"Outright destruction, neglect and basic deterioration" is to blame, lamented Patrick Loughney, curator of motion pictures at the George Eastman House in Rochester, one of the largest film archives in the United States. In the 1920s, many studios considered their movies to be mere products that could be discarded once they had earned money.
Loughney applauded the discovery of Beyond the Rocks because it gives "context to one of the least understood eras of American film history."
As the director Martin Scorsese says in a videotaped introduction to Tuesday night's showing, it was one of the first movies to feature two major stars. "That alone makes the discovery of Beyond the Rocks a noteworthy event," he says.
The film's unlikely savior was the collector Joop van Liempd, himself something of a legendary figure in his home city of Haarlem.
Van Liempd was a loner who has remained as much of a mystery to curators as many of the crumbling films he collected. By the time of his death in 2000 at the age of 87, he had amassed an enormous collection of film canisters that, fearing for their safety, he spread out over at least five locations, friends said.
But few of the canisters were labeled and many, archivists say, had never been opened. Some -- surprisingly given their flammability -- were stored next to a gas heater, museum officials said.
Jan van den Brink, a Filmmuseum curator, suspects that van Liempd might never have seen Beyond the Rocks, at least not the copy in his collection.
"With 2,000 cans of film, you can't see them all," van den Brink said. "It would have taken a lifetime."
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