Film enthusiasts call a film once thought to be lost and subsequently recovered a ‘Lazarus film’, after the distinctly dead man whom the Good Lord brought back to life in a rather cult-horror-film-like fashion. One of the most recent and well-known resuscitations was the original version of Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, produced in France in 1928 and considered lost after the master negative was destroyed in a fire. Dreyer himself tried to reassemble the original version from outtakes and existing prints, without much success. Then in 1981 a nearly perfect print was discovered in the janitor’s closet of a Norwegian mental institution. Dreyer died in 1968 believing that his early masterpiece was irretrievably buried in cinema’s cemetery.
We sometimes hear of lost films, occasionally of partially lost or ‘restored’ films, and much less often of Lazarus films. But how do films get lost in the first place?
As anyone who has seen Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso knows, little boys and old men should beware of playing with fire, especially when said fire comes in the form of nitrocellulose-based film prone to auto-ignition and gradual disintegration. Tornatore’s film depicts a very real danger in the projection of nitrate film reels: in January of 1927 a fire broke out in the Laurier Palace Theatre in Montreal during a children’s comedy called Get ‘Em Young; of the 800 children who came for the afternoon programme, 77 died, most from asphyxiation or being stampeded to death in the ensuing panic. As unfortunate as these accidental deaths are, still more devastating for film history is the loss of the very soul of this history, the films themselves.
Most films from about the 1890s to the 1930s were lost simply because of a different attitude towards film. Home-viewing wasn’t an option, and many a reel was destroyed after its theatrical run simply to save storage space in the studios. Others suffered from neglect or incompetent preservation, still others were recycled for their silver content, and at least in one case, Chaplin’s A Woman of the Sea starring Edna Purviance, the master negative was destroyed by the director himself apparently because of his lead actress’ unsatisfactory performance; if only some kind soul would take it upon himself to do the same for Jennifer Lopez’s Gigli.
It’s tantalizing to know of works that once existed but are now lost (like the first werewolf film ever made, appropriately called—wait for it—The Werewolf), but in some ways worse to be left with a film that survives only in part. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, influential forerunner to such futuristic and/or dystopic films as Blade Runner, Star Wars and The Matrix, was cut from about 153 minutes to 90 minutes—well over a third—for its restless US audience. Unless any of Cherwell’s readers is an ancient and wizened Berliner with a date of birth pre-1927, those who have seen Metropolis will have experienced the truncated version and will probably never have the chance to see it as Lang meant it to be seen.
Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), a silent biopic, was also cut down to a palatable size for its U.S. audience. During its grand total of nine showings in European cities shortly after its release, it was shown as Gance had intended: three projectors running simultaneously side-by-side onto a triptych-screen in something Gance termed ‘Polyvision’. The director said of his final scene, ‘At the end of the film, the left-hand screen went red, the right-hand screen went blue, and over this tricolor I superimposed a huge eagle! The audience was on its feet at the end, cheering.’ (Vive la France.)
Unfortunately, Gance’s arty arrangement did not go over well with Metro-Goldwyn-Myer, who soon bought rights to the film and kept only the central panel of the triptych scenes. The epic Napoléon was made a pastiche of its former self, whittled from over 5.5 hours to ‘feature length’. Cobbling together the scattered prints is a film restorer’s dream and probably a film preservationist’s nightmare. Kevin Brownlow managed to restore most of the film to its original state in three successive sessions (in 1980, 1983 and 2000), and the film, now standing at about 5.5 hours—properly Wagnerian in length—is an endurance test for the die-hard cinéaste. Now if only the Coppola mob (of Godfather fame) and composer-conductor Carl Davis could stop quibbling about rights to the film score and let it see the light of day in DVD format for UK/US release. Preferably, the DVD would contain both the restored version and the truncated U.S. release version for those of us who enjoy the ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ capabilities of DVDs.
You can find glimpses of Gance’s Napoléon on YouTube, and even in this unsatisfactory, pixelated, monotych digital version, it is pretty apparent why the audience were so taken with it during its premiere. In one of the scenes the beggarly madman with the Einsteinian hair and toothy maw shouts (silently), ‘Death to Saint-Just! Death to Robespierre!’, and you can feel the passion of the Parisian plebs stirring within you. Or, in any case, you know that the poor sods are goners.
With the advancement of film technology, prints and the humans attending them are thankfully no longer subject to spontaneous burning. The process of preserving and transferring crumbling film to a sturdier format is still a tricky business and in many cases cannot be attempted at all due to lack of interest, funding, or available technicians. But at some point in the future, such films, lying in their sterile climate-controlled storage cells might well be Lazarus films, – lost once to the collective cinematic memory, but not for all time.
Monica Park
