‘Film: The Living Record of Our Memory’ Review: A Dynamic Look at What It Takes and What It Means to Save Movies From the Dustbin

There’s a documentary aspect to every film, whether it’s a home movie, a commercial or even the glossiest tentpole: The images and sounds capture transient moments that memorialize people, animals, places. They give permanence to the impermanent. But imagine a world in which those films have disappeared — as an estimated 80 percent of silent films and half of sound films already have. In the robust and incisive Film: The Living Record of Our Memory, Inés Toharia, a documentarian specializing in film preservation, invites us to consider the ways movies have become essential to the human experience.The director spends quality time with a few well-known filmmakers and many of the “backstage people,” as one interviewee puts it, who devote their energies to safeguarding a vast array of moving images from the ravages of time, neglect and climate, not to mention obsolescence in the wake of ever-evolving formats and technology....