This piece is the result of a rather long internal process of reflection, which started after reading Calin Boto’s wonderful piece for Arta Magazine – an experiential, polemical approach to contemporary piracy. Such as is the case of any process that sets out to examine a gesture, a habit that is a part of quotidian life, and which passes through various changes as time goes by. What actually put this text into motion was a particular incident: the online leak of this year’s Golden Bear winner, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, by Radu Jude. In the light of discussions sparked by this event, I started thinking more and more about the role and roots of piracy, and its relationship to arthouse cinema, while also considering the sort of needs to which such a practice answers to. Piracy is intimately related to the concept of lack – of access to culture for the economically precarious, of those who come from geographical areas which have a lacunary, failing, or even non-existent cultural infrastructure, of access to otherwise unavailable films, and, recently, of the sense of community among cinephiles during the pandemic. At the same time, piracy also raises problems other than that of economic loss, the hegemonic (and thus banal) argument brought forward to incriminate it – all of which problems that modulate contemporary culture, and whose origins lie in cinephile practices that are decades old.

Ethical arguments in support of (film) piracy

“(…) copying is pervasive in contemporary culture, yet at the same time subject to laws, restrictions, and attitudes that suggest that it is wrong, and shouldn’t be happening. (…) Indeed, many of the most vibrant aspects of contemporary culture indicate an obsession with the act of copying and the production of copies (…) On the other hand, every time we install a new piece of software, listen to music, or watch a movie, we encounter the world of copyright and intellectual-property law, and the set of restrictions that have been placed around our access to and use of objects, processes, and ideas produced by the act of copying.

(…) these same laws are used by corporations to appropriate, copy, and sell increasingly large parts of what was once the “public domain.” (…) [They are] based on important but unexamined concepts like property, ownership, originality, authenticity—concepts which have been given very particular meanings by states and corporations at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” – Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying 

I must start off with a false confession – I, myself, am a pirate and have learned the methods of piracy ever since I’ve first had an Internet connection at home, back when I was fourteen and spending entire nights downloading albums which I would then minutely sort out into individual discographies, in folders and files with strict naming rules, while also searching for decent album art on Google Images, which I’d them code into each individual file using iTunes, for hours on end. Why is it a false confession? It’s because my entire generation is familiar with the myriad forms of piracy – especially that of software, music, films, and academic articles – and, even more so than this, just looking at my contemporaneous cinephiles, the vast majority of them (especially when it comes to those who were born outside of Bucharest, particularly those from towns in which cinemas disappeared during the post-communist transition) have accumulated their fundamental knowledge on cinema through piracy. A generation squished between cinephiles who still relied on cinemas and cinematheques for their education, and the younger one, which has better access to fundamental films due to a more competent and encompassing curation of streaming platforms (and, truth be told, also to better-quality versions): let us not forget that Netflix was launched on the Romanian market just five years ago, in 2016, and has only recently diversified its arthouse offer; MUBI had, for the longest time, an offer which was mostly based on recent festival fare; and other services (such as the Criterion Channel) are still only accessible through VPN services to Romanian viewers, for the moment. In the case of some rare, older films, piracy becomes the sole means through which these particular films manage to reach new audiences and still remain alive.

The biggest ethical argument in the favor of piracy is that of access – not just economic access, but also that to films that are otherwise not available under any other shape to a potential spectator, be they or not a cinephile. A fact that easily noticeable in second- and third-world countries, where anti-piracy laws are practically never enforced, and the access to films is very complicated (few cinemas, the lack of cinematheques that revisit historic films, a distribution model that mostly relies on Hollywood blockbusters, and so on). All of this sounds very familiar to Romanian audiences, but this is, in fact, a prevailing sentiment across the world – just listen to this episode from the Malaysian film podcast Fat Bidin, where the majority of arguments are not uncommon to local ears: especially the argument which states that, in many cases, piracy is the only method to obtain access to certain films. Film piracy is not a new topic in local debates about cinema. One of the most important moments in the history of these debates was a conference titled “Piracy and cinema”, organized by the Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest festival in 2015, which I also attended as a member of the audience. It was noticeable from the get-go that the panelists were people who, judging by the nature of their professions, were quite naturally opposed to piracy (distributors, members on the boards of online anti-piracy services, even a representative of the local police forces!). A state of affairs which, just as critic Catalin Mesaru noted in a piece in Film Reporter at the time, led to an unbalanced discussion between the speakers and the audience: on the one hand, pirates were made guilty of everything from reasonable observations (“those who are selling films to cinemas have shifted their aims from obtaining profits towards simply not losing any money”) all the way up to complete exaggerations, the blame being shifted onto them for other phenomena (“films will completely disappear due to piracy”, “the speed of the Internet in Romania should be capped – in the words of the man who proposed this absurd solution – in order to counter piracy”). On the other hand, the audience was pleading for what I was laying out earlier: “many of those who watch films, create them or write about them and are a part of certain age categories, have had their debut into cinephilia facilitated by piracy”.

