Call It Cred

By the time my family got our first VHS player in 1983, the format was already well on the way to besting Sony’s Betamax in its quest to become the standard medium for home video playback. I can still remember the first movie we rented to watch on our new machine—Poltergeist; to this day, one of the few Spielberg movies for which I have fond, if youthful, associations. This was two years before Blockbuster opened its first store and the home video rental market was still largely dominated by local mom & pop shops like Erol’s or Jacksonville Video—complete with tantalizingly be-curtained “adults only” rooms—which generally levied a significant one-time fee for new members and often required the remittance of annual dues. Presumably these fees paid for, amongst other things, the comprehensive catalogues that were published by each store, which included a list of all titles offered for rent—sub-divided by genre—brief descriptions of the films’ respective narratives, and notes about content which may be found by some viewers to be objectionable: violence, language, nudity, sexual situations or adult themes. I can remember reading these catalogues as though they were novels, delighting in particular in the descriptions of the R or X-rated movies I would never be allowed to view.

Though the VHS cassette has essentially been replaced by the DVD (digital versatile disc) as the default medium for home video playback, these two media are not exactly analogous. This is partially due to their respective technologies and the fact that the DVD, as it’s proper name suggests, has many applications aside from allowing users to watch movies on their televisions. Moreover, consumers do not use DVDs in all the same ways that they use VHS cassettes. An obvious example of this is the recording of television programming. Though DVD recorders are now affordable, the advent of DVRs, such as TiVo, and services such as On Demand has fundamentally altered the ways in which consumers view the problem of conflicted television program scheduling. Another major way in which DVDs are used in a fundamentally different way than were VHS cassettes is the fact that people are more likely to opt to purchase DVD recordings of their favorite films, rather than simply renting them, wherein it was far more rare to find a large library of movies on VHS cassettes (excluding dubbed copies) in someone’s home. There are a couple of reasons why this is the case. The first is physical: VHS tapes are somewhat large and cumbersome in comparison to DVDs and it takes a large amount of space to store a respectable library of movies in this format. The second and more important factor in this phenomenon has to do with the agreements that Blockbuster Video made with movie studios, which were specifically designed to discourage consumers from purchasing movies on VHS outright. Originally, Blockbuster paid a relatively high price for each VHS cassette they purchased and consequently kept 100% of the revenues from video rentals. In the 1990s, however, a new arrangement was made in which Blockbuster paid a nominal fee for new video cassettes and then gave 40% of revenues from the rental thereof back to the studios. As a corollary to this deal, for the first year after a film’s release on home video, the studios charged consumers an artificially high price—generally near $100—to purchase the film; effectively limiting movies to the rental market for the first year after their video release.

I watch a lot of movies. I also have a significant, if not over-large, collection of movies on home video. According to an informal count of the titles in my library conducted during the early morning hours of Thursday February 21, 2008, I have 539 movies in DVD format—this figure inevitably excludes some small number of movies loaned out to friends that have been so long in returning that they have effectively been forgotten. Many of these films are long, multi-disc editions that were comparatively expensive to procure—a prime example of this is the newly minted Criterion edition of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 ½ hour late masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz (retail price: $124.95).

More than a handful of my DVDs are bootleg copies of foreign editions of films that at least at the time of purchase had not been published for the North American market—a copy of Bresson’s adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Mouchette purchased on eBay in late 2005 for about $40. A substantial number of the rest are editions that are no longer in print and have thus escalated in value significantly in the time since they were purchased—a DVD of Juzo Itami’s Tampopo purchased second-hand at a Blockbuster Video location for $14.99 could now be sold through Amazon Marketplace for upwards of $100.

As someone who has taken a particular interest in movies—watching them, reading about them, thinking about and discussing them in a more or less systematic fashion—and has put forth the time and investment in acquiring a not insubstantial home video library, I inevitably have friends who wish to borrow one or more of my DVDs to see what it is I keep rattling on about—or, as may more often be the case, it is me who pushes the DVDs on to my unsuspecting (and often uninterested) acquaintances solely in order to have someone with whom I can talk about a particular work. I lend my DVDs out freely without any real regard to their value or scarcity, or the amount of time it takes to get them back.

