01.
The Register
A list of every silent film known to be lost, with what remains of each: stills, a script, a trailer, a reel in the wrong archive. 1,842 names so far.
Open the registerFor the films
no one can see
A memorial for the silent era, lost on nitrate · 1889 – 1951
Now projecting · London After Midnight, 1927
Scroll to begin“A film is not lost when it burns. It is lost when no one remembers what was on it.”
75%
of American silent features are lost
In 2013 the Library of Congress counted the American features of the silent era, 1912 to 1929. Of 10,919 titles, roughly three in four are gone: no negative, no print, not one reel. The rest survive whole, in pieces, or in someone else's language.
14%
survive complete, in their original 35mm form
Reel 04 · The fires
Cellulose nitrate carries its own oxygen. Once it catches, smothering does nothing, and a vault of it goes up in minutes. Projectors were built with a fire shutter that dropped whenever the film slowed, because one frame held in front of the lamp melts in seconds.
Three fires, three of the films in the register
- 1914Éclair studio, Fort Lee, New JerseySaved from the Titanic
- 1937Fox film vault, Little Ferry, New Jersey · 9 JulyCleopatra
- 1965MGM Vault 7, Culver City, CaliforniaLondon After Midnight
Redrawn from The Way of All Flesh, 1927 · only a fragment is known
Reel 05 · Five stages
Nitrate needs no fire. Left in a can, it decays in five stages.
Amber
The image fades and the base turns yellow-brown, like a print left in a window.
Adhesive
The emulsion turns sticky. Turns of the reel cling together and the can smells faintly sour.
Bubbles
Gas blisters rise in the emulsion. The smell is now sharp enough to notice across a room.
Welded
The reel softens into a single mass. Frames can no longer be separated; froth forms on the surface.
Powder
What is left crumbles into brown, acrid powder. Nothing can be printed from it again.
Reel 06 · What survives
What survives,
survives by accident.
In 1978 a bulldozer in Dawson City, Yukon, turned up 533 reels of nitrate buried in a filled-in swimming pool, kept whole by the frozen ground. Most films are not so lucky. This is the kind of thing that is left.
02.
The Search
Lost films keep turning up: in attics, in collectors' cellars, in foreign archives, in cans with the wrong label. Nine minutes of Garbo's The Divine Woman came back from a Russian archive. We write to all of them, every year, with the list.
03.
The Vigil
Every 9 July, the anniversary of the Little Ferry fire, we project whatever survives of the films in the register and sit in the dark for the rest.
Keep a seat04.
The Afterlight
The name is the glow the eye keeps for a moment after a light goes out. That moment is what a memorial is for.
Reel 08 · The Vigil
9 July
— days until the lamp is lit again
When the light goes out,
the picture stays a moment.
That moment has a name: the afterimage. Keep a seat at the Vigil and spend it with the films no one can see.