Archival Spaces

402: F is For Fake

Archival Spaces 402:

Film Preservation Hoaxes

Uploaded 28 June 2026

**Filmmaker Colin McKenzie in *Forgotten Silver* (1995)**

Recently, a story circulated on the net that a film archivist at the Carnegie Library in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Rebecca Lang, had found an unlabeled film canister in the basement, which turned out to be a previously unknown silent film from 1923 with Buster Keaton. The “nearly complete 35mm nitrate print” was The Forgotten Signal, found “along with original distribution notes and a handwritten letter from the local theater owner who had stored it there in 1928.” The sensational news spread like wildfire through the virtual biosphere, as Buster Keaton fans and film historians wondered why no such title could be found in any existing Keaton filmography, nor had the film been copyrighted. According to the source, “the Library of Congress and the Academy Film Archive confirmed the print was of high historical value,” because it contained scenes and gags not found in any known surviving examples of Keaton’s work. Finally, the discovery demonstrated that important cultural artifacts could be found in the most ordinary places. Less than twenty-four hours later, the lost Keaton film was proven to be a hoax.

It was film preservationist Paul E. Gierecke who in a post on 18 May on Facebook exposed the hoax, noting that a anonymous FB poster (Uhhgv622) specialized in sensationalized stories “touting the discovery of rare, lost, or unknown materials, e.g. a lost recording studio hidden behind a wall in a theater, a rediscovered silent film studio, discovery of a lost Buster Keaton film;” even established film historians have fallen prey to his/her hoaxes. Before Paul’s post, other commentators had questioned the authenticity, noting that the frames depicted in the accompanying image of the story were printed horizontally on the film, as if it were Vistavision, a historical impossibility in 1923. As Paul noted, this was AI nonsense, a con, a scam. To prove his point, he included an AI image of a Keaton photographic contact sheet, created by another FB prankster, David B. Pearson, who also specializes in fake AI images of silent movie stars:

All this brouhaha would be eminently forgettable if it circulated only among film historians and buffs who would immediately recognize the hoax, but film preservation and archiving have now entered the public consciousness, so the average consumer may not recognize such fabrications. In fact, we are now inundated with AI images of supposedly historical and/or contemporary events. Who is to know?

Peter Jackson in *Forgotten Silver (1995)*

More than 50 years ago, Orson Welles warned about art forgeries and hoaxes in his film, F is for Fake (1973); Welles had, of course, also staged his own elaborate hoax in 1938 with the radio show, The War of the Worlds. All this reminds me of the most sensational film preservation hoax, perpetuated by New Zealand filmmakers, Costa Botes and Peter Jackson, in Forgotten Silver (1995). First screened in October 1995 on New Zealand’s TV ONE, the program was accompanied by an interview with Peter Jackson in the magazine, New Zealand Listener, explaining how a collection of 35mm nitrate reels had been found in the shed of his late neighbor. The “lost history” of the pioneering New Zealand filmmaker, Colin McKenzie, caused a sensation, prompting scores of letters from people enraptured by the discovery of New Zealand films from before/after World War I, before any filmmaking by natives had been documented. Numerous film experts, including Leonard Maltin, attested to the find’s historical veracity. The day following the broadcast, the “mockumentary” was exposed as a hoax, but nevertheless went on to be screened at countless film festivals and even won prizes.

Born in 1888, McKenzie supposedly began making and screening films at age 12, projecting images with a bicycle-powered system and home-made film emulsion from egg whites (see Lumiere’s autochromes). In 1903, he filmed a successful flight before the Wright Brothers. He produced the first feature-length sound film in 1908, The Warrior Season (Oskar Messter created sound films in 1903). He and his brother used red berries from the (fictional) photina acquafolium to manufacture the first color film in 1911. During World War I, his brother shot footage at the Battle of Gallipoli, before he was killed in action.

