Videoland

"By focusing closely on the objects that embodied film in the last decades — videotapes and then dvds — Dan Herbert's book revolutionizes the materialist study of films. This is a breakthrough rethinking of cinema as an often quite physical commodity that moves — in sometimes fraught fashion — through the marketplace of contemporary visual culture." —Dana Polan, Professor of Cinema Studies, New York University "There has never been a book like this: an ambitious and wholly original study that seeks to understand the cultures of video stores. From industrial histories to small-town ethnographies to video guidebooks, Videoland engages a holistic, multi-faceted approach that enriches how we understand videos and their circulation, even after businesses have shuttered." —Lucas Hilderbrand, author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright "In the age of tiny shiny digital devices, it is easy to forget how revolutionary videotape once was. With Daniel Herbert’s superb study, we finally have a full account of the cultural practices that were appended to this now receding format. Herbert’s unique book gives us lasting documentation of the geography of taste that was the American video store. Videoland is an impressive and original portrait, one that shifts our understanding of the cultural life of an essential but underappreciated media format." —Charles R. Acland, author of Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence and editor of Residual Media 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 1980s until the early 2000s, changing the way Americans…