Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! explores the vanishing world of private film collecting – an obsessive, secretive, often illicit world of basement film vaults, piled high with forgotten reels, and inhabited by passionate cineastes devoted to the rescue and preservation of photochemical film.
Condemned as pirates and hounded by the FBI, film collectors have long lurked in the shadows. Yet their efforts have resulted in the survival of countless films that would otherwise have been lost to history. Archives and studios now look to private hands for missing titles and many collectors have begun restoring and releasing films themselves. As analog film fades from memory, the basement-dwellers and bootleggers of old are finally being given their due.
Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is a lively and loving tribute to the private film collector, a celebration of the fetishistic subculture of pre-video cinephilia, and a timely reminder of the glories of analog film.
I have taught filmmaking and film history at the college level for more than 25 years and have always been fascinated by the people and practices marginalized or omitted from official film history. The story of film is much wider, deeper, and fuller than anyone of us can imagine – and that story is often most interesting, most compelling and revealing, when looked at from the sidelines.
My work as a documentary-maker is drawn to those overlooked aspects of our film heritage: to the forgotten pioneers of the silent era; to the generations of projectionists who put the images on our screens; and now, with my latest project, to the obsessive subculture of private film collecting. With each project, the goals have remained the same: to expand our understanding of what cinema is and to increase our appreciation for all those who make, share, and preserve it.

Peter Flynn