Why Yale Library decided to preserve 3000 horror and exploitation movies on VHS | Hacker News Reader

Why Yale Library decided to preserve 3000 horror and exploitation movies on VHS

theatlantic.com

55 pointsbenbreen37 comments

The success of Blockbuster video may have in part been due to its cleanliness, but from my experience it was because your mom 'n pop shop would have two copies of a new blockbuster movie so you'd never get to see it, and Blockbuster would have a hundred waiting for you. These old movies are awesome, they bypassed the MPAA and touched topics that a studio would've considered too risky for general distribution, indie VHS really took over where drive-in movies left off. But in the end most people didn't care, they just wanted to watch the Matrix and Blockbuster had two shelves of it stacked two-deep. I don't know what's taken over since VHS. Maybe crowdfunding could fill this gap, but nothing will have the "feel" that these movies did, because nowadays with the Internet nothing can be truly "obscure" for very long.

When I lived in Iowa City in the 1990's, I used to go to a tiny video store called The Tofu Hut (How's that name for a deep 90's culture reference) which did a marvelous job of picking a selection of foreign movies, anime, fetish pornography and independent and exploitation films. There will never be places like that again. They existed in a small gap when VHS was thriving and Blockbuster wasn't dominant.

It would help if video content on the Internet were not centralized and commodified at huge impersonal sites like YouTube. There definitely ought to be such communities on the Internet. It's easier than ever to make film and it's easier than ever to connect with others and share.

It doesn't have to be. If you're willing to pay for the infrastructure and bandwidth no one is stopping you from hosting and streaming your own videos. What youtube and similar sites really centralize is not the content, but the distribution.

Are you aware of Karagarga?

What's your complaint about youtube? They host exabytes of video and make it freely available worldwide. There is no better resource for video creators.

Youtube decides what content is permissible by being one of the large gatekeepers for distribution. They also are a large lever for large copyright holders to push on to hurt small content creators who have less recourse for action (DMCA and whatnot).

Youtube is ultimately private property. It is not a commons. That's my complaint. The whole Internet is a commons but there's no commonly shared infrastructure on the scale of youtube for content distribution and relating content to other content and to communities of people, unless you count search engines as that infrastructure.

That's why it exists. There can never be a commons. There can be large private sites or small ones. Large ones like youtube are more useful.

> There can never be a commons.

Why not?

Because there isn't one now and there's no reason for one to ever come into being.

Their content policing borders on conspiracy to commit commercial copyright infringement, and goes considerably past what is required by law.

In other words, they only host content they feel comfortable redistributing?

There's a great (and possibly NSFW) tumblr dedicated to this genre: http://the-scandyfactory.tumblr.com/

It cites controversy about the collection but doesn't really go into what the controversy is. Why is it controversial? Or is it just not controversial?

The article covers it although not in detail.

Having lived thru it, the article quote "Conservative concern over the decay of family values" is pretty accurate. Some of the content being an intentional parody of family values talking points doesn't win friends, although it can be very funny. This extends to the modern day, nothing some like more than using what they describe as academic degeneracy to gain points.

There's no controversy, it's just an affection of the writer. They mention further down that there may be film purists who insist that movies are only correctly made and preserved in celluloid, but that luckily there's a "new generation of scholarship" interested in the history of home video. Apparently Leonard Maltin was part of this "new generation" when he wrote the Complete Guide to Home Video in 1981 :-P I find it extremely hard to believe that there's anybody academically involved in the history of cinema that would see this collection as without value and recommend putting it into the dumpster.

There's a documentary about VHS movies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewind_This!

It's somewhat reliant on nostalgia for the medium, which I don't have because I didn't have a VHS player, but even so, I found it interesting. It makes it clear why VHS is culturally important and why so many people care about it.

Um duh, cause it's a Library. (One of) Library's jobs is to preserve our culture as expressed in the media arts. Library's don't judge that culture. They maintain it so current and future society have a chance to.

I wonder if there has been art that was acceptable or at least tolerated once but is now illegal or so out-of-fashion that even libraries won't keep it? This certainly doesn't seem to be such a thing though.

An example might be if the age of consent for being in a porn video or having sex has ever been lowered. Then the older work might become illegal to keep in a library.

Pictures of naked children have fallen out of fashion, and even platonic pictures of naked children have fewer collectors now than before the anti-child pornography laws went in to effect.

I'm not arguing for or against, merely pointing out that in Victorian England, such collections were made and have trouble being maintained now.

I don't really get it. Digitize the movies and their boxes. Keeping the actual physical items seems like overkill.

