Categories
Monthly Screening Series Writing

Notes on Kim’s Video

Still image of video of Quentin Tarantino interviewed by MTV in front of shelves of commercial VHS tapes
Quentin Tarantino interviewed in Video Archives (MTV, 1993)

In 1993, Quentin Tarantino marked the VHS release of his debut Reservoir Dogs with a trip to Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. Already the most famous ex-video store employee – at least, famous for being so – QT made the appearance at his former workplace to honour his full circle moment. “People who work in video stores,” he told MTV cameras, “you’re in a grand tradition. This is the new film school, so keep it up!” 1

By all accounts, the employees of the Kim’s Video mini-empire were the ne plus ultra of that species (and many of them were or did become film-makers of note2). Video store clerks everywhere may have been the architects of your evening’s entertainment – and many a night was made or laid waste by a selection from an employee picks section – but rarely, alas, did Blockbuster FOH staff curate the store’s inventory itself. That’s a claim Kim’s clerks could make, since the shop’s stock was shaped and informed by them from its inception, the nascent Kim’s an extension of film student Matt Morello’s own collection.

Kim’s other claim to fame was the consummate surliness of its staff, reported in the New York Times’ piece on the 2004 closure of its Avenue A location. To some observers, the employees were “haughty” and “hostile”, the store’s heyday a “reign of terror”. The obituary continued:

“It was like an S-and-M relationship,” said Michael Robinson, a 14-year East Village resident, about the interaction between customers and some Kim’s clerks. Recalling a disparaging remark a clerk made about a mindless comedy Mr. Robinson intended to rent, he added: “You had to go all alpha male on them to get them not to bother you. But I do miss having it here now.”

Image of Kim's Video Upground signage
Kim’s Video signage

Whether they had to be assholes just to get hired, or if working there brought out in each of them their inner asshole is an open question. Another is, was it strictly necessary? Depending on your perspective, Kim’s either encouraged high standards of cine-literacy or discouraged (disdained?) curiosity – scourges of ignorance or punishers of naivety. And because the gold they jealously guarded was coveted by wave after wave of fresh-faced enthusiasts, they thrived / got away with it. Another Kim’s customer recalled, “Even when people were officially boycotting the place because of the mean service, they would go back just to browse.”

Nick Zedd, film-maker and one-time Kim’s employee, concluded, “Bogus snobbery is a sign of genuine insignificance and Kim’s clerks epitomized this form of neurosis.” But he also offered the following context:

“During its heyday, all Kim’s employees were paid in cash, below minimum wage. This resulted in inventory shrinkage as a form of revenge. One employee absconded with an entire collection of VHS tapes which he now hordes [sic] in his own ‘video grotto’3 on the Upper West Side.”

Where enthusiastic collecting and a deficit of personality meet, there’s a tendency towards gatekeeping. Gatekeeping itself can be a form of (self)preservation, a way of looking after a fiefdom that you’ve either established or bought your way into – drawing up the bridge against those who, you can only assume, would destroy it. Or, in other words, normalise and mainstream it, thus ruining your retreat from the world, spoiling the safe place you’ve found away from the anxiety of existence and the pain of being alive.

Flyer advertising the Kim's Video collection returning to New York City, a noirish image of Mr Kim, and the text, "Back in the City"
Promotional image advertising the return of Kim’s Video to New York

There is also, in fairness, a nobility and a utility in caring for something that society, mainstream culture, or people at large have either rejected or consistently undervalued. The sense of self (and self worth) that such a pursuit offers can be difficult to give up, even in part. Anyone who can be persuaded to defer to your authority is not a threat, while any challenges must be ruthlessly dissuaded. So, when Kim’s clerks defended the store, with extreme prejudice, against the intrusion of amateurs and gadabouts, they were curating the clientele as much as the collection.

There seems to be an essential tension between collecting and hoarding, championing and gatekeeping4. But what happens when the thing you protect is no longer under threat, either because it’s seemingly been saved or even finally destroyed5? Video stores, some valiant exceptions aside, are largely a thing of the past but the energy they focussed had to go somewhere. The gatekeeping tendency certainly endures and, for this writer, reached its apotheosis in a recent episode of The Video Archives Podcast, hosted by Tarantino and his erstwhile collaborator/fellow ex-clerk Roger Avary.

Those compelled by the kinds of parallel worlds conjured by Tarantino with his movie-movie universe – or, in general, alternative histories, fake movies, greatest movies never made, expanded universes of lore, etc, etc – would have been drawn to this very special episode which promised to pay tribute to the reportedly recently departed Rick Dalton. QT and pals would expound at length on the life and career of the star, animated by Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (2019) but otherwise fully imaginary.

This seemed, in theory, like a fascinating experiment in world building, a playful synthesis of both Tarantino’s fictional work and his new focus on film criticism, the throughline his encyclopedic cinephilia. Listening, though, it’s an oddly alienating experience and it’s not, perhaps, immediately obvious why. It does become clear – what better situation for the hoarding cinephile, whose fiefdom is under threat by vastly increased (and always increasing) access to film knowledge (if not always to films themselves), an explosion of insight and opinion, to hold forth on a world of films that no-one knows anything about, that no-one can know anything about, except you?6

Sean Welsh

Weird Weekend present Kim’s Video with Directors Q&A on Friday 28th March, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.

Further Reading

  1. When Video Archives closed, less than two years later, after a brief and ill-advised relocation to Hermosa Beach, Tarantino bought up their inventory (“Probably close to eight thousand tapes and DVDs.”) It now forms the bulk of his home collection, and the basis for The Video Archives Podcast with Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avary. ↩︎
  2. Esteemed Kim’s alumni include the men Michael M Bilandic, Dylan Kidd, Alex Ross Perry, Todd Phillips, Spencer Riviera, Sean Price Williams, Nick Zedd. ↩︎
  3. A video grotto is like a man cave which excludes customers, rather than simply women and children. ↩︎
  4. In some ways, the tension between collecting and gatekeeping is mirrored in the relationship between exhibition and preservation (a dialectic that goes at least as far back as the days of Henri Langlois and Ernest Lindgren, two heroes of preservation with differing views on exhibition). This conflict is also found in the quandary facing anyone engaged in researching, preserving and restoring films that are considered marginal – the free sharing of those films (and related materials) on torrent sites, private and otherwise, and on more public-facing platforms, in one persuasive sense means more eyes on these films. They deserve a bigger audience, after all, that’s the impetus behind preserving and restoring them in the first place. But since those efforts require manpower, resources and money, there’s a financial imperative that can be undermined if and when the film (and/or related materials) becomes freely available. It’s one of the most (only?) persuasive arguments against piracy, that it undermines livelihoods in the first instance as well as future efforts in the same regard. That argument is unlikely to find purchase with most people when it’s made by Disney or any other major studio. However, when the project is personal, or the organisation niche and underfunded, it holds weight. One problem facing independent (broadly encompassing DIY alongside small to mid-size distributors) efforts in this area is that the economics are not clear to most people, should they even be interested. ↩︎
  5. These brief notes don’t afford adequate space to satisfyingly grapple with the rise of streaming, the attendent death and rebirth of physical media, nor piracy, torrenting, listicle programming, AI and the end of work, etc, etc. ↩︎
  6. You would think, perhaps, that making your own films would be the ultimate scratch of that itch, but then many people peskily insist on the death of the author, that once the film is made its meaning belongs to the viewer, so, no. ↩︎

Leave a Reply

Discover more from

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading