How a Professor Rescued a Lost 1914 Silent Film From a Vault

A 1914 Japanese-American film was thought to be lost to time until a professor figured out the decaying reels were in a vault.

Professor Denise Khor of Northeastern University discovered a rare piece of movie history while she was doing research for a book about film culture. The reels she found in 2016 were believed to be the only known copy of “The Oath of the Sword.” It is among the earliest Asian-American films, historians said.

“It was a sheer miracle that this print survived,” said Khor, a professor of Asian-American and visual studies.

Preservationists needed to act quickly to save the nitrate film from decomposing. If they didn’t, the movie would join the roughly 80% of silent films believed to be lost forever. But the rescue process would be grueling and expensive.

Over the next seven years, a series of events saved “The Oath of the Sword” from obscurity and brought it back to the big screen. Khor and a group of historians and preservationists are set to show the film in Los Angeles on Sunday for its once-improbable 21st-century premiere.

Here’s how it happened.

Khor was doing research for her film-culture book when she found stray mentions of “The Oath of the Sword” in old news clippings. But the 1914 film was nowhere to be found.

Film studios usually only made a few copies of every silent movie, said Anthony L’Abbate, a preservation manager at the George Eastman Museum, a photography and film museum in Rochester, N.Y.

“The Oath of the Sword” was released in 1914 at the beginning of the U.S. silent-film heyday, according to historians. Films were often under 30 minutes long and played in black and white.

Silent films began dying out after the first sound film debuted in the late 1920s. Few of the silent films survived. Many studios trashed their reels, L’Abbate said. Some studios burned them when they needed fuel for on-screen fires.

The reels are valuable today because there are so few of them. Some studios later pushed to save those made by notable directors, historians said.

“The Oath of the Sword” wasn’t considered one of those films, Khor said, so the odds of finding it were close to zero. But she wanted to try.

She said that in 2016 she asked archivists across the country if they had any copies of the film. She heard back later that year about one museum, the Eastman, which had a decaying copy in a vault.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, are you joking?’ ” she said.

Khor said she flew from Boston to the museum in Rochester to see the 1914 film for herself. She was likely the first person to watch the movie in decades, according to her and the museum. The Eastman had listed the film in its extensive online archives but the museum has so many reels that it hadn’t paid attention to “The Oath of the Sword.”

The museum let her watch the film in its building after she paid a small fee, she said. She watched the film frame by frame, unspooling it with a flatbed machine. She watched it at about a 33% speed because the film was so delicate.

“It was thrilling,” she said. “I really took my time and savored it and I took a gazillion notes.”

Old news articles had described pieces of the 20-minute film, but finally she had a complete picture. It followed a young Japanese man, Masao, who leaves his lover, Hisa, to study at the University of California, Berkeley. He returns home after a successful few years and discovers Hisa had a baby with another man. Masao fights the man, an American ship captain, and kills him. Hisa is filled with shame and dies by suicide.

The black-and-white film reels were covered in dirt and dust and beginning to decompose, L’Abbate said. Every scene was intact but the title card and credits were missing.

Beside being the earliest known Asian-American film, “The Oath of the Sword” represented an important piece of Japanese-American history, Khor said.

A film studio called the Japanese American Film Company made the movie, Khor said. The film had a mostly Japanese cast, a rarity in an era when white Americans used yellowface in other films. The studio portrayed a respectable Japanese man in the U.S. at a time of growing anti-Japanese sentiment, Khor said.

Japanese-Americans in the 1910s were trying to claim a place in the burgeoning U.S. film industry, Khor said. Anti-Japanese attitudes and small filmmaking and marketing budgets blocked their way.

L’Abbate, from the Eastman Museum, said the surviving 1914 film reels came from an unknown source. A donor gave them to the museum between 1950 and 1975, when the museum began collecting old film reels. They were placed for safekeeping in the museum’s frigid vaults in Chili, N.Y., outside Rochester.

Khor contacted the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, which coordinated the preservation efforts with the Eastman Museum. They funded the restoration with a $20,000 grant in 2021 from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

The Eastman made digital scans of all 28,448 frames of the movie, totaling 1,778 feet of film, L’Abbate said. Then a team of three people spent two months editing dust, dirt and rips out of the scenes. They restored the original’s amber and blue tinting in romantic and nighttime scenes.

Then came the final step in the preservation process: printing the cleaned digital scans back onto film, L’Abbate said. A Maryland film lab handled this over several months.

“The Oath of the Sword” is scheduled to premiere on Sunday at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. Khor and some historians and film experts will be there.

It will be Khor’s second time watching the film.

“It’s been a long time in the making,” she said. “It’s going to be fairly spectacular.”

Write to Alyssa Lukpat at [email protected]