Online Video Streaming: Retro Remote's Sworn Enemy
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ShareAside from the Bigfoot and Alien Autopsy films, which have transcended the convenient label of “cinema” to become actual artifacts themselves (Alien Autopsy less successfully than the Patterson film, but we’ll give it a pass anyway), Filippe’s Forbidden Files are probably the most successful of the genre. “Collected” from around the globe, these short films arrive from nowhere like a randomly encountered news broadcast or government/military briefing, stay just long enough to create a sense of unease, and then disappear leaving just before we have a chance to properly scrutinise them.
Though the format is fairly typical – grainy, shaky camerawork with imprecise details and cold, scientifically detached narrators – Filippe draws considerable variety from his “found footage”, piecing together a narrative from vague fragments of black and white footage (as in “The Witch”, or “The Soldier”), making narrative suppositions from military or surveillance recordings (as in “The E.T.” or “The Divers”), or constructing a more solid documentary style (as in Siberia or The Ferguson Case).
Unlike the Patterson and Alien Autopsy films, Filippe make no serious attempt to get us to believe his films are real, but simply launches freely into the pleasure of the hoax, tweaking and suggesting just enough, and taking joy in exploring and exploiting restraint rather than the overt excess that invades so many later “found footage” films. Some, like Siberia are in fact fairly dull, but even in that lies a certain charm, as though we’re watching a classified instructional film that makes to pretense at asking for our interest or offering sordid details; the ordinary looking “cyborg” getting his arm trapped in a window isn’t much of a story and Filippe knows that the trick is not trying to turn it into one:
Adding to Filippe’s careful restraint is the excellent voice-over work, suggesting a clipped scientific or military objectivity, but echoing Filippe’s careful bursts of fantasy in its occasional hints of emotion and uncertainty; sometimes the voice needs to speed up to recount the events as the tempo of the events increases – a purely functional process, but one that accentuates the tension incredibly well. Similarly, it trails off as the events come to a close, not able to offer any real answers or details about what we’ve just seen, but simply caught up in a superficial – and unavoidably insufficient – recounting.
Most striking of all is the fact that even our narrator seems to be at a remove from the footage, often simply translating another voice-over which we hear faintly below; even our guide is only a secondary translator.
In fact, this “secondary” voice-over has been one of the reasons The Forbidden Files has been so elusive for English-language viewers: French versions seemed to be circulating, but The Forbidden Files is one of those rare instances where a dubbed soundtrack in one’s own language is more “authentic” than subtitles. After all, The Forbidden Files have no original language: the layering of translation and hints of an purely informational/instructional distribution are part of its aesthetic design, so the cinephile “authenticity” of “original language” audio with subtitles is, for once, wildly inappropriate.
Unfortunately, the DVD release here lists only French audio and English subtitles, and it’s pricey enough (and tough enough to find) to prohibit a casual investigative purchase for international buyers: judging from the description, and from the mainly French audio versions available as clips online, it seems unlikely that it has an English (or any alternate) audio option.
That was enough to make me cling to my static-filled, crappy (wonderful!) VHS copy of a few of the Files from late night TV broadcasts on Australian TV as part of SBS’s long-gone short film compilation series Eat Carpet (1989). Retro Remote still has pangs of regret over lending his high school drama teacher his VHS dub of Blue Velvet and never getting it back. Losing Blue Velvet was no big deal, but The Forbidden Files recorded from TV at the end of the tape (almost all of them!) have been, for too many years, irreplaceable. (I actually dropped into my teacher’s office on one of my last days of school to get it back – as luck would have it, he was watching that very copy of Blue Velvet at the time, and teenage awkwardness prevented me from claiming it…)
After all those years mourning lost “found footage”, Retro Remote was as pleased as a Siberian cyborg to find that ARTE, the European TV network that first broadcast The Forbidden Files, was officially streaming them on their website. Much more exciting was that first moment of English audio that emerged before the typical buffering began: ARTE offers The Forbidden Files with French, German and English audio!
Online video streaming is still Retro Remote’s sworn enemy: precious access could be taken away as quickly and capriciously as was my old VHS tape. I’ve written previously on the importance of online “piracy” in preserving film and television history in “Pirates Become Canon Keepers”, and check out Stephen Bowie’s excellent posts on online video from his indispensable Classic TV History Blog for some solid anti-streaming sentiments here and here. But ARTE’s streaming will at least do for now and if we’re lucky it will stay available until a better option (hopefully) appears. (Retro Remote will gladly trade a copy of 100% verified authentic footage of an unexplained object from his kitchen for an English-language set of the The Forbidden Files.)
Otherwise, The Forbidden Files is available on DVD (presumably only in French) here here and here.
A good (but lonely) unofficial site with information about all the entries is here.
The English, French and German language versions can all be found on ARTE TV’s website.
Streaming restrictions may prevent viewing in the US and other regions (Australia seems OK for now), which is just one more reason while these should be made more widely available.
In the meantime, any “found footage” genre fans should check out some of the forgotten gems of the genre, and hope that, because of streaming restrictions and limited distribution, they don’t end up lost again.
