Rewind This!

Josh Johnson – 2013 – USA

A nostalgic, sentimental and often humorous look back at the short-lived but all-pervasive VHS medium.  An up-and-coming novelty in the 70s, by the mid-80s virtually every household in the civilized world had a VCR, a collection of favorite tapes, and a membership to a video rental store.  Americans of a certain generation – (that I happen to belong to as well) – remember with fondness the feeling of anticipation while rummaging through the dust-caked shelves of local, mom-and-pop video shops and discovering the oddest titles from all over the world that would never have been accessible in theaters or on television.  The box covers were lurid, often hand-painted affairs and frequently more interesting than the content of the tapes.  These and programmable VCRs revolutionized the processes of film fandom, allowing kids to duplicate, pause, rewind and carefully examine films at their leisure, whereas prior to this one would only be able to watch a film as it’s running and then remember it as well as possible.  Rewind This! explores all these phenomena, but takes special interest in the collectors who admire the now-defunct format for both aesthetic and populist reasons.  Although it’s notoriously dull transfer quality and use of pan-and-scan to deal with wider film aspect ratios were an affront to the cinematic sensibility, VHS was somehow forgivable simply because of the unprecedented and almost limitless access to vast catalogues of films and other content that were otherwise unavailable.  The documentary even gets into the philosophical and anthropological issues raised by VHS, such as being able to trace a viewer’s interaction with the tape by noticing sections that have been rewound and re-watched repeatedly, or discovering generations of content on tapes that have been recorded over multiple times.  Even the cheapness of the prosaic tape image has been used deliberately by filmmakers to recreate the immediacy of home movies and television programming.  One interview subject reflects wistfully on the unintended connotations of the phrase “Be kind, please rewind” found on stickers used on many rental tapes; he sees it as a call to remember and preserve the unique nature of the VHS experience.