Video Vision
|She works at Video Vision, a warren of technological paraphernalia offering the nostalgic comfort of the analogue: valves, magnetic tape, scanning heads, cathode ray monitors, and of course endless cables, connectors and adaptors, transferring old tapes to new formats, VHS and eight track to digital, and refurbishing old equipment such as the recently acquired UNITRONX MT-074GX video cassette recorder.
So bulky it almost caused an accident when she left it behind the door and her boss Rodney tripped over it, a late appointment with a client wanting old concert footage of an avant-garde anti-tech punk band transferred from tape to something more user friendly triggers a format war of feelings within Kibby, not normally attracted to women but immediately finding something beyond friendship with Gator who identifies as a man and uses he/him pronouns.
A low budget science-fiction horror retro-romance of identity and overwritten images of the past echoing into the present set in New York, Video Vision is written and directed by Michael Turney and stars Andrea Figliomeni and Chrystal Peterson as Kibby and Gator, both immediately warm and likeable and full of quirks and totally believable in their hesitant, awkward and counterintuitive proto-relationship which drives the film.
With only middle-aged curmudgeon Rodney (Shelley Valfer) cheering them on, the challenges of a straight woman and pre-operative transgender man navigating their attraction and the baggage of their pasts and societal expectations not enough, of course there is more, Kibby suffering from strange nightmares since working on the UNITRONX, her skin blistering from a gunky residue on the cables which has infected her like an indoctrinal virus from Chasm City.
A film of formats and form where Gator’s body dysphoria and desire to present externally as he feels inside parallels the ideas of data being preserved even as the supporting medium changes, a remastered version presented in true fidelity uncompromised as the artist intended, Video Vision is more coherent than the similarly retro Laguna Ave and less cynical than Videoman even as interference from Prince of Darkness arrives to interrupt the signal.
The selling point of the film as a horror the backstory of Doctor Analog (Hunter Kohl) and his experiments in the eighties into techno-metaphysics, that aspect does not truly assert itself until the final scenes when the film becomes more adventurous and visually experimental but also unspools badly as Turney tries to tie the strands together and wrap them up satisfactorily, two individually promising ideas spliced together to the detriment of both yet definitely still worth a watch.
Video Vision was screened at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest