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Why so much cinema has been lost forever
- Arts & culture
We've been making motion pictures for well over 100 years, but an incalculable number of films have vanished: destroyed in noxious fires, lost in estates, even traded as war booty. A new book tells the stories of these doomed productions, from the early silent film era right through to our digital age of 'cloud' storage. Guest: Simon Miraudo, writer and film critic, author 'Last Rites for Lost Films: Charred Celluloid, Digital Decay and the Certain Death of Cinema', Low Heroes PressProducer: Jack Schmidt Get in touch: Email us at [email protected]
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B2 · Upper-intermediate
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It's called Round Hay Garden Scene and it lasts about a second. That we've got it is
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Is this episode right for you?
B2 · Upper-intermediate
Comfortable if you already follow TV news
- 82% of the words are B1 or easier.
- 169 words a minute: natural, fairly fast speech.
- 136 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.
Transcript
The opening of the episode. The whole transcript is in the player.
harder words (B2+)
The first surviving motion picture was shot 138 years ago. You can watch it on your laptop. It's called Round Hay Garden Scene and it lasts about a second. That we've got it is a miracle because so little early film survives. Not just talking about early primitive films but entire films, later on even Oscar nominees, are gone. Some burnt in fires, accidental
or deliberate, others were melted down by film studios because they wanted to clear the racks to make way for the new films, the talkies. And many more films are simply missing, never catalogued, reviewed, we know they were made, we know they were shown, but they have just evaporated. Australia is a guilty party I'm afraid to say, home
to the first feature film ever made, the 1906 story of the Kelly Gang, of which only a few scraps are now available to watch. Simon Mirado is a writer and film tragic with a fascination for history's lost cinema. His latest book is a kind of elegy to what's gone. It's called Last Rights for Lost Films, and Simon joins me from the ABC's Perth Studios. Simon,
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