45365, Bill and Turner Ross‘ SXSW-winning nonfiction film about their hometown of Sydney, Ohio, debuts today on SnagFilms, where it will be streaming for free for one week as part of Snag’s Summerfest, which brings festival films online for a limited time before their theatrical/TV/DVD runs.

As a big fan of this film’s dedicated formalism,  I concur with AJ Schnack who, in an interview the Ross brothers, recalls his experience watching the film at SXSW “where the total immersion forced me to adapt to the film’s rhythms and language” and thus concludes that 45365 is the kind of film best “seen in theaters or at festivals.”  Knowing this before attempting to watch the movie on my computer, I decided to try to approximate a bigger screen experience at home with the Snag stream by connecting my computer to my TV, but unfortunately Snag’s full screen option shuts down for every ad break. So it’s not the right format for “total immersion,” but hopefully it will expose the film to a wider audience, who might be moved to catch up with 45365 when Seventh Art releases it theatrically further down the line.

Also, 45365 on Snag would make for an interesting double online VOD bill with another film enjoying a similarly non-traditional release pattern, Loren Cass.

Though going into its second week at New York’s Cinema Village, Loren Cass has been available on Amazon VOD and for rental and purchase on iTunes for awhile. Like 45365, it’s an impressionistic study of a life in a single American town that privileges imagery, mood and tone over narrative.  But where one of 45365’s strengths is its emphasis on the multitudes that the town contains (from 4H princesses to ex-cons), Cass views its city — St. Petersberg, Florida, circa 1996, then reeling from racially-motivated unrest — through the narrow, nihilistic gaze of aimless young adults united in wordless loneliness and the instinct to ameliorate their frustration through fistfights, parking lot sex, and all manner of self-destruction. Both apply a kind of Cubist deconstruction and reformation of their prevailingly influential DNA. In the case of 45365, it’s Americana. In the case of Cass, with its strict “no future” worldview, narration from members of The Circle Jerks and The Dwarves and soundtrack full of bands like Stiff Little Fingers, Husker Du, it’s punk rock, and particularly the surviving echoes of the punk impulse in a world that’s no longer scared of it.

Cass‘ message and tone is much, much darker than 45365’s; as director/co=star Chris Fuller put it in an interview for FILMMAKER, “There are things about life that are ugly and unpleasant. The whole point of Loren Cass, in a nutshell, is to embrace that, celebrate the ugly things.” 45365 essentially goes for the opposite — it’s essentially about celebrating the beauty of the mundane rather than the potential horror. But both films are puzzles, asking the viewer to impose their own method of making sense of what’s on screen.  I suspect that if seen together, the darkness of one might lead to a deeper reading of the other.