Those lists are not in anyway complete or representative and just include films famous enough thst people notice they're gone and discuss them. Say, noticeably missing films from famous actors or movies famous for being lost in studio fires.

It's not a myth at all that only a minority ofnthrnfilms produced on the silent wra have come down to us.

Early films were rapidly produced and wernt necessarily taken very seriously as a an art form. It's maybe easier to think of lot of early film as the equivalent of youtube or tik tok. Film is difficult and expensive to maintaining some forms are super flamable and unstable. Imagine a random tiktokthst cost monet to stop it from combusting or rotting.

There alao matter that of that minority that survived, an even smaller minority are viewable in any way, especially online. There are more films in archives or that survive as fragments, but most aren't around, and there are many that no one alive today knew existed at all.

Think of thr thousands of movies made that get submitted to film festivals today and don't get picked up for distribution. Or all the random terrible horror films that went straight to vhs or dumped on prine video now. If the last copy of them goes missing or gets burned or gets destroyed in a world war, a 100 years from now who would know that Zombie Strippers 4: Blood Tease ever existed?

>there is actually should be a guy who knew that exactly these films are lost so he should know the names of it right

He is dead. Or more important, they are.

Films were never looked at as a long term thing back then, movies were completed in days & because of how volatile the film stock was, they would burn the film.

They never intended people to watch them over a 100 years later, so they pumped out stuff & it was gone before you knew it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films

Seems to me a reasonable estimate. When you only have 2/3 of one of the filmography of the most popular film-makers of the era, and literally thousands of films lost according the archives, I don't doubt that at least half and up to 80% as a reasonable estimate.

There are 147 missing episodes of the BBC TV show Doctor Who. The BBC didn't take care to preserve past episodes until the mid-1970s. I know that's TV. I think by then people were taking more care to preserve feature films. But it's still astounding to us today that they didn't look after episodes of one of their most popular dramas. The relevance of this, if it has any, is that it's therefore entirely credible to me that before 1930 or so, people weren't hanging on to films systematically as they would today.

There's a semi-documentary called "Dawson City - Frozen Time" that I highly recommend.

Dawson City in the Yukon was the last stop for a lot of film reels during the Gold Rush. By the time they got there, the relatively fragile nitrate films were often a little tatty, and the subject films weren't commercial enough anymore to be worth transporting any further, so they just disposed of them. But it was just one spoke on the wheel, plenty of other cities would have been the dead end for film reels like that.

In the seventies, a trove of these old dumped films happened to be discovered where there had once been an indoor swimming pool and ice rink. They had used the old pit as a dump to infill it for the rink, and the local permafrost happened to preserve a bunch of the film.

Many of the films recovered, even in their incomplete state, simply do not exist anywhere else, or weren't even known to exist. As I understand it, a number are completely unidentified - that is, we have part of the film, but we have no idea who is in it or what it's called or who made it.

That's just one city, and just a fraction of the films that one city would have disposed of, and we only have them due to civil and environmental happenstance.

It's not a myth, that stuff was just considered disposable, and it was disposed of.

>myth

It isn’t a myth.

>Wikipedia

If you read a something like this on Wikipedia:

>Most lost films are from the silent film and early talkie era, from about 1894 to 1930.[7] Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation estimates that more than 90% of American films made before 1929 are lost,[8] and the Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films are lost forever.[9]

You can click on links embedded in in the citations, which will take you to articles like these:

https://www.film-foundation.org/columbus-dispatch

https://variety.com/2013/film/news/library-of-congress-only-14-of-u-s-silent-films-survive-1200915020/amp/

which play out the Wiki’s claims.

>there is actually should be a guy

Here is the basic idea: a film historian named David Pierce looked up old film studio release schedules and catalogued and decided that 10,919 films were released before 1929. Pierce was only able to find ~1500 of these films in their original format. He was able to find non-original copies of another ~1200 films.

This feature article about the US Library of Congress’ efforts to digitized film gives some frustrating reasons for why those movies were lost:

https://whyy.org/segments/difficulties-with-digital-leave-old-school-film-archivists-reeling/

You can look at all the trade journals and fan magazines from the 1900s onward to make a estimation of all the movies that were released. This is how know of the non existence of these movies.

https://mediahistoryproject.org/collections/fan-magazines/