Lost Films

List of missing or lost silent movies, which are known to have existed but have no available, undamaged, viewable prints or extant copies. Some have estimated that only about 10-15% of the total films produced during the silent era (from the turn of the 20th Century through the 1920s) have survived to the present day.

During the initial era of silent filmmaking, thousands of films were being produced, both independently, from studios and by experimental filmmaking collectives. The infrastructure for preserving and caring for the negatives of these films was not yet in existence, and indeed the ownership rights to the films themselves was often cast into doubt. (The Martin Scorsese film "Hugo" detailed the situation with Georges Méliès' missing films, many of which were destroyed by the creator himself.) Though new prints of previously-thought lost films are discovered all the time, and restoration efforts can make some of these older films thought to have vanished viewable, there will likely always remain a large number of recorded and discussed films that are simply not viewable for modern audiences.

[A version of this list originally appeared on <a href="http://www.silentera.com/lost">SilentEra.com</a>