The VHS Blog-a-thon, February 22-28

Due to adverse weather conditions in Pennsylvania, it appears that I may not be able to see Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind until later this weekend or early next week. Regardless, there's no reason not to take the time to celebrate the love for this once prodigious format. In his review for said film, critic Dustin Putnam (a writer whose opinions I rarely share but whose enthusiasm strikes me as borderline unparalleled) says that "The fact is, VHS is obsolete for a reason, and no matter what warm and fuzzy memories it may bring up in those old enough to remember the VCR age, DVD is a vastly superior product that honors cinema in a way video cassettes never did." The key word in that statement is "product", thus equating an aesthetic form with technical virtues as if the two were inseparable and not somehow influential on the other. The fact is, DVD has transformed movie viewing in ways previously unprecedented, from clarity of image and sound to special features to the nonexistent need to rewind (between these and CDs, will that word get phased out of existence?), but it is a format that thus far fails in holding near the same level of personality as VHS. From their relative fragility to the ease of home recording, they represented a cinema of the self, rendering tastes and collections more easily assembled in the ways each viewer saw fit. Some may be mourning the premature death (stillbirth?) of HD, but it will be some time before those darling black cassettes are nothing more than artifacts in a museum if I have anything to say about it.

Contributions to this series can be e-mailed to me for inclusion (please include your name and the url of your article/post). My own should appear later next week.

• My VHS hidden treasures - gone but not forgotten by Alan Lopuszynski at Burbanked Movie Blog

Note: It wouldn't be another sparsely-attended movie blog by yours truly without an indefinite extension of publication acceptance. My own article will have to stay on hold until the time comes about to give it due attention (which is considerable), so feel free to continue kicking the ideas about until then.