A long-lost Sherlock Holmes film dating from 1916 has been discovered in the vaults of the Cinematheque Francaise, the Paris-based archive that houses one of the world’s biggest film collections.
Entitled Sherlock Holmes, the silent film stars renowned US actor-manager William Gillette and is an adaptation of the play with which Gillette was famously associated.
Celine Ruivo, director of the film collection at the Cinematheque Francaise, said the supposedly lost film was uncovered while staff were working on an ongoing project to catalogue the 80,000 boxes of nitrate films in its collection.
“It had been briefly cataloged in the past, but the document was incomplete. One of our team found it mistakenly put with some other Sherlock Holmes films,” Ruivo said.
ONLY RECORD
Directed by Arthur Berthelet, the Sherlock Holmes film was shot in Chicago by Essanay studios, now best-known for its series of Charlie Chaplin shorts made in 1915. It remains the only record of Gillette’s performance as Holmes, which popularized the deerstalker-and-cape image of the detective.
Gillette was by no means the first to come up with the look. Though never mentioned by Doyle, it is generally credited to an 1891 illustration by Sidney Paget for The Boscombe Valley Mystery short story.
The play — and presumably the film — is a compendium of Holmes’ “best bits,” weaving scenes from a variety of stories into a single narrative.
DISCOVERY
A nitrate negative of the 90-minute film that is subtitled with French-language captions was discovered in the Cinematheque Francaise.
“The film was to be tinted for the French market, we think, so it was in small rolls to make it easier to color,” said Ruivo, who has viewed sections of the work.
“It’s just marvelous to find a film that is lost. We are all very moved,” Ruvio said.
Restoration is being undertaken in Bologna, Italy, by the Cinematheque Francaise, in conjunction with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
“William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes has ranked among the holy grails of lost film, and my first glimpse of the footage confirms Gillette’s magnetism,” San Francisco Silent Film Festival president Robert Byrne said.
It is the only existing film of the actor, Ruivo said.
PREMIERE
The film is to have its modern-day premiere in January next year as part of the Toute la Memoire du Monde festival at the Cinematheque Francaise, followed by a US premiere in May at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing