Interview with Kevin Brownlow

Still: Napoleon

Abel Gance's Napoléon (France, 1927)

We were delighted to welcome to the NFT stage the man who graduated from filming history to become the country's leading film historian. His adventures in representation, reconstruction, restoration and revivalism formed the basis for the discussion.

Interviewed Monday 13 September 2004 by David Robinson

The reprint of the How It Happened Here book is published by UKA Press. Napoleon - Abel Gance's classic film has been republished and can be obtained from Books Etc at the Festival Hall, 0207 620 0403 and the Cinema Bookstore St Martin's Lane 0207 739 7895

Developing the interest

David Robinson: Ladies and gentlemen. I don't need to say 'Kevin Brownlow.' I think it's a very valuable reminder - to start with that film, and a reminder that Kevin is a filmmaker. A filmmaker who, for my money, has made two of the most lasting British classic films, and it's not too good to get distracted from that by all the work that he's done for other people's films, and for the world at large. In rediscovering, restoring, saving, recording and generally making known the silent cinema. I said to him as we were coming on 'wait a minute, what are you, exactly? I mean are you a collector, an enthusiast, a historian, a restorer, an interviewer, a... showman, as well?' We owe Napoleon [Abel Gance, 1926, and all those wonderful silent spectacles that we've seen since then, to Kevin. I'm not going to ask you what you are, Kevin. I will ask you, though, which came first, the film or the silent film enthusiasm?

Kevin Brownlow: I was going to be the second Orson Welles, and I can't understand it because I never even put on the weight [laughter]. I've been incredibly lucky though, I've practically always done what I wanted to do and I've always had the most incredible people to work with, who made it happen. And Andrew Mollo, my co-director on the features, and David Gill, my co-director on the documentaries, are two people without whom I wouldn't be sitting here. Anyway, what I will start with is - that sequence you have just seen was Winstanley [1975], and you can get the cassette on your way out, to see the rest of it [laughter]. During the war, at boarding school, to which I was sent at the tender age of three, we saw moving pictures in order to give money to Doctor Barnardo's. Doctor Barnardo's little cottage money box sat in the hall of the school and occasionally we would slip a threepenny bit in, and to reward us, once a year, they would show 9.5mm amateur films of the orphans at Doctor Barnardo's. Now the curious thing is I had not seen proper films yet, and I knew these were terrible [laughter] and I've always had a great prejudice against the worst sort of amateurism, which I have been capable of committing on occasion.

I then went to another boarding school just after the war, in Sussex, which we regarded as worse than Colditz, and the only thing that was pleasant about it was that the headmaster used to show films in the winter Sunday evenings, about once every three weeks. And he would take them from Wallace Heaton film library. He couldn't afford a sound projector and so we saw ourselves watching the films of our parents' generation. We grew up with Snub Pollard and Harold Lloyd and Chaplin, and I remember being struck by the crudity of the primitive comedians, with their huge moustaches and wondering why we were watching these... and I think it was Chaplin in The Count [1916] and Harold Lloyd in Never Weaken [1921] that awoke my fascination for cinema.

But what really excited me was the fact that you could convert a room into a cinema. The prefect put up a home-movie projector and drew the blinds, switched on and it was a cinema, and I thought this was absolutely miraculous. They were running a print of Oliver Twist [William J. Cowen, 1933], I remember, and it jammed in the gate, and a few frames fell by my feet. I was right up beneath the projector, as you can imagine, as close to it as I could get, and as soon as the show was over I rushed up into the dormitory - it was pitch dark, and this will show you the technological brilliance that I've always been gifted with - I stood in the middle of the room with my torch, and switched it on behind the film, expecting to see a theatre-quality image on the wall [laughter], and when this failed to happen, I begged my parents for a projector, but I forgot to put the word 'movie' in front of it, and the first Christmas I got one of those projectors where you can see a film strip of Black Beauty... [sighs]... that horse! That text!

Anyway, the next Christmas they got the message and they gave me a Pathescope 9.5mm Ace, with two films which I quickly wore out, and - by this time I was at day school and we were living in London - and I went out to the streets of London, and in a shop off Baker Street I discovered a place which sold old 9.5mm films for 1/6 a reel, and I bought several of them and took them home and I ran them to my parents who were great film enthusiasts. Aas soon as she saw the first reel, my mother said 'that's Douglas Fairbanks, Sr,' and the next film came on, 'that's William S. Hart.' and 'that's Bessie Love.' I'd heard the name Douglas Fairbanks, so I got very excited and skipped down the road and rushed into every shop and said 'I've got a film with Douglas Fairbanks...' to rather blank responses [laughter], but eventually I went to the library and pulled a book off the shelf and, once again, incredible luck - these little films that Pathescope put out, they always changed the title, for some irritating reason, probably copyright - they didn't want to have to pay it, and this Fairbanks film was called The First Man, and when I went to the librarythe only book on film they had was by Bardèche and Brasillach, History of the Cinema.It fell open at a still from the film I'd just bought, and it had underneath, 'Douglas Fairbanks in American Aristocracy,' the correct title, 1916. So I thought 'my God, if I've got a film that's in a book...' and I rushed out to find more, and American Aristocracy became a sort of symbol.