It isn’t any news to anyone that those most affected by piracy aren’t those who work in Hollywood or are some of cinema’s biggest names, but rather, those are the small, independent filmmakers that depend on the festival circuit to scrape a living by – and it’s a thought that has been polarizing online cinephile communities for a long time. Let’s go a little bit beyond the world’s most famous piracy websites, which rely on peer-to-peer torrenting technologies – from the classical Pirate Bay to the integrated download and playback program Popcorn Time, which emulates the appearance of a streaming service – and whose offers are more than sufficient for a beginner cinephile who’s in search of absolute classics (be they recent or not), or of films that are highly successful at the box office.^[1] The most famous website tailored to “advanced” cinephiles, who need to reach beyond the aforementioned services, is Karagarga – famous not only for its exclusivist character (one can only become a member after having received an invitation from another member, and only certain members have the right to invite others) but also for its strict rules, which enforce a precise, balanced ratio between how much one downloads and how much one uploads by using the torrent links on the website. KG is the kind of vast library which, due to its own internal rules, encourages the accumulation of an increasingly large number of films, and indeed very few are missing from its servers – a fact which is compensated by a list of rules that regulates the upload of new films, some of which are rules that essentially amount to ethical ones, intended as measures against the sabotage of certain films’ commercial distribution: uploads of screeners and working copies are strictly forbidden, as is the act of uploading a film before its official release. (On the other hand, there are also some elitist rules in regards to uploading: banning mainstream Hollywood and Indian films, as well as mainstream porn – whatever that means.) Of course, some of these rules seem to also ride on the tailcoats of the “Judex” scandal, named after the eponymous user who claimed to had caused a period of downtime which shut the website down for a few weeks – wherein the would-be hacker accused the site of an “omnivorous consumption [that] is a perverse manifestation of the consumer society you profess to hate”, and that the site was a key factor in the decline of independent cinema, considering a larger political context in which public funding for such kinds of cinema has been steadily decreasing for the past couple of years. Whether or not Judex was right is up for anyone to decide, but his call for action certainly has a strong ring to it: “Members of Karagarga – professors, students, critics, festival programmers, cinephiles – consider your actions. Do not support the piracy of recent independent films or works produced by independent labels and publishers.”

On the other hand, while considering the ethical arguments in favor of piracy, one can also then consider hypothetical situations in which it is not ethical – in short, that would be a situation in which the given film is already available through legitimate means that do not imply a prohibitive access cost, or which will shortly be available as such. I will illustrate this hypothesis by using one of the arguments that were used to support the act of pirating Bad Luck Banging – which was used in the very first paragraph of the overwhelmingly negative review penned by one Eleanor Marx for Trepanatsii, a website which is run by the local leftist meme collective, Dezarticulat. They write: „I don’t get why I have to see it in hiding, since it’s a film that was made with state money. And on top of this, the entire film is about how uneducated we all are. Well then, I don’t know, free [access to] culture, don’t save it up for festivals.” Of course, this is a wonderful and utopic argument – as most reductionist arguments are. First of all, the premise that films would in any way be “isolated” in festivals, away from the gaze of regular audiences, is a misleading argument: the fact that a share of the global cinematic output passes through this circuit before ending up in cinemas (which is almost impossible in practice nowadays, anyway, what with the pandemic) doesn’t mean that it will stay stuck in said circuit forever, especially not in the case of a film that wins an important award – quite the contrary, it’s a sign that these films will, at one point, be widely distributed, usually a couple of weeks or months after its premiere. Additionally, in the case of many independent filmmakers, festivals actually facilitate the audiences’ access to their works. That this entire system is at the beck and call of certain hierarchies and, oftentimes, the economic interests of sales agents or distributors, is undeniable – but for a kind of cinema that is already running on almost minimal resources in terms of production, this is one of the very few extant systems that can cover the costs of a film, and, of course, the filmmakers’ costs of living. (What a silly notion, that cultural work is also work! Or maybe we are kidding ourselves that absolutely all filmmakers are filthy rich?)

