FILM FRAGMENTS - Airing on Turner Classic Movies, Sunday April 3rd, 2011

Of the thousands of films made before 1930, as many as 80 percent are believed gone forever. The early movies were shot on nitrate film stock, which was flammable and subject to decomposition, leading to the low rate of survival. Fortunately for all of us, film archivists are constantly working to locate and restore as much of this footage as possible. Our collection of "saved" pieces of fi lm is divided into two sections. Fragments, previously screened at the 2010 TCM Classic Film Festival, is a rare collection of scenes, reels and segments from lost silents and early sound films restored by the Academy Film Archive, the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation. Among the recovered treasures: the final reel of the John Ford film The Village Blacksmith (19 22) and a clip of Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the only Oscar®-winning performance in a lost film. Other snippets are from such lost films as Cleopatra (1917), starring Theda Bara; The Miracle Man (1919) with Lon Chaney; He Comes Up Smiling (1918), starring Douglas Fairbanks; and Gold Diggers of Broadway, a 1929 musical featuring early Technicolor.