There’s a widely taken-for-granted consensus that in film lies immortality; in Damien Chazelle’s recent drama Babylon, a Tinseltown gossip columnist waxes rhapsodic about how actors captured on celluloid effectively live forever in posterity, her general sentiment reiterated in higher-minded terms by reams of film theory scholarship. Advertising lingo rebranded cherished memories as “Kodak moments” in response to our species’ innate desire to freeze a fleeting unit of time as a physical quantity we can revisit over and over at our leisure. This line of thinking is understandable, seeing as anyone can click over to the internet and watch 100-year-old footage of working-class daily life. But Inés Toharia needs everyone to know that it’s also fundamentally mistaken.
