On the Status of Lost Films
It appears that films have an unfortunate tendency to survive in inverse proportion to how badly we wish to see them. The vast majority of film history has already turned to dust, a fact generally obscured by contemporary evidence of digital abundance, where millions of hours of motion picture entertainment, more than a single person could possibly watch in a lifetime, can be accessed and streamed at a moment’s notice. In reality, as Jan-Christopher Horak points out, facing film history is like walking through “a massive graveyard in which lost films are buried, never again to be recovered or seen. As in life,” he notes, “the dead outnumber the living” by a frightening margin,1 with up to 90% of silent-era films currently deemed missing.2
Accepting Horak’s staggering “statistic of mortality,” as he calls it, forces us to reconsider how we study film history.3 In what is no doubt a heartening shift for the discipline, an entire panel took up the theme of lost films at Oxford’s 2026 “Rethinking Weimar Cinema” conference. A few years ago, when writing my dissertation on motion pictures produced in the waning years of the Weimar Republic (1929-33),4 I confronted a question for which no methodological blueprint seemed to have been worked out: How do we write about what isn’t there? I then spent some time mulling over those pesky archival silences and how to approach them, reconstructing the history of late Weimar’s lost films using only the outer edges of the puzzle.
The truth is that film historians play detectives all the time. Especially since the field’s archival turn, a pivot that redirected analytical attention toward film as a material artifact, we have begun to investigate the tensions born from the absences hidden within our primary objects of study.5 Upending the silence surrounding lost cinema in canonical film historiography requires abandoning what Paolo Cherchi Usai critiques as the “Model Image,” the cultural fallacy of film as a unique, immutable work of art.6 An apprehension, a certain fear of the unknown, may have deterred scholars from engaging with these missing histories more thoroughly in the past. My own research counters this disciplinary avoidance by embracing the fragmentary, plural nature of film itself, rethinking archival absences as generative sites of intervention.
So how do we write about what isn’t there? The answer lies in focusing directly on the margins that remain. As Lauren F. Klein argues in her conceptual work on archival silences, it is only by acknowledging the archive’s gaps that the historian can begin to see.7 Following Klein’s impulse, lost reels undergo an ontological shift: they become archival objects specifically designed to generate inquiry. I find Klein’s argument paralleled in astrophysics. Astronomers observe black holes indirectly.8 Invisible by its very nature, the black hole reveals itself instead through the way its missing center exerts a powerful gravitational pull, bending the light and distorting the surrounding physical matter. The void becomes legible through its impact on its environment. In much the same way, a lost film continues to exert a cultural pull. When physical celluloid strips vanish, the detective-historian must study the way that missing center interacts with (and sometimes warps) the surrounding historical context.
The missing object continues to be felt in the historical imagination, much like the sensations of a phantom limb after amputation. Though the physical celluloid has disappeared, something else persists in its absence. Critical engagement with this absence amplifies the silenced voice of these vanished works with ephemeral materials suddenly tasked with carrying the weight of the lost work. Usually relegated to the periphery of the “real” film, these archival scraps, anything from posters to personal diaries, become a primary medium once the celluloid itself is gone. The assemblage of documents that continues to point toward the missing film becomes, itself, our true object of study.
This movement from moving image to document is best described as a form of cinematic ekphrasis, the written representation of a visual artwork.9 Ekphrasis has a long tradition going back to Antiquity of using rhetorical and poetic devices to evoke images in the mind’s eye of the reader, combining evidence and descriptive qualities to produce an affective impression. In the humanities, especially art history, scholars have relied on ekphrastic description to analyze artworks, particularly those inaccessible or lost. In the study of lost cinema, this process translates the visual and auditory elements of the screen into textual evidence, standing in for the absent film.
Censorship records, alongside reports of further interventions in trade publications, reveal a reality that surviving prints often conceal. They undermine the comforting fiction that every film once existed in a single, authentic form. Beyond its immediate role as an act of subtraction, censorship paradoxically functions as a generative force, producing the unexpected archival traces that make historical reconstruction possible. This becomes particularly clear when one consults the records of the Berlin and Munich Filmprüfstellen, preserved by the German Federal Archives.10 They record, often verbatim, precisely those moments that audiences were forbidden to see. Dialogue survives while what was only captured on celluloid, the film’s visuality, its mise-en-scene if you will, vanishes. In the case of lost films, intertitles or transcribed dialogue remain while the accompanying images have long disappeared.
