“He’s one of our finest exports,” says Dixon of Horne, a Briton who often accompanies films at the BFI’s Southbank theater. All were accompanied by Stephen Horne, who played piano as well as bits of accordion, flute and percussion. The Washington screenings began last weekend, with “The Manxman” at the AFI and “The First Born” and “Easy Virtue” at a well-attended National Gallery double bill. “Nine was very unusual to do in that short period of time.” Ordinarily, the BFI doesn’t take on so many films at once, Dixon says. “We threw money and people at it, in a way that would normally be impossible within the resources of an underfunded cultural institution.” “The whole thing took about three years,” she notes. And the one block of his films that had never really been restored were the silents.” The occasion was the 2012 London Olympics, for which major arts organizations were encouraged “to sort of get out our London heavyweights,” as Dixon puts it. “The others had not been touched at all.”
“We had one go at ‘The Lodger’ in the ’90s,” says Bryony Dixon, the BFI’s curator of silent film. Most of the movies, made between 19, had never been restored until a recent project by the British Film Institute. Now his nine still-extant silent movies have been beautifully restored and are being presented at the American Film Institute Silver Theatre and the National Gallery of Art in an 11-film series titled “The Hitchcock 9.”
His skill as maker of silent films was long hard to ascertain, however, because of the condition of the existing prints. Alfred Hitchcock has gone down in movie history as a chatty fellow, the roguish filmmaker and droll TV host gleefully impersonated by Anthony Hopkins in last fall’s “Hitchcock.” But the British-born master of suspense began his career in the era when movies were mute, save for intertitles and musical accompaniment, and was one of the most accomplished directors of that era.
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