Most of America’s silent films have disappeared:
A new study unveiled by The Library of Congress notes that a scant 14 percent of the feature films produced and distributed in the U.S. from 1912-29 exist in their original 35mm format. That’s only 1,575 of the 11,000 or so features made during this nascent era of cinema, according to “The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912-1929,” the first comprehensive report of its kind. Meanwhile, 5 percent (or 562 films) of those that have survived in their original 35mm format are incomplete, and 11 percent of the films that are complete (1,174) only exist as foreign versions or in lower-quality formats.
As Katey Rich puts it, “early film history was basically a perfect storm for terrible preservation practices”:
Films were shown on highly flammable nitrate stock, which meant not only that storage vaults would routinely catch fire, but that projection booths would, too – with projectionists still in them. You may remember the giant pile of film that started the blaze at the end of Inglourious Basterds – yup, it was nitrate stock. And especially in the early days, film was considered about as disposable as a blog post – studios would melt down films to extract the silver, and as shown in Hugo, films by early master George Melies were confiscated by the French army, melted down and turned into shoe soles.
Alyssa zooms out:
It may be too late to recover many of the silent films that [historian David] Pierce has identified as lost – in some cases, the deterioration of film and negatives make it impossible to recapture viable prints of long-neglected movies. But he and the Library of Congress are absolutely right to call for vigorous efforts to step up film preservation, including repatriating the 76 percent of silent features that exist only in foreign release formats, to work harder with rights-holders to preserve movie master copies, and to preserve movies on poorer-grade formats so they will be more accessible. Preserving and restoring silent film history isn’t just a way of putting more entertainment back in circulation. It’s an attempt to recover our dreams of ourselves and our position in the world.
The Dish 