Most Popular Books by Kevin Brownlow

From Kevin Brownlow, cinema historian and discoverer of lost films, here is the first full-scale exploration of a vital and now almost forgotten chapter of American moviemaking: the response of early producers of the decades before World War I. All the issues that torment America today were rampant in the silent-film era: crime, poverty, alcohol, drugs, racial and ethnic prejudice, epidemics, and the controversies over birth control, abortion, and the death penalty. And there were others that persist today but were then even more explosive: sexual mores, government and police corruption, prison conditions, immigration, and strife between capital and labor. Although many early moviemakers ignored harsh realities, choosing to depict a society shielded by a “mask of innocence,” others went behind that façade, fighting the ever-present censors and producing films that made even the most sheltered moviegoer aware of deep rents in the country’s social fabric. Some films were exploitative, some serious, but together they add up to a revelation of the dark side of American life—a revelation startling to us today because it was later, in the era of the Hays Office, so thoroughly ignored, indeed denied, by Hollywood. Broken Blossoms, The Crowd, Humoresque, Regeneration: these films that have survived and become classics are, in these pages, studied in their historical context. And although a tragic number of other films have vanished, nearly all are reclaimed from oblivion by Mr. Brownlow’s brilliant feat of restoration and descriptive “reconstruction.” Here, never again to be forgotten, are The Fall of the Romanoffs, The Racket, Those Who Dance, and dozens of others. With this remarkable book, Kevin Brownlow completes the panoramic trilogy that began with The Parade’s Gone By… and continued with The War, the West, and the Wilderness. Like its predecessors, Behind the Mask of Innocence is an essential work of silent-film history, certain to become a standard reference; but it is more—at once a surprising portrait of a time not unlike our own and a powerful demonstration of the way in which a popular art form can reveal a society to itself.

The life and its biographer provide a landmark work on the cinema. Emerging from a childhood of nearly Dickensian darkness, David Lean found his great success as a director of the appropriately titled Great Expectations. There followed his legendary black-and-white films of the 1940s and his four-film movie collaboration with Noel Coward. Lean''s 1955 film Summertime took him from England to the world of international moviemaking and the stunning series of spectacular color epics that would gain for his work twenty-seven Academy Awards and fifty-six Academy Award nominations. All are classics, including The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India. Kevin Brownlow, a film editor in his own right and author of the seminal silent film trilogy initiated with The Parade''s Gone By. . ., brings to Lean''s biography an exhaustive knowledge of the art and the industry. One learns about the making of movies as realized by a master, but also of the highly personal costs of genius. The troubled Quaker family from which Lean came influenced his relationship with his son, his brother, and his six wives. Yet he showed in his work a deep understanding of humanity. The vastness of this scholarly and entertaining enterprise is augmented by sixteen pages of scenes from Lean''s color films, thirty-two pages from his black-and-white movies, and throughout the text a vast number of photographs from his life and location work.

Well illustrated book on history of silent movies

In the world of film collecting, the claim "find of the century" may sound an unpardonable exaggeration. But what discovery can equal it?1 Collectors had hailed the discovery of the occasional lost Keystone comedy in which Chaplin played, but nobody had the slightest idea that somewhere in England, somewhere in France, and somewhere in the United States lay three separate treasure troves of silent film which would, for the first time, reveal the working methods of the greatest single figure of the cinema. It was a treasure hunt involving innocence and guile, accident and coincidence. A treasure hunt which took us to Switzerland, France and the United States. The treasure, when it was uncovered, revealed information as precious as the film itself. From the material, we compiled a television series called Unknown Chaplin, three hour-long documentaries produced for Thames Television. Apart from the experience of making the series, we learned so much about Chaplin we could not squeeze into the commentary we decided to preserve it in the form of a book.

Timely new edition of a well respected book written about one of early cinema''s great masterpieces .

The first ever overview of women''s contributions to the dawn of cinema looking at a variety of roles from writers and directors to film editors and critics. Why have women such as Alice Guy-Blache, the creator of narrative cinema, been written out of film history? Why have so many women working behind the scenes in film been rendered invisible and silent for so long? Silent Women, pioneers of cinema explores the incredible contribution of women at the dawn of cinema when, surprisingly, more women were employed across the board in the film industry than they are now. It also looks at how women helped to shape the content, style of acting and development of the movie business in their roles as actors, writers, editors, cinematographers, directors and producers. In addition, we describe how women engaged with and influenced the development of cinema in their roles as audience, critics, fans, reviewers, journalists and the arbiters of morality in films. And finally, we ask when the current discrimination and male domination of the industry will give way to allow more women access to the top jobs. In addition to its historical focus on women working in film during the silent film era, the term silent also refers to the silencing and eradication of the enormous contribution that women have made to the development of the motion picture industry. “The surprise of the essays collected here is their sheer volume in every corner of a business apparently better able to accommodate female talent then than now..” Danny Leigh, Financial Times, July 2016 “ It''s a fascinating journey into the untold history of a largely lost era of film..” Greg Jameson, Entertainment Focus, March 2016 "This book shows how women''s voices were heard and helped create the golden age of silent cinema, how those voices were almost eradicated by the male-dominated film industry, and perhaps points the way to an all-inclusive future for global cinema..” Paul Duncan, Film Historian “Inspirational and informative, Silent Women will challenge many people''s ideas about the beginnings of film history. This fascinating book roams widely across the era and the diverse achievements and voices of women in the film industry. These are the stories of pioneers, trailblazers and collaborators - hugely enjoyable to read and vitally important to publish.” Pamela Hutchinson, Silent London “Every page begs the question - how on earth did these amazing women vanish from history in the first place? I defy anyone interested in cinema history not to find this valuable compendium a must-read. It''s also a call to arms for more research into women''s contribution and an affirmation of just how rewarding the detective work can be.” Laraine Porter, Co-Artistic Director of British Silent Film Festival “An authoritative and illuminating work, it also lends a pervasive voice to the argument that discrimination and not talent is the barrier to so few women occupying the most prominent roles within the industry." Jason Wood, Author and Visiting Professor at MMU “I was amazed to discover just how crucially they were involved from not just in front of the camera but in producing, directing, editing and much, much more. An essential read.” Neil McGlone. The Criterion Collection