His greatest epic, Salome, was more than ten years in the making, lost since 1931, until it was found in a secret vault in the New Zealand jungle, beneath monumental sets, also uncovered after 60 years. His life ended in a battle during the Spanish Civil War, the camera capturing the moment of his death. Forgotten Silver’s last twelve minutes document the world premiere of Salome, a retelling of the well-known biblical tale, at least what was left of the unfinished film. The film starred his brother’s wife, whom he married after his sibling’s death.

Director and Star/Wife in *Forgotten Silver*

Jackson, who was responsible for creating all the historical footage, is a master of cinematic deception. For the untrained eye, Salome looks like a 1920s biblical epic, except the camerawork is too busy and the actors’ faces too modern. The fake newsreel footage of early air flight, Gallipoli and the Spanish Civil War is even more convincing, unless you know that newsreel cameramen knew better than to film in the line of fire. Yet, there are also narrative inconsistencies, and other preposterous “facts.” But Peter Jackson learned his lessons well and would apply them to colorizing, distorting, and even falsifying the footage from the Battle of the Somme in They Shall Not Grow Old (2018).

400: Novels to Film

Archival Spaces 400:

Frank Borzage’s Little Man, What Now? (1934)

Uploaded 29 May 2026

Margaret Sullavan, Douglass Montgomery, Alan Hale in *Little Man, What Now?*

I recently read Hans Fallada’s world bestseller, Kleiner Mann – was Nun? (Little Man, What Now?), published in June 1932, just months before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The version now available in paperback in German is 25% longer (100 pages) than the original, which the German press had self-censored, removing with the author’s consent, sections dealing with Nazi anti-Semitism and a frank sexuality. Considered a masterpiece of New Realism, due to its exact description of the lower middle classes, caught in the throes of the Depression, the novel was further censored by Joseph Goebbels, then re-published in 1947, going through 45 printings and translated into twenty languages. It was also adapted to film in Germany in 1933 by Fritz Wendhausen with Hertha Thiele and Hans Thimig, but heavily censored, and in Hollywood in 1934 by Universal’s Carl Laemmle Jr. and Frank Borzage, starring Douglass Montgomery and Margaret Sullavan.

I have seldom read a novel about the late Weimar Republic that portrays with unrelenting precision the country’s Kleinbürger, their racism, their false sense of propriety, their hatred of the working classes, their sense of victimhood, so much like Trump and MAGA. The novel’s “hero,” Hans Pinneberg, is not very bright, constantly doing really stupid things, like spending 80% of his salary after a long period of employment on a completely superfluous dressing table; he worries excessively about what others think about him and is completely passive-aggressive, even towards his wife, Emma. “Lambkin,” as she is called throughout the novel, is a total innocent, even less intelligent than her husband, not very pretty, as her husband keeps telling himself, and easily manipulated, but votes for the Communists, like her father. After Hans loses his job in their small town, the couple moves to Berlin into the flat of his mother, who turns out to be a madam running an informal brothel. The social slide continues when they first move into an illegal flat above a furniture warehouse, and then into a garden colony outside Berlin, reminiscent of the one in Kuhle Wampe (1932), also starring Hertha Thiele. The novel ends, however, on an ever so slight note of hope, when Hans and Lämmchen reaffirm their love for each other.

*The Mortal Storm* (1940) with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan

One assumes that it was that love in the face of adversity that drew Frank Borzage to the novel. Andrew Sarris once characterized Borzage as an elusive romanticist with a profound commitment to love over probability. And indeed, while Borzage’s films such as The Seventh Heaven (1927), Lucky Star (1929), A Farewell to Arms (1932), History is Made at Night (1937), and The Mortal Storm (1940) have been praised for exactly those qualities, Little Man, What Now? has been called corny and “just so far over the top”(Nitrateville). Such a reading, however, is superficial and does not do justice to the films’ (albeit contradictory) layers of meaning.

