I grew up in a pulseless nothing-ville outside a certain Canadian metropolis. Bored and left to my own devices, I spent formative days at the altar of a CRT. While neither friendless nor bullied, no interpersonal connection stirred me like the movies. Playground frolics were fun but forgettable in the shadow of a Hitchcock set piece. Obsession festered. As a prepubescent, I gargled the entry-level arthouse canon and spat out its exoskeleton. I hit up the public library three times a week and left with skyscrapers of DVDs. Bergman, Welles, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard. My fledgling brain recircuited, transfixed by these new transmissions. The specters of adult affairs which silently ensnared my world—sex, violence, politics, depression—were at best vague allusions in the family-friendly media flung my way. These art films unveiled a world both lustrous and sad, something otherwise shrouded from my child-eyes.
At twelve, eureka: sleep is an avoidable hindrance to movie-watching. From then on, I haunted insomniac nights cuddled against a portable DVD player. I kept volume to a nearly inaudible whisper. Every night, my overworked mother smiled at her diligent son, so enthusiastic about his early bedtime. But averaging four movies a night, I quickly exhausted my local library’s meager DVD collection. Purchasing physical media was not feasible on a child’s income, especially with my voracious cinéppetite. I had only one resort: the high seas. Adults I knew yapped about piracy as a ravaging of artists’ hard work or a plunge into a labyrinth of computer-melting viruses. When I first downloaded a movie, I kept glancing over my shoulder to check for suit-and-sunglass-sporting CIA agents teleported in to reprimand me.
Sadly, our home was not compatible with my torrenting fantasies. Visiting friends often scoffed at our dino-den of fossilized tech. Part of it was financial constraint, the rest was my mother’s crusade against electronics consumerism. Until 2017—the year I left for college—we didn’t have wi-fi and our cable internet plan allotted only 20GB of monthly downloads. For comparison, the .mkv file of Abel Gance’s La Roue (1923) currently on my external hard drive is 125GB. Torrenting is a symbiosis of seeding and leeching, of giving and taking. Good etiquette means letting your computer seep like an open wound, files left available to anonymous, freebooting compatriots. This is impossible on a rationed bandwidth of 20GB.
Grade nine. I entered the barbaric armpit of high school with mischief pumping in my blood. Secondary school offered newfound independence, mobility, and computer access. Without my own laptop, school PCs became the frontier of my torrenting ventures. I selected computer courses to maximize my downloading window and seized lunch breaks as opportunities to restock my film inventory. Friends and lovers alike bemoaned my scarpering away from lunchtime plans. My personal life was a reluctant afterthought, secondary to the sphere of aesthetics. Much of my teenage hormonal instability coalesced around film acquisition rather than more conventional angst. It was a problem; at fifteen, I casually remarked to a girlfriend, “As much as I love you, I’ll never love you as much as I love movies.” A crumb of dating advice: if anyone says this to you, purge them from your life immediately.
At my school board, student accounts were heavily fortified. Almost all social media, non-educational game sites, and file-sharing indexes were untouchable. Meanwhile, teacher accounts were unrestricted (surely to the glee of certain porn-brained staff members). My geography teacher—a kindly antique of a man—was my most absentminded, technology-averse instructor. The keyboard was an unnatural appendage; he typed one-keystroke-a-second. Glancing over his shoulder as he logged in, I quickly deciphered each character of his password. Using his account, I installed my preferred BitTorrent client, and buried the shortcut in the depths of an innocuously-named subfolder. For two years, I shared his account with him in secret. Many of my seminal teenage film experiences were from Mr. T’s obliviousness. Once, a librarian noticed the emerald green desktop on my monitor while I was logging-out (student accounts were fashioned navy blue). I bumbled an alibi: “Mr. T and I were perusing the topography of interior BC mountain ranges, when he was suddenly struck by a bubbling of the bowels. He sprinted out the door to relieve himself, but insisted I keep exploring the map using his account!”
