“Film, the Living Record of Our Memory” – Lost and Found [MOVIE REVIEW]
At any given moment, cinema, the record of our remembrance of things past, is turning to dust. Tracking the international effort to find, preserve and restore what remains of that history, director Inés Toharia traveled the world to interview the guardians of our collective memory for her outstanding documentary, “Film, the Living Record of Our Memory.” Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber We have long known that, nitrate, the original medium of film was perishable, flammable and unstable. Almost 80% of all silent films and about 50% of sound films have been destroyed, either deliberately, from fire or through the aging process. Not viewed as an art early on, many studios would systematically destroy film prints in order to make room for new ones. After all, as was believed at the time, no need to keep that Fred Astaire movie because he’d soon make another. First run was thought to be the only run. At any given time in the past, anyone could go to a studio or lab dumpster and walk off with a treasure trove of movies. Luckily for us, this often happened, allowing so-called lost films to be found in private hands. Soon, probably not soon enough, archives were founded around the world…
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