Re: Plan 9 from Outer Space

In the Year of the Earth Rat, the Great and Powerful Keith F. Lynch 
declared:
> Paul Dormer <prd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> I remember a friend who's an academic saying a few years back that
>> she was teaching some sort of cultural studies course and she had
>> great difficulty getting her pupils watching any film earlier than
>> Pulp Fiction, and if it was in black and white, forget it.
> 
> Most young males are no longer Three Stooges fans?  That's hard
> to believe.
> 
>> Ironically, last time I saw the silent film Napoleon, it was shown
>> in a tinted print, which was how it was originally shown.  They had
>> to go back an investigate how silent films were tinted so that they
>> could duplicate it.
> 
> Weren't there any tinted prints of that movie remaining?

Film is a very unstable medium, and requires some rather expensive 
preservation. And on top of that, once talkies came in, lots of 
people assumed that silents had no value anymore and scrapped their 
prints. There are numerous silent films believed to be lost forever 
(Tod Browning's "London After Midnight," for example), and others 
that only exist because someone found a copy in their grandfather's 
attic in relatively good condition ("Nosferatu" suffered this fate, 
although that was as much because of a copyright dispute with the 
Stoker estate). Even the films that do exist are often chopped-up, 
and restorations require cobbling together different sources, and 
even so there are still pieces missing (the best version of 
"Metropolis" is still half an hour short of its original running 
time, and versions based upon the American release are half an hour 
shorter than that).