A woman wearing a kind of wire brassiere and panties glares through hooded eyes at the camera. She wriggles her pale flesh. An old man with a grizzled beard looks down on a youth playing a violin. On a snowy street, the youth hands the old man a coin. The old man walks off in a blizzard doubled by the whirling flecks and vortices of the decomposition in the ancient nitrite film. A fire blazes against a wall, pouring smoke onto a toddler who darts back and forth in terror. A woman breaks free of those restraining her in a dense crowd of onlookers. She climbs a stairway, lunging through the flames to reach the infant crouching under clouds of smoke. The woman takes the baby in her arms and, after much hesitation, hurls herself from a third story window, landing on a round canvas stretcher with a sort of bulls-eye on it. Then, the front of the brick building falls into the street. All of this is barely glimpsed through a pelting hail of white specks and dervish-like decay on the film. A woman flaunts her shockingly red hair. Half-naked people shown in silhouette against the full moon dive into a swimming pool. A preacher feigns the ability to heal the sick. A man lying prostrate at the preacher's feet, shakes with spasms but slowly rises, proclaiming that the pastor has healed him. Ten yards away a little boy on crutches, inspired by the healing drops his crutches on the path and lunges forward toward the faith healer, staggering but not falling. The faith healer's face is contorted with repulsion and horror. A beautiful boy wearing a turban makes a yearning gesture toward the camera.
These are some of the fragments of silent films otherwise lost that are preserved in a compilation called Fragments, a 2011 anthology containing film restored through various archival auspices. Many of the individual film clips are of limited interest -- but they have a melancholy aspect in that they represent movies that are now thought to be otherwise lost. The film's hosts, two stiff fellows who look at the camera with ill-concealed hostility, introduce the snippets of film, shown in nine groups of three each. The retrieved footage varies in length from about 8 or 9 seconds -- images of Roman Novarro in a turban -- to an entire reel of film from a picture that was probably released as a feature in 10 to 12 reels (that is, about ten minutes of screen time). Some of the stuff is astonishing, but lacking context, the footage seems a bit forlorn and, even, freakish. Clearly, film restoration is a matter for fetishists -- to the fetishist, all film is created equal and equally deserving of restoration. Unfortunately, audiences might not share this belief and some of this material, much of it degraded to almost complete illegibility, is too fragmentary to get much traction with the viewer. This is the sort of film that might haunt you in dreams but doesn't have much effect on your conscious mind. (The segments identified above are a. Theda Bara as Cleopatra -- about a minute of extant footage; b. Emil Jannings in The Way of all Flesh, an Oscar winning performance visible in remaining footage of about six minutes (and vandalized by a gloating narrative added to an earlier anthology film released in the fifties); c. Baby Peggy, a child star (four when the picture was made) in a lost melodrama -- the spectacular fire scene is about five or six minutes long but very badly damaged; d. an early technicolor screen test showing Clara Bow, the "It" girl; e. a fragment of a lost Clara Bow feature; f. Lon Chaney as a man pretending to be spastic and, then, healed in The Miracle Man (1919); g. Roman Novarro in a clip from a lost film.) The Roman Novarro clip signifies in a way what is wrong with this anthology. Novarro is a figure well-known from other films that have survived, including both Ben Hur and a complete picture from 1930 in which he sings. We know what Novarro looks like and have some sense of his physical habitus -- therefore, what's the point of showing eight seconds of him from a lost film, probably of dubious merit and, certainly, not remarkable in the tiny fragment here screened.
Several of the extended sequences in the film are interesting. In a 1918 picture starring Douglas Fairbanks, the hero (who looks like a member of the local Kiwanis) climbs all over some buildings -- he's supposed to be chasing a parrot that has escaped from him. The film poses the question as to who is really in the cage: the parrot or Fairbanks who works as a bank teller (that is, in a cage). A comedy two-reeler shows a frenetic breakneck race between several chariot-like rigs -- they crash into trees or roll off cliffs and the stunts are hair-raising. In an early musical, an enormous chorus of dancing girls trots around in a huge set featuring expressionistic, canted skyscrapers. There's some kind of plot involving a chorus-girl trying to seduce a wealthy man, but the lines are delivered in a stilted fashion as if the actress were reading them phonetically. Someone strums a guitar and sings "Tiptoe through the Tulips" in a high-voice, not exactly a falsetto, but crooning. Dancers appear and they hop around directly in front of the performer, a disconcertingly poor way of "blocking" the scene. Later, men in black suits appear and perform astonishing gymnastic effects while dancing -- they throw one another around the stage with abandon and turn back- and front-flips but it's all vaguely abstract because the camera doesn't move, set in an imagined balcony looking down on a proscenium stage where all of this havoc is occurring, the army of girls hoofing it on the enormous stage -- it must be eighty feet high -- while the lead actress cavorts in the center of all the action, but behind a scrim of specialty vaudeville acrobats hurling themselves around wildly, The longest and most interesting sequence is a hysterically overwrought John Ford melodrama, the last reel of something called The Village Blacksmith, a feature film from 1922, In a terrifying tempest, two men are scheming -- they are villains and their faces are contorted into Kabuki masks of overt evil. Two other men, both of them bedridden, cry out that something must be done. Then, one of the men throws himself to the ground and writhing like a worm wriggles out into the pelting fury of the storm. The man crawling in the mud like a worm invades the sanctum where the two villains are plotting. One of them seizes a bullwhip and begins to savagely lash the paralyzed man on the floor. Then, a brute of man appears on the scene, smites the vicious fellow wielding the whip (the poor fellow on the floor seems to be dead). He drags both of the evil men with the Kabuki demon faces to a church where a crowd of people are waiting. There's a sort of debate. The two evil characters have themselves been dragged through the mud and they are covered in black ooze. Cut to a wedding. A man is lurking near the wedding. When a well-dressed man appears in the frame, the lurking man seizes him and seems to steal his suit and trousers and tie. Then, the lurking man, suitably appareled, arrives at the wedding. Everyone seems happy. The End. (I have no idea what this sequence of events is supposed to mean but it is all vividly shot and edited with exaggerated actions, big gestures, and wild scene-setting -- the storm is shot as a number of soaking wet faces suddenly appearing out of the darkness to pull apart veils of branches or flapping leaves; they seem to be desperately searching for something. Now and then, these images are intercut with inserts of lightning and pictures of the wind knocking things down.) In a tiny fragment of technicolor sound film, Laurel and Hardy are also caught in a violent tempest. An mean-looking old bear ambles into a cave. The boys find that their tent has blown over and so they retire to the cave to sleep -- Olly: Stan, where did you get that fur coat? Stan: "I'm not wearing any fur coat."
It's estimated that only 3 % of the silent films made throughout the world on nitrite cellulose remain in existence and most of the surviving footage is horribly damaged. On the other hand, it has survived those who appear in it and those behind the camera, both as original audience and crew, as well. It's my sorrowful guess that less than 3% of those alive in 1919, for instance, survive today.
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