1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910790711103321

Autore

Herbert Daniel <1974->

Titolo

Videoland : movie culture at the American video store / / Daniel Herbert

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, California : , : University of California Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

0-520-27963-8

0-520-95802-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (333 p.)

Disciplina

302.23/430973

Soggetti

Video rental services - Social aspects - United States

Video recordings industry - Social aspects - United States

Motion pictures - Social aspects - United States

Stores, Retail - Social aspects - United States

United States Civilization 1970-

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Video Rental and the "Shopping" of Media -- 1. A Long Tale -- 2. Practical Classifications -- 3. Video Capitals -- 4. Video Rental in Small-Town America -- 5. Distributing Value -- 6. Mediating Choice: Criticism, Advice, Metadata -- Coda: The Value of the Tangible -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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 1980's until the early 2000's, 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.