The lost and the found

Napoleon (1927) The current version of this film runs at five hours and 32 minutes and has taken the film historian Kevin Brownlow more than 35 years to put together. Abel Gance's biopic of the early years of the French dictator is one of the great epics of the silent era, but was thought to have been lost until Brownlow put it back together from scattered fragments that came into his hands in the early 1960s.

His Lordship (1932) One of Michael Powell's early - short, cheap films designed to exploit cinemas' obligation to show British films - this was lost for 65 years until its return at the 1997 London film festival. Powell once joked that if any more of his lost films reappeared, it would ruin his reputation.

The Chess Player (1927) Directed by the once great, but now forgotten, French film-maker, Raymond Bernard, this epic of robots and boardgames in 18th-century Poland was another Brownlow discovery - although the first reel took the longest to track down after one Dutch copy turned out to have been damaged when the Nazis blew up a nearby dyke.

The Mountain Eagle (1926) No one since the late 1920s is known to have seen this film from Alfred Hitchcock's silent period. Hitchcock said he was pleased it had been lost, calling it "awful". A complete set of stills were found after the director's death,intriguing fans, who would also, no doubt, enjoy a look at a copy of Hitchcock's missing, unfinished first film, Number 13 (1922).

Cleopatra (1917), directed by J Gordon Edwards, cost $500,000 to make, with $50,000 going on soft furnishings alone. It was rapturously received at its premiere in Los Angeles, and became the great silent movie temptress Theda Bara's most famous and successful film. Unfortunately, the last known prints were destroyed in separate fires at Fox studios and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and now the script and a few stills are all that remain.

The Devil's Passkey (1920) Few great directors have suffered more losses than Erich von Stroheim, whose masterpiece Greed (1924) is also missing many sections. This story of a scandal has not been seen since the 1920s.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-25