The cinema is now more than 110 years old, and everyone is more or less in agreement about its value as an art form. Or so it would seem.
I am still shocked by the fact that 90 percent of the films made during the silent era have disintegrated. That means movies starring Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, and Conrad Veidt, and directed by King Vidor and F. W. Murnau—those films and countless others are now lost to us forever, and there are many others in danger of being lost. We can’t afford to lose any more. When I look at a picture like Beyond the Rocks, the recently unearthed Valentino-Swanson film directed by Sam Wood, I marvel at the sheer beauty and sophistication of silent cinema. Yet, locating old and rare prints and transferring them to safety stock is not the only task of preservationists. More recent works are also in danger, victims of decomposing film stock, color fading, and other forms of deterioration.
We are constantly reminded of the glory of movies, the beauty of movies, and yet we continue to allow them to disintegrate; for every carefully preserved title, there is another that has been rescued from oblivion at the very last minute, ten more that are in danger of disappearing, and twenty more that are already gone. We have made progress, of course. There are many dedicated preservationists out there who have devoted their lives to the cinema’s restoration and maintenance; to me, they are heroes. Moreover, we now have what I would call a “film preservation consciousness.” But there is still a widespread assumption that movies will just take care of themselves, and nothing could be further from the truth.
As I was reading Silent Movies, I was overwhelmed once again by the wonder of cinema, and by the urgent need to preserve it on a systematic basis. I became a sort of time traveler through the lost and forgotten titles of the silent film era. After wandering through these pages of precious images, you may begin to wonder why the passion for film preservation has not grown. Drawing on the extraordinary collection of the Library of Congress, one of the greatest repositories for silent film and memorabilia, Silent Movies serves as an introduction to the early days of the film industry, both in the United States and internationally. The lobby cards, stills, and other images—some of them drawn from the Library’s collection of paper prints and early titles—provide some of the few existing records of the earliest American films.
Many of the films featured in Silent Movies are part of the National Film Registry and provide a sampling of our rich and varied movie history. Saving these and other landmark pictures benefits everyone—the public at large, and the memory of their creators. Ongoing preservation of movies is really a tribute to all of us, for the arts—all the arts—are as necessary to us and to our well-being as the food we eat and the air we breathe.