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The following interview transpired in Hollywood on 3 November 1995. Kevin Brownlow was in town to host the Buster Keaton Centennial Tribute at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It had been four years since Brownlow had last been in Los Angeles. At the time of this interview, Brownlow had finished his book on David Lean (not yet published) and was working on the restoration of the F. W. Mumau silent classic, Sunrise (1927).
Biography
Kevin Brownlow was born in the late 1930s in Sussex, about fifty miles from London. Among his earliest memories are vivid images of the V-I bombings:
The teachers assumed we would be terrified by these monsters roaring by overhead, and they fed us orange juice-which was very scarce-to console us. What they didn't know was that none of us were in the least frightened-even when fighter planes followed the V-1 's, firing at them with their machine guns. It was all tremendously exciting. The sight of a V-1 meant not death and destruction to us children, but the certainty of a glass of orange juice!
He first discovered motion pictures while attending a boarding school in Crowborough, Sussex. Excited by his first encounters with Disney cartoons and Doug Fairbanks comedies, he got a job in a photographic shop in Hampstead. After making a few short films of his own-"the usual hopeless amateur stuff, where you pan frantically around the streets"-he tackled an adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's Les Prisonniers in 1954 when he was sixteen years old. At the same time, he began writing about films for a magazine called Amateur Cine World. The publication in 1967 of his first book, The Parade's Gone By, was a seminal event in film scholarship. It and several other books, including The War, the West, and the Wilderness (1979) and Behind the Mask of Innocence (1992), established him as the world's leading authority on the silent film period. Meanwhile, he was working as a film editor (on Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1968) and co-director (with Andrew Mollo) on It Happened Here (1965) and Winstanley (1978).
His restoration of Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) took thirteen years, leading to screenings in Europe, in Washington at the Kennedy Center, and...