Reinventing the classic video shop as a home for lost art
Ah, the video shop. It seems so quaint and old-school now but what a joy it was: the ritual of choosing, the posters on the walls, the arguments about what to watch.
They were places you could stumble across a gem. But today just a handful survive.
Format drift inspired Jessie Scott's project.Credit:Marija Ercegovac
Video artist Jessie Scott says video shops had a massive cultural impact, and in a new project she wants to recreate that as well as pay tribute to it. As part of her PhD at RMIT she is calling on professionals and amateurs alike to contribute their discarded works to her Art Video Shop.
Budding filmmakers, video artists, home video fans and pretty much anyone with a piece of video are invited to submit. Already she's received music and skate videos; wedding videos are not out of the question. Files in any format are welcome – she will endeavour to find a player for everything that comes in the door.
The end result will be a pop-up library at RMIT’s Capitol Theatre next year, collecting and lending out discarded video and film. It may also exist digitally, depending on how many digital submissions she receives.
“The idea is that there’s a lot of video art out there that’s been kind of abandoned,” says Scott (she is also a local programmer, producer and RMIT vice-chancellor’s scholar).
Video artist Jessie Scott is a fan of the video shop – and her DVD player. Credit:PENNY STEPHENS
Format drift is partly to blame. As she says on her website: "Bring me your tired beta cams, your poor mini DV tapes, your huddled DVDs, yearning to be inserted in play decks once more. Send the wretched refuse of your LaCie drives, plastic tubs and steel shelving units to me, that they may play another day."
The 38-year-old says VHS was the first "access medium" for film, before which the only option was the cinema or TV – and if you missed it, that was it.
“We didn’t have that opportunity to watch what we wanted,” she says. “Video shops were that first shift from film being a really experiential thing, something fleeting and transient, to something domestic. You could bring films home... people started their own collections.”
There was a democracy about video shops too, she says. “They were able to bring in things that were not part of regular distribution channels – B-movies and straight-to-video movies that weren’t released in cinemas.”
The old Colac video shop.Credit:Jessie Scott
They made film and film culture more accessible.
“[You] could be influenced by horror films or weird documentaries… These things were thrown together in this collision of content.”
Scott is a massive fan of the DVD player and her treasured DVD collection. She loves that it sidesteps the problem of internet speeds when streaming movies or series, the bane of many people’s lives.
The impact of streaming more broadly is not to be underestimated. “For a while, the internet matched if not exceeded the diversity of what was available in video shops,” she says, but that has changed. “Not only do you not have access to what you would have at your average Joe Blow video shop down the corner but you have to have specialist knowledge of film culture and the internet to find them.
“[Previously] you could go and find something you didn’t know you were looking for, which is the difference between the big streamers. They’re never going to serve up something they don’t think you’re going to be interested in.”
To make a submission, visit JessieScott.tv.