New Website Brings the Art House Into Your House
For the frustrated cinephiles who feel they’ve nowhere left to turn: relax! These people have your backs.
The Auteurs, a new online movie site looking to bring art house cinema to your house, has recently formed an alliance with filmmaking titan, Martin Scorsese—well, with his company, the World Cinema Foundation (WCF), at least. The idea is to preserve and spread films that, though artistic and beautiful, may not have ever found the audience that they deserved, until now. The website, calling itself an “online cinematheque” presents a selection of high quality classic and art house films, for members to watch for cheap—and in some instances, free.
These are not your average films. You won’t be able to find them on YouTube, or Vimeo, or even in most video stores that you may have near you. Most of these films, such as Masaki Kobayashi’s Harikari, or Luís Buñuel’s L’Age D’Or, are important works of art that your friends don’t even know existed. The Auteurs, in all its necessary arrogance is looking to cure this worldwide ignorance, once and for all.
Yes, all this is pretentious, but if wanting to show others something you find beautiful is reason for criticism, then we have some problems bigger than pretension, don’t we? And that’s what this project is really about: showing people films that they may not get to see otherwise. That’s why The Auteurs has implemented another feature on its website, and one that separates them from other video sharing websites out there: social networking.
The Auteurs intends to serve as a social networking site as well, where young people can watch the films and then help spread them through the Internet to friends around the world. The site will allow people to write reviews, recommend films, and as a result contribute to an expanded awareness of non-mainstream film. On top of that, the site is host to a series of online mini-festivals, presenting, for instance, a few films that have won big at Cannes.
For now, The Auteurs is still small, boasting a selection of only about 200 films, but with its new partnership with WCF and another already established connection with the Criterion Collection, it hopes to grow and increase its selection to around 1,000 films. In the meantime, if it can continue to compete with other sites such as jaman.com, and if it can prove that there is a base for art house cinema out there, there is a good chance The Auteurs will be a new trend worth contending with. Until time proves this right or wrong, young cinephiles may rejoice again, knowing that there’s at least one more place to turn for solace.
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