Being nominated for an Oscar confers a sense of history to a movie, inducting it into a category of films that—if they’re not literally archived in the Academy’s collection—will at least live on as trivia answers and podcast fodder for years to come. But, in what’s now established as a common chorus on Shelf Life, just because a picture has been nominated for an Oscar doesn’t mean it’s readily available.

The most famous “lost” Oscar nominee is Ernst Lubitsch’s 1928 film The Patriot, a movie that only exists in bits and pieces in the UCLA archive (and one reel that was discovered in Portugal). The Patriot is the only Best Picture nominee to suffer this fate, but there are others: 1930 Best Sound nominee The Song of the Flame only exists, appropriately enough, on an incomplete set of sound reels, while just a few minutes survive of Emil Jannings’ Academy Award-winning performance in The Way of All Flesh from 1927. Expand the frame to works that are mostly complete but missing a few key minutes, and the list gets even longer.

The Film Foundation estimated in 2017 that half of all American films made before 1950 are lost, so perhaps it’s inevitable, if depressing, that an Oscar nominee or two would be among them. But thinking about these things adds valuable historical perspective to the current awards landscape, where Netflix—which only releases physical copies of some of its most popular titles—has more 2024 Oscar nominations than any other studio. What will the lost Oscar nominees of the future be when streaming becomes an outdated technology?

Handgun

Blu-ray available April 2 from Fun City Editions.

Also known as Deep in the Heart for its Texas setting, Handgun was scooped up by Warner Bros. for distribution in 1983, then quietly shelved to make way for Clint Eastwood’s similarly themed Sudden Impact that same year. It’s the latest in a series of intriguing obscurities brought to Blu-ray—this one from a new 4K restoration—by Fun City Editions, whose brand as a label seems to be either bleak dramas (see also: Cutter’s Way) or frothy comedies (ditto for Party Girl).

West Indies

4K restoration in theaters starting March 22 at Film Forum.

Subtitled The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, Mauritanian French filmmaker Med Hondo’s 1979 movie West Indies isn’t just the African continent’s first musical. It’s also a glimpse into “a brand of post-colonial spectacle cinema that was never allowed to be,” dirtilaundri writes. Confrontational and unabashedly theatrical, Hondo’s daring musical deconstruction of the French colonial project spans 400 years of history, telling the story of how Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas, then set adrift again by mass emigration to in search of economic opportunity.

“As often with Med Hondo’s work, form follows a political position,” Felipe notes: Made for $1.3 million—then an unheard-of number for an African film—West Indies draws inspiration from the artificiality of Hollywood musicals, but to completely different ends. Rather than fluffy escapism, West Indies uses song and dance as a tool of anti-colonial agitprop, “re-purposing of the musical genre as a weapon against imperialism,” as Ethan describes in a rave review. He adds: “This is one of the great pieces of African cinema, and one of the best ways I’ve seen to depict oppression; through vibrant, violent musicality.”

The story takes place on a slave-ship set built inside of an abandoned auto factory, and features a Greek chorus of white generals, bishops, and bureaucrats—and one complicit Black politician—whose tactics change from chattel slavery to more subtle economic subjugation, but whose oppressive aims never alter. Hondo’s anger and disdain for these forces is expressed through satirical lampoonery and forceful movement, for what Sarah calls “a distinctly African take on a musical comedy with a clear, radical rhythm.”

Hondo is the subject of a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in March, with the 4K restoration of West Indies opening at Film Forum on March 22. This isn’t exactly a “lost” film, but it fell out of circulation after critics and audiences didn’t quite get it back in 1979. 45 years later, perhaps its time is now.

Suzhou River

Blu-ray available April 29 from Radiance Films, and available now from Strand Releasing.

Waqar notes, “there’s a unique sense of intricacy that’s gone into making” Suzhou River, which combines a whimsical sense of form inspired by the French New Wave with gritty documentary footage of the booming industrial Shanghai of 25 years ago. Add in an enigmatic, first-person narrator whose eyes are literally Lou’s camera and a Vertigo riff involving two women who look exactly alike—both of them connected by a mermaid doll—and you’ve got a beautiful piece of millennial ephemera where, as Sean puts it, “everything is feeling, but nothing feels real.”

Letterboxd write poetry about this movie, literally in the case of Olivia’s four-and-a-half-star review. Darren calls it “the story of a beautiful mermaid swimming in a dirty river,” a poetic encapsulation of the filthy, romantic canals of suburban Shanghai where our tale takes place. Radiance Films’ new Blu-ray brings Suzhou River to the UK for the first time, pressed to disc from a fresh 4K restoration, so you can really bathe in the 16mm film grain. US folks can pick up the recent Blu-ray from Strand Releasing.

[Originally scheduled for a March 25 release, Radiance’s Suzhou River Blu-ray has been delayed to April 29.]

Green Room

4K Blu-ray available March 18 from Second Sight Films.

Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein

Blu-ray available March 26 from Severin Films.

From Severin Films—a label that’s new to Shelf Life, but not to the physical-media scene—comes Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein from Jesús “Jess” Franco, the prolific Spanish cult director beloved by Euro-horror aficionados who call him “Uncle Jess”. Franco is sometimes painted as a talented director who wasted his potential making B-grade smut. As a bit of a smut apologist, I dispute this characterization—with the caveat that anything Franco directed in the last decade of his life is only for the most obsessive of completists.

That being said, if you’re looking for nudity, this isn’t the Franco Frankenstein for you: look to The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, a movie that has even less to do with Mary Shelley’s novel than this one. Although both films are hypnotic cough-syrup nightmares, Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein provides a more naïve type of pleasure; as Klon puts it, the picture “teeters dangerously close to being a kids movie… It’s childishly concocted, but somehow meditative at times.” That does mean that everyone keeps their clothes on, but it also means that it plays like “a goofy action-figure re-enactment put together by some kid on a Sunday afternoon,” Liz writes.

Franco’s monster-kid geekiness comes through in this Universal-style mash: we’ve got Dr. Frankenstein (whose first name is now Karl) and his assistant Morpho, bringing Dracula back to life using the blood of a chanteuse who performed (what else?) a somnambulant cabaret number in a previous scene. Once they’re all reanimated, Frankenstein’s monster s the vampires in terrorizing villagers, simply because that’s what they do. Then the werewolf comes in. None of it makes any sense, but that’s part of the charm.

There’s very little dialogue, and a constant whistling wind on the soundtrack, which combine to create an otherworldly effect. “It’s almost as if Dracs and Frankenstein accidentally wandered through a rip in the fabric and found themselves in some alternate reality where they both still exist, but everything is janky and fluidly glitchy,” ElectricwizardX describes. It’s not a “good” movie, but it is an oddly beautiful and endearingly earnest one. I love it, and if you think you might love it, too, the film’s North American Blu-ray premiere is now up for pre-order on the Severin website.