Okay, So What the Hell Happened to Fandor? (Also, I Prattle On About Arthouse Theaters)

Maybe the most arthouse-y streaming service of them all, Fandor, looks to have gone the way of the Chevy Nova in December and NOBODY is talking about it.

Was I their only subscriber?

Or are we all still numb from Filmstruck’s demise last November?

Fandor’s deal was (is?) that it was all about independent films. They made a big thing about their selection of Werner Herzog classics. They had Hal Hartley movies. Oodles of short films from all eras. A scattershot, but interesting, selection of deep, deep catalog stuff, like 1940s cliffhanger serials, old B-westerns and Pakistani movies from 1963. You could browse movies by what country they were from. You could browse movies by what festival it played in, from Cannes to Venice to SXSW to the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

They were the first streaming service to bring the arthouse aesthetic online. Fandor were doing something cool and I was happy to support them for six years. I saw River of Grass on Fandor. And Warning Shadows. And Sins of the Fleshapoids. And Going Places.

Then in December they rejected my bank card out of the blue. The card was good. I figured it was merely a glitch and I blew it off until early January when I decided to watch something. I went to Fandor’s site intending to get my account back in good-standing and maybe finally watch that 1963 Pakistani movie that was in my queue.

No dice. Error message. They didn’t want my bank card. They didn’t want any of my cards. I even offered them a handjob. They didn’t want that, either. I was locked out. Shunned. Turned away.

So I turned to Twitter, which, like it or not, can a be great place to search for news about things like this, and I found that other people had the same experience. Fandor weren’t accepting payments from anybody, even a powerful blogger with about seven readers like me.

Further research (meaning, scrolling down the Twitter search results for ten more seconds) reveals that, aw fuck, Fandor laid off pretty much their entire staff during the holidays and are now in limbo, hoping for a big buyer to come in and pick up the pieces.

Okay, looks like that’s it. Party’s over. Instant streaming has lost one of its few “arthouses”. And, shit, I feel like I barely made a dent in my queue over there.

(Note: From what I understand Fandor is still usuable and still taking payments if you subscribed through Amazon, which I once tried to do about a year ago until I noticed that the selection in Fandor’s Amazon channel was smaller than the one on their direct website/Roku app.)

It begs the question: Is the very idea of the “arthouse” outdated? I’ve seen young people who find the term confusing and even offensive. They take it literally. They see it as a false hierarchy thing. They think that we’re saying that three-hour Swedish films about suicidal sheep herders is “art” and everything else is beneath it.

They don’t know the arthouse experience like some of us crumbling old people do.

For me, the arthouse was simply an alternate “world”. A place where the trailers before the movie were in Russian or German and touted Emmanuelle Beart and where you got to see films off the beaten path. The audiences were often more respectful than the ones at the AMC and the theaters themselves didn’t try to beat into you the idea that a night at the movies always needed to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys. The arthouse didn’t have arcades or cartoon character mascots. No dancing popcorn box animations before the movie.  The arthouse was a place where the movie might be depressing. Or abstract. Or French. All surefire ways to not please a crowd.

In other words, the arthouse was a place that could open your eyes to all of the things that movies can be. And it was a living part of film culture. It was a place where you could go and other people were there.

(We had two great ones in Dallas when I was growing up.

The now-demolished two-screen UA Cine, which dated back to the 1960s and had chandeliers in the lobby and curtains that parted over the screen when the show started.

And the Inwood Theatre, which opened in 1947 and went arthouse back in the 80s with one large room and two little shoeboxes crammed upstairs. It’s still open today and is still the most beautiful-looking theater in the city, but its programming has gone mainstream.)

In most cities, the situation is more watered-down today. The modest neighborhood theater is a rarity. Everything is bigger now, with the norm being at least eight screens, including the new breed of “arthouse” theaters, where the overhead is so high that they usually need to devote half or more of those screens to mainstream stuff.  Sometimes the only difference between it and a regular AMC today is that the arthouse serves hummus and wine.

Now, I’m not one to pit “high culture” against “low culture”. One of this site’s tenets is that there’s no distinction between them (no “high culture”, no “low culture”; just “culture”, that’s it). I like to think that I give equal respect to 8 1/2 and Gremlins 2: The New Batch in reviews. The Constant Bleeder is all about good times and how kicks can be found everywhere, whether it’s in low-budget movies, big-budget movies, trashy novels or thrift store records. If you ever catch me putting on airs like I think that I’m the smartest guy in the room, please smack me.

But I do miss the old school arthouse theater. After 35mm film, it might be the thing that I miss most about moviegoing in the past.

I think that film culture lost a little something when we lost these destination places that dealt in exclusivity. We lost a scene and the idea of supporting it.

Culture is vast. Movies come out all of the time. Nobody can keep up with everything.

That’s why filters are helpful. Record labels, publishers, film companies, etc.

Arthouse theaters were one of those filters. They were usually small. If you liked a place, what they chose to show was meaningful. You might check it out just for that.

Maybe you can’t just move that idea to streaming, where you get 5,000 movies to wade through. Maybe that’s why Fandor took a tumble.

They certainly tried. The Fandor site was also packed with original articles and videos on film theory. They worked hard over several years to be a place where film freaks could gather. And it fell through.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about subscribing to MUBI and I intend to be all over The Criterion Channel when that starts up (and, hopefully, is available on Roku). Because it sure would be nice to have some vibrant niche movie streaming services today.

Every now and then though, I get to thinking that maybe you can’t have the “arthouse” without, ya know, the arthouse.