Black and white works of film industry icon, Kevin Brownlow, playing at Film Forum in the West Village

Oct 29, 2025

—5 min read—

Brownlow is a documentarian, writer, director and champion of Chaplin and other legendary figures of silent films and Old Hollywood. He won an Academy Award, an Emmy and a Bafta.

• 25 films reflecting Kevin Brownlow’s career are playing in the next weeks.

• He is a film historian, cinematographer and mythmaker known for his fictional spin-off of World War II, “It Happened Here”.
  

A few afternoons of back and white movies in Greenwich Village are in the forecast.

Martin Scorsese once said that Kevin Brownlow is “a giant among film historians… You might say Mr. Brownlow is film history.” Brownlow has contributed enormously to cinema studies, from his seminal collection of interviews with silent-era directors, stars, screenwriters, and crew detailing their experiences to his docuseries about movie stars and directors for television in the 1980s.

He also co-directed two original features with Andrew Mollo, It Happened Here, an alternative history following an Irish nurse in a Nazi-occupied England, and Winstanley, which follows 17th-century social reformer and writer Gerrard Stanley, who tries to establish a self-sufficient farming community on common land in England.

Film Forum is hosting a run with multiple showings of 25 films by Kevin Brownlow, including the historian’s own films. Select screenings will feature clips from his docuseries afterward.

At 30 years old, with a $20,000 budget in the 60’s, Brandlow wrote, designed, directed and edited “It Happened Here.”

Born in Crowborough, Sussex, England, in 1938, Brownlow started collecting silent films when he was only 11. He was first exposed to movies at prep school, where films from retailer Wallace Heaton were screened. At 15, he was an apprentice in the British film industry, beginning as an office boy. Soon, he was an assistant editor, and then became an editor in 1958, when he started gaining valuable experience on documentaries.

Before long, Brownlow was also writing, and in 1968, his first book, The Parade’s Gone By, was published. It was a compilation in which he interviewed various directors, stars, screenwriters, crew, and others who were involved with Hollywood during the silent era. Many people had written off silent films as old-fashioned and not worth studying seriously. Brownlow remembers when people regarded these films as existing only to be laughed at, but no one’s laughing now. With The Parade’s Gone By, he had begun his career as a film historian.

These and more of Brownlow’s films are playing at Film Forum. Some of the films included in Film Forum’s retrospectives are pieces the historian championed to bring back and keep circulating years after their release, such as Pandora’s Box.

For his next project, Brownlow tackled a cinema documentary series about Hollywood history, making film’s past accessible to the generation of 1970s latchkey kids. His first major series was Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film, a 13-part documentary produced by Thames Television in 1980. After this, he directed Unknown Chaplin, a three-part series about the career and methods of the silent film legend Charlie Chaplin. He also helmed series about Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd (his personal friend), D. W. Griffith, Universal Horror, Lon Chaney, and more.

Brownlow also co-directed an original feature film with Andrew Mollo titled It Happened Here, which shows an alternative history where the United Kingdom has been invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II. The film follows an Irish nurse working in England as she encounters people who believe collaboration with the invaders is for the best, while others are involved in a resistant movement against the Nazi regime and their local collaborators. Its title is a reference to the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here.

Film Forum’s retrospective includes Mr. Brownlow’s own films, those he was instrumental in restoring, and some that influenced and inspired him. This includes The Thief of Bagdad (1924), Greed (1924), Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), The Wind (1928), It Happened Here (1964), Winstanley (1975), and much more. Selected screenings will be followed by excerpts from his documentaries.

The retrospective will run from Friday, Oct 24, through Thursday, Nov 6. Read more about it and get tickets to see his films here.