ABSTRACT
The acquisition of silent films has been beset by a particular problem: by the time the first film archives were established in the 1930s, a large part of the entire corpus of silent films had already perished or been destroyed (Meyer and Read, 2000: 2). This was also the period when the ‘talkies’ replaced silent cinema, which meant it was no longer possible to acquire silent films from distributors after they were withdrawn from circulation. As a consequence, the NHFA – as EYE was called at the time – was dependent on the resources of private individuals who had built up collections of silent films in the past (Mallon, 2006).
