When Fox decided to stop publishing The Simpsons on DVD, one thing we lamented (apart forcing you to get a cable subscription to watch the show) was the fate of the show's audio commentary. The creators of The Simpsons recorded in-depth, insightful discussions for every episode of the show, and although you can still access the commentary through the official streaming app, it's significantly more hidden than it was on the DVDs. And we'll probably never have commentary for shows and movies released through Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming platforms.
When the Criterion Collection first devised commentary tracks, the concept attracted film scholars and served as an useful outlet for behind-the-scenes stories. As more DVDs included them, the tracks became more and more obligatory and less enthusiastic. Although it's over a decade old, I still remember the commentary track for the action movie Ultraviolet, where star Milla Jovovich plays with her cats for an hour and doesn't really say anything.
But we'll also miss out on the occasionally deeply entertaining track, like an example Holm gives of a low-budget action movie where the director is completely frank about its doomed production.
If they're going to be phoned in, they may as well not exist. It's a shame that the good ones may as well not exist now either.
Yesterday's post about Vidiots had us thinking about the VHS format again. Commercial VHSes have been out of print for nearly a decade, and with the last VHS player leaving the factory in July, it's glory days are clearly behind. Just for fun, this got us asking: what was the last VHS ever?
According to Inverse, the last commercial VHS ever published was David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, released on March 14, 2016. Others point to an extremely hard-to-find tape of Cars from 2007, but it's hard to figure out where those came from. Either way, we can safely say the VHS died about ten years ago.
The Inverse article goes on to wonder whether there might be a future market for VHSes in the same way that vinyl records have come back. Basically, there's not. The formats that replaced the VHS are all far better and more useful. We're always in the process of keeping our collection available and up-to-date, but we suspect we won't be purchasing new VHSes in 20 years.
If you read this blog, you know we have an affinity for digital preservation and weird, niche films that aren't available anymore. We do our best to serve the university community in those areas, but there are other groups with their own missions. Take Vidiots, a video rental store that's served Los Angeles film nerds (including directors like David O. Russell) for decades with its massive library of hard-to-find titles.
Now, Vidiots has launched a crowdfunding campaign to take wants to take their collection into the modern era by digitally preserving as much of their collection as possible. Vidiots has thousands of rare VHSes that are presumably deteriorating and may be the last copies remaining of certain films, and Vidiots wants to digitize those tapes, license them, and check them out to whoever wants a copy. Additional funds will go to creating programming to showcase these films. This is a huge benefit to the LA film community – which more or less overlaps exactly with Hollywood.
If you want to support a good cause that makes the world of film a better place, consider kicking a few dollars their way. Their campaign has about a month left to raise $45,000, any amount helps.
We have a bittersweet post to share today: after four years of service, Visual Media Collections Coordinator Molly Hubbs is leaving the AU Library. Molly has been an invaluable member of the Media Services team and a backbone of many of our ongoing projects, especially new acquisition processing and the push to digitize our VHS collection. Although we're sad to see her go, we're excited for her new and exciting opportunities. Best of luck, Molly!
Welcome back! The fall 2016 semester is underway now, and we're happy to see students back. You can come to us to watch any films you need to watch for class... but as we're often reminded, there are some things we just can't get our hands on.
Last week, The New York Times ran a story about the challenges of preserving films from the silent era. There's a lot of eye-popping statistics – especially that 70 percent of the films from that time are lost forever – but we were most amazed by the stories of alternative versions of movies. Evidently, studios used to produce pre-censored or re-written versions of movies to show overseas or in areas that could not yet play movies with sound, and their content and production vary significantly from the originals. Keeping these versions intact has been a nightmare for preservationists. If you ever need to watch something out-of-print for class, remember all these archivists toiling way to keep culture alive.
This is to say nothing of films that have never been available on a modern format, left behind on VHS. We're taking care of these cases as we find them in our collection, so rest assured, we're doing our part to prevent other films from being lost to time too.
Well, we've been dreading this moment for years now: the VHS is officially obsolete.
Funai, the last company that still manufactures VHS players, will end their production at the end of the month. This comes less than a year after Betamax tapes were also discontinued. As of August 1st, the VHS will be a format permanently in the past; outside of small artisanal efforts (the article we linked to mentions a collector community that might not go down so easily), there will never be any more VHS players than currently exist in the world. That's all we've got.
