Wants: FILM LAUGH LOVE
A fortnightly meditation on something for sale
An orange painted metal FILM sign from the collection of Diane Keaton. Available from Bonhams (est. $300 - $500)
This metal sign, which simply reads ‘FILM’, has airs of ‘Live Laugh Love’. But, coming straight from the studio office of Diane Keaton’s Sullivan Canyon home, it is animated by its provenance with something deeper.
‘FILM’. The sign might once have been descriptive – at over 1.5m wide, perhaps it labelled a storage shed at one of the early Hollywood studios? Yet one imagines that it was displayed by Keaton in an affirmative tone: lovingly signalling her identification with the community of filmmaking and its tradition.
‘FILM’: is it not a given? Seen here, as part of Keaton’s estate sale, the sign reads downright kitschly and ironically. Keaton was a totem of the 20th century – a sign, if you like – and her passing in October 2025 signalled that the century was finally over.
That century was the century of ‘FILM’: a medium which at its high-noon, must have seemed like it would endure forever. Works like The Godfather (1972) and Annie Hall (1977), which Keaton helped make, form the solar-core of ‘FILM’ as many people understand it. Coppola’s mob epic was her breakthrough as an actor: she was 25 during filming and only 26 when it came out.
In the empire of the smaller, smartphone screen we now inhabit, ‘FILM’ – the practice, community, and tradition – feels increasingly artefactual. Celluloid and its unique forms of artistry are faded. The forms of viewership it entailed are mutated or disappeared.
‘FILM’ was not a thing of the screen, as we have screens today, but a thing requiring projection and presence, implying the cinema with it. In this respect, it necessarily excluded our small screens. As they are made in 2026, movies are designed deliberately to include and indulge our small screen. ‘FILM’ is dismembered, as are the practices and forms of community that attended it, usurped by the fragmentary spectatorship of TVs, laptops and phones.
These collages made by Keaton herself also appear in the sale. In the haywire geometries of the first one, a characteristic tie-shape stands out, angling toward the bottom left, while her beloved black and white stripes frame a zany construction in the centre. On the verso she has written: ‘and this to [sic] / shall / pass! / dianekeaton’. Whether the collage was intended as a gift, and the inscription a message to a travailing friend, or simply as a memo to herself, or us (posterity), we don’t know.
Reading it now, after her passing, it is hard not to excavate from it a reference to herself and her moment: ‘FILM’. That, too, has passed. Which is not to say nothing of this tradition is left, rather to ask: what of it should we hold onto?
**
This orange painted metal FILM sign is part of the current At Home with Diane sale, part of the Diane Keaton: The Architecture of an Icon series at Bonhams in Los Angeles.