Kevin Brownlow

 

For decades, British film historian Kevin Brownlow has been one of the world's leading authorities on silent cinema. His own work as a feature film director, however, is much less known. In late March, the Film Museum will be showing both facets of his work.

 

Brownlow's fascinating TV series Hollywood and his books such as The Parade's Gone By are considered standard reference works, as are his films portraying the great icons of the silent era. Unknown Chaplin, for example, is a brilliant demonstration of how the spirit of thorough research can be successfully blended with a dynamic presentation of film history. Brownlow's features, on the other hand, illustrate a dimension of fictional film which most directors never dare to take. Shot on ludicrously small budgets, Winstanley (1975) and It Happened Here (1964) conjure up their respective worlds with a painstaking eye for detail: the age of Cromwell around 1650, and a dystopian 20th century parallel universe in which England has been occupied by the Nazis.

 

These films are unique in conception; they radically reduce the melodramatic elements of standard narrative cinema and promote the viewer‘s extreme immersion into a reconstructed past.