At 1/17/26 09:57 PM, SquigglyV wrote:The only one I can think of is Metropolis, one of the very first serious sci-fi movies and hugely influential on the genre as a whole. These days it's almost been fully recovered, but that's a fairly recent development, I think less than half of the original movie was available when I first became fascinated with it as a kid.
Film back then was like video games today, the publishers only saw it as a cash cow and not as an artistic medium in its own right so why bother preserving anything once the money stops piling up? That, combined with nitrate film being prone to spontaneous combustion, means that something like 75% of all silent films have been lost, even really big ones (we will probably never see a complete Charlie Chaplin filmography).
:Today I learned something new! Black-and-white films are lost because they might explode!
At 1/17/26 09:57 PM, SquigglyV wrote:The only one I can think of is Metropolis, one of the very first serious sci-fi movies and hugely influential on the genre as a whole. These days it's almost been fully recovered, but that's a fairly recent development, I think less than half of the original movie was available when I first became fascinated with it as a kid.
Film back then was like video games today, the publishers only saw it as a cash cow and not as an artistic medium in its own right so why bother preserving anything once the money stops piling up? That, combined with nitrate film being prone to spontaneous combustion, means that something like 75% of all silent films have been lost, even really big ones (we will probably never see a complete Charlie Chaplin filmography).
Today I learned something new! Black-and-white films are lost because they might explode!