Montgomery, Sullavan in *Little Man, What Now?*

Borzage’s Little Man, What Now is surprisingly faithful to the novel, even if the film makes little effort to portray Weimar Germany realistically. The pre-code film, released a month before Joseph Breen began strict enforcement of the Hays Code, opens when the unmarried Hans and Lämmchen learn from a gynecologist that she is pregnant. They marry, as announced by music in the train station, but must keep the marriage secret because he works for Kleinholz, a grain wholesaler, who only hires single men trying to marry off his daughter. Hans quits in anger when Marie badmouths his wife, believing her to be only a sexual fling. The film’s second third takes place in Berlin, after the couple relocates to mother Mia Pinneberg’s large flat, where she runs a gentleman’s service although neither realizes it, until his colleague at Mandel’s men’s store reads an advertisement to the group. In the film’s final third, Lämmchen finds them a new flat above Herr Puttbreese’s furniture warehouse. The con man Holger Jachmann, Mia’s pimp and lover, who had helped the couple financially, visits them after Hans has been fired and affords them a night on the town, before he is arrested in a nightclub. Inexplicably, those scenes had been excised from the novel’s shortened version, so how did they end up in the film?

As in the novel, Pinneberg has anger management issues, breaking dishes at least twice in frustration and attacking a colleague; he is characteristic of his social class, which identifies and dresses as bourgeois, but is actually exploited, a member of the white-collar working class. Interestingly, both Douglass Montgomery and Hans Thimig in the German film read as slightly effeminate, weak males who are beaten down by the system and are unable to fight back. Margaret Sullavan, on the other hand, who would star in no less than four films for Borzage, is, despite her naïve character, both luminous and a strong woman who even manages to outsmart her landlord. She fights for their love when he despairs. They are surrounded by mostly despicable characters, although the charming Jachmann and Heilbutt, Hans’ colleague at Mandel’s, prove the exception. Alan Hale, in particular, is a delightful rascal as Jachmann.

Known to be a conservative Catholic, Borzage’s politics bleed into the film, in contrast to Fallada’s more leftist and pacifist worldview. Fallada was a Social Democrat, although he later made his peace with the Third Reich, publishing throughout the period. The film telegraphs Borzage’s politics: A vaguely left-wing orator preaching equality and taking down the rich actually opens the film, establishing the anti-left messages to follow. Several characters advocate for knowing one’s place and accepting it. Borzage ends his film with Hans being knocked down by police during a Communist demonstration, and is afraid to go home, where his child has just been born. The novel ends similarly, but there a cop knocks him down for simply failing to move on in his shabby clothes. Nazis are almost invisible in both novel and film, except that in the novel, we learn that Pinneberg actually loses his job because he has been unjustly denounced at Mandels as a Nazi. At the same time, institutions of power are shown to be insensitive, even hostile to little men, including Mandel and Lehman, who are subject to antisemitic slurs in the novel. Surprisingly, the Jewish Heilbutt emigrates to Amsterdam, a covert nod in the film to the many Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany to Holland after 1933, although no reason is given for his emigration.

Thanks to archival research, Fallada’s handwritten manuscript of Kleiner Mann – was nun? was recovered and deciphered – parts were written in almost illegible Suetterlin script -, making the new expanded edition possible. Unfortunately, the German film version seems irretrievably lost, denying us the possibility of a comparative analysis of two very different cultures adapting the same novel to the screen.

The costly dressing table in *Little Man, What Now?*

399: Degenerate Art, the Exhibition

Archival Spaces:

Bonfires of the Humanities

Uploaded: 15 May 2026

**Exhibition “Degenerate Art” at the Galeriegebäude, Munich Hofgarten (1937)**

I’ve been combing through my papers before I send them on to the George Eastman Museum, and I stumbled across my review of Degenerate Art. The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, curated by Stephanie Barron and exhibited in 1991 in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. From today’s P.O.V., it was a seminal exhibit, not only because it addressed in a completely interdisciplinary way, and for the first time for Americans, the anti-Semitic and anti-modernist policies of the Third Reich, but also the lessons it had for Reaganite America. Reading the review today, I’m even more struck by the parallels between Germany 1937, America 1991, and DJT’s reign today. In this context, the exhibition “Degenerate Art” was not just an historical look at avant-garde painting, film, literature, music, and photography, but a powerful political comment on the state of art in culture in America in the 1990s (and today).

