
            Cinema Futures begins with an obscure photograph of some business people throwing film canisters into a trash can in late 1999. At the same time, the first digital versions of "Star Wars I - The Phantom Menace" were screened in cinemas. Pure coincidence?From there on, the film explores the economic frameworks in which analogue film prints were thrown out of theaters and were replaced by Digital Cinema Packages within a decade. The repercussions of this far reaching "mutational period" of film production, distribution and exhibition were not only technical and economical issues but also a silent revolution in how we make, view, understand and encounter movies on an every-day level.The film makers visit Sony Pictures Studios, The George Eastman Museum, The Library of Congress and many other locations and talk to film makers like Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Tacita Dean and Apichatpong Weerasethakul who all fight for the preservation of the film viewing (and making) experience. Furthermore, the film explores the demise (and preliminary renaissance) of Kodak as a key provider of film stocks direly needed not only by film makers preferring analogue film but even more by film archives and film museums who have to handle, maintain and preserve the vast history of 120 years of analogue film.In meticulously assembled talks with film archivists and IT experts, cut together with telling film excerpts and the director's own take on the analogue-digital transition, it dawns on the viewer that films of the past (and digital files of the present) have only a future when the challenges of the short-lived digital assets are faced openly (including the necessary huge financial efforts) and analogue film will be available not only for archival reasons but also as a centerpiece of the film experience. At the same time it becomes evident that we have amassed such a huge cluster of cinematographic and thus have to face loss and transience. The film makers make a strong point that digitization is not the solution but rather part of the problem, but avoid to dogmatically play off analogue film against digital file.Cinema Futures is an essayist journey to the world of film archives and the almost insurmountable dilemmas we have to face in keeping the "audiovisual memory" accessible and alive. This is not only an issue in the sphere of film archiving but also for those who want to keep those memories for the future, i.e. almost all of us.
    

David Bordwell

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