Second of all, the argument regarding state financing is frivolous, at the very least – not only because a sizeable part of a sum that is granted to any particular film must be reimbursed over a period of ten years, according to the provisions of the law on cinematography (which few Romanian films actually even manage to achieve, in practice), but also because there are numerous other services which are financed from the public coffers which still ask their users/consumers for a modicum sum in exchange, such as public transport, certain public utilities, and so on. I can already hear the counterargument – well, those things should already be free in the first place! Fully agree with you on this one, tankie, but for the moment they are not, and the people who work to provide them still need the means to work and sustain their costs of living until the system is changed, be it through the collapse of capitalism or not. Last but not least, what does it even mean to watch a film in so-called “hiding”, considering how common the practice of piracy is in Romania, where anti-piracy laws are almost never enforced on “regular” consumers? Of course, one can argue that, given the fact that cinemas are closed due to the pandemic, films could potentially be released much faster on VOD platforms, but considering that the entire aforementioned system of agents preferred to, and even successfully managed to completely block the release of numerous films last year, of all types (from blockbusters to experimental shorts), the systemic problems that we are searching for tend to be in the opposite direction than the one we generally look at. If we were to take a look at certain precedents, this particular type of piracy has only incentivized the industry to invent increasingly new methods to squash piracy, or to impose new barriers by using various means (purging Google results, calling for stricter laws, screeners branded with the name of the spectator as a deterrent, etc.) which only end up affecting the entire pirate ecosystem, as a whole.

The relationship between digital and analog piracy

At the beginning of the year, a little anecdote shared by professor and curator Andrei Rus from A Dance with Fred Astaire, the final volume of biographical writings published by director and Film-Makers Cooperative founder Jonas Mekas during his lifetime, had caught my eye. In it, Henri Langlois, the father of film preservation and the founder of the French Cinematheque, arrived in New York with a few reels containing the films of Jean Epstein, in order to present them at a retrospective dedicated to the filmmaker, that was hosted by the Film-Makers Cinematheque. Mekas returns the reels to France once the retrospective is over, and contacts them again two years later, intending to screen two of Epstein’s films once again – only for him to receive a volcanic response from Langlois: “You stupids, you had all those films I sent you and you didn’t make copies of them!” Of course, it’s the kind of reply that is symptomatic for his grand personality – legendary for his cinematic hoarding tendencies, and who used to risk his life during the Second World War to save film reels in all sorts of dingy locations (amongst them, the bathroom in his parents’ flat), and who pleaded for the preservation of all films after the war was over, including Nazi propaganda movies. Langlois has been the topic of countless books, films, and articles, but there is another trait of his that I would like to illuminate here, which was briefly explored in an episode of The Kitchen Sisters podcast. Beyond a system of voluntary deposits at the French Cinematheque, with filmmakers offering their own films up for archival purposes, and Langlois’ various sources which aided him in his quest of saving old films, it looks like, from time to time, certain films were “made to disappear”: the late Pierre Rissient remembers how, after two distinct screenings of the works of King Vidor and John Boorman, the director of the Cinematheque would rush the artists to dinner, only for them to find out on the following morning, when they came to pick up their reels, that the films had been “lost”.

Of course, these methods aren’t particularly Orthodox, especially coming from one of the founding figures of modern cinephilia, who was dubbed “the conscience of cinema” in the speech which introduced his honorific Academy Award win in 1974 – but if one is to search for their equivalents (insofar such an act is possible) in the digital era, one can sense that what seems to be Langlois’ ethos in regards to how one should go about to acquire films has mostly been assimilated by online pirate communities. (And, anyway, most cinephiles are already swinging between legal and illegal methods of film consumption – most of them go to the cinema when they have the chance to do so, they own subscriptions to various platforms, they buy DVDs, and so on.) It’s not at all hard to imagine that piracy was extraordinarily complicated during Langlois’ lifetime – especially due to the materiality of the film reels themselves, which implied certain costs in order to copy them – and even so, he would find (and encourage) such practices. Nowadays, the act of copying a film is basically free: it only depends on two common utilities and the ownership of a computer, which is by now a domestic object – and it’s truly possible that we are, in fact, living in a Golden Age of cinephilia, even if it’s one that is discreet, invisible, and largely undiscussed in terms of a positive impact, mostly only in private circles. And that is the result of the digitalization of cinema and of the onset of the Internet.

