TV Is the New Art House

As a young movie reviewer in the 1980s, I swore to eschew elitists like the critics at the Village Voice, whose annual “Best Of” lists used to read like a roll call from the United Nations’ developing countries bloc. Those lists were filled with films nobody else saw, like Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven or Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? And I went to the movies back then. In 1981, Santa Barbara boasted two Metropolitan Theatres–affiliated art houses (Riviera and Magic Lantern), an excellent independent theater (Victoria Hall), and a twice-a-week UCSB Arts & Lectures film series. If those failed, we went to L.A.’s Laemmle Theatres. Happily. Still, snobby big-city reviewers could trump us — finding enigmas like Hong Kong New Wave ghost stories to make us feel inadequate. I thereby swore never to be purposefully obscure.

But today I eat those words in an unexpected way. As the critics’ top-10 lists hit critical mass, I admit many of my picks never came near a week’s run at a local movie theater — films like Nymphomaniac: Vols. I & II, Snowpiercer, and Young & Beautiful. Some showed at Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) Director Roger Durling’s Wednesday-night Showcase series at Plaza de Oro, but I bet a paycheck you haven’t seen half the films on my 2014 “Best Of.” That is, unless you watch a lot of cable television.

Welcome to the brave new art house called Video on Demand (VOD). Presuming you have cable (and just forget about Netflix for a few minutes), VOD is not just a place to see something you missed in theaters but also a viable alternative screening room for edgy work. This, along with streaming films on our computer, is what replaced the old video store, and, like the old movies that went straight to video, it consists of films that were good enough to make but horrible to bet on, financially speaking. These movies premiere only on TV. To make matters worse, most movie exhibitors — like our own Metropolitan Theatres chain — refuse to screen them in theaters, a fact that became obvious a few years back when Lars von Trier’s Melancholia made critics rant but never showed in town. “You can safely say at this point that that is our policy,” said Alan Stokes, who is the chief booking agent for the company.