‘We’re not taking care of it’: why film preservation should be prioritized

A new documentary acts as a cautionary tale urging us to be more aware of how we store and preserve what we film and watch

There's a widely taken-for-granted consensus that in film lies immortality; in Damien Chazelle's recent drama Babylon, a Tinseltown gossip columnist waxes rhapsodic about how actors captured on celluloid effectively live forever in posterity, her general sentiment reiterated in higher-minded terms by reams of film theory scholarship. Advertising lingo rebranded cherished memories as Kodak moments" in response to our species' innate desire to freeze a fleeting unit of time as a physical quantity we can revisit over and over at our leisure. This line of thinking is understandable, seeing as anyone can click over to the internet and watch 100-year-old footage of working-class daily life. But Ines Toharia needs everyone to know that it's also fundamentally mistaken.

We're going so fast as a society that we don't always realize what we're leaving behind," she tells the Guardian from her home in Spain. We should pause to think about saving our digital materials, because they don't last forever. And a lot of video today isn't even meant to last, things like security camera footage, a lot of what's on YouTube. We're producing more than ever, but we're not taking care of it. A friend shows me a video of their kid taking their first steps, I think, Oh, that's not going to last.'"