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Articles by Kevin Brownlow
What I'm Reading: 'Twas The Night Before Christmas
It’s Christmas Eve so I’m going to keep this mostly short, but I did want to share a few articles I enjoyed this week (see below), and I also wanted to share this epic piece I wrote for Indiewire about the Hollywood history and mythology that inspired Damien Chazelle’s Babylonagain.
25 Years: Napoleon Conquers Again
I was traveling on the BART to Oakland, where the Silent Film Festival was staging four special screenings at the Paramount Theatre. As a train approached, I checked the indicator above my head. It read: “DON’T MISS NAPOLEON!” What kind of organization had brilliant ideas like that, I thought. (I learned that Bruce Goldstein, of Film Forum, was in charge of publicity.) These proved the finest screenings of my favorite film.
IndieWire’s Favorite Books: Staffers Pick Their Top Film Books
Products featured are independently selected by our editorial team and we may earn a commission from purchases made from our links. It’s always a good time to update your bookshelf, and today IndieWire staffers have selected some of their favorite film books, from screenwriting manuals to fascinating histories and even musings on the art of criticism itself.
Deep focus: The peak of silent cinema | Sight & Sound
Margaret Livingstone as the Woman from the City, tempting George O’Brien in Sunrise (1927) Something remarkable happened when Sight & Sound held its ten-yearly poll of critics and filmmakers around the world in 2012. It wasn’t just that Hitchcock finally took the lead, but that three silent films appeared in the top ten – with another at number 11, and two more in the top 50: a total of six films, all from the period between 1926 and 1931, when cinema faced its first major revolution.
Raiders of the lost film archives: digging for movie history in Dawson City, Frozen Time and Notfilm | Sight & Sound
It’s an image like the phoenix from the flames: a charred, dust-caked roll of 35mm film balanced on a spade, dug out of the black and frozen earth. What once danced, flickered and dazzled, then was lost, now promises to light up again, spilling its treasures like Aladdin’s genie. Though as viewers of Bill Morrison’s necromantic digs through the film archives since Decasia (2002) will know, the interceding years will have left their own marks on the images, making palimpsests of these remains.
The best film books, by 51 critics | Polls & surveys | Sight & Sound
You are here Home / Explore film & TV / Sight & Sound magazine / Sight & Sound articles / Polls and surveys Which are the most inspirational five books about film ever written? This was the question we asked 51 leading critics and writers, and their answers are printed here in full. ☞ Read Nick James’ introduction ☞ See the top five Sight & Sound reviews the latest film books every month.
They Shall Not Grow Old review: Peter Jackson brings controversial colour to WWI footage | Sight & Sound
Re-presenting archive film has always been risky, except when it’s too dull to stir any emotion. I remember the condescension that hung over the first presentation of Kevin Brownlow’s reconstructed Napoleon in 1982, when the idea of piecing together this battered and much-reviled carcass, with a patchwork orchestral score, seemed absurd to many.
London’s Cinema Museum is keeping cinephilia alive. Can it be saved? | Sight & Sound
The Cinema Museum was founded by collectors and enthusiasts Ronald Grant and Martin Humphries in 1984 as a museum and archive of cinema-going and exhibition, principally during the eras of early cinema and Golden Age Hollywood. The museum’s contents pour out of each doorway, trails of cinema paraphernalia guiding visitors into overstuffed rooms with boxes stacked ten-high to the ceiling.
Cinema Rediscovered 2017: new homes for old films
When the Lumière brothers invented their Cinématographe in 1895, they could see no future in their invention. As Mark Cosgrove of Bristol’s Watershed explained during a panel as part of last weekend’s wide-ranging Cinema Rediscovered festival, the moving picture machine didn’t appear to be a viable alternative to their existing business, domestic portrait photography.
David Shepard obituary: silent film’s great hunter-sharer
Without the pioneering work of film preservationist David Shepard, who died this week, our understanding of silent cinema would be much poorer. Shepard not only sought out and restored silent films, but he was determined to release as many as possible on to home video, where they could be enjoyed by the widest audiences.
Kevin Brownlow · Best Beloved · LRB 18 April 1985
The day has passed, thank heaven, when a film historian can read five books and write the sixth. In the bad old days this was often the case, particularly when the subject was Charlie Chaplin. Some writers described the early films without even seeing them. But that is nothing compared to the people who pretended to have worked with Chaplin. I once interviewed a celebrated American comedian who claimed to have been a child actor with Chaplin in Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914).
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