Shot and never seen again: Videotapes as waste and merchandise in post-socialist Romania

Abstract

What if videotapes were considered as either waste or commodity – to be forgotten, or sold and reused and re-recorded? This is the question raised by this text, which gives an account of a multi-sited ethnographic project that follows the human and material circulation of amateur analogue video technologies in Romania since the mid-1980s. At the intersection of anthropology and media archaeology, this text aims to show how videotapes have been an important part of a post-socialist Romanian media infrastructure, that distributed pirated media, home movies, and local television productions.