I’ve slipped into an analog mode of living. Increasingly, as my screen addiction worsens, I try to find ways out. This has manifested in a manic consumerism, buying things second-hand that might’ve been relevant to my workflow if this was 40 years ago, but now I try to force myself to use in order to slow down. Some of these purchases have been duds (rolodex), others I began using everyday (electric typewriter). Through a recent yard sale, I was able to finally acquire a TV with a VCR built in—a hot item on the resale market which I spent more money on than I would’ve felt comfortable with had I not been buying from a friend. Regardless, it too has become part of my routine; counterintuitively, having another screen in the house shouldn’t aid with attention, but, like the typewriter, I’m finding that more rudimentary objects (despite their purpose) help me stay focused.
There’s an immediate nostalgia to the clicks and whirs of heavy plastic and metal and running electric tape, just as there's the annoying recollection of that constant high-pitched hum which my parents never perceived, but I could hear from across the house as a child. What’s most beautiful about the format, though, is the imperfections: the bend on the edge of the screen, the lines running up and down, the gentle bloom cast over everything. It’s all anathema to the cold precision of digital.
The first thing I popped into the TV was Neil Jordan’s 1992 thriller The Crying Game, a film that, in its time, was important as one of the first big box office smashes for Miramax, as well having a transgender character as one of the leads, which Miramax intentionally concealed as part of a promotional ploy. Now, the film exists as something that’s getting rediscovered, through a Criterion release that features a radical new restoration. Gone are the “realistic” day tones filled with big blue skies and harsh white highlights, and in are stark filters and stylized colors. It’s not the first time Criterion has released something so different from previous home releases (their Blu-ray of Michael Mann’s Thief springs first to mind), but it’s the latest in a never-ending cycle of discourse about the “right” way to watch a movie, just as people debate whether or not IMAX aspect ratios are artistic or gimmicks.
On VHS, some of the sharper contrasts that’re softened out in the new restoration are exaggerated, to the point where the white lines of back lights create a banding effect, lifting characters off of their low-resolution screen. The nuances are lost, but it’s extremely efficient, reducing prime visual information to its most basic constituent parts. This reduction in the image’s clarity (not to mention its cropping—save for the title sequence, which is presented letterboxed) also, in a sense, reduces the artform, boxing it into the world of television, back when the distinction between was much more than just a difference in runtimes.
It’d be unwise to say that VHS versions are unintended crops—there were the odd pan-and-scans and lazy pieces of reframing, but practically any film made for mass consumption had this post-theatrical consideration built in. Some played into it more than others, but it’s important to keep in mind that so many of John Carpenter’s 2:35 classics were experienced by and most beloved as 4:3 approximations of the original.
In the digital sphere, the cleanness of the image, and the constant upping of what “high definition” means—from 720p, to 1080p, to 4k, and beyond—pushes this idea that there’s a real image hiding somewhere up in the pixels, so long as they can get them small enough. That in itself belies that cinema has always been an approximation, whether on an essential, formal level where the images themselves are approximations of light and movement, down to changes in screen size or the way that every single screening on a projected piece of film is a performance, one done between the projectionist and the degrading piece of material that they are shining a light through. To deny the specificity of that imperfection is to deny the medium itself.