For some, video rental stores are a foggy memory. The weekend rituals of two-day rentals were able to fill entire nights with an on-couch cinema experience crowding living rooms. Physical media brought the advent of the modern home entertainment system; the abundant amount of tape and disc options provided lovers of film with genre-spanning variety. Some rental stores are capable of continuing this tradition with the support of enthusiastic devotees. Victoria’s Pic-A-Flic was not so lucky.
Former owner Rob Nesbitt started working at Pic-A-Flic as an employee in 1995; in 2006, he bought the shop with his partner Karen Rissling. Although he later sold it, his great love for the store—which closed its doors permanently on September 22, after 40 years in business—persists today.
“When I started, the customer base was every shade of what the populace of the city encompassed,” says Nesbitt. “You know, it was everyone from the age of… I’m talking kids, seven years old, walking alone and get movies because we’re a neighbourhood store, you know, they just walked from their house, which was two blocks away and come and get something, to 90-year-old people with their walkers.”
A range of regulars grew as the store did. With young families and seniors alike, a community was born and Nesbitt had the privilege of witnessing it all.
“I worked there a long time and I saw families, I saw children be born in front of me—not in front of me, literally, but you know, babies being brought in,” he says. “I watched those kids rent from the kids section, move into young adult film, move beyond that. And I saw their parents break up. Like, I watched entire generations transmogrify in front of me as I stood on the other side of that counter.”
In the mid-’80s, the online streaming age was a long way away from threatening video stores, but it would get here eventually. For as much care and effort went into Pic-A-Flic, online streaming would eventually be the death of them. The fast and easy accessibility that so many enjoy kept people at home and away. But the experience of the video store is not to be taken for granted; the tender relationships that form within those walls are critical in the way we join film with its counterpart: connection.
“So much of what we’re doing now comes down to cost,” says Nesbitt. “It’s all about money and convenience, and those two things are not about making good art or making meaningful connection. That’s the antithesis of those things.”
Nesbitt says it’s a challenge when art and connection have been corrupted by a service supplied to us and fed to us as a better alternative. The charm of a video rental store is in the connection even the objects share.
“It’s a place you go to pick up a specific object, take it with you, have a period of time with it, and return it to that space,” he says.
In this space, the films are able to spend a lifetime in the hands of thousands and are cared for and treated accordingly. Video stores are unique, says Nesbitt, and a small business grown from the roots of passion is what carried Pic-A-Flic as far as it did.
“Everybody worked very, very hard,” he says. “I put my heart and soul into that store.”
In 2015, Nesbitt handed the torch to Pic-A-Flic’s final owner, employee Kent Bendall. With 25,000 films under his control, Bendall took into his hands a monolith of Victoria history with intention to continue its legacy. Although a known business risk, he and many others recognized new streaming sites did not compete with the breadth of titles Pic-A-Flic had accumulated over its 40 years of business.
“It’s this illusion of everything being online,” says Bendall. “Not everything is online. There’s thousands and thousands of pieces of art, and I think of movies and cinema as art. There’s tens of thousands of pieces that you can’t get online, you can’t access. That’s where physical media comes into play.”
Bendall—who moved Pic-A-Flic from its longtime Cook Street Village location to Stadacona Centre in October 2018—understands that big streaming services do not put focus on small independent or obscure films and lose out on prioritizing art in its many shapes. There’s a demand for physical media put out by companies such as Arrow Video, Shout! Factory and Criterion that puts emphasis on providing an experience with dazzling restorations, careful packaging, and bonus features.
“With the exception of The Criterion Channel that has access to some of their special features, I don’t think any other streaming service is going to give you commentary tracks or interviews or behind-the-scenes footage,” says Bendall.
It all comes down to what some in the rental game are calling “the convenience of mediocrity.” The closing of video stores such as Pic-A-Flic is proof of what we are willing to settle for. But on a consumer and human level, the art of film demands more of us.
Pic-A-Flic held a big sale of its stock before it closed, then sold its remaining catalogue to Oswego Video, a pet food/video store located in James Bay. They plan to rent and sell what they purchased from Pic-A-Flic alongside their own stock (Oswego Video declined to be interviewed for this story).
Although many believe video stores to be a dead establishment, some continue to live on past their expiration date. But this is not without the help of the public. Bendall stresses that what’s most important now is that we support local business, support the arts, and the local arts scene however we can, because if we neglect this, it will all go away.
The physical exchange that took place inside Pic-A-Flic and other video stores invites familiarity and warmth, something Nesbitt says online spaces can’t provide.
“I was a business owner, and I was making a profit, certainly,” he says. “But what those people gave to me on a human level, the way it changed my love for people, my appreciation of their time and their money coming into my hands and going back into the stock of the store… It’s just like a symbiosis. It was an organism and my heart was changed because of that store and because of those people. I can’t say enough about them, and I can’t express how much I appreciated them.”