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Entertainment
Confessions of a video buff
I'VE FINALLY given in and bought a DVD player. Out of affection and loyalty I had held on stubbornly all these years to videotapes and VCRs. But it now looks like 2002 is finally the year to bid farewell to videotapes, if not VCRs.
My one small triumph is that I never gave in to the VCD. Even when my video library warned me that they were going to stop renting tapes because there were no takers for them. I was one of may be five library members who still did my movie watching on videotapes — the others had long ago switched to VCDs.
I know several movie buffs, who are nostalgic for LDs (laser discs) the way I am nostalgic for videos. And they swear that the DVD still cannot match the sound and image clarity of the LD. Not to forget the LP lover who fought to keep the record culture from being swallowed up by the CD revolution. David Cronenberg envisioned videos vanishing in "Videodrome" and now "The Ring" has weaved a mystique around videotapes by creating a mysterious video that kills anyone who watches it.
Videotapes and VCRs are what made me a movie buff and a film critic. By making it possible for me (and countless other movie buffs around the world) to own a movie and watch it over and over again, they gave me the film education I needed. They let all of us get deeper into movies. And got us intimate with our favouritemovies. Our simple tools were `rewind', `fast forward', `stop' and `play'.
They came to us in the early 1980s. The few video libraries that were around charged a heavy deposit and the rental was Rs.10. Pricey for those days. Do you remember the kind of movies you could rent then? Mostly terrific films — classics, really — old and contemporary. And great prints, made from a master copy. Blessedly, we had not even heard of camera prints. (They just didn't exist: they are a uniquely 1990s phenomenon). They were pirated too but they were pirates of a different quality and class.
I could sooner or later rent or buy any movie on DVD that I want and yet it doesn't possess the thrill that hunting and finding a video used to give me. I still get a charge when I find a rare, hard-to-find film in some hole-in-the-wall library selling off its old tapes. Back then some libraries never knew the treasures they were sitting on.
They'd have all these cult films and hard-to-come-by Hollywood classics and they wouldn't know it. And it didn't matter to them. What mattered was the latest box office hit that everyone came asking for. That's where we came in — pirate movie buffs to the rescue.
We would borrow, say, "Badlands" (or "Bad Taste" or "Babette's Feast") and switch it with "Topgun". What you did was to take the tape out, put it in another empty shell, replace "Badlands" with "Topgun" and screw the shell back in place. It was a delicate operation but we managed. The library never noticed. And it was our deeply held believe that whoever, in his error, had next borrowed "Badlands" or "Babette's Feast" would actually be glad that it turned out to be "Topgun".
Thus our personal videotape collection grew. But no, that wasn't the only means of acquiring videos. That was when we were struggling students. Once we got jobs, our means of owning videos grew a little more sophisticated. We made copies. We pooled our respective VCRs together, invested in blank tapes and hunted for movies we've always wanted to own.
Our source to begin with was, once again, libraries — borrow the movie, make a copy each overnight and faithfully return the film. Later, we updated the same movies with copies made from master prints.
I think someone should say something on behalf of video piracy. If it weren't for them, we would never have had access to good movies. (I'm not talking about camera prints of box office hits. That should stop. It's idiotic not to wait and see "The Lord of the Rings" on screen instead of seeing it on a camera print. Because it will eventually play in our theatres, anyway. The same with "Gladiator" or "Harry Potter"). I'm referring to the kind of offbeat movies that never come to our theatres.
All through the 1980s and early 1990s, you couldn't get original videos in India even if you wanted them. And when they finally began to have a presence here in the retail market, it was mainly popular movies and blockbusters. Offbeat, arty, independent, low budget, foreign flicks and Woody Allen movies don't play in our movie theatres at all and the companies that have now (finally) begun to flood the market with affordable, original VCDs have once again skipped offbeat movies and serious drama. And so the only way to watch say, "The Hours" or "Being John Malkovich" is through these pirated VCDs. I don't know where any serious movie lover would have been without them.
Refining one's personal movie collection never stops, does it? Just when I've managed to replace prints of my favourite movies with original master videos, along comes the DVD. Now, I'll have to replace these master videos with DVDs, since they seem to the last word in home-movie watching.
I skipped the LD stage entirely. But a movie buff friend of mine began where I left off. He has gone from replacing original videos with original VCDs, VCDs with LDs and LDs with DVDs. Each time he replaced something with something, he generously passed on his collection to friends and old lovers. It hasn't stopped for him yet. When the DVD of a Director's Cut (or the Boxed Set) is released, he gives away his old DVD. Now he has nothing but scorn for videotapes and claims he has forgotten what they look like. A reminder of how videos will always be with us is that we still call them video libraries, don't we? Not VCD or DVD libraries. As in, ``I'm off to the video library.'' Which is what I think I'll do just now — they must have some old video I can rent.
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
(pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com)
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