Harold Brown Obituary

Harold Brown, who has died aged 89, held the post of film preservation officer at the British Film Institute’s National Film Archive (NFA) from its inception in 1935 until his retirement almost half a century later. The first of his kind (the official job title came in 1951), he was effectively, and without question, the inventor of the art and science of archival film preservation and restoration, starting out at a critical moment in the cinema’s brief history, when a significant proportion of its output had already been lost or destroyed through industry pragmatism, indifference and neglect.