Lost silent films uncovered in Australia

By Brooks Boliek

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - While the popularity of modern U.S. films worldwide is undisputed, a cache of lost silent films being repatriated from Australia proves that the so-called Hollywood effect goes back nearly a century.

The eight short films being preserved under a new program called Film Connection: Australia-America are virtually unknown, yet they demonstrate the lasting cultural hold that American cinema has worldwide.

The films range from 1912-27. Newsreels, documentaries, trailers and Hollywood promotional films that filled out theater programs and were widely seen by audiences in the U.S. and Australia are represented.

"What makes this partnership different, and I believe, ground-breaking, is that it recognizes that American silent film is a shared cultural patrimony," said Paolo Cherchi Usai, director of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

(NFSA).

Only a fraction of the American films created during the first four decades of the motion picture industry survive in the United States. They were often lost, destroyed or cannibalized after their immediate economic usefulness was exhausted.

The Library of Congress estimates that about one-third of American silent-era features that survive in complete form exist only in archives outside the U.S.

This project allows the films to be preserved and accessed through the five major American silent film archives: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Copies also will be publicly available in Australia.