The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age

by Paolo Cherchi Usai

Provocative polemic on digital media; Features foreword by Martin Scorsese, extract overleaf; It is estimated that about one and a half billion hours of moving images were produced in 1999, twice as many as a decade before. If that rate of growth continues, one hundred billion hours of moving images will be made in the year 2025. In 1895 there was just above forty minutes of moving images to be seen, and most of them are now preserved. Today, for every film made, thousands of them disappear forever without leaving a trace. Meanwhile, public and private institutions are struggling to save the film heritage with largely insufficient resources and ever increasing pressures from the commercial world. Are they wasting their time? Is the much feared and much touted Death of Cinema already occurring before our eyes? Is digital technology the solution to the problem, or just another illusion promoted by the industry? In a provocative essay designed as a collection of aphorisms and letters, the author brings an impassioned scrutiny to bear on these issues with a critique of film preservation, an indictiment of the crimes perpetuated in its name, and a proposal to give a new analytical framework to a major cultural phenomenon of our time.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, History

144 pages, Library Binding

First published August 1, 2001

About the author

Paolo Cherchi Usai is Senior Curator of the Motion Picture Department and director of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, USA, and founder of the annual Pordenone Silent Film Festival.

Reviews

[Sean Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

The postscript says more about the ideas facing film preservation today than the main text. The majority of the book are film stills juxtaposed with ruminations on the philosophical issues facing the moving image in a time of crisis. Worth reading but feels dated now that filmmaking is mostly digital.

[joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

really sort of ephemeral treatise on how "film history" and the "model image" don't and never did exist. delivery is both poetic and mathematical at the same time. each page-long chapter has an accompanying adjacent image, usually a movie still, that goes along w/ it, making the abstraction at least seem more accessible via association w/ image. probably only enjoyable for people who are so into film that it has ruined their lives, to the point that they would rather watch a movie they have already seen multiple times instead of meeting a new and interesting person they have never met.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

On one hand, it is concerned with the reality of film preservation, but on the other it is an academic work of philosophy. I didn't always understand everything, but there were pretty pictures on the left-hand pages to keep me entertained.

"The fact that the unseen is beyond our control is an excellent antidote to our claim of authority over the visible world, and administers a good shaking up to our deluded obsession with permanence. Sooner or later you and I will both disappear, along with our visions and memories of what we have seen and the way we have seen it."

[Samuelprime2007]

Cherchi Usai can easily be called a genius and an ardent lover of the cinema; in this, his collection of thoughts and aphorisms on cinema's destruction and disappearance, he brings to light a subject not often called upon and so should be praised. More on this later, as I come to terms with his anecdotal, abbreviated approach to writing.

[Meredith Reese · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nihilistic film preservation theory. Gotta love it!