24fps Archive

The 24fps Archive is the documentary record kept by 24fps, a collection of film and written material whose destruction exposes the fragility of political memory under surveillance and coercion. When DL and Takeshi Fumimota return to Ditzah Pisk’s home, the archive’s threatened security has become a physical reality: film and papers are being burned, while the house and its surroundings bear the marks of a forceful raid.

Contents and Custody

The surviving account gives no complete inventory of the archive, but it identifies its material form in vivid fragments. At Ditzah’s property, film cans and plastic reels lie scattered among unspooled film and bundles of papers, most of them typed pages. The archive therefore encompasses more than a single finished film or an abstract collection of information: its record exists across physical media that can be gathered, handled, and destroyed.

Ditzah had worried about the safety of 24fps’s records, and the raid makes that anxiety prophetic. She is not at home when the destruction occurs; she has taken refuge with friends and is reported safe, though badly frightened. The collection’s custody is consequently bound to the vulnerability of the person protecting it: the records are attacked where they are kept, and Ditzah is driven into hiding.

Destruction at Ditzah’s Home

The destruction is encountered through DL and Takeshi Fumimota’s return from Ditzah’s house. On the way, they have seen a formation of neutral-colored Chevrolets moving in loose ranks, each carrying four men with similar features and displaying exempt plates. Near the neighborhood, they encounter a roadblock. Takeshi parks at a distance, while DL slips away in disguise and enters the cordoned area.

There she sees an authoritarian display of force around the property. A Youth Authority bus with barred windows carries juvenile prisoners, and black smoke rises from the direction of Ditzah’s home. Outside the garage, conical piles of material smolder; flames flare among empty film cans, plastic reels, exposed film, and typed pages. Workers with brooms push any escaping scraps back into the fire. The destruction is not presented as accidental loss: the records are being deliberately consumed, and the cleanup prevents fragments from escaping the burn pile.

The violence extends beyond the archive itself. Ditzah’s windows have been smashed, her car wrecked, and the garden trees cut down with band saws. DL infers that the juvenile prisoners transported on the bus carried out this wreckage. The extensive show of force, she thinks, was unnecessary to the operation and intended to make the neighborhood witness it; no civilians remain outside, as the frightened neighbors have shut themselves in their apartments.

Records, Surveillance, and Erasure

The archive’s destruction belongs to a wider pattern in which institutional power acts on people through records and systems of observation. Elsewhere, Frenesi learns that people known to her have simply disappeared from a computer. She imagines lives and deaths reduced to sequences of binary entries, with existence in the system made vulnerable to an unseen operator. The physical burning of 24fps’s reels and pages gives that anxiety another form: information can be made to vanish electronically, or its material traces can be fed to flames.

Surveillance also reaches into private space. DL searches a house with a radio after suspecting that a Title III listening device has been installed; the crude microphone she and Ditzah find is a reminder that monitoring can be both technically rudimentary and politically consequential. Set beside that intrusion, the attack on 24fps’s collection reveals a power that does not merely watch or classify. It can also destroy the evidence through which events might later be seen, remembered, or contested.