One of the more interesting-sounding films to come out of this year’s Cannes festival marketplace is This Is How the World Ends, the debut feature by South African director Robert Dos Santos. And we say “interesting-sounding” because we haven’t seen it yet. Why? Well, it’s only available on VHS, reportedly making it the first straight-to-VHS film release in some two decades.
The Guardian just published an interview with Dos Santos that makes for fascinating reading—not least because the director casually drops the fact that he was inspired to swap his successful career as a lawyer for making films after he was menaced with a gun in his native South Africa multiple times in just a couple of months: “I realised that I’m going to die one day,” he said, “and if I’m going to die, I might as well do something that I’ll really, truly, passionately enjoy.”
That something was filmmaking, and if there’s anything that characterizes Dos Santos’s directorial career so far, it’s that he clearly has a flair for doing things differently. His first short film, entitled A Moment, is one seamless shot that was filmed by mounting a camera on a robotic arm called the Bolt-X. (The film’s single shot, appropriately enough, catalogues a man getting… shot.)
If A Moment attracted attention because of the method in which it was shot, much of the commentary around This Is How the World Ends has focused on the method of its release. It’d be easy to dismiss the VHS-only release as a gimmick, but there’s some pretty well-considered reasoning behind the decision. First, Dos Santos says, he wants people to want to see his film; requiring them to put in some effort means that only people who genuinely want to see the film will go to the trouble of getting hold of a tape. This is a more common practice among musical artists, and Bandcamp is full of acts that like to make their audience work for it a little bit.
More interestingly, he says that the format itself reflects both the film’s themes and his own personal feelings on the way we consume art. “[My film] is a film made by humans for humans,” he said to The Guardian. “I want people to feel something that’s imperfect, because VHS is not a perfect medium.” He returns repeatedly to the theme of being human in the interview: discussing how some of the film’s details will be lost on VHS, he says, “I’m in love with the images we shot, so it’s a compromise, but … compromise is a part of experiencing life… [It’s] the price you pay for being a human and for bumping up against the four corners of the world, and in this case, the four corners of the screen.”
The distinctive imperfections of VHS—its flickering images, descending lines of static, and color bleeding—can somehow make it feel more human than the hyperreal 4K 60fps footage that today’s cameras can produce. (We explored this idea recently in the context of a mod for Cyberpunk 2077 that makes the game look like grainy security camera footage.)
There’s also something here about how limitations can breed creativity. Dos Santos speaks in the interview about his distaste for AI, and the restrictions imposed upon his film contrast sharply with the just-type-a-prompt-and-get-anything-you-want nature of AI “art”. He’s not the only young filmmaker who feels this way: Backrooms director Kane Parsons was recently in the news for saying in an interview with paywalled Murdoch shitrag The Australian that “if I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would… Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.”
It’s heartening to see young filmmakers rejecting AI tools in favor of actually developing their craft—especially since so many of their older peers are going out with a whimper, not a bang, in proving disappointingly susceptible to the lure of generative AI. The kids, at least, are alright.
Unfortunately, if you want to order a copy of the film, it’s currently sold out. That’s a problem that people dealt with before streaming, and it just makes it more special if you get to see it someday.
