Via WNYC’s The Take Away, comes an interview with Dan Streible, a professor of cinema studies at New York University and founder of The Orphan Film Symposium.
Old movies, whether they be the Hollywood classics of the 1940s or your parent’s home VHS tapes, keep us rooted to our past. And silent movies are still the earliest cinematic record of our time—even if they have long been surpassed by more exciting forms of theater.
Unfortunately, the Library of Congress has reported that much of that record has been lost to history.
According to the Library of Congress, about 70 percent of the more than 10,000 silent films made between 1912 and 1929 are unaccounted for—many are suspected to have been burned or disintegrated without proper preservation and safe storage.
Read the complete story here.