![]() Many Technicolor two-color negatives from the 1920s and 1930s were thrown out when the studios refused to reclaim their films, still being held by Technicolor in its vaults. ![]() Thus, again, many were deliberately destroyed to save the space and cost of storage many were recycled for their silver content. It was not until 1930 that those studios converted to a sound-on-film process.īefore the eras of television and later home video, films were viewed as having little future value when their theatrical runs ended. These records were often lost or damaged, thereby making the reel a "mute print", and virtually useless for showing. and First National were lost because they used a sound-on-disk process, with separate soundtracks on special phonograph records. They simply needed vault space and the materials were expensive to house." There was no thought of ever saving these films. Harris has said, "Most of the early films did not survive because of wholesale junking by the studios. "Safety film" was relegated to sub-35 mm formats such as 16 mm and 8 mm until improvements were made in the late 1940s.īut the largest cause of silent film loss was intentional destruction, as silent films were perceived as having little or no commercial value after the end of the silent era by 1930. By 1911 the major American film studios were back to using nitrate stock. However, the plasticizers used to make the film flexible evaporated too quickly, making the film dry and brittle, causing splices to part and perforations to tear. Films with a nitrate base can be preserved by being copied to safety film or digitized.Įastman Kodak introduced a nonflammable 35 mm film stock in spring 1909. Nitrate film is also chemically unstable over time, and can decay rapidly if not preserved in temperature- and humidity-controlled storage. ![]() Fires have destroyed entire archives of films for example, a storage vault fire in 1937 destroyed all the original negatives of Fox Pictures' pre-1935 movies. Many early motion pictures are lost because the nitrate film used in that era was extremely flammable. Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation estimates that 80 percent of the American films from this era are lost. Most lost films are from the silent film and early talkie era, from about 1894 to 1930. ![]()
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