Cinema History and Preservation
In 1968 Brownlow's first book on silent film, The Parade's Gone By..., was published. The book had many interviews with the leading actors and directors of the silent era and began his career as a film historian. Brownlow spent many years getting support for the restoration of Abel Gance's 1927 French classic, Napoléon, a 'lost' epic film that used many novel cinematic techniques. Brownlow's championing of the film succeeded, and the restored version, with a new score by Carl Davis, was shown in London and New York in 1980 and 1981. Gance lived to see the acclaim for his restored film. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival presented the complete 2000 restoration of the film, with Davis conducting his score, at the Paramount Theatre Oakland in March 2012.
Brownlow also began a collaboration with David Gill with whom he produced several documentaries on the silent era. The first was Hollywood, a 13-part history of the silent era in Hollywood, produced for Thames Television and screened in Britain in 1980. This was followed by Unknown Chaplin (1983) (Charlie Chaplin), Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow (1987) (Buster Keaton), Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius (1989) (Harold Lloyd) and Cinema Europe: the Other Hollywood (1995), among others. They also restored and released a large number of classic silent films through the Thames Silents series (later via Photoplay Productions) in the 1980s and 1990s, generally with new musical scores by Carl Davis. The Search for Charlie Chaplin (2010, The UKA Press), a making-of book for Unknown Chaplin, was published in 2009.
Since David Gill's death in 1997, Brownlow has continued to produce documentaries and conduct film restoration with Patrick Stanbury. These include Lon Chaney, A Thousand Faces (2000), Garbo, a documentary produced for Turner Classic Movies to mark the centenary of actress Greta Garbo's birth, and I Am King Kong (2005) about filmmaker Merian C. Cooper.
In August 2010, Brownlow received an Honorary Academy Award for his role in film and cinema history preservation.
Read more about this topic: Kevin Brownlow
Famous quotes containing the words cinema, history and/or preservation:
“The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those of the film.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Is not our role to stand for the one thing which means our own salvation here but with which it will also be possible to save the world, and with which Europe will be able to save itself, namely the preservation of the white man and his state?”
—Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966)