Description
Available from October 28. Pre-order now!
It took us 300,000 years to make it to the movies. Will it take us just a couple hundred years to lose them?
From the author of Book of the Banned comes Last Rites for Lost Films, a cosmic celebration of cinema and a caustic cautionary tale.
It charts humankind’s march towards motion pictures—a miracle of technology, artistry and cultural myth-making—and wonders why they keep dying on us. Whether it’s the combustible celluloid of the first nitrate prints that were melted down for weapons of war, or the silent fire secretly wiping away decades of digitised memories, film seems to love getting lost. And we seem to love killing it.
Featuring interviews with Oscar nominees, international preservationists 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.
‘Last Rites for Lost Films is the next essential book for every film lover; it’s the funny, stirring, and thrilling adventure about all the movies you’ll never get to see. Simon writes with such excitement, you feel like you’re on the mission of discovery alongside him. You’re completely encased in a tense curiosity that makes you want to scribble down the name of every film mentioned onto your watchlist, only to realise ripping through this book might just be the only way you’ll ever encounter these lost movies.’ —Alexei Toliopoulos
‘Last Rites for Lost Films is about movies, yes, but it’s also about history and climate change, birth and apocalypse –– cycles we all endure. Miraudo’s second book isn’t a dirge but a profound, funny, and miraculous celebration of life, for movies and for what we remember of them.’ —Fran Hoepfner
‘I’m so glad this fantastically funny and obsessive book was written about the bonfire of film history; the lost and the unloved, the flammable and the commercially toxic, the fragile and the indestructible myth of cinema. It’s for anyone who’s kept awake by those bits of history that are enticing (perhaps solely) because they’re gone for good. Read it and then burn it in a tangle of old nitrate film.’ —Will Cox
‘Miraudo plays the part of Indiana Jones by way of Godard and Mekas— an archaeologist watching the magic slip through their fingers right as they grasp it. This book is a paean, a polemic, and a funeral pyre, where we see the double helix of cinema’s DNA have its rungs hammered off again and again, leaving us to ponder the very idea of the medium’s lineage and how to honestly trace it when so much of it has been disappeared through neglect, incompetence, and outright malice. Miraudo offers a map by way of a manifesto that made me want to start digging up hidden treasure, whether it’s there or not.’—Patrick Marlborough
‘My first film [The People’s Joker] was almost lost, banned and burned at the stake before it ever reached its audience, so I know firsthand that every finished movie is a miracle. Simon’s Last Rites for Lost Films is a fascinating, moving, and refreshing reminder of how easily cinema can disappear and why we should be grateful for every frame that survives.’ —Vera Drew