This won't have too much of a practical effect for most people who have already replaced their VHS collections, but we worry about what will come of all the VHSes that have never been re-released or preserved. Countless documentaries and ephemera will become unavailable, assuming the tapes last longer than the supply of players.
For a few years now, Media Services has been in the process of preserving our VHS collection to ensure that this problem won't impact the AU community. We've been conducting an extensive audit of our VHSes to see what isn't available on any other format and whether we're within the legal grounds to digitize and create our own DVD copy of it. As part of this, we're also collaborating with other groups on campus like ATV and Athletics to preserve other valuable VHS videos, including old commencement addresses.
We still have a supply of VHS players and staff who know how to fix them, so we'll be fine in the long run. Let's take a second to commemorate this inevitable but sad moment for physical media.
Now that we're in the slow months of summer, we have a chance to tidy up our department. A big part of that this summer is cleaning out desks that haven't been emptied in decades and finding all sorts of goodies in them.
Most of what we found was old files, but a few wonderful relics from the past stood out. We shared some of the best to Facebook. The catalogs are pretty amazing (look at all that wood paneling!), but the cassette of a 1984 Ted Kennedy speech at the nearby Methodist church has some real historical value. Luckily the University Archives had already backed it up!
Finals week has arrived, folks. In deference to your stress levels, we'll be sharing some light, entertaining things this week.
Firstly, we wanted to show you these great old "lantern slides" that were once displayed in movie theaters at the turn of the 20th century. In the days long before FirstLook and movie theater radio stations, theaters still used the empty screen between movies to explain theater policies and advertise. Apparently in 1912, wearing a hat to the movies was the equivalent of using your phone. (We're sure 1912's AMC briefly considered the idea of a hat-friendly theater.)
You can see a whole bunch of these in the Library of Congress's collection. The world of 2016 would probably benefit from a "Don't forget your umbrella" slide.
Occasionally, we have a laugh about some of the obsolete media formats we keep stocked behind the desk. We still have a large number of VHS tapes and a handful of LaserDiscs – and even an extremely unloved U-matic player that looks like part of the Space Shuttle.
But there's a format even clunkier than all of those. Behold, the CED Videodisc.
The video by retro technology group Techmoan, embedded above, explores this horrible media format. CED Videodiscs combine the impracticality of listening to music on vinyl, the blurry quality of VHS tapes, and the short running time of LaserDiscs. Discs only half an hour on each side and need to be flipped halfway through a movie. And if a Videodisc had any damage or particles stuck on the surface, it would skip wildly; many older discs are almost unwatchable.
We don't have any Videodiscs in our collection, probably because the format was dead by 1984. You'll have to make do with this video if you want to experience the absolutely worst way to watch a movie. Skip to about the 20 minute mark to see it in action.
As movie theaters search for new technology to drag people into theaters, the latest promise comes from Barco Escape, a three-screen technology designed for "immersive cinema" with a panoramic view or, potentially, action on three different screens at once.
But as Dennis Duffy once said, technology is cyclical. These ideas have come up before – in spectacular fashion.
Back in the 50s, the Cinerama format had a similar concept, using three projectors on a wide-angled screen to create a broader picture. The technique seemed so unusual at the time that the first Cinemera film, This Is Cinerama, is basically a commercial for the format; it opens with an educational lecture about the history of film to prepare viewers for what will come next. Flicker Alley released This Is Cinerama on Blu-ray a few years ago, complete with a fake curved screen. (Available from the AU Library under HU BLU 10798.)
Other movies have used multiple projectors to show several scenes at once, maybe none more famously than the 1927 silent film Napoleon. The 5-hour-long behemoth of a movie includes a sequence with three different projectors running at once. Because of the changing size of the screen and length, Napoleon is nearly impossible to watch correctly at home. You'll have to catch one of the rare theatrical screenings, held only 14 times since the 1930s. (A Blu-ray will also come out later this year.)
Or maybe, if Barco Escape catches on, you can watch Napeleon there. Everything old is new again!
The transition from physical to digital projection has been a long time coming, even if Tarantino has tried his best to keep the format around. This Sunday, another stalwart – the IMAX theater at the National Air and Space Museum – retired their 70mm projector.
