Friday, July 24, 2020

Macrovision 1 - the contents of this videocassette.

At the beginning of my VHS copy of The Ring (2002, dir. Gore Verbinski), after a standard copyright notice, a DreamWorks logo and trailers, there is an informational short sponsored by FACT, the Federation Against Copyright Theft. It explains the dangers of video piracy.

As a slightly edgy and streetwise sounding voice over warns “the pirates are out to get you, don't let them brand you with their mark“ a demonic blacksmith with glowing eyes and enveloped in flames, heats a branding iron bearing an X before holding it up to camera. 

 

The voice goes on to tell us video piracy funds organised crime, terrorism and that it will destroy 'our development and your enjoyment'. As the iron's brand is plunged into water it's X transforms into the copyright © and our voiceover gives way to a more measured and well spoken voice that advises how one should go about handing over any suspected pirates to the authorities.

Described on a Public Information Film fansite as “perhaps one of the darkest and scariest anti-piracy PIFs ever made“¹
it represents a coming together of the horror genre, anti-piracy and the videocassette; a cocktail that seeks to utilise horror tropes, on the home territory to scare viewers into resisting the temptation of dabbling in the dark arts of video piracy.

Elements that, according to Caetlin Benson-Allott's, Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring ² are also to be found in the tape's main feature.



The © brand now a sigil charged with another kind of authority and message. i.e. The movie you are about to see is a work of fiction, for your entertainment – but make copies of it and you will know the full might of the law and perhaps even the horrors of financial ruin or incarceration.

The ©, is finally displayed embedded, for increased emphasis and veracity, within the word FA©T. It seems the mantra – it's only a movie, only a movie... – does not entirely apply here and we are left with a question. Was a movie on videocassette, the cassette itself or the machine on which it was played capable of scaring audiences into regulating their video practices to fall into line with the desires of nervous holders of video copyright?


Anyone who has ever watched a horror movie in the slasher sub-genre, as exemplified by Friday the 13th (1980,dir. Sean Cunningham) or Halloween (1978, dir.John Carpenter) and very much imitated thereafter will know that tropes that exploit target audience anxieties and guilty pleasures, imagined or otherwise were part of that particular genre's language .

Whether sneaking out to smoke dope or having sex with a smuggled in friend whilst on babysitting duties, these minor transgressions were often met with the harshest and most immediate penalties.

Whether these repetitive acts of screen violence are understood to function as an ideological thrust from the film makers or merely evidence of a marketing feedback loop or assumption of their audience's desires and fears or a falling back on what has proven turn a reliable profit for the film's producers -- the notion that the horror genre, contains and makes use of 'cautionary tale' tactics and tropes is not a new one. 

With this in mind, Caetlin Benson-Allott's proposition in her 2013 essay Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, that the US remake The Ring (2002) hosts, a specific warning against transgressive behavior can said to adhere to a convention, long established within the horror genre. Benson-Allott's reading of the The Ring is akin to Samara's tape within it, in that it contains, hidden somewhere out of ordinary view, a threat of retribution lest the viewer do as they are told.

Benson-Allott's proposals can also be viewed as a very clever, playful meta-textual proposition, whereby a narrative concerned with the distribution of urban myth seeks to generate it's own.

Retrotechnophobia operates in sort of experimental hyperstitional sandbox, presenting it's ideas in the region of, too strange to be true yet too clearly evidenced to be easily dismissed as false, that provides fertile substrate for myth and associative thinking. It is also a learned and impeccably researched text that explores an area previously widely ignored. While focusing on the point of death of VHS, the horror of it's rejection en masse (just for the sake of a few more pixels, saved shelf space and a directors commentary) the text helps illuminate the fact that in certain respects the VCR was always abject. A miraculous medium yet one that, despite widespread diffusion, was rarely recognised on it's own terms. A bitterly poor substitute for the cinema, a mere add-on to television with 'Made for Home Video' or 'Straight-to-Video' considered hallmarks of cheap, inept attempts to ape dominant media
³.
The areas where Home Video and the VCR asserted themselves and found a niche also suggested abjection and deviancy; Pornography, extreme horror and of course illegal copy making ⁴.