The one-man crusade

It's a delightful film, made by an unknown director called Lloyd Ingraham and it's written by Anita Loos, but the important thing was it got me to the BFI. I wanted to find out more about it, and someone said 'why don't you go to the BFI in Shaftesbury Avenue?' And I remember one of the first people I bumped into there, who's here tonight, was Frank Holland, and he directed me to the Information section - I think it was even pre-John Gillett, and they had an index to the films of D.W. Griffith and it had the cast of American Aristocracy because it was officially supposed to have been supervised by Griffith... which it wasn't.

I learned that cast by heart and a few years later when I was working in the film industry, I heard people talking about the Al Parker Agency for actors. Albert Parker, was the villain in American Aristocracy and since I had a one-track mind, I knew that this was the same man, so I rang him up and was put through to him, and I said 'does the name Douglas Fairbanks mean anything to you?' [laughter] He said 'what do you mean, Doug Fairbanks? I directed him!' And so I said 'well I think I've got one of the first films you appeared in with him.' He said 'bring it over.' So I met my first contact with the silent era - the director Albert Parker, who directed The Black Pirate [1926] and John Barrymore in Sherlock Holmes [1922] and he was tickled to death to see himself as a villain in white ducks watching on the wall of his office - in a film that he'd forgotten he'd made. He became a very important contact because as people connected with that era came to London, he would put me in touch with them, or invite them to dinner.

He always claimed to have discovered Rudolph Valentino, and he made a film called Eyes of Youth [1919], which I discovered a 16mm print of, and he invited all his contacts, all his famous clients, and so I found myself running this Valentino film to Clive Brook, Trevor Howard, James Mason etc. etc., and it's an extraordinary coincidence that when we were making the Hollywood series [1980], and we'd started with a voice that didn't work, and our production manager, Liz Sutherland said 'haven't you thought of James Mason?' and so I was reunited with the Al Parker Agency.

DR: So, is that the lead-in to the next film, the next extract?

KB: Well yes it's sort of [laughter]...

DR: We haven't entirely practised... [laughter]

KB: As a film collector, I was exclusively on 9.5mm because I couldn't afford anything else, and I did find some really incredible films on 9.5mm that existed on no other gauge, and one day I met a collector who persuaded me to go over to 16mm by selling me, for the staggering sum of £2 a reel, what was known as an amber print of The Covered Wagon [James Cruze, 1923]. Amber prints produced by the Kodascope library were made from... I would say the camera negative, but fine grains anyway, of the original films, and the photographic quality was simply superb. It was such a thrill to see silent films looking like that because my enthusiasm was always crushed by people of my generation who couldn't stand the thought of silent films - they thought they were absolutely ridiculous. People would tell me that they were ludicrous antiques, badly acted, impossibly badly photographed, in juddering soot and whitewash, but that's all they'd seen, because when sound came in, the powers -hat-be that ran the picture business made sure that when you saw a silent film it was only to laugh at it, in series like Flicker Flashbacks [US series in the 1940s] and so on, you know... 'Poor Harold, it's doom for the groom, until he gets to his room'... you know the sort of thing...

Once I saw what these things were like, I embarked on a sort of one-man crusade to make people believe that the technicians of the past weren't idiots, and amber prints always did it. It made modern technicians gasp when they saw what was produced so long ago. And it made the people who had produced them, when I was eventually able to show them, really believe in their work again, because they had been misled by this prejudice as well.

The Goose Woman

KB: One day I got a list from a film library in Coventry and it had on it a title which I'd never normally have bothered with, The Goose Woman. 1925, with Louise Dresser, Constance Bennett and Jack Pickford, directed by somebody I'd never heard of called Clarence Brown. I took a risk because of that cast. What was exciting was that I really knew nothing about film history, and was discovering it on the fly. When I opened that parcel and projected that picture, I suddenly realised the incredible range of American silent films, and I felt 'My God, I wouldn't mind spending the rest of my life discovering them,' which is really what's happened.

Now this picture has a very odd story to it. I was so thrilled with it that I brought it, in 1960, to the National Film Theatre, and I thought 'they're not going to run this with a piano, these things were shown with orchestras when they were put on in the first-run theatres, so I'm going to do it with gramophone records.' Little did I know it would take 60 hours to select the music. I had to sit up in the commentary booth and try and fit them and it was absolute murder. The only thing was there was an interrogation scene towards the end of the film, and it was the first picture that used that dripping tap technique... I had an amazing response from people in the audience who said 'that's absolutely incredible, as the tap dripped, the sound was perfect,' and I had a cracked record [laughter]. Anyway it was the film - and Leslie Hardcastle reminded me of it today - I was so nervous about it because it was so fragile. I kept running up the spiral staircase into the projection box... 'what are you doing to it? What are you doing to it?' and I did this once too often and the chief projectionist just went >bmmmpf< [fist striking noise] so it remained in my memory [applause] and it will thrill me to see it on the screen in a moment.

