A more general way of framing the issue is that moving pictures have moved toward ephemera, or, in a more historical vocabulary a spreading dominance of ’television'. How else could we explain the low adoption of Blu-Ray among both individuals and institutions? HD-DVD is long dead, Blu-Ray platers are now cheap commidity items ($15 used at thrift stores), no new ‘hard copy’ technology is waiting on the horizon. People stream on Netflix, or Amazon, or use the VOD on their cable TV, etc.
I have no idea what libraries are doing these days. Given how long they still collected VHS into the DVD era, my guess would be they think DVD is good enough, and there’s no compelling reason to add another format to the collection with all the organizational issues and demands on labor power that presents, even if the tech itself is cheap. In a way, it would be hard to argue with that, as DVDs seem perfectly adequate for study purposes. However, personal/experimental work isn’t a good fit for the model driven by streaming-media TV shows like ‘Black Mirror’ and other Netflix/Amazon fare. Anyone who will pay to see it once will probably want the opportunity to see it again, at their own discretion, so at least for individuals (if not for libraries) the interesting in collecting a library should be pretty much the same. What has changed, then, is that this colllection is more likely to live as files on a hard drive, rather than individual optical disks. How then to get files to the folks who want one, and collect a bit of $$ in return? Penny Lane is distributing “Nuts!” via NUTS! iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vimeo On-Demand, Vudu and BitTorrent. The last of these is ther most interesting to me, a site set up to collect a $10 minimum pay-what-you-want fee, for which you get to DL (and, obviously, keep) high quality files of the film (and it’s ‘extras’)in the form of a torrent, as opposed to just having access to a video stream for a fixed window of time. Watching the film via iTunes, Amazon, Vimeo etc. actually costs a bit more than getting the BT DL, and apparently doesn’t include the extras. Of course, being up on those services makes it easier to find, or for folks just browsing to stubble across, and not everyone wants to keep 9.8GB of data for the film on gheir hard drives forever… But I don’t think any electronic distribution can substitute for the functions of touring filmmakers like Roger selling disks out of the trunks of their cars. Roger doesn’t just screen his films at his personal appearances, he talks about them and discusses stuff with the audience. The avaiabilty of ‘merch’ is integral to the whole theory/ethos of non-commercial making and distribution. Even though the copies may be digital in the form of a DVD, there’s a materiality in passing a piece of plastic hand-to-hand that fits the hand-made aesthetic of TB/TX Dance, the Strip Mall Super 8 film, etc. etc. That object then has a circulation of it’s own based on its materiality: you can loan it to a friend, give it away… If nothing else, the material disk acts as a souvenir/realization of the experience of Roger’s visit and the attendant discussion. And since a few extra bucks never hurts, the folks in the audience are likely to be far more willing to part with a few extra bucks right after the screening, when the experience is fresh, than to actually follow up with a BT download once they get home. I don’t think a USB stick is a good choice though, because it’s too expensive, and it’s impermanent. It’s not ‘the work’, but a container that has the work in it temporarily, which can be dumped out, erased, replaced with something else — just like everything else in the society and culture this kind fo work is straining against. So, as an alternative to an authored NTSC DVD, I’d just get good quality HD scans of the film originals, and make high quality .mp4 or .mkv files of them using the x284 encoder (e.g. in Handbrake), make a master data DVD-R containing them, and duplicate those as needed for car-trunk merch. You could even make a simple cover sleeve to give the disk some visual identity. There’s not that many people who only have optical-disk-player-free computers, and such folks could still easily find a friend to copy the files from the data-DVD to a thumb drive… Just my 2¢…. _______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
