Do you remember your favorite video store growing up? Director Alex Ross Perry, who recently released his experimental documentary film Pavements, chronicles the now virtually extinct rental shop industry in Videoheaven, a three-hour film that screened at the Refocus Film Festival earlier this month.
Fascinatingly, it’s not really a documentary. Videoheaven is uniquely devoted to studying cinematic depictions of the video store, so you won’t find talking heads sharing their personal experiences in the hallowed presence of physical media, or much archival footage documenting the historical and economic rise and fall of the video store. What you do get is feature-length film analysis, making Videoheaven a daring essay film that challenges form and medium to showcase the mythos of the video store as it evolved in real time across film.
Adapted from an unfinished and ultimately cut chapter from Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store by Daniel Herbet and narrated by Maya Hawke, Videoheaven features scenes from movies such as Body Double (1984), Clerks (1994) and I am Legend (2007). It delivers an impressive list of popular and more obscure films, but it also begs the question: if this were posted on YouTube, would it be classified as a film or a video essay? If video essayists projected their videos in a theater, would we call those films?
One of the film’s goals is to demonstrate how filmic depictions of video stores don’t quite align with our culture’s nostalgic notions of them now. They first emerged as sites of danger, with video cassettes viewed as something new and strange in films like Videodrome (1983). The video store then became an extension of this strangeness, a hotbed for violence.
Videoheaven is most interested in showing how the video store was a spot where the public became private and the private became public. The film is structured into six parts, one section dedicated to the growing popularity of the adult sections within video stores, which led to the stores’ frequent association with embarrassment and shame in Hollywood movies.
I’d argue the film’s greatest weakness is its hyperfocus on film analysis at the expense of historical and cultural context.
FilmScene’s Board of Directors Chair Uri Lessing also caught Videoheaven at Refocus. Fully engaged throughout the long runtime, it got him thinking about his time working at Video Adventure in Chicago from the ages of 16 to 20. Interviews with video clerks would have made the text richer, he said, as well as an exploration of the role scarcity played in the rental experience.
“In those early days of the video stores, they had maybe four or five copies of a new release. So as a teenager, I remember going to rent Risky Business and all the copies being gone,” Lessing said. “What do you do when you don’t have a copy of the movie you want? Well, you look for what is available, and what that led me to was a lot of obscure low-budget films that I probably would not have seen if that accessibility [issue] wasn’t there.”
Little Village asked other locals about their favorite bygone video stores. Many recalled subversive experiences.
“In the mid-’90s I was at That’s Rentertainment in Iowa City. I saw one of my teachers come out of the adults only section. She looked at me startled and said to herself loudly, ‘I can’t go anywhere without running into a student!’ and rushed away.”
“Hagen’s over on Gilbert Street. Just generally good memories of exploring the aisles as a kid. Also probably the first time I became aware of the porn section in video stores.”
[About The Hut Video] “You would walk into an empty room and then hear the footsteps coming up the stairs behind the counter. Great selection of videos that you definitely weren’t going to find at Blockbuster. My first viewing of Pink Flamingoes was rented from there.“
“Killer B’s movie store just East of the Eastdale Plaza. It had a huuuuge selection of B movies. It’s where I learned about Faces of Death.“
Cedar Rapids resident Chris DeLine plans to open his own video store, Razzle Dazzle Music & Movies, in the Lindale Mall this December. He hopes to combine video store experimentation with community accessibility.
“Not everyone can afford a lot of entertainment choices right now due to budget constraints … which kind of prohibits the discovery of new weird things,” he said. “But, if it’s $2 or $3 and it looks funky, and it looks like it’s worth the risk, I’m willing to take that risk.”
Nowadays, the surplus of content across multiple streaming platforms leaves people at a loss of what to put on. Going to a physical store to pick up physical media was a communal experience, in which knowledgeable clerks or other customers
“When I was growing up, a big part of it had to deal with connectivity,” DeLine said. “You go to a space and you find the thing, and then you find people who are looking at the same stuff you’re looking at. I think we’re kind of missing that right now and honestly, I’m just hoping I find that for myself through this.”
Videoheaven spends little time on the optimism and bonds forged in video stores, seemingly because films made during the video stores’ heyday neglected to highlight these connections. But, the film will certainly get those in the audience to dip back into their video store memories, offering opportunities for dialogues such as these.
“What is important and what we need to focus on as we develop the arts is the community experience around it,” Lessing said. “The Refocus Film Festival is a time not just to watch those movies, but to discuss them with the people around you. It’s about the community feeling of people of all different ages and demographics coming together and enjoying the cinema together. It’s something that’s that we’re missing in favor of easy content, you know. Video stores were once those kinds of places for me.”