It's not the original print you're going to see, but it is... we put that same original print very roughly onto tape. You'll see all the scratches and everything else - it really deserves to be restored. It deserves to be regarded as an American classic. It's still completely unknown, and it's by a director that I became very fond of, Clarence Brown, he became Garbo's favourite director. But this was before he was anything more than the fellow who was the assistant director for Maurice Tourneur. It was made at Universal, it's very battered, but [pianist] Neil Brand will give it life and I think you will be impressed by what they could do 80 years ago on the silent screen.

[Clip: The Goose Woman]

DR: Amazing... To what extent did what you learned with silent films... to what extent did that impact on your own filmmaking?

KB: An enormous amount. It is almost incredible, to make this statement now because cinematography has progressed so amazingly, but in the 1950s all the films you saw were studio-lit, in other words, they looked like movies, everybody had six shadows... they were brilliantly lit, and part of the problem was, in American studios, the drive-ins. Everything had to be incredibly bright because the screens in drive-ins were so enormous - the projectors just couldn't put out enough light unless the image was very bright, and it made films look incredibly artificial. I used to think, in the 50s, going to the cinema, that my silents were fresher, more innovative, and certainly more realistic. You didn't have back projection all the time, whenever the action went outside as you did in those days.

I disliked a great deal of the cinema that I was brought up with and what was remarkable about this film, as it progressed, was its passion for lighting. Everything had been thought out in terms of the light source, and rain would pour down a window and you'd see the reflection on the face. There was daylight lighting. And I remember showing it to cameramen and saying 'this is the effect I want.' I often showed films to people I worked with, to try and get that look, and one funny event on Winstanley, I was very struck by a very rare film called Chronicles of the Grey House[Zur Chronik von Grieshuus] by Arthur von Gerlach and in that there was an amazing scene on Lueneburger Heath in a tremendous windstorm, with the clouds scudding across the sun and making amazing patterns over the heath, and I realised there was not a chance in hell that we'd have that, but I showed it to the crew one evening and evidently God is a cinematographer because the next day He gave us exactly the same weather...

It Happened Here

DR: We're going to look at a bit of It Happened Here [1964]...

KB: Have we got to that time already? I was going to tell you about the background to that...

DR: I thought you paused for... I though that was a 'pause for extract'...

KB: ...Tell me you haven't done this before... 50 years ago a fellow called Derek Hill knocked on my door and I'd sent a couple of stills of my amateur film to the Amateur Cine World, of which he was the assistant editor, and they printed them and he came for the story about the making of this first film, which is long lost - thank God! But it took three years to make it and it was a ridiculous attempt to make a 'French' film in the middle of Hampstead. He said that I ought to be writing about films and I would say he taught me how to do it, except most of the early articles I'm absolutely convinced he wrote himself, I wrote for the Amateur Cine World and earned money - enough money to subsidise my film collecting. When that film was out of the way I joined the film industry and decided - I was eighteen now... seventeen, eighteen - it was about time I became a director.

The average age of directors at that time was 57 years old! Relics of the silent days, and if I didn't get started... well... also I was only interested in epics, I told you I was the second Orson Welles, so how about this for an Orson Welles subject: what might have happened if we'd lost the war? And then I thought 'My God, it's twelve years after the war, will anybody be interested?' So I started making this film and I cannot tell you what it looked like. Eric Mival made a very funny film which is on that cassette I advise you to get out there - Winstanley, and it's on the end of it, called It Happened Here Again [1976] and it shows some of the footage that I did - it's the most embarrassing thing for me to see. some of the footage that I did at the beginning of It Happened Here when I was a teenager.

Then I met another teenager, even younger than I was, called Andrew Mollo, and he looked at the footage. Now he had no idea there was such a thing as amateur films. He was an art student and he thought film was film, you saw it in the cinema and it looked professional, and when he saw the stuff I produced he said 'everything about it is incorrect' and he - amazingly, at the age of sixteen - knew an incredible amount about the Third Reich and the Wehrmacht and all the things I needed to know and, what's more, he was a collector of that stuff and he had what I needed. I made him the art director to begin with. He was so damning that eventually I threw it all away and started again... and thank God I did He turned me into a second Erich von Stroheim, in attitude if not in talent - that if everything is correct in front of the camera, the picture will look authentic, and it did, it just transformed it.

We unfortunately had no money - he earned nothing, I earned £6 10 a week, so we could have a shooting session about once every three months, and it went on for eight years. And it was Tony Richardson who saved our life at the end by financing it, and it was Stanley Kubrick who saved our bacon by giving us stock from Dr. Strangelove [1963] - I was terrified Peter Sellers would appear in double exposure all through it [laughter], and what I'd like to show you is one of my pet sequences. It's just a montage of the German army in London, very influenced by shots of the Channel Islands and in Paris and so on, and what I tried to do is to get that newsreel look where it doesn't look set up. Some of the shots don't work, but one or two of them do have that look that... yes, that's exactly how it must have been. So anyway, it's only three minutes..

[Clip: It Happened Here]

[applause]

KB: Somebody came up to one of our German officers with a cup of tea and threw it all over him... We had some very strange reactions in the streets. The German army had come over by special arrangement to train on the Castlemartin tank training ground in Wales, and a group of their officers was sightseeing in London when we were doing the march through Parliament Square. And of course they were all of the age to have been young men at the end of the war and they just couldn't get over it, they wouldn't leave us alone, we had them all day long. They examined the uniforms ... 'that's very good...' [laughter]

DR: And it's the perfect silent film - no titles.

