by FilmInk Staff
It took us 300,000 years to make it to the movies. Will it take us just a couple hundred years to lose them?
Book of the Banned author Simon Miraudo returns October 28 with his cosmic and caustic cautionary tale Last Rites for Lost Films: Charred Celluloid, Digital Decay and the Certain Death of Cinema.
It charts humankind’s march towards cinema—a miracle of technology, artistry and cultural myth-making—and wonders why it keeps dying on us. And why we keep killing it.
Featuring interviews with Oscar nominees, international preservationists, cinema owners and those who have been literally erased from cinema history, Last Rites for Lost Films describes the doomed productions, deleted files and directors’ cuts you were never meant to see, and the ones you never will.
This is for anyone who’s ever lusted after the prospect of witnessing Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried or Marvel’s first—and forsaken—Fantastic Four, as well as everything else you heard was burned, shelved or sued into oblivion. Last Rites for Lost Films has been described as ‘the next essential book for every film lover’, ‘fantastically funny’, and ‘a miraculous celebration of life’. It includes the behind-the-scenes story of Coyote vs. Acme‘s almost-axing, and travels from the missing first movies to cinema’s likely last gasp.
Praise for LAST RITES FOR LOST FILMS
“Last Rites for Lost Films is the next essential book for every film lover; it’s the funny, stirring, and thrilling adventure about all the movies you’ll never get to see. Simon writes with such excitement, you feel like you’re on the mission of discovery alongside him. You’re completely encased in a tense curiosity that makes you want to scribble down the name of every film mentioned onto your watchlist, only to realise ripping through this book might just be the only way you’ll ever encounter these lost movies.” – Alexei Toliopoulos
“Miraudo plays the part of Indiana Jones by way of Godard and Mekas — an archaeologist watching the magic slip through their fingers right as they grasp it. This book is a paean, a polemic, and a funeral pyre, where we see the double helix of cinema’s DNA have its rungs hammered off again and again, leaving us to ponder the very idea of the medium’s lineage and how to honestly trace it when so much of it has been disappeared through neglect, incompetence, and outright malice. Miraudo offers a map by way of a manifesto that made me want to start digging up hidden treasure, whether it’s there or not.” – Patrick Marlborough
“Last Rites for Lost Films is about movies, yes, but it’s also about history and climate change, birth and apocalypse –– cycles we all endure. Miraudo’s second book isn’t a dirge but a profound, funny, and miraculous celebration of life, for movies and for what we remember of them.” – Fran Hoepfner, Vulture and NYMag
“I’m so glad this fantastically funny and obsessive book was written about the bonfire of film history; the lost and the unloved, the flammable and the commercially toxic, the fragile and the indestructible myth of cinema. It’s for anyone who’s kept awake by those bits of history that are enticing (perhaps solely) because they’re gone for good. Read it and then burn it in a tangle of old nitrate film.” – Will Cox
“My first film [The People’s Joker] was almost lost, banned and burned at the stake before it ever reached its audience, so I know firsthand that every finished movie is a miracle. Simon’s Last Rites for Lost Films is a fascinating, moving, and refreshing reminder of how easily cinema can disappear and why we should be grateful for every frame that survives.” – Vera Drew
RRP: $36.99
Available 28 October 2026 AU/NZ/US/UK/CA.
Published via Low Heroes Press.
