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Assigning the year to which a film belongs affects how we think of it – but should we choose production or release date?

Let's try to push past the wordplay: how we date movies is serious business. Literary critics seem to rub along without having to write Twelfth Night (1602), but open any film book and you will find great thickets of brackets – Date Movie (2006) – mucking up otherwise perfectly respectable sentences. Moreover, the specificity these dates purport to offer is quite illusory.

Twasn't ever thus. Early film histories, such as Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now, first published in 1930, were largely unencumbered. Within a few decades, alas, parentheses had become de rigueur – but what to fill them with? Opinions varied. In later, much-expanded editions of Rotha's book, the most influential of its kind, films were dated "by their year of production, and not, as is misleading in some film books, by...

Two early Alfred Hitchcock efforts: Ivor Novello in The Lodger (top); Anny Ondra in Blackmail (bottom) "Rescue the Hitchcock 9" is the name of a campaign by the British Film Institute to save nine Alfred Hitchcock silent films, among them Blackmail (1929), shot as both a silent and a talkie. "Be part of the challenge to bring these rare films back from the brink and into the digital age to be enjoyed by everyone," urges the BFI website. Also from the BFI website: Curators of the BFI National Archive have identified a collection of films in desperate need of restoration with nine of Alfred Hitchcock’s early silent films being the first to seek rescue through the Support the BFI campaign. Hitchcock’s nine surviving silent films are among the most important in British cinema history. But decades of wear and tear have left them in urgent need of restoration. The nine...