Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape

source: Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape

Good movie!

The idea of a documentary about the cassette tape is a good one. I was all over this. What a shame. I was after a fast paced journey through its history - flashbacks to the 80s, the music from the time, the fashions, the famous people voxpops, fun little vinette reenactments, the inventor taking us through the design process and challenges - why there was a requirement for such a product, etc etc etc... I got NONE of it! Not one insight could I had not formulated myself. And the pace! Cassette tapes are a youth product, imbued with love, energy, passion. This doco seemed to be more concerned about examining the the theme of nostalgia, whilst at the same time failing to invoke any such emotion in the hearts of its audience. They clearly had no budget for a soundtrack or access the big names, but even so. There was an opportunity the carve of a diamond and they failed. Uninspired and very dull. Give it a miss. Unlike the classic cassette tape.

I find it doubtful that anyone who does not already have an interest in the subject would watch this, and as such I find it disingenuous to rank it beneath six stars. If you seek it out, you'll find something of interest. But the film is a weird paradox: It seems utterly focused on a single thesis (the cassette wouldn't survive without nostalgia) yet somehow meanders constantly (the sub-themes of that nostalgia are *all* over the place). If you make it to the end, you realize that nostaglia is maybe even a secondary theme to the subject of what I'd like to call "recreative labour." But it gets to that point very sloppily. And despite only being about 90 min, it feels like it goes on forever. This is perhaps because the cassette inventor is at odds with the theme. He seems perfectly content with his life and memories and with being old but not only doesn't have interest in waxing nostaglic, he seems bemused that anyone else would. As such, the storytelling sticks with that nostalgia far more than what *I* would have found interesting: how cassettes overtook albums as the most popular format, why eight-tracks failed in comparison, how long it took CDs to edge them out, etc. Etc. Etc. These are all minor details or storytelling casualties compared to the film insisting that you recognize "gosh, didn't we have something special here? Let's just bounce around from cassette aficionado or shopkeep to another with another random tale or tidbit. Then we'll go back to the inventor and see if his heart has softened any..." That was what was frustrating for me: Any time the film picks up on an interesting thread, it drops it like a hot potato and retreats to the nostalgia subject.

I sat through the documentary "Helvetica" about a typeface, and it was fascinating. Unfortunately, "Cassette" was not. I suppose the first rule of a doc is to explain how and why your subject came into being, but this doc failed that step. The rest was just a boring collection of people collecting mix tapes. I used to make them myself, so that was nothing new.

While this film might have been so much more it gets the zeitgeist of the reason Philips Compact Cassette became something beyond just another time specific recording medium. The film is slow and dreamy for the most part. It jumps around not unlike the countless varieties of people whose personal connections to the medium differs, but is a strong one. The cassette, and that special niche called the mix-tape brought emotion and democracy to music recording. Plus, and this can't be under-rated, it was portable! When we listen to music today from our personal collection on our phones and in the cloud there is a connection to the first truly portable democratic recordings which were cassettes. In other words, the cassette remains today and just won't die. The man who invented the idea and some of the engineers from Philips are here. They're elderly and most of them seem non-plusesd by the fact their little invention changed the world and lives of billions of people worldwide. It's all interesting to me since I spent hundreds of hours making cassette tapes to play in my car and my home Hi-Fi rig. Because I love the cassette and because it was an important part of my life I can overlook so much that was left out in this documentary. This film may not be for everyone as a result yet I find it comforting not unlike going through my cassettes and pulling out a jewel I may not have heard for two decades or more. It's like mining a bit of pure gold and basking in the pleasure. I confess I wish the industry had never quit making, and improving, Hi-Fi cassette decks. With the advances by audio manufacturers like Dolby, Yamaha, Teac, Akia, Sony, Technics, and Nakamichi in the seventies it stalled by the middle eighties. Today if the evolution would have continued it isn't a stretch to say the fidelity of cassettes may be near that of digital audio. Even though it never made that leap their are some mighty fine cassette decks one can still acquire through internet sales sites like eBay. I've bought three more nice decks in the past five years and watching this film I think I understand much better why I've done this. I'm glad Mr. Ottens conceived the Compact Cassette. He is a real visionary in my estimation. Oh yeah...I'm also glad National Audio didn't quit making cassettes. Not only can you get National Audio to duplicate your own band's music on cassettes, but more importantly to me they still sell brand new high-quality blank cassette tapes. Long live the cassette!

