The Lost World (1925)
(Harry O. Hoyt, US 1925, 90 min., 35mm)
The crowning achievement of Ed Stratmann’s career at the George Eastman Museum, the restoration of The Lost World took over a decade to complete. Most of the surviving prints of the film were truncated 16mm Kodascope versions. (Kodascope was the film rental arm of Eastman Kodak in the 1920s and 1930s.) Although the museum owned some material, there was still over half an hour missing from the original release. Stratmann’s research took years and involved film archives on multiple continents, including a foreign release print in the Czech Republic, footage that had been repurposed as stock footage in New York City, and hundreds of feet of material at the Library of Congress. All of these were printed (and blown back up to 35mm when necessary) so that Stratmann could painstakingly edit and re-create the original release version as closely as possible, finally completing the restoration in 1997. The film itself is the first adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel about an Amazonian expedition to find a land where creatures thought to be extinct, including dinosaurs, still roamed the earth. The stunning stop-motion animation effects created by Willis O’Brien led directly to his work on King Kong and Son of Kong eight years later.
Live piano accompaniment by Dr. Philip C. Carli