Time was, when I looked for an apartment, I prioritized proximity to four things: a place that sold fresh fruit, a place to do laundry, a place to casually drink and read (preferably not too fancy, but not a piece of junk either) and a place to rent videos.
As I shuffled myself from city to city, neighbourhood to neighbourhood, being near a half-decent video store became less important. Like, I'm guessing, a lot of people, I reasoned that I could download anything I wanted. Or tuck into one of the hundreds upon hundreds of DVDs and Blu-rays I own. Or make some brave, mighty pilgrimage beyond the four square blocks I generally shuffle around in, trekking across town to a brick-and-mortar, mom-and-pop video store, to strut among the rows of esoteric titles and racks of Staff Picks like some prodigal hero.
After a while, the decision was sort of made for me. The video stores started disappearing, and I was left either downloading or streaming movies I wanted to watch (or put on to fall asleep to). When I felt particularly brave (or remorseful), I'd bike down to my favourite video store, Eyesore Cinema on Queen West in Toronto (and no this is not an ad), to pick up the Decline of Western Civilization box set or a bootleg fan edit of Jaws that cuts out all the boring character development stuff and replaces it with more shark attacks. And Eyesore's owner-operator, Daniel, generally mocks my self-satisfied image as some conqueror, like, "Well looooook who decided to show up!"
And he's right. I don't visit the video store as often as I should, or even as often as I'd like to. I'm normally content to slap on whatever Second World War documentary just got added to Netflix and slip into unconsciousness to the dulcet tones of some British narrator droning on about Dresden or Stalingrad or whatever. I feel a certain degree of very contemporary guilt about this – that pang of nostalgic shame that comes whenever we use iTunes instead of going to the record store, or pop a multivitamin instead of eating an apple. But at the same time, the disappearing of the video store feels sort of inevitable, and my dropping $40 on a super-limited-edition Blu-ray of some dumb exploitation horror movie once every six weeks isn't likely to change that.
This kind of nostalgic lament for the video store is at the heart of Tom Roston's I Lost It At The Video Store. The book interviews a broad range of filmmakers, some of whom (Quentin Tarantino, Alex Ross Perry, the never-not-insufferable Kevin Smith) possess double insight as former video store employees. Nimbly sidestepping tiresome Gen X nostalgia, Roston's book looks at the tides that shaped the video-store era in the 1980s and 90s, how it democratized access to films and filmmakers, and how the arrival of mega-chains such as Blockbuster served to steamroll that same democratization, offering racks and racks of cheaply priced Hollywood new releases but little in the way of French New Wave classics or vintage Ozu. "I think it's really, really sad," says Tarantino of the video store's passing. "Something's lost: That can't be denied."
Now, of course something is lost when an entire mode of retail basically vanishes. But what elevates I Lost It At The Video Store above all the "back in my day … " tsk-tsk-ing is that not everyone is on Tarantino's side. For Kevin Smith, the medium doesn't matter so much. "I'm a movie lover at heart, so the quickest, easiest way you can get it to me is A-okay," he says, before grossly adding, "I need it in me. I just need the movie in me." For filmmaker John Sayles, the rise of digital technology has given filmmakers more control over the look of their films, without the fear that a given film's quality will be sullied by a lousy tape transfer or by the natural degradation of magnetic tape.
More than just another boring howl for material culture in the digital age, Roston's book proves the resiliency of cinema and the culture of film-lovers and filmgoers. It was way back in 1996 that Susan Sontag eulogized the "ignominious, irreversible decline" of the cinema in the pages of The New York Times Magazine. "No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals – erotic, ruminative – of the darkened theater," she wrote. "The sheer ubiquity of moving images has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as art and for cinema as popular entertainment."
Like all sky-is-falling forecasts, Sontag's "The Decay of Cinema" missed the mark. Yes, sure, that hypnotic experience of sitting in a darkened cinema has waned (albeit not yet into non-existence), as has the experience of getting tailored recommendations from a savvy video-store clerk. But it's not like the culture of film fandom (sometimes called, annoyingly, cinephilia) has disappeared. Like pretty much everything else, it has just migrated online.
"If cinema can be resurrected," Sontag's essay ends, "it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love." I see this cine-love around me all the time on the Internet, where film writers and movie lovers share their ideas or unembarrassed enthusiasms, be it on Twitter or dedicated websites like Letterboxd. And for now, we're still fortunate to possess a range of options: to beg for Netflix recommendations on Twitter or, if we're feeling particularly adventurous (or guilty), schlepping down to the brick-and-mortar, mom-and-pop video store and rent Jaws: The Sharksploitation Cut on a physical piece of pressed plastic, like some misty-eyed Neanderthal.