On its most superficial level, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin‘s Kim’s Video is a kind of fan movie. In recounting the history and the strange story of the aftermath of the legendary New York City cult video store of the title, the directors attempt to recapture what the rental shop meant and felt like to its acolytes in its heyday by employing cute tricks like 1990s-style digital video chyrons. But, thankfully, the movie is more than just a nostalgia piece. Not only does it turn out to have a hell of a yarn to spin, it becomes a case study in the way that cinematic obsession can turn into artistic inspiration.
That’s not just the case for Redmon and Sabin. As is made clear in new interviews, now-established filmmakers with serious indie cred like Robert Greene, Alex Ross Perry and Sean Price Williams all worked at Kim’s at one point or another. Clearly, the place fostered not just analytical and completist minds, it also spurred creativity.
Much of the early section of Kim’s Video is populated by VHS quality movie clips of the kinds of cinephilic treasures one could find at the store. These are presented without identifiers but most are name-checked in Redmon’s voiceover narration, giving the impression that the film is going to be a montage-heavy video essay of sorts like Thom Anderson‘s Los Angeles Plays Itself.
But the narrative gets more fascinating and more complex after the store closes and a small town in Italy buys the entire VHS and DVD collection with the stated intent of turning it into a museum that will turn the place into a tourist destination. Suddenly and thrillingly, Kim’s Video becomes a globe-trotting mystery/thriller of the type that would have found a home on Kim’s shelves as Redmon attempts to uncover why that museum never came to be, what’s become of the collection and what, if anything, can be done to save it.
Unlike some lesser documentarians, Redmon never appears on screen (well, not really) in his and Sabin’s documentary. It becomes clear that the film itself is his statement and that his obsessive love for these physical copies of movies is not just that of a nerdy collector. Kim’s Video is not just the story of a video store. It’s the story of Redmon himself, just like Mr. Kim before him, exorcising and sublimating his obsessions by creating something new, beautiful and, hopefully, lasting.