During the Weimar Republic, censorship could differ from region to region.11 A Berlin audience routinely watched a film substantially different from the version screened in Munich or Innsbruck. Every intervention produced another iteration of the work. Seen from this perspective, film history loses a certain sense of fixity and emerges as a field of constantly negotiated variants. The archive preserves many possible films, which, admittedly, makes life considerably harder for anyone hoping to produce the authoritative Blu-ray edition.
The traditional binary between “lost” and “extant” films obscures the actual, diverse spectrum of cinematic survival. A physical print represents a single version of any given motion picture artwork. As long as its paratextual ephemera survive, the film continues to exist, its very function transformed. While an extant movie may permit passive consumption, a lost film demands interrogation. Every surviving fragment becomes a clue, every review a witness testimony, and every censorship record an intervention that altered the film’s form. This is detective work of the most frustrating kind: the culprit is long dead, the witnesses disagree, and the crime scene has caught on fire.
All absences are equal, but some are more calculated than others. To investigate absence is to ask exactly how and why a thing disappeared. It is like retracing your steps to the last place you saw your wallet. The question is vital, though the answer is rarely simple. A sharp line divides films that vanish through material weakness, by nitrate fire or simple wear and tear, from films actively pushed into the dark. The former belong to the material history of cinema. The latter belong to its politics.
The final years of the Weimar Republic showed this distinction clearly. First, the film industry centralized under Alfred Hugenberg’s UFA.12 Then, following the 1933 election, the Nazi regime turned disappearance into a political weapon.13 The state promoted films that fed the völkisch myth.14 The new regime actively seized and banned works made by artists they identified as Jewish, or those tied to democratic and leftist politics.15 The survival of many such films today makes this look like an outlandish claim. But the censorship records expose the truth of the purge and its intent. After 1933, the state enacted a wave of retroactive bans on films that Germany’s first democracy had legally passed for the screen.16
Just as a paleontologist reconstructs an extinct animal from fossilized imprints in stone, the film historian reconstructs lost cinema from its lasting impressions on paper. The dinosaur has vanished, but the fossils remain. And just as it took decades to discover that more dinosaurs than previously imagined were feathered, we may find that some of these films were turkeys. Tastes change from one generation to another, and a work dismissed in its own day may suddenly appear astonishingly modern.
This inevitably raises another question: Who decides what is worth preserving? Archives often present themselves as neutral custodians of cultural memory, yet every collection reflects choices made by institutions, collectors, governments, and funding bodies. Preservation is never simply the recovery of what remains; it is also the selection of what deserves attention. Restoration itself is selective. We continue to devote enormous resources to returning the same canonical masterpieces to circulation while hundreds of less celebrated films remain uncatalogued, unrestored, or inaccessible. Preservation, no less than censorship, has its own politics.
The Förderprogramm Filmerbe (FFE) represents Germany’s most ambitious attempt to confront this challenge.17 Emerging from a 2018 agreement between the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and the German Bundesländer, the program evaluates preservation projects according to public interest, curatorial significance, and preservation urgency. Importantly, archives may seek support even for films whose copyright ownership is unclear, preventing legal uncertainty from becoming another form of disappearance. Institutions can counteract archival absence, but only through conscious choices about what deserves recovery. Without a history of lost films, how can we make those choices, and then justify them to funders?
The detective of lost cinema relies on a global network of informants. Across the world, archivists, scholars, filmmakers, collectors, and even anonymous online communities have spent decades pursuing films long presumed gone. These investigations differ enormously in scale. Sometimes the objective is the recovery of a single misplaced reel. Sometimes it is the reconstruction of an entire national cinema. Yet they all begin from the same premise: before something can be found, its absence must first be described.
