Living on Video

"It is, in fact, one of the most distinctive characteristics of home-video activity that it tends to favor the films that have the least to lose in translation. The machines steer you away not just from the mainstream movies but also away from the best and inexorably toward the fringe"

Check out the dateline on that quote. It's from the very dawn of the video age, back when the whole concept was still new and thrilling : elsewhere in the same article, the laserdisc-innocent Mr. Chute grumbles that visual-rewind tends to wear out the VCR head, and brags good-humouredly of his extensive tape collection ("bet my collection's bigger than yours"). It was a time when "home-video activity" was still a phenomenon worthy of analysis in weighty movie mags ; when a New Order seemed just around the corner ; when movie-watching seemed on the brink of transformation ; when video briefly seemed to threaten the existence of cinema itself. It was a time when a band called (I believe) Trans-X stormed the charts with the faux-electronic bit of Europop that gives this piece its title. "STOP!" cried the one-hit wonders ; and a robotic voice added, "Living on video..."

Stop? We'd only just begun. As you may know I'm very much a vidkid, a rental-reared, sell-through-suckled child of the video age. One of my e-mail correspondents likes to sign off with the phrase "VHS kills cinema", and I can certainly see why he (and others) might say that ; but for me, living in a small, remote place, video has always been what defines cinema, my main artery to the distant stream of goodies Out There. I can honestly say that, were it not for video, my life would be radically different : had some obscure Japanese technician not made some vital breakthrough in home-entertainment technology long before I was born, I'd almost certainly be making my way slowly up a corporate ladder now, occasionally watching sitcoms on TV and going to the movies about once a month - and, no doubt, all the happier for it.

Still, even I can see that Mr. Chute has a point. Fourteen years after his article, the original Video Generation are slouching towards their thirties - and the movie-going landscape is fuzzier than ever. Video is everywhere, but more as a dumping-ground than a viable medium : "straight-to-video" has become a pejorative, and - in Europe at least - the vast majority of films made before 1970 remain unavailable. The Video Generation are everywhere, too - arguing about THE GAME on Usenet, or declaring that "John Woo is God" in Attitude-laden mags like "Neon" and "Empire". Meanwhile, at the box-office, an "old-fashioned" movie with big, crude emotions finds an audience apparently starved of feeling, and ends up as the biggest hit of all time.

Maybe we should call them the Post-Tarantino Generation. After all, QT himself is now 35, and was only able to discover video in his late teens - as a kind of finishing-school for the cinematic education he'd already received at midnight movies and chop-socky double-bills. Like Mr. Tarantino, the Video Generation prides itself on a rather pedantic form of cinephilia, based on a knowledge of arcane minutiae ; above all, like him - and as suggested by Mr. Chute's comment - their tastes run disproportionately to the offbeat, the bizarre and the generally non-mainstream. Welcome, in other words, to the age of the "cult movie".

It's not surprising ; after all, the whole point of a cult is obsessive, all-consuming worship - which requires a celluloid deity that's always there, whenever you want it. Sure, you can talk about STAR TREK or STAR WARS, or the early work of John Woo or Peter Jackson - but, for the fluent total-recall of the true cultist, you need to have seen them and seen them repeatedly, on a VCR (indeed, it's unlikely that most of those who rave about HARD-BOILED or BRAINDEAD - or the STAR WARS trilogy, till last year - ever had the chance to experience them in a cinema).

More importantly, films themselves are adjusting to the video age. You might think, for example, that Hollywood blockbusters are diametrically opposed not just to cultdom but to the whole concept of video viewing - being "event movies", designed to lure you away from the small screen ; yet compare MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE with BACK TO THE FUTURE, blockbusters made a decade apart. I'll be surprised if you remember any specific scene from FUTURE in any great detail - it's the kind of seamlessly plotted film where everything contributes to the whole ; on the other hand, I'll lay money that you only really remember a couple of scenes from MISSION (the computer break-in and the climactic train-ride) - everything in between is little more than padding. It's what makes MISSION a lesser movie ; it's also what makes it ideal to own on video, so you can take it down off the shelf occasionally and forward-wind (or just instantly zap, if on laserdisc) to one of those memorable set-pieces. Those film-makers who grew up with video seem - whether or not consciously - to be particularly hip to this. Like CLERKS or PULP FICTION, Paul Thomas Anderson's BOOGIE NIGHTS - which, ironically, casts video as The Enemy - is structured as a whole series of (sometimes unrelated) set-pieces : you may not want to see the whole 2 1/2 hours, but there's no reason why you can't just watch the opening ten minutes, or Buck in the doughnut shop, or Rahad's pad. Over and over again.