KB: That's true...

DR: I'm sorry, by the way, I apologise for this clock-watching, but it is a tight programme and we do want to be sure that there's time for questions-and-answers. That's why we're hurrying on a bit.

Television

In your early days with silent films of course you were just this lonely eccentric, being a nuisance to everybody, and suddenly there's the breakthrough when, by some kind of miracle, television shows an interest and you get the chance actually, to show people silent films.

KB: Yes I first went to Associated Rediffusion and wasted an incredible amount of time before they thought it wasn't a very good idea to make a film about silent Hollywood. The miracle was actually Jeremy Isaacs. I was very snobbish about television - we didn't have one in the house, can you believe that? And kept having to go to some friends' to see The World at War [transmitted 31/10/73-8/5/74] and the friends were not interested in the war and I remember the poor wife used to lie on the sofa with her back to it. She couldn't stand it. It was 26 episodes and then they repeated them! So I decided we'd better get a television set. Well, I thought that was the greatest thing I'd ever seen on television, and I wrote a fan letter to Jeremy Isaacs and he said by coincidence, we had a party and I gave, as a farewell present to all the World at War crew, a copy of your book The Parade's Gone By, so let's meet. I think there's a television series in it.'

Well this was miracle upon miracle, except that I didn't want to do it. I thought 'Television? No! It would be like an alcoholic's cure...' and my wife, Virginia, said 'don't be ridiculous, this is the opportunity of a lifetime.' I said 'no, television, you don't understand, they would just make mincemeat of it. They have absolutely no rigour, no... awful...' So I went to meet Jeremy Isaacs, who I, funnily enough, had met at a documentary company we both worked at, World Wide Pictures, many years earlier, and he said 'I must warn you that television is an ulcer-producing occupation.' And I went out on to the street after the meeting and collapsed on the pavement. And I thought 'this is too early! I haven't even agreed!' Well it turned out I had appendicitis, not an ulcer, but it was incredible coincidence.

I finally started working for them and they said 'do you want to produce this on your own?' I said 'good heavens, no,' and they said 'well we think we've got the right man for you.' Well now... cut back... My father was an artist and he was very much concerned with film posters and the lettering on film posters in the 40s, and the man he admired above all else as an artist in this country was Eric Gill, so I was startled when I met David Gill, and I said 'are you any relation?' and he was his nephew. And when I said television, and people had no rigour, I hadn't met David Gill, my God! He was more rigorous than I was. He wouldn't let anything go. He was just the most careful and enthusiastic, humorous, perfect partner that you can have, and he handled all the politics... he really did the series buit I'm not going to admit it...can you imagine television doing this today? Thirteen hours on the American silent film. They wouldn't even put thirteen minutes of black and white on mainstream television at peak hours these days. So it was an extraordinary experience.

Jeremy Isaacs was pioneering by saying 'look, go and do the interviews because they won't wait. None of the studios will co-operate with us. They all think that That's Entertainment [Jack Haley Jr, 1974] can be made by each one of them and they'll make a fortune.They're not allowing any of their old footage to be used by television.' So we did the first sweep of interviews and we had a wonderful interviewer, Sue McConachy, who had done interviews for The World at War, with the Nazis so that fitted her with some of the Hollywood producers [laughter], and she did do one amazing interview with Bryan Foy, who made the first all-talking picture, Lights of New York [1928] at Warner Bros. and he died before we managed to get the camera to him. But there is an audio tape in the bfi. Incidentally again, Jeremy Isaacs said 'put all these interviews, before the negative's cut, make a print and put them into the National Film Archive,' and made Thames give them money to preserve them.

That's Entertainment having proved a tremendous success, they made That's Entertainment Part II [Gene Kelly, 1976], and when that was a flop, all the archives opened up to us, at enormous price, but we were able to get the footage we needed. I think 600 films passed through our hands and we did something like 75 interviews with the silent film people.But the most amazing part of all this was when we were trying to do the comedy episode. David insisted on them being scripted, and in enormous detail, and we were trying to do Chaplin and comedy and we knew we had to do an awful lot on Chaplin, and we couldn't get any reply from the Chaplin people. There was an agent here who insisted on $100,000, per minute, so that people wouldn't bother him for Chaplin footage, and it was David Robinson who said 'the secret is Rachel Ford, the business manager. Get in touch with her.'

So we got in touch with her and we got no reply. Eventually David said 'come on, ring her up. We've got to make a decision as to how much we can have.' I got through to her and it was engaged, and it turned out she was ringing me, and she invited us down to the Denham Laboratory vaults where the Chaplin footage was kept, and she said 'Sir Charles has allowed you a snippet.' And I thought 'how are we going to get a snippet to keep going for 50 minutes?' Anyway, we shot down to the Denham vaults and it was rather disappointing because the vaults were full of beautiful silver cans and pieces of paper with the names of the famous films on them: City Lights [1931], The Gold Rush [1925]... there didn't seem to be those wonderful piles of rusty cans that I'd hoped for with unknown titles. But then I saw at the bottom a title How to Make Movies [1917].

