In ¿Qué será del cine? Postales para el futuro (What will become of the cinema? Postcards for the Future), edited by Cecilia Barrionuevo and Marcelo Alderete, published by Mar del Plata Download text in Spanish
Of cinema, I don't despair.
Endings have been around since its beginning.
Cinema inhales death and exhales life.
Ghosts are its bones.
Ghosts crowd its body.
Grieving is a foundation to sustainable response. A path to understanding. Without sustained remembrance we can't learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think. 1
Let's give it up for impermanence.
We've trusted stone as archive but may as well write on water.
On the planetary time scale of our 4.5 billion year old home, film is less durable than rock, but in the end, it's particles that remain. Rule of the microcracy.
A vast biomass of microbes that have been around since nearly the beginning of earth-time sifted to the bottom of the sea and have become the cliff layers of canyons. Rocks are our ancestors. And minerals constitute the microscopic, organized crowd that is you this precise living moment.
A bit of 600 million year-old Charleston Gneiss from New Zealand:
Gneiss is a stone of defined layering between the light and dark elements. It's formed under such massive heat and pressure that the like-minded molecules tend to gather in sympathy. Usually the layering is straight, but stones with curved banding suggest especially powerful movements.
A 2.6 million year old crocodile tooth and a 'scute' from the Shungura formation of the Lower Omo Valley:
This rift ecosystem is a natural laboratory for considering the evolution of lifeforms and landscapes that were our neighbors at the rise of the genus homo. 2
Fossils, like film, are time travelers.
Letters to the future.
Time might be the one thing we can all agree to call supernatural.3
But we're still working out how to remember the future.
____________________________________ 1Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble 2The Plio-Pleistocene 3.6Ma - 1Ma 3Haldor Laxness, Under the Glacier