Conversely, my library contains no more than nine (9) films in VHS format. None of these cost me more than $10 to procure. Most of them, in fact, were had for $2 or less and a couple of them were totally free. The technology of this format is such that the image and sound quality are considerably diminished when compared to their counterparts on DVD. The format does not allow for any of the wide range of features—variable sound and commentary tracks, optional sub-titling in a variety of languages, choice of aspect ratio, historical and critical documentary features, archival interviews, et cetera—that we have come to view as our birthright with the advent of the “Special Edition” DVD. Limits in recording capacity mean that longer films must be split amongst two or more cassettes (admittedly this does happen with some DVDs, though the incidence is comparatively quite rare). One cannot instantly jump to a particular scene with a simple push of a button, as one can with DVDs. Shit, you even have to rewind the fucking things, for God’s sake.

And yet, I will only loan out one of my VHS tapes to the more trustworthy of my companions. In the rare case I do loan one out, it is only with exhortations that they be coddled during their use and returned at the earliest possible convenience. I get a little hyper when one is out of my sight for more than a week. What could explain this? Scarcity partially accounts for it, as some, though by no means all of the VHS cassettes I own are either currently out-of-print, or are unique to the point that they were never in print in the first place (more on this later). Fragility also plays a role; just about everyone who has any experience with watching movies on VHS has witnessed the consumption of a tape by the VCR. These factors are logical and seem pretty self evident, but they do not, on their own, wholly account for this discrepancy. The fact is, this seeming disconnect from a sound assessment of the real value of the individual articles comprising my home video library stems from a nebulous aesthetic of socio-cultural elitism. Simply put, the ubiquity of the DVD has given to the lowly VHS cassette something it never had of its own accord, namely cachet. To put it another way, the possession of obscure or scarce films in VHS format lends to their owner an aura of street credibility.

In order to illustrate this assertion, I will present you with a hypothetical scenario. It is your day off and you walk into your neighborhood coffee shop with the intention of planting yourself at a table and spending the next four hours really digging in to that copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason you have been promising yourself to read for the last year. You pay for your americano, seat yourself at an open table when suddenly you notice two very attractive members of the opposite sex sitting alone at separate tables, each reading a copy of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep—perhaps your favorite novel of the immigrant experience in America. Each of these individuals has, in their turn, acknowledged your presence and your obvious intelligence by pointedly gesturing toward your Kant, making eye contact with you and briefly smiling. Assuming the two are roughly equally physically attractive and equally smartly dressed, how do you decide which to approach, or, in other words, is there some other criterion by which you can make a qualitative differentiation between the two? It occurs to you at this point that though both of them happen to be reading the same novel, their respective editions of the work are markedly different. The reader to your right is reading a pristine copy of the currently available Picador trade paperback edition with the cover graphic depicting a cirrus filled sky—the receipt from the local Borders store sticks out from amongst the pages. The reader to your left, on the other hand, is reading the long out-of-print Avon Press mass-market paperback edition with its rounded corners (!), fire escapes abutting aging tenements and yellowed pages with the marginalia of past readers still intact—the same text, indeed, but hardly the same book. A book of this nature is the sign of a true bibliophile and was probably got for seventy-five cents at a local used book stall, if not fobbed off the bookshelf of a past lover. The difference between the two books and their respective readers is one of street cred—its abundance in the latter and its utter lack in the former.

Indulge me in sharing another anecdote, this one wholly actual, in order to further demonstrate the merits of this argument. In April of last year I had the opportunity to attend a screening over two days of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. The breadth, scope and completeness of this film are such that I feel it wholly beyond my meager powers to effectively write about it. This was undoubtedly the singular cinema-going experience of my life. Thus, I was inordinately gratified to learn that The Criterion Collection planned on publishing one of their full tilt special editions of this masterwork later in the year and I purchased my copy the day it was released.

