It’s been a little less than a week since Turner Classic Movies was saved from being ground up in Warner Bros. Discovery’s relentless content sausage grinder. Film preservation takes a lot of work, both from official, mainstream providers and some—well—less authorized sources. Over the past week, eagle-eyed classic film buffs spotted that TCM aired content originally created for the famed pirate movie archival community Karagarga.
As originally reported by TorrentFreak, users on the Karagarga forums had watched TCM air El Jardín de las Delicias—AKA The Garden of Delights—during Sunday’s block. Some viewers watching the movie with English translation noticed that at the end of the film, the subtitles were credited to “supersoft and scalisto for KG.” Twitter user @rarefilmm picked up on the reference to the BitTorrent tracker during El Jardin’s end credits.
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Karagarga is a famed private community working to maintain an online repository of old film content hosted across BitTorrent. The community works to preserve old, obscure, and cult films (and some other media like books or TV series) for the purpose of preservation and to help modern folks see the work of past generations. Karagarga eschews newer films that could get it picked up on Hollywood’s relentless anti-piracy radar. You need an exclusive invite to get access to its forum, though the community is cited by film buffs as one of the most effective movie preservation efforts of the modern era.
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Here’s where things get even stranger. Gizmodo reached out to TCM for comment about where it sources its subtitles, and a spokesperson told us that, according to film distribution company Janus Films, the subtitles were supplied by the rights holder, Video Mercury. The company is a Spain-based rights holder of many classic Spanish-language films.
The Karagarga subtitles could have been uploaded elsewhere online, so the rights holder could have sourced the English subtitles somewhere off the Karagarga archive. We reached out to Video Mercury for comment and about where the company sources its subtitles, but we did not immediately hear back. We will update this story if we hear more.
According to @rarefilmm, the same set of pirated subtitles appears when viewing the film through the Criterion Channel streaming service. It would make sense that both services received the subtitles through the rights holder. From the outside perspective, it’s a confluence of both the more “legitimate” side of film preservation and the rough-and-tumble internet folks working on their own time to sanctify film history. In another way, it represents that historical and artistic preservation isn’t—and shouldn’t— be beholden to the crushing whims of capitalism.
This is the state that TCM recently found itself in when Warner Bros. Discovery and its CEO David Zaslav planned to gut the legacy content channel, leading to protests from film buffs throughout Hollywood and beyond. It took high-profile Hollywood directors Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese to stop Zaslav’s bulldozers from razing one of the world’s best mainstream sources of film history.
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But the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO may be too busy trying to fight off the negative press of his ongoing cost-cutting crusade to care about the ethos of historical preservation. Freelance film critic Jason Bailey wrote a scathing article for GQ magazine about Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery, calling him “perhaps the most hated man in Hollywood” for his efforts trying to kill TCM and for destroying content like the unreleased Batgirl movie.
Based on his recent comments about the ongoing writers’ strike and college graduates heckling the CEO, Bailey was more than a little correct in his assessment. As first reported by The Washington Post, that didn’t stop GQ from first editing, then pulling the story after Zaslav’s company complained about “numerous inaccuracies.” Knowing his current cost-cutting crusade is ongoing, it’s easy to see that “most hated man in Hollywood” moniker sticking around.
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