Help Restore The 9 Surviving Hitchcock Silent Films

True fact. Alfred Hitchcock was easily the most influential and important film maker of all time. Yes more so than Kubrick, Kurosawa or even Ratner. The BFI is currently in the process of restoring his 9 surviving silent films with the intention of screening them next year with a live score being played as is their intended form of presentation. They’ll need a lot of work. These films are edging onto 80 years old now. So wanna help? Click the jump to find out how.

So the process of restoring these films is a lengthy one and a complex one but the restoration will be very beneficial to film viewers and maker alike. By restoring the films a important piece of British cinema will be returned to it’s former glory. Students of film will be able to view them in a new level of quality and to add to that it would make a potential home release easier to achieve. So which 9 films are in the restoration process?

The Pleasure Garden (1925)
The Lodger (1926)
The Ring (1927)
Downhill (1927)
Easy Virtue (1927)
The Farmers Wife (1927)
Champagne (1928)
The Manxman (1929)
Blackmail (1929)

So how can you help? Simply by going here and clicking on the big image that says donate. There’s even a way for people not of the UK residency to donate. You see the BFI is a charity and it relies on donations such as these to help out. I intend to donate next month once pay day comes around. If you donate over £25 they’ll keep you informed of the restoration process and send you the odd special offer. Well worth it because the BFI do some cool screenings. Last month they showed Jan Svankmejer’s Alice which believe me is a rare and beautiful treasure of cinema.

Here’s the details about what each donation value can help do.

£75 – would help to scan 375 frames of film for digital clean-up

£150 – would help to restore digitally 450 frames of film

£500 – would help to print 2,000 frames back to film for preservation

£5,000 – would help restore digitally a reel of film

£15,000 – would help to reproduce the colour tinting or black and white grading of the original nitrate prints by using digital colour and image correction techniques

£30,000 – would help to scan a feature film’s worth of frames (i.e enough frames to reconstruct 100mins of film) for digital clean-up

£50,000 – would help to enable digital clean-up of a whole film

£100,000 – can secure the full restoration of a single feature film

So if you happen to be loaded feel free to donate £100,000. If not then please donate what you can spare. This may not be a charity along the line of helping kids with cancer but it’s a worthy cause for the arts. If the arts aren’t preserved then our history and education aren’t preserved.