VHS Video Cleaner
TDK Cleaning Tape

Let's go back to the 90s, a decade when cinema seemed to be infused with that revolutionary desire typical of various new waves. Just as mainstream cinema was refining its techniques to achieve an almost perfection of special effects, many auteur films went in the opposite direction as a counter to this pursuit of aesthetics devoid of content: Dogma 95, mockumentaries, the praise of digital, the reevaluation of handheld cameras...
Yet few remember that little group of films known as "Cassette Pulisci Testine" or "VHS Video Cleaner". Films by anonymous, iconoclastic, visionary, and apocalyptic directors. Mysterious films, at times even unsettling. The primary goal was to revolutionize cinema in silent tones: these videocassettes, unexpectedly, ended up in the homes of everyone who owned a VCR in that golden decade. An epochal case, given that the works in question were anything but easy to consume: completely devoid of any kind of narrative, lacking dialogues, actors, scripts, direction. From this point of view, "TDK Cleaning Tape" is a homage to many underground animation experiments in the 90s: an oppressive electronic soundtrack accompanies the incessant whirling of an incandescent red sphere, the only sign of life in an entirely black, post-apocalyptic universe. Other works on the same vein seem to pay tribute to Rybczynski, Pipilotti Rist, or even Len Lye, rereading all these artists in a dark, esoteric, sepulchral key. Still, all seem to agree on this need to keep the viewer glued with an unkind hypnosis derived from enigmatic and sinister music and often minimal animations. Creativity is in power: these small films will have their decade of glory before disappearing definitively. 
Despite the wide commercial consensus and the silent revolution these cinematic products sparked in the audiovisual field, no one seems to remember. 
Many of you, I know well, will have watched "TDK Cleaning Tape" and other masterpieces of the movement. Perhaps some of you still hide it in your film collection. Have you asked yourselves why you have it?