Boutique - To Preserve And Collect

Label Legacy

Boutique -
To Preserve And Collect
Directed by Ryan Bruce Levey
USA/Canada 2024
Orama Filmworks
World Premiere FrightFest 2024 screening

I’ve never really understood the collector mentality myself but, I do buy an awful lot of Blu Rays (enough to keep me busy well into retirement before I get a chance to watch them) from various US Boutique labels (and more than a few of our own, home grown boutique labels here in the UK too), so it was a no brainer for me to make this movie the third of my four choices at this year’s FrightFest.

Boutique - To Preserve And Collect starts off with a look at the birth of the home video boom of the 1980s (although, curiously, the earlier bootlace cinema boom is not covered in this documentary) and how things developed over time with a special emphasis on the preservation of film. So we have stalwarts of the industry such as Severin Films co-founder David Gregory and Vinegar Syndrome co-founder Joe Rubin alongside many of their contemporaries, talking about how they started (there’s even an appearance from the great Kier-La Janisse and people like Samm Deighan).

Often this involves booting and then selling VHS cassettes to their friends for cash including the age old misdemeanour of filming cinema screenings and then putting them on tape. It was almost heart warming to hear one of the many talking heads in this picture explaining that the early films you purchased might have people standing up in front of the screen and walking across the picture... something that I remember happening more than a few times on the odd pirate copy during the 1980s and, actually, something I’ve seen happen when certain cinema films on ‘certain internet channels’ have somehow not managed to get their own HD transfer of a modern film (yeah, I know it’s charming but, I don’t watch pirates unless they’re full HD these days... I’m obviously a snob in this regard).

And, of course, the irony is not lost that a lot of these people who started off this way are now saving the films and preserving them for future generations... in admittedly high priced Blu Ray editions but, that’s the way it is and, when you think about the amount of work which goes into finding, scanning and restoring these lost treasures (some of which, it’s very clear, would not have been expected to have been brought back from the dead) well... maybe those are not such high price tags after all. When the director went on stage for the Q and A at this premiere screening, he was very respectful of the customers who buy these things, I think... making the point that without the likes of people like me and our willingness to buy and explore films we’ve never heard of before, then the funding to rescue these disappearing treasures would not be there.

A couple of criticisms because, as you know, even with a great movie like this, I like to throw in a few things. So number one, the music is almost constant. It’s obviously needle dropped from a music library (I believe) and it does play over a lot of the talking heads. Sometimes this works okay but, on occasion it’s maybe just a little distracting and mixed just a little too high (remember, bass notes and percussion can sometimes be overwhelming at the wrong levels) but, to be fair, the director did mention it was a little ‘hot’ in some places and that he was going to fix it.

My only other criticism is that this was not quite, yet, the documentary I would personally have wanted. It would have been nice to see a project such as The Sensual World Of Black Emanuelle or All The Haunts Be Ours followed and taken through from initial meetings, tracking down scannable prints, combining different sources and scanning etc through to the finished product. That being said, though, this documentary does nod to those projects and there’s enough here to make it an important talking point... especially when it comes to the rescue and restoration of films which the likes of Criterion and Scorcese, perhaps, would not consider trying to rescue alongside the other great work they are already doing themselves in the world of film preservation.

So, yeah, Ryan Bruce Levey’s documentary Boutique - To Preserve And Collect is definitely one for the fans of those wonderful Blu Ray releases from the likes of Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, Altered Innocence, Criterion, Arrow, Second Sight and all the others I don’t have room to mention. If that’s your thing, one can only hope a Blu Ray release (alongside some hopefully fabulous extras) will be coming along at some point soon.