How a Taylor Swift Lyric Gave Me an Existential Crisis

## i. Prelude

The film canisters sit in a climate-controlled vault somewhere in Munich. A shot list is composed with over 450 camera positions. An hour of experimental colour tests performed, the film stock whirring through the camera, light and shadow dancing exactly as imagined.

This is all that remains of [Alfred Hitchcock's unmade film](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/greatest-movies-never-made-alfred-hitchcocks-kaleidoscope/) _Kaleidoscope._ The master of suspense was reduced to tears when Universal executives, disgusted by the script, cancelled the project in 1968\. The tests are said to be beautiful. The film would have revolutionized cinema technique. We'll never see it.

[_London After Midnight_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films), starring Lon Chaney in 1927, now considered the "holy grail" of lost films, destroyed in the 1965 MGM vault fire along with hundreds of others, the silver nitrate burning at temperatures that could liquefy bone. [Over 90% of films made before 1929](https://paleofuture.com/blog/2014/7/2/roughly-90-of-movies-made-before-1929-are-lost-forever) are gone forever. Think about that. Ninety percent. Not locked away in some archive—_gone_. Turned to smoke and ash. All those faces moving in lamplight, all those stories whispered in title cards, reduced to nothing.

And that's just the films that were made and lost. What about the ones never even filmed?

In 1942, [Andrei Tarkovsky began adapting Dostoevsky's _The Idiot_](https://www.imdb.com/list/ls073356642/). He died before it could be realized. [Alejandro Jodorowsky's _Dune_](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/a-failed-rock-adaption-of-dune-might), which would have featured Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, with a soundtrack by Pink Floyd was killed before production began. [Stanley Kubrick spent two years researching _Napoleon_](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/dec/13/stanley-kubrick-napoleon-philip-french), amassing 15,000 location-scouting photographs, 17,000 slides of Napoleonic imagery, historical advisors from Oxford. The studios wouldn't fund it. Too big. Too expensive. Historical epics were out of fashion at the time.

Then there's the yellow-tinted basement of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, where [Jewish prisoners' artwork sits in filing cabinets](https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1320&context=ulr), claimed as property of the institution rather than the murdered artists who created them. Woodcuts made on New Year's Eve 1942\. Sheet music composed in the Terezin ghetto. Plays performed in secret before the gas chambers. [Julo Levin was a highly regarded artist until 1933](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda-and-censorship), when the Nazis arrested him and forbade him to show his work publicly