Film is Dead. Long Live Film
                         
Director: Peter Flynn
Year: 2024
Rating: 7.0
Collectors are crazy and yet thank goodness for them. I was a mini-collector of dvds so I know. My apartment was filled with them. People would come in and immediately think I was nuts. But I only had about 6,000 dvds - but it was a small apartment. And then when I decided to move to Thailand after I retired, I ripped them all and tried giving them away. Except for a friend from Subway Cinema who took many of the Asian films, nobody else that I asked wanted them. Nobody in my co-op or circle of friends. Physical. Everyone streams. So, they all ended up in charity stores probably being sold for $1 a dvd. The funny thing is once I gave them away it didn't bother me at all. Ok - this film has nothing to do with that except I understand the mentality of being a collector - always needing more - not watching them - just filling the shelves around you.

 

These are collectors of film prints and the director visits a bunch of these people. They open their garages or basements and there are hundreds of film canisters or loose reels. These are people obsessed with finding films - home movies, full films, shorts, commercials, snips as they call them, educational films - pretty much anything you can think of that made it to film is a collectible by someone. But a lot of these people do more than collect. They preserve them, try and restore what can still be projected, transfer it to digital and share it at festivals or on YouTube. Much of this only exists because they went into a dump and picked it out. One fellow goes around to all the old Drive-Ins and scavenges for films. One person found and restored a serial from 1929 titled King of the Kongo with Boris Karloff and cleaned it up and restored it - but that isn't all. The sound was on a bunch of records - and so he had to synchronize the records to the video and digitalize it. And he showed it in a theater. It is amazing - one fellow with a huge collection donated it to the National Archives - I wonder if they would have taken dvds?  Even my library didn't want them.

 



Most of these collectors are getting up there in age and they worry about what will happen when their time runs out. Will there be anyone out there who will carry on the work - give a nice home to their collection. Time may be running out because all these prints no matter how well kept are dying. What they do it seems is illegal. They have no rights to the films and back in the 1980s the FBI came after some of them and put them in jail. Now some film companies who long ago lost their copy are coming to collectors asking to see if they have it. One person guesses that 90% of film has been lost - they are doing what they can to preserve our memories not only of film but of ourselves.