The British Film Institute has remastered nine silent films by cinema's master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, following an international fundraising campaign for their restoration.

The BFI is hosting a festival to screen all 58 surviving films by the influential British director as part of the London Olympiad.

Stars such as Tippi Hedren and Bruce Dern will speak and a digital project entitled 39 Steps to the Genius of Hitchcock will celebrate his legacy.

Hitchcock began making films in the silent era and the restored works, shot between 1925 and 1929, foreshadow his later hits such as Vertigo, Psycho and Notorious.

Special projects officer Keiron Webb looks at the title frame of The Lodger at the British Film Institute archive. Every miniscule scratch, blotch and speck was removed during the restoration. Special projects officer Keiron Webb looks at the title frame of The Lodger at the British Film Institute archive. Every miniscule scratch, blotch and speck was removed during the restoration. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)

The BFI, facing reduced funding as part of Britain’s austerity measures, made a broad public appeal to raise money for the restoration initiative in 2010.

The institute says most of the £1 million (about $1.6 million Cdn) raised was provided by The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and American filmmaker Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation, which specializes in film conservation.

The BFI has also commissioned musical scores by contemporary composers to accompany screenings of four of the remastered silent films. They are:

  • The Pleasure Garden (1926), with a score by Daniel Patrick Cohen.
  • Blackmail (1929), with a score by Neil Brand.
  • The Ring (1927), with a score by Soweto Kinch.
  • The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog (1926), with a score by Nitin Sawhney.

French director Michel Hazanavicious has said his Oscar-winning film The Artist was inspired, in part, by Hitchcock's The Ring. The other five silent-era Hitchcock productions the BFI restored are:

  • Downhill.
  • Easy Virtue.
  • The Farmer's Wife.
  • Champagne.
  • The Manxman.

Remastering the so-called Hitchcock 9 to a fresher, crisper format is the largest restoration project the BFI has ever undertaken. The films had been held in the BFI's archive, but each had imperfections. Also, other copies were discovered internationally, which allowed the institute's experts to restore lost footage like an additional 20 minutes to Hitchcock's debut film The Pleasure Garden.

Each frame of film — more than 100,000 for each title — was examined and restored using the newest restoration technology.