AUSTIN, Texas – In a world of Netflix queues, iTunes movie rentals, and 3-D IMAX screenings, there are still purists who believe that the best way to watch entertainment is the VHS tape. And many of them are in Rewind This!, a documentary on the VHS subculture that debuted this week at SXSW.
It delves deep into the love of the magnetic tape medium, digging up not only the VHS tape's disruptive past as the original TV programming time-shifter, but also exploring the culture of collectors and remixers that have sprung up around the largely defunct format. It's a scene that director Josh Johnson, producer Carolee Mitchell and cinematographer/editor Christopher Palmer know all too well.
"We were all living in Austin at the time and we were really involved with the film community – the filmmaking community, but more significantly the film-obsessive community," Johnson told Wired about what lead them to make the doc. "Several of our friends – primarily Zack Carlson, who's in the film – were all actively acquiring video tapes at the time because they were the only way to access these films that had started to become obscure that weren't released in later formats. That idea was very exciting, the idea of this disappearing chapter of film history."
What's compelling about Rewind This!, which premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival this week, isn't that there are so many people who love one particular media format – for everything there is, there is a collector – it's how the film unearths a strong nostalgia for a time isn't even really that long ago. Do you remember "Be Kind, Rewind" stickers, or how magical it seemed in the early days of VHS be able to watch your favorite movies and TV shows at any time? Then this movie will give you all the feels.
But more than the history of VHS as a medium, Rewind This! – a Kickstarter project that raised $23,000 – is most compelling when it examines why its subjects to want to collect VHS in the era of streaming media. While some love the scarcity and uniqueness of the films released only on VHS and never again, others see the tape as a media fossil record, full of layers upon layers of recordings: old music videos taped over old commercial breaks taped over early 1990s sitcoms. And VHS, unlike DVD or Blu-ray, has the ability to display its own history – not just in the media on the tape, but on the physical tape itself where skips, glitches and overlapped recordings leave their mark.
"When you watch a VHS tape there's almost like an archaeology that you can do on it where there's this history written into the physical material of the thing itself. You get to see the parts that are really beat up and you know that someone rewound that and watched it over and over. It's like the part where there's boobs or the part where the guy explodes and you know that was someone's favorite part and they couldn't get enough," Tommy Swenson, video editor Alamo Drafthouse, notes in the documentary.
And still others – like the found footage artists at Everything is Terrible! – give new life to obscure old videos by remixing them and/or uploading them to YouTube or other video-sharing sites.
"If you were born in the late 70s/early 80s, you just got used to VHS. And for about a decade, you thought that’s what movies looked like, more or less," Dimitri Simakis, one of EIT!'s founders, told Wired. "But you can’t be a snob about formats and you are encouraged – no, obligated – to share your finds with the world. I’m lucky I have EIT! as a place to share my finds in a somewhat digestible way."
It was far more digestible than even he realized. When Simakis, who is (full disclosure) a friend of this writer, and his EIT! cohorts began sharing their VHS remixes online in 2007, he had no idea videotapes had a fanbase. Then the collective went on tour, taking their full-length collages to art house cinemas (and amassing a joke collection of Jerry Maguire VHS tapes that now is close to 5,000 copies). "Holy guacamole," he said of his tour experience. "I took great comfort in meeting folks who are also cursed with this love for a cumbersome, dead media." Simakis now programs a Video Nights series for the non-profit LA movie theater Cinefamily featuring nothing but VHS.
"We play films that were only released on VHS off a VCR that we built inside a giant wooden VCR (with blinking lights and everything!)," said Simakis, adding that the combined EIT! members have collected nearly 12,000 tapes. "Nothing in this world beats watching a movie with two hundred other souls who are as captivated and as passionate about movies as you are. And no Netflix library or personal collection can beat that."
This is the passion that Johnson has captured with Rewind This!, a love for a lost art that may not stay lost if its protagonists have anything to do with it. Still, the attention is a double-edged sword; Simakis nearly "ralphs" at the idea of VHS collecting becoming the new hipster pastime and "making it impossible for working-class folks like me to see these lost gems." It's a danger that gets even more real once someone makes a documentary about it. The filmmakers have considered this, and while they admit drawing more attention to VHS culture – combined with the increasing scarcity of VHS tapes – could lead to higher prices, they're not too worried.
"There's no logical reason for that. Vinyl has a purpose because you can make the argument that it sounds even better than even CD," Palmer said. "But if you want to collect a VHS that exists in a better quality format it doesn’t really make sense to me. Unless you have this idea – which for the three of us is how we collect VHS – of finding things that only exist on VHS and loving those things and holding them because they're gold."
