Silent Treasures From the New Zealand Film Archive A dozen long-vanished films again see the light of day in the new DVD anthology from the National Film Preservation Foundation, "Lost and Found: American Treasures From the New Zealand Film Archive." A few have big names attached to them - John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Mabel Normand - but every movie here has its own fascination, some for social and historical reasons, others as entertainment pure and simple. They are a varied lot, ranging in date from 1914 to 1929, and in length from under a minute to full-scale features. What these films do have in common is that, as recently as four years ago, no one outside the small circle of film collectors who had originally acquired them knew they existed. They all belonged to the legions of missing and presumed lost movies of the silent era, a category that includes at least three-quarters of all silent features, and even higher for short films. It always seems a bit miraculous when lost films resurface; for so many to turn up at once in the same place is a phenomenon of biblical proportions. These films, along with many more (176 in all) that are still in the cataloging and preservation pipeline, were quietly residing in the New Zealand Film Archive when Brian Meacham, an archivist for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, dropped by its Wellington headquarters during a vacation. He was confronted with a trove of nitrate prints of non-New Zealand titles that the young institution had yet to preserve (understandably, the New Zealanders were focused on their own national cinema). Mr. Meacham soon discovered that the collection contained a large number of American movies held by no other archive, thanks to a quirk of early film distribution. Where films are normally returned to the studios that made them once their commercial life is over, it was considered too expensive to ship used prints back to the United States after they'd finished their antipodal careers (Australia is also proving to be a good hunting ground for lost American movies). Abandoned by their owners, many films fell into the hands of collectors, whose libraries were eventually deposited with the national archive. The New Zealand find made headlines when it was announced in 2010. Responsibility for repatriating the American films was assumed by the National Film Preservation Foundation, the nonprofit, charitable affiliate of the Library of Congress's National Film Preservation Board. I am a member of the board, and have served on grant panels for the foundation, though none related to this project. With support from several public and private institutions, including the Hollywood studios that retained copyright to some of the titles, the films are being preserved by the foundation's five archival partners: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; George Eastman House; the Library of Congress; the Museum of Modern Art; and the University of California, Los Angeles, Film & Television Archive. The present disc presents highlights from the first group of films to be reclaimed, while the project continues; more are available for streaming at the foundation's Web site: filmpreservation.org. Others will be added as they become available. Although the films on the DVD come from different eras of film exhibition - embracing the evolution from storefront nickelodeons with their programs of one- and two-reel narratives to the movie palaces of the 1920s, with their full-length features and live orchestras - the types here suggest the breadth of a typical evening at the movies during the silent era. The program opens with a travelogue, though one of an unusual sort: "Lyman H. Howe's Famous Ride on a Runaway Train," the 1921 version of a concept that Howe, a traveling showman who worked the Northeast, filmed several times. The picture is a pure thrill ride, with the camera attached to the front of a train hurtling around hairpin turns and down steep mountainsides, creating the same exhilaratingly vertiginous effect that the makers of "This Is Cinerama" would replicate with a roller coaster in 1952 (and which digital 3-D continues to exploit today). Animated cartoons, which had become a staple of the program by 1914, are represented by Paul Terry's 1923 "Happy-Go-Luckies," featuring the overlooked team of Henry Cat and Fido Dog. The educational component is provided by a sponsored film, "Birth of a Hat: The Art and Mystery of Making Fur Felt Hats," produced around 1920 by the John B. Stetson Company. "The Love Charm" (1928) is a one-reel novelty produced to show off an improvement in the two-color process then being developed by the Technicolor corporation. Serials came into existence in the early teens as producers began to struggle with the storytelling limitations of one- and two-reel narratives. "The Chinese Fan" is Chapter 5 of "The Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies," a 1914 Edison serial centered, like many of the first chapter plays, on a fearless young woman, in this case a reporter played by Mary Fuller. From the same year, "Won in a Cupboard" is a Keystone comedy starring, directed and most likely written by the no-less-fearless Mabel Normand, all of 21 at the time. A short trailer for John Ford's lost "Strong Boy," from 1929, introduces the disc's centerpiece, a tinted print of Ford's five-reel feature of 1927, "Upstream."