It was in 1997 that DVDs first started appearing on the high street. They were smaller and cheaper than laser discs, more loaded with extras than video cassettes. Over 6bn were sold in 2011 alone. It’s often forgotten that Netflix, these days a streaming behemoth, started out as a mail-order DVD rental service (with offerings more extensive than any physical shop and with the bonus of no late fees). But by the end of 2021, sales had fallen to 1.2bn. In a recent conversation with a group of 18-year-olds, half told me they’d never seen a DVD. One asked if they were like CDs.
I’m no collector, but I have hundreds of DVDs. They fill countless shoeboxes and form teetering stacks into which my cats love to dive headfirst. It’s hard for me to imagine a life in which I’m not within arm’s length of my Ingmar Bergman boxset, Jonathan Miller’s adaptation of MR James’s unheimlich Whistle and I’ll Come to You, or a complete edition of Maigret starring Rupert Davies. They feel like old friends—reassuringly solid in a way that digital files are not.
DVDs played a crucial role in keeping film culture alive in Britain at the turn of the century. Mehelli Modi, founder of Second Run, a leading independent DVD label, recalls to me that when he was setting up his company in 2005, “all the broadcasters had stopped showing anything which might be called world cinema. Channels like the BBC which had done so much for my film education no longer had seasons on Robert Bresson. At most, you might get a single Michael Haneke film at one in the morning.” Repertory and independent cinemas were also struggling against the might of the multiplexes. Another challenge was that DVD players could only run films sold in your regional market. “Thank goodness for the Koreans,” laughs Modi. “They weren’t allowed to advertise it, but they made machines that, if you pressed a few buttons on your remote, became multi-region. That changed everything. Nowyou could buy titles from all around the world.”
In 1996, Susan Sontag wrote an essay for the New York Times declaring the death of cinephilia which, she believed, was “grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema’s glorious past.” When DVDs came along, they offered unprecedented opportunities for learning about the rich film histories of Asia, Latin America and Japan.
Because they could store more data than videotapes (and to justify their higher prices), DVDs offered lots of extras: commentary tracks, deleted scenes, outtakes. British-born Ashley Clark, now curatorial director at the universally admired Criterion Collection label in New York, remembers as a student chancing on an import copy of the label’s edition of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. “It had a 60-minute documentary about the making of the film by the brilliant documentarian St Clair Bourne,” he tells me, “an essay, Public Enemy’s video, the full Cannes Festival press conference where the white Eurocentricity of the film industry is in full view. Providing this context helped enrich my understanding of the film. It showed how art could be allied with politics and social commentary.”
Times change. DVDs were popular because of their maximalism. Now, by contrast, there are so many films, so many websites and platforms, DVDs are positively minimalist. For Vic Pratt, co-founder (alongside William Fowler) of the Flipside, a label devoted to lesser-known and experimental postwar British cinema, “there’s a bombardment of sources. It’s easy to go down the internet rabbit hole. Our titles—whether it’s Expresso Bongo with the young Cliff Richard, or mondo-exploitation films like Primitive London—have a finite end and a sense of curation to them.”
Pratt makes a good point. Too many streaming platforms offer a surfeit of content. Their films, stripped of context, saddled with iffy sound and picture quality, feel like all-you-can-eat buffets. Titles can disappear without warning when licensing deals expire. And your internet goes down? Well, tough.
DVD sales will never reach their former levels. But the best labels—Second Run, Criterion, and the Flipside among them—still attract loyal audiences, who regard them as arbiters of taste in the way music fans place their trust in particular record companies. Miklós Jancsó, then in his eighties, was stunned by the young audiences he attracted after Second Run issued DVDs of his 1967 film about the Russian civil war The Red and the White. The Flipside’s louche aesthetic is evident in the work of directors such as Edgar Wright and Nicolas Winding Refn.
High-quality DVDs are an art form. They require imagination, labour—and a fair bit of idealism. They make demands too: to be handled well, to be protected. A DVD is not so much a film as a relationship.
