Seconds Per Frame

This page is Gregory Wild’s fault.

I should have expanded my Video page into individual reviews as I’d done years ago with my Music library, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle the challenge of writing something more than a flip comment about so many videos. I could write about music until my fingers were worn down to stumps, but films are a different beast altogether (“Films are a different beast.”), and in some ways more complex and in other ways more simplified. But in 2006 I received an email from the director of the deservingly infamous film Highway of Heartache, Gregory Wild, thanking me for touting his film on my website (for better or for worse, as my comments on it were both celebratory and warning), and shortly thereafter he sent me a copy of the press kit for the film’s belated (and quite unlikely) DVD release. And I thought “well, shit, I have to rave about this and about more of the film’s qualities than I could address in a cheap one-line assessment, and that means expanding my Video page…” but I wasn’t in a space that allowed for that at the time, so the project hung in the air like a piñata that I didn’t dare swing at unless I was ready to deal with the fallout.

Most of this video library is films, but there’s also a good showing of music videos and documentaries (the latter mostly historical in nature) as well as a smattering of television-related stuff. I’m not a film buff by any means…I go to maybe one film per year; and I don’t watch TV. So that I have a video library at all is a little odd. It’s mostly composed of certain “classic” films and ones I happened to encounter in my 20s and 30s. From time to time I add to this library, but it’s not what you’d call a “living” thing, reflecting my tastes.

As for the question of format, it’s a mixed bag here but largely VHS videotape with maybe 20% now in DVD format. That some of these items have even manifested on VHS in the first place is surprising, and where something’s now available on DVD I may have acquired that format if the DVD interface has anything significant to offer. It’s rare. Then again, I have a multisystem VCR that’s still serving me quite well in its 8th year of use, allowing me to watch obscure-but-beloved French and British videos which aren’t likely to command DVD release…and there’s the question of how long DVDs will be the medium of choice. All of that considered, I’m happy with my library’s format for the most part.