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.
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