Addicted to Love is not a film anybody likes or cares about, or even remembers. It’s one of those films disappeared in the sands of time, managing to have literally zero cultural impact. There’s so much media today – peak TV, a boom of indie films scrabbling for a smaller piece of the pie, three hundred hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute – that we’ve created a modern inverse of the lost films of early cinema. Those films quite literally ceased to exist, either due to studios dumping them to make space or accidental destruction by fire (nitrate film, which was standard before the 1950s, can spontaneously combust if stored improperly). The Film Foundation, Martin Scorsese’s film preservation non-profit, estimates that ninety percent of films made in the US before 1929 are lost.
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