We hear not nearly enough about the only high-profile film festival catering to the most unfairly deprecated genre in moving-picture history.
The 2024 Cat Video Fest is touring the United States. Earlier this week Ethan Shanfeld reported for Variety magazine as the event touched down in “one of New York’s finest cinemas”. The author admits the presentation is more a feature compilation than a genuine festival – “a 73-minute medley of cat videos compiled from around the world” – but, grossing about $280,000, or more than €250,000, it confirms the form’s stubborn resilience.
What other genre of online video would attract audiences of this size to a collective big-screen experience? All polls suggest that the stupid general public prefers (yeah, okay, I guess) dogs to (brilliant) cats. The canine is searched for on the internet considerably more often than is the feline. Yet there is no comparable enthusiasm for pooch videos on YouTube or TikTok. No ill-tempered labradoodle competed with the late Grumpy Cat, generator of memes galore from 2012 to her sad death in 2019. Dog enthusiasts will, no doubt, celebrate the fact that none of their number produced an equivalent to the irritating “I can has Cheezburger?” craze that appended baby talk to pictures of cats in comical situations from 2007.
Cats are worshipped on the internet as they were worshipped in ancient Egypt. In 2015 New York’s highbrow Museum of the Moving Image staged an exhibition, How Cats Took Over the Internet. “What you have here, in addition to some adorable imagery, is a window into the history of the internet,” Jason Eppink, associate curator, told the Guardian. True enough. From as long ago as 1998, when the world-wide web still wore chainmail and travelled on horseback, I can remember the brief enthusiasm for a site called Cat Scan. The idea was that you placed your unfortunate animal on an office scanner and then posted the result for the public to hoot at.
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Cat Scan wasn’t entirely humane; not surprisingly, it generated objections from those who felt Tabby or Biff would be permanently scarred (or at least blinded). One can only imagine the fury the site would now generate. One constant in the cat-video universe – and in all such universes – is the fainting crusader who detects abuse in even the most harmless clip. “It’s cruel to allow a cat that close to a television set as it could blow up and kill them,” catnap8735 hammers; “will be reprting 2 animal services,” kittydefender adds, “as feeding cats brown food causes ulcers”. Another strain, mostly American, worries about the cats contaminating work surfaces. Ninnies will ninny.
Anyway, Cat Scan faded and celebrities such as the bemused Grumpy Cat, the short-legged Lil Bub and the amiable, inquisitive Maru (still with us at 17) emerged. The lovely Bodega Cats account on X curates agreeable animals in American corner shops. The same blowhards who used to erroneously argue that pornography comprised 80 per cent of internet use, or some such figure, could plausibly tell the same lie about cats.
Both those activities have been around since cameras first produced moving pictures. The ninnies would, no doubt, object to the film-makers strapping boxing gloves on cats for the 1894 silent The Boxing Cats. The Sick Kitten, from a few years later, which has a little girl feeding “medicine” – maybe just milk – to her apparently happy pet, is a rare example of a film that, technical advances aside, would require no alteration to play with undimmed success 120 years after completion. One can imagine #SickKitten turning up to promote his spin-off web series at Comic-Con. Perhaps the little fellow was as well out of it.
So why has this gone on forever? JD Vance may use “childless cat ladies” as an unqualified insult, but cat lovers, whether heirless or not, continue to take up a staggering amount of bandwidth. Dogs, goldfish and budgerigars not so much. One theory is that cats’ flattish faces mirror the human visage better and are so that bit easier to anthropomorphise. Maybe. But pugs do an even better job. Another suggests that, more independent than dogs, cats are better at carving out independent identities.
Something else is worth considering: one way in which cats are unlike most of us humans. It is fairly easy to imagine a dog – bumbling forwards, tongue lolling, barking at the sky – as having something like a sense of humour. Not so Felis catus. Most cat videos are humorous and, nobody loving a comedian who laughs at his own jokes, they profit from apparently humourless stoicism as the beast gets his head stuck in a crisp bag or brings down the Christmas tree. They are Buster Keaton. They are Bill Murray. They are Steven Wright. They have deadpanned since the pharaohs, and they will deadpan forever.
