May 20, 2025

Year after year, TCM brings outstanding guests to the TCM Classic Film Festival—not just to introduce films, but also present entertaining programs.​ 

From Across the Pond: Sights and Sounds of the British Film Institute, Ben Roberts, BFI Chief Executive in Conversation with Guillermo del Toro instantly caught my eye on the TCMFF schedule, as I’m a big supporter and frequent visitor of film archives and libraries. The BFI National Archive celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, and to honor the occasion, TCMFF’s Salute to the BFI comprised of this program and several screenings from the esteemed archive’s collection. Movies included Blithe Spirit (1945), Edge of the City (1957), Mildred Pierce (1945) on nitrate, The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), To Be or Not to Be (1942), and Jaws (1975). I attended TCMFF’s conversation with Roberts and del Toro, and after the fest concluded, I had the opportunity to interview Roberts. I’ll start with highlights from the TCMFF event first before I dive into my chat with Roberts.

Roberts opened From Across the Pond with some background on the British Film Institute, founded in 1933. “We exist as a charity to promote and protect the art of film, TV, and the moving image,” he said. “We do everything, pretty much, at the BFI. We look after safeguarding the very first stories that were committed to film, we support new filmmakers and new work, and we also explore the future of storytelling—we’re experimenting with new technology both in terms of filmmaking and also film preservation as well. So we like to say that we bridge the past, present, and future of film culture.” Today, the BFI holds over eight million items from around the globe, including the world’s largest nitrate collection and largest assortment of American film and TV outside the US (an astounding 25,000 items). Some collections they own, and others no one owns because the titles are out of copyright.

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Director, writer, and producer del Toro has been a cinephile since childhood. He’s worked with the BFI in numerous capacities over the years, from borrowing prints from the archive during his days as a programmer to writing a chapter in the BFI Compendium Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film (2013) to collaborating with them on a recent remastering of his feature debut Cronos (1992). The BFI “is not just a beacon in its own country; it’s a beacon worldwide,” del Toro remarked.

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Roberts and del Toro discussed several important British filmmakers and movies during the program, including the duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. “Some of their films, to me, are pinnacles of cinema, period,” del Toro noted. “Black Narcissus (1947) to me is one of the three most beautiful films in color ever made and one of the most perfect, purest expressions of cinema.” Roberts remarked that the duo was “radical,” which del Toro heartily agreed with. “They never find a solution that has been done before; they want to do something new.”

Speaking of innovative filmmakers, del Toro is a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock—he’s even written a book on him!—whose first feature, The Pleasure Garden, celebrates its centennial this year. The BFI has completed incredible restoration work on Hitchcock’s first nine surviving features from the mid-late 1920s, which they call the “biggest and most complex restoration project undertaken by the BFI National Archive to date” on their website. “If you had to find a root to thriller and suspense, it goes through Hitchcock,” del Toro explained. “This was a filmmaker that articulated every single step of cinema—silent, sound, black and white to color, 3-D to Scope; he’s one of the few filmmakers that had a hand in the genesis of every single step.”

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In the realm of suspense, Roberts and del Toro also talked about gothic cinema, highlighting the British classic Gaslight (1940), which had basically been kept a “secret” after MGM purchased the rights and asked for all prints to be destroyed prior to their 1944 adaptation. Del Toro commented on some of the differences between the two movies, including Charles Boyer’s “sensual, warm” villain and Anton Walbrook’s “cold as a knife” turn as the same character. Despite the British picture being overshadowed for years by the Boyer-Bergman version, in recent years its finally gotten its due. Roberts added that the BFI, which held a print of the 1940 version since the ‘40s, digitally remastered the movie in 2013.

The fantastic TCMFF program made me want to learn more about the BFI, which is just what I did during my post-fest conversation with Roberts. Our talk focused on the BFI National Archive’s holdings, their mission to make the archive one of the most open in the world, and exciting upcoming programs.  

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As a classic film fan, I was curious first and foremost to find out what some of their oldest titles are. For starters, the BFI possesses a lot of older material outside the traditional cinema realm—think newsreels, experimental films, and home movies—"that gives you a sense of British life through early adopters of the first cameras,” Roberts said. Of course, they also hold a plethora of narrative films, too, including Victorian silent cinema and silent Sherlock Holmes entries from the early 1920s. (The latter was an enormous restoration project that’s still on-going; three episodes, one each from three early 1920s British two-reel series starring Eille Norwood, Arthur Conan-Doyle’s favorite on-screen Sherlock, premiered at the London Film Festival last year and are currently being re-scored).

