She said the print of "The First Degree" the CFA holds is in fantastic condition. He was just honored with the Robert Osborne Award at the But Brownlow isn’t content to just be honored for his own past work — he wants the work to continue, freely offering up advice about how future milestones in film preservation might be achieved. "Honestly, it's sort of a miracle the film survived at all," said Yasmin Desouki, collections manager for the Chicago Film Archives. "It's sort of has this Cain and Abel retelling of a sibling rivalry," said Desouki. Silent film made in China, and rediscovered in Uruguay in the 1990s. When you speak to Kevin Brownlow, you have a direct link to some of the greatest “King Vidor would say to me, ‘Every time I saw a Cecil B. DeMille picture, it made me want to quit the business,’” Brownlow said during a phone interview with IndieWire from his home in London — a sentiment about the “Ten Commandments” filmmaker Brownlow disagrees with. This is a list of rediscovered film footage, i.e. NPR from Illinois State University An advertisement for "The First Degree" and other films printed in the Dec. 1922 issue of "Universal Weekly.
“I discovered the reason for this was when sound came in, in order to make sure that people didn’t want to return to silents again, film producers used to take very primitive silent pictures and put funny sound effects in, and honky tonk music, and crude, ‘hilarious’ commentary and show them as one-reel comedies. She said while the Chicago Film Archives would generally showcase such a discovery, the COVID-19 pandemic complicates any public exhibition plans.
“So I spoke to a high ranking member [of the Cinemateca] on the telephone, and just to try and test the waters, I asked him if he had a print of the lost Erich von Stroheim film ‘The Devil’s Pass Key.’ And he simply said, ‘I’ve seen it.’”“The Devil’s Pass Key,” a 1920 silent drama mounted by Universal Pictures under its Jewel label, is still considered lost, and its rediscovery would help illuminate more about von Stroheim’s career.“You can see that really one’s work consists often of running around from archive to archive just checking on the things that they know they’ve got,” Brownlow said.Dale Fuller (left) and Gibson Gowland (right) look on as director Erich Von Stroheim welcomes ZaSu Pitts to the set of “Greed”But some archives may not even know what they have — or had.
This June, staff at the Chicago Film Archives found a complete copy of the 1923 feature film, "The First Degree" hidden among theKrosse was a marketing director of films at Caterpillar who amassed a collection of more than 100 films produced or distributed by C.L.
"Nitrate films are very touchy," said Desouki, noting many of the films were lost to fire or explosions. To judge a work of art by the way the artist lived and thought is cockeyed.”To Brownlow, history needs to be faced head-on — not improved, just preserved — even when it’s hard to look at.Interviews with leading film and TV creators about their process and craft.Get The Latest IndieWire Alerts And Newsletters Delivered Directly To Your Inbox "It's kind of a niche part of the melodramatic genre," she said. The holy grail of silent film preservation might be a complete eight-hour print of von Stroheim’s “Greed,” which MGM slashed to a releasable 140 minutes in 1924. The film is now in the public domain. The Smiling Lieutenant: Ernst Lubitsch: Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, Miriam Hopkins: Rediscovered in Denmark in the 1980s. “It Happened Here,” an alternate history film imagining if Britain had been invaded by the Nazis, was made on a shoestring but picked up by United Artists, which cut some controversial scenes depicting British Fascist collaborators, who were portrayed by actual Neo-Nazis. See List of incomplete or partially lost films and List of rediscovered films for films which were thought to have been entirely lost. Brownlow’s advice to the next generation of film preservationists: “Look through historic foreign fan magazines and find out what the foreign release title was of American films that are thought lost, then look for films with those titles.”Brownlow was born in Crowborough, Sussex, in the south of England in 1938. He reportedly stored the reels of 16mm and 35mm films in a closet next to a hot water heater, according to CFA volunteer Carolyn Faber, who drove to Peoria to pick up the films. Gance, then 89 years old, was in attendance. A 97-year-old silent film once thought lost forever was recently rediscovered amidst a collection of old film reels donated by a Peoria man to the Chicago Film Archives.