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It is a time that the over 30s can only know: the one, when in the evening we would choose our film in a video club. In the 1980s, there were 8,000 stores in France. There are only a handful left today.
The video club is first and foremost a whole world at your fingertips. Philippe Zaghroun, owner of JM Vidéo, runs one of the last video clubs in Paris. It welcomes the teams of France Télévisons in its Haveback store, where he stores his first VHS tapes. “It’s a whole story, a whole era. You realize ? Take a film, and be able to watch it at home. It was extraordinary“, he remembers. The stores offered all genres of cinema: fantasy, horror and even auteur cinema.
“I still have a little pinch when I see some rarities, there is always a little moment of nostalgia “, says Philippe Zaghroun. He who lived through the frenzy of the early 80s refuses to lower the curtain. At the time, France had 8,000 video clubs. In Calais (Pas-de-Calais), Bruno Clément, owner of Vidéo Pilote, experienced the golden age. “At the highest yield, we had 30,000 subscribers. On weekends, we released 700, 800 films “, he recalls. Today he only has one store, and has only 1,500 subscribers, a far cry from the days when his father had 12 stores in the region.
The market collapsed at the end of the 2000s, with the arrival of video on demand. Today, the video club is also a memory to be preserved. “Out of 50,000 different titles, there are around 8,000 films that cannot be found. If we disappear, these films disappear with us“, warns Philippe Zaghroun.