Streaming the past: Cinephilia, video-on-demand platforms and the present life of European film history

This article examines the tensions between transformation and continuity in recent European film culture. The emphasis is on the ways some institutions have channelled attention to film history and the tensions that go along with that. The Spanish streaming service Filmin will serve as a case study. The article will analyse how particular forms of interaction between the company and its users channel practices and discourses which were originally related to the European film culture of the 1950s and 1960s and are now being adapted to an online environment. This interest in the European film past is also analysed in relation to mounting attention to questions of cultural heritage that have grown progressively in European cinema since the 1990s.