I must tell you that Rachel Ford was a very intimidating lady in her early 70s. She had been an officer in the French army during World War II, with 2,000 under her command. She said 'oh that's a film he made for fun. It's not very good.' And I said 'do you mean to say that Chaplin made films for fun, that he didn't release?' She said 'yes...' 'Could we see it?' 'I don't see why not,' and she allowed us to take the cans to the projection theatre, and what you are going to see next was what we saw. This is coming off tape, and it has some grading problems in it, but it's got a marvellous Carl Davis score. Carl Davis wrote the music for Hollywood and for practically everything else we did. It is one of the things I'm most proud of finding. I mean somebody would have found it, David would have found it the next week, but I'm thrilled to have come across it in this way, and then to have been able to make it public in the series Unknown Chaplin [1983], which you can also buy on your way out in the foyer [laughter]. So Unknown Chaplin please.

[Clip: Unknown Chaplin]

Napoleon

DR: Before I embark on the next bit, I want to steal about 90 seconds to relate a piece of history. It goes back around 50 years this piece of history. I was then living in Hampstead. One Sunday afternoon I was innocently walking through Hampstead, doing no harm to anyone, when I was accosted by a wonderful man. He was then the deputy curator of the National Film Archive, Liam O'Leary, who said 'I'm going to take you somewhere.' 'Oh yes?'... suspicious. So he led me along. We went to a very nice block of flats. We went to a flat - a charming couple there who were most welcoming, and they had this son, very silent, bespectacled child, and then I discovered what we had come for. We had to go to this child's bedroom, which was all fitted out as a little toy cinema.

Now this is Sunday afternoon, a nice sunny Sunday afternoon, I'm going to see some kid's toy cinema... okay. So we all had to sit down and there's a turntable and he's fiddling with the records and things like that... so sitting down... not a very good grace. And then the film goes on the screen and it's a newsreel from 1927. and I thought 'well this can't be all bad...' and then that was the short and then up comes the feature, and up on the screen comes the title 'Abel Gance's Napoleon.' This is impossible because Napoleon at that time was a completely vanished film. It did not exist... but there's Napoleon on the screen in this child's bedroom. We sit there and we watch... I think it ran all of 55 minutes, didn't it?

KB: Yes.

DR: This was a miracle, and so I thought differently. One of the amusing things about this story is that Kevin always insists that it was not Liam O'Leary who brought me there, but Derek Hill. Now he's already mentioned Derek Hill. I also want to say that Derek Hill not only commissioned his first film articles, he also commissioned my first film articles, and he's here tonight... Derek, who took me to meet Kevin Brownlow first?

Derek Hill: You spoke to me about him first, and then I met him.

DR: Yes, so I'd already... it was Liam O'Leary who took me.

DH: Yes. [laughter]

KB: I'm the historian... [laughter and applause]

DR: So that's the story finally put right.

KB: It would take me about four months to tell you the story of Napoleon, but it started with those two reels of 9.5, covering the Marseillaise sequence, the chase across Corsica and 'The Double Storm.' I had seen cinema at last. The cinema as I thought it should be. The most experimental film, which to me is still the most extreme in terms of technique, not even Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941] comes anywhere near Napoleon in terms of innovation in one film. So this is a trailer for the big show of Napoleon on 4 and 5 December. Any of you who have not seen it will have possibly the last chance to see it, the bfi is being very brave and withstanding legal threats from the United States, where, of all people, Francis Ford Coppola has decided he owns the rights, and has suppressed this version that we have done with the bfi, this long version, as he has suppressed the full version for the last 23 years. He got hold of my first restoration and reduced its length to fit what the Radio City could accommodate, and decided that is the restoration. There is no other. It's been a bone of contention for many, many years. We hope we'll be able to sort it out this time.

Abel Gance made three of the most astounding silent films: J'accuse [1918], La Roue [1922] and Napoleon, all of them extremely experimental. The sequence you're going to see is called 'The Double Storm.' It's when Napoleon was escaping from Corsica, he took a dinghy out to sea and Gance discovered that that night or the next night, in the Convention, there was a coup in which the extremist left-wing, the Jacobins, overthrew the moderate centrists, the Girondins, and he combined those two elements along with Victor Hugo's phrase 'to be a member of the Convention was like being a wave on the ocean.'

Now the sequence you'll see has a story behind it. It was this sequence that Patrick Stanbury was asked to go down to the National Film Archive and show to Anker-Petersen, Danish sponsors, who were looking for something to put money into in the motion picture line, and it was this sequence that convinced them to put the money up so that we could do this new restoration of Napoleon, tinting it, reshooting the titles in the exact type face and putting in all the footage that had been found in the intervening years, and it's this version that the American rights holders won't let us show in the United States. The rights, in this business, are always held by the wrong people, but I did feel that to suppress a film is the job of someone like Doctor Goebbels, not a great director, but... anyway... So this is the last extract and we'll have Q&A afterwards? Remember that to Gance, cinema was the music of light and in an American film, this scene could be done in five quick shots. But he uses the motion picture like music. This is not completely as the restoration will be on 4 and 5 December. There are a few shots missing, there's a very important title missing, but if this doesn't thrill you, then you'redead![laughter].

