KEVIN BROWNLOW is best known, and perhaps most celebrated for, his pioneering contribution as historian and champion of silent cinema. His expansive books on the period - The Parade's Gone By (1968) and the later Behind the Mask of Innocence (1990) offered unprecedented overviews of key figures and themes from an era that was all but forgotten at their time of publication, and established a field of academic enquiry that has blossomed in film studies' 'historical turn' of recent years. He is also known as the most passionate and thorough documentary chronicler of the silent era and its personalities in the many films he made over the course of thirty years and particularly in two landmark, and sadly unavailable, TV series: Hollywood - a thirteen part history produced in 1979 and Cinema Europe: the Other Hollywood (1995). Given his passion for cinema from an early age it was perhaps...