Some investigations took place on a continental scale. The “Lumière Project” (1991-95), for instance, brought together archivists from fourteen European countries.18 Under the leadership of Gian Luca Farinelli and Vittorio Martinelli based out of the Cineteca di Bologna’s “Search for Lost Films Bureau,” institutions across Europe contributed copies of missing films. This allowed for the creation of a collective filmography and an unexpected number of restorations. 19 Around the same time, David Meeker and Allen Eyles at the British Film Institute launched “Missing Believed Lost,” an effort that filled longstanding gaps in the UK’s national film heritage. 20
Elsewhere, the work has taken the form of international repatriation. 21 Since 2005, the China Film Archive has collaborated with regional and overseas partners to trace displaced titles. Their successes include the 2014 return of The Cave of the Silken Web (盤絲洞, dir. Dan Duyu, 1927) from the National Library of Norway and the repatriation of the Korean films Sweet Dream (미몽, dir. Yang Ju-nam, 1936) and Tuition (수업료, dir. Baek Un-haeng and Choi In-kyu, 1940) to Seoul.
Alongside institutional undertakings are more personal investigations, searches that begin with a single scholar’s curiosity. At a global level, Carl Bennett’s “Silent Era Presumed Lost” list has, since 1999, documented hundreds of missing silent films, regularly updating information on missing silent films and new discoveries. Between 2016 and 2023, I conducted a systematic search across international archives and private collections for 380 all-talking Weimar feature films produced between 1929 and 1933, ultimately rediscovering a substantial number previously believed lost. These findings, now published as an appendix to my dissertation, document a far higher survival rate than indicated by the German Federal Archives’ 2007 list of presumed missing films or the Lost-Films.eu inventory. Nearly every archive that responded to my inquiries yielded at least one or two missing titles. Among the most significant discoveries was a pristine, uncatalogued print of Never Trust a Woman (Ich glaub’ nie mehr an eine Frau, dir. Max Reichmann, 1930) in the UCLA Film & Television Archive.22 This discovery, combined with additional prints located in Belgium and Portugal, led to a full 4K restoration in 2021-22. Of the 380 films in my corpus, only a minority remain truly missing (marked with an “X”), with archival locations or digital transfers identified for the vast majority.
Similar endeavors have been undertaken elsewhere. Around 2011, Davy Chou combed French and Cambodian archives for traces of the roughly 400 Cambodian films produced between 1960 and 1975, only thirty of which survive, eventually making the documentary Golden Slumbers (2011). Between 2014 and 2015, Thierno Souleymane Diallo traveled across Guinea searching for the lost film Mouramani légende noire (dir. Mamadou Touré, 1953) for his documentary The Cemetery of Cinema (Au cimetière de la pellicule, 2023). And such impulses have a long history. During the 1920s, French cinephiles tracked down Georges Méliès, then working as a station shopkeeper, to recover what remained of his films after many had been melted down during the Great War. Weimar scholars will recall Paula Félix Didier’s transport of a 16mm negative of Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927) from Buenos Aires to Berlin in 2008, revealing long-missing sequences of the classic.
