A generation of filmmakers who cultivated their enthusiasm in video stores adopted the mantle of disreputability and outsiderness handed down by the French New Wave. Bob Rowan/Progressive Image/Corbis

The first sentence of Tom Roston’s introduction to his engaging new book, “I Lost It At the Video Store: A Filmmakers’ Oral History of a Vanished Era,” reveals much about the story that he tells: “Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt flickered from the television that hung from the ceiling.” The book starts with Godard because, even if Roston doesn’t say as much, the only reason that this book exists—the reason that most of the filmmakers whom Roston interviews, including Quentin Tarantino, Alex Ross Perry, Allison Anders, and Joe Swanberg, had anything to do with a video store en route to their cinematic calling—is that the French New Wave got there first.

No, they didn’t have videotapes in the forties and fifties, but those young future filmmakers, as teen-agers and young adults in postwar Paris, thought that the way to make films was to go to the movies three times a day for ten years, to become freelance critics for obscure specialized publications, and to use whatever connections they could make, along with their wealth of knowledge about movies, to edge their way into the business and shoot short films, a low-budget feature, or whatever.

The idea was original: watch, criticize, learn, then put that learning into practice. As soon as word about their autodidactic methods got out—as it did when their first films were released, in 1959 and 1960—the New Wave begat the revivalism of Peter Bogdanovich; the film-school generation of Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas; and the next film-school generation of Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee. And that’s where Roston’s story kicks in.

His book delivers essentially a two-part history. First, it’s about the rise of VHS rentals via video stores and the experience of working in and relying on video stores as surrogate film schools. Second, it’s about the business side of home video—the availability of home-video-based funding for independent films, largely between 1985 and 1995, and its effect on a generation of filmmakers that included Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, whose first films, “Reservoir Dogs” and “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” respectively, were financed that way. There are as many roads to filmmaking as there are filmmakers, but the book presents the particular romanticism of the video store. Tarantino and Kevin Smith were inspirational filmmakers by the mere fact of passing from video stores to international fame. Their films reflected their own origin stories (as did the films of the New Wave) and, in addition, reflected the very concept and ideal of independent filmmaking.

These filmmakers adopted the mantle of disreputability and outsiderness on which the New Wave was based. The young French critics of the nineteen-forties and fifties put forth an idea that scandalized the French cultural world: that many movies considered art were junk, and that many movies considered junk—arrantly brassy movies made with commercial intent, such as the movies by Alfred Hitchcock and many other Hollywood filmmakers who were virtually anonymous there, such as Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller—were actually art pieces of the first order. They offered an original view of the history of cinema and a hierarchy of artistic values for the cinema of their own day—and they validated their preferences with the films that they themselves made.

The generation of Bogdanovich and De Palma scandalized the American art-film establishment with their taste for Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and other Hollywood movies widely considered mere corporate culture—until they rendered that taste utterly mainstream. Future generations of rising filmmakers in the United States cultivated similar tastes, or, rather, followed in the footsteps of the young French tastes, but did so often within the sheltering and validating walls of film schools. They crystallized the heuristic furies of the New Wave into a curriculum and they, too, validated their ideas with the movies that they made. But the generation of Tarantino and Smith found their own Z-movies, scandalous objects to embrace, such as horror films and pornography.

Video stores rendered cinephilia happily dubious again. The stores were the launching pads of true outsiders, and their examples provided inspiration for Swanberg and Perry to see video stores as cinematic playgrounds (Swanberg worked at his local store starting at age sixteen). Then, when these younger filmmakers went to film school, video stores were a kind of counter-programming, an assertion of values and of personalities different from those found in their studies. They exalted the anti-academic values of disorder, spontaneity, and enthusiasm.

Video stores, as Perry emphasizes, are even more about the company of similarly passionate colleagues than about the films. One of the key video-store artists who inspired Perry and who continues to inspire many others is the cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who worked with Perry at Kim’s Video in the East Village and has done the cinematography for Perry’s features and for many other remarkable films, including Ronald Bronstein’s “Frownland,” Josh and Benny Safdie’s “Heaven Knows What,” and Robert Greene’s documentary “Fake It So Real.”

It’s self-evident that watching and thinking about movies would be an important way to learn about making movies—especially in the absence of the traditional path to movie-making, which was to get a job in the business and work one’s way up. The history of modern cinema is of perpetual revolution—of outsiders with no access to the business finding ways to make movies outside Hollywood (Kevin Smith talks with Roston expressly about the geographical issue) and to crash into the business by making movies that, for the most part, don’t resemble Hollywood movies.

There is no one mode of filmmaking that arises from video-store devotion or other cinephilic enthusiasm—Tarantino’s films and Swanberg’s don’t seem to have much in common. The family resemblances that do exist between the films of video-store cinephiles involve a multi-layered, polyphonic sense of structure, currents of thought beyond the action that link their movies with the high-concept movies of Hollywood. Perry’s “Queen of Earth,” for instance, is both a straightforwardly devastating story of emotional crisis and a virtual manifesto on the very possibilities of image-making in relation to such a story. Swanberg, even when he makes movies that cost around two thousand dollars, has an abstract sense of story, of the complex and manifold connections between the bit of action shown on-screen and the world that it evokes.

Roston’s chapter on the end of video stores is titled “three nails in the coffin: Blockbuster, DVD, and the Internet.” But DVD and the Internet, despite helping put video stores out of business (DVDs were largely bought, not rented, and, of course, streaming video gets around brick-and-mortar stores altogether, whether for rentals or purchases), helped the generation of filmmakers raised on video stores to get their work released. Filmmakers such as Swanberg and Perry, though they were raised on video stores, have made their names by means of the Internet, DVDs, and streaming video.

Movies that, in the past, would have come and gone, unseen by critics, now get discussed widely through the much livelier, more perceptive, rapidly responsive, and essentially democratic scene of online writing and social media. Art houses started responding to younger viewers whose tastes and interests were now being cultivated online. Places that didn’t show the work of young independent filmmakers started to do so, and new venues sprang up for that specific purpose. Films that don’t get a theatrical release, or that get only a scant one, often become readily available on-demand. In other words, what killed the independent filmmakers’ mode of training has sparked their careers.