Organized by Stephanie Barron, curator of twentieth-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum, this exhibition was five years in the making. It attempted to reconstruct one of the most infamous modern art exhibitions of all time, Entartete Kunst, organized by the Nazi art bureaucrats in 1937 and shown in Munich and twelve other German cities in the following four years. Having confiscated over 16,000 paintings, sculptures, and drawings, representing some of the finest Expressionist, Dadaist, New Realist, and Constructivist art in Europe, the Nazis put on display 650 of those works, which they thought best symbolized the crimes of modern art against the political, moral, and religious sensibilities of Germans. Unbelievably, the original exhibit was eventually seen by three million people, making it the most popular exhibition of modern art of all time. The contradictions inherent in such a monstrous and monumental project were visible in the new exhibition, which, in taking the same name, enlarged the scope of the original to include not only artworks from 1937 that miraculously survived, but also rooms dedicated to banned literature, music, and film. Apart from the overwhelming power of the art itself, visitors were struck by the continuous parallels to Amerika in 1991, a fact which many documented in comments in the exhibition’s guest book.

Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler visit the *Entartete Kunst* **opening, 1937**

“I left because of Hitler. He is a painter, too, you know, and there didn’t seem to be room for both of us in Germany,” said George Grosz in New York in 1942. The quote was one of a series, presented in the exhibition’s entrance gallery. Looking at the oversized photographs of the authors quoted, one could ask, how could a nation turn its back on so many great minds? The answer is forthcoming in the next room, where a video monitor presents a Wagnerian pageant, a parade of Germanic Valkyries, celebrating the 1937 opening of the “House of German Art,” and its exhibitions of Germany’s so-called artistic triumphs: pseudo-classical Aryan warriors, cast in bronze, chaste, idealized German girls, ripening in oil to produce soldiers for the fatherland.

**Renate Müller, an oppositional actress murdered by the** **Nazis**

Yet, as the introductory gallery makes abundantly clear, the attacks of the right against modern art began long before the Fascists actually took power. Even in the mid-twenties, when German museums and art curators in Berlin, Dresen, Mannheim, Essen, and Stuttgart were among the most progressive in the world, actively supporting both their German contemporaries and French and other European modernist works, right-wingers increasingly attacked these institutions for misappropriating government funds to buy “cultural bolshevist” art. Then as now, the question of public funding was used by conservatives not only as an excuse to attack the aesthetic merits of individual works of art, but also, more importantly, to destroy art museums, which, as public institutions, had come to reflect the liberal image of Weimar Germany. The labels in “Degenerate Art” included the names of the artists and the prices paid by museum curators, who supposedly joined together with art critics and dealers in a fantastic Jewish conspiracy to waste taxpayer monies on trash. After 1933, no less than twenty-one museum directors were fired from their posts, art criticism was banned, and countless artists were forced to emigrate or forbidden from working. This administration’s war on art and culture begins with the Kennedy Center and ends with the defunding of NEA, NEH, PBS, and IMLS, with the firing of the Librarian of Congress sandwiched in between, while MAGA Republican school boards ban hundreds, if not thousands, of books.

**Marc Chagall, *The Blue House* (1917)**

Ironically, many of the confiscated works that survived the Holocaust exist only as a result of the opportunistic greed of many Nazi officials, who also needed to finance a war. In June 1939, literally weeks before the Germans marched into Poland, the Galerie Fischer in neutral Switzerland auctioned off over 125 lots, including van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, Chagall’s Blue House, and Georg Grosz’s Metropolis (1925), most selling under value. The auction, which was attended by such luminaries as Joseph von Sternberg, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., and Pierre Matisse, the painter’s son, is documented in detail in the exhibition and in a catalogue essay by Stephanie Barron.

