Rediscovering Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes fans will be promised a more authentic representation of the fictional detective with the restoration of a century-old silent film series chronicling the London detective’s adventures, AFP reported.

Audiences will get their first glimpse of the restored works from the early 1920s next week at a screening at the London Film Festival, accompanied by a newly commissioned live score by artists from the Royal Academy of Music.

The October 16 premiere of just three of the short films, in what is being called Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases, will take place in the Victorian-era grandeur of the Alexandra Palace Theater in north London.

A wider release on DVD and Blu-Ray will follow, including an international tour, with the British Film Institute (BFI) restoration team excited to reveal their years-long efforts.

“They are the last silent Sherlock-related works to be restored,” explained Bryony Dixon, the BFI curator who led the project.

“The other survivors have already been done, so these are the things audiences have been patiently waiting for,” she told AFP at the film charity’s national archive in Berkhamsted, northwest of the UK capital.

“Sherlock Holmes is always popular around the world. As they say: you could just write Sherlock Holmes on a cardboard box and sell it. So it’s in people’s interest and it’s time to be seen.”

Authenticity

Produced in 1921-23 by British production company Stoll Pictures, the 45 episodes of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and two feature films being restored are all film stars of the era, Eille Norwood.

He was author Arthur Conan Doyle’s favorite on-screen Sherlock.

Conan Doyle’s creation has been adapted for the big and small screen hundreds of times, with Guinness World Records hailing him as the most portrayed literary human character in the history of film and television.

Famous faces who have played Sherlock recently include Robert Downey Jr and Benedict Cumberbatch. But Stoll’s black-and-white adaptations were made with the author’s approval while he was still writing the stories, setting them apart, according to Dixon.

“People will be interested in seeing a film version of Sherlock Holmes…in an early stage of development for the screen,” she said.

“There’s a level of authenticity to this character, vis-à-vis Conan Doyle’s creation, that you maybe don’t get with later Sherlock Holmes.”

Time-consuming

Restoration of more than 20 hours of footage – funded by an initiative from data storage and management company Iron Mountain – began in 2019 in the BFI’s vast archive. The repository, in a former farmhouse, houses hundreds of thousands of reels dating back decades, stacked high on rows of shelves in refrigerated vaults.

Particularly old footage on nitrate film – such as the Stoll series – is also kept at another even colder location in the west of England, but taken to Berkhamsted for restoration. Conservators in white coats spent months meticulously checking and cleaning reels of negatives and original prints.

Some were damaged, requiring meticulous repairs.

“Despite all the damage, it is in very good condition,” said senior conservator Kirsty Shanks, noting that old coils can arrive decomposed into “a solid, sticky, powdery mess.”

Many of Sherlock’s nitrate prints were moldy, oily, brittle and fragile, requiring time-consuming manual cleaning, she added. Another challenge has been negatives arriving in sections rather than complete reels, requiring the team to sequence them.

Special

Down a hallway lined with old movie posters and vintage movie equipment on display, Ben Thompson spent hundreds of hours in a windowless room, working on the endeavor.

The image quality leader had to ensure that the new digital version replicated the 1920s images in texture, color palette and other aspects.

It uses software to match the original filmmakers’ use of color tones – mainly blue and amber dyes – with parts of the negatives to help denote night, day and flashbacks.

Thompson also participates in the repairs, noting that the top and bottom of the coils have often borne the weight of previous use and require the most intensive rehabilitation. “It’s the beginning and the end where you get into the real manual labor,” he explained.

He said he worked for days on a single 10-second opening scene of Sherlock’s hometown of Baker Street. In comparison, some mid-scenes required just a few minutes of fixing.

BFI veteran Shanks described the project as the most “challenging” restoration of his career, but still a labor of love.