Of the brick-and-mortar stores disappearing from our high streets, even more than the used bookseller, I miss the video rental stores most of all. Ah, what fun it was to wander down the aisles in search of something to watch on a Sunday night; to stumble upon a vintage film you'd never heard of starring James Mason or Claudia Cardinale; to make compromises with your partner when you each wanted to watch a different genre; to take a risk on Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Alberto Cavalcanti; to finally gets your hands on the restored DVD of Le Mepris that was usually out.
Every video store I entered seemed to posses at least two VHS copies and one Betamax version of Eating Raoul which nobody seemed to rent. To this day, I've still never seen it. And there were many similar low-budget comedies and trashy horror films, equally as omnipresent in the home entertainment establishments of the nineteen-eighties, that have now faded into well-deserved obscurity.
A video store near me of blessed memory specialized in "cult" and foreign films. It also maintained a darkened alcove in the back where a variety of pornography was procurable by those with licentious tastes. I recall waiting in the checkout line for ages behind a piggy-eyed man who was renting at least a dozen smutty titles. For some reason, customers renting conventional films were limited to only three at a time, and I remember thinking it grossly unfair that perverts were so favored.
Perhaps the store owner thought XXX aficionados were less easily satiated than regular cineastes, and would return for more films within a day or so, whereas mere movie lovers like myself would keep My Night At Maud's out for at least a week before exchanging it for something else, therefore it made economic sense to offer unlimited skin flicks rentals. At any rate, the clerk conversed with the piggy-eyed man about his selections at great length; he merely sniffed at my less outré choice. In fact, I suppose the stock of cult and foreign films were probably just a vaguely respectable front for disseminating hardcore porn. But that's how most business works, of course, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
Nevertheless, compared to the streaming services available today, the brick-and-mortar video stores, however dubiously they operated, were a combination of goldmine and Aladdin's cave. Streaming video is the one sector of the digital media revolution that provides less content than the old physical media options did. Try finding Odd Man Out or Night of the Iguana on Netflix and you'll find yourself facing a blank screen. If you feel like watching a Fellini film or a masterpiece of silent cinema you need to buy a Blu-Ray disc and Blu-Ray player or else you're out of luck. Which, naturally, isn't true of hardcore porno films. Streaming pornography from every decade is almost unavoidable on the Internet. God forbid, in this brave new virtual world, my piggy-eyed friend should suddenly have less access to his favored form of audio-visual escape.
And so it is now I who is forced to special order his viewing pleasure from South Korea, where DVDs are sold much cheaper than anywhere in the United States. I'm currently waiting on a copy of Major Barbara that costs about ten bucks including shipping. A good deal, but I'd still prefer to simply rent the damn disc from a store whenever I find myself in a Wendy Hiller mood.
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