Silent and Really Old Films

[Tim]

Yeah, they look great.  Too bad the whole films are lost.

[ladyfiaran22]

I've also been watching classic Japanese film too, I've already seen Rashomon and Seven Samurai by Kurosawa. Both are brilliant and I've ordered more from the library, it's a relief after having to watch the Woody Woodpecker film with my students. That is one of the worst movies I've ever seen 😣

[Tim]

The only Japaneses movies I've seen are the Godzilla ones

[ladyfiaran22]

Godzilla is cool, but I prefer the older classic films. I hated the one that came out in the 90s, I like to say that Godzilla is supposed to suck. It's supposed to be a guy in a rubber suit stomping on cardboard buildings and bad dubbing, not all slick.

[Tim]

Do you get TCM (Turner Classic Movies) Vanessa?

They show old silent movies.  Usually Sundays at midnight.

[ladyfiaran22]

I don't have TCM since we cut the cable because the bill was getting too high, we just pay for the Internet connection. A lot of silent films are on YouTube since many are public domain, the studios lost the copyright a long time ago. You can watch a lot of silent films or compilations of silent films on YouTube. Here's a documentary about film preservation: 

[Tim]

Nice that some are trying to find these old movies and preserve them.

However, some are no doubt lost forever.

[ladyfiaran22]

I first started getting interested in lost film and film preservation when I attended Hudson Community College in the mid 2000s, my school had a screening of Decasia. That was both scary and compelling, it’s an avant-garde movie of disintegrating silent film with a soundtrack of atonal music

[Tim]

Hopefully more of these old films will turn up.

Private collectors might have copies.

[ladyfiaran22]

I actually wrote a story about a family-owned company which tracks down old films, restores them and releases them on DVD or streaming through their website. It’s posted on the fiction archive Mibba and it’s a sort of Sol Duga story since it involves the Lacroix clan but there’s no actual time travel. It got mixed reviews since the subject is sort of obscure plus I wrote it when I was obsessed with Premier League soccer, I tend to write stories based on stuff that interests me but is obscure for many people.

[Tim]

Sol Duga can travel back in time and rescue those films.

Wish they could go back and saved those Doctor Who stories that the Bonehead Broadcasting Corporation destroyed, 50 years ago.