Probably the first star of the American cinema was Annabelle Whitford, a dancer who had made her name at the Chicago Exposition. So popular was her Serpentine Dance -- originated by Loie Fuller -- that the camera negative wore out and the picture was remade in 1897, three years later. Enough copies of the original version survived so that it appears this is as exact a duplicate as possible.
Over in France, the Lumieres remade one or two of their early movies, but this was a problem of early cinema. It was solved by eventually using an intermediate negative print, often called a "lavender dupe" so that the camera negative could be saved for possible re-editing.
