Lost and Gone Forever

July 9, 2010 10:16 PM

Lost Films, a project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, is a wiki aimed at identifying the over 3500 films declared orphaned or lost in their archives. Other archivists and the public can go to the Identify section and look at surviving photographs, film fragments, and documents, as well as comment and upload any materials of your own, just in case you had promo materials for some unidentified 1915 German war buddy comedy just lying around. (Via Slate).
posted by Weebot (6 comments total)

Undoubtedly the best one is this 1910 ancestor of the modern "experimental film".
posted by shii at 10:30 PM on July 9, 2010

Wunderbar. Although I must say that I was disappointed with how many have just stills rather than clips. That may be down to me though, I love out-of-context old movie scenes. Some of those stills and descriptions made me really hanker for seeing some action.
posted by unliteral at 5:10 AM on July 10, 2010

I was thinking about posting this myself, and I applaud you for doing it, Weebot.

But by not directly linking the insane German footage of the many ways to fail at extinguishing burning nitrate film stock, you might be burying the lede!
posted by NortonDC at 7:59 AM on July 10, 2010

This is fantastic. It's great to see someone harnessing the power of the internet to find out more about some of these clips.
posted by immlass at 9:48 AM on July 10, 2010

My god. About 12 minutes in, they're pouring foam onto it from something that looks more like a cannon than a hose, and it's sat there, in the middle of a mountain of the stuff, enough to make any rave-goer shit himself, and it's still burning merrily away.
posted by subbes at 11:50 AM on July 10, 2010

Even at this late date. Here's hoping it catches on.
posted by IndigoJones at 4:12 PM on July 10, 2010