Arne Andersen was associated with Landmark College in Vermont for fourteen years, where he acts as Special Assistant to the Executive Vice President, as editor of the quarterly College newsletter, and where he led a film course. He holds a B.S. in Journalism from Boston University. Before that, he worked in medical administration, first at Boston's New England Medical Center, next at New York's Gracie Square Hospital, and finally at Vermont's Health Care and Rehabiliation Services. He has been retired since 2011.
Arne has been a film fan since before conception, his mother and his aunt having been avid moviegoers in the twenties and thirties. He was brought up on the classics and avidly took to the revival house movement, which began at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Mass practically his back yard.
In the course of his 58 years he has seen thousands of films, first through television and revival houses, then by visiting national archives, and finally by tracking down rare VHS prints via a private collector network. He has contributed hundreds of reviews to the Internet Movie Data Base and communicates with film fans world-wide, helping them track down their must-sees. His life long hobby has been to see every film ever nominated in every category by the Motion Picture Academy (except for short subjects and documentaries). To date of the 2600+ movies that entails, there are only seven extant he has not seen, all but one in the 1927-1920 release years.
Arne's love of silent film began when he saw his first (MGM's THE KISS with Greta Garbo) at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts during his college years. Since then he has seen over three hundred of the surviving silent films and is in contact with archivists and private collectors, who have done individual research into existing silent material the world over.
The lists of "lost silent and early sound films" constitute current opinion of this network as to what exists and what does not. This is never (nor can it ever be) a concrete list, as surprises are constantly popping up (note the recent reclamation of THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, BEYOND THE ROCKS, TWO ARABIAN KNIGHTS and THE RACKET) from oblivion and feared-lost status.
In the six years since this site was last updated (April 2009, status has changed for 84 films. A total of 60 films have been removed due to their being located in their entirety. A further 10 have notations that complete soundtrack Vitaphone discs have been discovered. Eight films have emerged as fragments, while a final six have survived in one to two reel lengths. This is all due, no doubt, to intrepid film connoisseurs and a concerted effort to discover, restore and maintain our silent and early talking film heritage. Good job! Keep up the good work!
These lists are merely "guidelines," primarily to separate what is known to have survived from what the experts fear to be gone forever. The greatest practical use for these lists is to prevent silent film fans from exhausting time and resources on seemingly fruitless missions to view that which is "lost" to us. A second use might be for those with time, money and resources at their disposal to narrow searches for identified "lost" films. Concrete lists of a director's or actor's work, for example, are more manageable than complete filmographies.
These lists are provided solely as an aid and resource for silent film fans. For anyone out there who can identify the location of a film on this list, we encourage you to contact this website so that we can both remove the film from the list and rejoice over its return to the fold.