Every film ever made used to be worth something before anybody watched it. Not the way a critic means. The way a scrapyard means. The picture was never a picture. It was metal: silver salts in gelatin, knocked apart by light and left standing exactly where the light had been. What you have been calling grain is a crowd of silver specks arranged by photons into the shape of somebody's face. It also meant the worst picture ever committed to celluloid had a price underneath it that no audience could argue down. A print was something you could put on a scale. In the accountant's view the studios were never storytellers at all: they bought precious metal by the ton, and printed shadows on it, shipped it to Cleveland, and got it back scratched.

Then the metal left. There is no assay now. What a picture is worth is what somebody will stand behind. That sounds flimsy. It is also how paintings and wine and money have always worked. Silver at least tarnished. It went dark in the drawer and made a nuisance of itself until somebody who cared turned up with a cloth. A digital file does not do that. It does not fade and it does not warn you. It is perfect right up until the afternoon it becomes a dead link, or a forgotten recording on a vacant feed. Nothing keeps a picture now except somebody deciding to keep it. The metal used to be willing on our behalf. Now the willingness has to be ours, and that is the only part that was ever any good.