Abrams' New "Star Trek" Loaded with Political ...
End Times: Violence and Destruction at Cannes ...
All Tomorrow's Parties: "The Great Gatsby" ...
Will Aronofsky's "Noah" Inflame Religious ...
The Best and Worst of Sundance 2013
Where is Jafar Panahi's "The White Ballo ...Did FilmCatcher Die?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but did FilmCatcher.com die? While surfing the web just now, I stumbled upon the fact that all of FilmCatcher.com content is no longer available, and the URL has been taken over by a movie blog.
Re-launched at Sundance 2008 as a film portal and magazine, which aimed to "bring attention to the freshest cinema" and announced digital distribution deals with Pyramide International, Originial Thinkers and a partnership with FilmAid International, FilmCatcher had all the new media tools that few film websites offer--namely plenty of original video content. I was recruited as a contributor, and respected freelance journalist Damon Smith was onboard as an editor. When I heard that Damon had left, I knew it was only a matter of time before fresh editorial would die, too. But the entire website and all its archives?
I hope it reappears in one form or another. This is personal, of course, as the articles I wrote for FilmCatcher are no longer to be found anymore on the web. Not to toot my own horn, but one particular piece, titled "Against the Future of Cinema: There Is No Such Thing as Small Movies," was one of my most widely read articles -- at least, according to Google. Definitely more opinion than journalism, the piece argued -- somewhat simplistically and idealistically -- that "the intimate environs of your living room are not sufficient for films that excavate human intimacy." I admit the piece was a bit of a polemic, but at least it raised some interesting discussions. I wrote about a half-dozen pieces for FilmCatcher, which I'd like to see available to readers. But that's just a tiny percentage of the material that Damon provided. I'm sure he and Cristina Garza didn't put all that time into seeing their work completely vanish from the memory of the Internet. Let's hope it returns.
Latest Tweets
-
“For the last 20 years, every director in China has faced a kind of tremendous torment & that torment is censorship,” http://t.co/uJIfxrts3Z
Posted 18 hours ago -
"What makes an image gay positive or not gay positive?" - on BEHIND THE CANDELABRA and queer cinema | ReelPolitik http://t.co/MsvEIWcaTO
Posted 19 hours ago -
The Anti-"Milk": Will "Behind the Candelabra" Get Tarnished as Homophobic? #Cannes2013 #HBO #GLAAD | ReelPolitik http://t.co/DpRQBcW6Xg
Posted 22 hours ago -
Self-censorship, Iranian cinema and Asghar Farhadi's "The Past" | ReelPolitik http://t.co/8at5HbbYCK
Posted 1 day ago
3 Comments
jingmei | June 16, 2012 9:22 AM
Wow, bit dramatic and just very very happy to see the vividly long life of the blog articles on Indiewire, fucking awesome (almost into tears). ;o Because just discovered Filmcatcher accidentally online, through some web links of Filmcatcher, so still don't know what's the condition of this website with cool videos nowadays. At least needs some momerials maybe.
Al - FilmCatcher Co-Founder & President | August 7, 2009 1:09 AM
Anthony, just to add to Kirk's response....yes, we do plan to explore migrating as much of the old site's content as we can over and somehow integrating it into the new blog format, either via links or, hopefully, more organically.
There are some technical challenges I won't bore you with, but what Kirk said about the old site's failure to attract sufficient interest to pay for all the wonderful content we loved producing is unfortunately right on the money. In a scene that is playing itself out all over the web these days, that sad fact was at the heart of our financiers' insistence that we either figure out how to refocus the site or look at abandoning it. While the latter approach would've certainly kept the archive online, like all survivors, we opted instead for life, and life requires evolution.
So we've thrown all the resources we can at executing a radical transformation that has enabled us to step up the volume and frequency of our posts to ten times what it was. Already, we're seeing promising increases in traffic, viewership, and best of all, the volume of responses and other indicators of engagement and interactivity on the site.
While it's going to be an ongoing process, and these are still very early days, from what we've seen in the last month, it's fair to say that we may soon be able to invest in the resurrection of some of the great stuff you, Cristina and Damon produced. With any luck, we may even be able to crank up those video cameras again that we have back in the closet gathering dust.
Trust us...we, like you, would really like to see that happen..
Kirk - Film Catcher Site Runner | July 24, 2009 9:49 AM
FilmCatcher as it was known is dead. Unfortunately Cristina's wonderful videos were not enough to keep a site afloat during these times of economic ill weather. We do hope to release them in the future in the form of a video blog but I won't even promise that will happen.
As far as your articles go, I assure you we would have no problem with you reprinting them on your blog. I would hate for them to disappear from the internet entirely. We really appreciate your past contributions and enjoy reading your writing where'er it may be printed.
The current blog on FilmCatcher is a different tone and a different scope of film for suresies, but we hope that some of our old readers can find value in it. If not, well, dems da breaks.