Emil Nolde’s *Christ and the Sinner (1929)*

**Ludwig Kirchner’s *Dancing Couple* (1925)**

The works of no fewer than 109 German artists were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition. In reconstructing the original exhibition, the designers have retained the original structure, without, however, including the blatantly inflammatory wall texts of the original. Thus, the first room presents religious subject matter, grouped in 1937 under the headings, “Insolent mockery of the divine under Centerist rule” and “Revelation of the Jewish soul,” including Emil Nolde’s Christ and the Sinner (1929), Max Beckmann’s Crucifixion (1909), and Ludwig Gies’ sculpture Crucified Christ (1921). Like our latter-day born again legislators and school boards, the Nazis loved to cloak themselves in a religious mantle, to undercut the credibility of their political enemies: “Public institutions were allowed to purchase so-called works of art, which made fun of Christian symbols in a manner which I dare not reproduce here,” said Adolf Hitler at the exhibition’s opening, according to German newspaper reports.

Sexuality has, of course, always been the other stick with which to beat opponents, then as now. In 1937, the Germans called it “An insult to German womanhood,” and “The ideal-cretin and whore,” when they displayed Max Ernst’s The Creation of Eve (1929) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Dancing Couple (1925). Our President may be a pedophile, a serial philanderer, and an egomaniac, but he loves to cloak himself in the Christ.

398: Germany, 1 May 1951

Archival Spaces 398:

German Cinema’s Low Point

Uploaded 1 May 1951

**German cinema damaged by Allied bombing**, **1948**

Today is my birthday. I (and my twin brother, Michael) were born in a medieval town in Germany’s Rhineland, Bad Münstereifel, seven months preemies and weighing 3 lbs each. Since we were born in a convent, not a hospital, we were given an emergency baptism by the Cellitinnen Sisters, who told my mother we would be dead soon. We survived and emigrated to America in December 1951.

Had my parents gone to one of the cinemas that year that survived the Allied bombing in the war, they would have been treated to an almost unending stream of commercial films of inferior quality. While the Allied government had, in the first years after World War II, pursued a denazification policy for the film industry, by 1951, after the establishment of the Federal Republic in May 1949, most former Nazi filmmakers, even the worst criminals, like Veit Harlan – the director of the anti-Semitic Jew Süß (1940) – were back in the saddle, producing films. Of the ca. fifty films released in the Federal Republic that year, all but three were retreads and remakes of Nazi films, melodramas, historical films, comedies, crime dramas, Heimat films, produced by directors, writers, and actors who had willingly submitted to Dr. Joseph Goebbels Propaganda Ministry, thereby morally supporting Adolf Hitler’s genocidal war.

For example, the two biggest box office successes of 1951 were So grün ist die Heide / Green is the Hearth (1951, Hans Deppe) and Dr. Höll (1951, Rolf Hansen), the first giving birth to hundreds of Heimatfilms, the second to another particularly German postwar genre, the Ärztefilm, doctors’ films; both directors had produced Nazi propaganda films. These film melodramas, however, contributed to German amnesia about the Holocaust – Heide was situated in the North German moors, not a bombed-out building in sight, an amalgamation of every Heimatfilm trope of the previous 20 years, but in color. Höll presented German doctors as noble and self-sacrificing, even relinquishing their personal happiness, rather than as willing participants in the euthanasia of tens of thousands of Germans, as “unworthy of life.” Modern film scholarship hasn’t necessarily rehabilitated these films, but it has sought to read between the lines, discovering repressed social tensions.

The three films that rose above the abject mediocrity of West German film production were Die Sünderin/The Sinner (released in February), Der Verlorene/The Lost One (released in September), and Das Haus in Montevideo / The House in Montevideo (released in December).

