The Life of General Villa

Like maybe hundreds of other movies that marked the birth of one of the greatest forms of art accessible to the masses; this movie is simply lost forever. Lets hope that a copy turns up in a Siberian landfill under the permafrost someday.

Movies were considered consumables in their day, if the studio couldn't make any more money on it, why spend any money to save or archive a copy? With highly volatile film stock it just didn't make economic sense to preserve these gems. Back then they treated movies as they did the live theatre, once the take at the box office started falling off, you'd change the venue for a new one and when you ran out of new venues you would completely abandon the old production and move on to a new script.

I have to wonder about this because two film giants thought enough about the production to understand its historical iportance as the first motion picture filming of life battle sequences. That fact alone might have by itself convinced Griffith of the pictures importance to posterity. Historically speaking this film would have been at least as important as 'Birth of a Nation,' a picture so controversial that I'm honestly surprised it didn't get purposefully destroyed. There remains hope at least vestiges of this picture survive in some obscure archive but whether the remains can be salvaged is another story.