Charred Celluloid, Digital Decay and the Certain Death of Cinema
Out 6 October 2026.
Pre-order here 1 June 2026.
It took us 300,000 years to make it to the movies. Will it take us just a couple hundred years to lose them?
Last Rites for Lost Films charts humankind’s march towards cinema—a miracle of technology, artistry and cultural myth-making—and wonders why it keeps dying on us.
Is it because the first nitrate film prints were made of combustible celluloid, a material that combines bones and silver, and was often melted down for weapons of war? Is it because we abandoned physical media and now can only access a fraction of the films we once casually strolled past in a video store? Is it because we’re now dedicated to digital formats and artificial intelligence, unaware of the silent fire secretly wiping away decades of digitised memories? Or is it because we’re as haphazard with movies as we are with ourselves, each other and our planet? (The answers are yes, yes, yes and oh boy, yeah, this one in particular.)
Last Rites for Lost Films is a a cosmic celebration of cinema, and a caustic cautionary tale for a crisis that once inspired Martin Scorsese to scream in an open letter, “Everything we’re doing right now means absolutely nothing!”
Featuring interviews with Oscar nominees, international preservationists, cinema owners and those who have been literally erased from cinema history, Last Rites for Lost Films describes the doomed productions, deleted files and directors’ cuts you were never meant to see, and the ones you never will. This is for anyone who’s ever lusted after the prospect of witnessing Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried or Marvel’s first—and forsaken—Fantastic Four, as well as everything else you heard was burned, shelved or sued into oblivion. Pay your respects as we travel from the missing first movies to cinema’s likely last gasp, and find out if there’s still a glimmer of hope for film—and humans—yet.