The cinema that no longer exists: why most silent film has been lost

In 2013 the Library of Congress published the most serious count there is: of the silent features produced in the United States between 1912 and 1929, 70% are entirely lost and only 14% survive in the format they were released in. The rest scrape by as foreign prints, 16mm home reductions or fragments. It is a hard figure to take in: these are not minor films but well over half of an entire art form.

How a film gets lost

There are three ways, and none is spectacular. The first is chemical: until 1951 the stock was cellulose nitrate, which burns remarkably easily —it does not need outside oxygen to keep burning— and which, if it does not burn, decomposes on its own into brown powder. The second is the acetate that followed, theoretically safe, which develops what is called vinegar syndrome: the print smells of vinegar, shrinks and delaminates. The third is the commonest and the least cinematic: somebody decided it was taking up space.

Because that is the uncomfortable part. For decades, a film that had finished its commercial run was scrap with silver in it: prints were burned to recover the silver nitrate from the emulsion. The great vault fires —Fox at Little Ferry in 1937, which took practically all of its silent output; MGM in 1965, which destroyed the only known print of “London After Midnight”— merely finished off what plain accounting was already doing.

And every now and then one turns up

In 2008 the director of a film museum in Buenos Aires —the Pablo Ducrós Hicken— looked again at a 16mm negative that had sat catalogued for decades without anyone examining it closely. It was a print of “Metropolis” with twenty-five minutes that existed in no other version anywhere: the film Fritz Lang had released in 1927 and that his American distributor had hacked down. The restoration premiered in Berlin in 2010. Eighty-three years later, it could be seen almost whole again.

The story repeats more often than you would think, here too. The only known hand-coloured print of Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon” (1902) reached the Filmoteca de Catalunya in 1993 in what looked like an unrecoverable state: the film was a solid block. It took years to separate it frame by frame, digitise it and give it back its colour. It screened restored at Cannes in 2011.

What this means for an archive

The practical conclusion is not nostalgic: a film does not preserve itself. Preservation costs money every year —temperature, humidity, backups, format migration— and what is not actively preserved disappears, digital included. A hard drive forgotten in a drawer lasts less than a well-kept 35mm can.

That is why an archive that shows old cinema is not a collector’s whim. While the commercial circuit only moves what sells, what is left of silent film lives in film archives, in public-domain editions and in the prints someone bothered not to throw away. This archive has a free-cinema section with part of that material, watchable in full and with no platform. Checked on 20 October 2026.