Our admin was naïve, but not entirely oblivious; an acquaintance in my year routinely bypassed school firewalls to play his favorite dino platform game. Unbeknownst to him, launching his software somehow disabled our school-wide network. In my computer lab classes, we relished the intrusion; it meant a respite from classwork for the duration of his game sessions. When admin finally uncovered the source of our daily blackouts—a dino-loving tenth-grader—he was threatened with expulsion. Paranoia nagged me at night. If he was nearly ejected from school for indulging 100% legal prehistoric simulations, they would show no mercy for my password-snatching piracy expedition (especially considering certain arthouse downloads teetered on quasi-pornographic). I pictured my jowly TERF principal dropkicking me into another school district. And so, I pursued less risky torrenting methods.
Ultrasurf was developed by a Silicon Valley follower of the Falun Gong: the far-right, anti-CCP religious cult behind Shen Yun. As a free HTTP proxy anti-censorship tool, Ultrasurf angles to help internet users in Mainland China bypass state firewalls. The program conceals user IPs and traffic through a network of proxy servers and mirror sites. It’s also a proprietary software with (alleged) malware behavior concealed in its code. As a teenager, I knew none of this context. Ultrasurf was ideal since it downloads as a self-contained .zip file, no installation necessary. A thumb drive with Ultrasurf pre-downloaded opened a firewall-bypassing browser for freer roaming on school PCs, undetected by admin. Small catch: it was slow as shit. Downloads stretched for eons; I developed the patience of a meditative sage while leeching a mammoth blu-ray rip of Visconti’s Senso (1954) over multiple months. Today, Ultrasurf (a Windows exclusive) is fairly archaic. Nonetheless, it received sizable Republican funding during the Trump presidency in a soft power maneuver against China.
My greatest torrenting asset has always been Karagarga (KG). This year alone, it’s allowed me to probe the relatively inaccessible filmographies of Govindan Aravavindan, Yasuko Miyata, and Yoshio Fukuma. Founded in 2004, KG is a private peer-to-peer file tracker, a vast and esoteric library of high-res rips. Torrent health is sustained through a web of amateur archivists, seeding indefinitely. The catalog includes anything except “mainstream productions from Hollywood or India.” In some ways, the site is comically authoritarian; it’s invite-only, and users must maintain respectable seed-to-leech ratios or face exile. These measures strive to maintain torrent-health and stifle legal intrusion. Yet despite its cinephilic utopianism, despite its rebuke of copyright capitalism, KG recreates a (relatively harmless) economy and class structure where bytes are capital.
I was fortunate to score an invite from an older internet friend I met via Letterboxd circa 2012. One day, he deleted all his accounts and vanished from my life. He sent a farewell message: something about wanting to dilute internet distractions and focus on becoming a great filmmaker – “the New Jersey Harmony Korine.” Instantly, his canary-yellow Gummo (1997) avatar vanished from my feed. As he surrendered to offline life, my heart skipped a beat. I felt irrationally betrayed by a friend, a mentor, shattered by the delicate tetherings of digital bonds. For a week, I grieved silently and dismissed all invitations from flesh-and-blood friends to instead simmer in solitude.
In these teenage years, my aesthetic values coagulated; my cinephilia blossomed through duplicitous zig-zags around institutional cyber-bulwarks. This route gave me Claire Denis. I devoured her whole oeuvre in a month, awed by how whole narratives could unfold in vacant stares and corporeal gestures. Every week was a new education: the pop art misanthropy of Mario Bava, the kinetic grace of Kenji Mizoguchi’s camera, the unexpected warmth in Chantal Akerman’s durational alienations, Erich von Stroheim’s meticulous mise-en-scene. My mother turned gray in the periphery, my eyes locked on the screen.
I feel such gratitude to the anonymous internet users who actualized my adolescent film education, whose uploads are the continued crux of my learning; I could kiss every one of you. A warm allegiance blankets me, awed at these intangible communities, geographically separate strangers bound by niche passions. Peer-to-peer trackers are manifestations of our modern film culture, where movies are experienced foremost in pixels. I grew up in a world where film was mostly intangible, shared through invisible cyber-passages. I internalized this immateriality young, deprioritized the palpable world in front of me and all its beating hearts. I neglected my full sensorium for a purely audio-visual sphere, a symptom of a uniquely 21st century film culture: disembodied, formless, waltzing in the ether.
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