Socio-cultural hub, consumer mecca, and source of existential dread — the video rental store forever changed the way we interact with movies. With narration by Maya Hawke over footage culled from hundreds of sources (from TV commercials to blockbuster films), Alex Ross Perry — whose PAVEMENTS provided the opposite bookend to our summer — tells the story of an industry’s glorious, confusing, novel, sometimes seedy, but undeniably seismic impact on American movie culture.
Before you ask if the film has that video store scene, understand that this obsessive deep dive into the aisles of cinema history is — at three hours long — exhaustive to say the least. While recent nostalgia for VHS and physical media has focused on starry-eyed narratives about the ubiquitous nature of the video store experience as some idyllic childhood rite of discovery, VIDEOHEAVEN posits a more complex and telling relationship with the advent of home video and this universal access to entertainment.
“The material will be irresistible to any cinephile who has spent countless hours in these spaces.” — Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times
“VIDEOHEAVEN embalms a world of choice, and greater sociality, that was once the cutting edge of modernity and now is history…. It matters to commemorate it –– not because the video ‘era’ was great. It matters because it was a chapter of American life.” —David Katz, Critic’s Pick, Film Stage
“...Isn’t simply a history of video stores; it’s at once an act of canonizing even the most trivial depictions of them on screen and Perry’s own entry into that canon….. Perry isn’t digging up images from movies and TV to retreat into a world no longer accessible to us, not calling for a return to the past. Rather, he’s showcasing a new way, and perhaps the only way left, of keeping the torch burning.” —Taylor Williams, Slant Magazine