In a text where he approaches his own experience with film consumption technologies, the legendary critic David Bordwell pinpoints the “moment that movies no longer became appointment viewing” – in reference to both cinemas (whose capacity was obviously limited) and television programs – as “a revolutionary turning point”, and names the video-cassette^[2]  as the one object that granted films an “aftermarket”, along with the ability of directly manipulating the viewing experience (“They could pause, skip ahead or skip back, race fast-forward or –back, play slowly, and above all, play the movie over and over”)^[3]. Looking at the vast libraries of certain piracy platforms, especially that of sites that archive numerous rare films or the works of lesser-known auteurs (in the same vein as the cinephile preservationism proposed by Langlois), one can conclude that such platforms also contributed to an afterlife of films that would have otherwise been lost, maybe forever, in some film archive or another. Rarities are thus no longer the exclusive privilege of physical archives, no longer dependent on the direct involvement of curators in order for them to be seen – they can be discovered on one’s own, and I would even go as far as to say that such libraries stimulate the act of searching. For example, rarefilmm.com has an impressive collection of obscure titles (finally, a website that lives up to its name!), and even boasts a gigantic section titled Wanted. (Of course, and unfortunately so, physical archives still have a main advantage here – they are places where lost films^[4], lost fragments^[5], or alternate versions^[6] can still be discovered; I am not aware of any equivalent cases in terms of online rarities – as I will elaborate in the below section.)

The thing with versions

The case of Bad Luck Banging is particularly fascinating because it involuntarily resuscitates an old interest particular to obsessive cinephiles – that of film variants. In a (meanwhile deleted) call published to his personal Facebook profile, Jude asked audiences to abstain from watching the leaked copy of his film, since it apparently lacked certain key components which could prejudice one’s understanding of the final product, particularly the voice-over which accompanies the films’ second part, the structuralist essay^[7]. Of course, the leak led to a rather bizarre local reception of the film – one can notice a rift between that of film critics, which was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and based on the film’s final copy, and that of other commentators, who saw the “illicit” copy.

Whether or not this polarized reception can be fully attributed to the circulation of this working copy is debatable. But what interests me here is the fact that not only is this a case of a film that, after winning a top award in Europe’s festival circuit, ended up very quickly on the Internet, but rather, I’m intrigued by the possibility of witnessing, in real-time, the effects that the spread of an unfinished copy has on the discourse surrounding a film. To be clear, what we have here is most probably the copy which was submitted for approval to the Berlinale and to other festivals (a Vimeo link containing what seems to be the leaked version came into my own hands at one point, sometime before the incident) – and it’s an absolutely common practice for filmmakers, producers, or sales agents to submit unfinished versions of their works toward consideration (generally, they lack certain post-production elements: color corrections, sound design work, etc.). At the same time, it’s also absolutely common for a film to be re-edited after receiving negative reviews at a festival premiere – such as the relatively recent case of Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny (2003). (Do keep in mind the hilarious war of words between the filmmaker and late critic Roger Ebert.)

Cinema’s shift into digital mediums – from digital images to computer-based editing, all the way up to a mostly digital-based consumption of film – eliminates these imperfections that used to amount to a Holy Grail of sorts to certain cinephile arenas, for the most part. A shift that is, of course, still incomplete – unfortunately, there is little interest towards digitizing copies that were intentionally modified by third parties, such as that of films butchered by communist-era censorship, or even the famous cassettes dubbed by Irina Margareta Nistor. Let us consider the case of John Cassavetes’ debut film, Shadows (1959), as an example. The film premiered in its first variant in 1958, to a rather cold reception of its tiny audience (with the notable exception of Jonas Mekas, who would go on to pen an enthusiastic review in Film Culture). This determined the filmmaker to re-edit his film and shoot additional scenes, distilling its perspective by creating a greater focus on its protagonist, Leila, while also deciding to drop most of the soundtrack composed by legendary jazzman Charles Mingus. The film’s initial copy, which the director himself ended up disavowing, and which only existed in a single physical copy, was considered lost for decades. It was rediscovered only in 2003, years after the death of Cassavetes, along with its fabulous tale of survival: the film cans hosting the reel were found in a subway train, and were bought by a second-hand salesman after lying for God knows how long in the “lost objects” section, who never managed to resell it, finally ending up after a long time in the hands of a film professor after a tip-off.

