In the summer of 1983, I travelled to Paris with nothing but a knapsack and a small carry-on satchel—not even a laptop computer, which hadn’t been invented yet—and managed to see about a hundred movies in less than three months, thanks to the copious offerings at the Cinémathèque Française and the city’s many boldly programmed theatres. But a day or two after I arrived I called my one friend of a friend there, a young Parisian woman who’d been a foreign-exchange student in my home town. She drove over to get me at my hotel, with an apology. Before she could take me to see some sights, she had an errand to run: she had to return a tape to the video store. I was astonished. Why in the world would a person who lived in the thick of the Parisian cinematic cornucopia need to own a VCR and rent videotapes? (As I recall, the city had more than three hundred theatres at that time—and the tape in question was “Taxi Driver.”)

New York was a cinematic cornucopia back then, too (here’s a listing from the same week in 1983 to prove it), and I was a late adopter of home video. But once I had a VCR I made frequent visits to the gloriously cinephilic VideoRoom, which is still thriving—and often found myself wandering bemusedly among the categorized shelves of empty tape boxes, drowning in the surfeit of options, unable to choose a movie that perfectly suited my mood or inchoate desires. That confusion was a sure sign that the movie I yearned to see hadn’t yet been made, that what I sought above all was the shock of the new (not of the new-to-me but of the new-to-the-world), a jolt that not even the ultimate archive can provide but that the local multiplex or art house can.

Nonetheless, at the center of my delightful discovery of VHS tapes as a movie-delivery device—both those I rented and those I taped off TV—was the power of the remote control. Home video allowed me to watch movies the way that I read books: at my own pace. I could freeze the movie in place and advance it frame by frame or render it in slow motion, watch in fast-forward, even watch backward. The most important button on the remote wasn’t “play” but “stop”—the power of not having to watch an entire movie in a single sitting was a fundamental gain. The way that a film is watched commercially, unspooling in a theatre at a fixed rate for a fixed duration, may not be the best way to watch it—may not be the best way for me, at a particular time.

I remember reading an interview with Jean-Luc Godard in which he described his viewing of Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket” when it was in first run (it came out in December, 1959, right around the time that Godard was finishing “Breathless”): he went to a movie theatre to see it many times, entering the theatre at random times during screenings and staying there for only ten minutes on each occasion. (In a critics’ poll, he named it the best film of the year.) In the nineteen-seventies, Godard was an early advocate of home video, which he considered a crucial device for the analysis of movies by means of moviemaking, a process that was much harder and less exact on film. When I got my VCR, I wasn’t embarking on a colossal history of cinema, as Godard was; I was merely seeking pleasure and found that the device enabled me to savor movies in unprecedented ways. When DVDs supplanted tapes (though I still have plenty of the latter), the freeze-frames and frame-advances became precise and rock-solid, although the fast-forwarding and reverse-viewing often became a succession of stills rather than a rapid transport of the integral film.

Which brings us to the brave new world of streaming. Criterion has left Hulu and migrated its collection to the new site FilmStruck, which offers a changing selection of films to stream that are also available on DVD or Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, and others that Criterion licenses but hasn’t released; subscribers can also access films from other home-video distributors. (Brian Patrick Eha recently detailed the partnerships in a report on this site; I recently wrote about some of FilmStruck’s rare offerings.) It’s a lavish list of movies (about which, more soon), but it suffers from streaming-itis: the inability to control the viewing experience with any precision. (It offers a pause button and a sliding bar to shift around, but no fast-forward, rewind, or frame-by-frame advance.)

The problem is endemic to streaming sites—neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime does any better at handing control to viewers—but there’s nonetheless an ideological thread that comes loose in this functional difference between streaming and hard-copy digital media. The shift of control to the stream itself brings the experience a little closer to that of the movie theatre. For Netflix and Amazon, the similarity is purely coincidental; for FilmStruck, a cinephile site, it is, if not a selling point, at least a happy metaphor for the primacy of theatrical projection.

There’s another sense in which streaming over all recalls moviegoing: it takes the very notion of access and availability out of the user’s hands. Writing in the Times about the prevalence of streaming services, Glenn Kenny cited the industry executives’ view of home video: “As much money as home video made, the movie industry always hated it. The idea of consumers actually owning motion pictures was anathema to them.” Every time Godard went to see ten minutes of “Pickpocket,” he bought another ticket; if he’d had a DVD of it, he’d have paid once. Streaming makes viewers pay forever, and regularly, in order to maintain access to movies that they might otherwise have had at hand—if they were near their home-video collections and if the equipment to play their disks continued to exist.

For those who love their DVDs—and, for that matter, VHS tapes, of which I have many, bearing movies that haven’t yet been released on digital media (at the head of the list is Jean Eustache’s “The Mother and the Whore,” which isn’t on FilmStruck, either)—format expiration is a looming menace. (How about those LaserDiscs?) But the real return for the monthly cost of a FilmStruck subscription is real estate, on both sides of the equation. Streaming instead of owning frees up lots of wall space or floor space at home, and restores the movie-viewing experience to the primal lightness of hitting a new town with just a knapsack and a satchel and seeing a hundred of the thousands of movies on offer there. But streaming also de-localizes the moviegoing experience, uncoupling it both from the offerings in a town’s theatres and those piled up in one’s own home; it’s the portable cinémathèque.

Streaming services are also the tasting menus of a cinephile’s dreams. I always fantasized about having enough money to do what Godard did with “Pickpocket” on a daily and nearly randomized basis, dropping en passant into a movie theatre to catch ten or fifteen minutes of whatever happened to be playing there, or, similarly, haunting a multiplex to skip around from theatre to theatre without fear of detection. With FilmStruck, an evening’s solitary viewing can turn into a grandly random jambalaya of disparate styles, eras, languages, and tones.