Lost Film - Later Lost Films

Later Lost Films

An improved 35 mm safety film was introduced in 1949. Since safety film is much more stable than nitrate film, there are comparatively few lost films after about 1950. However, color fading of certain color stocks and vinegar syndrome threaten the preservation of films made since about this time.

Most mainstream movies from the 1950s onwards survive today, but several early pornographic films and some B-Movies are lost. In most cases these obscure films go unnoticed and unknown, but some films by noted cult directors have been lost as well:

• Several films by Kenneth Anger from across his career have been lost for a variety of reasons.
• Ed Wood's 1972 film, The Undergraduate, has been lost along with his 1970 film Take It Out In Trade, which exists only in fragments without sound. Wood's 1971 film Necromania was believed lost for years until an edited version resurfaced at a yard sale in 1992, followed by a complete unedited print in 2001. A complete print of the previously lost Wood pornographic film The Young Marrieds was discovered in 2004.
• Tom Graeff's first feature film, The Noble Experiment (1955), in which director/writer Graeff plays a misunderstood genius scientist, was considered lost until found by Elle Schneider during the production of a documentary about Graeff entitled The Boy from Out of This World.
• Most of Andy Milligan's early films are considered lost.
• Many short sponsored films—films made for educational, training, or religious purposes—from the 1940s through the 1970s are also lost, as they were thought of as disposable or upgradable.
• Some of Jackie Chan's and Sammo Hung's first roles, including Big and Little Wong Tin Bar, have been considered lost.
• The first three films of noted Finnish melodrama actor and director Teuvo Tulio were lost along with several other films that were of interest at least for historians of Finnish cinema, when the film depository of the company Adams Filmi burnt down in Helsinki in 1959.
• Sometimes only certain aspects of films may be lost. Early color films such as Lucien Hubbard's The Mysterious Island and John G. Adolfi's The Show of Shows exist only partially or not at all in color because the copies that were made of the film that exist were created on black-and-white stock. (See List of early color feature films.)
• Two 3-D films from 1954, Top Banana and Southwest Passage, both exist only in their flat form because only one print, made for either the left or right eye to see, exists.