Restoring Powell and Pressburger at the British Film Institute

A scene from The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, the first film to be restored. Photograph: Courtesy of Park Circus ITV

The British Film Institute’s definitive and all-embracing celebration of the films and creative genius of arguably Britain’s greatest film-makers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (‘Rejecting hatred and fear’: why Powell and Pressburger’s weird, confounding films are perfect for our times, 16 October) is a welcome culmination of a project begun in the early 1980s by the BFI National Film Archive (of which I was then deputy curator) to restore the Technicolor masterpieces of P&P’s production company, the Archers.

My boss, David Francis, had persuaded a percipient National Heritage Memorial Fund to sponsor the programme, involving complex chemical laboratory skills, beginning with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The archive restored all the Archers’ major works (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death) in this way, along with P&P’s dormant reputation.