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"By focusing closely on the objects that embodied film in the last decades — videotapes and then dvds — Dan Herbert's book revolutionizes the materialist study of films. This is a breakthrough rethinking of cinema as an often quite physical commodity that moves — in sometimes fraught fashion — through the marketplace of contemporary visual culture." —Dana Polan, Professor of Cinema Studies, New York University
"There has never been a book like this: an ambitious and wholly original study that seeks to understand the cultures of video stores. From industrial histories to small-town ethnographies to video guidebooks, Videoland engages a holistic, multi-faceted approach that enriches how we understand videos and their circulation, even after businesses have shuttered." —Lucas Hilderbrand, author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright
"In the age of tiny shiny digital devices, it is easy to forget how revolutionary videotape once was. With Daniel Herbert’s superb study, we finally have a full account of the cultural practices that were appended to this now receding format. Herbert’s unique book gives us lasting documentation of the geography of taste that was the American video store. Videoland is an impressive and original portrait, one that shifts our understanding of the cultural life of an essential but underappreciated media format." —Charles R. Acland, author of Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence and editor of Residual Media
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Video Rental and the “Shopping” of Media
Part I. The History and Culture of Video Rental
1. A Long Tale
2. Practical Classifications
Part II. Video Stores and the Localization of Movie Culture
3. Video Capitals
4. Video Rental in Small-Town America
Part III. Circulations of Video Store Culture
5. Distributing Value
6. Mediating Choice: Criticism, Advice, Metadata
Coda: The Value of the Tangible
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Daniel Herbert is Assistant Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan.
Summary
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.
Additional text
"An accessible history of the video rental store and its impact on media consumption."