[Clip: Napoleon]

[applause]

KB: I think it's worth mentioning that that was the first of the Thames Silents. Carl Davis and David Gill decided it would be wonderful for a television company to put back to the cinema something of what it had taken away, and to present silent films as they were shown originally in first-run houses with live orchestra, and it lasted with Thames and then Channel 4, nineteen years until Michael Jackson [head of Channel Four]decided to withdraw the sponsorship, which I think is one of the scandals of our age. Channel 4's remit was for experiment and minority interests, and if silent film isn't important in the artistic progress of the media, then what is? I suppose he needed the money for Eurotrash... [laughter]

DR: The money wouldn't have gone very far towards Eurotrash, would it? They were really, by their terms, modest investments.

KB: That's true.

Audience questions: ...KB on John Krish

DR: Question-and-answer?

KB: Yes, there never are any questions... [laughter]

DR: Yes... please...

Audience: Mr Brownlow, I've followed your career with the greatest interest since It Happened Here and you've been so modest you haven't mentioned many of your books which have contributed so much as well to all our understanding. I think everyone interested in silent film owes you the deepest debt...

KB: Thank you...

Audience: But to come to my question. I had the pleasure - pleasure for me, maybe not for you - of meeting you at various times over the years, and sometimes I've said 'it's great what you're doing with all your research and reconstruction, but when are we going to see another film from you - another fictional film.' You've given me various answers over the years, but when I read the NFT programme, you actually said you know what your shortcomings are as a film director. Well I'm not aware of them, having seen Winstanley, having seen It Happened Here. I wonder if could tell me what you've got in mind.

KB: One of the problems with It Happened Here was we shouldn't have made it. It was a calling-card, we thought - Andrew and I said 'when we finish this, we'll be swamped by offers...' and we're still waiting [laughter]. We got the reputation on the first one of being... you know people are very simplistic, and if you put somebody on the screen saying 'Jews are bad,' you are automatically an anti-Semite. We were regarded as nothing short of Nazis when we produced It Happened Here, and that reputation was not helpful in this industry. And Andrew and I were offered the second unit on The Viking Queen [Don Chaffey, 1966], as I recall. So we had to make another film and we wouldn't have made that if it hadn't been for Mamoun Hassan who was running the BFI Production Board, and he enabled us to make Winstanley, but did that bring offers? Funnily enough Winstanley was intended to be a professional film from the start. Andrew and I said 'well we're not going to make another film for nothing...' So we took it around the studios and I remember one American producer called me into his office and he says 'Kevin, I've read your script... great, great script. But I don't like Winstanley. Now you don't have to like the leading character, but in Henry Levin's film Genghis Khan, [1965] he has a fine relationship with a girl...' [laughter]

DR: Yes...

Audience: Can you say a little bit about John Krish?

KB: Oh yes. I'm glad you brought that up. When I came into the picture business, in documentaries in 1955 - my God, 50 years ago - as an enthusiastic, bouncy amateur filmmaker I thought everyone in the film industry was alight with enthusiasm, and I couldn't believe it when people said 'go to the cinema? I have enough of that during the day...' and I remember the woman editor there was contemptuous of the idea of the art of the film. So I was very, very, very despondent, and John Krish... I remember I had met him before, but he was working at that company, and he had completely the opposite point of view. He really became my mentor, in fact he taught me how to edit, which was pretty important, because I became a professional editor from 1958 on, and also I used to try out my silent films at his house. He used to react very honestly and he'd say 'that film is simply appalling. I don't know how you can even look at it...' and that was very valuable because I was looking at Poverty Row nonsense - just because it was a good print and rare I thought 'this is wonderful...' you know, and they made just as many ghastly films in the silent days as they do now. So he has been of tremendous importance and, yes, my tram film was a direct imitation - a sort of tribute to his wonderful The Elephant Will Never Forget [1953]. Tremendously important in my life.

Audience questions: Meeting Abel Gance / making people talk

Audience: Mr Brownlow, you met Abel Gance - what was he like as a man in old age?. Is it actually true that when Napoleon was first shown here, someone phoned him up and...

KB: No that was in Radio City, when it was being shown there in '81, following the show here at the Empire. David Gill took the telephone right onto the stage, and everyone was giving this standing ovation, and they knew exactly what it was. We'd woken him up and it was about 6 o'clock in the morning in France, but at least we woke him up for a good purpose. I met him at the old National Film Theatre, when it was the Telekinema. I was doing a mock school certificate exam in German, when a telephone call came through. It was Liam O'Leary again, he had got in touch with my mother. When people rang the school, it was only because a relative had died, so nobody asked any questions. I was let go from the exam [laughter]... I went home. My mother said 'Abel Gance is at the National Film Theatre.' I picked up my printed scripts of Napoleon and photographs and rushed off, and was very nervous because one's idol can often turn out to be somebody you wish you hadn't met, but Gance could not have been more perfect. He looked like a mediaeval saint, with his white hair swept back. He was only in his 60s, my God, the age I am now, and this was 1954.

