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“It’s a Silent Fire”: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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I'm on a private tracker (pejoratively known as a "piracy site") that specialises in obscure films and documentaries - no mainstream, big studio films are allowed. It is an archive that I am happy to be a part of... and I definitely consider it to be an "archive"; corporations are not going to be interested in maintaining anything that's not profitable. I regularly upload queer films that are difficult to get hold of and I'm happy that they are held on the computers of others in case someone, someday, would like to watch them.
Just gonna add that archives like this are absolutely vital for students too. During a module on animation, which included an historical/contextual research component, I relied heavily on "piracy" to source pretty much everything I looked at from the 1930s onwards - basically everything that was too new to have entered the public domain, but too old/unpopular/obscure to be readily available in a "legal" manner. Most of my fellow students didn't go past 1928, and they lost marks in that assignment as a result. I did not volunteer information about my sources for these files, and the teachers wisely opted not to ask. 😅
What's the best film that you've watched that's the kind of film that'd be on your obscure private tracker?
I recently watched a documentary called Palestinian Identity, made in 1984. I am in the UK and was a young boy at the time, smothered in Very British Propaganda so I was interested in watching it because it was made by the PLO Film Unit. It was excellent and, of course, many parallels to be drawn between then and today, especially because the film begins with a walk around a recently destroyed children's school. It included some fascinating interviews with some of the leading Palestinian cultural figures of the time including Mahmoud Darwish who's considered to be Palestine's national poet... which reminded me I needed to start reading poetry again! Anyway, I'll be quiet now, that went on longer than I was expecting! Thanks for the lovely question.
https://palestinecinema.com/movies/palestinian-identity
Only one paragraph? Please, a few more! <3
I'm an ex-filmmaker and would be interested in your private tracker if u wanted to DM it to me.