Alfred Hitchcock - Earliest Alfred Hitchcock Film Discovered

The recovered parts of the film, a silent British melodrama entitled The White Shadow, were made in 1924 and Hitchcock is credited as assistant director.

Officials at the New Zealand Film Archive stumbled across three of the movie's delicate nitrate reels in its collection last year (11) and no other copies are known to exist.

The film will be streamed for free on the U.S. National Film Preservation Foundation's website for two months after bosses at online film service Fandor donated cash and bandwidth to the project.

David Sterritt, Chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, hailed the discovery as "one of the most significant developments in memory for scholars, critics, and admirers of Hitchcock's extraordinary body of work".