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
