3 Movies; 13 Moons

A friend with broad experience in these matters gave me some advice in terms of attracting a broader readership to my little operation here. One of the things he suggested was to at least periodically write about movies that people (regular people, not “Film” people) are watching and thinking about right now. With this advice in mind, I traveled to my local video rental outfit and rented three movies: Michael Clayton, La Vie en Rose and Collateral, with the intention of devoting my next post to at least one of these movies.

I first watched Michael Clayton, reasoning that as a Best Picture nominee, it must at least be passably good and therefore of sufficient interest to generate maybe a half-dozen paragraphs of quasi-informed commentary. I suppose the experience of viewing Atonement should have demonstrated the flaw in this reasoning. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about Michael Clayton, but rather that very little of it would be complimentary and it could reasonably summed up in a handful of sentences. There is something about this new(ish) strain of Hollywood milquetoast liberalism that just seems to rub me wrong. I mean, do we really need to see a film like Michael Clayton in order to know that corporations bury evidence of the dangers of their products and pay high-powered law firms millions to convince the world of their ignorance? The cleverly non-linear narrative structure was also particularly irksome. I don’t necessarily have a problem with a movie that begins at the end (see: Citizen Kane et al), unless it is done with the express intention of misleading viewers and artificially creating suspense, as was the case with Michael Clayton.

Collateral was similarly disappointing, though for entirely different reasons. I have been recently shown the light as regards to the brilliance of Michael Mann, so I have been slowly working to familiarize myself with the examples of his oeuvre with which I had previously been unfamiliar. Like many of Mann’s movies, Collateral works very well in some ways and falls flat in others. Technically speaking, it is nearly as impressive a movie as Miami Vice. Mann’s shot constructions and compositions are undoubtedly amongst the most exacting and impressive of any contemporary Hollywood director. I challenge anyone to name me another filmmaker who could give Los Angeles the impression of being a unitary metropolis as opposed to the amorphous sprawling mess that it is, as Mann has done with Collateral. Stylistic achievements aside, however, the film is ultimately done in by its thin, contrived plot and its shameless sentimentality.

Albert Einstein defined insanity roughly as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Though clinically dubious, Einstein’s wisdom in this case convinced me to hold off on watching La Vie en Rose, at least for the moment, and instead turn to an unqualified masterpiece for cinematic succor—in this case, Fassbinder’s In a Year With 13 Moons (1978).

In his short but extraordinarily prolific career, Rainer Werner Fassbinder subverted the conventions of Hollywood genres—most particularly the family melodrama—in his effort to explore the ways in which people laid the architecture of their own suffering through their denial of love and the abortive nature of their relationships. Fassbinder was an unconventional filmmaker and In a Year With 13 Moons is an unconventional film. What makes the movie extraordinary is that it is through this unconventionality that the film succeeds precisely where many more conventional movies fail.

The narrative of In a Year With 13 Moons concerns the final days of the transsexual Erwin/Elvira Weisshaupt. The opening sequence shows Erwin/Elvira, dressed in men’s attire, soliciting the sexual attentions of a man in an open park setting and being set upon and beaten when her castrated nature is discovered. The low early morning lighting and the presentation of the film’s opening credits lend to what by most rights would be considered a scene of high drama a perfunctory nature that will become emblematic of the film in general.

In his monograph on the life and works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christian Braad Thomsen writes, on the subject of In a Year With 13 Moons, “The narrative is ruptured in practically every scene, and is not taken seriously at the very point when the film tradition in which Fassbinder had previously worked would have pushed things to a melodramatic climax. I know only one other film made on the same principle: Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963) also deflects away from its tragedies, instead of wallowing in them” (256). Thomsen seems to get it half right here, at least in his identification of Godard as Fassbinder’s principle forebear in adopting the Brechtian technique of interrupting the viewer’s response to the action for the cinema. There is more of Godard in In a Year With 13 Moons than Thomsen suggests here, however. Moreover, I would argue that it is precisely because he treats the events portrayed in this film with great seriousness that he intentionally pulls the viewer out of any emotional connection therewith.

