Sunday 31 December 2017

11/2017 VHS Massacre: Cult Films And The Decline Of Physical Media (2016)


Dirt cheap documentary about the struggles faced by amateur film makers, the rapid replacement of physical media by streaming/digital stuff and the people that hunt through the second hand piles of VHS tapes for the obscure and forgotten films that never got digitised.

LLoyd Kaufman, who is, I think, contractually obliged to appear in every doc of this type, also brings up the worrying prospect of how much power the media giants have and what they'll do to retain it in a changing world, with issues such as censorship and net neutrality. That of course could lead to a long, tedious pile of words on here itself, but another time perhaps.

The most striking thing for me was the footage taken from inside video shops at their peak, compared to that taken in their dying months, and then after closure. At their height, they were almost like social venues, places to hang out longer than the process of selecting a film would logically take. In the independent ones, they would frequently be staffed by people who were knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the films on the shelves, be on good terms with their customers and decorate the interiors of the shops with posters, cut-outs and reproduction props of the contemporary and enduring, older films.
Sad fucks like me used to feel very at home in such places.
Then came the monopoly of Blockbuster, (one victim of the change to digital that makes some of us happy) and the small independent shops, and their welcoming character was killed off in pursuit of bland, production line profit chasing.

Anyway, there is more to this film about films on actual film than what I've waffled on about, and, aside from a wobbly first fifteen minutes, it's well worth watching.

Which ironically I did on a streaming service. Ho hum.



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