plur62's profile

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Sunday, November 10th, 2024 2:16 AM

Solved

Who are the people who rate films lost almost 100 years ago?

Question & Idea

We know that thousands, probably tens of thousands of feature-length, short and documentary silent (and numerous sound) films have been irretrievably lost for various reasons (most often due to fires in film studios), but, somehow, many of them have IMDb ratings, although many have been lost for over 90 years. 

We can't know whether people are rating these titles by accident (if there are titles with the same name) or on purpose, but it would be nice to disable ratings for long-lost movies.

There should be a topic where such films could be reported, when it can't be done via the edit page button. You can often find out on the web when and why a certain title was lost.

For example, all copies of this silent animated film, 

https://imdb.com/title/tt0007646

which is considered to be the first feature-length animated film, were destroyed in a fire in 1926, but the film was still rated by 77 users.

As I already wrote, rating should be disabled for such films.

Thanks

8.6K Messages

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2 months ago

@plur62 😀

??

El apóstol (1917)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0007646/ratings/


User reviews
https://www.imdb.com/review/rw9332843/

8/10
A Landmark in Animation History: El Apóstol
by osint-tools  : Sep 19, 2023
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288 Messages

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6.1K Points

"Reviews" for lost or abandoned movies are nothing new to IMDb, I've come across them many times, some people "review" them and others write information about the movie and add that it's lost, IMDb user PamelaShort

https://m.imdb.com/user/ur45193665/reviews?ref_=m_ur

This film is definitely lost as no copies exist from 1926. Film database for Spanish-language films (you can translate in your language):

https://m.filmaffinity.com/es/film492349.html

Yes, people rate and review movies for political, patriotic reasons even though they haven't seen them.

(edited)

Employee

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5.6K Messages

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2 months ago

Hi @plur62 -

We will have our team in charge take a look, do you have any other examples we can look at?

There may also be possibilities like the mentioned above.

@Coyote444 on the top right corner of your notification box you will see the "Mark all as read" option, that will clean them.

Cheers!

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@Bethanny​ 

Yes, for many titles, I will post them here if the thread didn't get closed.  :)

55 Messages

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1.3K Points

2 months ago

I agree with this sentiment, as I too feel that people should only be allowed to rate films that they have actually seen. And, films lost to the ages in 1926 were almost certainly not seen by anyone alive today.

The only caution I have is that there are films that while they are lost in their entirety, they do exist in snippets (such as The Way of All Flesh), or were lost in the '50s/'60s (such as 1972's Nobody Ordered Love) and there are people that did see and remember them.

So I hope that the solution doesn't sweep too broadly and prohibit older users from rating recently lost films or users from rating partially lost films.

(edited)

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6.1K Points

@thebluetuna​ 

IMDb sometimes disables voting for lost titles such as these two early Oscar-nominated films:

4 Devils (1928) by F.W. Murnau

The Patriot (1928) by Ernst Lubitsch

"4 Devils" is completely lost, but "The Patriot" partially, excerpts exist, 'one reel from the film has been recovered' according to silentera.com

http://www.silentera.com/PSFL/data/P/Patriot1928.html

(edited)