The Fate of Cinephilia in the Age of Streaming

In the summer of 1983, I travelled to Paris with nothing but a knapsack and a small carry-on satchel—not even a laptop computer, which hadn’t been invented yet—and managed to see about a hundred movies in less than three months, thanks to the copious offerings at the Cinémathèque Française and the city’s many boldly programmed theatres. But a day or two after I arrived I called my one friend of a friend there, a young Parisian woman who’d been a foreign-exchange student in my home town. She drove over to get me at my hotel, with an apology. Before she could take me to see some sights, she had an errand to run: she had to return a tape to the video store. I was astonished. Why in the world would a person who lived in the thick of the Parisian cinematic cornucopia need to own a VCR and rent videotapes? (As I recall, the city had more than three hundred theatres at that time—and the tape in question was “Taxi Driver.”)