A Thousand Cuts is a fascinating look at a subculture of movie history unknown to a lot of fans. I knew a little bit about movie collectors and their trials before reading it, but not much. This books illuminates the phenomena and casts light upon many of the surviving participants.

I'm not talking about pikers like me who collected movies on VHS or DVD. No, these lunatics went to any and all lengths to own as many film prints as they could possibly manage to obtain. The prints were the property of the studios, so owning them, and especially selling them, was highly illegal.

Each chapter of A Thousand Cuts is a mini-profile of a current or former film collector. Some are sad stories, some are raucous and hilarious. All of them are wistful. It reads like an episodic noir novel.

It isn't all pretty. There were doublecrosses, malicious actions, betrayals, outright thievery. The true film collectors did it out of love, but many did it for profit.

The FBI got involved and many houses were raided. Films were confiscated, collectors and dealers were sometimes incarcerated. The studios hated the collectors. And yet...

Were it not for the movie collectors, many films would be incomplete or even completely lost today. Every lover of classic movies owes an enormous debt to them. God knows they spent more money than any sane individual would in order to feed their obsession for movies. Collecting is a disease, but it can be a sweet one.

A Thousand Cuts isn't merely a look back at obsessive film collectors, it is nothing less than a requiem for the medium of film itself. The beauty and symmetry of a film driven through a projector by its sprocket holes. The act of physically loading film into the projectors. Splicing in replacement frames by hand into prints and restoring lost or damaged movies.

Reading this book made me feel a little sad that I wasn't part of it. I certainly understand the allure and compulsion of collecting. My passion and dementia is books, but I obsessively collected movies on tape and disc for a long time. I think of the clandestine meeting of fellow film junkies. The homes converted into makeshift mini-theaters. The joy of watching not only lost or forgotten films, but any movie at all. The heyday of film collecting took place before the advent of home video.

Things change. That's inevitable. I am sure people bemoaned the medium of film and how it took away the luster of live performances. We who loved and lived for film are heartbroken that digital technology has made film obsolete.

A Thousand Cuts brings it all home and it conjures up an evocative and potent picture of a time and culture long past. Now there are only memories and dusty, deteriorating films and film equipment.

Written by Mark Sieber

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