TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

As the film industry moves to digital, we are gradually losing films from the past:

“What worries me is there’s a vast number of films that exist,” says Bernardo Rondeau, assistant curator of film programs at LACMA. “Will all those millions of films make the transition to DCP? Certainly they won’t. A lot of the films haven’t even made the transition to DVD.”

With every move to a new screening format, a percentage of films doesn’t make the jump. And once they’re gone, they’re gone. It is a gradual winnowing down of the past. Our entire knowledge of the silent film era, for example, is barely a glimpse of what was actually produced.

One of the advantages of digital formats and the web is supposed to be that we can keep copies of things forever, never losing them due to negligence or failing physical media—a permanent record of the past. For film, that doesn’t appear to be at all true.

Think about what it means to lose films entirely. They will gradually be erased from our cultural memories until no one’s sure that they existed at all. And with it, our understanding of past eras will disappear, too.