When Star Wars: The Force Awakens debuted last month, so many people insisted on seeing it at the Air and Space Museum because of the quality of the 70mm projection. But as The Washington Post points out, the aging equipment hasn't changed much from 1976 and requires intensive labor to setup. The projectionists and "hipsters" (not our words, see the article) might enjoy the feel of film stock, but for a theater that regularly shows so many different films, digital is simpler and faster for everyone involved.
Film projection will always have a place, even if just in specialty theaters. The Air and Space Museum's transition feels like a bigger change, though, because of how many people have gone through that theater.
(Also, look at how chunky that projector is! Holy moly!)
The upcoming release of Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight is a pivotal moment for physical film. Tarantino famously loves film stock (having shelled out money to keep film production plants running); the director wants his upcoming movie to showcase the rich power of film in a way that's undeniable to studios and audiences. But showing that film in all its glory takes specialized equipment. Only select theaters will project it as intended in Ultra Panavision 70 – a beautiful format that, it turns out, nobody really remembers how to use.
No major commercial film has been shot in Ultra Panavision 70 since the 60s, and given their rarity, few working projectionists have experience with the format. This might explain The Hateful Eight's apparently disastrous advance screening last night, as reported by HitFix's Drew McWeeny, in which the film drifted out of focus for two hours before the theater decided to play the digital version instead. The event meant to celebrate physical film stock might have convinced attendees that the format isn't practical anymore.
McWeeny warns that too many of these failures could reduce film stock to a fetish object for filmmakers with little meaningful use. He notes that the most recent season of Project Greenlight involved a huge push to shoot on film rather than digitally, "[a]nd in the end," he says, "it made no difference."
If theaters struggle with the medium's show-off piece, that's a bad portent – and clearly not what Tarantino and other film diehards hoped for. We're sure The Hateful Eight looks gorgeous when projected correctly, but the long-term outlook on watching film like that seems more uncertain.
For those who missed out on the 80s, Betamax tapes were the main rival for VHSes before it was clear which videocassette format would be most popular. Betamax tapes had some clear benefits – compact size and higher image quality – but VHSes cost less to produce and attracted more publishers. (As legend tells, adult entertainment helped drive the sale of VHS machines more than Hollywood movies.) Although Betamax tapes lost the battle, they continued to find use as a recording format for professional film production. But it's unclear why Sony was still manufacturing them... or who was using them.
With the advent of streaming platforms that now almost universally work in browsers and on nearly an electronic device, it seems that we'll never have another "format war" as intense as what Betamax wrought. Device manufacturers and publishers will always fight over who gets the most popular content, but there's no longer a question of whether one of two whole mediums will become the global standard.
As anyone still setting on their pricey Betamax collection can attest, that's for the best.
At long last, 26 years after the film's release, today is the day that Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrive in the future in Back to the Future Part II. Despite occupying only a fraction of the running time of the entire trilogy, the futuristic 2015 is one of the most iconic and memorable depictions of the future on film.
Dozens of websites have already covered what BTTFII got right and wrong about the distant future of 2015, so instead, let's round up all the Back to the Future-related happenings in the city today!
If you can't make it out to Reston, the Regal 14 in Gallery Place downtown will host a screening of BTTFII at 5pm... which we assume is as close as they could get to the 4:29pm, the exact time Marty and Doc arrive in the future. The Esquire Network will also run a marathon of the series throughout the day. (Our copy of Back to the Future II is already checked out, sorry! The original is still available though.)
And for the 21+ crowd, Fantom Comics in Dupont Circle will hold a Back to the Future celebration party this evening, complete with a costume and impression contest. Hill Valley-themed drinks are promised.
We could join the chorus bemoaning that we didn't get hoverboards or self-drying jackets, but instead, let's celebrate that our 2015 is exciting in different, totally unexpected ways. for instance, you're reading this blog post that I wrote from the basement of a library instead of a newspaper! Take that, USA Today!
Beloved 80s adventure movie The Goonies turned 30 last week. That's a milestone you probably didn't know or really care about, much like how you missed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie's 25th anniversary in March.
But it was a big deal in Astoria, Oregon, the small northwest town where The Goonies was filmed. Over the weekend, Astoria welcomed over 10,000 fans (more than their total population) to take part in a weekend of meet-and-greets, panels, and other Goonies-centric events. The big draw this year was a screening at John Warren Field, a high school athletic field featured in the movie that will soon be torn down. Fans also participated in the "One-Eyed Willy Treasure Geocaching Hunt," which is about as crudely modern as a Goonies remake would probably be.