Hildegarrd Knef, Willi Forst in *Die Sünderin* **(1951)**

The biggest film scandal of the new West German Republic propelled Die Sünderin to one of the year’s most popular films, drawing more than 2 million viewers in its first three weeks of release. The Catholic Bishops advocated a total ban, as did the national censorship office. When that failed, they organized riots and stink bombs in theatres. Hildegard Knef, as a call girl who falls in love with a mortally ill and suicidal painter, convinces him to try a risky brain operation, which is successful, at least temporarily. Restored to life, his paintings of her bring him fame, but the brain tumor that is blinding him returns; she assists him in his suicide, then follows him to the grave. Knef, very briefly seen in the nude, was initially the casus belli, but it was the double suicide that sent Papist tempers ablaze. Fifteen years later, my German landlady would still scream “whore” at the TV every time Ms. Knef appeared on screen. Yes, it was pure melodrama, but consistently presented through the female protagonist’s voice, in voice-over in complex flashbacks, and visually through her camera p.o.v. and other distancing devices. Director Willi Forst conceived Die Sünderin as a morality play, asking whether a prostitute could be considered moral if she sacrificed everything for a doomed man.

**The Doppelgänager motif of film noir in Peter Lorre’s *Der Verlorene* (1951)**

Directed by and starring Peter Lorre, Der Verlorene follows Dr. Rothe as a serial killer who murders his fiancée for stealing his medical research, then murders other women. His counterpart is his assistant, Hoesch, who works for German counterintelligence, slept with Rothe’s fiancé, and sweeps murder under the table. Later, Hoesch arrests and kills a group of anti-Nazi officers and government officials, referencing the July ’44 conspiracy. After the war, both are on the run, hiding in a Displaced Persons Camp. Unlike the opportunistic Hoesch, who is completely amoral – as were most Nazis – Rothe feels guilty and wants to die, eventually after a long night of drinking, killing Hoesch, then throwing himself in front of a train. Dr. Rothe allegorizes the role of the German people in Nazi Germany, without ever displaying a Swastika, a self-image postwar German audiences did not want to see: the film disappeared from cinemas less than two weeks after opening, while Lorre kept the film out of the American market, fearing reprisals from the McCarthyites. Nazi-trained film journalists resented the fact that Lorre, a German-Jewish refugee from Hitler, who had “led a good life under palm trees,” while they suffered through bombing raids, had lectured them on Nazi Germany. A film maudit, Der Verlorene, remains an important modernist analysis of postwar Germany, its gaps and fissures, and film noir lighting reflecting the moral chaos of a country searching for a new identity.

Curt Goetz, Albert Florath, Valerie van Martens in *Das Haus in Montevideo*

Curt Goetz was a Swiss-Jewish comedian/playwright who was able to perform and write screenplays (Glückskinder, 1936) in Nazi Germany, before “being stranded on tour in America” at the beginning of World War II. He and his wife, Valerie van Martens, returned to Switzerland in 1945 and started touring Germany with his new play, “Das Haus in Montvideo,” which he adapted to film in 1951. Goetz plays an uncompromisingly authoritarian and pedantic German professor who prefers corporal punishment for his twelve children and requires them to thank him for the beating. He inherits a fortune from a long-lost sister, whom he threw out of the house because she had a child out of wedlock. Yet, when he learns the terms of will, he is willing to compromise his moral principles and his own daughter, who is required to have a baby out of wedlock, but the happy end reveals that his own marriage was illegal, making him the father of twelve bastard children. Nowhere is the recent Nazi past visible, even if Goetz lampoons the very bourgeoisie that supported Hitler. The film was a monster hit, maybe because authoritarian school teachers had long been a target for humor in German cinema, even during the Third Reich, with films like The Punch Bowl (1944).

Interestingly, then, all three films deal with moral dilemmas at a time when Germans were still reeling from the moral abyss of fascism.