Lost Films

[HerrSchreck]

It's really not an exaggeration-- this thing has been fiendishly sought for ever and ever with a huge fanaticism.. it's Lon Chaney, after all, in one of his wildest makeups ever. A dude actually murdered someone and blamed it on Chaney's characterization when it came out! Think in terms of the difference in popularity between a film like Phantom of the Opera, and Foolish Wives. There are kabillion bought & sold copies of Phantom in a thousand different editions, and a perhaps few thousand Foolish Wives from Kino in R1 and probably a Eureka or something overseas. It truly is way up there, and I've heard it described as the most sought after lost film (at least for general audiences, i e outside of cineaste circles).

[domino harvey]

Hmm, maybe you're right. Admittedly I'm not the target audience for this announcement, but any lost picture being found is of course good news regardless of the film itself. This is why I encourage all YouTube sluts to keep a backup copy of their videos in a climate-controlled vault.

[stereo]

What I really get a kick out of are the 1st person narratives of discovery. This one does sound suspiciously like the 4 Devils hoax (as we'll assume for now), but it also sounds a lot like Ray Carney's immaculate reconception of Shadows and Faces from attics and archives, respectively. This is becoming the Coronado cum Ponce de Leon narrative tittering between orgasm, Shakespearian tragedy, and ego fulfillment.

That said, I'm not ready to discount anything a priori.

[HerrSchreck]

The whole HorrorDrunx story felt, to me, like distinct bullshit-- especially considering how 3/4 of the thing is all preamble about how it took him practically 20 fucking years to come out with this shit.

[Danny Burk]

As Shreck says, it is indeed the poster child of all lost films. It probably wasn't very good (Everson actually saw it in the 50s and said as much), but the stills of Chaney in makeup admittedly whet the appetite to see the thing.

That said, this is merely the latest in a long line of hoaxes. It happens - no kidding - about once a year. It just spreads faster nowadays thanks to the internet. These wild stories have been popping up as long as I can remember...I won't usually waste time commenting, but couldn't resist a few lines this time.

The best one was at a film convention in the 70s or early 80s. There was a bulletin board where buy/sell ads could be posted for films, posters, etc. One was a list of nondescript films that no one would want, but within the list was a line for "35mm nitrate silent film. Doesn't have title, but Lon Chaney is in it. Appears to be dressed as a vampire." That line was crossed out and marked "sold." Classic!

[myrnaloyisdope]

I want a Convention City hoax, stat!

[Barmy]

1. Why didn't he report this before?

2. When he found the film, why was his action limited to "uh, can you change the database...buh byeeeee!"

3. The girlfriend part is so laden with lame coincidences that it reads like bad Dickens (I know, redundant).

I give him credit for a relatively well-written and almost typo-free story. I just feel sorry for someone who has that much time on their hands.

Is it true that 80% of all films are lost? After all, Jess Franco directed about 80% of all films, and they all seem to be available on DVD.

[HerrSchreck]

The percentage of silent films that have survived the ages I've heard hovers somewhere along the 20% line...

[Saturnome]

It just seems to be random numbers that got repeated.
What films in that horribly big 80% are especially noteworthy?

It seems every important and/or acclaimed films of the silent area survived at least in some watchable form (yes, even Greed). Well there's some lost titles, all I can think of: London after Midnight, 4 Devils, Cleopatra (yeah, I doubt it's any good?), hmm.. Quirino Cristiano's animated films, Der Golem (first film), Sjostrom's The Divine Woman...

... And I kinda like Clara Bow and I know some of her well known films haven't survived.

What else?

[Roger_Thornhill]

What else?

A number of early Allan Dwan pictures are lost.

[stereo]

I'm not sure 'lost' is the right word necessarily to use here, but what about Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried or the infamous Smokey is the Bandit? -both masterpieces I'm sure...

[Kinsayder]

Silentera.com maintain a list of the lost.

I'm never quite sure, though, when people talk about 80% of all silent films being lost, whether that figure includes all those minuscule masterpieces of the "Chunky Edwardian Lady Removes her Bloomers" variety. There seem to be a few like that in the Silent Era list.

[Michael Kerpan]

I think about 95% of Japanese silent films are lost -- this includes hundreds of films of films by people who created plenty of masterpieces (in their surviving works).

