http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-vanishing-20090226
"Like the Hawaiian crow and the Chinese river dolphin, Costa-Gavras's 1972 Uruguayan political thriller State of Siege is effectively extinct. While it survives in a few, used VHS versions (you can get one through Amazon.com at $159.99) and presumably somewhere in 16mm or 35mm film prints, it is among hundreds of important and critically acclaimed films no longer readily accessible for home viewing.
"In the wake of video-store shutdowns across the country, and a move toward DVD-only subscription services modeled after Netflix and digital download initiatives, the non-digitized movie is becoming an endangered species.
"The death of VHS has long been foretold. In November 2006, Variety published an obituary headlined "VHS, 30, dies of loneliness." But the industry appears to have overlooked the films themselves.
"VHS-only masterpieces like Erich Von Stroheim's Greed, Sam Fuller's Underworld U.S.A., and Alain Resnais’s Providence have always been difficult to find, but with the decline of the format (not to mention U.S. repertory houses), the chances of seeing them are only getting slimmer.
"At least, legally and in pristine form. A number of the films mentioned in this article can be found as downloadable files on peer-to-peer-sharing BitTorrent sites. And diehard cinephiles have not always bothered with copyright law. That’s what made Kim's Video famous. One of the few centralized places in the world where one could find rare classics, bootlegs, imports, and various oddities, Kim's Video was like a BitTorrent site in the flesh. The recent collapse of the Kim's empire and owner Yongman Kim's decision to ship the company's esoteric, 55,000-film collection to the small Sicilian town of Salemi are among the latest disasters to befall the auteur-film rental market. (((Unless you're anywhere near the once-dying town of Salemi, in which case, wahoo, you're the Pompeii of off-the-wall art flicks.)))
"According to former Kim's Video clerks, the library included such obscure VHS titles as Werner Herzog's documentary on televangelist Gene Scott, God’s Angry Man; a bootleg of Robert Frank's never-released Rolling Stones doc, Cocksucker Blues; Samuel Fuller's Hell and High Water; Penelope Spheeris's The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, and several Andy Warhol titles, along with all sorts of little-seen and eccentric Asian and European imports. "They also had bootlegs of all these bizarre Turkish knockoffs of Hollywood movies," recalls Kim's-clerk-turned-critic Matt Singer. "Turkish E.T., Turkish Star Wars, and so on. I have never seen those anywhere else."
Other independent video stores exist, but for how long and with what stock? ...
(...)
With every new shift in media technology, from 16mm to VHS, from traditional broadcast to cable TV, from VHS to DVD, huge numbers of films are lost, says Facets Multi-Media executive director Milos Stehlik, who includes such titles as Robert Downey's Chafed Elbows, Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend’s House?, Glauber Rocha's Antonio Das Mortes, and Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the IRT among the films he fears will disappear in a post-VHS culture.
"What irritates me is that with each technology comes all this promise—that you’re going to be able to watch whatever you want, whenever you want. But then it turns out not to be true," he says. "Because most art films are marginal, financially, to the mainstream culture, they will always get pushed out."
"I never understood how this myth that 'everything is available on DVD' got started," agrees critic Dave Kehr, the DVD columnist for The New York Times. As evidence, he points to Turner Classic Movies' database of U.S. feature films—of the 157,068 titles listed as of late February, 2009, fewer than 4 percent are available on home video. TCM also includes a reader's list of the top 200 films not on DVD. While many of the titles are available as imports—for example, there are South Korean versions of John Huston's The African Queen (#2) and Elia Kazan's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (#67) and Spanish versions of René Clair's I Married a Witch (#11) and Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (#100)—many others are not available at all, including René Clément's This Angry Age (#1), Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (#4), and King Vidor's Northwest Passage (#7).
Kehr, and others, lay most of the blame on studios that own the rights to the films. "The worst offender is Universal," he says. "They don’t have any idea what they've got in their library. They were releasing a number of films on VHS that you can’t get in any form today." ...
(((That reminds me, I gotta turn in this rental-store copy of JACK SMITH AND THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS, in which the freaked-out, ultra-visionary gay auteur, who insists on principle that he will never finish and ship a movie for the sell-out wolves of commerce, dies AIDS after half-surviving for years on cheese and crackers.)))
