Critic's Chair: Guy Somerset on the wonders of MUBI.COM, the movie streaming service that contains an embarrassment of worldwide riches
As a young man living in the English countryside in the 1980s, I received a schooling in film second to none. No, I’m not suggesting some Soviet-style Commissariat of Enlightenment instructing the shock troops of agriculture in the finer points of movie history by dispatching mobile cinemas to the cornfields of East Anglia. I’m talking about the BBC.
Of course, for Britons of a right-wing persuasion, the BBC is indeed a Soviet-style commissariat. But for me it was my introduction to cinema, thanks to its many afternoon and late-night screenings of classics from the 1930s through to the 70s, and in particular the cultish Moviedrome, a Sunday night strand introduced by the endearingly eccentric Alex Cox, director of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy.
The cineaste of today has to be more proactive in finding films to watch. A ‘classic’ on television now – on traditional channels and streaming services alike – is frequently no more than a decade old and if it is older may very well be something starring Steven Seagal.
The 1980s are now vintage themselves, as far away from us as the 1940s were from those watching then. They gave rise to many classics, even ones not starring Steven Seagal. But cinema began at the end of the 19th century, encompasses more than the output of Hollywood, and some viewers want a taste of that.
You’ll find a few crumbs if you poke around the streaming services – a lot of crumbs in the case of Amazon Prime Video, although they are mostly stale, the company seemingly having bought up The Warehouse’s last remaining stock of dump bin DVDs before its stores phase out the format altogether.
The Warehouse’s stores used to be a good bet for the occasional cinematic curio. Op-shops continue to be so and you can pick up many a genuine classic for as little as a couple of dollars. I am slowly building up quite a collection of screwball comedies, westerns and Alfred Hitchcock’s early English thrillers.
For less mainstream fare, particularly from countries other than the United States, New Zealand’s film societies and festivals do sterling service.
In Wellington, we have the legendary Aro Video rental store, with more than 25,000 movies from countries far and wide, reaching into the deepest recesses of film history. Yesterday it hosted a fundraiser, something even a store as good as it now needs to do. Its DVD Fair at Aro Valley Community Centre featured rarities, collectibles and bargains, including pre-loved DVDs donated to “keep the Aro Video dream alive”. The Aro Valley Community Centre is probably a bit of a stretch for most of you, especially if you’re reading this over your flat white in Remuera, but the store is online too with a postal service, so there is no excuse not to take advantage of its extensive stock.
For me at least, until last year and the first week of the Covid-19 lockdown, that was pretty much it. Then somebody told me about MUBI.
At that point, this streaming service had a wonderfully simple and focusing model: 30 films available at any one time, each there for 30 days, with the oldest disappearing each day, when a new one was added.
It was like being at an especially well-programmed film festival. One that never ended. You weren’t overwhelmed by choice and couldn’t dilly-dally watching. The selection of old and new films from around the world, both mainstream and more obscure, was impeccably curated and wholly trustworthy. All for about NZ$100 a year.
Lockdown was the perfect time to test drive the service. Suffice to say, I am now better versed in the films of Louis Malle than I have any right to be (the French film-maker being the subject of one of the service’s director seasons).
Since then, MUBI has adopted a model more in line with other streaming services, offering a permanent extensive library of films to choose from, rather than leaving us reliant on its restricted 30-day programme, although that programme remains as well for those who like the structure it provides.
Oh, what a library it is too! Separate sections devoted to 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s masterpieces, Women with Movie Cameras, Film Festival Favorites, individual festivals such as Rotterdam and the Berlinale, American Indies, Films about Films, first films, Indigenous Shorts from the Sundance Institute, The New Auteurs, old auteurs such as François Truffaut and Alejandro Jodorowsky, New Brazilian Cinema, A Journey Into Georgian Cinema, A Journey Into Indian Cinema …
In recent weeks, I’ve been enjoying the season devoted to the 1960s and 70s Hungarian film-maker Márta Mészáros (who knew films in an Eastern Bloc communist country could be so self-examining in their social and sexual politics?), the strange experimental erotica of Japan’s ‘pink’ film genre, and the early 1950s and 60s films of French writer–director Éric Rohmer, familiar to most of us only through his later 1970s and 80s films full of bourgeois bed-hopping and philosophical theorising about matters of the heart.
MUBI has become an embarrassment of riches. So is it churlish of me to say I kind of miss when its 30-day programme was all there was and there was no circumventing it?
The choice now can be daunting. I am reminded of the anxiety-inducing pressures of my annual New Yorker subscription. I have had one since the mid-1990s and I still have unread copies from the mid-1990s, kept because I feel I will – really should – one of these days get around to that 10-page article on the sleeping patterns of New England barn owls.
A new issue arrives each week, I read the cartoons and the shorts at the front of the magazine, and then set aside the longer articles for later. And later never comes.
At the end of each year, so consistently it is now part of my post-Christmas routine along with taking down the tree and decorations, I go through the pile, hanging on to those issues that contain something I think I might yet read. You know, 15-pagers on the dietary habits of some ancient tribe of the east Amazonian rainforest. That sort of thing.
Every decade or so, I also sort through this set-aside pile. Most end up in the bin. And on it goes. It has become a lifelong habit I can’t break. Buying but not reading the New Yorker.
I really can see the same thing happening with MUBI. I like to think of myself as a New Yorker reader and I like to think of myself as a MUBI subscriber.
But sometimes it’s just too much and I can go weeks without watching a single thing on MUBI. What kind of ingrate have I become? Sometimes, God forbid, I even find myself watching one of those Steven Seagal movies instead.
MUBI.COM
