Leah Cantor
3Qs
On August 9, 1981, Lisa Harris opened the door to the Video Library (839 Paseo de Peralta, 983-3321) for the first time. Now, days short of 40 years later, the business—which still rents VHS tapes—is the oldest video rental store in the country, and second oldest in the world. We spoke with Harris on the cusp of the milestone.
Are we seeing a smiliar indie film/curated experience thing as we have with vinyl?
That’s the perfect analogy. All of a sudden, people who weren’t even born yet find there’s a lot of titles on VHS that aren’t available on DVD. Especially in the ‘80s indie horror genre, you’ve got to get into VHS. Same with a lot of foreign language films. The really interesting esoteric things fell by the wayside.
[Our clientele is] incredibly diverse. We’ve had people who have been renting from us for well over 30 years, and then we have all this resurgence of new young film-o-philes, especially 20-something males who say, ‘I want to rent Aliens and I want to rent it on VHS.’ It’s become very hip and trendy again. It’s the ‘Oh, boy!’ experience for the people who are just re-finding VHS.
VHS quality doesn’t stack up at all. You can tell that it was on tape, but that’s what probably helps give it its retro feel. Disc is always going to have more clarity. The other just has a nostalgic feel, a homey experience in its own strange way.
Is renting VHS a ritual-like experience?
It’s not just VHS, any video is becoming considered nostalgic in the world of streaming. Santa Fe is lucky to have bookstores, and quite a few vinyl stores, but as a general rule, places like this don’t exist anymore. It’s just not the same experience to cruise through a list online rather than to stand in front of a rack. The best music, the best books, the best movies I’ve ever found, I was standing next to a stranger who said, ‘Oh, if you like that you’re going to love this,’ and they’d be right and you would have never heard of it.
So much of it is the interpersonal experience of coming in and looking at this stuff and seeing things that it didn’t even occur to you to ask for because you didn’t even know it existed to ask for it. How do you know what is going to pique your interest, if you don’t know what all is out there? You have to be able to see it.
And believe me, we don’t want this to be a non-tangible world. You want to be able to still hold on to something. That way, nobody can take it. But it’s also...there’s just something about holding it in your hand and reading about it, and discussing it with people. It’s a very different experience. I have people talk about how they spent 45 minutes looking online to find something, and by the time they found something they might want to see, they decided they don’t have time to watch anything anymore. So, they come to see me and I know exactly what they’ll like.
So much for me is getting to have the human interaction and talk with everybody. I’m kind of their video therapist, and it’s like, ‘What’s going on?’ and then I can find them the right new movies to help get them through their evening. People trust me enough to say, ‘You know what I like—give me three.’
You work even harder because you would hate to disappoint. It’s family after all this time. I have people that have been coming to me, like their mother walked in while she was pregnant. I went through the birth, the kid’s growing up; now the kids have grown up, they’ve gotten married and are coming in with their kids. And then I also have people brand-new who say, ‘I just moved to town and I couldn’t believe how lucky I was that there was still a video store.’
We were the first video store [film critic] Leonard Maltin ever walked into, and he was sitting there, holding the VHS cassette of Casablanca going, ‘I cannot believe I’m just holding Casablanca.’
How close to your romantic ideal has it been to run this store for a career?
Nobody, truly nobody, was more surprised than me. If you had told me in my 20s that I was going to do this my entire adult life, I would have looked at you like you had just cursed me. And yet, for the last 10 years, the world has shifted. After having done it for my entire adult life, I have fought to keep things going in the ever-shifting world of streaming to pandemic to everything else.
To me the fantasy almost seems like 100%. And the reality is probably 80%, because my husband’s doing all the stuff behind the scenes and I get to do all the yapping up front. I get to have all the fun where I’m talking to everybody all the time.