Bonus points to anyone who recognizes the quote in my title from a classic 80s romcom (talk about nostalgia). But that's the feeling this documentary left me with. The forgotten cassette tape is a GREAT subject for a documentary, and although I'm about to mostly bash this film, I'm very appreciative that someone made the effort of filming a documentary about the poor bygone cassette tape. But wow, this experience was a bummer. You end up waiting 90 minutes for anything of substance--hard-hitting facts, interesting trivia, or humorous anecdotes--but ultimately it's as empty as that Led Zeppelin IV case that sat in the glove box of your car for 7 years because you hoped whoever stole the tape would eventually bring it back, but no dice. "Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape" is a well-intended documentary, done professionally with good (stock?) footage and a nice glossy shine. Oddly, it's the opposite of what it attempts to portray: the idea that the cassette tape revolutionized music because it brought music into the raw, grubby, un-commercial hands of the public. I loved that message, but ultimately the documentary chose to take a different path. There are 3 routes the filmmakers could have taken to make this documentary a success: (1) they could have gone the historical route and made this an educational film - which they did not. (2) They could have gone the technical route and dug deep into the acoustics of why tape/analog is different than digital - which they did not. Or (3) they could have gone the comedy/entertainment route and made this a cheeky, bizarro documentary full of interviews with oddballs, fanatics and weirdos (sort of like the entertaining and partially disturbing documentary about comic con fans, "Ambassadors of Hollywood") - which they did not. Instead, this documentary chose route (4) which is pure sentimentality and nostalgia. It works for the first 20 minutes as we meet the grey-haired octogenarians who were responsible for the cassette's design back in 1963, but that runs out of juice fast, especially because the old fellers aren't particularly excited about the subject themselves. They just sort of sit around taking long pauses between sentences, talking about random things as the documentary gives us a sappy soundtrack of slow guitar plucking in the background. "You're not a very nostalgic person" the interviewer says at one point to the inventor of the cassette. This is followed by a long silence and then "no". "Say something! Resembling anything!" I found myself shouting in frustration. Nobody wanted to enjoy this documentary as much as me, especially since I just took the plunge and bought a box of 50 random cassettes off ebay and was hoping to get hyped for my ear-muffling musical marathon. Instead, I feel like that moment when you realize, oops I left my Cyndi Lauper tape on the dashboard and it melted into soup. The slow nostalgia of this flick sucked the life out of me, and unless all 50 cassettes I receive end up being Enya, I definitely don't feel like this flick put me in the appropriate mood for my rediscovery of 80s awesomeness. Well maybe we can try again in 50 years when someone does a documentary about the CD.

source: Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape

The idea of a documentary about the cassette tape is a good one. I was all over this. What a shame. I was after a fast paced journey through its history - flashbacks to the 80s, the music from the time, the fashions, the famous people voxpops, fun little vinette reenactments, the inventor taking us through the design process and challenges - why there was a requirement for such a product, etc etc etc... I got NONE of it! Not one insight could I had not formulated myself. And the pace! Cassette tapes are a youth product, imbued with love, energy, passion. This doco seemed to be more concerned about examining the the theme of nostalgia, whilst at the same time failing to invoke any such emotion in the hearts of its audience. They clearly had no budget for a soundtrack or access the big names, but even so. There was an opportunity the carve of a diamond and they failed. Uninspired and very dull. Give it a miss. Unlike the classic cassette tape.

I find it doubtful that anyone who does not already have an interest in the subject would watch this, and as such I find it disingenuous to rank it beneath six stars. If you seek it out, you'll find something of interest. But the film is a weird paradox: It seems utterly focused on a single thesis (the cassette wouldn't survive without nostalgia) yet somehow meanders constantly (the sub-themes of that nostalgia are *all* over the place). If you make it to the end, you realize that nostaglia is maybe even a secondary theme to the subject of what I'd like to call "recreative labour." But it gets to that point very sloppily. And despite only being about 90 min, it feels like it goes on forever. This is perhaps because the cassette inventor is at odds with the theme. He seems perfectly content with his life and memories and with being old but not only doesn't have interest in waxing nostaglic, he seems bemused that anyone else would. As such, the storytelling sticks with that nostalgia far more than what *I* would have found interesting: how cassettes overtook albums as the most popular format, why eight-tracks failed in comparison, how long it took CDs to edge them out, etc. Etc. Etc. These are all minor details or storytelling casualties compared to the film insisting that you recognize "gosh, didn't we have something special here? Let's just bounce around from cassette aficionado or shopkeep to another with another random tale or tidbit. Then we'll go back to the inventor and see if his heart has softened any..." That was what was frustrating for me: Any time the film picks up on an interesting thread, it drops it like a hot potato and retreats to the nostalgia subject.