Sherlock Holmes fans are being promised a most authentic depiction of the fictional detective, with the restoration of a century-old silent film series chronicling the London sleuth's adventures. Painstakingly restored by staff at the British Film Insitute's National Archive, audiences will get a first glimpse of the restored works from the early 1920s at a London Film Festival screening, accompanied by a newly commissioned live score from Royal Academy of Music performers.
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00:00One of our recent projects, the one we're working on at the moment, is quite an ambitious
00:26one, which is to restore all of the silent Sherlock Holmes series, which was made by
00:32a company called Stoll between 1921 and 1923.
00:55Sherlock has been the most challenging restoration I've worked on, mainly because of the scale.
01:01So this film is a nitrate print from 1923.
01:07As you can see, it is quite damaged.
01:10By running the film through your fingers, you can really feel any split paths, any bumps,
01:21anything that is unusual, and any damage in the film.
01:28On the road there, it's irresistible to have a go.
01:37Most of what restoration is, is using adjacent frames to copy pixels,
01:50or use them as an algorithm.
01:54The palette of colours that are used generally help to portray the time of day.
02:01This film changes colour pretty regularly, and this is a flashback.
02:06So this is a flashback to night, and this is a flashback to an interior.
02:20They are actually following the line of the original Conan Doyle stories, and they were approved by him.
02:32He really loved the actor Eileen Norwood as well, who he thought really looked the part.
02:38He was the most prolific, so he played Sherlock Holmes more times than anyone else,
02:44and still holds the record on the big screen, if not the small screen.
02:48We all know that Hollywood likes a happy ending.
02:55It's quite difficult not to make Sherlock Holmes likeable, whereas he's not particularly in the books.
03:18.