Other famous cases concerning alternate versions of canonical films concern Touch of Evil (dir. Orson Welles) – initially butchered upon release by Universal, its original was discovered by accident in 1975, and then restored according to Welles’ instructions in 1998; Once Upon a Time in America, the last feature by spaghetti western master Sergio Leone – almost cut into half (139 minutes) for its initial US theatrical run, re-edited in chronological order for its USSR release, then finally presented in a restored, 251-minute-long version at Cannes 2012; Heaven’s Gate (dir. Michael Cimino) – a film notorious for its very speedy editing and for sinking the illustrious career that seemed to emerge with The Deer Hunter, which circulated in innumerable variants; and Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott) – released in a director’s cut version in 1992 which eliminates Rick Deckard’s voice-over and the 1982 version’s happy end, and then launched in a definitive cut in 2007. Of course, eternal director’s cuts are also a marketing strategy that banks in on respectability politics – just look at the recent example of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a relatively unique phenomenon, since what it proposes is a film that is conspicuously fully auteurist while, at least intuitively, it seems to be the least auteurist kind of cinema possible (long live vulgar auteurism!^[8]), and let’s not forget that this is the second Snyder title to get such a treatment, after Watchmen (2009). On the other hand, to cite another recent example, if the original version is a complete disaster that lacks an enthusiastic fanbase (as in the case of Justice League), it seems like not even such strategies can help save it – see the positive, yet few reactions to the re-cut of one of cinema’s greatest disappointments, The Godfather III: Coda.

On the other hand, one must acknowledge the unique advantage of Internet culture in this regard: digital piracy has also helped birth the fan/unofficial cut phenomenon: amateur re-edits of certain films, usually modern box office mammoths, a symptom of remix culture. One of the most famous (and hilarious) cases is that of The Phantom Edit, one of the first fan edits to massively circulate on the Internet and to even be reviewed by film critics, where, amongst other changes, the vast majority of scenes featuring the much-loathed Jar Jar Binks were excised. Even more so, another legendary leak, also related to George Lucas’ series, led to the birth of an entire generation of memes (amongst them, the classical “DO NOT WANT”) – that of the final episode of the second Star Wars trilogy, Revenge of the Sith, which was illegally distributed as a working copy in China, and whose subtitles seem to have been run back and forth between English and Chinese in Google Translate. It’s a copy that has become an Internet legend in its own right in the meantime, and which has also led to a hysterical meme re-dub of the film which uses the subtitles’ broken English. Will this variant of Bad Luck Banging also gain a certain level of posterity in the years to come? It remains to be seen.

Pandemic-era piracy

Alright, all of the above leads us to the following question – what is there left to do when cinema is quite literally forced to secede from its materiality and must be fully embraced by digital? All the eye-roll-inducing prophecies of 2019 regarding the “death of cinema” at the hands of streaming platforms (whose chief suspect was, of course, none other than Netflix, the mammoth service which by then was already starting to heavily court arthouse/festival fare – just take a look at Marriage Story, by Noah Baumbach, and The Irishman, by Martin Scorsese – after having already waged its conflict with Cannes) didn’t really account for the emergence of a situation that would lead to the physical closure of the vast majority of cinemas across the globe, for a duration of time that was long enough for the entire industry to be compelled to rethink its approaches, that is, beyond those who simply hid away their unreleased films and stayed put for the year. (If in the summertime cinema attendance will explode just as it did in 1946 – well, that’s anybody’s guess.) Almost naturally, piracy blew up during the pandemic, especially in its first months: for example, the most recent film released by the Walt Disney Studios, the live-action remake of Mulan, was pirated in numbers that were almost double of those racked up by its predecessor, another remake, Lion King.^[9] These numbers are hiding a whole different reality, however: the emergence of pirate communities on Facebook, which in the context of the pandemic, ended up as surrogates for the sense of community that arises amongst faithful spectators of cine-clubs or cinemas. Enter la loupe: associated with French experimental filmmaker Frank Beauvais, la loupe is a francophone community (which, thankfully, doesn’t get angry at the odd post in English) that, at the time of writing, has amassed a membership of over 15,000 cinephiles. The fundamental rules? No films that are available in cinemas, on streaming platforms, or available for first-hand purchase on DVD in France. In contrast to the solitary model of the torrenting pirate, here we have a community experience: beyond posts in which some member might share a downloadable cache of rarities, discussions are usually initiated from particular inquiries – be it a specific film, or the oeuvre of a specific auteur, or thematic searches which seek out as many films as possible that share a given common element (certain narrative constructions, formal typologies, figurative elements, and so on). And it’s not just that: the demographics of the group seem to emulate those of Karagarga – teachers, filmmakers, critics, festival workers, and so on – without imposing its notorious restrictions. And amongst them – Radu Jude, to tie things up in a nice circle, who mentioned the group in the special thanks credits of his latest film, and who was even celebrated there after having won the Berlinale’s top award: “Félicitations à notre loupiste/Congratulations to our loupiste!”. I had been part of other pirate Facebook groups in the past, the majority of which are now inactive, or zucced (i.e., banned): but these groups had a different engagement strategy, namely an administrator with sole posting rights, who would mysteriously post a link to an album once every couple of weeks, only to disappear again. (Truth be told, these were music communities – and, well, music piracy has truly become redundant, what with Spotify, the successful monetization of YouTube, and so on.)

