I went into Queen Video last night to see what VHS movies they were blowing out for cheap. The clerk said “Oh it’s YOU Mr. Woods.” He bent down on one knee and weakly handed me a video box, his hands trembling over his head. I took it. It was some lame 80s crap with Shadoe Stevens– sorry, not bad enough. PTUH! I spat on the cover and threw the box onto the floor in disgust. It crashed on the wall-to-wall carpeting. Shocked patrons looked on.
“Ha!” said I. “Is this all that you have to offer the webmaster of the Video Lost and Found?” The 19-year old manager quickly ran out. “Forgive him– he’s young, he doesn’t understand. Here– I have something I’m sure you will like.” He quickly scrambled back.
“We have some more of those bad Filipino action movies you’ve been collecting lately.” The place grew still. Heartbeats echoed on the soundtrack. My hawk-eyes examined the teeny tiny print on the box. “Ah, more films by Cirio Santiago to add to my inventory.” The manager sighed in relief. All was right with the world. I put the vids in my saddlebag, and waltzed out of the video store, as patrons ensured a path was cleared for my grand exit. On the street, spaghetti western whistling and Spanish guitar echoed on the soundtrack as I lit a tiny cigarillo and sauntered down to Spadina Avenue.
God bless the DVD revolution.
Because now has never been a better time to hoard VHS tapes.
Yes, in order to clear the shelf space for digital video disks, both mom-and-pop and franchise video outlets alike are selling off their slow-to-no renting VHS tapes, often at a price lower than one would pay to rent them! And as the DVD is fast becoming the popular video format of choice, which is pushing out the analog VHS, I can only think of a time ten years ago that when compact discs finally became the accepted format in music consumers’ minds, dissidents would start collecting vinyl en masse. Be it the 33 RPM or the 1/2 inch videotape, this curious trend of people hoarding outmoded devices is hardly a new thing in human behaviour. Avid antique collectors have been pillaging people’s estates ever since the dawn of transportation. Thus, buying up an armful of VHS tapes is to me no different than snatching up some old quilt at a yard sale, and then getting it appraised on “Antiques Roadshow”.
When 33 RPM was still in vogue, people still hoarded scratchy 78’s and 8-track tapes from garage sales. Why? Partially, it is due to the superficial fact that people snap up some outmoded device in the hope that it will be worth something someday. (I say superficial because the collectibles market is not as lucrative as the garage-saling entrepreneur would like to think… people continent-wide are doing the same thing.) More than that, I think this strange trend of buying (soon-to-be) useless cultural artifacts leans towards the western world’s materialist bid to not only amass stuff that is unique from their neighbours, but to amass plenty of it! When entertainment items started becoming more affordable, that is- less of a luxury, so too I think the age of nostalgia was born, and that era has never left. As long as one seemingly usable format gets replaced by another, the nostalgic era will not leave us anytime soon.
My fantasy scenario in the introduction may not be as “out-there” as I first felt when I wrote it. Even something allegorical like that bears some kind of fundamental truth. Snapping up some obscure Filipino Rambo rip-off is still some by-product of cultural snobbery. The only difference lies in one’s perception of what high-and-low culture may be. In other words, a cine-snob at Cinematheque will boast that they’ve seen every film in the Straub-Huillet retrospective (to name one filmmaking enterprise that is notoriously inaccessible, especially on video), and some tapehead may proclaim their joy at finding the original VHS release of The Herculoids. High and low culture are still nonetheless marginal tastes at the edges of the big fat center, which is homogenized, safe, and usually bland. That high and low culture however exist at completely opposite ends of the spectrum is rather irrelevant—for one thing, cultural snobbery exists in either of these, and personally I am not convinced that one is any more or less highbrow or refined than the other.
Further, we live in the age of information. The television waves are saturated with news 24 / 7, and for that matter, the Internet is just a click away. Regardless of how much information is out, almost all of it is the same, and much of it is biased. Therefore, this “cultural archiving”, if you will, becomes an act of rebellion, as we are grabbing things which are quite often passed over by the mainstream. The true collector who raids the VHS bins is not looking for a copy of Pretty Woman, they are looking for something little-known, perhaps even by themselves. Not only is this act a matter of holding on to something that would otherwise be ignored by the mainstream, it is also an act of justifying our existence.
Why else would we hoard VHS tapes by the boxload? Are we afraid that some of these titles will never be found again, even on DVD? Is it because they’re cheaper by the unit than even the rental price of a DVD? Perhaps even the greater truth is, in this age of information overload, we’re just looking for something to discover again. Or for that matter, given that the age of nostalgia still persists, perhaps this is an attempt to recapture our youth, or at least something we lost along the road to maturity.