He had a tremendous sense of humour, he was very enthusiastic still, despite the years he'd not been allowed to work, and the only problem was I kicked myself for not having learned French more diligently at school. We had to have an interpreter. But I remember at the end of our meeting he said in broken English 'keep your eyes straight forward... non, non, les yeux Polyvision.' [laughter]. That was the beginning of a long friendship ... I mean I couldn't have done the restoration of Napoleon without him, although he kept forgetting where certain sequences went, and they kept dodging about a bit, and he was - amazingly - at Telluride in 1979, watching the film when it was shown outside in the freezing cold. He retreated to his hotel room and watched it from the window, and that's unfortunately the only way, because he never heard Carl Davis's fantastic score. The man who was accompanying it on the organ, his fingers froze and he just stopped, so it was shown in dead silence, but at least he did see that version - as it was 4 hours 50, and he was quite emotional at the end of that.

DR: I remember once - meeting Gloria Swanson for the first time, and I said to her 'do you know Kevin Brownlow,' and she said 'is it possible not to know Kevin Brownlow?' [laughter and applause]... Your books are an enormous tribute to your ability to find these people and to make them talk.

KB: Well it struck me, when I was trying to find information about the film - this is ridiculous, it's as though Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway were still alive, and nobody was interviewing them. So I managed to get to America in 1964 and went to Hollywood. I was going to meet some actress who was standing me up, and I was in the lobby of the Masquers Club in Hollywood, staring at the wall, and an old lady said 'who is that?' and it was a picture of Fred Niblo, so I said 'that's Fred Niblo, the director of Ben-Hur [1925].' She said 'you're too young to know that' [laughter], so I said 'oh no, he's a silent film director and I'm fascinated by silent film directors.' She said 'I'm married to one, but you'd never have heard of him.' I said 'who was he?' She said 'Joseph Henabery.' I said 'my God, he was Abraham Lincoln in The Birth of a Nation [D.W. Griffith, 1915],' and she said 'you've heard of him? You'd better come and meet him' [laughter], so I went to meet Joseph Henabery, and I asked one question and I got a four-hour answer [laughter].

And it was what he told me made me write that book, because in England film history tended to be... you know that dreadful book by Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon... somebody said 'how do you do your historical research?' He says 'mental telepathy mostly' [laughter], and historians over here tend to work that way. They had decided that... [laughter]... I'd better put that in the past... they worked that way... that D.W. Griffith had photographed that great scene of Babylon, with the camera coming out of the clouds over that great set - from a captive balloon. Henabery happened to be on the machine that actually photographed it, and so he was able to draw it for me and explain that it was a massive elevator, like a siege tower, on mining rails, and the grips pushed it slowly forward, and from about 80 feet up this lift descended slowly over the vast set of Babylon in 1916 - Griffith didn't need to do that, nobody would have missed it. But it was magical to listen to a man who had worked so closely with Griffith, and still regarded him with such awe. And that's another cassette you can get when you go out [laughter].

Audience: I was very interested in your story about American Aristocracy and I'd very much like to see the film. What happened to your print?

KB: It was eventually... my print was only 9.5mm, and it was horribly abridged, but it turned up on 28mm in the collection of Don Malkames, in New York, and it has been copied by Eastman House, so you can see it. It doesn't look as good as it should, but at least you can see it. It was shown at Pordenone, wasn't it?

DR: No, no, it was in Bologna.

KB: In Bologna, and went down very well indeed. It's a delicious little picture with Doug Fairbanks as a butterfly collector and Al Parker as a gun-runner during the Mexican Revolution.

[Editor's Note: The George Eastman House new print of American Aristocracy was shown at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival on October 17, 2003.]

DR: One little parenthesis about Al Parker is that he very much created Richard Attenborough...

KB: Oh yes...

DR: Richard Attenborough got him as his agent and he managed Attenborough's career with enormous skill, and that was the foundation... he was very smart... I can't see the hands going up... I can see one there, I've spotted one there...

Audience: [inaudible question]

KB: In the case of David Lean, it was - rather like being asked to work on the Hollywood series - I said 'no, no, no, no, absolutely cannot do it, I'm too busy.' I was working on the D.W. Griffith documentary. And the publisher kept saying 'you could work with Sir David Lean, he would rather like you to do the interviews and then he'll write the book. You do the recording and...' I thought that was irresistible. I would just sit there with a cup of coffee, listening to these wonderful anecdotes and then I'd hand the tapes to him to write the book. So I agreed and we had a wonderful time, for many, many, many of these interviews, and then one day I said 'how are you getting on with writing it?' He said 'what do you mean, writing it? I thought you were writing it!' [laughter] and we'd both been Spiegeled! So when he died I couldn't resist carrying on. I'd got hundreds of pages of transcript from him, which was a wonderful start, and then everybody else was extremely generous with their memories too. That was a very exciting experience. Funnily enough, no television company will do a documentary on David Lean. It seems to me completely barmy. They all say 'oh the London Weekend one...' which was very good, but was 20 years ago, and was just him '...is enough.'

Audience questions: Restoring Napoleon

Audience: Gance put so much work into Napoleon. How did it get dispersed?

