Footage from long-lost 1917 epic ‘Cleopatra’ emerges

Roughly 30 seconds of footage from the long-lost 1917 film version of “Cleopatra” has been located.

Frame enlargements from the film, which starred Theda Bara as the Egyptian queen, were identified in the “Lost Cleopatra” forum on Facebook by Nicholas Inglis, an Australian lawyer and film memorabilia collector, who noticed a posting in another Facebook forum where a film collector was seeking help to identify the source production. It is not immediately clear where the footage emerged from or whether additional fragments exist; the newly discovered footage has yet to be digitized for online presentation.

“Cleopatra” was one of the biggest box office hits of its time, thanks in large part to Bara”™s risqué costumes and the epic grandeur of the production. The last known copies of “Cleopatra” were destroyed in a 1937 fire at a New Jersey warehouse that stored the Fox Film Corp. silent films and in a 1940s fire at the Museum of Modern Art”™s film archives. Only a 20-second fragment of footage survived (see below), and in 1980 the American Film Institute named “Cleopatra” as one of the 10 most wanted lost films of all time.

Photo courtesy of “Lost Cleopatra” on Facebook