The Fragility of Online Archives | The State of Cinema
A year ago, I wrote an essay about piracy (and, implicitly, about online archives, be they “legal” or otherwise) as the source of a new type of cinephilia and method of film archival, starting from the case of the online group “la loupe” and going down to the “the founding figure of modern cinephilia” (as I put it), the legendary Henri Langlois. In the meantime, “la loupe” is gone (or at least, from Facebook), and in the time that passed since I wrote that text – not without feeling guilty, thinking that I might have contributed to the situation by making the group visible, nor without a message sent to me by the administrator of a piracy group that I'd “better not mention their names next time I write about them”; well, at least he didn't question my “good intentions”! — I kept thinking about the shortcomings of that text, written in one of the few moments of utopianism of the pandemic years, about one of the few phenomena that could inspire a utopic feeling. After all, the idea of utopia is grounded in idealism, in a possible reply or manner of organizing model in response to current circumstances – and as legitimate as it was not to discuss negative phenomena in the article at the time, I now feel that I might have been speaking from the deceptive, quicksand-like place of the “end of the pandemic”.
Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.