Not only does this volume feature, as the title suggests, many previously unpublished photos of the silent film star (these consisting of film stills, production shots, and personal photographs drawn from the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), it also contains extensive commentary on Pickford''s career and each of her films. Not merely the most popular actress of her day, Pickford also exercised complete control over her films, making her a pioneer for women in positions of power in the film industry. For film historians and fans, this valuable volume contains a wealth of otherwise unavailable information about--as well as images of--her career. 9x12". Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Here, from one of today’s leading authorities on film history, is the story, told brilliantly and for the first time, of the pioneering movie makers who as early as 1905 traveled beyond the studio stages to make feature films on location—and in so doing recorded the real history and real life of their time. The War, the West, and the Wilderness is the result of more than a decade of passionate research by Kevin Brownlow, whose last book, The Parade’s Gone By… (hailed by Charles Champlin as “the definitive work on the silent era”) is regarded as a classic history of early motion pictures. His new book is alive with the voices of the film-makers themselves, in their logbooks, in their letters and diaries, in their firsthand accounts of their adventurous journeys and cinematic innovations, and—even more immediate—in Brownlow’s interviews with cameramen, director’s, lighting technicians, and actors who relive those days, taking us with them to the Great War, to the West, ad into the Wilderness. It is the triumph of this book to reconstruct the dramatic moments when these men and women contrived, against ordinary odds, to bring to movie audiences for the first time, the look, the feel—the actuality—of large events and distant places, from the great battles of World War I to the South Seas with Jack London aboard the Shark, and the gold rush in Tonopah, Nevada.

The story of the making of a film about the supposedly successful Nazi invasion of England in 1940.

Winstanley: Warts and All" is the story of the making of the film "Winstanley," written by director Kevin Brownlow and now published for the first time, telling what went wrong (everything), and how the film was kept from audiences all over the world, but was declared a work of genius in France. ... ... In the words of director, Kevin Brownlow: "My first book was How It Happened Here, about the making of my first film. As a film historian, I thought I should keep a careful record of the making of Winstanley as well. It was written immediately after the events had occurred, when my memory was vivid. The manuscript sat on the shelf for 34 years, but reading it back recently I found some of the verbatim dialogue, especially the excuses from the laboratories for ruining our precious film, very amusing - which I certainly didn''t at the time. UKA Press suggested putting it into print at last, since they had already reprinted How It Happened Here. They have been very generous with photographs, and combined with the DVD, just released, the book makes a fascinating example of how-not-to-do-it for any budding film-maker." ... ... "The Kevin Brownlow / Andrew Mollo duo are among the most challenging and idiosyncratic of independent filmmakers. They have made only two films, It Happened Here (1966), and Winstanley. Although both made friends and enemies in equal measure, they are at last enjoying wider recognition as outstanding and important films. ... Brownlow, a first rank film historian, and Mollo, historical consultant on such iconic masterpieces as Dr Zhivago, used amateur actors to create both films on shoestring budgets, working at weekends and driven by a fanaticism for historical accuracy and a fascination with the subject matter, which is the playing-out of big social visions (fascism, socialism) in the lives of ordinary people. ... Filmed in black-and-white, Winstanley is intensely beautiful visually, comparable to the work of Eisenstein, Dreyer, or Abel Gance. Indeed the meticulous accuracy of the sets and costumes alone would justify its inclusion in any film lover''s collection. But over and above this it tells the heart-rending story of the visionary Winstanley''s beautiful dream overturned by the might of the entrenched aristocracy and the common people''s fear of change.

Describes the making of the silent movie, Napoleon, and depicts the struggle to reconstruct the original version of the film

La Parade est passée est l’opus magnum de l’historien du cinéma muet Kevin Brownlow. Best-seller international, jamais traduit en France, ce livre rassemble les témoignages des plus grands acteurs et réalisateurs de l’âge d’or du cinéma muet d’Hollywood. Au fil des pages, le monde de Louise Brooks, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton ou Gloria Swanson revit sous la plume alerte et érudite d’un homme qui, à lui seul, a contribué à sauver des dizaines de chefs-d’œuvre du cinéma américain. Auteur de nombreux ouvrages historiques ou études, Kevin Brownlow est aussi le plus grand spécialiste du Napoléon d’Abel Gance auquel il a redonné vie en le préservant puis en le restaurant.A l’automne 2010, lors d’une cérémonie à Los Angeles qui distinguait également Francis Ford Coppola et Jean-Luc Godard, la communauté d’Hollywood a remis à Kevin Brownlow un Oscar d’honneur pour l’ensemble de son œuvre de sauvegarde du cinéma muet américain. Richement illustré d’environ trois cents documents iconographiques, ce témoignage inestimable donne enfin au cinéma muet ses lettres de noblesse et démontre son pou-voir de séduction et d’émotion sur le public contemporain. L’institut Lumière lui consacre en octobre l’édition 2011 de son festival.

Oral interviews with Cooper and Schoedsack together, and Cooper alone, about their early careers. Including following topics: filming of "Grass" with Marguerite Harrison Blake, "Chang" and "The Four Feathers" for Jesse Lasky. Explorations of Ethiopia, Persia (Iran), and Siam (Thailand), meeting with Haile Selassie. Cooper''s experiences in prison in Russia during the Russo-Polish War with Claire Chennault.