Regeneration

I would have preferred to write this review without giving this film a numerical rating, because it just about doesn't exist any more. All but one reel is missing and of that single reel, about 80 percent is gone. Nitrate decomposition has gotten almost everything but about a minute at the beginning and some of the titles. That's a bit strange, because title sequences were usually printed on a cheaper film stock and, with black backgrounds for the white letters, with more silver nitrate, there was a greater chance for chemical reactions with the nitrate film stock.

The IMDb, however, does not let me write in the comments section without rating the film, so I have assigned it a placeholder rating of 5. I have done this to write something about this movie I want you to read.

if you are reading this, you have a great interest in old films. They all need your help if this important record of who we have been is to survive. Please do what you can to help. Otherwise, no one will be able to see even this almost vanished record.

Regeneration (1923)

Sadly, this 1923 film is just one of thousands that are currently lost. The survival rate of silents are extremely low but they're even lower for these type of race pictures. Thankfully one reel survives but it's in such poor condition that there's actually only a couple minutes of footage that you can actually see. The decomposition is really bad on the reel so the majority of the eleven-minute running time is just ugly footage that is in such bad shape that you can't even see anything. As the disc warns, this is exactly why we need film preservation so that other films or fragments can at least be saved for future film buffs. This footage can be found on Kino's Pioneers of African-American Cinema.