Most Wanted: BFI searches for missing films

The British Film Institute is asking the public to help it find 75 lost British films. A similar appeal back in 1992 located 16 films that had not made it into any archive. Robin Baker, head curator at the BFI's national archive, explains how people can help it find the movies here.

Film history is littered with tales of films destroyed, junked or lost, whether through laboratory fires, production companies going bankrupt or because they were simply no longer seen as commercially valuable. Most films of the silent period are gone - once sound came in, no one imagined silent films would ever be of interest again. Early cellulose nitrate prints, still in use until 1951, contained small amounts of silver and when films came to the end of their run, they were often melted down to remove the precious metal. There are also more sinister tales of prints deliberately destroyed by studios when they obtained the rights to remake a title, as MGM tried to do with the 1940 version of Gaslight.

The BFI National Archive is committed to filling the gaps in the national collection and is asking the nation to help them; the list of 75 'Most Wanted' British films contains titles they would like to preserve and make available. So this is a call to arms to the public as well as collectors and archivists around the world - check attics and cellars, sheds and vaults and let the hunt begin for the BFI Most Wanted.

More information at BFI website here.

Original story BBC Radio 4 Today Programme here.