Restored versions of some of Alfred Hitchcock’s rarely seen, early silent films will be screened next year in England as an official part of the London 2012 Festival next summer, the finale of the Cultural Olympiad that runs concurrently with the 2012 Summer Games in London. The British Film Institute is behind the series of one-off screenings which will feature newly commissioned orchestral accompaniments.
Nitin Sawhney, who sites frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Hermann as an inspiration, will be composing a new score to accompany the 1926 thriller The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Recent graduate from the Royal Academy of Music Daniel Cohen will be supplying a new score for Hitchcock’s The Pleasure Garden (1925). Ironically, The Pleasure Garden was Hitchcock’s first film and this will be Cohen’s first commissioned work.
It has also been announced that Tansy Davies will be providing a score for an as yet unnamed third film.
The BFI has been active as of late in restoring the early works of Hitchcock, specifically the films he made between 1925 and 1929, with their “Rescue The Hitchcock 9” initiative. Recently, the BFI received a grant of $250,000.00 from the Film Foundation, in association with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, to aid in the restoration of four of the films from that era – The Lodger, The Ring, Blackmail and The Pleasure Garden.