Does all this sound like video-watching is a process of chopping films up, mixing and restructuring them to suit the viewer-consumer's particular taste? Yes. Absolutely. This is my point. Indeed, it's almost misleading to talk of "cult movies" in describing how video deifies the films that have "least to lose in translation", the flashy and erratic at the expense of the seamless and solid. What's really being deified here is the audience, and what's changed is the balance of power between viewer and viewed. We are the cult ; films worship us.

I'm constantly amazed at how the transformation wrought by video is just taken for granted - I'd have expected reams of articles by now, think-pieces in the Sunday editions of national papers. Maybe it's because its potential remains largely unexplored : it remains horribly difficult to get access to the vast majority of older movies, and - isolated treasures like the Criterion Collection excepted - most of the best prints are still on TV, however disfigured by commercials and station logos.

Yet think about it : with a little effort you can now get the whole picture, the whole history of movies together in one room. You can trace an actor or director's career from film to film. You can decide to watch certain scenes and ignore others. You can visual-wind through the whole thing, or watch scenes frame-by-frame. You can blithely overturn and /or fuck around with what took years of effort, millions of dollars and hundreds of people to create. You can mix'n match, as if making one of Rahad Jackson's "Awesome Mix Tapes".

What's the big deal? maybe you're thinking ; after all, you can do the same thing with books, right? Is a visit to the public library some kind of Spiritual Experience now? Ah, but books have always been interactive - indeed, what you get out of a novel usually depends on how vividly you can imagine it. Films are different ; they always have been. You sit in the dark, watching a ready-made, predigested, carefully-detailed reality ; all you can do is take it in. Your only freedom comes in the power to like or dislike what you see ; otherwise, you have no control. In fact, that's the point. It's a bit like watching a conjuror do his tricks - the less you know about the mechanics of it, the better off you'll be ; it's like being a child again, a powerless observer in a big, thrilling world.

Indeed, watching films in a cinema is in many ways like going to school. You sit where you're told, surrounded by others, all of you there for a common purpose. You're not allowed to talk, just listen quietly. You might not believe what you see and hear, but only a troublemaker would question it out loud. The only difference is you can walk out - but you're immediately conspicuous if you do so, and people give you dirty looks if you make any noise.

Video changed everything. We're no longer content to watch the conjuror do his tricks - perhaps because we can now watch them frame-by-frame, and spot the joins. The Video Generation won't just sit back and accept "movie magic" ; they love to know exactly how special-effects were accomplished - every blockbuster comes with its "Making Of" documentary ; they love to nitpick, and spot continuity errors (witness the popularity of "Premiere" magazine's "Gaffe Squad") ; they're obsessed with knowing stuff about the people onscreen - not the harmless make-believe peddled by old fan magazines but real stuff, how much so-and-so got paid and how much their previous movie grossed. It's all about control - and, for better or for worse, we have been Empowered.

Meaning what, exactly? Take a look at the following :

"Audiences used to have an almost rational passion for getting the story straight. They might prefer bad movies to good ones...but although the movies might be banal or vulgar, they were rarely incoherent. A movie had to tell some kind of story that held together : a plot had to parse...Perhaps now 'stories' have become too sane, too explicable, too commonplace for the large audiences who want sensations and regard the explanatory connections as mere 'filler' - the kind of stuff you just sit through or talk through between jolts."

Another 90s jeremiad about the short attention spans of the MTV generation? Actually, no : that's Pauline Kael, from a 1964 article in the "Atlantic Monthly" entitled "Are Movies Going to Pieces?" (a little long, but well worth reading). Written in the dying days of Old Hollywood, the article bemoans the increasing irrationality and lack of shape in films both popular and arthouse ; needless to say, it applies just as well to our own movie age. The incoherence of blockbusters like TWISTER and THE LOST WORLD is well-documented, but "art" films - even the good ones - are often just as shapeless : why, in the climax of CAPITAINE CONAN, is it dramatically necessary for Conan to be a prisoner rather than a soldier? what's Holly Hunter's role in CRASH? what exactly is going on in GOD'S COMEDY and TEMPTRESS MOON?

How, you may wonder, can any of this be connected to video if Ms. Kael was describing the same problems 34 years ago? But the real question is, what do 1964 and 1998 have in common? In both cases, an alternative way of watching movies had / has been operating, going from novelty to standard fixture, for about 15 years - indeed, at one point Kael wonders whether television, "with all its breaks and cuts, and the inattention, except for action, and spinning the dial to find some action", mightn't be responsible for the situation she describes. Both TV and video stress consumer comfort and convenience ; both encourage a mix'n match kind of film-watching ; and, inevitably, both lead to a dilution of storytelling.