Archives themselves often become sites of unexpected discovery. The color documentary To Regain by Work (Herwinnen door werken, dir. Alex Roosdorp, 1946) was rediscovered at the EYE Film Institute in September 2014 during a review of 16mm agricultural films from the 1930s.23 The Marofilm collection, to which it belonged, had been donated in 1966 and remained on the shelves for almost five decades as an orphan of the archive. In 1979, curator Eva Orbanz discovered hundreds of film snippets, surviving pieces of lost films or clips from existing ones, while searching through the artistic estate of pioneer cameraman Guido Seeber at the Deutsche Kinemathek.24 At the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Daniel Woodruff undertook a project to conserve 24,860 images from more than 1,000 lost silent-era productions.25 These individual frames were used to create visual reconstructions of films in a lantern slide show format. The Asian Film Archive likewise recovered numerous Malay-language productions through targeted searches across Southeast Asian collections.26
Nor are archives the only places where recovery occurs. No film should be considered “definitely lost” because multiple copies were often produced, and they have historically resurfaced in such unexpected places as an attic, a garden shed, or even buried under a swimming pool. From 2012 to 2019, the Library of Congress’s annual “Mostly Lost” workshop has invited archivists and enthusiasts to identify anonymous fragments collectively, often through remarkably small details, such as a familiar building, an actor’s face, or even a car model. Digital culture, too, has developed its own preservationists.27 Between 2007 and 2026, “Lost-Films.eu” invited users around the world to contribute information to its database. Even the private BitTorrent community “Karagarga” has developed what might be described as a form of “swarm archiving,” collectively preserving rare works otherwise unavailable through conventional channels.28 The Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications actively searches for and digitizes endangered radio broadcasts and journals, while the Wayback Machine has, among other things preserved 470,000 MTV News webpages, digital-born content subject to other forms of loss than analog formats.29
Though there is still much to be said for the haptic experience of the physical archive, its many pleasures and the importance of preserving the analog materials they contain, it is safe to say that online platforms have unquestionably transformed archival research for scholars of Weimar film. The Media History Digital Library’s repository, “Lantern,” has made decades of trade papers searchable, including Der Kinematograph. For many researchers, the era of scrolling endlessly through microfilm and microfiche is increasingly giving way to searchable digital repositories. Researchers can now trace production histories, exhibition patterns, and contemporary reviews from the comfort of their home. Meeting David Pierce at a FIAF Congress in Los Angeles inspired me to build upon this impulse by launching the “Weimar Talkies Project” at UCLA, a virtual archive and companion piece to my dissertation, digitizing Film-Kurier reviews alongside the detailed plot descriptions from the Illustrierter Film-Kurier programs, creating a corpus that could be searched and compared across hundreds of productions. Inaccessible besides microfilm at the time, the Film-Kurier issues have since been digitized in full and made accessible thanks to UC Berkeley’s Digital Library collections. Likewise, the German Federal Archives have made a great portion of their assets freely accessible. Many films can now be streamed directly through the German Federal Archive’s “Digitaler Lesesaal,” while censorship records are available through its “Invenio” portal. Together, these collections have also opened the door to digital humanities methodologies, involving optical character recognition, large scale text analyses, or data visualizations just to name a few possibilities.30
Digitization doesn’t cure our headaches. We are just forced to switch from Tylenol, a long-approved and generally safe medication, to a newer state-approved analgesic. In other words, preservation changes its shape, and the new shape comes with its own set of problems. Software becomes obsolete, metadata disappears, file formats become unreadable, and digital objects suffer forms of decay quite different from nitrate and acetate.31 The irony is not lost on me that “Lost-Films.eu,” a website devoted to archival absence, has officially been down since May 2026, only accessible via previous snapshots saved on Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Given this new archival fragility, organizations such as the Film Foundation are right to require that digitally restored films also be struck onto analogue film stock.32 Under controlled conditions, we understand the lifespan of a film print far better than we do that of a hard drive.
Now that I have outlined the task of the historian of lost films, as I understand it, it is easy to feel a sense of futility in this task, a feeling akin to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, gazing helplessly at the ever-growing wreckage of the past while being driven inexorably forward into an unknown future. In Benjamin’s famous formulation, the angel longs to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,” yet the storm of progress prevents him from turning back.33 The historian of lost cinema occupies a similar position. We are surrounded by incomplete works, what Benjamin called “Abfall der Geschichte,” or the refuse of history: discarded fragments, traces, and remnants through which the past continues to speak, allowing new histories to be written.34 We can examine, describe, and preserve what remains, but we cannot undo the catastrophe that produced these fragments. In some cases, you can literally smell it. Lost cinema is one of the few historical catastrophes that announces itself with the scent of a poorly dressed salad, what archivists politely call vinegar syndrome.35
Yet I do not view this reflection as a lament. Writing about what has vanished is not an attempt to reverse history, but an active and urgent engagement with it. The impossibility of complete recovery does not eliminate our responsibility to engage with absence. Like Benjamin’s angel, we continue our work despite knowing that the task is ultimately unavailing. The value lies in what we recover as well as the act of confronting what was lost and asking why certain traces survived while others disappeared.
