
Why Yale Library decided to preserve 3000 horror and exploitation movies on VHS - benbreen
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/saving-the-scream-queens/401141/?single_page=true
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A_COMPUTER
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.

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danharaj
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.

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9872
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.

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danharaj
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.

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9872
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.

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danharaj
> There can never be a commons.

Why not?

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9872
Because there isn't one now and there's no reason for one to ever come into
being.

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

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copsarebastards
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?

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A_COMPUTER
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.

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mrob
There's a documentary about VHS movies:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewind_This](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.

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njharman
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.

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Asbostos
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.

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SomeStupidPoint
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.

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

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

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thaumasiotes
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?

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nitrogen
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.

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shard
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.

