Oh, some context — ten years ago I decided to watch as many Ingmar Bergman things I could lay may hands on, which turned out to be 87 things, so I landed on this design for the blog series:
Most of those things I watched were his well-known and fully available films, but he’d also done a large number of stage plays, and there’d been a number of short films, TV plays, and short documentaries about Bergman, and these were really hard to come by.
I found a guy in France (I think; still not sure) that sold bootleg DVD-Rs of this stuff — he must have been collecting for decades, and that helped a lot. I also found stuff on the torrents, and on other blogs, and in the end, people who had recorded stuff from the TV in the 80s also sent me things.
Anyway, after watching all this marvellous stuff, I wondered whether I should do something with this treasure trove… but I didn’t. Then I saw that the bootleg guy had totally disappeared off the face of the internet, and his DVD-R burning business with it.
So I thought the time was probably come to just upload all the things that were not commercially available anywhere to Youtube, as “The Bergman Channel”. And so I did, and I was surprised that the channel survived the copyright strikes, but it did — mainly because the main copyright holder to Bergman’s work is Svenska filmindustrier, who have mainly just claimed copyright for the things in Sweden. So if you’re in Sweden, half of The Bergman Channel is blocked.
But today I got this:
The interesting thing is this:
What to do next
[…]
* Delete your video. If you remove your video before 7 days are up, your
video will be off the site, but your channel won’t get a copyright strike.
It’s a “soft” copyright strike? I’ve never seen one of those before. Are they new? Anyway, it’s nice, because if you get three normal copyright strikes, your entire channel disappears. So thanks — I’ve now deleted “Karins ansikte”. Is it available elsewhere now? I haven’t paid attention…
While I was logged into the channel again for the first time in at least four years, I had a look at the stats:
Hey, total view time is 17K hours! Nice. Looks like the most-watched Bergman thing is the long-lost made-for-TV film Rabies. I mean, you can understand why it’s long-lost — the video quality is kinda bad, and if they don’t have a better source than this, I guess they’d feel bad about releasing it commercially. But like I said, I haven’t really checked whether these things have become available by now…
Watch them all here before they disappear. By this rate (one going missing every four years), that’ll take only 128 years…