Not only was the VCR undervalued it was largely misunderstood, resulting in a black slab of technology sat in almost every home, simultaneously as mundane as it was impossible to truly understand.

We lived with VCRs for twenty five years without ever really finding out how they worked.

I'll write more about this in the future but Benson-Allott is absolutely right to describe the videocassette as a “small casket whose inner cavity... cannot be opened”  unless first hidden within the recesses of the VCR, itself a black box extraordinaire – arguably the most highly sealed to enter into home/consumer use up to that point and maybe even since. 

Why wouldn't they make ideal hiding places?

Benson-Allot isn't the only writer to consider hidden content or intention in The Ring. In the introduction to Cinema in the Digital Age, (2009, Walllowerpress) a series of essays on cinema's transition from analogue to digital that frequently turns to The Ring, Nicholas Rhombes also considers it a space for concealment when he cites it as 'A genre film hiding an Avant-Garde video inside it'. He locates within The Ring 'strange correspondences between film images, a sort of secret history' and suggests digital technology has 'stripped away a layer, and exposed uncanny associations'.

Retrotechnophobia seems to epitomise a treatment of the moving image media suggested by Rhombes when he states, 'terms like 'intention' and 'genre' need to be reinvented, for what links films together is not simply their plots, their styles, their directors, but something less coherent'.  Benson-Allott would seem to agree when talking of 'new video studies' and the reading she applies to The Ring feels as though it exists not merely as subtext but as something not unlike the active elements within Samara's curse tape. 

In the digital age we've grown accustomed to the idea that there is always a little more than we can see within our media content. From the serendipity of the Easter Egg, to the hidden sector, the tracker, the Trojan and the large portions of data and media within the files themselves that seem to sit dormant, unused, often apparently empty.

Lines of code such as 'Multiline comments' that are hidden from view, within the inner confines of a file - not visible to a user or viewer and hidden from the platform or operating system under which the code is running.

There are such spaces and artifacts to be found within analogue media but they are not as simple to create, conceal or manage. They have been less discussed or understood and are perhaps, therefore, arguably always less expected.  
When reading it's complex electronic signal, the VCR's specialised electromechanical processes are so contingent on precise variants such as timing, pressure and sensitivity that it is highly vulnerable to interference, error and loss. For this reason, barely any intervention be it hobbyist, hacker, artist was made at the actual 'read' end of the VCR apparatus. Video processing, manipulation and effects generation that began with early video artists before swiftly being further developed in industrial, creative and later home user contexts deals exclusively with the video signal as it leaves the playback device rather than as it is captured within it. For these reasons the home VCR lived and died as a black box technology.

The functioning of a black box can be described or observed as extrapolation even when the inner workings are obscured.  A simple block diagram could be used to explain the functional relationship between a videocassette and a VCR without ever having to remove a screw but, at most levels of proficiency exploring and explaining such spaces, using blind cause and effect descriptions creates potential for certain factors and interstices to be overlooked.  

Every blackbox will contain areas unknowable from the outside. Given the complexity and integrity of the VCR and Videocassette it should come as no surprise that they possess such spaces too.

Within the narrative of The Ring, Samara's tape utilises such a space. Locating room for an occult function in a device that already exhibited high levels of the unknown.

Caeltin Benson- Allott's exploration of The Ring  as horror laced with anti-piracy propaganda led me to consider another anti-copy apparatus that would seem to uncannily display and evoke similar tropes and features. Like Samara's curse it is hidden within the medium, burnt in using non conventional means to a location deep within the sealed container.

1. https://pif.fandom.com/wiki/Federation_Against_Copyright_Theft_-_The_Pirates_Are_Out_To_Get_You  --  watch the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLBY4qzUMNw

2. Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press

3. Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium, 2014, Michael Z. Newman, Columbia University Press.

4. A key reference here is clearly, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, 2009, Lucas Hilderbrand, Duke University Press but also Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horror-Avant-garde, 2000, Joan Hawkins, University of Minnesota Press and Electric Blues: The Rise and Fall of Britain's First Pre-recorded Videocassette Distributors, 2016, Julian Upton, Edinburgh University Press are also all great.