We love when people care way too much about their favorite pop culture, and we're sad that we missed The Goonies anniversary. Only one year left to plan for the Short Circuit celebration!
You can also always check out The Goonies from our collection for a belated celebration (HU DVD 3576).
Even beyond its familiar DC setting, The Exorcist holds a special place in cinematic memory as one of the most successful and – just going from anecdotes – most terrifying horror films ever made. It's difficult to envision any pop culture event today holding the nation's full attention and enthusiasm, let along a horror movie, but The Exorcist came very close on its release in 1973.
We didn't believe the anecdotes about the enormous turnout and reaction until we watched the above video, an undated and apparently orphaned 20-minute news featurette about the movie's success and impact. Moviegoers lined down the block to see The Exorcist multiple times, with many apparently leaving mid-screening and returning again to see if they could stomach it a second time. This is astounding footage that demonstrates the central role movie theaters played in American culture life decades ago. And this fervor predates Jaws and Star Wars, generally considered the first blockbusters.
Even something as big as Jurassic World won't bring out the same neighborhood-spanning queues or inspire visceral reactions from the audience, so this video of the hype surrounding The Exorcist is the closest most of us will get to seeing a movie release of such sensational scale. (The freakouts over how intensely scary it is are just icing.)
Now comes the difficult part of every year when we say farewell to our departing senior staff. This year, we have five staff members graduating: Caitlin, Claire, Jasmine, Travis, and Trevor. We've gotten to know this crew over the past several years, and they've done a terrific job exceeding patron expectations of great library service.
We're sad to see them go, but we know they're moving onto exciting careers and future programs. We wish them the best of luck!
We post about film preservation frequently on this blog, and for the most part, contemporary film preservation effort in our neck of the woods are excellent. Between the National Film Registry and the continued investment in restoring older masterpieces, we've come a long way from losing all our silent films. But such an infrastructure doesn't exist elsewhere in the world, and many countries continue to struggle to save their works.
For an example of the ongoing fight to save film history, look no further than India. The Jakarta Post reports that, in recognition of the country's National Film Day, Indian film critics have called more a concerted effort to preserve national cinema. The country's national film archives are apparently decaying, with even some films from the 90s already degrading in quality. Many solvable problems are cited, especially budgetary constraints and more mindful collection (and copyright) management.
There's a strong interest and thirst for historical Indian film, and even though individuals and smaller organizations have made strides in saving national cinema, a greater national effort is only a good thing – both for India and film enthusiasts worldwide.
In a move even more controversial than their decision to launch a standalone streaming subscription service, HBO has decided to remaster classic television series The Wire in high-definition widescreen. The show, as directed by showrunner David Simon, was intended to be show in the 4:3 aspect ratio of standard-definition television sets. In the process of extending that image to 16:9, this remaster makes significant edits to the cinematography of the original series – and that doesn't sit well with many people.
We've previously touched on the big difference that aspect ratio can make, so this certainly isn't a minor change that's going unnoticed by filmmakers. The Wire is often considered the greatest television series of all time, and to many, this type of creative tampering borderline heresy.
Simon seems to feel ambivalent about the remastering, mentioning that some scenes work better in widescreen while others don't. That's inevitable for such a sweeping change to the original format. But we think you, the discerning film enthusiast, deserve to be the judge of that. (Hit the jump for the clips...)
Do you remember your first R-rated movie? Many people probably merged into the world of violent and dark films without great fanfare, but for others, graduating from PG-13 to R is a rite of passage and a sign that, yes, a parent figure thinks that you're mature enough to enjoy that sort of movie.
If you're in the mood for a heartwarming, inspiring story about this passage into young adulthood, look no further than a recent post from film critic Drew McWeeny. McWeeny showed his son an R-rated movie for the first time, in a very personal blog post, he explains his son's extreme enthusiasm for The Terminator and what it's like watching a child take that first step into an unexplored, adult realm of culture. It's a beautiful, emotional piece, generally about growing up but specifically about watching the next generation become film enthusiasts.
We'll let McWeeny's article speak for itself. It's touching and highly worth a read if you get the warm-and-fuzzies thinking about the future relevance and magic of film.
