First Trailer for Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven Captures the Rise and Fall of the Video Store

A late but exciting addition to the July movie calendar is Alex Ross Perry’s second release of the year. The three-hour essay film/documentary Videoheaven takes a comprehensive, staggering look at the history and near-demise of the video store solely through film and video excerpts as narrated by Maya Hawke. Following its IFFR premiere earlier this year and recent Tribeca stop, it’ll now open from Cinema Conservancy at NYC’s IFC Center on July 2, Vidiots in LA on August 6, with an expansion to follow. Ahead of the release, the first trailer has arrived.

Here’s the synopsis for the film, which was inspired by Daniel Herbert’s book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store: “Sociocultural hub, consumer mecca, and source of existential dread; the video rental store forever changed the way we interact with movies. With narration by Maya Hawke over footage culled from hundreds of sources (from TV commercials to blockbuster films), Alex Ross Perry’s VIDEOHEAVEN tells the story of an industry’s glorious, confusing, novel, sometimes seedy, but undeniably seismic impact on American movie culture.”

David Katz said in his review, “In Videoheaven, Blockbuster––to take after Thom Andersen––plays itself. Now deep in a pop-cultural-scholarship phase inaugurated by his last feature Pavements, Alex Ross Perry has made a generous, absorbing three-hour essay film-cum-documentary on nothing else but video-rental stores, those fabled and most benign of places. That is the loveably niche subject, but like the best examples of those brick-and-mortar venues, it contains multitudes: closely inspired by academic Daniel Herbert’s acclaimed media studies text Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, Videoheaven is the ne plus ultra consideration of this topic to date, dispensing large portions of information and close analysis entirely through a combination of film and TV excerpts, occasional pieces of archive, and voiceover from Maya Hawke (who appears in some of the former, along with her dad). Born in 1984 and coming of age in the early millennial period, Perry is declaiming that this was his generation and this was what mattered. It was magnetic tape and clumpy boxes, yes, but through rose-tinted shades, they look burnished in gold.”

See the trailer below via Letterboxd, along with Alex Ross Perry’s discussion with Peter Strickland from the Rotterdam world premiere.

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