Boob Tube.

There’s an Episode of Parks and Recreation where Amy Poehler’s Leslie wants the council to subsidise the local video store, which looks like closing, while Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson opposes government in the arts at any level and Poehler’s claim that the shop is the community window into culture is undermined by the owner shifting to porn because that’s what his customers want. Every time that she cites something like Rashomon, Adam Scott’s Nick Wyatt interjects “That’s on YouTube.”

Forget about news and current affairs. It’s sitcom where all the great issues are debated.

I always thought of You Tube as source of murky pop music clips and  Stupid Pet Tricks. I however now discover it’s where movies go when they die - a doorway into the lost (to Australians) world of Archives and Cinematheques. It seems likely there’s a lifetime of serious movie viewing there.

This is good news - bad news. With trembling fingers, I put Brigitte Helm’s name in the search bar and up came screens of icons for profane dance clips from Metropolis.

However it didn’t alert me to her presence in  the Karl Hartl/ Walter Reisch Die Gräfin von Monte-Christo with Gustav Mephisto Gründgens and Rudolf Die Driegroschenoper Forster or Carl Grune (now there’s a lost auteur) doing Am rande der welt, where she partners Wilhelm Dieterle. Both films have English captions though the second one looks like it came off a reject 8mm dupe.

If you try Florence Marly (with Ray Milland in Sealed Verdict, Von Stroheim in l'Alibi and Denis Hopper in Queen of Blood or as the Princess in Krakatit) you discover she also did a run of movies in the post war Argentine.

Without any navigation guide, it’s hard to work out just how much material there is - particularly as it’s like the ocean. You should never turn your back on it. The pieces that you click “watch later” frequently aren’t there next day. I had to go through fourteen screens of film noir (!) before I came upon the history-making Peter Cushing-Rudolf Cartier 1984.

The bulk of the foreign language material comes without sub-titles. A lot of it is misidentified and irretrievable. Quite a bit appears to be duped off the tackiest VHS copies in the world. When you get a dissolve, it looks like someone poured soup over the image. This traces back to the suppliers. Watch the trailer for Bicycle Thieves to see the sharpness and range of tones the system is capable of delivering.

This Above All - Tyrone Power & Joan Fontaine

Here is a selection of the feature titles I located. It’s not any kind of best list. It is however a very good match with my wants - just about all pre 1950, because I’ve had better access to anything made since.

Du Haut en bas French G.W.Pabst with Jean Gabin, Michel Simon & Peter Lorre, Myamoto Musashi  WW2 Mizogchi, Mail Train/ Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It Walter Forde with Alistair Sim and Gordon Harker, Ladro Lei, Ladro La  Luigi Zampi, Louise Brooks BBC Doc., Mask of Diijon  Lew Landers/Von Stroheim, Mesalina 1924 silent voice dubbed,  The Guilty Generation - Helen Twelvetrees 1931 sharp, Gyurkovicsarna  Nils Asther 1920, English captions, I’ll Give a Million Hollywood re-make of pre war De Sica, The Love River - Egyptian Omar Sharriff with S/Titles, Strange Impersonation - Anthony Mann B movie anticipates “Dark Passage”, New York Nights - Lewis Milestone 1929, Little Rita in the Far West Rita Pavone/Baldi - good copy, Kiki - Mary Pickford /Cameron  Menzies,  Circonstances Actuantes Arlety 1950, Seas Beneath 1931 John Ford with George O’Brien, Ettore Fieramosa  Blassetti, Svegliati e uccidi  Lizzani, Gloria Brigitte Helm & Gustaf Froelich (use Stummfilm Fan copy), Volga Volga - Grigori Alesandrov, soso quality but English sub-titles, Un Revanant Xtian Jacques/Jouvet scored by Honneger,  This Above All Litvak, O Tesoro/ Der Schatz - Pabst’s first movie, Devdas India 1935 Eng. S/Titles, Little Old New York  King Vidor soso quality, El día que me quieras last and reputedly best of the Spanish speaking Carlos Gardel films made at Astoria, Brothers Karamazov - Fritz Kortner/ Otzep 1931 Eng. S/titles,  Meet Me in St Louis - David Susskind TV version, Le Destin Fabuleux de Desirée Clary Sacha Guitry fair, The Cossacks John Gilbert silent, George Hill-Clarence Brown, Irgendwo in Berlin Post WW2 Fritz Rasp/Lamprecht, Woman to Woman Victor Saville 1929, Albuquerque Randolph Scott & Gabby Hayes in Cinecolor, Crossroads great Kinugasa silent,  Frauennot - Frauenglück  Eisenstein/ Alexandrov, Up the River Humphry Bogart’s first movie, Spencer Tracy/John Ford, Hitlerjunge Quex Nazis 1933 S/Titles.

Of course these are not the only thing the site offers. I find myself following John Stewart, who’s been regrettably missing from our local TV, but the real buzz remains finding access to the history of the movies that traditional coverage omits - think of that  drear British series which takes four hours to reach a screen filling close up of the word “Sound” - without ever a glimpse of a cowboy.

Equally disturbing is the lack off any professional or peer documentation on this You Tube material. Because there is no promotion of the kind for theatrical, broadcast or DVD exploitation of movies, no money changing hands, there’s no incentive to discuss a You Tube discovery.

The question remains why local enthusiasts should have to fossik through the Internet for the privilege of huddling alone over miserable copies of  the output of major movie makers, when it’s taken for granted that big screen presentation of this material is only a Metro ride away in the real world.

Barrie Pattison 2020