To me, the staggering success of a group such as la loupe could only come in the context of social distancing/isolation and of closed cinemas – in spite of the fact that last spring, we witnessed an explosion of online festivals, the increasing collections of already-existent streaming platforms (such as the arrival of the MUBI Library, the fact that Netflix is acquiring more and more arthouse films), or the inauguration of fully new ones (such as Henri, arsenal 3, Another Screen, and so on), and so one can conclude that access to cinephile-sanctioned films might seem easier than ever, these groups are also addressing the fact that the pandemic has brutally and traumatically severed the physical community aspect of cinema. Entire sociological studies have been written about cinema as a social habit and ritual – and the ones describing the current situation are probably on their way – and so this new mutation of the community should be interesting in these regards. Not only is this a kind of community in which piracy is accepted as a given (thus eliminating the need for a pseudonym to be used on some dank Internet forum, with users comfortably posting from accounts that reveal their real identities), but it is also a place where debates about cinema are very much alive, participatory, centered on films to whom the fates haven’t really smiled up to now: and it might be that this is truly the Edenic garden of Henri Langlois’ worldview. Let’s hope that la loupe and her little sisters (which I won’t name here, to prevent a zucc) won’t disappear as discreetly as they appeared, once cinemas reopen – along with the transformations to pirate practices which they have birthed. To quote Morrissey – Shoplifters of the World, unite and take over!

[1] On the other hand, the illicit distribution of somewhat rarer films has suffered a recent mutation – they are now oftentimes passed “from hand to hand”, through links of uploads on sites such as MyAirBridge, MegaUpload, and so on.

[2] I must point out the fact that, prior to video cassettes, for a while during the seventies, there was another way to privately consume films, namely 8, 9.5, and 16mm copies, as well as Super8, many of them containing Hollywood films.

[3] In this same piece, Bordwell states that streaming technology is a new episode in the battle against piracy, which is parallel in spirit with film screenings, only digital, since they both imply no ownership over a given copy of a film. “I think it’s fair to say that home video, in the form of tape, laserdisc, and digital disc, democratized film study,” he writes.

[4] A list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rediscovered_films

[5] Two more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rediscovered_film_footage + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incomplete_or_partially_lost_films

[6] The IMDB classification of various variants: https://help.imdb.com/article/contribution/titles/alternate-versions/GB7UDDKCAAVFXCXH?ref_=helpart_nav_16#

[7] I’ll take the occasion to answer to Andrei Gorzo and his rebuke of my appreciation of this fragment as structuralist in his review of Bad Luck Banging, wherein he supposed that I was originally referring to cinematic structuralism – I was in fact referring to structuralism as a school of theoretical thought, thinking of names such as de Saussure and Levi-Strauss. But I am glad that this finally gave an occasion to Mr. Gorzo to write even one paragraph about anything else other than Romanian cinema, classical Hollywood narrative cinema, Andre Bazin or Graham Green.

[8] See the piece in Cinema Scope where the concept originated: https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-online/vulgar-auteurism-case-michael-mann/

[9] I am still baffled by the phenomenon of these remakes to this very day, and I can only attribute it to the Marvelization of cinema.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.