Many contemporary documentaries eschew thorough journalistic inquiry in favor of distractingly flashy camerawork and video effects. No such problems exist with Scratch, documentarian Doug Pray's follow-up to his hugely entertaining 1996 grunge-doc Hype! As with that superb debut, Scratch demonstrates that Pray knows who to talk to, what to ask, and how to cut the results together to create an illusion of exhaustiveness. Scratch is a documentary about turntablists, those renegade hip-hoppers and vinyl fetishists who take old recordings and convert them into new musical expressions. Pray approaches the art form from different directions, getting to the roots of turntablism in early rap (with extensive homage to and discussion with GrandMixer DXT, the scratcher on Herbie Hancock's breakthrough single "Rockit") and following the timeline all the way up to the current young turks, including almost all the recent winners of New York's DJ competitions. Scratch goes digging for old vinyl with help from DJ Shadow, and allows legendary spinners like Mix Master Mike and DJ Qbert to break down the method and preparation for creating what often sounds like improvised noise. Few imaginable points about turntablism remain unaccounted for, and few well-known DJs are left out of the proceedings. And the performance footage is ridiculously exciting, given that it consists mainly of men standing behind record players. It helps that Pray partially edits the film in a "scratch" style, jumping visually back and forth, and that he often lets the camera linger on the artists' magnificent hands, even when they're at rest. Pray has said that it would have been inappropriate to use digital technology to make a movie about analog artists, so Scratch was shot on film—which, fairly or unfairly, gives the documentary instant heft in this almost-too-easy digital-video world. The extra expense and effort of celluloid demonstrates Pray's dedication to matching the medium and the subject, and his no-fuss style gives the story of turntablism room to tell itself. It's a doozy of a story, too, about a group of musicians who use the technology of the present and the mindset of the future to make a delicious hash out of the best parts of the past.