“Historicity begins with decay and ends with the pretense of immortality”

The Death of Cinema was published in 2001; its appearance within months of 9/11 and the fact that one of the book's illustrations shows Taliban activists burning films in Kabul. The painstaking process of demolition was, documented with moving images. This new manifestation of iconoclasm occurred in March 2001, just when The Death of Cinema was going to press. The "twin towers" in Manhattan were attacked six months after the "twin Buddhas" had been blasted with explosives. Historicity begins with decay and ends with the pretense of immortality implicitly or explicitly proclaimed by any new technological innovation. Insofar as cinema matters to us as a phenomenon of historical relevance, curators and scholars should be committed to treating. Scholars and curators have been reluctant to engage with the "human factor" that reveals itself in a projection booth through the interaction between the projectionist and the machine. The term "curatorship" has been the victim of considerable semantic abuse in recent times.