Marty wanted to get every movie there ever was, we recorded everything

April 2, 2024 1:28 AM

The collection is also a physical manifestation of his famously omnivorous appetite for visual media. Scorsese has frequently spoken about growing up asthmatic in a New York City household that lacked books but was one of the first on the block to get a television set in 1948, when he was six years old. For young Marty, who wasn’t able to play in the streets as frequently or vigorously as other kids, the 16-inch screen of the black-and-white RCA Victor in the living room became his window to the world – and, critically, his first exposure to great cinema. from ‘He was always voraciously watching’: Scorsese’s secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist [Grauniad; ungated]
posted by chavenet (3 comments total)

Reading the pull-quote, my first thought was "I hope to hell someone is digitizing all that", so I was relieved to read later in the article that is indeed the case. Also this bit:

The broadcast recordings include commercials, bumpers and other marginalia, which Espelie said “are as fascinating, in some cases, as the originally desired main recording events. Because of the way television lacked backups, these VHS tapes may provide some of the only copies of these ‘interstitial’ materials.”
posted by briank at 5:46 AM on April 2 [4 favorites]

He makes the best fucking tapes
posted by anazgnos at 7:15 AM on April 2 [7 favorites]

Makes me think of Marion Stokes, subject of the documentary Recorder by Matt Wolf. She recorded over 70,000 VHS and Betamax tapes from broadcast sources between the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 and her death in 2012 on the day of the Sandy Hook massacre. (Previously link predates the documentary and includes an overestimate of the number of tapes.) Wolf has also produced a book using images from Stokes' archive, Input.

Stokes TV Archive Experiment on the Internet Archive.
posted by larrybob at 4:13 PM on April 2 [1 favorite]