My VHS Theatre

Back in the 1980s when I was in college at the University of Georgia and shortly after, friends and I would decide that we’d like to see a movie. We would pile into a car and head over to a video rental store, Quality Video, located across from the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Taco Stand on Milledge Avenue in Athens, Georgia.

We would get back to one of our places and watch films that included Lewis Allen’s Suddenly (1954), Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946), Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) among others.

There are many ways for a film to achieve greatness. Spaghetti westerns were often awkward with voices dubbed in for both English and non-English speaking actors. This quirk ended up becoming part of the genre’s charm, like the martial arts films of the 70s with their even worse dubbing combined with delightfully ridiculous sound effect for fight scenes. A great film can be great based on more than its intentions or outward beauty.

VHS is not just a format but represents an important and influential period for film appreciation and film making. Director Quentin Tarantino has stated an affection for VHS, which is understandable since he considers that his time working at a video rental store provided him with the material and essence that formed his skills as a film director. He has also stated a dislike of Netflix and streaming films in general. Unlike, Tarantino, whom I consider a genius, this blog will not be agenda driven. I enjoy Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services. One of the main reasons I have decided to start this blog is that I have been able to pick up videotapes for about 25 cents at thrift stores because VHS is a defunct format.

For this blog, I will watch these films on a Daewoo 27-inch CRT with the Rosen RVP9800 VCP, designed for automobiles but plugged into that old television. As expected, the image nor the sound is very good, but the point of watching movies on a VHS is to capture the essence of the film and to not be distracted by the beauty of its cinematography, lighting, or sound qualities. It’s also reminds me of when I would watch films after midnight as a teenager, discovering the wonderful world of older movies that stood the test of time as well as movies so bad they went through the looking glass to become entertaining.

Essentially, I believe that watching movies on videotape forces a viewer to focus on the movie itself—the good, the bad, and the cheesy.