Subsequent to her ordeal in the park, Erwin/Elvira returns to her apartment where she unexpectedly meets her lover, the failed actor Christoph and a bitter argument ensues. The content and shot constructions of this scene call to mind the masterful central scene in Godard’s Contempt, which depicts the argument between Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot in their Rome apartment. While the similarities between these two scenes are remarkable, it is their differences which are truly instructive. The characters in Godard’s film are highly idealized and the troubles with which they are dealing seem comparatively trite. The analogous scene in In a Year With 13 Moons is conversely remarkable for the unstinting ugliness of the characters and barbs with which they stick each other. Erwin/Elvira is fat and manly and scarred and frighteningly vulnerable. Christoph, for his part, is vulgar and merciless in pointing out these shortcomings. One gets the sense in watching this scene in Contempt that the relationship may be doomed, but both parties will undoubtedly survive the rift (though of course one of them doesn’t)—the same cannot be said for Erwin/Elvira.

The scene which follows this argument is undoubtedly one of the most disturbing, affecting, memorable and baffling in all of cinema. Erwin/Elvira meets with her friend the prostitute Red Zora and relates to her how she once, when still a complete man, worked in an abattoir. The two then walk to a slaughterhouse and watch as the throats of a half dozen steer are slit and their blood pours forth torrentially. As they and the viewer regard this nearly unbearably grisly scene, Erwin/Elvira proceeds to recount her sad history—her years in the slaughterhouse, her marriage to the slaughterhouse owner’s daughter, her wife’s giving birth to their own daughter and her subsequent journey to Casablanca for her sex-change/castration—to Red Zora. The effect of this is singular as at one moment the non-German speaking viewer finds it difficult to read the subtitles as she is transfixed by the nauseous violence of the images. When this violence becomes overpowering, she seeks solace in the words, but the emotional violence recounted is equally merciless. The viewer ultimately finds a kind of balance by alternating between these two elements, at once getting the emotional force of the violence of each, while being spared the brutal totality of either.

The music over the introduction to this scene is the main theme from Nino Rota’s score for Fellini’s Amarcord (1973). At first glance, this seems to be a jarring mismatch of music to thematic and visual elements, but it actually underscores the primary aspect of the film’s narrative. Amarcord—which translates as ‘I remember’ in the dialect of Fellini’s native Rimini—is essentially a long reminiscence on Fellini’s youth. In a Year With 13 Moons is also a meditation on the past and in particular it is Erwin/Elvira’s search for her own forgotten past in the hopes that she will find clues to suggest the source of her ultimate brokenness.

Fassbinder’s oeuvre is one of the most personal bodies of work in the history of cinema. That In a Year With 13 Moons is one of the more personal of his films is therefore significant. Fassbinder himself wrote, directed, photographed, edited and decorated the film himself. The film is notable for many of its unique and truly masterful compositions. There is a scene in which Erwin/Elvira and Zora listen as their friend Seelenfrieda recounts a dream, primarily during one roughly two-minute shot. The low candle lighting and red/orange/golden color scheme portends the visual scheme of Berlin Alexanderplatz. The shot is static with the camera roughly at eye level. To the left there is a cross hanging on the wall behind and above a small television set, which is turned on. Seelenfrieda is in the right foreground, directly behind and empty set of shelves, which serves to chop up the frame into geometrical segments. Behind him, a well built man slowly and rhythmically performs biceps curls with a pair of dumbbells. In the far background, Erwin/Elvira stands and Zora lays on the floor against the wall. The effect is striking and calls to mind the modernist compositions of Michelangelo Antonioni.

