Fiddle-de-dum, Twiddle-de-dee
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday September 13, 1987
A VIDEO cassette recorder for the compulsive knob twiddler? Behold the new model NV-G25A from National Panasonic Australia, which appears to fit that bill.
The VCR is dominated by a knob at the right hand end of the faceplate. The knob operates a system called Dial Search, which has previously been available only on National Panasonic's industrial models.
Just keep twisting the Dial Search knob and you can switch between normal and reverse playback, briefly review a section of the tape, freeze the action or switch between three different slow-motion speeds, plus normal and double-speed action. It can also be used to cue the tape: that is, position it at a precise point for editing or playback.
Lots of other VCRs have those features, of course, but the controls are operated by separate switches. The beauty of Dial Search is having them all controlled by the one rotary dial, allowing you to click swiftly and easily between them.
For people who do a lot of tape editing - those who shoot their own home video movies, for instance, or those who like to record from TV and later edit out the commercials while dubbing to another machine - this is a great boon. There is less chance of hitting a wrong button while hunting among the maze of controls on most VCR fascias.
The NV-G25A also incorporates National's bar-code scanning device, designed to make programming unattended recordings an easier process. This uses an electronic wand, much like the ones you see in some supermarkets and other stores, to read program details encoded in bar form and save you having to punch them in manually. Bar-coded programs are now being printed in some TV guides.
It is a two-speed machine, capable of recording for up to eight hours on a single tape in the LP mode, and sells in most stores for around $1,300.
JUST five months after its cinema release, Tim Burstall's film of D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo is available on video. Kangaroo (Vestron; 100min; M) is due in the video stores today.
It is a handsome film on a fascinating subject. Parallelling the real-life experiences of Lawrence during a visit to Australia in the early 1920s, it concerns a war-disillusioned English writer who emigrates to Australia with his German-born wife after his works have been suppressed because of their outspokenness on social and sexual issues.
In Australia he seeks a freer, more tolerant world in which to rebuild a career and a troubled marriage, but becomes embroiled in political unrest. Concerned at what he sees as rapidly advancing socialism, Kangaroo, a charismatic, right-wing politician and leader of a secret army of returned World War I soldiers, plans repressive anti-union legislation followed by a para-military coup.
Violence breaking out in the streets belies the notion of Australia as a new Eden. Mobs surge, shots are fired...
Kangaroo is only a story, of course. But how accurate is its portrait of Australia in the 1920s? Recent research has established that there was indeed a secret right-wing army in Sydney, and some figures have put it at 14,000 strong.
Lawrence had left Sydney, disillusioned with Australia as he was by most places, in 1922, and never returned. The rise of the New Guard didn't take place until a decade later.
Did Lawrence know something? Had he been in touch with Australia's underground fascists? Whatever the truth of the matter, there's no doubting that Burstall has made an excellent and thought-provoking movie from Lawrence's musings on the forces running through Australian society.
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald
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