Posted on : Sep.5,2006 12:01 KST

Technology may evolve, but love of cinema remains intact

Stephen Cremin, Screen International

The switch from analog to digital media has taken place during the last decade or so. If you are like me, you probably have fresh memories of impatiently rewinding VHS video tapes. When VHS technology emerged, it was like a private film festival, a gateway to world cinema. It changed the economics of distribution and allowed for less well-distributed works to leak through the cracks of the mainstream.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I became a member of Japanese, Korean, and Hong Kong Chinese video stores in different corners of London. All were illegal and eventually closed down by the government. The 1984 Video Recordings Act forbade the rental or sale of films that hadn’t gone through an expensive process of classification and/or censorship. The Korean video store escaped the law the longest, hidden in the back room of a supermarket in a London suburb.


I own hundreds of VHS tapes, occupying cabinets and boxes across two continents. I have friends whose collections number in the thousands, cinephiles bound to their houses and apartments by their prodigious media libraries. The existence and content of their collections reflect historical inefficiencies in film and television distribution. A film lover at one time had the difficult mission of recording European films off of smaller television stations at 3am, films that were never released on VHS anywhere in the world.

I know that many readers will have had the same experience. One of the pleasures of attending the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival used to be the unexpected pleasures found on late-night cable television. I was once lambasted by a colleague over breakfast for not waking him at 4am, when Korean cable was screening a black comedy starring Ahn Sung-ki that he’d waited twenty years to catch, having been unable to find a secondhand VHS tape of the title at Dongdaemun Market.

Vinyl and VHS were replaced by CDs and DVDs, respectively. But if analogue media was a necessary predecessor to digital media, then digital media is just another stepping stone towards downloads from a universal library. Perhaps the whole concept of music and video ownership was an historical accident because technology - and human nature - needed a few more years to catch up. Instead of suing avid users of file-sharing networks, studios should be hiring them as consultants.

For various reasons, Asia may be ahead of the curve. In Taiwan, sell-through DVDs never really caught the public’s imagination and Buena Vista is pulling out of home movie distribution there, just as both Universal and Paramount are withdrawing in South Korea. Piracy is blamed, but perhaps consumers have also come to realize that collecting movies is a fool’s errand.

Speaking as the proverbial fool, I have bought and re-bought the same movie in various formats, aspect ratios and picture qualities. And not to watch, but to collect. For when you begin to amass hundreds of DVDs on your bookshelf, there’s no need, let alone time, to watch them all. It’s enough just to know that they are there, like a yet-to-be-classified lobe of the brain. Perhaps it’s a post-Matrix thing, an extension of the relevatory "I know kung fu" moment.

The lack of a strong home video market is often cited as one of the problems facing South Korean cinema. Some have argued that the growth of the Korean film industry over the past 10 years is an illusion, as it was spurred by the simultaneous collapse of the video rental market. The important thing, piracy or not, is that people are still finding pleasure in the movies.



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