For this list of lost films, a lost film is defined as one of which no part of a print is known to have survived. For films in which any portion of the footage remains (including trailers), see List of incomplete or partially lost films.
Films may go missing for a number of reasons. One major reason is the widespread use of nitrate film until the early 1950s. This type of film was extremely flammable, resulting in several fires, such as the 1967 MGM Vault fire and the 1937 Fox Pictures' vault fire. Nitrate film was also melted down for its silver content. Films may also become lost because production companies went bankrupt, or because no one thought the movies were worth saving. Occasionally studios would remake a film and destroy the earlier version.
This is necessarily an incomplete list. Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation claims that "half of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever." Deutsche Kinemathek estimates that 80-90% of silent movies are gone; the film archive's own list contains over 3500 lost films. While others dispute whether the percentage is quite that high, it is impractical to enumerate any but the more notable and those that can be sourced.
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—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935)
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—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)