One hundred years after their creation | Silent films about Sherlock Holmes returning to screens

(Berkhamsted) This should delight fans of Sherlock Holmes: silent films on the adventures of the most famous London detective have just been restored a century after their creation and will be broadcast from mid-October.

In the 45 episodes of Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the two restored feature films, the detective is played by a cinema celebrity of the time, Eille Norwood.

He was the favorite on-screen Sherlock of author Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). The character’s creator had also approved these adaptations, produced in 1921-1923 by the British film company Stoll Pictures.

Sherlock Holmes has since been adapted hundreds of times for the big and small screen. According to the Guinness Book of Records, he is the most represented literary character in the history of cinema and television. He was notably played by Robert Downey Jr and Benedict Cumberbatch.

But “there is a level of authenticity in the character (played by Eille Norwood), compared to Conan Doyle’s creation, that we do not find in the later Sherlock Holmes”, estimates Bryony Dixon, curator for the silent films at the British Film Institute (BFI), which led the project.

The public will get their first glimpse of the restored works at a screening on October 16 during the London Film Festival, which will be accompanied by a concert by the Royal Academy of Music. The films will then be released on DVD and Blu-Ray.

“Always popular”

The restoration represented years of work for the dedicated BFI team.

“These are the last silent works depicting Sherlock to be restored,” explains Bryony Dixon.

Fans were “impatient”, she continues, wandering through the BFI archives in Berkhamsted, northwest London.

“Sherlock Holmes is still popular, and all over the world. As they say, you could write Sherlock Holmes on a cardboard box and sell it.”

Restoration of the more than 20 hours of footage began in 2019 in the BFI’s vast archives.

The depot located in an old farm house houses hundreds of thousands of reels dating back decades, stacked on high shelves in refrigerated vaults.

Particularly old footage on nitrate film is kept at another, even colder, site in the west of England, but it is brought to Berkhamsted for restoration.

Conservators in white coats spent months meticulously checking and cleaning reels of original negatives and copies.

Some were damaged, requiring repairs.

“Despite all the damage, the condition (of the reels) was quite good,” said Kirsty Shanks, chief curator.

Old spools can break down. Many of Sherlock’s nitrate prints were moldy, fragile and brittle, requiring tedious manual cleaning.

Another problem was negatives arriving in sections, rather than complete reels.

Hundreds of hours

Ben Thompson spent hundreds of hours in a windowless room working on this project, down a hallway with posters of old films and old cinema equipment on the wall.

He had to ensure that the new digital version matched the original images in terms of texture and tones in black and white.

He particularly focused on the beginning and end of the reels, which are often damaged from past use.

“Sometimes the automated tools do most of the work and it’s at the beginning and end (of the reel) where there’s real manual work,” he explained.

Ben Thompson worked for days on a single 10-second opening shot showing the Baker Street neighborhood where Sherlock lived.

In comparison, some mid-reel scenes only required a few minutes of restoration.

For curator Kirsty Shanks, “it’s something very special to work on these films that have been around for a century.”

This restoration project was the most “difficult” of her career, but also one of those she enjoyed the most.