Vision Quest

[chocolateboy]

The Incredibly Strange Film Show thread reminded me that Wossy started me on a painfully long quest to track down a copy of one of the films he featured. There's a clip in the Hong Kong cinema ep of Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues. It's a rooftop scene with particularly intense, operatic slowmo and some funky focus-pulling. It also contains a shot

Spoiler alert

(in the ankle)

[close]

that The Matrix rips off many years later.

The scene starts around 02:50 and finishes roughly at 05:30:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzX4wA6Aw7s#t=02m50s

Anyway, I loved the clip and tried to get hold of the film. Whenever I went to London I would trudge round the VHS (initially) and later DVD shops in Chinatown trying to get a copy. I guess after about a decade I must have given up.

It was released a couple of years ago on DVD. The rest of the film is fairly standard-issue Tsui Hark (i.e. nothing he hadn't "produced" in A Chinese Ghost Story (he must have directed chunks of that) and his first film), but that scene still makes my heart stop beating for two minutes.

According to the ISFS thread, it was broadcast in the late '80s. I picked up the DVD maybe four or five years ago, so that's roughly a 17 year quest to track down a VHS DVD.

I've had similar sagas with songs (including one song that I looked for for years, found, and have subsequently re-lost), but nothing as long. Ditto with TV shows and other films. But this was special because I actively butterfly-hunted it. It's the difference between getting a popup every time you wake up saying "TODO: look for Peking Opera Blues" vs occasionally remembering to look for something.

There's still plenty of stuff I'm after. I reckon I can beat 17-ish years quite easily. What epic grail quests have you endured to track down a book/record/TV show/radio show/film?

[jutl]

I've been looking for a decent copy of this since about 1990 when my off-air VHS started getting ratty. No luck yet :(

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts8sAhHJl_s

(from 7.29 and the beginning of this next one)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrR6NZfyP_Y&NR=1

[sirhenry]

I think my most epic quests have been for two records; the first, Barry Andrews - Win A Night Out With A Well Known Paranoiac, I heard on an Anne Nightingale Halloween Special back in the late Seventies and the second, Marin Marais' Tableau of a Lithotomy, was played by the Rezillos on a John Peel show around the same time. Even the rise of the internet didn't bring them to a wider audience until last year, some 30 years after my search began.

My favourite long-lost was a Screen Two play from 1993 called Dirtysomething. It's a twee romance in the world of traveling crusties and is only known for being Rachel Weisz' first appearance on screen. Never repeated and never released on DVD my tape of it was recorded over soon after recording it and I expected to never see it again. Then, at the end of last year, I mentioned it in a post on a Bonzos forum and was chuffed to get a pm from a member who not only knew of it, but knew the writer. So I asked her to pass on my thanks for happy memories and two weeks later  I was sent a bootleg DVD of it made by the writer herself.