My own reconstruction of the silences surrounding late Weimar cinema emerged from precisely this tension between obligation and impossibility. The project emerged from a personal relationship with the histories I was attempting to recover. I was born and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, in a multilingual and international environment. At home, we spoke German. In school and with friends, we spoke French. A certain lack of national rootedness was simply the norm.
My grandfather, the documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophüls (1927-2025), and I shared a love for all things show business. When I first took the stage as a young teenager singing opera, he spat over my shoulder and declared, “Toi, toi, toi! Welcome to showbiz, kid!” Later, I had the privilege of watching his own creative process at work when he documented his life for the Arte documentary Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Un voyageur, 2012), followed by the memoirs Meines Vaters Sohn (Propyläen, 2015) he dictated to me,36 a process that echoed the way his own father, Max Ophüls (1902-1957), had once relied on a young Marcel to commit his memories to paper during their exile in 1940s Hollywood.37
Working on the book connected me to a German past that felt strangely familiar. The Germany I encountered in Weimar cinema, with its wit, intelligence, sobriety, and sentiment, felt more like home than the Germany I occasionally visited as a child. There was something uncannily familiar about it. Digging through archives and discovering forgotten films became, in an unexpected sense, a way of returning to a place I had never actually lived but that felt like home. There is a German expression I made up and that rang particularly true while doing this work: Bearbeiten ist Verarbeiten, or in English: to work on something is also to work through it. Notice how it loses its punch in translation.
It ultimately brought me to Los Angeles, where I dug into the archives of other émigré families, including people my great-grandfather had known and worked with, who had preserved documents that had never before been examined by researchers. The boundaries between personal memory and historical investigation began to blur. The people who became the subjects of my research, filmmakers such as Wilhelm Thiele (1890-1975) and, more recently, screenwriter Irma von Cube (1899-1977) existed within the same networks of Weimar culture, displacement and survival that shaped my own family history.38 I remain deeply grateful to the descendants who opened their homes to me and trusted me with family papers and stories that, in many cases, no scholar had previously seen. I found them, perhaps all too eerily, by consulting newspaper obituaries combined with some amateur P.I. work (e.g. via Google and social media). Whether this constitutes archival research or stalking is a distinction I have learned not to examine too closely.
At times, those stories overlapped in ways that were rather painful. Kurt Gerron (1897-1944), for example, embodies one of the tragic possibilities of this history: a career interrupted by exile, persecution, and murder. His trajectory from Weimar Berlin to Auschwitz via the Netherlands feels painfully close to what could have happened to my own great-grandfather. Max Ophüls, like Gerron, found himself in Holland after fleeing Germany. But while Ophüls’ single Dutch film The Trouble with Money (Komedie om Geld, 1936) was a commercial failure and pushed him onward to the United States, allowing him to continue his career and make my own existence possible, Gerron’s success encouraged him to stay in Europe and he was ultimately deported and killed. Much of his directorial work now survives only in fragments, if at all. Had Ophüls stayed in the Netherlands, I would not be writing this.
Only later did I realize that Donna Haraway described this not as research bias to be corrected, but as situated knowledge. Haraway’s intervention famously critiques the “god trick,” the problematic pretense of a “bird’s eye view” that claims to pursue objective, universal knowledge from a neutral position.39 By acknowledging that I had not chosen the archive objectively, but that the archive had, in many ways, chosen me, I am embracing a partial perspective. I view this situatedness less as an obstacle to be overcome, but rather as leading me to a more sustained, thorough inquiry because it forces an ethical acknowledgment of my own limits as a viewer. In my case, the familiar is familial, and the intersection of personal and historical memory creates a dynamic interplay between identity, scholar and text.
