"A funny thing happened on our way to digital utopia: we find ourselves increasingly missing reality." David Sax's 2016 book The Revenge of the Analog acknowledged that humans need to work, sell, and live in the real world—not on a screen.
One of the best aspects of living in Hamden, Connecticut, USA is Best Video --more precisely, Best Video Film & Cultural Center. Hank Paper founded Best Video as a video rental store in 1985, and organized it around his extraordinary archive of films and programs on DVD and VHS. After 30 years and the demise of the video rental business elsewhere, Paper sold Best Video to a newly-formed nonprofit local cultural center. With over 30,000 titles, and a special wealth of classic, foreign, and independent titles, Best Video had become a cultural asset that the community could not let go. It now boasts curated screenings, a local performance space welcoming local musicians including high school students, readings and literary events, and a coffee bar that has become a local favorite (in addition to providing high-quality sipping while browsing).
Walking into Best Video is an experience akin to entering a good public library --friendly, unhurried atmosphere, excellent help and advice, and a wealth of interesting finds that you probably did not realize you were looking for, or missing. Although the archive supports life on a screen —once the silver screen, now the flat digital kind— that screen time is firmly anchored to the sensory life of reality.
With Best Video, your selection is not guided by what a streaming service wants to show you (often disguised as "recommendation"), or what it pays that streaming service to curate. A streaming service could never support the number and variety of independent films archived on DVD. How Best Video's films are organized is both a little confusing and delightfully idiosyncratic --categories such as "Oscar losers," films organized by directors living and dead, film noir, musical events, and of course the staff picks. If you can't find it, the staff can locate it in minutes.
Best Video enables and enhances that a rare contemporary experience --true serendipity. Films you did not know existed, or forgot about, or never heard of, or supply an interest that you're just beginning to develop. The joys of collocation are very similar to the shelves of a good public library—items both famous and obscure, sometimes right next to each other. I have become aware of how the offerings of the streaming services are channeled, guided, and limited, as well as how dreadful their search interfaces are. How arbitrary their assignments of genre or interest are.
The streaming services are an excellent example of the problem highlighted in Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. The shallow offerings on Netflix, Hulu, or any of the others serve the corporate interests that finance them —so that amazing material is simply omitted and by omission a viewer cannot even think to look for it. Where Carr was concerned with our withering abilities to think and read deeply, visiting Best Video shows how by analogy we are also losing the ability to view and imagine deeply. Ukrainian film such as Bitter Harvest (2017—about the profound famine of 1932 called in Ukrainian the Holodomor, in which millions died) form a sense of national reality so often lacking in superficial popular recommendations.
The film collections of larger public libraries can partially fill the void left by the death of independent video rental stores (as well as the bland chains). The best part of Best Video is sheer unpredictability —not a quality that streams to your home easily. A funny thing happened on the way to ubiquity —it turns out that place is important. Best Video is a vital third place for viewing, talking, and finding —some of the qualities that make us human.
