When We Took Hold of Our Dream Lives

As part of the IFFR 2025 Focus programme Hold Video in Your Hands, which celebrates VHS culture, IFFR programmer Olaf Möller explores the context and significance of the selected films.

In an early scene of Sasabe Kiyoshi’s Dawn of a New Day: The Man Behind VHS (2002), fictional VHS-inventor Kagatani Shizuo observes his family and some friends watching a variety show they taped from television (with a different home video system). This small bunch of people radiate with joy when they revisit a merry moment of the past at their own time. And not only that: they get to keep these sounds and images they so love. Until then, moving image media engagement was clearly defined by schedules and ownership – things happened at a certain time and place, be that in the cinema or on TV, under the strict control of the art’s producers, the exceptions consisting of those who had (usually small gauge) projectors at home, though access to films they could show with them were few and far apart. Now, the moving image world was heading in a direction similar to that of radio and the music publishing industry when cassettes and player-recorders were introduced for the consumer market, but with wider ramifications. Viewers gained unprecedented autonomy, and with that they became accidental custodians of a culture that until then was essentially out of reach for anybody not a specialist. The dynamics of film and television history were changed thanks to the release of films and television shows for the home media market, combined with taping galore and full frontal piracy. Now, someone living in, say, France, could order tapes from, say, the Philippines, and discover a whole cinematic universe – or find a Pinoy supermarket somewhere near whose back room might hold illicit treasure: pirated copies. Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind (2008) is a monument to ordinary people making film history on their own – by showing how they remade beloved classics with little means, lots of community spirit and seemingly unfathomable amounts of fantasy. 

But this was only one kind of autonomy. Jagannathan Krishnan’s Videokaaran (2011) offers one Mumbai denzien’s account of how VHS, piracy and illegal screening venues changed life in the slums: by making films available to those who’d otherwise probably never see them, as they were too poor for a cinema ticket. That the quality of the tapes was wretched didn’t really matter – as it didn’t for the customers frequenting Bangkok’s Van VDO store, where future Thai directors found bootlegs of films otherwise impossible to see (as told by erstwhile regular Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit in his 2014 The Master). Or take the heroes of Lukáš Bulava’s Video Kings (2020) whose speed dubbing feats, as well as organisational craftiness, were part of the ground work that lead to the Velvet Revolution. Indeed, is the whole collapse of Central and Eastern European state communism imaginable without those moles of culture who saw to the accessibility of films deemed undesirable by those in power? And let’s not forget one of the many topics Gyz La Rivière touches upon in Videotheek Marco (2025), how VHS helped Chinese, Indian, Turkish and Moroccan communities in the Netherlands to keep a sense of national identity, to stay in contact with the film fashions and television trends in the countries so many of their relatives still lived in, the cultures they had left behind or were also born into. Video stores were community builders – at least in the beginning, before the corporate behemoth got going with its equalising of tastes and minds. 

In fact, the new-found autonomy and emancipation brought about by VHS seems to have looked so frightening that it produced narratives galore of video culture’s dangers. Former video store clerk Gary Cohen’s shot-on-VHS Video Violence (1987) features customers as snuff movie auteurs, while genre craftsman Yamanouchi Daisuke’s Muzan-E: The AV Murder Video Exist (1999) exposes a snuff movie as a hoax that nevertheless turns into mass murder as if video was a cult of violence that sucked everybody in… Which makes it logical that in Emilio Silva Torres’ documentary Directamente para video (2021) the story of Uruguayan auteur maudit Manuel Lamas and his 1988 cult creation Acto de violencia en una joven periodista sounds like a tabloid tale of snuff and doom. One has to remember, though, that violence in cinema and its wider cultural causes and meanings had been a topic since the 1970s when already notorious, soon to be VHS supersellers like Simon Nuchtern, Roberta and Michael Findlay’s Snuff (1976) or Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) saw heated discussions on the pages of middle- and highbrow publications alike, not to mention censors going ballistic. The vision planted into an ever moral and hysteria-prone society was that of youngsters home alone watching Faces of Death (1978) by John Alan Schwartz, and not of birthday parties where droves of teens saw themselves in John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles (1984). 

Both were true, of course, as Christopher Smith and Megan Kathleen Fox’s miniseries Video Nasty (2025) gleefully and tenderly remind one of, but the latter part seems to live mainly in the minds of those around back then – in remembrances of a period made of change and promise. Albert Birney’s lo-fi animation Melody Electronics (2025) pays tribute to a consumer utopia in which VHS was part of a technically fully integrated daily life where video players and home computers were as ordinary as toasters and hair dryers. This technology was cute, in an antediluvian way, when the tapes were bulky, when the cool computers had a whooping 64k RAM and looked like bread bins, when one needed to put the phone receiver onto an acoustic coupler to send data through the landline. And it’s eerie that Hans-Christoph Blumenberg chose Dr. Mabuse as the main point of reference for his debut Tausend Augen (1984) which so precisely documents that historic moment when culture said farewell to its analogue existence and got ready for the digital next, with video as a stage between, which nobody back then could have known.Alex Ross Perry’s ten-years-in-the-making Videoheaven (2025) is among many other things also a chronicle of this fall, and it’s surely not by accident that it ends with moments from Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007), where a video store encapsulates all that was lost. But the space is still there in the film. And many a tape made back in the 1980s now float around in the YouTube ocean. In a moment like this, memories of an SD world might contain some kernels of spiritual resistance very much needed now.

written by Olaf Möller