“Mr Brownlow is a giant among film historians and preservationists, known and justifiably respected throughout the world for his multiple achievements: as the author of The Parade’s Gone By, a definitive history of the silent era, and . . . a biography of David Lean . . . and as the director with Andrew Mollo of two absolutely unique fiction films, Winstanley (1975) and It Happened Here (1964) . . . On a broader level, you might say that Mr Brownlow is film history.” – Martin Scorcese on Kevin Brownlow’s Honorary Lifetime Achievement Academy Award

Kevin Brownlow is a British film historian, television documentary-maker, filmmaker, author, and film editor. Born in Crowborough Sussex He collected films from the age of eleven, and at the age of fourteen, with a 9.5mm camera, began making The Capture, an adaptation of a de Maupassant story, with its action updated from the Franco-Prussian war to 1940s France. The fascination with the Second World War continued in the much more ambitious It Happened Here (1965), based on Brownlow’s own story idea. In 1940 after the defeat at Dunkirk Britain is invaded and occupied by the Nazis who treat the country as a satellite fascist state. . There is a split between the resistance and those who prefer to collaborate with the invaders for a quiet life. The protagonist, an Irish nurse, is caught in the middle.

Brownlow developed the concept of the film when he was 18 years old, in 1956. He turned to Mollo, a 16-year-old history buff, to help him with the design of costumes and sets. Mollo was intrigued by the project and became his collaborator. The film was in the making for the next eight years, which the Guinness Book of World Records (as of 2003) calls the longest ever production schedule.The film was shot in black and white on mostly borrowed 16mm equipment which gives an impression of a newsreel although bo stock footage was used. The beginning of the film is marred by poor lighting and sound quality though Stanley Kubrick became intrigued enough by the rushes to donate film stock to the project. Director Tony Richardson (for whom Brownlow would work as an editor) provided funds to finish the production. round 900 volunteer actors were involved with a few professionals, notably Sebastian Shaw and Reginald Marsh, giving their services. Veteran wartime BBC radio announcers Alvar Lidell and John Snagge gave their services free to voice reconstructed newsreels and radio broadcasts.

Cut from many versions shown commercially are scenes where former members of the British Union of Fascists air their philosophy (in keeping with the plot of the film but diametrically opposite the strongly anti-fascist theme). The scenes were restored thirty years later after Brownlow regained the rights to the film. It Happened Here premiered in September 1964 at the Cork Film Festival. Many people were upset by the idea that the villains in the story were not just the Nazis but their British collaborators. The film seemed to be saying that fascism can rise anywhere under the right circumstances and that people everywhere could fall under its spell. Research prior to the film from various Nazi-occupied territories (including the Channel Islands) suggested that this was indeed the case.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote: “The acting by unfamiliar people is beautifully natural and restrained, particularly that of Pauline Murray in the principal role. Through her human and subtle generation of an ungrudging sympathy, one becomes involved in her dilemma and is caught up all the way in the despair, uncertainty and terror of her experiences.”

In 1967 Kevin Brownlow, who had edited both his own film and several documentaries, worked as the editor on The White Bus with Lindsay Anderson which involved an impassive young girl being taken from her suicidal London life back to her home in North England on a bizarre bus trip.

With a runtime of 46 minutes it was intended as part of an anthology movie with two further segments being directed by others. Peter Brook directed Sero Mostel in The Ride of the Valkyries which was shown only once and Tony Richardson’s contribution, the mini-musical Red and Blue, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Douglas Fairbanks Junior achieved only a press preview. Tony Richardson and Kevin Brownlow would work together the following year on The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), a film is about the folly of war, and the poor state of the British Army and its leadership during the Crimean War (1853–56). The film was produced during a time of public frustration over the Vietnam War, and it has been argued that in retrospect it can be seen as a warning against military interventions in other lands. To help inspire Richardson, Brownlow showed him the cavalry charge directed by French master Raymond Bernard in the 1927 silent movie The Chess Player which Brownlow and David Gill (later restored for Thames Silents at Thames Television, Kevin Brownlow is credited as supervising editor and he was nominated for his second BAFTA, this time for Best Film Editing; he had previously been nominated with Andrew Mollo for Best British Screenplay for It Happened Here. Andrew’s brother, John Mollo, acted as historical consultant for The Charge of the Light Brigade

