DOC NYC 2010: Kevin Brownlow's Cecil B. DeMille
Kevin Brownlow is admittedly not a fan of Cecil B. DeMille’s work. But, he, like film audiences throughout the 20th Century, was struck by the spectacular, melodramatic and enormous qualities of DeMille’s movies. Brownlow’s engrossing documentary, Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic successfully captures the filmmaker’s own larger-than-life qualities that influenced the movies he made.
For the documentary, Brownlow had access to some stunning archival footage from DeMille’s career, the most intriguing of which was the making of the iconic scene of the Red Sea parting in The Ten Commandments from 1956. DeMille had made the movie, and its signature scene, three decades earlier in the 1920s, but his second attempt at capturing the parting of the sea was “extremely impressive,” Brownlow says. According to Brownlow, the effect from the 1956 version actually used Jell-O and reverse action photography to create the wall of water effect.
DeMille’s career started during the Silent Film era, a period in film history in which Brownlow has extensive interest. Brownlow has worked to restore and recapture many films from that era, most notably, he said, is Ben-Hur from 1925. The Technicolor sequences of the film had turned “sludge brown,” Brownlow said, but through a collector in Prague, he obtained a complete, uncut film roll of the movie. Using that incredible piece of film, Brownlow was able to restore the film to its original glory.
Sometimes, films from the silent era are missing scenes and, in that way, “you have to be psychic,” Brownlow said. He points to his work on The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, where anti-German sequences had been taken out. “We had to put them back in,” Brownlow said, having to figure out where in the film the original sequences belonged.
In addition to his restoration work, Brownlow has made several of his own films and has written many books about the silent era. Asked which medium he prefers, Brownlow said he gets more enjoyment from authoring.
“The trouble with films is that there are deadlines and all sorts of problems, more so than sitting by yourself at a typewriter,” he said.
Brownlow still yearns to make his own DeMille-esque epic on screen. “Instead, I’m getting my kicks vicariously by showing films from great directors,” he said.
–Nick D’Amore
(Photo by Elizabeth Stene)