If cinema-going is akin to school, then stories are the lessons taught ; and, as viewers move away from passivity to a new self-determination (however spurious), we're increasingly impatient with the kind of tightly-knit, waterproof storytelling you can just abandon yourself to. How else to explain the failure of QUIZ SHOW and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, or the underperformance of DONNIE BRASCO and FLIRTING WITH DISASTER? These are structured, thought-out films with something to say ; but audiences are too hyped-up - too drunk on their new-found power - to sit back and listen.

Which is where David Chute's quote comes in. Conventional wisdom has it that films with a strong visual style lose most "in translation" to video, but in fact it's not too hard to appreciate a stylistic flourish or a beautiful image on the small screen, just as you can appreciate a great painting through a photo in an art book (it's not the same, but you can appreciate it). No, the movies that lose out are the less spectacular ones, those that demand a modicum of patience and concentration - those where visual flair isn't as important as empathy with the onscreen characters.

Try putting on a Golden Age classic, the acme of cinematic storytelling. Try concentrating on that all-important first half-hour, as the plot and characters are set up, while cars roar by outside your house and the phone rings every twenty minutes. Trickiest of all, try resisting the temptation to go to the kitchen for a glass of water, or to pause the tape so you can get up and check how old Jimmy Stewart was when he made the movie, or to play with the image in any of the various possible ways. My personal hang-up - and I suspect I'm not alone in this - has to do with lines that, for whatever reason, are muffled or inaudible : I just can't resist rewinding the tape so I can listen to them again - and again and again, getting more and more frustrated. I know I'm wrecking the movie's rhythm ; I realise that, in a cinema, the offending line would be just a momentary irritation, quickly forgotten ; but I do it anyway. Why? Because I can, I guess.

Thus it is that video takes us "away from the best and inexorably towards the fringe" - to cult movies, with their mind-blowing highlights and one-dimensional people. It puts us in the driver's seat but also takes away our road map - takes away that instant identification with people's problems that comes so easily when the people in question are twenty feet high and there's nothing to distract us from them. It's undoubtedly harder to be manipulated on video (isn't that the argument home-schoolers always use against sending their kids to school?) ; it's also harder to feel. No wonder TITANIC is packing them in.

As Gore Vidal put it, "A movie on video cassette always looks better than it is, but is somehow less interesting ; whereas in the cinema films often look worse than they are, but are more interesting." Video flattens things out - only the flashy and flamboyant survive. And, knowing we can never duplicate the cinema experience, we become ever more obsessive about coming as close to it as possible - insisting on widescreen over pan-and-scan, on the laserdisc (or is it DVD?) with the sharpest transfer, the clearest sound and the most impressive array of Special Features.

There's a middle-aged guy in my town - an old-socialist type, perpetually broke and harried - who runs a small cinema. Once a week he screens classics and older movies in a repertory-theatre deal, sometimes giving a short spiel before the movie. The audience is tiny and constantly diminishing, not least because the prints he shows are dreadful - scratchy, mutilated and at least 20 years old (this is not a guess : the Greek subtitles on these prints feature punctuation that became obsolete around 1979). A few months ago I went to see AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD there. It was terrible : not only was the print ancient, but there seemed to be a red haze over everything, like the depiction of Mars in old sci-fi movies. It was the last straw ; I walked out halfway through and, meeting him at the door, confronted him about it.

The expression on his face was unforgettable : though he apologised for the print, his eyes seemed to blaze with a sense of betrayal. What was I talking about? they seemed to be saying. Didn't I realise this was AGUIRRE he was showing? Didn't I realise how - living in an isolated place before the miracle of video - he'd spent half his life reading about this film, dreaming about it, wondering if he'd ever get a chance to see it? What kind of film buff was I anyway, complaining about some red fucking haze? Didn't I realise how rare and wonderful an occasion this was?

Well, no ; actually, I didn't. Unlike my fiftysomething friend - who treats his broken-down VCR with condescension, and uses it mostly for recording football matches - I'm one of the Video Generation. Unlike him, I'd already seen AGUIRRE - years before, on a pristine videotape with proper subtitles. And I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful that I don't have to wait, as film buffs before me had to wait, for famous films to make their way laboriously (if at all) around the world, in tattered prints with a red haze over everything.

Yet living on video has also taken its toll. For me, the damaged AGUIRRE might as well not have existed. Like every vidkid, I've had it too easy : I've been given a whole world of movies to play with, and discarded those that seemed malformed or imperfect. No longer a passive observer, I treat movies as a consumer product, exercising my God-given (and market-driven) right to seek - no, to demand - a minimum standard of convenience and user-friendliness.

And what about what lies beneath the packaging - the actual content of AGUIRRE, the stuff to ponder and talk about, Herzog's grim satire of colonialism? For my friend, it was all that mattered ; but for me - and, I suspect, all too many others - it was simply lost in translation.

Copyright Theo Panayides 1998