“Kim’s Video” reaffirms the value of physical media in storytelling

David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s new documentary about the storied video rental store premieres at Arts + Literature Laboratory on October 4 as a benefit for Four Star Video Rental.

While the documentary Kim’s Video (2023) chronicles the history and significance of the independently owned New York City video rental chain of the same name, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s letter to ghosts of cinema past interrogates the active role of movies in shaping reality. Or at least Redmon’s reality, and his obsession with owner Yongman Kim’s massive and beloved physical media collection that had been stranded halfway across the world in the Western Sicilian town of Salemi after being donated in 2009. Tension, built up through Redmon’s tenacious narration and Sabin’s sharp editing between archival footage and their own, creates an intriguing portrait of missing images in-between—rendered in the motion pictures once recorded onto analogue VHS tape and optically encoded onto DVD.

Redmon and Sabin’s Sundance Film Festival hit premieres regionally on Wednesday, October 4, at 7 p.m., at Arts + Literature Laboratory as a fundraiser for Four Star Video Rental. Tickets are $10 in advance and at the door. Madison’s own indie store has endured since 1985, changing owners and locations to become a cooperative after former owner Lisa Brennan left in 2014, and then reverting back to a standard business right before pandemic lockdowns at its new home at 459 W. Gilman St. (Current co-owner Lewis Peterson is a Tone Madison contributor.)

The parallels between the fate of Mondo Kim’s on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood and our own local haunt may be minute, but the threads connecting them are obvious—as congregating places for cinephiles of all ages. As the Wisconsin Film Festival edition of WORT-FM talk show Mel & Floyd, annually hosted in the aisles of Four Star, has proven, the community space contains more than the sum of creative voices who’ve passed through our fair city over the decades.

One of the first interviewees in Kim’s Video is a former regular of the store, Dennis Dermody, who proclaims how “they had so much stuff that you couldn’t find anywhere.” Curiously, this sentiment remains true today in the sense that video stores like Four Star house complete and ever-growing collections that are arranged with conscious care. (Thanks to them for indulging my interest in the Toronto New Wave this year, for one.) It rails against the cabal of streaming services who push their own latest lackluster fare, all while inexplicably acquiring and losing distribution rights to older titles. Now absorbed into a broader content catalog, movies seem like a tenuous part of an ephemeral ecosystem before being scattered into the digital ether.

Two benefits of a physical media collection in an anchored location, which the film world perhaps didn’t (or couldn’t) fully grasp when video rental stores first ascended during the 1980s, are eliminating barriers to access and promoting media preservation. The latter is at the heart of Kim’s Video, as Redmon admits he wants “restitution” after learning what has befallen Mondo Kim’s 55,000-title collection in the 2010s. All those plastic cases sat neglected, partly unshelved, and rain-damaged in small-town Sicily, after Yongman Kim received a gleaming proposal at the end of the 2000s from the town of Salemi and their 2008-2012 term art-critic mayor, Vittorio Sgarbi. As Kim pursued other business ventures, Sgarbi seemed to promise that the media would be minded there as if it were part of a museum’s valuables.

A considerable portion of the Kim’s Video features Redmon fancying himself a sort of movie-like sleuth, a protagonist of an unassuming political thriller. He compares himself to such fictitious characters as Thomas in Blow-Up (1966) or Jack Terry in Blow Out (1981) in pursuit of the truth of physical artifacts that are the movies themselves. It’s a sort of meta turn that enkindles Wes Anderson-esque caper-inspired ideas about how to abscond and transport all that media back to its original home in New York City.

At times, this perspective leans too much on forging a breaking-news narrative rather than taking a broader inventory of the culture that Kim’s Video and video stores curated. However, as this film argues, “Cinema is a record of existence.” In the personal way that Redmon and Sabin integrate the totality of cinema history—from Redmon’s opening five-minute diaristic tapestry that includes clips of everything from Manos: The Hands Of Fate (1966) to Clean, Shaven (1993), to a concluding, cleverly literal interpretation of the famous Jean-Luc Godard quote, “It’s not where you take things from; it’s where you take them to”—the archives of video stores everywhere really have shaped “our collective memory of the living dead.”