Lost Film - Lost Film in Film

Lost Film in Film

Several films have been made with lost film fragments incorporated into the work. Decasia (2002) used nothing but decaying film footage as an abstract tone poem of light and darkness, much like Peter Delpeut's more historical Lyrisch Nitraat (Lyrical Nitrate, 1990) which contained only footage from canisters found stored in an Amsterdam cinema. In 1993, Delpeut released The Forbidden Quest, combining early film footage and archival photographs with new material to tell the fictional story of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition.

The Universal Pictures feature film The Cat Creeps (1930) is a lost film with the only now-extant footage included in a Universal short film called Boo! (1932). UCLA still has a copy of the soundtrack. The Fox Film Corporation feature Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) only exists in a trailer made to promote the film, and in a Spanish language version Eran Trece (There were thirteen ).

The James Cagney film Winner Take All (1932) used scenes from the early talkie Queen of the Night Clubs (1929) starring Texas Guinan. While Queen of the Night Clubs was not a lost film in 1932, no prints of the film have survived through the decades since then. But the Cagney movie still is extant along with the selected footage taken from Queen of the Night Clubs.

Peter Jackson's mockumentary Forgotten Silver purports to show recovered footage of early films. Instead, the filmmakers used newly shot film sequences treated to look like lost film.

In Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse double feature, both the Planet Terror and Death Proof segments have references to missing reels, used as plot devices.

John Carpenter's Masters of Horror episode Cigarette Burns deals with the search for a fictional lost film, La Fin Absolue Du Monde (The Absolute End of the World).

Actress turned gossip columnist Hedda Hopper made her screen debut in a Fox Film called Battle of Hearts (1916). The star of the film was William Farnum, then at the beginning of his long Fox contract. 26 years later in 1942 Hopper produced her documentary series Hedda Hopper's Hollywood #2. In the documentary, Hopper, Farnum, her son William Hopper, and Hopper's wife Jane Gilbert view portions of Battle of Hearts. These brief portions of that movie survive within the Hopper documentary. More than likely Hopper had an entire print of the movie in 1942. However, like many early Fox films, Battle of Hearts is now lost or missing.