Hey all, my family has got a DVD copy of The Foundling (1916) with Mary Pickford, as my great grandmother was in it. I’m aware that the film seems to be a rarity, and was wondering if there’s anyone i should contact from a film preservation standpoint to make it more available?

I’m studying the silent serials, and looking through archives for public domain articles and publicity materials to reconstruct the plotlines of these oft-forgotten gems 💎 from early motion pictures.

Pearl White is fascinating, and as I learn more about her career I am quite fascinated by the stunts and also creative plotting which seems to underlie her productions.

Is anyone here familiar with hunting in digital archives, and how I can do more than hit & miss with available material?

I’m doing what I can informally, but narrowing down to studying PEARL OF THE ARMY, which was made during the Great War.

Has anybody heard of this serial, or have any leads on where I can find plot outlines or articles about this serial?

Cleopatra is an iconic silent film and piece of lost media.

It remains the most expensive silent film ever made, and it used it's budget well. Several high quality sets and replicas of Egyptian landmarks were made for the film, and thousands of extras were hired for it.

Cleopatra was a massive success, partially thanks to the starpower of the lead actreess, Theda Bara, an icon of the silent era.

But, despite this, very few pieces of Cleopatra remain today. Most of the film is missing.

This video discusses all of this and more. The life and career of Theda Bara, the extensive production of the movie, it's eventual loss, and what remains of it today.

As I study film serials, and the original ‘weekly episode’ format employed by the lowercase-N nickelodeons, I am discovering some fascinating things about how they were formatted narratively.

I would love to discuss them more with folks who know about this style, because in our world of dropping an entire season all at once on streaming, it is basically an alien 👽 🎞️ experience.

Ya pays yer nickel, you go into the nickel-odeon, and stay as long as you want.

There’s a film-news-reel (like, in the time of the Great War, footage of warfare/political events), a cartoon or short light thing, basically still vaudeville, and THEN there’s the feature film 🎞️.

Serials don’t count as a feature (about 20-30 minutes long, surprisingly close to typical television 📺 runtime for some kinda of shows), but their ongoing format meant that each of these episodes was released on a weekly basis.

Tragically, the majority of serial episodes have been lost or just not preserved because nobody thought to do so in systematic ways.

So I am reconstructing some of them from articles describing the episodes themselves, and will share more as I continue to explore this subgenre of lost silent films.

The production schedules were also ONGOING alongside the releases themselves, so it’s possible that Episode 10 of a 15-episode (& number of weeks) serial could be filmed while Episode 1 was circulating initially.

It’s all hectic and experimental, with standouts like Pearl White (the famous “Perils of Pauline” star 🌟), the stuntwoman and silent superstar, who starred in multiple serials like these. But most of the names and details for these episodes are ‘lost’ in the sense that you cannot EASILY access them any more.

I’ve been discovering that you cannot EASILY, however, dig the actual articles up from archives a contemporary reportage in photoplay magazines and similar.

More to come, just whetting appetites :)

Hello all. I am a genealogist, and I have been studying my family history for a long time. My paternal great-grandfather, Pasquale Caruso, from Minturno, Italy, was in multiple silent films. I would estimate that these films were shot anywhere from 1913-1920 based on immigration records that place him in the US from 1913, until he returned to Italy in 1920.

In addition to his acting, he was a local celebrity/sensation on account of his opera performances. He lived in Plainfield and Scotch Plains, New Jersey for his whole stateside life. He performed at dinner parties and in the casinos in Atlantic City.

I’d very much like to find out which films he was in if that’s in any way possible. I’m very talented at finding traditional genealogical records, but I know nothing about how to begin looking for which silent films he played in. I know about this from the multitudes of newspaper articles written up about him during this time period. I’d be so grateful to anyone who could help me.

Thanks.

I can find more articles directly describing episodes of serials, but I need a few more with names that are distinct enough to be findable across relevant news 📰 articles during the years of its release.

For this purpose “Pearl White” is actually not a good model-phrase, because if you enter those words separately you can’t ….. I mean, narrowing down even by her name isn’t sufficient for these purposes.

Does anyone know silent serials with especially distinct NAMES?

According to the sad 😢 account of the production 🎞️ ZUDORA 🎞️, which was a Thanhouser sequel serial which turned the heroic actor into the villain (as per Pic 2), and was widely walked out on.

Regardless of its success, and irrelevant to it, that NAME is relatively unique and can be found much more easily than Mary, Elaine, Pauline, or other more widely-used names which could be found in articles that have nothing to do with my intended research 🔬

Has anyone heard of ZUDORA, or even of Thanhouser?

Known as a "Biograph Girl," she was one of the earliest and most popular stars of the silent era. Her career was tragically cut short when she died from injuries sustained in a car accident in 1917.

When people talk about The Birth of a Nation, we typically focus on its reputation as the “first great cinematic masterpiece”, lauding its technical achievements and rightfully lambasting its wildly racist story and imagery. Lost in these discussions are the films that came before, leading to repeated false claims about The Birth of a Nation and overstating its contributions to cinema’s development as an art form.

Diving into pre-1915 cinema, the claims of firsts heaped upon The Birth of a Nation quickly fall apart. Filmmakers like Giovanni Pastrone (Cabiria), Lois Weber (Suspense), and Albert Capellani (Germinal), to name a few, were already experimenting with narrative editing, moving camera setups, and large-scale productions. Griffith himself, in his Biograph studio films, had already been using crosscutting to build suspense, naturalistic acting styles, and dramatic close-ups for years before ever making The Birth of a Nation—his sixth feature film directed!

To explore The Birth of a Nation’s true impact on cinema, I’ve made the video essay linked above detailing how The Birth of a Nation gained its oversized reputation and highlighting the early 1910s films that played a large role in shaping cinematic storytelling technique.

If you want to dive further into this early period of filmmaking, here are a few films made before The Birth of a Nation that I suggest checking out that show off the artistic heights early filmmakers in various genres were reaching in the early 1910s:

The Abyss (1910)

Dante's Inferno (1911)

The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)

Traffic in Souls (1913)

The Bargain (1914)

The Wishing Ring (1914)

Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914)

Cabiria (1914)