Vinyl

Alan Zweig talks to people who collect records, but not about music: what he wants to ask is what drives a person to collect in the first place. The answers move quickly off collecting and onto loneliness, obsession and postponed lives. The strange thing about the film is that Zweig puts himself on the questioned side too, aiming the camera at a mirror to record his own confessions and describing how records kept him from the family he wanted. Shot on a camcorder, it looks cheap and is completely honest. Among the people he talks to are Don McKellar and Harvey Pekar. Zweig kept using the same mirror method in his later documentaries, so this one reads as the start of a long series he built on himself.