There are a few things you can't do on YouTube.
Chief among them is this:
Playing a long unedited clip of a film you did not make.
The YouTube Content ID system is trained to look for long clips of unedited footage.
If it sees it, it flags it.
The length can vary. Ten to thirty seconds is common.
You can get around it with various editing tricks --
scale the footage down, put it in a frame,
flip the footage around, speed it up,
slow it down, play it next to other clips in the same frame -- basically,
do anything to fundamentally alter the sequence of images that appear in the frame.
This is why, for example, so many video essays take the form of super-cuts --
quick, little moments like these don't matter much to a Content ID algorithm --
and why so many great video essayists chose to talk about subjects whose work can be expressed with short,
punchy clips: the camera work of Michael Bay, the production design of Wes Anderson, that sort of thing.
And it's why so few video essays show long, unedited clips.
Or long, single takes.
Like this one.
I've always thought that this system made some sense.
If you're a copyright holder and you need a program to look for copyright violations,
you'll want to go after instances where the footage is unaltered, where the clip hasn't been transformed.
The algorithm operates on the belief that the essence of a movie is time.
Captured once, it is the unaltered, unchanging truth of what a camera sees.
The director of this scene would agree.
So this scene from Andre Tarkovsky's masterpiece, Nostalgia,
which documents a single task being completed in real time, is nearly impossible to show on YouTube.
[Don Draper:] Nostalgia:
It's delicate,
but potent.
[Kyle] Now, if you're a fan of Mad Men, you probably think you know the etymology of the word "nostalgia."
[Don Draper:] In Greek,
nostalgia literally means
the pain from an old wound.
[Kyle] Don Draper's not accurate here.
"Algos" is the Greek word for pain, but "nostos" doesn't mean "wound"; it means "to come home."
It's a rough cognate with the English word "nest."
Nostalgia:
The pain to return home.
[Film narrator:] This is the first photograph I ever made with the direct intention of making art
[Kyle] This is from another film called "nostalgia," by experimental director Hollis Frampton
His narration describes photographs. His camera shows the photographs.
Shows them as they burn.
And the descriptions of the photos don't match.
The voiceover describes the next photo in the sequence, not the current one.
Photographs, themselves captured time,
which now only exist as records of their own destruction.
And as we see them burned,
we're already starting to forget their stories, as we struggle to remember the present.
The future, described.
The past, presented as it's destroyed.
There's a reason this character is doing this -- why he's trying to carry a candle across a pool.
Because he met a maniac who thought the world was going to end,
and so he kept his family locked away for the better part of a decade
to protect them.
He tried carrying a candle across the pool of Saint Catherine and therefore
save the world.
He wound up publicly immolating himself in a bold, futile gesture.
In the film, our protagonist, a Russian in Italy, is trying to honor that madman
By taking his time.
The other factor in the algorithm is which companies decide to run which properties through the Content ID system.
So clips of latest blockbusters, with armies of copyright lawyers maximizing opening weekend profits, are the most likely to go down.
Some companies don't mind full reproductions as long as there's some transformative element,
because they know that meme YouTube can get plenty of mileage out of certain copyrighted clips.
And if full movies do exist on YouTube, they're only ones which no one cares about anymore,
ones past their marketability
There was an essay by Daniel Fairfax in the June 2018 issue of Senses of Cinema where he described how weird it was
to rediscover this made-for-tv Stephen King adaptation in its entirety on YouTube.
Absolutely the kind of thing that couldn't be made today.
Fittingly,
It's a movie about otherworldly monsters who swallow up the past when the past is no longer needed.
Fairfax called YouTube "the archive of detritus":
a dumping ground for undesired intellectual property.
And, seemingly, a great place to talk about cruddy old movies, dumb commercials --
things from the pre-streaming era of media.
Resurrected by jaded adults furious that they are no longer children.
Makes sense.
Until YouTube started cracking down on them.
Which led to the support of smaller video hosting sites,
like...
Blip.
Whose main draw outside of YouTube was its lack of a Content ID system.
I... used to be on blip.
It's been dead for, um,
three years now.
And, here I am, still listening to the orders of a maniac convinced the world was about to end.
even though the man was a fool, an abuser, cruel in his neglect, but... when you do something long enough
you tend to forget why you started.
And eventually it just becomes about the act itself.
And the reason why you started
becomes unimportant.
And you keep going, because you're in a constant present,
and it's not about memory, the past, or your future, but
just about doing the task before you.
Just about taking the next step.
Just about staying present in this moment of captured time.
Keeping the flame burning.