The Master, Restored

The British Film Institute has restored nine silent and early sound films from the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock.

The films are:

The Pleasure Garden
Blackmail
The Ring
The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog
Downhill
Easy Virtue
The Farmer's Wife
Champagne
The Manxman

An additional treat can be found in the restorations; an extra twenty minutes of footage from The Pleasure Garden were discovered, allowing the BFI not only to restore the film, but lengthen it, too. Blackmail is being released with a score by Neil Brand - and he's amazing; I've heard his impromptu piano accompaniment to several silent films at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone.  

Hats off to Martin Scorsese and his Film Foundation, which raised most of the money for the restoration! The BFI will hold a festival of all Hitchcock's films during the London Olympiad, and two actors from his films - Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie) and Bruce Dern (Marnie, Family Plot) will speak at the event.

Lost

One of the saddest things about the silent era; so many films from that time no longer exist. I read somewhere that the guesstimate is 80 - 90%.

That is one GRIM statistic. For all of the great films that still exist, how many more are gone? No wonder we get excited at the news that the missing footage of Metropolis has been found. I wouldn't mind taking a tour of screening rooms, old movie theaters, and the houses of theater owners, in the hope of finding even one reel of a missing film. I'm that intent.

I know that the AFI has a list of "Most Wanted" of the lost films, but I couldn't find it online; I found many mentions of it, but not the list itself.

Here are some of mine:

The Miracle Man
The Greatest Thing in Life
London After Midnight (I've seen this referred to as perhaps the most famous lost film of them all)
Remodeling Her Husband (starring Dorothy Gish and directed by none other than her sister, Lillian; her only film behind the camera)
Cleopatra
The entire epic of Greed
The Boy in Blue
Number 13

Chaney! Gish! Murnau! Hitchcock!