By Marisa Pjerrou
Bijou Café (http://www.bijoucafe.com)
is a site dedicated to showcasing media in streaming video. New, independent
short films, original animated shorts, campy oldies, and even television
and film classics can all be found at Bijou Café. There are
lots of gems hidden in this site if you're up for a kind of treasure
hunt: you just have to be patient enough to sort through a lot of
junk in order to find the good stuff, and be willing to contend with
tricky navigation through the web site's cluttered and unintuitive
design. Finding Chris Marker's beautiful French black and white sci-fi
short, La Jetee (1962), was an incredible treat, as was the
"The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove" episode of the classic British
black and white television series from the 60's, Secret Agent,
with suave actor Patrick McGoohan. Even the original Satan's School
for Girls from the 70's with Kate Jackson was available in its
entirety!
Bijou Café is owned and promoted by NASDAQ-listed Streamedia.Net
(http://www.streamedia.net),
a "dynamic broadband services" company that focuses on Internet
and streaming media capabilities for business communications. Betting
heavily on the potential growth of streaming media in the Internet
(according to the company's press releases at its web site), Streamedia.Net
explains its acquisition of Bijou Café as a move to advance
the company's "presence in the critical online, and offline film
industry." On the www.bijoucafe.com
homepage, an overwhelming and disorganized menu of a whopping 21 buttons
surprisingly lacks an "About Us" link; rather one has to
go to the Streamedia.Net site in order to get some background info.
Here at www.streamedia.net,
Bijou Café is described as "one of the web's longest running
and most acclaimed venues for independent and classic films"
that apparently appeals to types ranging from film industry professionals
to "Gen XYZ into new media." Described as an "online
version of art-house cinema" the Streamedia.Net web site further
touts Bijou Café as having a "keen sense of film history"
as well as "respect for artists and their under appreciated works."
One thing that baffled me was that while Streamedia.Net obviously
knows a thing or two about design - this is obvious by looking at
the examples of web environments created for corporate clients shown
at the Streamedia.Net web site - how does it tolerate the totally
unaesthetic look of www.bijoucafe.com?
The contrast between the sleek, modern-looking Streamedia.Net web
site and the cheap, barely pulled-together look of Bijou Café
is startling; why parent company Streamedia.Net can't spend a few
bucks to give its subsidiary a makeover is odd.
It appears that anyone can submit an "independent" film
to Bijou Café: all you have to do is read the agreement, fill
out a form, and then send your piece in. You can also pay for your
film to be marketed by Bijou Café. Judging by the large amount
of on line promotion given to some really terrible-looking independent
film projects at www.bijoucafe.com
- Rock n' Roll Frankenstein, for example - one can guess the
producers must be paying Bijou Café through the nose. Whether
or not Bijou Café sorts through submitted materials with some
kind of criteria in mind for accepting or rejecting was unclear. Considering
the amount of incredibly bad fare I had to sort through on the end
user side, I'm led to think that Bijou Café isn't being too
selective in its choices. Bijou Café's home page prominently
promotes some of this mediocre material. I struggled to sit through
a surprisingly violent and pointless leprechaun cartoon. An equally
pointless live action short about an annoying animated movie script
(with actors Jason Alexander and Rob Schneider in cameos) was described
as one of Bijou Café's most popular pieces. I didn't even bother
to finish the documentary, Mac Kelly: Life in the Director's Chair,
that Bijou Café trashes in its write-up, but at the same time
promotes for its kitsch value. And I found one animated short, Big
Fun Show, to be incredibly offensive in its degrading, sexualized
depictions of women.
The few new films I did like at Bijou Café possessed some
similarities in being less dialogue and speech-oriented and more visually
dominant style, so in a way, more suitable for a web environment.
Buy American, a short silent film depicting a robot battle was quite
good, although the political statement it was trying to make about
car manufacturers was lost on me. An original made-for-the-net sci-fi
series Since Noon Yesterday, was also enjoyable and had some
pretty good actors, although it did seem to be ripping-off The
X-Files. A short animation piece without dialogue entitled Trigger
Finger by Gul Kevel Ramani was a beautifully done commentary on
guns, predator and prey. As I mentioned earlier, Bijou Café
does have some really good stuff interspersed between lots of worthless
junk. There is an impressive library of full length feature film classics
such as an early Fellini entitled The Swindle, a few films
by Ed Wood, Jr., Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, and more. The library
of shorts has some interesting films as well, like some interviews
and press footage of The Beatles, and several black and white shadow
puppet animation films by Lotte Reiniger, such as The Little Chimney
Sweep. A big problem was finding these oldies but goodies buried
in the Bijou Café web site; the home page doesn't promote these
pieces at all, and even when clicking onto the "Features"
and "Shorts" pages, it still isn't clear that a whole library
of films is available! While it's great that these features and shorts
are available at Bijou Café, I would personally rather see
La Jetee or The 39 Steps in the way it was meant to
be shown - in a theatre - rather than on a tiny 2"x2" screen
on my computer. And why would people want to watch a great film on
that tiny screen when they could also just rent the video and have
a better viewing experience?
One of my biggest recommendations for improvements to www.bijoucafe.com
is the need to completely overhaul its design, layout and navigation
controls: good features at the site, such as the classic features
and shorts, are not apparent to the user and are hard to find; too
big of a margin is given to annoying advertising banners that constantly
blink at the bottom of the screen, making the main body of the website
smaller; keep the background colors and/or wallpaper consistent with
every page, and don't pick horrid colors such as neon green! I could
continue endlessly with such suggestions. Another nitpicky suggestion
I have concerns the site's archival methods. If Bijou Café
is as keen on film history as the Streamedia.Net web site states it
to be, they should at least have the common courtesy of listing the
film director's name and the year in which the film was made next
to the blurb about the film - common knowledge to most in the citing
of or reference to a type of media.