[Rufus T. Firefly]

In terms of US films, a lot made before about 1913-1914 survive because they could not be copyrighted as a film, but could be copyrighted as photographs. So studios printed every frame on paper and submitted it to the LOC, hence the paper print collection. After 1914 the survival rate drops. There's a worse survival rate for films from 1928/9 than there is for 1925/6, simply because many silents were discarded in the switch-over to sound.

Jon Mirsalis on alt.movies.silent made his own ist of what silent features were made and what survives in the archives - he estimated that 77% of all American silent features were completely lost.

[mattkc]

They're not silent films, but for me the most horrible and unforgivable losses to cinema would probably be Mizoguchi's A Woman of Osaka and The Life of an Actor. How could the two films made in between Zangiku Monogatari and Genroku Chushingura not be the most sought after lost films? Instead they never even seem on the radar in discussions about lost films, and they're literally never mentioned at all. Does anyone here have any knowledge about them, like if they even actually existed at one point? I know that an earlier sound Mizoguchi, Ah, My Home Town, is lost as well.

[Cold Bishop]

Not to mention a good number of Mizoguchi silents (I've always been interested in Blood and Soul especially), along with various films, many of which must certainly have been masterpieces, from Tomu Uchida, Daisuke Ito, and Sadao Yamanaka.

It just seems to be random numbers that got repeated.
What films in that horribly big 80% are especially noteworthy?

It seems every important and/or acclaimed films of the silent area survived at least in some watchable form (yes, even Greed). Well there's some lost titles, all I can think of

I think things get more sketchy once you get outside the well known "silent" film countries such as Germany, France, U.S., etc.

Not to mention, I'm more disheartened by the possible "undiscovered" films. Certainly not every "masterpiece", let alone "great, but not perfect", films would have been acclaimed upon release. There certainly must have been a good deal of films that were simply misunderstood or ignored, but if we were able to see them, could recognize greatness in.

[HerrSchreck]

Any of our German friends know if Sybille Schmitz' final feature Das Haus an der Küste still considered lost?

[MichaelB]

If I remember rightly, the discovery of the Mitchell & Kenyon collection in the 1990s augmented the BFI National Archive's pre-1910 collection by a fifth. To put that in perspective, the M&K titles number roughly 800.

[Danny Burk]

US film survival percentage depends a lot on the studio. MGM films, for example, have a higher rate than others thanks to an earlier start on preserving them. This was actually started prior to the 1967 fire, which wiped out quite a few films that weren't yet copied. Everyone knows about LAM and DIVINE WOMAN, but there are another three lost MGM Chaneys and many with other major MGM stars such as John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, etc.

Paramount is one of the worst; they simply didn't care and let 'em rot. Their survival rate right up to the end of the silent era is only about 20%. The lost include von Sternbergs, many Clara Bow and Bebe Daniels comedies, most of Raymond Griffith, and endless others.

Fox lost a large percentage of silents in the 1937 vault fire, so their rate is poor as well. Only 3 or 4 out of around 40 Theda Bara films exist, for example.

Independent stars/producers tend to have a much better rate because they did their own archiving. Chaplin, Lloyd, Pickford, de Mille, Fairbanks, etc. have very high survival rates after they started to produce their own films; usually most or all of these have survived.

[Si Parallel Universe]

The guy who was claiming to have gotten close to London After Midnight catalogues a series of discoveries that he is claiming to have made in the past including a Fleischman Popeye short that he passed onto the relevant archive in LA. So one way to check the authenticity of his latest claim is to check the validity through the people responsible for the restoration and archiving of those shorts. If he had no part in the recovery all the rest of his claims are highly questionable, if he did, it might be genuine but I'm still skeptical.

[Kinsayder]

Some knowledgeable scepticism on the matter at NitrateVille.com and alt.movies.silent.

There's even a website devoted to these London after Midnight myths.

[Gregory]

It seems every important and/or acclaimed films of the silent area survived at least in some watchable form (yes, even Greed).

It seems safe to say that a huge factor in which films critics and other audiences have deemed important after the silent era was whether or not they survived. The contemporary reputations of a lot of films has little to do with what was thought of them when they were made and more to do with subsequent reappraisals.