Several weeks later, two of my very close friends—both of whom are also great admirers of Fassbinder’s work—showed me the gorgeous, complete 8-cassette VHS edition complete with seven of the eight cloth covered slip cases, which, when placed together, depict an image of the historical Alexanderplatz with the film’s title embossed in gilt Teutonic lettering that they had procured from the video store at which one of them works for some ridiculously paltry sum (maybe ten dollars?). On a practical level, mine was the superior edition in a multitude of ways: the respective image quality cannot reasonably even be compared, my DVD edition includes three supplementary documentary films and the Philip Jutzi’s complete 1931 adaptation of the novel from a script penned by Alfred Doblin himself. And yet I felt somehow inadequate when faced with their prize.

My own collection of films on VHS is small enough to warrant an inventory thereof:


Rights, Respect, Responsibility
Our Boys
Zero for Conduct
Bunuel’s Wuthering Heights
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (R-rated version)
Drowning by Numbers
Rosetta
Shoah
Orson Welles’s Othello


The first two films have a particular sentimental value for me as they are two of the films in which I was featured as a performer. Rights, Respect, Responsibility was the first film for which I auditioned and subsequently the first film in which I was cast—though I was not cast in the role for which I read. It was a short film produced in the aftermath of Terrible Tuesday in New York in 2001 for distribution to public television stations and school systems in order to teach youngsters tolerance toward people’s differences in general and Muslims in particular. I played the role of Kevin, a ruthless high school bully who incessantly badgers and beats upon the South Asian Muslim entrant into our erstwhile lily-white community. Our Boys, on the other hand, is a short heist film, which was written by a fellow student from my scene study workshop and produced on the ultra-cheap-and-quick in a diner in northern Utah owned by this same student’s aunt. Zero for Conduct (Zero de Conduite) is the legendary short film by the French master Jean Vigo about an anarchic uprising in a French boarding school, which was a primary influence on Lindsay Anderson's If . . . I saw this film at the Janus Films retrospective at Lincoln Center and found to my delight that it was still available in VHS format and could be got for $15 through Amazon.com. The subsequent four films—Bunuel’s Wuthering Heights; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover; Drowning by Numbers; Rosetta—were picked up at my neighborhood Hollywood Video location as part of their liquidation of their complete stock of films on VHS for about $2 each. Though each of these movies made for a fine score in its own right (although learning upon arriving at home that the copy of Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was the R-rated version, with more than thirty minutes of footage excised was something of a disappointment), it was the discovery of Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers—a film I had rented on a VHS some years earlier and which I still consider to be Greenaway’s most effective movie but which is inexplicably unavailable in any format in the North American market—which had me jumping up and down and hooting through the aisles at Hollywood. The final two films in the list were picked up at the same Delaware rental shop at which my friends procured their copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Finding these particular films was no easy task, as they were tucked away in a room quite literally stuffed with VHS films, which represented the inventory of a sister store that had recently closed down. My friends and I spent nearly an hour picking through the stacks and stacks of cassettes (arranged in no particular order) trying to find the best combination of movies to purchase—these were offered at $2 per cassette or three for $10. I found the copy of Shoah quite early in our search and was glad to be able to forego purchasing the $150 New Yorker Video DVD set of the documentary. As the entire film comprised five cassettes, I needed to find one other movie in order to make a neat two sets of three tapes. I kept saying to my friends that I hoped I could find a copy of Welles’s Othello. The store was getting ready to close and I had decided on a copy of George Romero’s Martin, when Monique pointed out a stack of boxes and asked if I had looked through them. I hadn’t and immediately upon poking my head inside, I saw Orson Welles's black face staring right back at me.

More films will undoubtedly be added to my VHS collection over the years. Unless somebody steps up and puts it out on DVD, I predict I will pick up a VHS of Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . within the year. Even as the collection grows, however, the older tapes will begin to decay, lose their images or otherwise become unwatchable. As consumers begin to move en masse from standard DVDs to Sony’s high definition Blu-Ray discs over the coming years, the technological inferiority of the VHS cassette will inevitably become more apparent. Yet with this increasingly apparent inferiority will come an inversely proportional rise in their emotional-aesthetic cachet.