Lost film
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sometimes a copy of a "lost film" is rediscovered; these have been referred to as "Lazarus" films. A film that has not been recovered in its entirety is called a "partially lost film."
Lost film in film
Several films have been made with lost film fragments incorporated into the work. Decasia (2002) used nothing but decaying film footage as an abstract tone poem of light and darkness, much like Peter Delpeut's more historical Lyrisch Nitraat (Lyrical Nitrate, 1990) which contained only footage from canisters found stored in an Amsterdam cinema. In 1993, Delpeut released The Forbidden Quest, combining early film footage and archival photographs with new material to tell the fictional story of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition.
The Universal Pictures feature film The Cat Creeps (1930) is a lost film with the only now-extant footage included in a Universal short film called Boo! (1932).
The James Cagney film Winner Take All (1932) used scenes from the early talkie Queen of the Night Clubs (1929) starring Texas Guinan. While Queen of the Night Clubs wasn't a lost film in 1932, no prints of the film have survived through the decades since then. But the Cagney movie still is extant along with the selected footage taken from Queen of the Night Clubs.
Peter Jackson's mockumentary Forgotten Silver purports to show recovered footage of early films. Instead, the filmmakers used newly-shot film sequences treated to look like lost film.
In Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse double feature, both of the Planet Terror and Death Proof segments have missing reels used as plot devices.
John Carpenter's Masters of Horror episode Cigarette Burns deals with the search for a fictional lost film, Le Fin Absolue Du Monde (The Absolute End Of The World).
See also
- Lost artworks
- List of lost television broadcasts
- List of unpublished novels by notable authors
- Lost work
