Be Kind Rewind and Videophilia

Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind’s use of the now-largely marginalized medium of VHS is more complicated than it might first appear. On the one hand, VHS exists in Be Kind Rewind primarily for the plot device of Jerry’s accidental demagnetizing of the movies in the video store, something logistically simpler than with other technologies. On the other, the medium of VHS also makes it easier for Mike and Jerry to record new movies, without the logistical demands and hands-on training needed to work digital video capabilities.

There is something potentially more accessible about VHS in its production and distribution; moreover, its presence as a site of cinephiliac re -appropriation in the film reminds the careful viewer that the industry of home video itself was created by various forms of audience behavior.“Video, as a reproductive technology, was introduced for making recordings,” writes Lucas Hilderbrand in a recent issue of Framework, “and film buffs from the very beginning were bootleggers.”

While major studios rightly feared the loss of control over movies’ circulation which the new age of home viewing would bring, he adds, instead “it was [movie] buffs who made their own recordings and small business owners who developed the video store industry.” Is Be Kind Rewind in part about an attempt to hold onto cinephilia’s pirated past?

Be Kind Rewind is a nostalgic love letter to the era of cinephiles defined in their interests, tastes, and access, as much by the now defunct format of VHS as by the theatrical presentation of 35mm celluloid. “The distinctly homemade quality of the sweded videos,” writes Chuck Tryon inReinventing Cinema, “also articulates a larger nostalgia for VHS itself as the format becomes increasingly obsolete."

Does the sweded version of Ghostbusters in the film register more with me personally because I have more memories of watching an awful copy of it recorded off a late night HBO screening in the mid-1980s than of watching it in a Madison, Wisconsin, multiplex?

Like most die-hard movies buffs of my generation, I grew up on television. I grew up not on projected films, but on televised ones (and on hastily recorded copies of televised ones), and VHS copies represented an ownership of the films I loved and thus, along with the intimacy of living room and bedroom viewings, a closer sense of an emotional bond to the movies in question.

VHS resonates in the movie for how it—like film only less subtly—haunts the digital image that is the Be Kind Rewind movie itself, and for how VHS coexists closely alongside film in the larger history of media. In the crucial narrative scene early on, Jerry (now magnetized by a failed attempt to destroy the power plant) walks around the video store, unknowingly demagnetizes all the titles.

At a couple of moments when Jerry walks too close to the camera, the film image is deliberately altered to create the effect of an analog tape being warped by the magnetic field, mimicking a dysfunctional VHS analog image as the electronic pulses begin to fluctuate. It is a nod to the figurative ways in which, as D.N. Rodowick and Nicholas Rombes have argued, older media coexist with newer media. This disconcerting, deliberate imperfection is a perfect metaphor for how VHS literally and symbolically haunts the digital image in Gondry’s film.

There is also, of course, a political element to this older medium. As Hilderbrand noted in a superb discussion of “videophilia,” “the politics of video have, from the beginning, been a politics of access.” Mr. Fletcher’s resistance to DVD is partly a reflection of his larger resistance to change, touched upon in different ways throughout the film. However, its also a commentary on two crucial aspects of cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction—both related to the politics of access.

One is the economics of the situation, the idea that older businesses and/or those struggling to survive in low income areas simply cannot afford to switch over their entire library of titles to a new format.

Second, and this is related to the first point, newer platforms for watching movies necessarily contain fewer titles. Older movies (specifically those not deemed as high-profit titles by studios) fall increasingly by the wayside as films migrate from newer format to newer format. This fear haunts my earlier celebration of Blu-Ray, of course, as this newest iteration of home viewing technology necessarily brings with it a smaller catalogue of titles.

Just recently, famed film critic Dave Kehr notes that, “for bringing the latest Hollywood blockbusters into homes, Blu-ray is without parallel. But it is less friendly to older films, foreign films and films made with antiquated technologies (like 16 millimeter and analog video).” In Be Kind Rewind, Mr. Fletcher observes that the newer all-DVD rental store, West Coast Video, may have a “larger” selection, but it mostly compromises of 20-30 copies of the same films, rather than a truly diverse and eclectic collection of movies. Holding on to VHS becomes one way to (try to) hold onto to film’s past.