While the BFI holds countless cinematic treasures, they still take new acquisitions, and they’re continually on the hunt for lost films. For instance, Hitchcock’s second feature, 1926’s The Mountain Eagle, is at the top of their Most Wanted list, a catalog of British films they’re searching for to “preserve and make available.” (Fun fact: My boyfriend, a former Academy film archivist, helped re-discover elements of two movies on the BFI’s Most Wanted List over the years: 1944’s It’s in the Bag and 1974’s All I Want Is You… and You… and You…) “We always try and socialize what we’re looking for because material does turn up in the strangest places,” Roberts noted. That said, a big challenge for the organization is that they can’t take everything in between storage facilities already operating at a high capacity and the time required to manually assess items. However, to help on the latter front, the BFI recently received new automated scanners that can review material and produce quality reports without needing someone to evaluate them on a film bench.

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As the BFI National Archive houses so many items, sometimes discoveries are made within their own collection. That’s exactly where a very rare Walt Disney animated film, Sleigh Bells (1928), which features an early appearance by Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was uncovered. “Rather like the story of our Jaws print, some of the most surprising discoveries have come from within our own archive, which just speaks to the enormity of it,” Roberts commented.  

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On the topic of Jaws, I was curious about the 35mm release print from the BFI that screened at TCMFF, as it was marketed as a rarity. Indeed, it was. The print was an IB Technicolor dye transfer (which is very resistant to color fading), a process the Technicolor lab in London was still utilizing when the labs in Hollywood and Rome had already ceased production on that format; at that point in the US, Eastman Color was the main system being used. “That print in particular, I guess, is rarer still because it’s barely been touched, so there’s nary a scratch on it,” Roberts reported. “It’s pretty amazing. It looked amazing at the Egyptian.”

In reading more about all the BFI prints that were screened at TCMFF, I stumbled upon a line in the TCM program guide mentioning that one of the organization’s missions is to make the BFI National Archive “the most open moving image collection in the world.” As Roberts said, “The principle for us is there’s no point having an archive if you can’t make it as accessible as possible; storage and preservation is one thing, but we’re not solely interested in that.” Rather, they’re interested in exploring the many ways in which the archive can be "enjoyed, used, and reused," Roberts remarked. This includes people watching prints at events around the world, like TCMFF; making more material available online, a timely endeavor that requires multiple stages—preservation, restoration, digitization; ensuring the collection is discoverable and available to researchers and students; and allowing creative people to use the material, within the bounds of copyright. As the BFI is a national, global collection—not owned outright but rather on behalf of the public—they “understand our responsibility to make it open and available for the people to use,” Roberts commented.

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And use it they sure do! Coming up, Roberts is looking forward to The BFI Film on Film Festival, their four-day event celebrating film on all formats. They’ve only held the fest once before, and the second edition is set to take place in London from June 12-15. The event will open with a rare IB Technicolor print of Star Wars (1977) and is slated to feature unique programs, like a screening of a 1929 nitrate print of Un Chien Andalou (1929), believed to be the oldest print to play in the UK, and a 35mm screening of the pilot episode of Twin Peaks (1990) with guests including Kyle MacLachlan in attendance in honor of David Lynch. Roberts raved about how enthusiastic the audience was at the first edition to watch film showing on film; they were especially surprised to find how popular the event was with younger people. “That’s just a wonderful thing to experience within our building when you’ve got generations of people excited about the material of film,” Roberts enthused—not just the rarity of experiencing a movie they might not have seen before, but also watching a film print, which has a certain sound and visual quality.

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While the archive holds so many treasures from the past, they recognize the importance of evolving with the times and keeping up with the way modern media is created and consumed. In that spirit, the BFI has started collecting born-digital material and curating online video, which is “a world away from so much of the classic film we hold,” Roberts said. “But fast forwarding a century in the same way that we’re now talking about Victorian and 1920s silent cinema, I think the fact that we continue to collect and we’re collecting digitally native footage and online video now will be equally interesting to audiences in 100 years’ time.”

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Thanks to the team at ID-PR for their help in arranging my interview with Ben Roberts.