Over at Moving Image Source, Anthony Kaufman has up an interesting piece on the death of VHS, through the emblematic prism of the shuttering of famous Kim’s Video, and how as the format goes, so too do films like Costa-Gavras’s 1972 Uruguayan political thriller State of Siege become effectively extinct.
With this shrinkage in accessibility comes a collective constricting of the (inter)national cinematic consciousness, so goes the theory. Slow rot. And yup, I’m an offender too, as I’ve seen no André De Toth films, to my knowledge.
Surely there is much to be made for the often shoddy treatment Universal
and Paramount have shown their (deep) vaults… the neglect of catalogue titles, not the dress-up given titles they do release to DVD. Warner Bros. at least tries to really consistently reach out to true, older cinephiles. But
I’m also, somewhat fancifully, of the Darwinian notion that quality,
like hope, eventually floats. The key word being eventually. There are certainly films — many of which Kaufman mentions — worth fighting for as the march to digitalization continues. But a solid
percentage of what vanishes “into the ether,” as Dave Kehr says, might just frankly deserve to… just
the way the canon of Jeff Speakman will eventually vanish with Blu-ray. My $.02.
Hello. There is still a difference between something (dvd) and nothing (vhs), but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry. :(. Eranthe.
The amount of foreign films that will be lost forever is truly staggering. That’s the real crime against cinema — the fact that so few companies in a position to do so have any investment (emotional, financial or otherwise) in rescuing these works in the digital age, for future generations.