Cassette, on its international quest to explore the cassette tape – and above all, the mix tape – its origins, its influences, its demise and its resurgence, absolutely has its heart in the right place. It manages to interview all the surviving inventors, it has the obligatory talking heads of Henry Rollins and Thurston Moore, not to mention live footage of presumably grateful Williamsburg hipster bands.
The problem is almost paradoxical: Cassette documents a great many people with a huge passion for the subject matter; something that does not appear to be particularly shared by the filmmakers, themselves. The film is consistently permeated by a largely impassive atmosphere which one can only assume is the reason behind its general lack of pursuit. Absolutely, a lot of people are consulted – we hear from DJ Ron G and others about the mixtape’s major influence on hip hop, we see Mike Watt discussing the impact it had on the garage band’s ability to get recordings out there, but we never really explore the impact on such movements and phenomena; all we get are some anecdotes as a camera scans over collections of tapes, or someone holds the cover up to the camera, the majority of the time, the lens is too unfocused to capture the titles or images, anyway.
When you think of all the eccentricities of cassette culture out there, all the crazy packagings noise and experimental artists like Aube, A Band, The Gerogerigegege, Merzbow and others have been involved with that isn’t mentioned at all, you really can’t help but feel a little cheated. Instead, we hear X number of people saying the exact same thing about the tape’s relevance to hip hop, X number of people saying the exact same thing about the tape’s relevance to punk, X number of people saying the exact same thing about how their tape-related manufacture/distribution/retail business hasn’t yet folded.
I absolutely agree with the sentiment that a documentary is not the same as an adult educational video, and there is no necessity to “learn” in the strictest sense anything from one. However, feeling like I’ve gained almost nothing phenomenologically has led me to the conclusion that, whilst nothing at all is particularly bad about Cassette it is the standardest of standard boilerplate kickstarter-funded pet project documentaries, without even really showing the “love” implicit in the term amateur. Shame, really.
**1/2
Lexi Watches Films and Writes About Them Sometimes 