Getting Right In Under Kanopy

Monday is movies. Or TV. And today it’s both. Via Kanopy. A wonderful worldwide service connected to your library card. I love Kanopy. It’s one of the best online archives for film lovers.

In the cross-table dinner-party conversations of Saturday night, I heard someone say they weren’t watching the current season of Succession just yet because they had cancelled Neon, so that the family could have Netflix.

I felt guilty. We have Netflix, Neon, Prime, Disney, Apple, YouTube (Premium), and a monthly Patreon deal with Aro Video. Add Spotify Premium into the mix and we’re paying for a lot of subs. Add free channels Tubi and TVNZ+ into the mix and we’re most certainly not starved for content.

Quite the opposite.

I had spent the two days prior to this dinner-party enjoying another streaming platform altogether. My new favourite: Kanopy.

Kanopy is free. And when I was first told about it – a few years ago now – I scoffed. Another streaming platform. A freebie. Restricted to six-plays a month. Pah! I would not need this service.

But then, a few months back, I spotted it there in the apps on a smart-TV at a friend’s house. This wasn’t just something you had to clunkily access on your computer’s browser. This was a legit “channel” now.

Kanopy is a network of films, TV shows, and educational materials available to you for free most-anywhere in the world…if you have a library card.

I love having a library card – and I use it most days. I’m always reserving books, collecting and returning books. Doing my best to read some of the books too. And now I’m using my library card/membership by being signed up to Kanopy. You can get DVDs from your library (usually) but you can also access the archive of library titles via Kanopy.

Every month you get six films. Once you’ve clicked ‘play’ on something, you have three days to watch/rewatch. If you let that lapse and then head back, it’ll count as another play. The counter in the corner of the screen when you log-in refreshes on the first of each month, so you can’t roll over five unplayed films to carry through.

You might blitz six films in a month. And that’s fine. They’re free! (Your library pays a distribution fee/royalty per play).

But also, you have the kids to pick up and drop-off, work to presumably clock in on now and then, and, if you’re a normal human being, you probably have Neon at the very least, so that you can watch each and every tantalising and devastating episode of the latest season of Succession right as it drops, weekly. You might also need the Disney channel too, so you can watch re-runs of Golden Girls. And, anyway, the point is…you might think you’ll use up six films quickly. Reality is, you won’t.

On Friday night, I started watching Miami Connection, a 1987 martial arts/action-mess that wasn’t widely available until its 2012 re-release. It features a synth-score to die for and ultimately makes no sense. That basically has me written all over it. And though I had to chip away at it over the weekend, I was glad to find it. And I think I might have loved it.

On Saturday morning, I rewatched Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold – a documentary about the internet and the tech-dystopia we’re willingly hurtling ourselves towards. I loved this when I first saw it (released in 2016) and it was just as good on a rewatch. Disturbing, fascinating stuff. So many smart people interviewed for this film. And put together with Werner’s signature/baffling touches.

I also rewatched Ron Mann’s 1982 concert/documentary, Poetry in Motion. I used to own this on DVD, and regret moving it on. Finding this again on Kanopy has been one of the recent highlights of my movie-fixation. I’ve watched it a three or four times on Kanopy in the last few months. Poetry in Motion features around 40 poets (Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders) and has some mind-blowing performances. It was a revelation to me when I first watched it in the early 2000s. And it’s as much a comfort-food concert-doco watch as The Last Waltz or Stop Making Sense.

I’m up early on Monday morning to write this, and in the background, I’m watching Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, a PBS TV doco-episode from the early 00s, linked to the book of the same name, which explores the story behind the famous Billie Holiday song. The book is fantastic, and I’m a Billie Holiday fanatic, so I’m always going to watch anything I can find relating to her or her music. This is more about “Lewis Allan” (Abel Meeropol. The man that wrote that song. But by association, it’s about Billie Holiday. I have a YouTube channel full of Billie Holiday docos and yet I only found this one a month or so ago on Kanopy.

A friend sent through a list of 100 essential horror films and asked how many I had seen. I did a quick head-count of 70, which was more than I had at first thought perhaps, and instantly it became less than I liked. So, straight to Kanopy where I looked up 20 of the 30 I haven’t yet seen and straight away added them to my watch list.

My Kanopy watch list features about 200 films. Yeah, sure, I might never make it through all of them. And if I really get a roll-on, I’ll be stalling every five-or-six days waiting for the next month to roll around. But it’s a vital interface. A catalogue. A collection to behold. I can watch some of these on the far-too-many other platforms I subscribe to, but I might gather them all in one place at least – to make sense of them.

Isn’t that how it works with libraries? The library doesn’t feel cheated on if I reserve a book, check it out, start it, then buy it from a store or on my Kindle, returning the copy for someone else to check out.

Kanopy is a wonderful service.

I thought to highlight it – perhaps you have heard of it but hadn’t signed up (it’s easy, you just need a library card). Or maybe this is all news to you. Free films that you’re paying for with your library card. A wonderful worldwide service.