70% of 11,000 silent movies made in America between 1912 and 1930 have been lost Not a trace remains of three quarters of the films that were made Movies lost include Cleopatra from 1917 and The Great Gatsby from 1926 Study carried out by Library of Congress in Washington By Tom Leonard Hollywood's golden age of silent film has largely gone forever. The vast majority of feature-length silent movies made in the U.S. over the past 100 years have been lost due to decay and neglect, according to a new study that will horrify cinema lovers. In the first comprehensive survey of silent films, the Library of Congress in Washington discovered that not a trace remains of three quarters of the films that were made. A film still from Beyond the Rocks with actors Rudolph Valentino (right) and Gloria Swanson made in 1922. It was found after 75 years but sadly thousands of other silent movies remain lost Of the nearly 11,000 feature films made between 1912 and 1930, only 14 percent still exist in their original format. A further 11 percent of the films only exist as lower-quality formats or foreign versions. The casualties include some of the most memorable films of the era. Notable movies now considered lost include 'Cleopatra' from 1917, 'The Great Gatsby' from 1926, Lon Chaney's 'London After Midnight' from 1927, and 'The Patriot' from 1928. The losses were partly attributed to the fact that the nitrate film stock was very vulnerable to fire and deterioration. But the study also blamed the movie industry's tendency - with the honourable exception of the MGM studio - to neglect or simply destroy prints and negatives. A return: Oscar-winning film The Artist with Jean Dujardin as George and Berenice Bejo as Peppy Cinema-going was the most popular form of entertainment in the 1920s, before either network radio or television. In the US alone, a country of 116 million people notched up average cinema admissions of 46 million a week. As movingly portrayed in the 2011 Oscar-winning silent film The Artist, this soundless era and its stars were swept aside by the arrival of the 'talkies' - movies with sound. Historian and archivist David Pierce, who conducted the study for the library, said few other defunct art forms have the resonance of silent films. 'It's a lost style of storytelling, and the best of the films are as effective with audiences today as they were when they were initially released,' he said. Films featuring early stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Mary Pickford still exist When you take away dialogue from a narrative story, it actually puts quite a challenge upon the creative people involved to tell the story entirely in a visual fashion. And it's that limitation which makes the films so effective.' Films featuring early stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Mary Pickford still exist. Archives such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Library of Congress have been preserving early films for decades. But for every classic film that survives, the study notes, half a dozen have been lost. Conservationists hope foreign archives and private collections might be able to help identify other remaining films that can be saved. Librarian of Congress James Billington said America had lost much of the creative record from an era that brought its films to the heights of cinematic achievement. 'The loss of American silent-era feature films constitutes an alarming and irretrievable loss to our nation's cultural record,' he said.