ALEX ROSS PERRY: VIDEOHEAVEN (2025)

The rise and decline of the video store, as told in film clips

This is a film about video stores, which has been done before. But this one is notable for its many amazing film clips. The phenomenon of video stores, Maya Hawke's narration says, began in the seventies and ended in the 2010's. The narration sees this as a kind of contemporary cinematic heyday, and when we think of, say, Quentin Tarantino, we can only agree. Didn't work in such a store give birth to this marvellous film-buff filmmaker in a special way, providing a library and a film school? The narration points out the video store era was a time when getting a movie to watch at home was a "face-to-face, hand-to-hand process," a person-to-person social transaction (and imagine talking to Tarantino in choosing and taking out your pick). There is a nostalgic cult of the VHS among film buffs, with a place for the video store in it.

Why did video stores predominate in America more than Europe? The film doesn't give a good explanation, but assumes it's because they were places mostly for Hollywood products. Does that matter, and is it even true? My favorite video stores were all ones where lots of foreign films were on offer. And yes, I watched this film because of strong memories of a dazzed, blissful period when I myself rented, brought home, and watched videos in one format or another nearly every day.

The film concentrates on showing and talkling about clips of video stores from movies, starting with Ethan Hawke's Hamlet, where a hertbreakngly young Hawke wanders wide-eyed and pale-skinned through a videos store in knitted cap and plunging neckline whilst a soft voice-over of his voice recites the "to be or not to be" soliloquy. We see a richly decorated store in the 1989 Speaking Parts. There will be many, many more.

Next comes a focus on the topic of VCR's, which, starting in the late 1970's, quickly becme a staple in Ameican homes: video cassette recorders, used primarily for playing videotapes. Some of us had two machines, one for playing the rented videotape, the other for copying it while watching it, fof future re-watching, which rarely happened, after the tape was returned to the rental store. There were those of us who accumulated thus hundreds of putatively illegal copies, in one's own private library. Who watches them now? But there still are a few video stores, which mostly might have the DVD's that replaced the tapes, but the tapes too. I find from a search that "Seattle's Scarecrow Video is one of the world's largest physical media collections, with over 130,000 film titles available to the public to rent on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VHS. The institution's VHS collection is comprised of around 15,000 items." And it's current. The importance of this survival is that, as with 78 rpm to LP, and LP to CD, many titles in one format never get transferred to the new one.

VHS tapes first appeared in the US in 1976 (in Japan a year before) and interest in the wonder of independent home viewing (not relying on what came over your TV channels) rapidly grew. Over the course of the 1980's, the narration tells us, there was "a profound change in American movie culture," signalled by the growing dominance of home video-watching over movie-theater-going. Not a happy development, I might say; but then, it meant people could watch lots more films. Videos and video stores were the main conduit through which new movies got seen. The chain stores like Blockbuster took over from the little, dark, ideosyncratic stores with their film buff staffs. They instead were "family-friendly," large, brightly-lit, uniformly laid out, organized, but lacking that je-ne-sais-quoi that made the little video stores places with a vibe and more of a cult feeling and following. Those of us who were video fiends and buffs never really warmed to the big chain video stores, but we had to resort to them as the cool ones were overwhelmed or gave up - though a few powerhouse indie stores remained like the famous Scarecrow Video in Seattle, Beyond Video in Baltimore or Movie Madness in Portland. The force of change of course was technology. This film doesn't much go into that, but people continue to watch videos at home, ideally on blu-ray, probably on much bigger and nicer screens than were common in the heyday of VHS. But they must have to buy them rather than rent them.

I remember videotapes. They coild let you down, as when you got stuck with a bad copy or a broken or damaged tape. But with a high quality VCR it was possible to watch segments of a film in slow-mo, and even frame by frame, to pick apart how a sequence was made. Apparently this is still possible with high-quality players. It is I who have fallen off. Though over the past 20 years I have watched a lot of new films in the Walter Reade Theater at New York's Lincoln Center, which is as good a sound system and big screen as you can find, I've also myself to become largely reduced to watchiing online screeners on a laptop.

That way, something is lost - the physicality of the movie-viewing experience. When we are no longer getting access to the thing in a physical form, and it's robbed of its thing-ness, it also loses an essential element of its value. Think of the difference between wearing a diamond necklace and looking at a picture of one. An online screener, a blu-ray DVD, or a VHS tape all provide an image on a screen, but the disc and tape deliveries have a physical, artisial quality.

Alex Ross Perry's film, as I've suggested, is most notable for its many short clips of movie scenes set in video stores. A brief one from Juice (1992) simply shows the behind of a very fetching female video cleark in rolled up denim short shorts - and long black stockings. Next there immediately comes Hélas pour moi (1993), where another female cleark proffers a video of Cannibal Man to a tall blond young French guy with a top knot, who sets the video aside and says, "Pour que le mal existe, il faut justement la créature" (For evil to exist, the creature is necessary).

