‘We thought video stores would continue to exist in the future; now we know, they exist only in the past…’
It’s so easy to romanticise video shops in a way that anyone born after 1999 would no doubt find bizarre and hysterical, but in many ways, they have come to symbolise a lost era in cinema and pop culture generally that is gone and never coming back. One of my earliest formative memories is the time when I wet myself in Clearview Video near my house while the two girls behind the counter pointed and laughed… I was 28-years-old. I joke, obviously; I think I was 3 or 4 (still too old), but the point is that these places were more than bricks and mortar. As a kid, video shops were a portal to another time, another place. As a result of this, video shops and VHS in general have been eulogised in everything from South Park to Stranger Things to Be Kind Rewind. Videoheaven, from Her Smell director Alex Ross Perry, is the ultimate love letter to the humble video shop, and it’s brilliant…
Featuring clips from literally hundreds of movies, from big-budget Hollywood fare to tiny independent films, Videoheaven, narrated by Maya Hawke, tells the story of the birth of the video store (to use the film’s parlance), to the boom period of the ’80s and ’90s, to the death of the industry due to the advent of DVD and streaming. Not only did this meticulously researched documentary give me a whole list of films to watch that I’d never previously heard of, it’s also both nostalgic and clear-eyed about its subject matter. Videoheaven doesn’t argue that the video store era was better than today; instead, it serves as a document, a video essay that will tug at the heartstrings of anyone who ever walked into a video store holding their parent’s hand full of excitement and, in my case, full of jelly and ice cream. Man, I’d give anything to have that feeling back again.
As a warning, I came away from Videoheaven carrying a profound sadness, a grief even. As a man rapidly approaching 40 and becoming more and more aware of my own mortality, Perry’s film is not just mourning a few long-abandoned buildings and an obsolete video format; it’s a stark reminder that, like the humble video store, we too will eventually become irrelevant – a surprisingly moving, innovative and poignant video essay.
