There also was a short segment about KG in Cahiers du Cinéma a while ago.
Here's the full article translated from French:
How to be a cinephile at the internet age?
The New Cinephilia (yet, yet)
By Hugues Perrot and Vincent Poli
These last years, it seems that there’s a certain distrust around the term “cinephile” and the world that surrounds it. It sounds as something cheesy, something already gone. There’s-no-need-to-go-back. A whole overused idea of cinephilia comes to mind when we pronounce the word. The teaching of cinema at the university certainly is one of the reasons of that distrust, what explains our conflictual relation to the university (expressed in the March edition of the Cahiers), we, who claim ourselves cinephiles. What does it mean, to be a cinephile? Louis Skorecki, in Contre la nouvelle cinéphilie (Cahiers no. 298, October 1978), has described at length this way of being, this obscure world where we plunge when we enter into a movie theatre. The cinephile probably looks more for dissension than for consensus, even if it means going through the specific routes of this kind of reasoning – namely, erecting a pedestal around such and such filmmaker maudit. But what are the ideas behind the head of a 20 year-old cinephile today, the ideas that constantly make him submerge deeper and deeper into the thickness of this darkness, which he crosses and which he lives? Probably the idea of building up a house made of films, of arming himself up in the world -- and, at the same time, of offering himself to it.
From the side of those who do not distrust, on the contrary, the term “cinephile”, the practices of our generation, the one that has not known cinema before the Internet, raise a certain panic regarding the fact that “everything is available”. In the dossier about Henri Langlois published in April in the Cahiers, Serge Toubiana, the director of the French Cinémathèque, asked himself: “Do we become cinephiles through the Internet? I’m not sure”. So we, young cinephiles, explaining our uses of the Internet, would like to answer Toubiana, and to dispel some ideas received from him.
What cinephilia on the Internet?
First of all, we do not militate for a change in the modes of apprehension of films. We do not watch films neither in a tablet nor in a mobile phone. Neither do we watch them in bits, looking for unique sequences that would make them "cult films", nor considering that they are decomposable at leisure. If it's true that films dialogue among them, they also stay, in the great majority of cases, untouchable monoliths. The modes of appropriation, after all, haven't changed after the advent of DVD or VHS. Downloaded films are watched in a computer or, whenever possible, in a TV -- the biggest screen available. Although it is a simple file, the movie calls to escape from the computer. In other words, we're always in a scheme "films watched in theaters" + "films seen at home", the same as before the explosion of downloads.
In this case, what would be the contribution of the Internet? According to Serge Toubiana, "today, more than before the Internet, the work of art goes to you more than you go to it." Does a work come to us because it is available, findable on the Internet? It seems that, on the contrary, we now face such a multitude of films that it is difficult to make a choice. Even if the Internet has dramatically improved access to films, it's not as easy to promote them. Films now can get lost in a pile of possible titles well beyond the dreams of 80's and 90's collectors. The Internet, providing easy access to all those films, did way more than putting them all on an equal footing: it mixed the cards. As rightly said Serge Toubiana, there is no "programmer" on the Internet. So what is the task of a cinephile? He must choose from this huge sum the film he will watch.
We frequently go to the Cinémathèque, we follow its programming. But what the Internet gave us is precisely the chance to also escape the logic of programming, to free ourselves and to extend our expertise: to complete it and to research (to feel). To accomplish this research, we must explore cinema in its major lines but also in its dark sides. We must explore its underground. Any cinephile will feel this dilemma: at the same time we want to see everything, there are just too many films. Inevitably, a choice has to be made. But this choice, when we download a movie on the Internet, actually is not different from the one we make when choosing which movie to see on a Wednesday, since twenty of them come out every week.
KG Community
To get away from a fixed image of the Internet, you need to know certain download sites for rare and minimally-edited films on DVD, often private but particularly intriguing, such as Karagarga, Cinemageddon or AsianDVDClub. These sites cultivate secrecy with a system of cooptation, strict rules and, in the case of Karagarga, no mainstream film prior to the ‘80s (this may seem strange but if Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant isn’t allowed, find it elsewhere!). And yet, everything is done to promote sharing (créer un partage) among the members — including a download system (torrent), based on a ratio that forces you to share part of a file for a certain amount of time before you can procure another film. In order to maintain a stable ratio, you’re supposed to limit yourself to around two films per week, but many new users, because they haven’t read or understood the rules and they’ve jumped on a dozen or so rarities, end up “limited” (Karagarga, less elitist than a few years ago, no longer bans the gourmand just “limits” him). It’s in this way that this site has become the most attractive and most secret gold mine on the Internet. To encourage discovery, a new theme is regularly put in place: the “Master of the Month” is subject to more flexible rules and invites everyone to discover, say, the relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis, the Thai New Wave or Soviet science-fiction. It’s a form of curation, definitely rare on the Internet. Each film has its own detailed page, replete with several screen shots. It’s rather often that once they catch our eye, we pause for a moment, caught in their careful study — we’ve found it! And we discover, although nothing can prepare us for it, the cinema of Mani Kaul, Gerard Holthuis, Zhang Ming, Bahman Farmanara, Kinuyo Tanaka or even Alain Cuny, the more than 80-year-old director of a unique film (the marvelous L’Annonce faite a Marie in 1991). But it’s also an excellent port of entry into any film whatever and may just as well send you towards Red Line 7000 by Hawks.
Users are also encouraged to create subtitles and collaborate on large projects. Who knows if English subtitles exists for such works asLa Maison des bois (Pialat) or Six fois deux / Sur et sous la communication (Godard)? At this moment, there are subtitles in the midst of being finalized for the incredible series of Manoel de Oliveira: Amor de Perdiçao (Doomed Love). Of course — and it’s especially true for this film (by de Oliveira) since we watched all of its nearly five hours at the Cinematheque — there exist copies with subtitles, but these remain confined to audience-based screenings, and so we return to the problem: how many people are able to take part in the screenings of films that are rarely shown? How many don’t live near an arthouse theater or repertory?
We’re all conscious of the loss that comes of viewing a film on a small screen rather than a large one. The debate is closed — let’s drop it. In rediscovering films, in talking about them, in sharing in them, humbly, we become the projectionists of our own proper cinema [such a beautiful line in the original French: “En retrouvant des films, en en parlant, en les partageant, humblement, nous devenons les projectionnistes de notre propre cinéma”]. On Karagarga, you only have to click on our handles (“Chambre verte” and “Bison pourri”) to see what we’ve downloaded and in this way discover the grand lines that forge our cinephilia.