As someone with a vested interest in preserving the voices of Holocaust survivors, my own family having lost relatives during the Holocaust, I find myself returning to similar questions of obligation and disappearance. How do we ethically continue to honor the voices of those generous people who gave their time, energy, and democratic commitment to educating future generations about the horrors they endured? As we lose the last living witnesses of the Nazi genocide, how do we continue to preserve what they told us, and the sense of responsibility they inspired in us, a responsibility that naturally came with listening? The stakes, of course, are not the same. Yet both forms of disappearance leave us with a similar problem. Films vanish. Witnesses fall silent. Posthumously, their echoes no longer leave a mark with the same lived intensity. The archive may remain irreparably incomplete. None of this absolves us of the responsibility to keep asking questions of what survives. If anything, absence makes those questions more urgent.
Circling back to the lost films resting peacefully in cinema’s graveyard, many are simply ghosts waiting, unidentified on forgotten shelves, miscatalogued in regional archives, or hidden in private collections. Reconstruction is therefore anticipatory. By learning the contours of what has vanished, we increase the likelihood of recognizing it when it unexpectedly reappears. Sadly, that would make the work of the historian of lost films a relic. But what greater pleasure for a cinema lover than to know they contributed to the preservation of one of its reels?
Footnotes
1 Jan-Christopher Horak: “Film History and Film Preservation: Reconstructing the Text of Joyless Street (1925)”. In: Screening the Past, Issue 5, 16 November 1998, https://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-5-first-release/film-history-and-film-preservation-reconstructing-the-text-of%c2%a0the-joyless-street%c2%a01925/ (last accessed July 26, 2026).
2 The statistic that only 10–15% of silent-era films survive today is widely recognized among film historians. In specific regions and genres, the loss is even more severe, with some survival rates dropping below 10% (Japan: An estimated 95% to 99% of all silent films are lost; India: Out of approximately 1,330 silent fiction films produced, only 13 are known to survive, and all are incomplete; China: Only 5% of the 1,100 productions made between 1905 and 1937 still exist; United States: Upwards of 90% of American films made before 1929 have disappeared; Russia: less than 15% of pre-Revolutionary films remain, with only 400 out of nearly 3,000 films surviving). See Daniel Woodruff: “Recreating Motion Pictures From Visual Artifacts”. In: Journal of Film Preservation, No. 58/59, October 1999, p. 63; see also Carl Benett: “Silent Era: Presumed Lost”. In: Silent Era, https://www.silentera.com/lost/ (last accessed July 26, 2026); Luke McKernan: “Losing Films”. In: The Bioscope, 3 January 2010, https://thebioscope.net/2010/01/03/losing-films/ (last accessed July 26, 2026); David Pierce: The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912–1929 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources and Library of Congress, 2013), p. 21.
3 Jan-Christopher Horak: “Film History and Film Preservation”, cit., n.p.
4 See Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert: Cinematic Loss: Missing Pieces of German Film, 1929–1933 (PhD diss., University of California, 2023).
5 See Eric Smoodin: “As the Archive Turned: Writing Film Histories without Films”. In: The Moving Image, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2014, pp. 96–100.
6 Paolo Cherchi Usai: The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), p. 25.
7 See Lauren F. Klein: The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings”. In: American Literature, Vol. 85, No. 4, 2013, pp. 661–688, here p. 684.
8 See Stephen Hawking: “Black Holes”. In: A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam Books, 2017, pp. 83–102.
9 See Anna Klishevich: “Cinematic Ekphrasis of Lost Films in Fiction: From Representation to Transmediation”. In: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, Vol. 26, 2024, pp. 151–171.
10 To consult German screening permits (Zulassungskarten or Zensurkarten, 1906–1945) as primary sources for intertitle transcripts and censor cuts, see digitized holdings of over 38,000 documents made available on the German Federal Archive’s (Bundesarchiv) invenio portal, including records from the Berlin police commissioner (1908–1920) and the censors’ offices in Berlin (1920–1945) and Munich (1920–1932): https://invenio.bundesarchiv.de (last accessed July 26, 2026).
