Lost Silent Films
Jon Wengström, Senior Curator, The Archival Film Collections of the Swedish Film Institute
A large part of the Swedish film heritage was lost in a devastating fire in 1941, which led to only half of the fiction films from the silent era having survived to the present day. But from time to time some of these lost gems are rediscovered, sometimes in the most unlikely places. Jon Wengström from the Archival Film Collections gives in this article an account of lost as well as rediscovered films.
Sweden’s national filmography covering the silent period from 1989–1929 comprises 478 films of which some 270 are preserved, some of them though only as short fragments. This means that almost 50% of the films from this period have not survived.
The main reason why so many films were lost is the fire in the studio Svensk Filmindustri’s facilities in September 1941. With growing concern during the ongoing war, the authorities convinced Svensk Filmindustri to move the contents of its vaults from Filmstaden in Solna to a place which was further from residential areas, since cellulose nitrate films are highly flammable. The designated building was owned by Nitroglycerin AB, the company created by Alfred Nobel, and was situated on the Rävudden cape by Vinterviken in the southern parts of Stockholm. All original negatives to the fiction and feature-length films from the silent era were stored there; films which had been produced by Svensk Filmindustri, its predecessor Svenska Biografteatern or by studios which over the years had been acquired by or merged into Svensk Filmindustri; in other words, a vast majority of all silent films produced in Sweden.
The reason why as many as 50% of the films from this period still exist today, is because projection prints were kept elsewhere when the fire broke out; this is particularly true of the more famous, and at the time successful films, to which many prints had been struck from the negatives. These have been rediscovered for instance in projection booths of cinemas, with private collectors and not least in film archives outside Sweden.
Using these projection prints as sources for duplication over the years, new negatives have been made from which new screening copies have been struck to make the films available again. At times, painstaking restoration and reconstruction work have been necessary, not least when a new preservation element has been made from multiple sources. The films’ original Swedish intertitles have been recreated when rediscovered films have been unearthed in the form of foreign projection prints. Nowadays, rediscovered elements are also digitized and digitally restored. Also, when nitrate prints of already preserved films turn up, new restorations may be carried out which better render the films’ original characteristics in terms of length, aspect ratio, intertitles and colours.
Please note that the above figures of survival rate only cover the films included in the book series “Svensk filmografi”, considered as the national filmography. There was also a large amount of short non-fiction films, newsreels, advertising films and other commissioned works, produced by a number of studios, including Svensk Filmindustri (which did not store the negatives to these films in Vinterviken however, thus their non-features have largely survived). Exactly how many films which were produced in total during the silent era is today impossible to state, and so is a figure of survival rate.
Since almost half of the fiction films from the silent era have been lost, all rediscovered Swedish silent films are of great interest for us. If you have films you wish to donate to our collections, go to the link at the bottom of this page. There you will also find a link to the webpage “Preserved and lost silent films”, which has a list of all Swedish silent films included in the national filmography.
(published in June 2022)
Swedish silent films which have been found since the year 2000
Swedish films which have been considered lost are fortunately rediscovered from time to time, mainly outside Sweden. Sometimes films are found in other film archives' collections when non-catalogued films are being identified or registered, or when previous errors in cataloguing are discovered; sometimes films are found in the most unlikely places (in attics, closed-down theatres or even in churches) and have been handed in to an archive who then contacted us. Here is a list with examples of films which have been unearthed since the year 2000. Click on the titles to read more about the films in the Swedish Film Database.
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In 2005 the Cinémathèque française in Paris informed us that they had found the film's original negative in their holdings. The film was produced by the Pathé Frères branch in Stockholm with a French director, and the three main male parts are played by the Swedish directors-to-be Victor Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller and Georg af Klercker. The Film Institute had temporary access to the negative, and made a new preservation element and a print, in which the original colours of the film was recreated thanks to handwritten annotations on the negative and with reconstructed Swedish intertitles, using a text list in the paper archives of the Film Institute as a source.
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In 2009 the Cinémathèque française in Paris communicated that they had identified the film's original negative in their collections. The Film Institute had temporary access to the negative, and made new preservation elements and a print, with recreated colours based on handwritten annotations on the negative. It is the only feature-length film produced by Frans Lundberg in Malmö which has survived.
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A short fragment held in the archive of the public TV broadcaster Sveriges Television was the only surviving element of the film until 2009, when the Filmoteka narodowa in Warsaw announced that an almost complete nitrate print had been discovered in a church in the south of Poland. The Film Institute had temporary access to the print, and in 2011 made a duplicate negative and a new print, with recreated colours and Swedish intertitles.
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In 2002 the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin found a tinted print of the film in their nitrate storage facility in Koblenz. From this print the Film Institute made a new negative, from which a print was struck with recreated colours and Swedish intertitles.
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In the autumn of 2018, the archive at the Centre Nationale du Cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) in Bois d'Arcy outside Paris announced that they had found tinted nitrate print of the film with German and French intertitles. The film was restored by the CNC in collaboration with the Film Institute, who recreated the film's original intertitles, and we now hold a digital theatrical screening copy of the film in our collections.
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The distribution company Lobster Films in Paris rediscovered a tinted nitrate print of the film with French intertitles, which the Film Institute via the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen had access to in 2006, when a duplicate nega
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An eleven-minute fragment of the film already existed in the Film Institute's Archival Film Collections when the BFI National Archives in London informed us in the early 2010s that they had received an almost complete nitrate print of the film in a donation from a closed-down cinema. BFI has preserved the film by making a new duplicate negative.
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The Gosfilmofond archive in Moscow had material of the film in their holdings which was erroneously catalogued as belonging to a German film from the late 1910s with the same title. In 2009 the Film Institute acquired a duplicate positive (unfortunately one of the film's six reels was missing in the Russian element), from which a duplicate negative and a new print was made with Swedish intertitles, which were recreated from the original title cards in the Film Institute's paper archives.
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In 2017 a private collector revealed that they were in possession of a complete tinted nitrate print of Georg af Klercker's last film, which was later donated to the Film Institute.
