Records (2021), directed by Alan Zweig.
review by BK Munn
Sometimes a film just speaks to you, you know? Records is Alan Zweig’s sequel and self-described “bookend” to his legendary 2000 documentary Vinyl. In that first film, part of Zweig’s curmudgeonly “Mirror Trilogy” in which he turns the camera on himself at the same time as he projects his anxieties and foibles onto his subjects, looking for clues to his own loneliness and depression, Zweig managed to find some of the worst examples of record collectors. Alongside collecting heroes like Harvey Pekar, Don McKellar, and Jello Biafra, Zweig dredged up a gaggle of misfits with various personal issues and hoarding tendencies, almost uniformly single men, who shared his conflicted attitudes about collecting and seemed to be engaged in filling an inner void with the habitual accumulation of records.
In this new film, Zweig is seemingly in a much better space, both mentally and in terms of physical location. Twenty years later, he’s traded in his dark, rat-infested apartment for a bright, sun-dappled house in a middle-class Toronto neighbourhood. The aimlessness and self-recrimination of his earlier film(s) has been replaced with some semblance of joy and contentedness; Zweig’s young daughter appears off-camera in the film and the sense we get is she is key to this newfound solidity and balance. His record-collecting has changed, too. Instead of binging and purging indiscriminately, he now seems more focused on buying records for enjoyment, living with some records for only a short time while keeping a core collection that brings him happiness. Likewise, the bulk of collectors he interviews come across as well-adjusted and artistically-inclined music lovers who collect records as an outgrowth of that passion. Many of his subjects use music and collecting in a wholesomely self-directed, therapeutic manner, and several seem to have found their collecting central to long-term relationships and romance. The climax of the film focuses on a happy hetero couple that have that rare thing, a MERGED record collection (gasp!) and, pointedly, two healthy-looking straw-haired tykes who share their parents’ love of tastefully obscure vinyl.
The film is full of stimulating insights into the collector mentality, tempered with Zweig’s patented wry humour. Where the original film took place at the tail-end of vinyl’s long reign as the world’s primary music format, where the sadsack collectors on display seemed like relics of another age, pathetically hanging on to a dead medium, Records comes to us in the middle of the much-touted vinyl resurgence and a newly-thriving industry of deluxe reissues of classic albums and boutique record stores. In a world where you can find a plethora of documentaries about record shops and watch tens of thousands of Youtube videos of record collectors showing off their latest finds, Zweig’s new film nevertheless serves as a timely coda to that bygone era and a fresh way to think about our obsession with “things”. For myself, Zweig’s original film was less a cautionary tale and more of an inspiration. As a confirmed collector from my early years, his exploration of the collector psyche and his Quixotic, haunted quest for the Louvin Brothers’ “Satan is Real” mirrored my own conflicted approach to my vast accumulation of stuff. My wife and I now co-own a record store and have watched Vinyl many times over the years to the point its crusty characters seem like old friends and yes, we also have a large merged record collection (full disclosure: we have met and are on friendly terms with several people in this new documentary and have actually sold at least one record to the director. Zweig had even asked Kara to be in Records, but she demurred since the prospect of having a strange film crew in our tiny home during the pre-vaccine days of the Covid-19 Pandemic did not excite us). The callbacks and self-referential aspects of this new film make it seem like the continuation of a conversation begun two decades ago (these are our people!) and anyone who enjoyed Vinyl or is just curious about why someone might line the walls of their house with thousands of pounds of cardboard-jacketed plastic discs in the era of streaming and digital will find Records a satisfying, and maybe even comforting, experience.
Now streaming on TVO:
https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/records
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