“We took VHS culture for granted”: Alex Ross Perry on his Rotterdam world premiere ‘Videoheaven’

US director Alex Ross Perry, whose credits include 2014’s Listen Up Philip and 2018’s Her Smell, arrives at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) this week with two new features.

Videoheaven world premieres in the festival’s focus on VHS culture, ‘Hold Video In Your Hands.’ Loosely inspired by the 2014 book Videoland: Movie Culture At The America Video Store by Daniel Herbert, it’s a film essay constructed around clips from films and TV shows featuring neighbourhood video stores: everything from Friends to I Am Legend. 

Videoheaven was produced by Perry himself alongside Andrew Adair and Jake Perlin through non-profit organisation Cinema Conservancy, which also handles international sales. Maya Hawke reads the voice over.

Ross Perry’s second film in Rotterdam, Pavements, is an experimental musical biopic about the cult 1990s band. Sold by Utopia, it world premiered in Venice’s Horizons section and has its Dutch premiere at Rotterdam.

In Rotterdam, Ross Perry is also taking part in a ’Big Talk’ with fellow filmmaker Peter Strickland. 

What was the point at which you decided to take on this epic homage to US video culture?

I began making it 10 years ago. Dan’s book had come out and I was very excited by it. The crucial other thing was that in 2013, the year before, the greatest essay film, Los Angeles Plays Itself  [directed by Thom Andersen], was remastered and re-released after being trapped in rights purgatory for years. I had always been fond of the film but now I was able to see it over and over and own a copy of it. I was just obsessed with the visual language of it. Rewatching that film again and again and reading Dan’s book, it just clicked.

You worked in video stores, didn’t you?

In high school, I worked at Suncoast Video, a chain that existed in American malls. Then, when I was at college, I worked in Kim’s Video in Manhattan which was a legendary sales and rental store with a one-of-a-kind collection. I had tried many times to make something set in a video store, a show, a series, anything. The one that ended up working is a personal three-hour academic essay film! It is just a really important part of my life and of many others’ lives - a story that needed to be told.

The Maya Hawke narration is evocative and often funny. Is that from you or from the book?

I started with Dan [Herbert’s] text. Dan’s text provided the factual, historical and academic framework that comprises the first half of the movie about the origin of the video store, the store in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s. Then, as the project went on, the second half of the movie became slanted toward my own thesis and interpretation of this history and of what these hundreds of clips said to me when they were stacked up. What began to emerge for me was this pattern of sadness. We took this [VHS culture] for granted, we made fun of it because we didn’t think it would go away - and now it is gone.

VHS stores were very communal spaces. Now, audiences stream movies, without human interaction. Is that something you regret?

If the movie depicts one thing over and over, specifically in its longest chapter about the character and archetype of the clerk, it’s that the [VHS store] space was one of interaction, be it pleasant or frustrating. That was the inherent identification in most customers’ minds of this retail space with sociality. Of course, this exists in revival cinemas but the difference for me is that people arrive at a movie theatre knowing what they are going to see. There is scene after scene in Videoheaven, and moment after moment in life and history, of people arriving at a video store, not knowing what they want, browsing among thousands of options and relying on a clerk to recommend something. It becomes about choice and decision. That is gone even though streaming offers more options.

What are distribution plans for Videoheaven?

Anyone who wants this movie, you can play it. Get in touch. It can play in your art museum, in your micro cinema, in your video store. There will be some deal to be made with a distributor but if there’s still a video store, they can put up 10 chairs and put this on a projector, they can do that and play us a few bucks.

• Video culture comes into focus at Rotterdam: “We all grew up in the VHS period”