it was also in 1968 that Kevin Brownlow had his first book of film history published, The Parade’s Gone By which featured the recollections of over 100 people involved in making films before the advent of sound. Interviewees included Mary Pickford, Fritz Lang, Buster Keaton, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, David O Selznick and Gloria Swanson. Kevin Brownlow highlighted the fate of silent films; if they were shown at all in the 1960’s it would often involve washed out and damaged prints being projected at the wrong speed. One chapter in the book is devoted to a French filmmaker, Abel Gance, who he describes as the French Griffith, and the greatest filmmaker of all time, citing Gance’s Napoleon (1927) as the prime example. Many innovative techniques were used to make the film, including fast cutting, extensive close-ups, a wide variety of hand-held camera shots, location shooting, point of view shots, multiple-camera setups, multiple exposure, superimposition, underwater camera, kaleidoscopic images, film tinting, split screen and mosaic shots, multi-screen projection, and other visual effects

Kevin Brownlow, who, as a schoolboy, had met Gance and nad also purchased two 9.5 mm reels of the film from a street market He was captivated by the cinematic boldness of short clips, and his research led to a lifelong fascination with the film and a quest to reconstruct it. The first version of his restoration of what had originally been a badly mutilated print was shown at the 1979 Telluride Film Festival with 89-year-old Gance watching from a nearby hotel window. The finale, in Polyvision, employed three specially installed synchronized projectors that expand the screen to triple its width. Kevin Brownlow has devoted fifty years to refining the restoration and his latest (2016) iteration is the full content of the movie (five hours and thirty-two minutes at 20fps) with a score by Carl Davis.

Secker and Warburg, who published The Parade’s Gone By, also published Kevin Brownlow’s book How It Happened Here, which described the making of the film It Happened Here and the reception it received. The book contained almost 100 pictures, mostly stills from the film and an introduction by film critic and author David Robinson. Subsequently, Andrew Mollo and Kevin Brownlow began another project, Winstanley. Gerrard Winstanley was an English Protestant religious reformer, political philosopher and activist during The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. He was the leader of the group known as the True Levellers The group occupied public lands that had been privatised by enclosures and planted crops. Winstanley sought to level the ownership of property itself, which is why Winstanley’s followers called themselves True Levellers and others branded them Diggers.

Like their previous collaboration, Andrew Mollo was meticulous about costuming details, authenticity of the armour was assured by simply getting permission to borrow and use items from the Tower of London. Virtually all the cast and most of the crew were enthusiastic amateurs so shooting revolved around the availability of those with day jobs. The film, about the Diggers’ valiant, doomed radical Christian commune at St George’s Hill, Weybridge after the English civil war, took over a year to shoot. Kevin Brownlow documented the making of the film in his diaries which, as Winstanley, Warts and All, was published in 2009.

” As a film historian, I thought I should keep a careful record of the making of Winstanley as well. It was written immediately after the events had occurred, when my memory was vivid. The manuscript sat on the shelf for 34 years, but reading it back recently I found some of the verbatim dialogue, especially the excuses from the laboratories for ruining our precious film, very amusing – which I certainly didn’t at the time.” – Kevin Brownlow

Kevin Brownlow’s collaboration with David Gill produced several documentaries on the silent era. The first was Hollywood (1980), a 13-part history of the silent era in Hollywood, produced by Thames Television. This was followed by Unknown Chaplin (1983), Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow (1987) (Buster Keaton), Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius (1989) (Harold Lloyd) and Cinema Europe: the Other Hollywood. His company, Photoplay Productions, founded with Patrick Stanbury, Is one of the few independent companies to operate in the revival of interest in the lost world of silent cinema and has been recognised as a driving force in the subject, receiving the Silent Film Festival Award in 2010. The company has been involved in the restoration of over 40 feature-length silent films and a number of shorts with Carl Davis providing the scores.

Kevin Brownlow has directed a number of documentaries for Photoplay on silent film subjects such as Lon Chaney, D W Griffith, Greta Garbo and Buster Keaton. His books on film history include Behind The Mask Of Innocence (1990) which surveys the treatment of contemporary social problems by film directors and producers in the early part of the century; David Lean: A Biography: (1996) and The Search for Charlie Chaplin (2010) about the discovery of three separate caches of Chaplin material which generated three one hour documentaries about the man and his working methods.

In August 2010 Kevin Brownlow received an Honorary Academy Award for his role in film and cinema history preservation.

“The reason I put so much energy into it at the beginning was that while there were plenty of people looking after the talkies, almost nobody was doing the same for the silents. Now there are plenty of very good historians and restorers.” – Kevin Brownlow

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