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Several days ago, Scott Kirsner linked a CNET story about YouTube’s plans to automatically block all copyrighted content beginning in September. Google already pulls content based on copyright holder request, but if this ends up going through, it would have a much farther reaching impact on the kinds of fil m clips and oddities that I often link to on SpoutBlog. I think it’s a mistake. Right now, YouTube is the closest thing we have to a comprehensive online archive of 20th century culture. Just in terms of its educational potential, it’s invaluable.

So, while we can, let’s put the YouTube archive to good use. If there’s any filmmaker whose work lends itself to an introduction via YouTube, I’d say it’s Michelangelo Antonioni. At the very least, the YouTube watching experience may be the only way to transform his work for short attention spans. His best scenes worked almost as self-contained shorts; his poderous narrative pacing can make a full feature feel at best like an event, and at worst, like an unbearable slog.

Almost all of the Antonioni clips currently available on YouTube represent the last scenes of their respective films, which makes sense, as several of these are now film school staples, although I’d love to be able to show you, say, the opening of Red Desert. Still, I’ve compiled four final scenes here; consider the fifth spot reserved. If someone manages to upload a clip (ANY clip) from Red Desert (available on frill-free DVD) before YouTube’s proposed regulations go into effect, I’ll update this post.

1. Zabriskie Point (1970)

Antonioni’s much-maligned hippies-in-Death Valley film is by turns laughable and stunning. It’s most famous for its two hallucinogenic set pieces: in one, two beautiful road-tripping strangers screw on rocky desert shoal. As Fiona A. Villella noted at Senses of Cinema, this “leads to a complete breakdown in realist narrative logic as multiple couples and groups of young people engaged in sexual play magically appear throughout the valley.” Antonioni repeats the logic of multiples in the latter set piece, in which the female half of this couple watches as her boss/sugar daddy’s vacation home spectacularly explodes to sounds of Pink Floyd on the sound track. Antonioni presents the explosion in slow motion, over and over again from different angles, cut with close-ups of the innards of the house (the TV, the fridge) combusting as if part of a separate demolition. Thus hippie bliss gives way to violent, anarchic destruction. Absolutely, without a doubt, the best art film explosion sequence of all time.

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Under discussion:

The Rum Diary  (2008)

• If it’s a labor dispute that finally gets The Rum Diary off the ground, then so be it. “The latest statistics for filming in L.A. confirm what everybody already knows,” writes Dave McNary for Variety. “The studios and networks have revved up production, stockpiling projects as strike fever engulfs Los Angeles.”
• After at least a decade of producing softcore for teenage boys, Maxim’s getting in the business of … producing softcore for teenage boys! The men’s mag will slap their name on a Screen Gems teen comedy called Virginity Rocks!, which will tell the story of “a gorgeous transfer student who clings to her virginity and gets all the promiscuous girls in school to abstain from sex; in response, the popular guys ask the school stud to try to bed the poster girl and ending her ‘virginity rocks’ campaign.”
• IMAX has announced a plan to release Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Rolling Stones documentary, on their massive screens simultaneous to the film’s September 21 premiere in “real” theaters. Insert “do we really need to see those walking corpses on a such a scale?” joke here.

While we’re on the subject of Ingmar Bergman, let’s talk about Bergman parodies. To gauge the Swedish’s master’s impact on 20th century culture, one needs to look no further than YouTube, where you’ll find “Bergmanesque” clips from Mystery Science Theater 3000, French and Saunders and an Alamo Drafthouse video contest. Then there’s the above clip, which appears to be an NYU student short. Titled simply Thirst, its YouTube summary reads in part: “What if director Ingmar Bergman did a commercial for Coca Cola? Written and directed by Leslie Chase, the film is set in the late 50’s and follows the thirsty, lonely lives of two Swedish sisters.” It’s tribute, it’s dead-on parody, and it’s genius.