If Erwin/Elvira’s quest to uncover her past provides the thrust of the narrative, the film’s defining moment (every movie has one) comes when she and Red Zora visit the orphanage at which s/he was raised. Zora approaches one of the nuns and inquires if she is Sister Gudrun—the nun Erwin/Elvira remembers as the one who primarily raised her. Confirmed of her identity, Zora brings her to Elvira who introduces herself as Erwin Weisshaupt. Sister Gudrun indeed remembers Erwin and proceeds to tell the gothically tragic story of Erwin’s childhood. Erwin’s mother brought young Erwin to the orphanage explaining that his father was lost in the war and that she could not raise him alone. The young boy was doted upon by the nuns in the convent and at a certain point a young couple came and hoped to adopt Erwin as their own. In order to confirm her wish to give Erwin away for adoption, Sister Gudrun paid a visit to Erwin’s mother and finds that his father has returned, more children have been born and the mother seems to have forgotten completely about her son Erwin. Since Erwin’s father is still alive, his permission must also be given for the boy to be adopted and as the mother does not wish her husband to know of the child’s existence, she refuses this permission.

The way in which this scene is presented is even more important than the story related. Each of the three characters present remains in her own space, not acknowledging the presence of the other two. It is almost as though the story is too devastating to be shared collectively and that it must indeed be absorbed alone. It is in this way that Fassbinder’s film reveals a realism that is wholly absent from conventional melodrama. Movies portrayed in a typical melodramatic mode will always present the tragedy or sadness of it characters in such a way as to invite the audience to sympathize and feel affronted by the circumstances in which the characters find themselves. Real world tragedy is never so neatly parsed and if it were it would fail to be tragic. Humans find themselves in tragic situations precisely because they fail to invoke sympathy, causing others to look away or otherwise view their problems as unfixable.

Another important aspect of this scene is Fassbinder’s casting of his own mother, Lieselotte Pempeit, in the role of Sister Gudrun. One can sense the subtext of Fassbinder’s feelings regarding his own fatherless upbringing bubbling up through Gudrun’s narration. Moreover, the revelation that Gudrun was reading a volume of Schopenhauer when she was interrupted by Erwin/Elvira and Zora is significant in terms of the themes of death explored in the film (more on this later).

I would also point out that it is at this point, roughly halfway through the film, that the quixotic nature of the Erwin/Elvira and Red Zora’s quest becomes apparent. This quest is indeed quixotic in the sense that despite discovering the ostensible source of Erwin/Elvira’s loss of identity, this discovery does nothing to heal the wounds. Further, there is a genuine comedy in the pairing of Erwin/Elvira and Red Zora and the futility of their ‘adventures’ in righting past wrongs.

The irony of Erwin/Elvira’s transgendered status is that Erwin was not a homosexual. Indeed, the film reveals that the decision to travel to Casablanca for the sex change/castration was a rash one made as a result of an infatuation Erwin had for his one-time business partner, the brothel owner-cum-real estate speculator Anton Saitz. In what was undoubtedly a manifestation of Erwin’s desire for a father figure, he admitted to Saitz one day that he was in love with him. Saitz explained that this wouldn’t be a problem if only Erwin were a woman, leading to his fateful trip to Casablanca. Saitz’s own story is a further illustration of Einstein’s definition of insanity. Imprisoned in a concentration camp as a child, Saitz was freed with the liberation at the end of the war. Rather than learn from his experience of the Nazis’ brutality, in adulthood, Saitz modeled his own brothel on the concentration camp model.

Erwin/Elvira opts to visit Saitz at his office on her own, presumably to continue her quest to exorcise her demons. Learning of the location of his office by listening to the ramblings of a disgruntled former employee, Erwin/Elvira climbs the stairs toward the 16th floor and narrowly avoids running into Saitz and his entourage on their way down the stairs. The inexplicable gunfight she witnesses in the parking lot below calls to mind the parking lot altercation, which occurs at the beginning of the road trip in Godard’s Weekend (1967).

The remainder of the film becomes fully imbued with the theme of suicide and death. As she waits in an abandoned office for Saitz’s return, Erwin/Elvira watches as a man prepares a noose from which to hang himself at which point she asks him for a light. She asks if he intends to kill himself, which he readily admits—even asking if she minds. Before he does, however, she offers him some red wine, French bread and cheese. She then reveals this to be something of an homage to her former life with Saitz:

“It’s an old story with the red wine and the French bread and cheese; almost a bit sentimental, when I think about it. But what would life be without sentiment? Pretty sad, I’d say. It all started with cheese.”

