Rewind This!

The VHS cassette arrived in 1976 and within a decade changed the relationship between people and film. A film could now be watched at home whenever you liked; it could be paused, rewound, copied. The documentary follows the consequences: rental shops, films made straight to video, a culture of bootlegs, and films that could find no distributor circulating on tape. Josh Johnson is less interested in the technology than in the culture that grew around it. Collectors, shop owners, directors and people who wrote about tape all speak. Atom Egoyan, Mamoru Oshii, Lloyd Kaufman, Cassandra Peterson and Jason Eisener are among them. The film's interesting finding is this: VHS was a low-quality format, and precisely because of that it recognised no boundaries. Films no studio would have pressed spread on tape. Who it's for: Anyone interested in film history, how formats shape culture, and the world of collecting. Who it's not for: The telling is nostalgic with little critical distance, and it moves between topics in a scattered way.