> the physical qualities of VHS offer much more than the 0s and 1s carried on an electron stream directly to televisions

that's the money quote. maybe watching videos with tracking issues gives the whole experience an ambient warmness missing from evil computers.

This made me wonder if there are any plugins that would simulate the visual artifacts of head tracking, limited bandwidth, etc. for video playback, the same way as there are effect plugins for music production which approximate the characteristics of tube amps, record players and tape decks.

There is an iOS app called Glitché[0] that simulates the VHS effect for images. Video is planned.

[0] http://glitche.com/

VHS Camcorder[0] has been making the rounds on my Instagram feed. I fear $3.99 is a bit too steep for a silly video filter.

[0]: https://boingboing.net/2015/08/21/vhs-camcorder-app-makes-yo...

While I haven't heard of any project that emulated the tape-specific effects of VHS, the video game emulation community has done a lot of work on emulating NTSC. For example, Blargg's NTSC libraries[1] simulate composite and s-video derived gamma curves, blur, marginal horizontal-sync, color bleeding and fringing, and more. The color "correction" really helps the look of old game systems that were designed for NTSC.

I've seen GLSL post-process filters for MAME (or was it a MAME derivative?), too. Some of those even simulated stuff like the curved surface of a CRT. Also, there is xscreensaver's "xanalogtv" hack.

I wonder how hard it would be to modify one of these to include bad tracking.

side note: I believe MAME has (or had?) a mode that would slowly accumulate some of "brightness" from any saturated pixel that stayed the same for a large numbe4r of frames. This data was saved globally, so if you played certain old games that were very static, you would get "monitor burn" after images.

[1] http://slack.net/~ant/libs/ntsc.html

The Kung Fury short films have what appears to be a mock head tracking offset effect. Maybe they used an actual VCR, or faked it manually, though.

I've found that older VHS tapes often suffer from losing the sync signals, making the display shiver and bend. This can be corrected somewhat with a device called a Time Base Corrector.

One can collect the tapes and boxes, but being able to play the tapes is inevitably going away.

If you've got a video projector, watching even a good quality VHS tape that way is just awful (blotchy, fuzzy, smeary).

I'm all for the preservation of history, but I have no desire to handle VHS tapes ever again, and will always prefer higher res formats.

Remember that in the heyday of VHS, a "big" TV was maybe 19", and VHS picture looked just fine on those.

Not really just fine. I went to the movies a lot because the TV was so lousy.

These days, the HD picture is so good I no longer go to the movies.

Do you feel the same way about books? Or paintings?

I'd say this approach is fine for books if you scan them, but not if you OCR them and keep the resulting text. I've seen a lot of OCR errors, and archival copies are often not vetted before being archived.

But for paintings... an image of a painting is the painting. The only advantage of the original is that, if you believe that it's the original and that it hasn't changed with the passage of time (e.g. by fading), you can prove that the original really looked like that. As soon as you have trouble with either of those assumptions, the archived copy is at least as good (and in the case of fading over time, better).

There's a problem in philosophy asking whether you believe that a molecule-for-molecule copy of a painting is metaphysically equivalent to that painting. Obviously, there's no way for any test to tell them apart, but a lot of people will say that nevertheless the original is metaphysically different. Are you one of those?

If we expand "image" to include a 3D relief map of the brush strokes, then I might agree.

But there is still forensic analysis, spectroscopy, etc. that can only be done with the original.

This. You have not seen Van Gogh's paintings until you've seen them in person. He heaps on gops of paint on his canvasses, and the third dimension is an aspect of the paintings that cannot be appreciated fully in 2D reproductions. As a corollary, the lighting of a painting is an important aspect of viewing it, as the angle of light will affect highlights and shadows, especially for some paintings which use glossy paints.

Boy - you are way wrong. If you have printed materials like books then scanning gives you everything needed for reproduction. With paintings there are many more unique elements. Eg. Not all colors are covered by rgb. Even those covered may absorb and reflect light differently. So looking at the image with different lighting or from different angle may create unique impression. There is also texture that cannot be easily scanned.

We may get there with scanning and displaying technology someday but at the moment good copies are created by artists and not printed.

Have you seen a painting in person? They don't look like reproductions.

Not the OP, but if they are not going to scan and encode those tapes, I hope they keep some players around and some tech to fix them. VHS is just way to prone to decay.

If they were film stock, then keep the film stock since it is basically its own archival. Books and paintings last. VHS does not.

What are folks using for archival video formats these days?

If something is unique then I generally agree. The vast majority of books are not unique. Paintings are unique works and I think preserving them has value.

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