The Mountain Eagle
lost in archives OPEN fame 2/5
Alfred Hitchcock's second feature film (1926), a British-German silent production of which no copy is known to survive. It sits atop the British Film Institute's "most wanted" lost-films list — the kind of object that plausibly lingers unrecognized in an archive vault or private collection rather than being provably destroyed.
Scorecard
- +0.45 · The Mountain Eagle (1926) was directed by Alfred Hitchcock early in his career…
- -0.21 · No print of the film is known to survive, and the British Film Institute lists…
- +3.00 · technique_term
- -0.42 · No print of the film is known to survive, and the British Film Institute lists…
- +3.00 · technique_term
- -0.42 · No print of the film is known to survive, and the British Film Institute lists…
- +0.15 · Lost silent films are periodically recovered from foreign archives, private…
Location hypotheses
No location hypothesis has been recorded for this treasure, so there is nothing to plot — and this tool never fabricates a map or a dig site. Per the scoring gates, an absence of location data caps Findable now at band 2 (LONG-SHOT).
What would it take?
No emerging or speculative technique changes the picture yet — the frontier findability band (LONG-SHOT) equals the current band. A breakthrough here would need a genuinely new capability, not just a maturing one.
Evidence ledger (3 verified facts)
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The Mountain Eagle (1926) was directed by Alfred Hitchcock early in his career and released in the UK and Germany; it is a documented, exhibited film with surviving stills and production records.known by 1927-01-01 · diagnosticity high · confidence 0.90↳ Wikipedia: The Mountain Eagle journalistic
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No print of the film is known to survive, and the British Film Institute lists it among its "75 Most Wanted" lost British films — a status that reflects an administrative loss, not a documented destruction event.known by 2011-01-01 · diagnosticity high · confidence 0.85↳ Wikipedia: The Mountain Eagle journalistic
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Lost silent films are periodically recovered from foreign archives, private collections, and mislabeled cans, so a surviving nitrate print resurfacing in a European or overseas archive remains a live possibility.known by 2016-01-01 · diagnosticity medium · confidence 0.60↳ Wikipedia: Lost film journalistic
Technique matrix
| Technique | Family | Maturity | Applicability | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Archival & primary-source research | archival | available | 3/3 | Film archives and distribution records are where a surviving print would be traced. |
| ML / LLM archival mining | computational | emerging | 2/3 | Mining digitized archive inventories for candidate mislabeled reels. |
| Crowdsourced transcription | computational | available | 1/3 | Cataloging archive holdings at scale raises the odds of spotting a mislabeled can. |