TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

No first-generation copies are known to exist of Sunrise (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1927), which explains the uneven quality of all surviving prints known so far; whatever is left of The Blue Bird (Maurice Tourneur, 1918) is a far cry from the lovingly tinted and toned copies originally made from the camera negative. When faced with these realities, collecting institutions have no other choice than to settle for what they have, in the hope that elements of better quality will eventually emerge. On rare occasions, their patience is rewarded by sheer coincidence, as happened in 1981 when a beautiful 35mm nitrate print of La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) was retrieved from the basement of a mental hospital in Norway.