KB: Oh because, first of all, you have to remember that Gance was a bit mischievous. He was going to make the life of Napoleon in six separate features, and he spent the money for all six on the first one [laughter] and when he got to the end he realised he hadn't quite reached Waterloo, in fact he was about 20 years away [laughter] so he had to produce a rabbit out of a hat to make the audience forget they hadn't seen Waterloo and, believe me, when you see this picture you'll never think that you've been denied anything. Exhibitors in France were used to films of episodes, in which you had a twelve-hour version of The Three Musketeers [Henri Diamant-Berger, 1921], shown in hour or two-hour episodes per week. And that's how Napoleon was going to be shown, but it got absolutely massacred.

The exhibitors decided on their own versions - what bits they were going to see, and it got dispersed when it went to America - they cut the five or six-hour version down to 75 minutes, and it ended with George Washington - I don't know how they managed that, and in the end there was a sound version in the mid 30s, and the silent one was chopped up for that, and the Cinémathèque Française did have a perfectly good version, but the one they sent here in 1963 for a big season on the French Avant-Garde was a version which was so appalling Gance had actually sued the people that put it out. And that was still being shown by the Cinémathèque Française, and seeing that made me decide this film has to be put back properly, and... we're still at it!

Audience: [inaudible question]

KB: Wouldn't you think, too, that von Stroheim would have kept on with the original version of Greed [1925], but he didn't either, that's... an awful shame.

DR: It's a pity they didn't do the obvious thing and turn it into a serial. I wonder why they didn't do that.

KB: Well, they did in some places. It was shown properly occasionally, but it ended up by being a dog's dinner. It's very difficult to follow the release of that film, but what we saw in 1963 was horrendous. You saw that scene at the end of the double storm, when you have about sixteen superimpositions, all done in the camera by the way. Well, the one of Napoleon, in this version that was shown here in '63, was tested without any of the other superimpositions, so suddenly, in the middle of this film we see the storm, you suddenly cut to Napoleon, perfectly dry, going... [laughter], and the audience was hysterical [laughter].

DR: Your restoration has now been shown for about 24 years. How much has it grown in those 24 years?

KB: In 1980 it was 4 hours 50. We enlarged it in 1983, when the Cinémathèque suddenly realised that they did have some material after all, and then in 2000 it became 5 hours 31, and that's how it stands at the moment, and it doesn't seem more than half an hour.

Audience: Do you think Coppola's desire to repress your restoration has something to do with his desire to have his father's music?

KB: Yes, unfortunately it does. And the curious thing is that the father is now dead, and the music doesn't fit the new version, and he says 'we'll make it fit!' So it's very unfortunate. I often think of how Coppola removed his father's music from his films and gave them to Nino Rota, but anyway, better not go into that...

Audience: You have added all this film, and found it. It's nothing like the film that Coppola says he owns. Gance was alive when Lelouch sold the contract to Coppola, wasn't he? Did he not argue about that, because I remember him saying Gance would never ever give a contract for this film to anybody, and anyway it was dispersed all over the place... what does he own?

KB: Gance decided to make another version. And he made Bonaparte and the Revolution [Bonaparte et la Révolution, 1971], and it was awful, because he took most of the footage of the silent version, but converted it into a documentary, with paintings and historical quotes, and the government supported this and Claude Lelouch was the middle-man, and somehow Claude Lelouch got from Gance the rights to the silent Napoleon, we think. I won't go into it, because I shall be sued for libel or something, but it is the most cringe-making business, and it ended up with Claude Lelouch being the only person to make money out of Napoleon, and he made $430,000 I think. He had done nothing whatsoever, except threaten Gance and me with legal action if we proceeded with the restoration. Anyhow, I wrote a book about all this, and Jean Davis is having it republished, ready in time for the show in December, so you'll read all the hot detail in the last chapter, and we'd better bring this to an end...

DR: Well I know we've got enough good talk to go on for another hour or two, but we're going to - unless we put up really big resistance - we're going to be thrown out at 8 o'clock, but let's just have one more question. Do I see a hand there? Yes...

Audience: First of all I want to thank you hugely for... I was lucky enough to see Napoleon in 1980... I'd like to ask you - there is a lack of... there's one great person, contributor, to the film, and you've not written about, and that's yourself... and I wondered when we can expect your autobiography.

KB: Well, funnily enough I've been working on it for a long time, and decided 'my God, I couldn't publish this...' and so I've decided it's for my daughter Julia, when she decides 'oh what a shame I never talked to Daddy about all this...' because I never interviewed my father and I regret it bitterly, I wish he'd left memoirs behind. The only bit of it I'll publish is the story of meeting the old silent film people. They were the most incredible people I ever met in my life, and it was the fulfilment of an ambition. So that will, I think, one day, be printed, but the rest of it...

DR: All this is slightly untrue, because there is one published fragment of the autobiography, which is How It Happened Here.

KB: Oh yes, that's true...

DR: ...which is a marvellous book, and extremely hard to find. That would be a nice one for the bfi to reprint. [As a result of this event, the book is being republished by UKA Press]

KB: That's useful for people trying to start to make films, because it's how to make a film on nothing, and end up with nothing [laughter].

DR: It would stop anybody going into... [laughter]... Kevin, thank you for everything.

KB: Thank you, David.

[applause]