Here's the full list from the National Film Preservation Foundation of the 75 previously lost silents recovered in New Zealand. An amazing variety of films that covers the spectrum of the silent era, including documentaries, comedies, westerns, animation, drama, and instructional films. What a treasure that closes a bit of the massive gap of lost silent films.
I am a late 19th and early 20th century U.S. historian by training. Although I can teach widely within the field, I'd prefer to talk about this period as often as possible.
The work of the National Film Preservation Foundation has added a tremendous tool to my teaching repertoire. It's one thing to talk about race and it's another to supplement that with showing a racist film from the 1910s. You can yap on and on about immigration, but to see an early gangster film overflowing with Italian stereotypes drives that home in ways I cannot.
Just today, my American Cities class read and discussed an article about how Progressives thought the urban environment of immigrants was icky and was contributing to race suicide. They felt the need to get immigrant children out of the urban nature they were used to and into beautiful bucolic rural nature.
That fit perfectly with the 1912 film The Land Beyond the Sunset, available on the 4th disc of Volume I of the NFPF's Treasures from American Film Archives. In this film, a young boy lives a terrible urban life. He is taken care of by a drunken abusive grandmother. He sells newspapers to earn income, which his grandmother promptly steals to buy more booze. But he has a ticket from some reformers to go out in the city for a day. While in the park, a woman tells a story called "The Land Beyond the Sunset." In it, a young boy is mistreated by an evil witch but good fairies intervene. They then put him in a boat and go to an island beyond the sunset without evil old witches. The boy sees his own life in this story. He then doesn't go back to the city. He escapes, steals a boat, and sails into the ocean to the land beyond the sunset.
Of course, you know he's probably going to die. And that's the point--this film is a middle-class fantasy about how awful the slums are. The boy would rather die than be poor.
Thanks to the National Film Preservation Foundation, I can show The Land Beyond the Sunset and any number of other silent, rare, and experimental films to my classes. I owe them tremendously. The students got the point in a way they never would have without the film. It was wonderful.
The NFPF is preserving our glorious history. Give them a little cash if you can spare it. I want more awesome silent movies to present my students.
The Thanhouser family should be honored by this nation for rescuing the films their ancestor made between 1909 and 1918. The tiny independent studio in Milwaukee made about 800 films in 9 years, mostly the 12-15 minute one-reelers that dominated the day.
Probably 85% of silent films are lost. No one thought to preserve them. Plus they were highly flammable. So the vast majority were thrown out, unloved and unwanted. Thanhouser himself tossed his collection in the 1920s. But some prints survive. And more than we think in the end. New findings are happening all the time. The Thanhouser family has located about 200 of the films--that might be only 25%, but 25% is a lot.
What's important about this is not just film history. It's U.S. history. As a scholar of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, I have found these silent films the best single teaching tool in the world. I can talk about urban issues, the women's suffrage movement, immigration, etc., until my lips turn blue. And I think the students are interested. But put on a film like "How They Rob Men in Chicago," a short that shows both a robber and a cop cleaning out a poor guy walking down the street, and students get it in a whole new way.
This was a period before there was a way to make a movie. People were figuring it out as they went. Restrictions on what you could put on film remained in a nascent stage. So people did some amazingly crazy things in these films--things you could never get away with today. They put society and societal values on the nitrate. So not only are these early films important parts of film history, they are a window to a lost past. All movies are perhaps, but by the 1930s, the big studio systems had taken over, film had been bowlderized by the Hays Code, and audiences had begun to expect certain ways of telling stories. This doesn't mean film noir doesn't help us understand the late 1940s, but it takes a lot more analysis to make sense of it than it did in 1912, when they just made comedies making fun of women's suffragists, showing both great humor and also the increadible sexism of the day.
You can buy the Thanhouser collections here. It seems that only 1 is available through Netflix, which is unfortunate.
The bizarre world of silent film can hardly be explained. Really you have to watch the movies. However, I'm going to give you the plot of 1907's "The 'Teddy' Bears" as an example of why more people should watch these films.
It's basically Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Except that Goldilocks has brown hair. But whatever.
The Three Bears (in Victorian clothing naturally) go for a walk.
Goldilocks walks in. She eats the porridge. But before she sleeps in Baby Bear's bed, she happens to open a door. This door reveals a weird but cool bear claymation dance scene.
OK then. And then she sleeps.
Then the bears come home. Baby Bear has been bad. So you get to watch him get spanked. Then they discover Goldilocks in their bed. She escapes through the window and the bears chase her. Rightfully so too. She stole one of Baby Bear's dolls (a teddy bear of course). And she was guilty of breaking and entering. I mean, really what did she expect.
So Goldilocks runs away. Then she runs into Theodore Roosevelt (someone playing him of course which I shouldn't have to mention but then in silent film, it's entirely possible that he would show up). TR then shoots Mama and Papa Bear down, killing them each with one shot. Then he captures Baby Bear and puts a chain around his neck. Whether he'll be sold into a circus or a zoo or what is not explained. Then Goldilocks and Roosevelt go to the Three Bears' house where she takes the rest of the bear dolls.
End of movie.
Still from The Toll of the Sea (1922) with Anna Mae Wong. This is one of the first color films, even though it only can use a limited amount of colors. Lots of red and green. It is also a great exercise in Orientalism.
Silent screen star, and one of my favorite actresses of all time, Clara Bow. She's a hell of a lot better than her reputation wound up making her look.
Well, maybe that's an overstatement, but this new 2 disc set of silent baseball footage and fictional film looks pretty amazing. Dave Kehr describes it as "a thinly disguised attempt to smuggle some lesser-known early films onto the DVD market." Fine by me. If a few baseball fans watch these films and realize how cool silent film is, great.
As for me, I'm moving the 1st disc up to #1 on my Netflix list.
With my fiancée out of town for the wek for work, I rewatched Potemkin tonight, and am reminded how much I miss TCM's Sunday Night Silents. Say what you will about Ted Turner - he gave us TCM, and the world will be forever indebted to him for that alone.
