A vat of oil : A house that falls down in fire

This : its historical moment

as

Stieg Larsson film adaptations : our own

98 years on, the prosecution's long durée concrete evidence in  The Case of the General Worsening of Popular Cinema and the Mutual Incapacity to Throw This Thing in Reverse.

Of course, the defense has a very strong argument: well, beyond the exigencies of nitrate film stock and large fires, what do you think tends to get preserved?  Remember all that was lost, all that was to its historical moment as Gigli is to ours?  Remember the canon and the retroactive construction of a falsely elevated standard of taste that had little to do with what was watched and even less to do with how?  Just because something is tinted and intertitled, that doesn't mean it is better, you pissy nostalgites!

There is a tremendous scuffle in the courtroom.  "Contempt!  This is no hall of justice!  Hang them all!"  A red cloud of smoke pours up from the witness stand.  It clears.  Someone has made off with the judge.  In his place, a small obsidian gavel.  Very fragile.

[I am beginning a loose project winding through the Feuillade-Franju-Allain-Souvestre hallows of Fantômas-Judex-Les Vampires.  Henceforth, reader be aware: plot, conspiracy, and to get masked up may come to mean, for a brief period, something rather different than they have in previous writing...]