When Europe Led the Parade : How come ‘Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood’--an enthralling TV series about the early days of filmmaking--is available everywhere <i> but</i> Hollywood?

Given that it was produced by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, it is not a surprise that “Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood,” the pair’s new six-hour documentary series, ranks among the most significant and entertaining investigations of the film medium, a model of comprehensiveness, intelligence and wit.

Made for television, this examination of film on the Continent from 1895 to 1933 has been licensed, according to John Fitzgerald of D.L. Taffner/U.K. Ltd., one of the series’ producing partners, “in pretty much every country in the world.” This doesn’t just mean big nations like Britain, France, Germany and China, but more modest entities like Malta, Iceland, Cyprus, Sri Lanka and Brunei. It has, in fact, been sold just about everywhere anyone can think of. Except the United States.

“We’ve shown it to PBS and several of the major national cable channels and they say, ‘We’ll get back to you,’ ” Fitzgerald relates. “Broadcasters over here are fairly slow in the decision-making process, and that’s compounded by funding problems.”

While corporate dithering and the Sisyphean monetary difficulties of public television are eternal problems, it is little less than shameful that a series of this quality was not immediately snapped up by somebody. Not only will those interested in film feel compelled to tune in, everyone who watches, no matter how little or how much they know about the subject, will end up not wanting the hours to end.

Those familiar with the collaboration between Brownlow, the most respected name in silent film scholarship, and Gill know that this praise isn’t hyperbole. Their previous works on PBS, including “Unknown Chaplin,” “Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow,” “Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius” and “D.W. Griffith: Father of Film,” have won Emmys and Peabodys and left both audiences and critics thinking they’d never seen anything quite like it.

But difficult as those shows are to improve on, “Cinema Europe” takes what they’ve done a step further. In part, this is because the world of European silent film is so unexpectedly rich--in its heyday well ahead of what was done in the United States--that watching these programs leaves a sense of awe and humility at the extent of what those now-forgotten filmmakers accomplished.

Dogged researchers, intent on finding the best prints and insistent that they be shown at the correct speed (always a problem for silent film projection), Brownlow and Gill have ransacked the world’s great archives and private collections. Besides discovering fragments of films thought totally lost, like the Pola Negri-starring “The Yellow Ticket” and Ivor Novello in “The Constant Nymph,” they have brought to light so much that is unfamiliar that they estimate that “about 90% of the films we show are unknown to the general public, not having been seen in 70 years.”

For American audiences especially, who know little enough about their own silent heritage, let alone that of Europe, the series, with its clips from literally hundreds of films, will be an unexpected revelation, the equivalent of a comprehensive university film history course and several times more entrancing. You can feel the excitement those pioneering filmmakers felt at the artistic strides they were taking, and Brownlow and Gill’s delight at discovering it all over again is just as palpable.

The series’ opening program, “Where It All Began,” talks about cinema’s beginnings as a working-class attraction that was expected to last as a fad for perhaps a year. Everything from the gorgeous, hand-colored fantasies of Georges Melies to the sly comedy of Max Linder, whom Chaplin called “my professor,” is covered, with much attention given to the Italians, who starting in 1910 made a series of dramas set in antiquity like “Quo Vadis” that still impress with their scope and ambition.

Each of the next four programs focuses on the cinema of a particular area of Europe, and all are characterized by surprises and revelations. The first of those, “Art’s Promised Land,” is in many ways the most surprising, revealing that Sweden and Denmark were for a time the world centers of artistic filmmaking. This segment also features the earliest films made by the radiant teen-ager later to become Greta Garbo, here seen not only in “Gosta Berling’s Saga,” her debut, but in an earlier advertising film done for a clothing store where she worked.

Taking up where the Scandinavians left off were the Germans, examined in a program called “The Unchained Camera” in tribute to the determination of that country’s filmmakers to free themselves from what they considered “the tyranny of the tripod.” Intent, as opposed to Hollywood, on lighting the set, not the stars, German directors and cameramen brilliantly involved themselves in everything from huge historical dramas (some directed by Ernst Lubitsch) to intense, claustrophobic Expressionist manifestoes like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” This segment also highlights Fritz Lang’s massive four-hour-plus “Die Nibelungen” and explains the inner workings of its impressive mechanical dragon, at the time the envy of the cinematic world.

Given Brownlow’s championing of Abel Gance (he restored the director’s massive “Napoleon”), it is fitting that Gance should be the centerpiece of the hour on France, “The Music of Light.” Though the neglected Marcel L’Herbier and Carl Dryer’s masterpiece “The Passion of Joan of Arc” are well represented, Gance deservedly occupies center stage. Besides “Napoleon,” the hour investigates his 1922 “La Roue,” whose rapid cutting anticipated Eisenstein’s “Potemkin” and caused Jean Cocteau to memorably insist, “There is the cinema before and after ‘La Roue’ just as there is painting before and after Picasso.”

The last of the national segments focuses on Britain, and, as the “Opportunity Lost” title indicates, it explains how the monopolistic practices of Hollywood and the unadventurousness of the British industry crippled that country’s output. The one exception was, of course, Alfred Hitchcock, shown displaying some of his trademark maliciousness in rare sound-test footage. Not only are we told how influenced he was by German filmmakers (one associate claimed he used to say “achtung” instead of “action”), but by this point in the series we can recognize the impact for ourselves in the clips from his first two films, “The Lodger” and “Blackmail.”

“End of an Era,” the final episode, is by definition the saddest, as it details the reasons, starting with the rage for sound and ending with the Second World War, that meant that “the possibility that Europe’s cinema could rival Hollywood was dead.” For another of the strengths of this series is that it convincingly ties in what is happening on screen with what was going on in society as a whole.

Two other aspects of “Cinema Europe” should be singled out, both of which heighten its sense of immediacy. One is the frequent use of newsreel footage, ranging from a rare 1919 glimpse of Adolf Hitler at a train station rally to a shot of a worried chauffeur checking Archduke Francis Ferdinand’s car just after a bomb attempt on his life and minutes before he was to be assassinated in Sarajevo.

Equally illuminating are the dozens of interviews Brownlow and Gill provide. They seem tohave talked to everyone from that era who remains alive, including Gance’s 103-year-old technical genius, Simon Feltman, and have supplemented those labors with archival interviews (ranging as far back as the 1940s) with those who have died.

Excellent interviews also characterized the first of Brownlow and Gill’s collaborations, the delightful 13-part look at American silent film, “Hollywood: The Pioneers.” Brilliant as this 1980 series was, many Americans have still not seen it because lack of interest from PBS meant that it was initially released piecemeal in commercial syndication, playing on obscure channels at odd hours.

While it would be equally pathetic if PBS or some other network can’t get its act together enough to broadcast “Cinema Europe,” D.L. Taffner’s John Fitzgerald is ever hopeful. “ ‘Benny Hill’ was one of our programs, and they told us that it would never fly outside of New York and L.A., but we had our biggest success with it in the Bible Belt,” he says. “We love tilting at windmills.”

Those who believe that--to quote Brownlow’s celebrated phrase about the silent era--”you cannot enjoy the last reel unless you know what happened in the first,” will wish them luck.