Film Preservation Society

“Beyond The Rocks is a notable lost film. Silent film fan enthusiasts keep hoping that a print will surface somewhere but so far we can only look at the stills from the film and imagine what it was like.”

I found such sentences in a website which explains the status of “Beyond the Rocks”, however, surprisingly, the original nitrate projection print of this film has just been found and will be restored and shown by Dutch Filmmuseum, according to their press release dated of April 17th, 2004. For film fans, researchers and film archivists, this was not a forgotten film, but one of the most famous lost films, and that was why this discovery had a huge impact. On the same day, European media such as BBC broadcast details of this news and a few days later, even Japanese newspapers covered it, as did Dutch TV (VPRO)’s program called “R.A.M.” (You might know this program as its Takeshi Kitano special, shown on Japanese TV). As it was possible to get this kind of information from Japan through the internet in real time, though I couldn’t understand the language, I’ll introduce what I got, as best I can.

First of all, the story. It’s about a British woman, Theodora(Gloria Swanson) who got married unwillingly to a rich old man but is going to fall in love with a handsome young aristocratic man (Rudolf Valentino); the romantic love story…… just like a typical Valentino melodrama, it seems. “20 seiki America Eiga Jiten” edited by Akio Hata says this film was released May 1922 in the US and Japanese release was March 1923. The original novel of the same title was by Elinor Glyn, the script by Jack Cunningham and it was directed by Sam Wood. 8 reels in total. Swanson is famous for her outstanding performance in “Sunset Boulevard” which Paramount digitally restored in 2003, but just as with her role in that film, the peak of her career as a film star was in the silent era. This film was also the only time she worked together with that other silent film star Valentino.

Secondly, the process of this discovery. After the death of a film collector who had a tremendous amount of nitrate prints, his family donated more than 2000 cans of film to Filmmuseum, which was the start. In western archives, it’s common to put an accession number on each artwork at the very beginning of acquisition, and this number will never be changed or deleted, as opposed to location numbers, and the films are dealt with using this number in the process of inspection and cataloging. So, even if the film is going to be destroyed in the end, the accession number remains for good. “Beyond the Rocks” was for a while an unknown film, which only had an accession number. Later, archivists with gasmasks were opening rusty film cans whose labels could not even be read, and taking out film in horrible condition - sometimes deteriorating, with moss formed or misshapen without cores etc. - to check reel by reel, to reveal what they really were. The print just taken out from a can, seemed to be a feature film of the Dutch version, and the top title was read as “GOUDEN BOEIEN”. In the past, it was common to change the title or the characters’ names, and sometimes the ending scenes depending on the country in which a film was to be distributed, but fortunately, in this case the characters names were the same as in the English original. So when the archivist did a character name search on IMDb, using “Theodora played by Swanson”, the result appeared as “BEYOND THE ROCKS”. She didin’t believe that at first, but after repairing and putting the cans in proper order, it was the discovery of the complete print of the long lost film. If the first reel was lost or even if it had been almost complete but without the top credit, the identification might have been very difficult. By watching the TV program about this, I guessed the print is tinted in yellow in some parts, and there is a end title “EINDE”, and it looks as though some parts are badly deteriorated, and in some scenes emulsion is melting away, but probably the projection damage was not that bad, and the edge code seems to be the product of KODAK?

Not only celebrating the discovery of the lost film, but I think Filmmuseum was very consious about making the best use of this opportunity to broadcast the importance of film preservation activities. The archivist was showing her respect to film collectors in general, and clearly pointed out the importance of film collectors existence in the archival world, and the possibility of more discoveries thanks to them. Not by accident, nor through national strategy, this tragic love story was saved and is going to be revived on the screen purely through the deep love of a film fan.

(2004.06.01 from Sticky Tsushin Vol.18)