One of the first films by Bill Morrison, “Film of Her” is about the moving image archive and the memory contained in rolls of celluloid stored in large vaults. A ficto-documentary using found footage, the film tells the story of Howard L. Walls, a Librarian of the Library of Congress who in 1939 saved a vaultful of paper prints documenting the earliest days of cinema from incineration. Hidden on these papers were the first movies in film history. “Film of Her” links a memory of the cinema with the autobiographical memory of its viewers. In fact, the librarian goes through a huge archive in search of a particular woman – the “her” of the title – fixed in his mind since boyhood when he first saw the woman in a film at a provincial theatre. This recovery of personal memory is a small step towards the affirmation of a necessary collective memory. For this reason, the film becomes the future project of Bill Morrison: to retrieve old films, whose decay proves the transitory nature of film as a means of preserving memory. Morrison’s cinematographic strategy rests on the continual inclusion of this archive material, sometimes in a literal sense – connecting to what the voiceover tells us – but at other times showing how images are a too fleeting means of memory production. The first images of “Film of Her” are comparable to “Man with a Movie Camera” and the ability of cinema to be an industrial means of reproducing reality and its complexity. This film by Bill Morrison, while not one of his best known works, is certainly a little treasure about cinephilia and the quest for the meaning of life in films. (DR)