The rapid, entertaining onrush of clips throughout is sometimes ironic; repetitive; not always selective. Some quirky or violent moments occurring in video stores appear after the statement that they had become a dull and ordinary feature of ordinary life. But the point is made that, in the 2010's, video stores in movies became routine, "unremarked-upon." And meanwhile a big format shift had come, from videotape to DVD (laster disc isn't mentioned, and true, it's only a blip, though I had them), which further downgraded the indie stores that might not have had the funds to lay in a full stock of DVD's. Partly this is a history not just of video stores so much, but of video stores on film, and the point is repeatedly (rather reduntantly) made that now, such images are historical only, because despite a few lingering stores, they have vanished from daily life.

Videoheaven's history shows that at first in movies video stores were shown a lot as associated with violence or porn. In the later 1980's they started to become more routine background with no special associations. The narrator also recounts how the stores themselves changed, as has been mentioned already, but also with the addition of small video rental sections in electronics stores or supermarkeets, etc. Again the dizzying number of short clips continue, showing how often video stores appeared in movies, in their day. We also see a dizzying array of bad male hairstyles.

In fact video stores were partly associated with violence and porn in real life, because one thing at least some of them did was make available movies that couldn't be shown in movie theaters or on television, B movies, slasher movies. Some of them actually had a little room with porn curtained off from the rest. But now the internet has no curtains.

Sometimes Videoheaven seems more like a doggedly thorough academic paper than a thoughtful documentary film. It doesn't seem to care about the quality of most of the films it shows clips from, which becomes obvious when it shows clips from Nicole Holofcener's 1996 Walking and Talking, where the passing affair of a female character, Amelia (a young Catherine Keener) and a "scruffy video clerk named Bill" (Kevin Corrigan), even if only a subplot of the film, seems more interesting than any of the films briefly glipsed so far. Were there no interesting movies involving video stores before 1996? This film goes back and forth in time, attaching immportance to the difference between the 1980's and 1990's, and then seeming to merge them together.

A point of interest arises when video clerks (finally!) come up as a topic, and the two clerks who became famous directors, Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino. A clip of Tarantino himself shows he revisited the store where he worked for five years to clelbrate his film's coming out on video, while Smith's Clerks is described because he alone of the two made a film set in a video store. Obviusly clerks are the human element in the video store, and important in movie representations of these places, and they play lots of different roles: potential date, mean S.O.B., smart guy, know-it-all snob, or "sympathetic outsider."

The film goes a bit overboard when it calls negociating a film rental from a clerk "a sacred transaction." Transaction, yes; but sacred? An interesting twist is scenes from bigger, more mainstream video stores where the clerks aren't so much rude, like Randal, in Kevin Smith's classic Clerks, as super-dumb about movies, like the one in Terry Zwigoff's 2001 Ghost World, who doesn't even know 8 1/2 from 9 1/2 Weeks. Basically, compared to small or independent video stores, the big chain ones in real life sucked, even if they had a lot of videos, because they lacked the individual touch or clerks who knew and cared.

It's nice, and logical, that this film gives special attention to Michel Gondry's 2008 Be Kind Rewind, with its fanciful tale of a video store that becomes, however implausibly, a center of interactive community creativity by fostering artisinal local remakes of Hollywood films. The narrator cites as the last film to be set in a video store is Marianna Palka's 2008 Good Dick, about a store clerk (Jason Ritter) who falls for an unnamed woman played by the director. The narrator is only interested in the fact that this was shot in a real video store that actually survives today, L.A.'s Cinephile Viideo. Is it a good movie? This documentary doesn't care. Tim Grierson concluded his review of iGood Dick in the Village Voice: "It feels provocative but inconclusive—brimming with intriguing ideas about love’s dark underbelly, but not quite confident enough to pull them off." Notes like that, about which of thsse movies featuring video stores are actually worth watching, would have made this a better, more useful film. It is interesting to be reminded tht Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend (2007) has a video store Will Smith visits after the apocalypse, shot in a store thatf actually went out of business shortly thereafter.

It's not germane to this film specifically perhaps, but in my mind I find the images of video stores are now replaced by videos of Criterion Closet Picks (I love the one by Mark Ryance, whose "perhaps" favorite is mine too, and what he says about it is beautiful) and the French counerpart, where ten-best picks in a similar cube packed with DVD's can be found on YouTube.

Videoheaven provides much more detail than can be mentioned here. I've left out dozens of films that are briefly cited with an identifying clip showing a video store glimpse. Indeed, the seeming comprehensiveness of this documentary - in its discssions of films, in its slightly repetitive orgnization - is a feature that can tend to make it seem at times more wearying than entertining. We deserved for the filmmakers to show us a more interesting, clearer path through all this detail. Perhaps Perry's taking ten years, as reported, to make this film contributed to a loss of perspective. Nonetheless, a feast and a record for VCR fans.

Videoheaven, 182 mins., was watched for this review on an online screener: the way a lot of us watch movies at home today. It premiered Feb. 5, 2025 at Rotterdam, according to Deadline, as part of "a Focus strand entitled 'Hold Video in Your Hand', celebrating the community spirit of VHS culture," which included other films. It was also featured at Groningen, Nyon, Jeonju, Sydney, Tribeca and Oak Cliff. US release July 2, 2025.