The sprawling runtimes of amateur film-analysis videos on YouTube have seemingly inspired a new subgenre of documentary filmmaking among professional cinephilic directors: the durational essay doc. No longer restrained by what audiences would pay to sit through in a theater, essay films about niche cinematic topics are getting more unwieldy in length, aiming to be more exhaustive & definitive than they are concise. 2021’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched expanded what would normally be a 40min Blu-ray extra about the history of folk horror cinema to a three-hour flex, too gargantuan to be ignored. 2023’s We Kill for Love did the same for the history of the erotic thriller genre, exhaustively chronicling its straight-to-video period in a near-three-hour runtime (which I did thankfully get to experience in a theater, thanks to the fine freaks at Overlook Film Fest). That small canon has now expanded with Alex Ross Perry’s three-hour video essay Videoheaven, which has an official website advertising its availability for theatrical bookings but most audiences will watch streaming at home on The Criterion Channel. Videoheaven is arguably a more expansive project than We Kill for Love or Woodlands Dark, in that it doesn’t restrict itself to a single genre. It instead attempts to comprehensively catalog the onscreen depiction of video rental stores in all televised & cinematic genres, with all of its on-screen imagery pulled from vintage clips from movies, sitcoms, new broadcasts, commercials, and corporate training videos. It attempts to track the rise, reign, and decline of the American video store as a cultural institution by noting the ways it was characterized & documented over the past half-century of filmic media. It is, inarguably, more of an academic exercise than it is populist entertainment, but like other durational essay docs before it, its length & thoroughness transforms that exercise into an unignorable cinematic event.

Of course, these three-hour attention testers are only cinematic events for audiences who are already deeply nerdy about cinema as an artform. In the past, the durational documentary format was reserved for more socially or historically substantial subjects like Shoah‘s five-hour oral history of the Holocaust, Ken Burns’s eleven-hour recap of the American Civil War, or the unblinking institutional observations of any Frederick Wiseman film you can name. This new crop of post-YouTube essay movies about The Movies only offers a deviation from that tradition in the newfound frivolity of their subjects. It’s a newly achieved level of audience pandering, signaling to movie nerds that the micro-budget horror films and direct-to-video softcore schlock we waste our time with is Important, Actually. Within that new paradigm, Videoheaven already feels like the Final Boss of movie nerd pandering. It escalates the “Remember all these movies?” clip-show format from more routine pop docs to only include clips from movies that feature hundreds of posters for and references to even more movies. Not only are we revisiting televised & cinematic depictions of video rental stores, but we’re also leaning in to read the titles that populate the shelves of those stores. And since Perry is, himself, the same kind of movie nerd that he’s also pandering to, he shares his audience’s cinephilic interests to an almost uncanny degree. It’s not enough for him to include Matthew Lillard working a video store counter in John Waters’s Serial Mom; he makes sure to feature the scene where Lillard is watching William Castle’s Strait-Jacket on the store TV, doubling the reference. A wide shot of a video store exterior in Amazon Women of the Moon had me excitedly pointing to a poster for Russ Meyer’s Supervixens in the display window; Perry then immediately cuts to an image of Russ Meyer himself working that store counter, signaling that he shared in the same excitement. It was just as much of a pleasure to revisit longtime personal favorites like Muriel’s Wedding, Sugar & Spice, and The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert in clips as it was to spot VHS covers for more recent personal discoveries like 52 Pick-Up and I Heard the Mermaids Singing on the background shelves. One scene from an obscure McG-directed romcom called This Means War featured Reese Witherspoon & Chris Pine flirting in front of a video store display for DVD copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope in the exact edition I had just returned to my neighborhood public library mere hours before pressing play. I was indeed in video heaven: overly pandered, pampered, and validated.

The other tact Perry takes besides pandering to already-in-the-know cinephiles is claiming space on future university syllabi, functioning as a teaching tool for Gen Z & Gen Alpha students who might not have any direct personal experience in video rental stores. Gen Z gets their own form of audience pandering in the employment of Maya Hawke as the narrator, who appears onscreen in several clips as a video store clerk in the TV show Stranger Things (after opening the movie narrating her dad’s performance of an existential crisis inside a Blockbuster Video in 2000’s Hamlet, further justifying her involvement). She plays mouthpiece for Perry’s observations about the video store’s evolution in culture and on the screen, landing some fairly convincing observations about how the video store setting is a uniquely American filmmaking phenomenon, providing a space for the film & television industry to talk about itself and its audience. Where the script might slightly overplay its hand is in the claim that all modern depictions of the video store experience (such as on Stranger Things) are now commentaries about the past, as if any remnants of the industry are a form of retro-media nostalgia. I don’t know if that’s entirely true; not yet, anyway. Sure, most newly launched video stores (like Los Angeles’s trendy Vidiots or our local indie spot Future Shock) lean into kitschy 80s & 90s aesthetics, but there are also several major hangers on from the old days that are still operating as normal. Just a couple months ago, I watched a new indie drama called Two Sleepy People that features characters hanging out in the continually operational We Luv Video, and it didn’t play as a nostalgia trip to the past at all; it’s just a hallmark of living in Austin. Ross’s point will inevitably be proven right, though, and future generations of young people will need to have The Video Store Experience explained to them in order to fully grasp what’s happening in, say, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, in which the main character spirals into her own academic video essay project while working as a video store clerk. In the meantime, it feels as if Perry forgot the axiom that “You can never quarantine the past” (as posited in his previous documentary, Pavements) while mourning the recent loss of his own go-to video store, Kim’s Video in New York City. The real deal is still out there, even if it won’t last forever.

Although its subject may initially sound shallow to non-cinephiles, Videoheaven continually proves to be a rich text throughout its deliberately excessive runtime. It addresses the video store clerk as both a villainous know-it-all movie nerd archetype and as an aspirational archetype for those know-it-alls, hoping to become the next Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino by applying their cinephillic knowledge to the perfect indie screenplay. It pauses at length on the looming presence of the beaded “back room,” exploring mainstream America’s attraction-repulsion relationship with commercially available pornography (something younger generations will likely only experience in increasingly private spheres). Personally, I was most thrilled whenever the movie touched on subjects I’ve recently covered on this website—the trashier, the better—like the self-hating video store owner of Video Violence or the hostile video store takeover of Toxic Avenger III: Citizen Toxie, both of which are discussed at length as helpfully illustrative texts. It was reassuring to know that someone else out there finds this societally meaningless topic just as personally meaningful as I do, and I found a kindred spirit in Perry’s clip-to-clip interests at every turn. Academic exercises or not, the curation & duration of these exhaustive cinephila essay docs always end up revealing something personal about their respective directors’ obsessions & motivations. They’re achieving every video store clerk & customer’s dream: conveying good taste & cinephilic knowledgeability through media selection & consumption, establishing themselves as the intellectual champions of Watching Movies.

-Brandon Ledet