issue 7: Cathode Cinema

Discussed: Cathode TV, “underground cinema laboratory,” Los Angeles, Bradley Friedman, Shuji Terayama, Twitch, “Cathode flavor,” PRON, chat, community, etc.

Decades before people were “killing their TVs,” television represented something different, and more hopeful. Following WWII, the medium surpassed radio as a source of remote connectivity. One had to plan around the programming. Family dinner happened before or after a specific show was scheduled to air. Elvis’ trademark pubic thrust scandalized millions of screens simultaneously. Households across the country were synced in this way. For better or worse, television was a unifying force.

Naturally, history had its way, and the medium was carved up, Tower of Babel style.

When the U.S. entered Covid lockdown, the three people behind LA-based film collective Cathode Cinema had been operating as an offline brick-and-mortar screening series. Suddenly, they found themselves without a shared physical world. Remote connectivity became the only way to operate, and Cathode TV was born.

The Cathode TV format was not location-specific, but it was live. Nightly schedules were announced on platforms like Instagram and supplemented by alluring frames from the films them- selves. Viewers synced up accordingly. Running parallel to the night’s presentations was a lively chat, a feature which continues to animate the channel’s broadcasts today.

A lot of highly-online individuals gave up the false freedom of the menu and surrendered to the cult’s all-night programming. They found themselves in something resembling a community. To date, the Cathode “cult” boasts hundreds of members, maybe more.

I spoke to the three behind Cathode – Jonnie Prey, Jesus Antonio Rivera, and Christopher Reid Martin – via email in the Summer of 2023.