Lost Film

A lost film is a feature film or short film that is no longer known to exist in studio archives, private collections or public archives such as the Library of Congress, where at least one copy of all American films are deposited and catalogued for copyright reasons. Of American silent films far more have been lost than have survived, and of American sound films made from 1927 to 1950, perhaps half have been lost. The phrase "lost film" can also be used in a literal sense for instances where footage of deleted scenes, unedited and alternative versions of feature films are known to have been created but can no longer be accounted for. Sometimes a copy of a lost film is rediscovered. A film that has not been recovered in its entirety is called a partially lost film. For example, the 1922 film Sherlock Holmes was eventually discovered but some of the footage is still missing.

Most film studios routinely had a "still" photographer with a large-format camera working on the set during production, taking pictures for potential later publicity use. The high-quality photographic paper prints that resulted, some produced in quantity for display use by theaters, others in smaller numbers for distribution to newspapers and magazines, have preserved imagery from many otherwise lost films. In some cases, the surviving coverage is so extensive that an entire lost film can be reconstructed scene by scene in the form of still photographs. Stills have been used to stand in for missing footage when making new preservation prints of partially lost films.