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In this year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics, Britain's cultural institutions, including the BFI, wheeled out their big gunsforthe London 2012 Festival. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Turner were obvious candidates, and who better to represent British film than its most celebrated genius, Alfred Hitchcock. The preservation and reassessment of his work is a top priority for the BFI, so this seemed a propitious moment to look again at his first nine surviving films. Of all of his films these were most in need of restoration and rediscovery, and the BFI National Archive was in a position to make a real difference both to the film materials and to their reputation.
His early work is still relatively unknown except among completists and is ripe for reassessment. It's surprising that although these films have always been available due to Hitchcock's prominence, none of the many prints and DVDs in circulation have benefited from full archival restoration. Some re-mastering or re-printing work has been done over the years by the BFI and the rights-owners. Only The Lodger (1926) was fully restored in the pre-digital era, but the new combination of photochemical and digital restoration techniques now make it possible for really significant improvements to be made in the surviving materials.
The BFI's restoration team consisting of curators and technical experts have undertaken detailed print source research with partner archives and rights-holders, and have worked with external digital laboratories, as well as doing much of the restoration work at its own facility, to produce restored 35mm prints (and DCPs) of the nine titles, three of them tinted, and new preservation masters.
There was a definite benefit to doing all nine titles at the same time - we learned a lot about Hitchcock's filmmaking style and predilections. We learned a lot too about contemporary studio practice, which was vital in the restoration process, as we only had the evidence of the film prints themselves to go on. No production paperwork survives for any of Hitchcock's silent films, and the British film censor records for the silent era were destroyed in the Blitz. British International Pictures, for example, made second or "export" negatives compiled from alternative shots (rather than filming with a second camera, a common practice in...