It’s a game cinephiles hate to play, lost and found, with the emphasis on lost. Yet films thought to be lost have been found . . . and some lost films remain lost. We found In Search of Lost Films (BearManor Media, $29.95/$19/95), a new book that investigates how an extraordinary number of important films are believed to be lost forever.

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 films are gone;^[5] the film archive’s own list contains over 3500 lost films. A study by the Library of Congress states that 75% of  all silent films are now lost.  An interesting note: No prints of Nobody Ordered Love (1972) exist; director Robert Hartford-Davis ordered all prints to be destroyed upon the his death. This film is on the BFI 75 Most Wanted list.

How could this happen? And is it possible to recover these missing gems? In this new book, noted film critic and journalist Phil Hall details circumstances that resulted in these productions being erased from view. For anyone with a passion for the big screen, In Search of Lost Films provides an unforgettable consideration of a cultural tragedy.Spanning from the early days of the silent movies to as late as the ’70s and touching all corners of the global film experience, groundbreaking works of significant historical and artistic importance are gone. Cinema icons including Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Oscar Micheaux and Vincente Minnelli are among those impacted by this tragedy, and pioneering technological achievements in color cinematography, sound film technology, animation and widescreen projection are among the lost treasures.