Kevin Brownlow

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Kevin Brownlow (born June 2, 1938 in Crowborough , Sussex ) is a British film historian, film collector, writer and director . He has been involved in the rediscovery and restoration of many important silent films. As a director, he mainly shot historical television documentaries , but also several feature films. In 2010 he was one of the few film historians to receive an honorary Oscar for his life's work.

biography

Brownlow developed an interest in silent films from an early age . This developed into a lifelong passion for cinema and film history (especially its early days), which established his career in film documentation and reconstruction. In the 1960s he visited and interviewed numerous older and forgotten film pioneers, thus securing eyewitness material from an otherwise lost epoch of film. He processed the interview material in the book The Parade's Gone By… , his debut work on the silent film era from 1968 (German film pioneers , published 1997) , which has become a standard work .

His fascination for the Second World War brought him to the side of the filmmaker himself, by turning the course of the story into its opposite in his alternative world - war film It Happened Here (1964) and letting the National Socialists occupy Great Britain. The film received a BAFTA nomination and won awards in Germany and the USA . Production took eight years for him and his friend Andrew Mollo , and the production of their next film Winstanley (1975) took even longer .

Brownlow, himself a film collector, spent years getting support for his project to reconstruct the classic 1927 film Napoléon by Abel Gance . The film is an early example of split-screen technology or the widescreen format. His efforts were crowned with the performances of the approximately five-hour restored version in 1980 in Paris and 1981 in New York in the presence of director Gance.

At this time Brownlow began a successful collaboration with David Gill , with whom he produced several award-winning documentaries about the silent film era. The first of these was the 13-part Hollywood series compiled for Thames Television in 1979. Unknown Chaplin followed in 1983, Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow in 1987 , Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius in 1989 and the six-part series Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood in 1996 . Gill and Brownlow restored and released a large number of other silent film classics through Thames Silents in the 1980s and 90s, all of which were provided with new musical accompaniment by Carl Davis .

After Gill's death in 1997, Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury continued to produce documentaries for Photoplay Productions. These include Garbo (2005), a production for Turner Classic Movies on the occasion of Greta Garbo's 100th birthday, and I'm King Kong (2005) about the filmmaker Merian C. Cooper .

In November 2010, Brownlow was awarded the Honorary Oscar for his services as film historian and curator . On the occasion of the award, Martin Scorsese described him as a "giant among film historians and film custodians, known worldwide and justly respected for his numerous achievements".

Filmography

  • 1962: Nine, Dalmuir West
  • 1964: It Happened Here (co-directed with Andrew Mollo)
  • 1968: Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite
  • 1975: Winstanley (co-directed with Andrew Mollo)
  • 1979: Hollywood (TV series, co-directed with David Gill)
  • 1983: Millay at Steepletop
  • 1983: Unknown Chaplin (TV series, co-directed with David Gill)
  • 1987: Buster Keaton: No laughing! (Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow) (TV series, co-directed with David Gill)
  • 1989: Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius (TV series, co-directed with David Gill)
  • 1993: DW Griffith: Father of Film (TV series, co-directed with David Gill)
  • 1996: Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (TV series, co-directed with David Gill)
  • 1998: Universal Horror
  • 2000: Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces
  • 2002: The Tramp and the Dictator
  • 2004: Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic
  • 2004: So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton & MGM
  • 2005: Garbo
  • 2005: I'm King Kong !: The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper

bibliography

  • The Parade's Gone By… Secker & Warburg, London 1968. Dt. Pioneers of film. From silent films to Hollywood , Basel and Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-87877-386-2 .
  • The War, the West and the Wilderness . Secker & Warburg, London 1979.
  • Hollywood, the Pioneers . Collins, London 1979.
  • Napoleon: Abel Gance's Classic Film . Jonathan Cape, London 1983.
  • Behind the Mask of Innocence . Jonathan Cape, London 1990.
  • David Lean . Richard Cohen, London 1996, ISBN 1-86066-042-8 .
  • Mary Pickford Rediscovered. Rare Pictures of a Hollywood Legend . Abrams, New York 1999, ISBN 0-8109-4374-3 .
  • Winstanley. Warts and All . UKA Press, London and Yorkshire 2009, ISBN 978-1-905796-22-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kevin Brownlow. September 17, 2014, accessed February 26, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Kevin Brownlow Film Night. In: The Cinema Museum, London. Retrieved February 26, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Brownlow, Kevin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British film historian, writer and director of television documentaries
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Crowborough , Sussex