Guest Post: Pixelh8 on Piracy’s potential effect on film

I can remember it clear as day, which is surprising as I was quite a wayward teenager at the time. I think it was a gang of about eight or nine of us huddled in to a suburban bedroom of a 16 year old boy, it was 1994 or there about and VCR’s had just made it from the living room to the bed room.

“Have you seen this?” a friend asked brandishing a VHS Cassette, a tape that that appeared to have had many lives from the appearance of multiple layered labels. But it was the writing scrawled in in red felt tip, “Natural Born Killers” that got everyone’s attention.

“It’s Banned”, “It just came out in America” and other similar comments were spoken in hushed tones at the the sight of this audio visual “contraband”. This grainy, shaky, documentary style satire mesmerized us for the hours that followed.

Ultimately yes it was a pirate version of the film, a hand-held-camera-sneaked-into-the-back-of-a-showing-of-the-film-version, recorded somewhere in North America. Despite all of these “technical” flaws, all of Oliver Stone’s directorial brilliance shown through, it was and still is a masterpiece of satire. The video tape was viewed many subsequent times and referred to in high esteem over that summer. It was the “film we should not have”, we were quite tame suburban teenagers and this was the wildest thing we had ever seen.

Years later wandering through a high street “multimedia outlet” which has since gone the way of the dinosaurs, I came across a DVD version of “Natural Born Killers” and bought it immediately, ironically due to the fond memories it conjured. Excited by my purchase, I couldn’t wait to get home.

I should have known by the glossy case and sleek packaging something was terribly wrong. As soon as the film started it was clear, and that was the problem, the film was crystal clear, long gone was the grainy, voyeuristic layer of hand held camera filter. The “film we should not have” filter was removed and in it’s place was this for want of a better word was this “product”. Oliver Stone’s directorial skill and master storytelling was still present, it just didn’t feel right. Maybe it was rose tinted glasses but for me a lot of the magic had gone, disappeared with the cleanliness of the commercially released product. It was like falling in love with a rough and rugged live concert version of a song only to be let down by the clean shaven topped and tailed version offered on a studio album.

I don’t ever think it was the piracy aspect of the video that made it so risky for us, we had grown up in a tape / disk swapping culture of the 1980′s and 90′s, it sadly never felt wrong to do so. I don’t know what ever happened to that tape or the lad that owned it but I would give up my store bought DVD for it any day.

A similar thing happened to master film-maker Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” which was removed from distribution at his request, but when you are a teenager if it’s not available in the shops “it’s banned” and you want it even more (Government policy makers please take note). I can remember again seeing a similar tape-to-tape-to-tape-to-tape-to-tape-to-tape-to-version of this which had been secretly passed around like some handwritten bible before the printing press had gotten involved. Again it had a “should we be seeing this” feeling about it, “you can get this as a book, in the library but why not the video?” was the subject of much speculation. People didn’t feel they were pirating they were fighting against censorship, quite the opposite of feeling bad for being “pirates” they were liberating art, or so it was thought.

Time moved on and DVD players replaced the VCR and entire collections of videos were simply left in the past. It was years later when I encountered a “A Clockwork Orange” again this time, I was a film student, and like the great cliché working in my local cinema and by then I had had a complete change of heart.

To my absolute horror and passion for the work of Stanley Kubrick “A Clockwork Orange” was given a cinematic release? Why not dig up his corpse and animate him like a Teddy Ruxpin for a press conference. Sorry, I was upset that the studios chose this film to release right after his death. I can remember boycotting working the the screen that was showing “A Clockwork Orange”. I completely refused to clean or man the door of a film that “we shouldn’t be seeing” and I risked being fired and was subsequently demoted for doing so.

So where do I stand on things like “piracy” now? I don’t tolerate it at all, my belief is when you download illegally / steal music, film or video games you steal peoples time, the time they have given up to create something for you to engage with. I’ll stop there I am not here to preach about my views. I just found it an interesting paradox that for me the grainy pirate version of “Natural Born Killers” added something to the mystique of the film, the dodgy way in which you had to access “A Clockwork Orange” did the same. Something their clean “commercial product” available in major supermarket counterparts lacked.

I also find it interesting that several films since the days of the VCR such as “Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield“ and countless others utilise this lo-fi grainy, hand held, cut in and out of badly tracked video tape approach to imply that your seeing something you shouldn’t, something that has been found, something special and a little bit risky. TV Dramas, music videos, documentaries and even main-stream news even use this approach, for this very reason. It’s not to say that piracy brought about this style of editing and “filtering” but I would certainly argue that it has helped make it more prevalent, and more understood by the modern viewer. It for me at least is a case of art imitating piracy, or is that art pirating art that is being pirated?

Matthew C. Applegate, widely known as Pixelh8, is a multi-disciplinary artist and chip-tune musician who has been a vocal opponent to the Digital Economy Act and has been a central figure in the campaign to save Bletchly Park. You can buy his music on iTunes, or via his website and for information on forthcoming performances and great conversation, you can follow him on Twitter.