Reductions

Vhs, 30, dies of loneliness. The headline was for an obituary run by Variety in November 2006, one of many nods to the format as it entered its twilight. Critics waxed nostalgic, weighed in on the aesthetics of analog video, debunked the myth that “everything is available on DVD.” But never mentioned in these considerations—indeed, barely remembered at all—was the previous chapter in the history of home viewing: the digest film. Among cinema’s most compellingly illegitimate objects, and once widely available in department stores, camera shops, and mail-order catalogs, digests were heavily edited versions of feature films. Bumped down from 35 mm to 8 mm, they were often cut to around seven to ten minutes so as to fit on a single reel, even stripped of color and sound. The first such reductions were repurposed westerns released by Castle Films in 1947, and the practice continued through the early 1980s (titles like Marketing Film International’s seventeen-minute Raiders of the Lost Ark would be the last of their kind). Unwieldy visions of their parent material, digest films were always ridiculous, and sometimes sublime. Below, a sampling.

The Birds

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

Original: 119 minutes

Digest: 16 minutes, 48 seconds

Hitchcock’s film is a notable case, one in which both the original and the digest are distinguished by what isn’t there. In the original, tension is artfully built by the lack of a traditional score, an eerie quiet that is punctuated by the unmotivated, inexplicable attacks of the film’s ubiquitous villains. In the butchered syntax of the digest, we begin immediately with Tippi Hedren driving up to the Bodega Bay schoolhouse. Here, it is exposition that is jettisoned, and in mere moments the scene is overwhelmed by screaming children and terror from above, followed in short order by two additional sequences of avian aggression. The structure is breathless: all exclamation, no ellipses. Sadism is distilled, however sloppily, and the abridgement becomes a fixed idea made real, a haunting, flawed half memory of a film manifested in permanent form.

The Godfather from Hong Kong

(Shu Mei Chin, 1974)

Original: unknown length

Digest: 7 minutes, 18 seconds

In her essay on Walter Benjamin, discussing his love for things diminutive, Susan Sontag wrote, “To miniaturize means to make useless. For what is so grotesquely reduced is, in a sense, liberated from its ­meaning—its tininess being the outstanding thing about it. It is both a whole (that is, complete) and a fragment (so tiny, the wrong scale). It becomes an object of disinterested contemplation or reverie.” Likewise, digest films are set free, for with narrative all but evacuated, a different sort of looking becomes...