I will say this- although there was not a happier man than I when the 1980s officially ended, I do concede that the decade had some good points. Yes, it was the age when the videocassette was born, but also, this was the time when I seemed to have both money and time at my disposal. For many, the age of the videocassette introduced them to a previously undiscovered world of cinema. Remember, there were not as yet a plethora of movie reference books at Coles, and the Internet was way off. Therefore, people would often rent a wide area of titles, without prejudice but with a lot of curiosity, and they genuinely had time on their hands to watch the armloads of videos they brought home. Even though there were fewer homes than today which had a VCR, it was rarer still to actually own a factory pre-recorded cassette. Today, you get them for pocket change in Walmart. But the first store-bought videocassettes I ever saw were in K-Mart in 1985—they were all public domain titles which have since been recycled to death, but they were selling then for 20 bucks apiece (not cheap, even by today’s standards).
Today, both consumers and retailers alike are less willing to spend their money and time on untried product. Few mom and pop stores (if there are any left) will risk stocking a title that didn’t make a mint at the box office. For that matter, franchises like Blockbuster would rather fill a whole wall of copies of Spiderman than throw in one stinking Anchor Bay re-issue of a Cassavetes film. And for these politically correct times, stores spend more time and energy filling their spaces with bland pap which is certain to appeal to a broader demographic. 27 copies of Seabiscuit, and not one of Sugar Cookies. That is to say, the video world is less subservient to the tapehead living in his mother’s basement, than to the wholesome family unit.
Therefore, in some subconscious way, perhaps hoarding these obscure titles hearkens one back to some simpler time in one’s life… when we weren’t so jaded by the cynicism of adulthood, and weren’t so burned out by the age of useless information. I can’t imagine why else someone would buy a 20 year-old videocassette with tracking problems, chocolate transfers, and –gasp- which are likely shown in full-screen mode. As for the reasons for my own obsession with snapping up old VHS tapes, I think it is for all these reasons I have alluded to above.
I don’t consider myself a cultural snob by any means, even though my “Look what I found” attitude may suggest that I am. And for that matter, I do not consider myself to be performing any kind of public service, although I’m sure the video store owner is grateful that I am helping the business create more retail space. Although I am snapping up titles for my website The Video Lost and Found, which I am launching in the fall of 2004, the truth is, the site is an attempt to justify my compulsion of buying these things, and not the other way around. I am no Luddite- in fact, I love DVDs. However, since I work in a profession which has desensitized me to new images and certainly to new information, I do believe that this pathetic hoarding of VHS movies is a subconscious way for me to relive a time in which my beloved world of cinema seemed new, and it is becoming a thrill for me to discover things again. In the bins, I have found titles that I have been meaning to view yet have never gotten around to it (and these days, it’s cheaper to buy it then rent it), obscure titles which have piqued my curiosity, or stuff to replace my crappy EP-mode off-air copies of films. More often than not, however, it is curiosity which explains most of my purchases.
That explains most of the contents of the 40-something titles I acquired at the Honest Ed’s 90-cent VHS sale (it took me about three days to grab them all). But perhaps the craziest treasure trove I have scored of late was earlier in the summer when one of my favourite haunts had a whole bunch of videos for a dollar or two apiece in their sidewalk bin. I managed to scoop a whole bunch of little-known titles on the Paragon label. For those who may not have seen any Paragon videos in the 1980s, this Nevada-based company was the 8-track tape of the video world. Their video packaging was also the least common denominator—the front of the box had a scan of an old movie poster, and the back had a movie synopsis which averaged the length of one you would find in TV Guide. This would run underneath something that passed for a still from the movie in question—more often than not, it was some Warhol-ish silkscreen image, or a painting instead of a photo. Even though the earliest videocassettes often had poor transfers from well-used film prints (before they re-issued the titles, struck from better masters), they looked state-of-the-art compared to the “quality” transfers that one found on a Paragon video. What made this sidewalk discovery even more precious to me, was that the video boxes had obvious water damage on them. Perfect! This to me is the ultimate retro-pillage… soiled artifacts from a bygone era.
It was worth the purchase alone just to see the reaction of the man behind the cash register (“You want THESE?!?”). One man’s gold is another’s garbage, but furthermore, this one haul is an encapsulation of all of the things I have pondered in this article. Something old is new again. I managed to beat out other tapeheads from making this strange discovery. Most of all, finding these obscure relics is joyous act of personal discovery, but maybe too, it is also an act of cultural snobbery. Perhaps I speak for other video enthusiasts when I say that the surreal opening of this piece isn’t really that fantastic after all—we really do put ourselves on a high horse by amassing this seemingly important ephemera. We are proving our own existence, our own right to independent thinking, in an age when too many decisions are being made for us. Isn’t identity the ultimate act of rebellion?
Originally published in The Program, 2004.