Scratch

The documentary tells the history of hip hop DJing, the thing called turntablism. It starts in the Bronx in the seventies with turning a record back by hand to play the same passage again; from there it runs to two-turntable setups, digging for records, DJ battles and the crews formed in San Francisco in the nineties. Among those speaking are DJ Premier, Q-Bert, Mix Master Mike, Jazzy Jay and DJ Krush. Doug Pray's film treats DJing not as accompaniment but as an instrument, and shows it rather than arguing it: the movement of a hand on a record produces a sound directly. The section on digging for records is the best loved part; people spend hours in basements inside boxes of vinyl. The telling moves chronologically but does not lecture. Ninety-two minutes, and it is the documentary most often turned to on the subject.