Streaming Hope, Streaming Despair, Still Streaming

It is a human habit, perhaps, to project the present into the future-a default mode that drives forward even when the road has crumbled.So it was with film in Year One of the pandemic, characterized by a state of denial shaded with panic.By the end of 2020, film festivals were adjusting their schedules according to an imaginary "after" as if the vaccine were set to materialize imminently, universally, and magically everywhere, to step out from behind the curtain and restore life to what it used to be: movie theaters open, film festivals under way. 1 Presumably in the screen version, in the new "normal" world, the more than a million dead will be rendered living again (if only).Are film scholars and cinephiles uniquely programmed for this kind of fantasy?Perhaps the alternative has been just too awful to imagine.But for anyone already weary of screens, screens, screens, there has been scant alternative, even in terms of column inches across publications.A lot of attention, including in FQ editorials, has been focused since the start of the pandemic either on the public spaces of film festivals and movie theaters or on the private accommodations of home viewing and mediated participation. 2 Somewhat perversely, every form of page-only, noninteractive "dumb" media has offered its readers an education in companies and platforms: Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, RingCentral, Microsoft Teams, and the new one that has probably arrived by the time you read this.At the same time, in the digital domestic sphere, there has been a barely remarked reproduction of the pervasive social inequities outside: no computer, few computers, bad internet, no Wi-Fi, less access to platforms and interfaces, less or no income, less or no childcare, less or no access to extended family (at least, not without significant risk).The pandemic is more than a pundit assignment, and it was killing massively at press time.In terms of the public sphere, plenty of ink has been spilled opining as to the future of movie theaters, with theaters still shuttered and commercial chains declaring