Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) is set in a single restricted location, the Parisian apartment in which a dying, suffering woman is being cared for by her husband. The film plots an obsessive formal language of spatial increments, organizing itself around minor but crucial distances across the geography of the home. Against and within this ordered relation of objects and space, extraordinary pain and terrible violence ultimately arrive.

In the last 25 years we have displaced much of our culture, labor and recordkeeping into the digital domain. While the digital turn has vastly enriched many lives, it has also amplified divides, accelerated inequalities, elevated the possibility of historical amnesia and brought us new and onerous forms of labor. But it is not irreversible, argues Rick Prelinger, Professor of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz and founder of the Prelinger Archives.