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THE SUMMER GAMES HAVE ALSO BEEN A LATE SUMMER FOR THE DIRECTOR RECLAIMED FOR BRITAIN AND ACCLAIMED FOR THE GREATEST FILM EVER MADE/BY RICHARD COMBS
1. PAINT THE TOWN HITCHCOCK
IT MIGHT BE AN OLYMPIC EVENT. NINE HUNDRED PEOPLE HAVE assembled in front of a London landmark, and for a moment you might think they are here for a marathon perhaps, because from a distance such spectators all look alike. They all have one face. But actually, crowds have gathered for a bit of stage hocus-pocus, a vanishing trick (call it The Audience Vanishes). They are standing in front of the British Museum, and all of them have donned cardboard cutout masks of Alfred Hitchcock. A restored print of the silent version of his 1929 film Blackmail is about to be projected on a huge screen in the forecourt of the museum (scene of the film's big chase climax), with a score composed by veteran silent-film accompanist Neil Brand and performed by the Thames Sinfonia.
The masks are a token of the fact that Hitchcock was everywhere in the city this summer. Bfockmail is one of five of his silent films that have been restored by the British Film Institute's National Archive and presented with new scores at live performances around town; his boxing film The Ring (27) played at the Hackney Empire in East London, a venue that Hitchcock apparently visited in his youth. All bar one of his silent films are due to come back to life in the BFI's biggest-ever restoration program, "Rescue the Hitchcock 9." Still missing is his second film, The Mountain Eagle (26), made in Germany, which has pulled off a complete vanishing trick. But it might still magically reappear: in a fascinating recent discovery, three reels of The White Shadow (24) - on which Hitchcock worked as writer and designer - came to light in New Zealand and were included in a three-month Hitchcock series at BFI Southbank.
All the Hitchcockery became fused this past summer with the hyperbole surrounding the Olympic Games. The Hitchcock season, for instance, was part of the London 2012 Festival, which despite its name was a U.K.-wide festival of the arts and was in turn a culmination of the Cultural Olympiad, "the...