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The Counterculture Counter Culture of Kim’s Video. When home video became popular, in the early eighties, I was young, underemployed, and incredulous that anyone who lived in a city teeming with repertory houses (such as New York or Paris) would bother with it. Then I got a job, and I got the idea. Classic-era cinephiles had to arrange their lives around screening schedules, which made it hard to make a living. Full-time moviegoing was a vow of poverty (or a privilege of heirs), but, with a VCR, one could watch to one’s heart’s content at any hour of day—or, more probably, night. Culturally speaking, this convenience brought with it a big shift: indulging a passion for movies, previously a public and collective activity, instantly became private and solitary. But the collective aspect didn’t quite disappear, so long as one had a good local video store and got to know the people behind the counter. Indeed, a new kind of cinephile society sprang up. Customers were spared bewildered wanderings through canyons of video boxes by the good advice of the counter people, and the time that those counter people were forced to spend with one another created its own fanatical ecosystem.
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