in
Cleopatra (1917). Four hundred
stills, one minute of the film itself, and the intro are known to have survived. '' (1919), a lost British film, reputedly "the first movie to ever be based entirely on a famous science fiction novel" Most lost films originate from the
silent film and
early talkie era, from about 1894 to 1930.
Martin Scorsese's
Film Foundation estimates that more than 90% of American films produced before 1929 are lost, and the
Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films are lost forever. The largest cause of silent-film loss is intentional destruction. Before the eras of
home cinema,
television and
home video, films were considered to have little future value when their theatrical runs ended. Similarly, silent films were perceived as worthless after the end of the silent era. Film preservationist
Robert A. Harris has said, "Most of the early films did not survive because of wholesale junking by the studios. There was no thought of ever saving these films. They simply needed vault space and the materials were expensive to house." The studios could earn money by recycling film for its silver content. Many
Technicolor two-color negatives from the 1920s and 1930s were discarded when studios simply refused to reclaim their films, still being held by Technicolor in its vaults. Some used prints were sold to scrap dealers and ultimately edited into short segments for use with small, hand-cranked 35 mm movie projectors, which were sold as a toy for showing brief excerpts from Hollywood films at home. '' (1928), starring
Dolores Costello, the second
Vitaphone feature to have talking sequences, is considered a lost film because only its soundtrack is known to have survived. Many other early motion pictures are lost because the
nitrate film employed for nearly all
35 mm negatives and
prints created before 1952 were highly flammable unless carefully conditioned and handled. When in very badly deteriorated condition and improperly stored (such as in a sun-baked shed), nitrate film can
spontaneously combust. Fires have destroyed entire archives of films, such as the
1937 storage-vault fire that destroyed all the original negatives of pre-1935 films made by
Fox Pictures and the
1965 MGM vault fire that destroyed hundreds of silent films and early talkies, including
London After Midnight, now considered among the greatest of all lost films.
Eastman Kodak introduced a nonflammable 35 mm film stock in 1909; however, the
plasticizers employed to increase the film's flexibility evaporated too quickly, rendering the film dry and brittle and causing splices to separate and perforations to tear. By 1911, the major American film studios had reverted to nitrate stock. "Safety film" was relegated to sub-35 mm formats such as
16 mm and
8 mm until improvements were made in the late 1940s. Nitrate film is also chemically unstable and over time can decay into a sticky mass or a powder akin to
gunpowder. This process can be very unpredictable; some nitrate film from the 1890s is still in good condition, while some much later nitrate film was scrapped as unsalvageable at barely 20 years old. Much depends on the environment in which the film is stored. Ideal conditions of low temperature, low humidity and adequate ventilation can preserve nitrate film for centuries, but in practice, storage conditions have usually fallen far below this level. When a film on nitrate base is said to have been "preserved", this almost always means simply that it has been copied onto
safety film or, more recently,
digitized, but both methods result in some loss of quality. '' (1929), the third
Warner Bros. film shot in
Technicolor, is a "
partially lost film". Some pre-1931 sound films produced by
Warner Bros. and
First National have been lost because they used a
sound-on-disc system with a separate soundtrack on special phonograph records. In the 1950s, when 16 mm
sound-on-film reduction prints of early talkies were produced for
television syndication, such films without complete soundtrack discs were at risk of permanent loss. Many sound-on-disc films have survived only by way of these 16 mm prints. As a consequence of this widespread lack of care, the work of many early filmmakers and performers exists in the present day only in fragmentary form. A high-profile example is the case of
Theda Bara, one of the most famous actresses of the early silent era. Bara appeared in 40 films, but only six are now known to exist.
Clara Bow was equally celebrated in her heyday, but 20 of her 57 films are completely lost, and another five are incomplete. Once-popular stage actresses who transitioned to silent films, such as
Pauline Frederick and
Elsie Ferguson, have little left of their film performances. Fewer than ten movies exist from Frederick's work from 1915 to 1928, and Ferguson has two surviving films, one from 1919 and the other from 1930, her only talkie. All of the film performances of the stage actress and Bara rival
Valeska Suratt have been lost. Most of the starring performances of
Katherine MacDonald are gone save for a couple of costar appearances. All of
George Walsh's Fox appearances have disappeared. Only three of the films of Fox's
William Farnum, an early screen Western star, have survived. Others, such as
Francis X. Bushman and
William Desmond, accumulated numerous film credits, but films produced in their heyday are missing because of junking, neglect, warfare or the demise of their studios. However, unlike Suratt and Bara, because Bushman and Desmond continued working into the sound era and even on television, their later performances survive. Films were sometimes destroyed deliberately. In 1921, actor
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was charged with the murder of actress
Virginia Rappe. Following a series of trials, he was ultimately acquitted, but not before his name had become so toxic that studios engaged in the systematic destruction of all films in which he had a starring role. The
Charlie Chaplin-produced
A Woman of the Sea was destroyed by Chaplin himself as a tax write-off. in the lost Western
The Oregon Trail (1936) In contrast, the filmography of
D. W. Griffith is nearly complete, as many of his early
Biograph films were deposited by the company in
paper print form at the
Library of Congress. Many of Griffith's feature-film works of the 1910s and 1920s were added to the film collection at the
Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and were preserved under the auspices of curator
Iris Barry.
Mary Pickford's filmography is nearly complete. Her early years were spent with Griffith, and she gained control of her own productions in the late 1910s and early 1920s. She had originally intended to destroy these films but later relented. She also recovered as many of her Zukor-controlled early
Famous Players films as were salvageable. Western star
William S. Hart, an influence on such later filmmakers as Akira Kurosawa, has a tremendous amount of surviving feature work with only a few lost films. Likewise, almost all of the films created by Charlie Chaplin have survived, as well as extensive amounts of unused footage dating back to 1916; the exceptions are the aforementioned
A Woman of the Sea and one of his early Keystone films,
Her Friend the Bandit. Stars such as Chaplin and
Douglas Fairbanks benefited from their great popularity: because their films were repeatedly reissued throughout the silent era, surviving prints could be found even decades later. Pickford, Chaplin,
Harold Lloyd and
Cecil B. DeMille were early champions of
film preservation, although Lloyd lost a large number of his silent works to a vault fire in the early 1940s. In March 2019, the
National Film Archive of India reported that 31,000 of its film reels had been lost or destroyed. ==Later lost films==