Robert Zemeckis, Death Becomes Her (1992)
There is no OMGcatrevolution without Hannah, our co-founder and collaborator. Our last post--our final post--was a heartbroken attempt to grapple with her sudden passing, and we're still heartbroken, still grappling. We still do instant two-steps of pleasure and then immediate sorrow when we see cats in films, from Nocturama to It. And it's not just us: read eminent film scholar Tom Gunning pay tribute in the latest Society for Cinema and Media Studies newsletter, or Ian Bryce Jones' eloquent blog posts and lovely short found-footage video tribute (which deserves its own post here!). There's been an outpouring of grief, love, memorials, and it hasn't even been a month.
But we're posting this, not to revive the tumblr, but to further honor Hannah. Her beloved partner Jacob came across these on her computer--taken on August 25, they would presumably have been her last post here. The irony of the film isn't lost on us, and it isn't funny, but we think she would have found it funny. We are long-time Zemeckis haters, and she was a professed fan; we're certain she was right and we are wrong, and we wish she were here to explain away the crapulent Forrest Gump. We're sure she--and perhaps only she--could do it, too.
In any case, her final post here was Buster Keaton, a perfect four-screencap sequence that cuts to the heart of why cats fundamentally drive the cinema engine. There's such a wealth of her sharp-eyed film observations contained here that I hope people continue to dig around in the posts, or randomly come across decontextualized rebloggings, and appreciate what is, after all, just one small ephemeral sliver of the Hannah Frank Archive.





