The small joy of getting lost in a video store for hours has become harder and harder to come by over the past decade. It’s this feeling, trying to recapture a once key part of movie culture, that sits at the core of director Alex Ross Perry’s comprehensive essay film Videoheaven, playing at Arkadin Cinema & Bar on August 28 at 7 p.m.
Narrated by Maya Hawke, Videoheaven uses clips from films and TV shows to track video stores from their initial inception in the ‘70s, where they served a fairly niche audience, through their boom in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and then through their eventual fall in the ‘00s and 2010s as streaming eroded the industry.
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Notable clips featured in the film include Ethan Hawke in a Blockbuster reciting the “to be or not to be” soliloquy in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, Jack Black’s video store crash course in film scores from The Holiday, and climactic video store fights from The Big Hit and The Toxic Avenger III: The Last Temptation of Toxie, among many others.
The film is interested in a number of ideas about these depictions, such as what the video store meant as a nexus of the universe that brought communities together—for better or worse depending on what you were renting—or how film and television perpetuated the idea of clerks as socially awkward, unhelpful, pretentious know-it-alls making the video store seem more inaccessible as it was fading into obscurity.
Perry notes that the original spark for Videoheaven came in 2014, when he read Daniel Herbert’s book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store. Perry reached out to Herbert and, as the two of them began talking, he found out that Herbert had cut out a chapter about depictions of video stores onscreen.
“I asked him to send me the chapter,” Perry says. “ Once I read it, I said, This is a movie. Let’s work together and make this into a film.”
Inspired by seeing a 10th anniversary restoration of Thom Andersen’s sprawling 2003 essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, which discusses the representation of Los Angeles onscreen using shots from other films, Perry saw an opportunity to do something similar, keeping much of Herbert’s research and text intact while using video store-related clips from film and television to illustrate the points.
In 2015, Perry visited Herbert in Michigan and discussed some of the films he used in his research, ultimately combing through about 40 films and figuring out how each could potentially be used. This morphed into semi-regular calls together over the next three years, firing up their hard drives and spending an hour or so a week discussing more potential films to include. Perry and Herbert then created a rough outline that they whittled down throughout 2019 and 2020, eventually bringing in editor Clyde Foley and giving him a copy of the hard drive, which housed 80-90 films.
During the pandemic, Foley began editing together rough assemblies using Perry’s writing—a combination of Herbert’s research, the cut chapter, and Perry’s own insights further refined by critic and director Michael Koresky—and the clips on the hard drive. This allowed them to get a better sense of which clips worked, which ones didn’t, and which ones felt like they were being burned off when they had potential to do more.
“Weekly, for three years, the process of sitting with Clyde was looking at the text and saying, When we have this sentence, what do we need to look at? And when we’re looking at this clip, what do we need to be saying?” Perry says. “We were asking those two questions every step of the way.”
Perry himself has a great affinity for video stores. One of his first jobs was working at Suncoast Video, and he later worked as a clerk at Kim’s Video, a sprawling New York City video rental institution that has been closed since the late 2000s. He is also currently the steward of Kim’s Video Underground, which is now housed in the basement of the Lower Manhattan Alamo Drafthouse and features roughly 15,000 titles from the store’s original 60,000 film collection available to rent for free. With the lack of any traditional video rental options in New York City, Perry sees this volunteer project, as well as the process of making Videoheaven, as something that captures the essence of why he loved video stores in the first place.
“It feels like the cliché beat at the end of a movie where a character realizes, This is what made me love this. This is what it’s all about,” Perry says. “But that’s how I feel to escape Zoom calls, pitches, and professional woes and just sit down there with unusual movies and remember a time where the only thing that mattered was constant exploration and discovery of as many films as possible.”
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Now, more than a decade later, after much collaboration between Perry, Herbert, and Foley, Videoheaven is making the rounds on the big screen. Arkadin will even have its own video store pop-up before their August 28 screening of the film, during which ticketholders will be able to check out one tape from Arkadin’s VHS collection to keep forever. The filmmakers hope that those who attend recapture a little bit of that lost feeling, of being in these spaces, surrounded by films—whether you recognize them or not.
“This is for people who desire to spend three hours in a video store,” Perry says. “And if you spend those three hours in the store of the movie, hopefully you say, God, that really was special, wasn’t it? or you say, Wow I really missed out, that would’ve been great. These were all real spaces. I just hope the takeaway is that we really did lose something.”
