Review: "Videotape" by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy

Videotape by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy
Published September 2025 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

Now, videotapes are all but obsolete—in retrospect they were something of a blip in media history, rapidly replaced by DVDs and then video streaming services. But when videotapes were first invented, bringing media not just into people's homes but on individual schedules, they were revolutionary. In Videotape, Godeanu-Kenworthy ties the history of the videotape (and accompanying VCR) to Iron Curtain politics—videos as black-market goods, as subversion, as a distinct touchpoint in history.

Videotapes don't particularly interest me, but random microhistories do, and Object Lessons is one of my favorite series these days. Perhaps the best moment here is Godeanu-Kenworthy's recollection of a woman who did much of the translation of English movies into Romanian for a behind-the-Curtain audience. There's a broader discussion of audio translations that were superimposed on the original track, so that you could hear both the original English and the Romanian translation (my family hosted an exchange student from Ukraine once, and he had learned fluent English from watching such films in Ukraine), but I love the specificity of this one woman's voice being the soundtrack for a generation (and her idiosyncracies being recognizable to that generation too).

The Iron Curtain material also helps because the history of the videotape itself is relatively short. More tension than I might have expected despite that (e.g., film studios pushing hard against videotapes because they were afraid of losing control of the market), and of course videotapes paved the way for other things, but it's an interesting departure from microhistories of things that are still heavily in use; it's something of a different story when the biggest part of said story seems to be over.

I enjoyed this, but because I'm not a film/television person I went in knowing that my practical interest would have limitations. Obviously Videotape is best suited to videophiles, but I recommend the entire series to bog-standard nerds who like deep dives.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.