580 hrs of VHS in 300 seconds.
A while back, I would obsessively record things off the TV and collect films from film fairs, shops and car boot sales — this film represents a third of the quest to digitise that collection, a project that began around 2008. Around 580 hours of dropped frames, filled hard drives and distracting ingesting chugging away in the corner of my studio.
The constant in the tapes is me. It's as good a self-portrait as I'm going to make at the moment. Some of the tapes are old favourites, some I have never watched until they went in, and some I still have no clue as to what is on them.
I often would set the recorder going at the start of a film and then go to bed and pass out, the tape stopping automatically when it would run out. As a result many of the tapes have a whole heap of footage recorded after the thing I wanted had finished, resulting in a single-channel blind trawl of late-night programming — a lot of Ceefax and Oracle.
The 580 hours contained in this video are destined to meet their 1,160 brothers and sisters in an installation planned to run over three consecutive days. But that is a story for another time.
One of my favourite film soundtracks is from a flick called You Are What You Eat (the film is in there, I think).
I am definitely what I watched. — b