FOUND SHERLOCK

The announcement last week that a previously "lost" silent Sherlock Holmes film made in 1916 and starring William Gillette had been found wrongly labelled in the French Film Archive should give hope to everyone who is a fan of old movies that many things thought "lost forever" are still waiting to be rediscovered.

Because of the nature of a lot of the early film stock, much of the early films from the magical silent era have deteriorated beyond saving, and many more movies have been lost to both the ravages of time and carelessness, as well as accidents, fires and a general lack of understanding at the time that these things were anything other than ephemera, so any discoveries are to be treasured and savoured, and when it is something as significant as an early performance of such an enduring and iconic character as Sherlock Holmes, and performed by one of the earliest and most significant actors to become associated with the part, then we ought to consider ourselves to be very lucky indeed.

Many of the mannerisms and props that William Gillette brought to the part of Sherlock Holmes on stage remain fixtures in the public notion of the character to this day and it is often his original stage performances that people are thinking of when they put the image together in their minds, not least the pipe and deerstalker which, whilst they featured occasionally in the original Strand illustrations, and are referenced in the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, became far more associated with the character through Gillette's portrayal.

What fascinates me, however, is that this film was made whilst Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was still writing the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I wonder how much the later stories, published after the film and the tours of the play, were then influenced by the image created within them…?

There is something else quite astonishing about those early movies anyway. The Sherlock Holmes discovery might very well be nearly a century old, but it immediately transports us to a time when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was still alive and the Sherlock Holmes stories were contemporary and people - fans, I suppose, but I'm not sure that the term was being used back then - were waiting with baited breath for the latest adventures to be published, much as modern readers still are whenever one of the major series authors announces their next novel.

And then there's that sense of travelling back in time to another Lost World, a fragment of history that we can at least look at, even if we can't go back and experience it fully. This, I imagine, is as close as we're ever likely to get, at least in my lifetime.

I'm very fond of the "Lost Worlds" of what it was actually like to live in various eras, which is why I'm often drawn to movies that show the actual streets of whatever time it was filmed in.

I've never really got over the fact that, when a friend of mine lent me his copy of "The Birth of a Nation" once, I was watching a film made about a conflict that had been fought fifty years prior to it being made, but which was now older than the conflict itself was at the time, if you see what I mean…?

Next year, that movie, with all of its terribly racist content, will be a hundred years old and twice the amount of time between in being made and the war it portrays will have passed, yet it probably remains a more accurate document of certain attitudes prevalent at the time than any modern reconstruction of that same era could ever be, simply because the events themselves were still within the living memory of some of the players, and a lot of our current attitudes which make us wary of showing the full horror of our dark and dismal history might now make us shy away from some of the more unpleasant and brutal truths.

Film.

It's an important medium, and sometimes an important historical document, too.

Not only that, but, thanks to film, we now get to see William Gillette playing Sherlock Holmes, which is something many of us never thought possible.