(courtesy First Showing)
SNAPSHOT
For some thirty years, from the 1980s until their decline in the 2010s, video shops were crucial arenas for film culture – and both highbrow and lowbrow American cinema has documented their rise, fall and changing meanings. Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, a labour of love ten years in the making, retraces this history using solely appropriated footage from a vast array of films, ranging from huge Hollywood productions to non-professional no-budget affairs, sold solely at their neighbourhood video shop. Inspired by Daniel Herbert’s book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, Perry renders the video shops a mirror for a wider social history of various developments in media, community structures and the flow of capital – how, for example, the early video shops with their bespoke, responsive curation, were pushed aside by chains with commercial, centralised selections, and how a culture of secret knowledge once generously shared was turned into an institution for the manufacturing of consensus … 📼Videoheaven is directed by American indie filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, director of the films Impolex, The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip, Queen of Earth, Golden Exits, Her Smell, and the other faux doc Pavements, plus many music videos. It’s produced by Andrew Adair, Daniel Herbert, Jake Perlin, Alex Ross Perry. This first premiered at the 2025 Rotterdam Film Festival months ago. (courtesy IFFR and First Showing)
Like many people of my generation, and I suspect the one just beneath, much of my chilled at-home time used to revolve around which video I was going to rent.
We’d lob hopefully into the neighbourhood store, wishing and praying, if we hadn’t thought to reserve it in advance, that the latest release we wanted would be on the shelves; if not, then off to the older shelves we’d go, happy to relive an old favourite.
It was exciting, it was fun and while, yes, technically, streaming is more convenient, the fun of a random discovery on the shelves is gone, and that, for all the ease of our modern digital life, is kind of sad.
Videoheaven is our chance to experience it all over again, albeit with an American lens, when it releases in select US arthouse cinemas (first at IFC Center in NYC & Vidiots in LA) on 2 July 2nd, with more cinemas to follow at a later date.