Emulsion Ep. 10 - Alex Ross Perry and Clyde Folley on Videoheaven
Perhaps no line of dialogue better encapsulates lived experience than this bon mot offered by John Huston’s Noah Cross: “Of course I'm respectable. I'm old! Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”
I thought about this line––granted, a line I think about at least once a week––while watching Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, which is perhaps the closet a movie can come to putting us back in the four walls of a video store, a concept so old that some people reading this will have never directly experienced that once-commonplace, even disreputable home of cinephilia. Building off Daniel Herbert's book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, Perry spins a history through film, television, and documentary clips overlaid with a soothing narration from Maya Hawke, who happens to play a video store clerk on Stranger Things and whose father is featured in Videoheaven's very first sequence. This is a movie of both choice and coincidence, assembled carefully but perhaps with a certain kind of kismet tying it all together.
With Videoheaven beginning a limited run––you’ll hear more about its exact New York venue herein––I spoke to Perry and Clyde Folley, his editor on the film and an editorial voice at Criterion.
The Film Stage Presents
Subscribe for conversations presented by The Film Stage, your spotlight on cinema since 2008.
- No. of episodes: 401
- Latest episode: 2025-07-03
- TV & Film
Where can you listen?