11 Although the Reich Motion Picture Act of 1920 established a national framework for film evaluation, censorship during the Weimar Republic remained inconsistent. Munich, in particular, established itself as a counter-center to Berlin, with the Bavarian government fighting for cultural-political independence. The Munich police department served as its own censorship authority, often banning films that had already been approved by the central inspection agency in Berlin. See Ursula von Keitz: “Filme vor Gericht: Theorie und Praxis der Filmprüfung in Deutschland 1920 bis 1938”. In: Deutsches Filminstitut, https://difarchiv.deutsches-filminstitut.de/dt2jz02.htm (last accessed July 26, 2026); see also Petra Putz: Waterloo in Geiselgasteig: Die Geschichte des Münchner Filmkonzerns Emelka (1919–1933) im Antagonismus zwischen Bayern und dem Reich. Trier 1996, pp. 52–53; Kai Nowak: Projektionen der Moral: Filmskandale in der Weimarer Republik. Göttingen 2015, pp. 8–9.
12 See Klaus Kreimeier: “The General in Civvies: Ufa under Hugenberg”. In: The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 158–172.
13 See Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert: “Banning Jewishness: Stefan Zweig, Robert Siodmak, and the Nazis”. In: Barbara Hales, Valerie Weinstein (eds.): Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2021, pp. 278–299.
14 See David Welch: Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945. London, New York: I.B. auris, 2001, p. 265.
15 Established in July 1933, the Reich Film Chamber (Reichsfilmkammer) instituted compulsory membership restricted to artists deemed “racially pure” by the new regime, executing a systematic expulsion (Entjudung) overseen by Hans Hinkel. This barred Jewish, democratic, and leftist creatives, from now on branded as “degenerate” (entartete Künstler), forcing their exile or professional ruin. Beyond targeting personnel, Joseph Goebbels exercised special administrative powers to ban specific films outright, such as Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933). See David Welch: Propaganda and the German Cinema, cit., pp. 31 (n. 29), 41, 72–73, 83–85.
16 The legal framework for retroactive censorship was established by replacing the Reich Motion Picture Act of 1920 with the Reich Cinema Law of 1934. Under a subsequent 1935 regulation, all films produced or imported prior to 30 January 1933 were subjected to re-examination under expanded Nazi ban categories, resulting in retroactive prohibitions of Weimar films. See “Verbote, Zensur und Prädikate im NS-Staat”. In: Filmportal.de, https://www.filmportal.de/en/node/1166061 (last accessed July 15, 2026).
17 Warning that severe funding cuts and capacity-strained storage threaten Germany’s analog film legacy with irreversible chemical decay, the Film Heritage in Danger initiative and partner archival bodies are mobilizing political pressure, issuing template petitions, and advocating for low-barrier public access to demand that policymakers grant permanent, guaranteed institutional funding beyond 2028. To get involved, see “About this Campaign”. In: Film Heritage in Danger, https://filmerbe.org/page.php?1,500,0,0 (last accessed July 26, 2026).
18 See Catherine A. Surowiec (ed.): The Lumiere Project: The European Film Archives at the Crossroads. Lisbon: Associação Projeto Lumiere, 1996.
19 See Gian Luca Farinelli, Vittorio Martinelli: “Recherche des films perdus: Les films identifiés” [February 1996], http://fgimello.free.fr/enseignements/metz/histoire_du_cinema/films_perdus.htm (last accessed July 26, 2026).
20 See Allen Eyles, David Meeker (eds.): Missing Believed Lost: The Great British Film Search. London: British Film Institute, 1992.
21 See Liu Dong: “‘Lost’ Films Return Home – Successful Cases of Repatriation”. In: Journal of Film Preservation, No. 91, October 2014, p. 109; see also “China Film Archive”. In: Qualla, https://qualla.com/china-film-archive#list/wx4e/china-film-archive-wp (last accessed July 26, 2026).
22 See Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert: “Die Rückkehr eines Verschollenen: Die Auffindung und Restaurierung von Richard Taubers Tonfilmdebüt”. In: Filmblatt, Vol. 28, No. 81, Spring 2023, pp. 55–62.
23 See Rommy Albers: “Herwinnen door werken (Reclaim through Work)”. In: Journal of Film Preservation, No. 95, October 2016, p. 48.
