Home video changed the relationship between film and audience irrevocably. It’s hard to countenance now, but until the late ’70s, you didn’t get to own movies. You didn’t even get to rewatch them after they left cinemas, unless you were lucky enough to catch them on TV on one of four or maybe five channels. So the sudden arrival of recordable, replayable, affordable VCRs meant that, first and foremost, ordinary viewers could examine films in a way they never had before. And you didn’t just have the power to rewatch — you could pause, rewind and play again, you could fast forward through the boring bits, obsess over a closeup, deconstruct a sight gag, or pore over a sex scene. In short, you could fetishize and commodify your movie love in a way that would have been unimaginable just a few years before.
“Son Of Rambow”
Perhaps it was the chicken, perhaps it was the egg — but it can’t be a coincidence that home video appeared on the scene more or less simultaneously with the modern blockbuster. The first VCRs were being manufactured and distributed on a small scale in 1975, the year of the first blockbuster, “Jaws.” And two years later, they were introduced on a mass scale into the U.S. —1977 was the year of “Star Wars.” Suddenly, you could express your love of a movie outside its theatrical release not just through cereal box tie-ins, trading cards and toys, but through ownership of the film itself. You could learn every word and recreate scenes with your friends. And when your family finally got a camcorder, you could try to shoot the whole film, long, long before the term “sweding” was invented (in Michel Gondry‘s “Be Kind Rewind“). And while many of those kids going the “Son of Rambow” or “Raiders!” route have grown up and gone on to become the blockbuster directors of our time, even that is not home video’s most dramatic impact on the film culture of today.
That influence is everywhere. Without the democratization of obsessive movie love that home video represented, blogs like this one would have no reason for existence. Film critics in the internet age like to think mistily of the good old days when criticism was solely the province of the authoritative few: Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris and maybe the Cahiers du Cinema collective, sending up puffs of iconoclastic insight like so much Gitanes smoke. And there certainly was a definitiveness and a thoughtfulness to that period’s writing on film that is harder to find these days. But film is not theater; it was never meant to be rarefied and was always intended to exceed the physical limitations of how many people could be in any one place at any one time. It was always meant to be for everyone, not just the very cultured, the very tasteful, the very lucky. And once home video released the genie from the bottle, there was nothing to stop this mass medium from becoming ever more massive or to stop its appreciation becoming a far more populist discipline. It might have watered down the purity of cineaste endeavor, but it also ensured the continuing relevance and vitality of the medium.
Reportedly the most valuable VHS around.
Of course, not all of the offshoots have been positive. While it’s an indelible part of the childhoods of probably every adult in the Western world currently in their 30s or 40s, home video was born of the the same cultural shift that saw the complex, challenging, grown-up films of the 1970s cede centrality to the youth-skewing, blockbuster adventures of the 1980s. In its way, it contributed to an infantilization of culture, not just by further disseminating those often formulaic family-friendly films, but also by making film culture and discussion subject to the same consumerist, acquisitive impulses that underpinned the social fabric of the 1980s. Traces of that can still be seen in the childishness of the extremes of fan culture today. The manbabies mewling over ruined childhoods because women now wear proton packs, and the factionalism that springs up around tentpole movies irrespective of their actual quality, all speak to the entitlement and petulance of an 1980s kid who somehow believes that because they can own a film, they own the film.
Documentary “Remake Remix Rip-Off”
But if that is one downside to the VHS sea change, it shouldn’t be ignored that the widespread accessibility of home video was also instrumental in bringing about very positive social change in some communities. There are a couple of great recent documentaries on the topic, particularly “Remake, Remix Rip-Off,” about the Turkish piracy industry, and “Chuck Norris vs Communism,” about the illicit importing and dubbing of Hollywood films in Ceaucescu’s Romania. In some parts of the world, pirate-able, smugglable VHS (anyone with two VCRs could rip a copy of a film, be it ever so degraded) became a genuinely subversive force within oppressive, unjust regimes. And as much as we lament the homogenization of Hollywood product, while blockbusters swamped theaters back in the States, the cheapness of VHS meant the fringe element could also flourish as never before. From shoestring exploitation films in which untested filmmakers, often from non-mainstream communities, could find a platform, to the “video nasties” that so heavily influence modern horror, to the cultish rediscovery of old movies that had gone unseen for decades, home video liberated far more than it constricted.
None of this is to say we should all be wailing and rending our garments because some company in Japan has finally put a period at the end of the home video sentence. But where that little piece of news has even been reported, it’s usually been dubbed “the end of an era,” and that’s not true either—the VHS era has not ended, it has expanded. There are technologies that have come and gone, that have been replaced or upgraded and have left no mark on the culture except as embryonic forms of something else. But VHS, the cutting edge of the home video phenomenon that found its apotheosis in the 1980s, was the opening salvo in a cultural revolution that is still ongoing. It’s worth a stray thought the next time you see a bin full of cracked videotapes at a flea market, or the next time you buy a coffee in the nearby Starbucks that used to be a Blockbuster: from the most infantile Ghostbro to the most effete Criterion aficionado, all of us who participate in any way in modern film culture still live in the house that VHS built.