New report: 70 percent of America's silent films are gone forever (1 Viewer)

Sad news but not surprising:

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2013/12/04/silent-films-study/

Yes this was a very sad read but not illogical due to the powers that be from the 20's through the 40's treated film as a one time commodity. And saw no use for most silent films after the introduction of sound.

And, sadly, 70% of the ones that remain in reasonably good shape are not and may never be available to fans in decent BD or DVD form or, unfortunately, at all. On the positive side, the small handful that have made it to BD are often quite sublime and are really the discs I value most in my collection. I've been to many screenings of silents featuring nice prints over the decades and often wonder why they still remain absent. If someone spends the time and effort to secure these nice prints why can't someone get them out on disc and to the public?

Much of the issue also has to do with the nitrate film stock on which they were shot. There's a reason these films are kept in an underground, temperature and humidity-controlled vault. Nitrate film, even kept under the best of conditions, is highly unstable. It's weird, though. You can look at a film negative from the turn of the 20th century and it's gorgeous. Another one from the same year is practically dust. I'll say this: the folks at the Library of Congress work their butts off with very little money to preserve what they have. If you're a film lover, these men and women are your heroes. You can get a better idea of what they do by watching the documentary, These Amazing Shadows. It's on Netflix, if you're interested. It's about the National Film Registry and it's both sad and fascinating.

Far less has to do with nitrate, and more with studios junking their assets. Let's look at reality.

The problem era was di-acetate.

RAH

Why many studios are/were worthless. Thankfully a lot of stuff are in the hands of the people who really do care about them. Grapevine comes to mind for one. How so many Griffith/Keystone films survived still shocks me.

I watched Ford's UPSTREAM a couple nights ago as well as some of the other films that were found in New Zealand in 2010. The film itself wasn't good but it's always great when any film turns up. I wonder how many are in vaults somewhere just getting worse with each passing day because no one has the money/time to look for them or see what needs to be done in order to save them. It seems silent films have more of a spotlight on them but more needs to be done.

An article by Bill Holland, which asserts a lot of master recordings being trashed over the years.

http://www.billholland.net/words/Labels%20Strive%20to%20Rectify%20Past%20Archival%20Problems.pdf

Robert Harris said:

Far less has to do with nitrate, and more with studios junking their assets. Let's look at reality.

The problem era was di-acetate.

RAH

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Yeah, but them dadgum VAULT FIRES...grrrrrrrr...

From TCM's website:
1914: Lubin fire in Philadelphia destroys Oliver Hardy's film debut as well as footage of McKinley?s ambulance leaving the Expo after he was shot. Also lost in this fire Hobart Bosworth's version of The Sea Wolf.1914- Los Angeles: The lab shared by Keystone and Ince Films has a fire destroying films.1915- Edison's vault may have had a fire.1924 Universal (East Coast)Vault Fire includes negatives to Universal films 1913-19241933 Warner Bros/First National Vault Fire destroys most of 1928-1930 Vitaphone talkies1937- 20th Century-Fox (NJ)- Negatives for most of , if not all, pre-1935 Fox films destroyed. Big problem was that original negatives and fine grain masters were stored in the same vault. "Cleopatra" starring Theda Bara is lost, so is "Way Down East" as well as films starring William Farnum, Harry Carey and Tom Mix are lost. Also companies such as Educational Pictures, World-Wide that Fox sub-distributed for are lost.1940s- Museum of Modern Art suffers four major vault fires one which is said to have wiped out 2/3rds of the collection including Hans Richter's hand painted color animation Rhythmus 25.1943- Harold Lloyd's personal vault has a fire. Losses include the Lonesome Lukeseries and the original camera negative of Safety Last!
c. 1950s- RKO has a major vault fire that results in the loss of Citizen Kane. Other RKO titles believed lost include Case of the Sgt, Grischa, Freckles,Laddie,Leathernecking, The Monkey's Paw, West of the Pecos, White Shoulders, Hit the Deck (soundtrack only survives) and Runaround.1959 the Cinematheque Francaise has a vault fire that destroys films including Von Stroheims The Honeymoon.1961: 20th Century Fox's New Jersey vault has a fire where the explosion could be heard for three miles. Lost films include most of Theda Bara's work.1965: MGM has a vault explosion and fire that destroys the entire contents. Films include A Blind Bargain, The Divine Woman and London After Midnight.1967 National Film Board of Canada Vault Fire1993- Henderson Film Lab Fire in London. Destroys the original negatives of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy as well as Ealing Studios Comedies.Also at some point, George Eastman House had a vault fire that destroyed part of their collection.

Not just vault fires. I've never forgotten a discussion with director Richard Brooks in the mid-80's where he talked about raiding the vaults for "old films" to hang in the folds of the tent material to make it go up in flames faster in the big fire scene in Elmer Gantry. Of course, he was deeply sorry when recounting the story to us, but he said that was the attitude toward old films at that time. He said he had no idea which films went up in that scene.

I was at a seminar on Media Preservation last night at New York University and one of the presenters, Marty Epler, showed pix of his find in Jordan (the Middle East) of cans of 35mm film in a garage, the owner of which wanted to trash them. The labels were in different languages, some in English, some in French, some in Russian and some in Arabic. Epler got $10G from the President of Jordan to start doing something to save the films. (He was only able to digitize ten reels--in Germany, the nearest place with the right equipment--with that amount.) He showed a few seconds (digitized) from one of the films, "The Strange Case of Dr. Manning," a British mystery from 1957 starring Ron Randell and Greta Gynt. His aim seemed to be to digitize whatever films he found. If it was up to me, I'd want to store the films in a proper archive. These prints have lasted X number of decades. How long can we expect a digital copy to last?

Vic Pardo said:

I was at a seminar on Media Preservation last night at New York University and one of the presenters, Marty Epler, showed pix of his find in Jordan (the Middle East) of cans of 35mm film in a garage, the owner of which wanted to trash them. The labels were in different languages, some in English, some in French, some in Russian and some in Arabic. Epler got $10G from the President of Jordan to start doing something to save the films. (He was only able to digitize ten reels--in Germany, the nearest place with the right equipment--with that amount.) He showed a few seconds (digitized) from one of the films, "The Strange Case of Dr. Manning," a British mystery from 1957 starring Ron Randell and Greta Gynt. His aim seemed to be to digitize whatever films he found. If it was up to me, I'd want to store the films in a proper archive. These prints have lasted X number of decades. How long can we expect a digital copy to last?

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Sorry.

Sounds like waste of 10k.

RAH

I had always heard that it was 90 percent of all silent films were gone forever. This is good news that it may only be 70 percent!

And some silent films are still waiting to be found:


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3173700/Silent-films-100-years-ago-dump.html

Hardly news. Like Mark said, the figure quoted is usually much higher.


I'm more curious as to why it's been posted in the Blu-ray forum; surely it belongs in Movies (Theatrical)? Have noticed an increasing trend for folk to dump any old random stuff in the Blu-ray forum, just because it's the busiest - and it goes unchallenged. Then the mods weigh into various other threads requesting that posters stay on topic!


Perhaps the OP would like to give his rationale? Perhaps a mod would like to move it to its proper place?

Brenty said:

Perhaps a mod would like to move it to its proper place?

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Done. Thanks for bringing it to our attention Brent. We can't catch 'em all.


EDIT: Another thing I might add is that it would be even more helpful if you directly reported the situation to us using the "report" function--available in each post box. Because if I hadn't seen the title of this post in the "Recent Topics" widget and clicked on it because it interested me, I never would have known.