No intern task is too small. Not getting coffee, not running errands and certainly not rummaging through piles of old films only to dig up a long-lost piece of history.
When Dan Martin was asked to sort through dozens of old film cans, some of which were rusted shut, at Historic Films Archive, a stock-footage library on Long Island, he was happy to do the unglamorous work. He described the company’s climate-controlled storage vault as a “dark, concrete basement” flush with films.
“This is the sort of thing that you go to school for as a film preservation student,” said Martin, 26, who is studying at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Standing in the vault during the final week of his internship last August, Martin could have picked his next stack of films from any number of shelves. The one he happened to select included a remarkable discovery: five film cans containing 16-millimeter film of “The Heart of Lincoln,” a 1922 picture that was one of more than 7,000 silent films considered lost by the Library of Congress.
“The Heart of Lincoln,” directed by and starring Francis Ford, was among roughly 10,000 films donated about 20 years ago from a university in the Midwest, said Joe Lauro, the owner of Historic Films Archive. “Most of the films from that collection were educational films that were shown in classrooms,” he said. Those films were typically discarded by the institutions when they became worn out.
It is the second Lincoln film by Ford — a pioneer in early Hollywood and the older brother of John Ford, the Oscar-winning director — that has been found in recent years. In 2010, a copy of his “When Lincoln Paid” (1913) was discovered by a contractor during a demolition of a New Hampshire barn.
Francis Ford played Lincoln nine times in the silent films he directed, including “The Heart of Lincoln,” a one-hour film that follows a young Lincoln seeking shelter in the home of a widow during a terrible storm. Years later, during the Civil War, that widow’s son is captured by the Yankees and is accused of being a spy. The widow goes to see Lincoln, who commutes his sentence and saves his life. Lincoln also signs the Emancipation Proclamation in the film.
The discovery provides important context to a director and actor who helped shape movie history but has been largely forgotten. A report published in 2013 by the Council on Library and Information Resources found that 70 percent of feature-length silent films made in America have been lost to time and neglect.
“There are so few of Francis Ford films extant that this was doubly delightful to find,” said Kathy Fuller-Seeley, a professor of media history at the University of Texas at Austin and an academic expert on Ford.
Lincoln was a historical figure the Ford brothers regularly visited in their work, Fuller-Seeley said. “He loved to impersonate Lincoln,” she said of Francis Ford, who also loved making pictures about the Civil War.
In 1917, Ford quit Universal Pictures and started his own brick-and-mortar studio. In need of money after his business manager began stealing from him, Fuller-Seeley said, he returned to the plot of a film he made in 1915, also called “The Heart of Lincoln.” The newer title is a full remake with an added prologue.
“He was writing his own scenarios or scripts, and let’s just say coming up with new ideas was not his strong point,” Fuller-Seeley said. “So he took a plot he knew well, and he reshot the thing.”
One crucial piece of evidence that the film Martin unearthed is the 1922 version is the presence of Ford’s son Philip as a young soldier. He would not have been in California when the original version was made.
The discovery was an exciting one for Martin, who is now interning at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Virginia.
“This isn’t a very common thing to come across,” he said. “You could be a film archivist and, you know, never come across a film of historic or cultural value like this.”
The version of “The Heart of Lincoln” that Martin found was in good condition and eventually cleaned and digitized. Brief clips were screened at a film preservation festival in Sag Harbor, N.Y., Lauro said, but it is not yet ready to be shown to the public. Lauro said he planned to have a score composed and would then have the film restored and enhanced.
Not many people have seen “The Heart of Lincoln” since it was released more than a century ago. In 1922, it played for only a day at various movie theaters.
“It wasn’t a big blockbuster hit, but people loved patriotic stories and stories about Abraham Lincoln,” Fuller-Seeley said. “So, you know, it did all right.”
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