Videoheaven

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Alex Ross Perry

By almost any reasonable metric, I missed out on the firsthand experience of the video store as a sociocultural force. My first steps into what would become my present condition of cinephilia with 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, and Blade Runner came courtesy of Netflix’s red envelopes, not a VHS or in-person rented DVD. But I was there for the end, or close to it: I still have memories of the Hollywood Video my family used to go to after we moved to Southern California, nestled in the Irvine Marketplace close to a still-standing (now) Regal Edwards. I truthfully can’t remember a single title that we rented—possibly National Treasure, although that might have happened after we already “permanently” switched to Netflix—but I remember the feeling of something approaching intimidation. I never chose the films we rented myself, and so I was left free to wander amid all these titles I had no knowledge of. Most of all, I had the classic experience of being frightened by the horror section, a long row of grotesque cases leering at me that I tried to avoid, yet always found myself looking at just to confirm it was still there.

Maya Hawke—the narrator of Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, his second documentary to be released this year—probably didn’t have much more video store experience herself, the artistic prominence of her parents notwithstanding. But her voice, bright and eager to inform, has a great influence on the overall tenor of the documentary, in a manner even its director may not have intended. Perry, of course, is perhaps the most prominent filmmaker to have emerged from the legendary Kim’s Video, which itself received a documentary a few years ago, and correspondingly comes from a lineage of specific, hyper-cinephilic video stores that, in my own particular way, I did actually experience firsthand. During my last two years of undergraduate education in Seattle, I volunteered at Scarecrow Video, the largest publicly accessible repository of film and television in the United States. Some of the most formative and happiest moments of my earliest cinephilia came from simply being there, learning the system of shelving discs and cases on both sides of the counter and exploring the inviting nooks and crannies of the store (the Psychotronic section and its subcategories like “Li’l Bastards” and “Cannibals” still unnerved me), along with their ludicrously generous system of allowing me to rent ten discs per shift for free. I even made an experimental short film, shot on MiniDV, that posited the store—which still stands strong as a non-profit in the face of innumerable challenges—as an institution to be valued in the same way as a museum. I was conscious that I was already coming in after the end, but it was an example of a still-glorious afterlife in concrete form, contra Videoheaven‘s conception of itself as cataloging the sometimes celebratory, sometimes sordid spectral existence of video stores as represented by cinema. (I’ve also visited but never rented at CineFile, the Los Angeles video store featured as itself in Good Dick (2008), the sole film featured here for which Perry reserves unusual vitriol.)

Videoheaven—like Alexander Horwath’s recent masterpiece Henry Fonda for President—consciously models itself on Thom Andersen’s landmark Los Angeles Plays Itself, but unlike these two other examples it eschews on-location footage shot specifically for the film, opting instead for a fully archival approach. At the same time, its narration and scope can read more self-consciously academic: instead of Andersen’s proudly subjective point-of-view or Horwath’s grounding in his subject’s biography and historical context, Perry—in a text edited by the great critic Michael Koresky, whose own red pen I’ve benefited from many times—uses Daniel Herbert’s book Videoland as a jumping-off point, adopts an informational tone that emphasizes objective fact, particularly in the first hour that’s intended as a literal history of the video store’s rise and fall, which Hawke’s chipper voice does a lot to make engaging. Indeed, one of Videoheaven‘s best jokes is its titanic restraint in not pointing out that Hawke’s father Ethan is the first person on screen—courtesy of Michael Almereyda’s stupendous rendering of “to be or not to be” in his Hamlet (2000)—or that she herself acts as one of the video store workers (alongside Joe Keery, featured in Perry’s previous documentary Pavements) in Stranger Things, for Perry a key example in a recent surge of period depictions of video stores in media.

In a podcast interview for Nick Newman’s Emulsion, Perry at one point ruefully noted that while Andersen had an entire treasure trove of the best films ever made to work from, he had to feature some of the worst. This is more self-effacing than anything: of all the films I know with a video store, the only major missing example is Ulrich Köhler’s In My Room, and Videoheaven finds room for such incongruous films as Godard’s Helás pour moi, Egoyan’s Speaking Parts, and To and Wai’s Fulltime Killer in its first fifteen minutes alone. That being said, Perry’s approach is more anthropological here, concerned with the human behaviors elicited by this odd in-between space that was at the center of American culture for decades, and as such he tends to value film clips for a particular behavior exhibited or piece of video store-related scenery on display, which is how McG’s This Means War (2012) or the truly awful-seeming Film Geek (2005) get extensive playtime.

What might set Videoheaven most apart from its other video essay brethren, however, is the clear urge to memorialize something that Perry sees as already being in the past. This tendency, which has already drawn a bit of criticism from Matt Lynch, my friend and former colleague at Scarecrow, doesn’t necessarily irk me (coming from a different video store generation than Matt and Perry) as much—my main, minor gripe is that Perry, a very gifted director of fiction, doesn’t have quite the same knack for molding archival footage, which becomes quite apparent at feature-length—because it allows him to tap into a certain emotion that could otherwise elude a study of an institution that Perry acknowledges was often stereotyped in its depiction of media as a place and experience that degraded everyone involved. By insisting on its past existence as an often fulfilling and misunderstood one, there’s a not-undeserved valorization that reaches its apotheosis in its final extended sequence, a study of I Am Legend. Besides allowing Perry to connect it to the source material’s previous adaptation The Omega Man, featuring the same exact clip used in Los Angeles Plays Itself (Body Double, which happens to be one of Videoheaven‘s first major extracts, is another film in common), this inherently correlates the apocalypse with this less-expected but quite devastating localized apocalypse, presenting and preserving this form of connection at the very last moment it retained a relevance to contemporary audiences. In moments such as these, the identification of cinephiles with these almost vanished, sometimes kitschy yet perpetually undervalued spaces is truly moving.