Embracing YouTube’s “Transcendental Amateurism”

Film critic Peter Bradshaw has fallen prey to the addictive allure of YouTube. “In parallel with its own exponential growth, my fascination with YouTube has galloped into a raging obsession. Whole evenings, theoretically dedicated to writing, have been hijacked by a terrible need to click away from the Microsoft Word document, onto the internet browser, and from there the lure of YouTube is irresistible. What’s not to be fascinated by? However slick or however rickety, the best of these mini-movies have an unmediated quality, a found-object realness that is completely lacking in anything available in the cinema or on TV.”