I have a lifelong interest in early cinema, and collect rare films and professional equipment from the silent era. 

​I edited and co-directed several film history documentaries with Oscar-winning film historian Kevin Brownlow, including The Tramp and the Dicator, Cecil B DeMille: American Epic, Garbo, and I'm King Kong: The exploits of Merian C Cooper.

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Silent Film Restorations

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I have been lucky enough to uncover and preserve several films previously listed as lost. These include  four American silent feature films, a Harold Lloyd comedy, a film by Georges Melies' brother, and the earliest known fragment of a Lon Chaney feature film.

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I was the editor on Kevin Brownlow's restoration of The Cat and the Canary (1927), a complex process reediting foreign release prints to match the original American cut, making it possible to see the film in higher quality than had been possible for decades. This restoration was released on Blu Ray last year.

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In 2019​ I produced a reconstruction of the previously lost William S Hart film The Gunfighter (1917), combining 9.5mm prints with nitrate fragments, which was unveiled at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in 2019.

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In 2025 I restored the first ever British feature film from an original titled nitrate print in my collection, which was screened at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, along with two other films from my collection.

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My current restoration project is the 'lost' PG Wodehouse film The Small Bachelor (1927), of which I have the only known copy.

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Publications

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My article about the complex restoration process of The Cat and the Canary was published in Film History in 2014.

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I wrote an article in Film History in 2019 about the restoration of The Gunfighter.

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Most recently I wrote a chapter, They Survive on Nine-Point-Five: The lost films on the 9.5mm gauge and the need for their preservation in 9.5mm Film and Participatory Media Before the Digital Age, published by Routledge last year.

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Film shows

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I am an advocate for screening original prints on period projectors, including the 9.5mm, 16mm, 28mm and 35mm film gauges.​ 

I have put on these shows at places including the BFI, The Cinema Museum in London, Birkbeck College, the Flatpack Festival in Birmingham, and the Electric Palace in Harwich:

https://www.eadt.co.uk/lifestyle/silent-film-show-electric-palace-harwich-8978166

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I have put on two shows of 35mm Kinemacolor, the first successful true colour system dating from 1908, at Birkbeck College, London, and at the 1911 Electric Palace, Harwich.

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I put on the 28mm event at the BFI's Film on Film Festival in 2025, using original prints and projectors from my collection. At Film on Film I also presented live 78 accompaniment for a screening of an original nitrate print of Un Chien Andalou (1929).

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I am on the committee of the Kennington Bioscope, a group putting on regular silent films with live musical accompaniment, at the Cinema Museum in London.​​​​​​​ Most recently I screened a rare 9.5mm print of Betty Balfour's Cinders (1926), and the only known print in the world of her Daughter of the Regiment (1929).