“all your base are belong to us”

I spend a lot of time working in film vaults.  Some of them are where old film goes to live; clean, cold, dry climates that arrest the decay of emulsions, binders, and plastics that hold the images we’re trying to preserve.  And some of them are where old film goes to die; toxic concrete corridors of trapped moisture, mold and rust that steadily eviscerate the memories left behind.  Memories that simply leave the vanished future.  This quote, scrawled in the elevator in one of the old vaults on Seward Street in Hollywood, has always mystified me; a vacant, disconnected, wide-eyed fragment like those rotting in the cubicles around the corner…

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