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But good luck parsing out whos who.
(Could that be Jos sister Meg, near the center, in the flat shoes?)
The movie, save for this one surviving image, has been forever lost to the sands of time.Poof.Gone.
As a compulsive completist, I found this revelation startling: How could this have happened?
Whered the movies go?
And will they ever resurface?
As it stands, little is known about the first everLittle Womenmovie.
The copyright may only have been an American copyright.
Theres almost no information anywhere on that film.
The nextLittle Womenadaptation was an American one, and a well-promoted affair.
This silent film premiered in 1918 and received a wide release in early 1919,according to IMDb.
The prolific silent actress named Dorothy Bernard starred as Jo.
It was a big film, says Lorusso.
It got tons of publicity.
The home of Ralph Waldo Emerson was also shown.
Conrad Nagel was in it as Laurie he was soon to be a major MGM star.
They even allowed the film to be shot on location atOrchard House, Alcotts long-preserved home.
Everything was filmed there, under the watchful eyes of the Alcott family, Lorusso says.
The movie was distributed by Paramount and seems to have received robust support.
Every mother will want her daughter to see it.
Was it a hit?
And yet, despite such a positive reception, the film didnt survive the transition to talkies.
Theres no record of it having been rereleased anytime after 1919.
Brady shut down his film-production company around 1920.
Today there are listings for the 1918 film oneBayandAmazon Prime, but those are phony.
(As one Amazon reviewer protests: This is 1950 TV drama, not 1918 silent picture.)
Little Womennever reappeared after its initial run, Lorusso confirms.
Nobody knows what happened.
Logically speaking, its unlikely there remains any living person who saw this film more than a century ago.
I mean, it was 102 years ago, he adds.
Even a 5-year-old seeing the film would be 107 now.
Alas, my search yielded zero results.
The circumstances surrounding the first twoLittle Womenfilms are tragic but not unique.
Indeed, the history of early cinema is scattered with the bones of lost movies.
Alfred HitchcocksThe Mountain Eagle?
Fans of silent cinema have grown accustomed to this particular anguish.
The glut of lost films means that large swaths of film history are forever irretrievable.
The contributions of women behind the camera, too, are easily forgotten.
And this is the era that got hit the hardest by lack of preservation and decay.
In an email, film historian Brownlow identified five major causes of silent films becoming lost.
It was pretty much a throwaway kind of thing, Lorusso says.
It wasnt seen as art that needed to be preserved.
When the talkie era arrived, virtually nobody considered that silent films would have any value.
Often, studios would deliberately destroy the silent version of a film when they released a talkie version.
The lostLittle Womencould conceivably rise from the dead, particularly given the interest generated by Gerwigs film.
As we always say, a film is only lost until its found, Lorusso says.
Stranger things have happened.
In many cases, films presumed lost show up in foreign archives because of title changes.
In other words, 1918sLittle Womenmay have been shown in Europe under a different title, Lorusso speculates.
Consider, for instance, the story of the 1916Sherlock Holmes.
For nearly a century, this early adaptation of the mystery franchise was presumed lost.
(The movie itself, she says, turned out to be just a charming film.)
Its almost like a mystical experience, Fiore says.
This time that was lost, coming back to you.
These people who are no longer here, these things that no longer exist, these image captures.
