Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store

by Daniel Herbert

Videoland offers a comprehensive view of the "tangible phase" of consumer video, when Americans largely accessed movies as material commodities at video rental stores. Video stores served as a vital locus of movie culture from the early 1980s until the early 2000s, changing the way Americans socialized around movies and collectively made movies meaningful. When films became tangible as magnetic tapes and plastic discs, movie culture flowed out from the theater and the living room, entered the public retail space, and became conflated with shopping and salesmanship. In this process, video stores served as a crucial embodiment of movie culture’s historical move toward increased flexibility, adaptability, and customization.

In addition to charting the historical rise and fall of the rental industry, Herbert explores the architectural design of video stores, the social dynamics of retail encounters, the video distribution industry, the proliferation of video recommendation guides, and the often surprising persistence of the video store as an adaptable social space of consumer culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, cultural geography, and archival research, Videoland provides a wide-ranging exploration of the pivotal role video stores played in the history of motion pictures, and is a must-read for students and scholars of media history.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, History

332 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent companion piece to Joshua Greenberg's From BetaMax to Blockbuster. Herbert looks at the social aspect of video store culture and how home video re-defined what cinema meant to most Americans. Rather than decree the death of video store culture, Herbert leaves its ultimate fate open-ended, providing opportunities for further research. I plan on using this as a foundational text for my dissertation research and cannot recommend it highly enough for anyone interested in video and/or cinema in the 1980s and 90s.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

An academic examination of video rental culture in the United States from its inception to approximately 2013. Pretty interesting to learn how the whole thing came about. Not a quick read though.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like a text book at times and is incredibly dry but does offer some interesting perspectives and look ins at the industry some of us miss.

[Óli Sóleyjarson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bókin er löng og ítarleg sem er kostur og galli. Þeir sem vilja sökkva sér í efnið með því að lesa eina bók ættu endilega að lesa þessa. Það er þó galli að hún sekkur stundum í fræðilega, og jafnvel pómó, orðræðu sem er hálfþreytandi og jafnvel ólæsilegt fyrir þá sem ekki hafa reynslu af slíku. En flestir slíkir kaflar eru stuttir og það má hlaupa yfir þá ef maður nennir þeim ekki.