TT: The gadget that turned movies into art

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I make a consipicuously counterintuitive proposal about the history of film. Here’s an excerpt.
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Is film a fine art? I don’t know many people who’d claim otherwise, even after watching this summer’s parade of brain-deadening blockbusters. Any medium that has been used to create such permanent masterpieces as, say, “Chinatown,” “Rashomon” or “The Rules of the Game” no longer has anything to prove. But was film a fine art in 1913? And how about 1933, or 1963? While most moviegoers would likely answer in the affirmative, I beg to differ. As far as I’m concerned, it wasn’t until 1983–just 30 years ago–that movies became more than a species of purely popular entertainment.
Born in 1956, I grew up in in a small Missouri town that had only one single-screen movie theater. The only “arty” films I saw there were Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” and Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” What’s more, the nearest public TV station was in St. Louis, just beyond the range of our rooftop antenna (this was well before the coming of cable TV). It wasn’t until after I left home that I saw any pre-1950 movies…
In 1975 I enrolled in a small college located in a suburb of Kansas City. I had a tiny TV set in my dorm but was too busy going to class to watch it more than sporadically, and my school had no film series. At that time, Kansas City was home to two “art houses,” one of which showed first-run foreign films and the other domestic revivals. I doubt I saw more than a dozen “classic” films in the second of those theaters, none of them more than once. As a result, I failed to absorb the concept of Film as Art….
What changed my point of view? The VHS videocassette recorder, which was introduced to the U.S. by JVC in 1977. Like many other Americans, I bought my first VCR in 1983, six years later, right around the time that prices were coming down. “Citizen Kane” and “Grand Illusion” were the first “classic” films of which I owned VHS copies. I’d never seen either one before, and I’ll never forget how thrilling it was to be able to view them at will.
If you’re under the age of 50, or if you grew up in a film-friendly city like Chicago or New York, my experience will almost certainly be alien to you. I can assure you, though, that it was not merely common but normal. Today’s youngsters simply can’t imagine the overwhelming power of the cultural transformation that was made possible by the invention of the VCR….
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Read the whole thing here.