Monday, March 5, 2012
On Video / Obsolescence Week / Film Obsolescence Week: Into the snow!
Posted by Ben Sachs on 03.05.12 at 09:58 AM
I’ve never regarded DVD as a flawless alternative to VHS. The advances in image and sound quality may be inarguable, but it’s far more disruptive to the movie-watching experience when a disc skips—or stops playing altogether—than when a cassette image goes snowy around the top and bottom. And, actually, I kind of resent those technological advancements, which often have been trumpeted at the expense of the movies the discs contain. In hindsight, one of the best things about VHS was the format’s fundamental modesty: watching a tape, you were well aware that you weren’t seeing a movie but rather the facsimile of one. Videocassettes were a consolation prize for people unable to go to the theater (which is how any movie ought to be experienced) and the knowledge that you saw an inferior image at home only reaffirmed the spectacle of seeing it projected on a big screen.
With the constant developments in home viewing, the distinction between moviegoing (the very word connotes physical activity) and simply watching something gets blurrier every day. This only makes me nostalgic for the more benign blur that runs throughout the VHS copy of Chloe in the Afternoon I watched a few dozen times in college. Is there any mutation that can be made to a movie on Netflix Streaming that evokes the dog-eared page of a favorite book?
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