The Death of Cinema

History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age

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by Paolo Cherchi Usai,

Foreword by Martin Scorsese

British Film Institute

Due/Published August 2001, 144 pages, paper

ISBN 0851708374

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 were 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 pressure 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, Paolo Cherchi Usai 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.

The Death of Cinema is published in Italian as L'ultimo spettatore. Sulla distruzione del cinema 1999, Editore Il Castoro.

"[Cherchi Usai] has drawn . . . the picture of a worldwide crisis that commands our unconditional concern. His portrait of a culture ignoring the loss of its own image is a devastating moral tale . . . " --Martin Scorsese