‘Videoheaven’

By Mark Graham

Director Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven is not a picture that will appeal to everyone. However, for those of us who exist in the Venn diagram overlap of film geeks and cultural anthropologists, this three-hour video essay that charts the “birth, life, death, and afterlife” of the video store will tickle parts of your brain that often remain, um, untickled. This once ubiquitous part of American life in the ’80s and ’90s sadly went the way of the dodo, but Ross Perry does a remarkable job here of using news reports, clips from television shows and movies (ranging from Seinfeld to the Last Action Hero to Hamlet), and trenchant voiceover analysis (delivered courtesy of Maya Hawke) to illustrate what we lost when advances in technology and forces of capitalism came together to destroy one of the late twentieth century’s shining examples of an entrenched “third place.”

Photo: ©Miramax/Courtesy Everett Collection