Underplayed Gems

Thames Silents

Thames Silents poster
Genre
documentary film, documentary television film
Country
United Kingdom
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

This documentary series covers the restoration and re-release of silent films. It shows the work of Kevin Brownlow and David Gill in bringing classic movies back to audiences. The films include works by Chaplin, Keaton, and other silent era stars.

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What happens

Thames Silents is a series of releases (theatrical, broadcast and home video) of films from the silent era produced by the British ITV contractor Thames Television. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill were the two main people involved in the project. The collaboration between Brownlow and Gill had begun with the Thames documentary series Hollywood (1980), a thirteen part exploration of the silent era. It was an enormous success, and generated a degree of renewed interest in silent cinema. Subsequently, Thames screened the team's two subsequent television series, Unknown Chaplin and Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, plus the two part Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius examining silent comedy. In conjunction with several US organisations, the Thames Silents project restored full-length silent films, often released for limited cinema screenings. These began with Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) in 1980, a French epic for which Brownlow has a special affection. Later examples include Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd comedies, and films by other significant figures from the period such as Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Erich von Stroheim, Rex Ingram, and D.W. Griffith. Napoleon was one of Channel Four's earliest broadcasts, and many of the films were released on home video. The composer Carl Davis was commissioned to write new scores for almost all of the releases. Thames Silents continued, via Brownlow's Photoplay Productions, since 1990; Thames Television lost its ITV franchise in December 1992. It is no longer used as an imprint by FremantleMedia, the ultimate owners of Thames. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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