Cinefantastique Online

Keith Brown of Giallo Fever has an interesting post inspired by a trip to the Edinburgh International Film Festival: Critics, Pirates, Creators and Consumers. Brown tries to come to grips with the importance of critics in the Internet age (where websites allow writers to go into depth about movies that would have received a paragraph in a film review magazine – if that much) and piracy.

Now, of course some reviews are always going to be longer than others, with some films warranting more commentary than others. But the thing that really stuck me, thinking about it, is how the web frees us from word / space limits, and how different things can be if we approach even the least film with a view to finding something more to say about it beyond a summary dismissal: what happens if we actually have to try to work through, for each and every film, what it does specifically as a unique object?

The piracy topic is a bit murkier, but even the murk has meaning – which is to say that the subject is not as clear as the anti-piracy people would have you believe. This becomes obvious to fans of disreputable cult cinema, including horror, who find that obscure titles are simply not available through conventional means (revival houses, DVD, cable TV) and therefore resort to obtaining pirate copies.

The positive piracy panel, meanwhile, was interesting for the very admission that its title – which itself is of course problematic, in that we should really be debating and defining exactly what piracy is, whether it is anything beyond armed robbery at sea – made. Piracy is not, as the somewhat on-the-spot spokesperson for the Federation Against Copyright Theft often found himself trying in vain to get around, a cut and dry situation. What is positive for one individual or group, namely the fan who wishes to gain exposure to a wider range of cinema, is bad for another, namely the big players who really do not want us to become aware of any alternatives beyond the narrow range they are offering.