SCREEN | VHS Nostaglia – Renting Something from 'Videoheaven'

"Video provides the means to invent a past in order to live in the present."

Cinema Conservancy / Stranger Things

Productive independent filmmaker Alex Ross Perry examines the cultural impact of 1980-90s video rental shops in his extended film essay, Videoheaven, narrated by actress Maya Hawke, who notably portrayed a video clerk herself in season four of the popular '80s-set television series Stranger Things. By assembling video rental depictions in movies throughout cinematic history, Perry recounts the past's media infrastructure and modes of distribution through the medium of film itself, as inspired by film professor Daniel Herbert's non-fiction book, Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store.

The Criterion Collection video editor Clyde Folley impressively and painstakingly stitches together nearly three hours of archival footage from countless movie scenes seamlessly as Hawke narrates Perry's historical context of the nostalgic bygone VHS era of mass home video consumption. Videaoheaven then digs deep into how video rentals were dramatized and what it ultimately said about this once widely ubiquitous process that seemed essential to daily life, from big city, urban living to a more family-oriented suburban existence.

Videoheaven thoughtfully explores home video culture's relatively short-lived but large-scale lifespan through our relationship to the act of renting movies, told as a decades-spanning time capsule. It also veers into the supposed "dangers" of the proliferation of low culture direct-to-video titles, particularly cheap horror, and a lasting legacy of humiliation as public/private space seen on screen. Beyond that, Perry summarizes how quickly local neighbourhood indie stores quickly gave way to impersonal, standardized corporate chains, most notably through the rise and fall of Blockbuster, which led to our current state of homogenous studio cinematic fare.


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