24 See Helmut Herbst: “Seeber’s Snippet Collection”. In: Journal of Film Preservation, No. 84, April 2011, p. 38.
25 See Daniel Woodruff: “Recreating Motion Pictures From Visual Artifacts”, cit., p. 63.
26 See Chew Tee Pao: “Repairing and Restoring Singapore’s Reel Heritage”. In: BiblioAsia, Vol. 18, No. 4, Jan–Mar 2023, https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/all-sections/vol-18-issue-4-jan-mar-2023-asian-film-archive-restoration/ (last accessed July 26, 2026).
27 See Wendi Maloney: “Recovering Silent Films: The Mostly Lost Workshop”. In: Library of Congress Blogs, January 17, 2019, https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2019/01/recovering-silent-films-the-mostly-lost-workshop/ (last accessed July 26, 2026).
28 See Eric Hahn: Saving Cinema: Circulation and Preservation in the Age of Computational Film. PhD diss., University of California, 2022, pp. 92–99.
29 See Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, Juliya Ziskina: Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record. San Francisco: Internet Archive Press, 2026, pp. 8, 117.
30 For further ideas, see Adelheid Heftberger: “The Current Landscape of Film Archiving and How Study Programs Can Contribute”. In: Synoptique, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 2017, p. 58, https://works.hcommons.org/records/xr5vj-erp86 (last accessed July 26, 2026).
31 Data decay (or data rot) refers to the breakdown of digital information on storage devices like solid state drives. As opposed to analogue media, this digital decay is exacerbated by digital storage media’s reliance on complex and highly ordered systems which ultimately make them more vulnerable to entropy. For more see Kevin Fairbanks, Simson Garfinkel: “Factors Affecting Data Decay”. In: Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2012, p. 2; Giovanna Fossati: From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009, p. 62.
32 See The Film Foundation: “DIY Preservation”, https://www.film-foundation.org/diy-preservation (last accessed July 26, 2026), especially the recommendations for digitally created works (“Best”: “master materials transferred to acetate film stock”); The Film Foundation: “FAQ”, https://www.film-foundation.org/faq (last accessed July 26, 2026) (“new film elements are created and archived to serve as the long-term preservation masters”). See also International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF): “FIAF Digital Statement”, https://www.fiafnet.org/pages/E-Resources/Digital-Statement.html (last accessed July 26, 2026), which notes that digital preservation is an active process involving continued management, migration, and adherence to preservation standards rather than simple storage.
33 Walter Benjamin: “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. In: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. by Hannah Arendt, Leon Wieseltier. New York: Schocken Books, 2007, pp. 257–258.
34 Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project. Trans. by Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 461.
35 For more information on acetate film decay and best practices, see James M. Reilly: IPI Storage Guide for Acetate Film: Instructions for Using the Wheel, Graphs, and Table: Basic Strategy for Film Preservation. Rochester, NY: Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, 1993, https://s3.cad.rit.edu/ipi-assets/publications/acetate_guide.pdf (last accessed July 26, 2026).
36 See Marcel Ophüls: Meines Vaters Sohn: Erinnerungen. Berlin: Propyläen, 2015.
37 See Max Ophüls: Spiel im Dasein: Eine Rückblende. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2015.
38 See Jan-Christopher Horak, Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert (eds.): Enchanted by Cinema: Wilhelm Thiele Between Vienna, Berlin, and Hollywood. New York: Berghahn, 2024.
39 See Donna Haraway: “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives”. In: Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, 1988, pp. 575–599, here p. 584.
About the Author
Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert is Lecturer in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a research focus on Weimar cinema, German-Jewish exile, and early sound film. He is co-editor (with Jan-Christopher Horak) of Enchanted by Cinema: Wilhelm Thiele between Vienna, Berlin, and Hollywood (Berghahn, 2024), shortlisted for the 2025 Willy Haas Prize. His articles have appeared in Journal of Film Preservation and Filmblatt, and his book chapters include contributions to Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2025), Die Musik macht den Ton: Zwischen Filmkomödie und Musical (edition text + kritik, 2025), Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema (Berghahn, 2020), and Goethe als Literatur-Figur (Wallstein, 2016). A former Skirball Center and Leo Baeck Institute Fellow, he is currently a Visiting Fellow at lucernaiuris (Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies at the University of Lucerne).