If I can philosophize for a moment, the only way I've found to avoid being too disturbed by the thought of so many lost masterpieces is to think about it in a somewhat Buddhist way: All those precious films going up in flames are something like a brilliant sand mandala being swept into a little pile and dumped in the ocean. Amazing new films are coming along all the time that can ultimately be appreciated only temporarily, as well. But part of me always butts in on this idea and says, "Damn it, I still wish I could see all those Sternbergs, Murnaus, Mizoguchis, Fords, etc."

[carax09]

It seems every important and/or acclaimed films of the silent area survived at least in some watchable form (yes, even Greed).

It seems safe to say that a huge factor in which films critics and other audiences have deemed important after the silent era was whether or not they survived. The contemporary reputations of a lot of films has little to do with what was thought of them when they were made and more to do with subsequent reappraisals."

You took the words right out of my keyboard, Greg. Also, it seems to me that the films that are widely believed to be lost masterpieces often have tantalizing fragments left behind which serve as hooks for us to hang our fertile imaginations on. Who's to say there weren't dozens of films on par with 4 Devils and London After Midnight, of which nothing survives?

I doubt Fox trusted Raoul Fucking Walsh with the reins to The Big Trail because they liked the way he walked across a room. It was a decision based on the reputation Walsh made in silent film---some of which are tragically lost.

[tryavna]

Surely Lubitsch's The Patriot has to be ranked as one of the most prominent of all lost films. It's the only movie nominated for Best Picture Oscar to be lost. (I believe the only footage that is known to survive is from the trailer.)

Of course, we're primarily talking about lost feature films and their unknown aesthetic merits. There are also probably thousands of lost newsreels, actualities, etc. that would have inestimable historical value -- both in terms of what they would show of early 20th-century life and in terms of the developing technology of cinema.

[HerrSchreck]

Paramount is one of the worst; they simply didn't care and let 'em rot. ... The lost include ..most of Raymond Griffith...

A loss, to be sure. I was lucky enough to lose a bet about the "official" aspect ratio of Vampyr, and wound up having to pay off in tix (at MoMa) to see Griffith's "Hands Up", an absolutely riproaring silent comedy taking place during the civil war. If all lost bets paid off that hilariously, betting'd be a hell of a lot more fun.

Some knowledgeable scepticism on the matter at NitrateVille.com and alt.movies.silent.

There's even a website devoted to these London after Midnight myths.

That Gebert dude (the guy whose site the second link constitutes) is the guy who started Nitrateville this year.

But part of me always butts in on this idea and says, "Damn it, I still wish I could see all those Sternbergs, Murnaus, Mizoguchis, Fords, etc."

Yamanaka, for the love of Jupiter!

What also amazes me is how many silents that do survive-- many in fantastic shape and many every bit the equal of so many "canonical" films which get produced and reproduced each year in a thousand different editions every which way but polkadotted-- but not are never distributed on home video and never get onto television or the screen (aside from a flicker on Moma.. if they have it in their vault). Karl Grune, Pick, Jessner, von Gerlach, Joe May, Paul Czinner, Oswald, to name a tiny few, not to mention their equivelants in other european countries, Japan, China, and of course the US. The fixation on getting Nosferatu out yet again from Kino & Moc/Eureka, or the Langs, etc.. this is all well and good, but there are so many masterpieces out there which never see the light of day. Thank god for Milestone, Kino, Edition Filmmuseum, Arte, and a couple others in a smaller way, who keep the spigot at least semi open. It's really why I did a total & complete 180 on Kino, whom I usedta blast to high hell on these pages for their Pal/Ntsc conversions.. I realized how much bleaker our film experience & knowledge would be without them stepping up and getting so much never-before released (or heard of, in so many cases) out there. Why in God's name no one else is releasing Paul Leni, or stuff like The Blue Bird, Fairbanks (and all the core american silent classics), Lubitsch, all the obscure expressinist titles, the old Italian epics, heaps of silent comedy, etc etc, lost gems like Alibi.. is beyond me. I can say I'd probably be only half the silent film fanatic I am today without guys like these (i e Milestone w La Terre or Chess Player) plugging away to reveal titles no one else will touch that completely captivate me.

With so many existing titles unreleased, I wonder if the discovery of more lost titles would simply add to the frustrtating backlog? Gremillon when, ladies and gentlemen?