherently illegal act and has even been utilised by some filmmakers as a form of distribution. One more self-reflexive example is the two part documentary film series, Steal This Film (2006), which was produced by an organisation called The League of Noble Peers in order to ‘bring new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think “after intellectual property”, think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity.’ A large motivative factor in its production was a 2006 raid on the server rooms of one of the most popular public torrent sites, The Pirate Bay. The creators of the film saw this as an act of persecution, and as a result the documentary series was released on The Pirate Bay and watched by nearly 5 million people.
Director Jane Schoenbrun, known for their experimental horror such as We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), also made the decision to distribute one of their films on BitTorrent. In 2016, BitTorrent launched The Discovery Fund, designed to support independent filmmakers in distributing their films. The first recipient was collective: unconscious (2016), an anthology of short films made by five directors, with Schoenbrun serving as the executive producer. At the time of its release, Schoenbrun said they wanted as many people as possible to see it and more recently revealed that they had turned down a ‘25k [distribution] deal to put ‘collective: unconscious’ on BitTorrent’ and that ‘piracy is actively good for emerging filmmakers.’ Schoenbrun’s decision was less politically motivated than the creators of Steal This Film, but was a concerted effort to ‘decouple commercial value from artistic value’ as well as enable the film to have an audience that it would not have had if they had favoured mainstream distribution channels. The unusual release method of collective: unconscious serves as further evidence that filmmakers are recognising torrenters as a segment of cinephiles that values artistic over commercial quality and will therefore intentionally seek out films of this ilk. Torrenting, rather than simply posing an alternative to mainstream film consumption, has caused a shift in cinema viewers from mere passive audience members to active participants in intentional communities, playing a vital and increasingly necessary role in collectively distributing, archiving, and restoring cinema.
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