When Alan Zweig’s documentary “Vinyl” premiered in 2000, many viewers assumed they were about to see a celebration of record collecting — a quirky tour through the crates of obsessive music fans.
That is not the movie Zweig made.
Instead, “Vinyl” turned the camera inward, using record collectors to explore loneliness, compulsion and the strange emotional lives people build around the objects they cherish. Twenty-six years later, the documentary — long considered a landmark of Canadian non-fiction filmmaking — is returning to the big screen at the Revue Cinema on April 28.
“That movie changed my life,” said Zweig, 74, who has since directed 11 other documentaries exploring similar themes and his own search for meaning and connection. His latest, “Love, Harold,” which examines people coping with grief after the suicide of someone they loved, screened last month at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema.
Zweig became well acquainted with failure and rejection as he struggled to fund numerous film projects in the ’80s and ’90s. “I was very attached to those 25 years of failure,” Zweig said, seated in a coffee shop in the Junction. “When a certain kind of success came along, I was still framing my whole life in terms of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And that was absolutely true for at least 10 years afterward.”
The Alan Zweig we encounter in “Vinyl” is caustic and curmudgeonly (his 2004 followup was titled “I, Curmudgeon”). He trades barbs with several interesting characters, including fellow director Don McKellar and the late American comic book writer and noted sourpuss Harvey Pekar. “This isn’t the apartment of an extremely social person,” Zweig says to one collector who needs to move crates of records in order to access his bed.
When we see Zweig in his own rundown apartment, he’s dealing with a rodent problem. “It was in a trap near the easy listening records,” he says of the mouse, his own camera-wielding image reflected in a mirror — an Alan Zweig staple.
At one point, a classical music collector gets defensive when asked why he still lives with his mother. A vinyl obsessive who claims to own every pop song ever recorded insists Zweig test his photographic memory of old K-tel compilations, while fixing the filmmaker with a cold, sharklike stare.
In one of the film’s most memorable moments, a surly country music fan seethes over losing his records in a divorce settlement — only for Zweig to nonchalantly ask where his ex-wife sold them, hoping to score the man’s copy of a Louvin Brothers LP.
Many featured in the documentary were Zweig’s acquaintances. “There’s a guy in the film who was my friend all through the making of the film,” he said. “Until he saw it.”
Former Toronto Star film critic Geoff Pevere appears in one segment, recounting how he once threw his albums in the trash during an apartment move because he didn’t want anyone else to have them. “For several years after ‘Vinyl’ came out,” Pevere recently said, “I would be approached by people who recognized me as the guy who tossed his record collection in a dumpster. Not once was it to commiserate. It was always to express shock and disgust at such a sacrilegious act.”
“There’s a lot of distressing content in the film,” said Dave Bertrand, a programmer at the Revue Cinema. “At first, you’re kind of gobsmacked by the characters — these collectors who are really lost in their own worlds. But what really hits you is that Alan is exploring his own depressed state. It’s a very personal journey.”
Watching the documentary today, Bertrand says the film feels different than it did when he first saw it. “I was just pushing my daughter on the swings a second ago,” he said, noting the contrast with the more hopeful 2021 sequel, “Records,” which Zweig made after becoming a father. “When you go back to ‘Vinyl,’ you think, ‘My God, what a sad state to be in.’ You’re watching a lost soul searching for something — and it forces you to look at yourself and all those eccentric quests we never seem to stop pursuing. I’m grateful for the age and experience that gets you out of that place — and I’m sure Alan probably is too.”
Bertrand has never seen the film with an audience. “I’m curious how some of the cringier moments land,” he said, particularly a scene in which Zweig tries to win a date with a woman he’s interviewing. “It’s pure pain. You want to curl up into a ball and die.”
For Bertrand, “Vinyl” has long been at the top of his screening wish list. A new Blu-ray released by local home video label Canadian International Pictures proved the right time to program it.
Zweig still likes the film, he wishes it were shorter than 110 minutes. He also still likes records. “I like looking through boxes of records. If you tell me there’s a guy selling records, and they’re in a basement, and I have to get on my hands and knees and crawl through a puddle, I’ll do that. But it’s no longer the siren call that I referred to in the film.”
Throughout “Vinyl,” Zweig films himself leaving stacks of records outside his old College Street apartment. He’s never been shy about giving away albums — he gifts them to many of the film’s interviewees. “Used records have always been an exchange between me and the world. I’ll have it for a while, I’ll pass it on,” he said. He’s cranky about the price of used vinyl at the moment — “they’re overinflated” — but he’s happy record store owners are doing well.
He’s passed on many LPs to his adolescent daughter: “The records I was listening to when I was a teenager: “The Best of the Animals,” “Sounds of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel. That felt really good.”
Zweig, who hosts two podcasts — “Tubby,” about self-image, and “The Worst,” about the worst things in life — says he’ll probably hand out selections from his collection of 1,500 records at the Revue, where he will participate in a post-screening Q&A. “I think I could get it down to 800.
“I can live with that.”