The discussion which takes place between this man and Erwin/Elvira becomes almost absurdly philosophical. When she asks him why he wishes to end his life, he explains that it is because he does not wish to allow things to go on being real simply because he perceives them. Essentially he is choosing to end his life to make a philosophical point. But there is an important philosophical point to the man’s view of suicide and one which will bear further in Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979). This is the idea as proposed by Schopenhauer that suicide is not a negation of existence, but an attempt on the part of the suicide to enter into a different form of existence altogether.

As if such evidence were needed, Erwin/Elvira’s eventual reunion with Saitz confirms the futility of her journey through her past to find and ostensibly heal the sources of her suffering. Saitz is revealed to be an archetypal example of arrested development. He no longer performs any work in his office and instead spends his time viewing and reenacting Martin and Lewis movies with his cronies. It takes some time and an old photograph to remind Saitz of who Elvira/Erwin is/was and when he does remember, instead of commenting one way or another, he insists upon a song and dance first. Erwin/Elvira somehow joins in with this prearranged song and dance and the viewer is again struck by the film’s moments of seemingly inappropriate comedy. The dance ends and Saitz tells Erwin/Elvira that she’s grown fat, but its okay because everyone is getting fat these days and in an aside informs his retinue that this lady used to be a boy named Erwin.

The film’s downward spiral has reached a sort of critical mass at this point and the viewer senses that Erwin/Elvira’s end is near. The remainder of the film is surprisingly affecting—one might almost say sentimental, but throughout, Erwin/Elvira’s predicament and her suffering are kept one step removed from the viewer’s ability to relate. Erwin/Elvira brings Saitz to her apartment and while she goes to the kitchen, Saitz encounters Red Zora who has been sleeping on Erwin/Elvira’s bed. Zora learns of Saitz’s identity and immediately recognizes his signficance to Erwin/Elvira’s story. This does not prevent her, however, from welcoming his sexual advances. Erwin/Elvira witnesses this and, defeated, goes into the bathroom and cuts off her hair while staring into the mirror. She then outfits herself in men’s clothing and pays a visit to his former wife and daughter. She seems to make an abortive attempt at reconciliation with his wife, but both realize it is too late. Erwin/Elvira returns to her apartment and seeks out a neighbor to talk to. The neighbor, friendly as can be and completely ignoring the obvious existential crisis through which she is going, explains that he would love to talk, would love to come down and have a beer, but it is after 11:00 and he must be getting to bed.

The soundtrack of the film’s final minutes is suffused with a recording of Erwin/Elvira talking about her past suicide attempts. Convinced that something terrible is happening, the neighbors attempt to enter Erwin/Elvira’s apartment, but are thwarted at the door by Saitz’s guard, who insists he cannot let anyone in. One by one, Erwin/Elvira’s daughter, wife and even Sister Gudrun arrives. Each must be searched for weapons by Saitz’s sentry before they can enter. When they finally gain entry into the apartment, Erwin/Elvira is found lifeless on her bed as Red Zora and Saitz emerge, oblivious to her fate, from their embrace on the floor beside her. The viewer’s experience of this scene is hampered by the insistence of the continued recording of Erwin/Elvira’s suicidal monologue. This has the ultimate effect of highlighting the inevitability of Erwin/Elvira’s death, while at the same time preventing the viewer from experiencing any real emotional involvement with the truth of it.

It can be argued that among filmmakers, Fassbinder had a greater understanding and a greater grasp of the emotional violence with which we treat those closest to us in part because he was a great practitioner of this violence in his own life. He may have seen his portrayal of this cycle in his films as a sort of penance for his own actions. Whatever the case, he was, in his films, able to reflect the awful banal truth of this emotional mayhem in a way very few other directors could and there may be no better example of this than In a Year With 13 Moons.

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.