F.W. Murnau's Faust. |
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents its winter event this Saturday, Feb. 16 at the Castro Theater.
The program features a sure-to-please lineup of all-American
classics—from the inventive comedies of Buster Keaton to the
swashbuckling heroics of Douglas Fairbanks to the charm of "America's
Sweetheart," Mary Pickford—as well as one of the towering achievements
of German silent cinema by the great director F.W. Murnau.
The festival starts at 10 a.m. with J. Searle Dawley's 1917 version of Snow White. The screening coincides with the Walt Disney Family Museum's celebration of Disney's 1937 version of the German fairy tale, for it was the silent version that inspired the teenage Walt and helped chart his course for decades to come. Featuring live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin, Snow White stars Marguerite Clark in the title role.
The festival starts at 10 a.m. with J. Searle Dawley's 1917 version of Snow White. The screening coincides with the Walt Disney Family Museum's celebration of Disney's 1937 version of the German fairy tale, for it was the silent version that inspired the teenage Walt and helped chart his course for decades to come. Featuring live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin, Snow White stars Marguerite Clark in the title role.
Buster Keaton in The Scarecrow. |
Snow White
will be followed at noon by three of Buster Keaton's early short
comedies. Keaton had spent several years as a sort of apprentice to
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, at the time the second most popular screen
comedian after Charlie Chaplin. Keaton was Arbuckle's co-star and
co-director in a dozen or so short films made between 1917 and 1920. But
when Arbuckle graduated to making feature-length films for Paramount,
the keys to Arbuckle's old studio were passed on to Keaton, who was
determined to put his own stamp on the genre.
Keaton shelved his first attempt, The High Sign,
after screening it for Arbuckle, who laughed uproariously throughout
the picture. If Arbuckle liked it that much, Keaton reasoned, it must be
too similar to Arbucke's brand of comedy. So he pushed himself harder
to come up a fresh approach, and the result was One Week
(1920), hailed upon its release as a new and unique contribution to
screen comedy. The film contains many of the hallmarks that would
characterize Keaton's work for years to come: inventive gags, graceful
athleticism, daring stunt work, a fascination with machinery, and of
course Buster's stoic, unsmiling demeanor.
The Scarecrow (1920) follows in this vein, starting off with a celebrated sequence that shows Buster and his roommate having breakfast in their jury-rigged mechanical kitchen. And The Playhouse (1921) takes Keaton's mechanical interests to the extreme with special effects using multiple exposures of Keaton. Set in a vaudeville theater, Keaton not only takes the role of stage performer, but plays every member of the orchestra and much of the audience. The Keaton program will be accompanied by Donald Sosin on the piano.
The Scarecrow (1920) follows in this vein, starting off with a celebrated sequence that shows Buster and his roommate having breakfast in their jury-rigged mechanical kitchen. And The Playhouse (1921) takes Keaton's mechanical interests to the extreme with special effects using multiple exposures of Keaton. Set in a vaudeville theater, Keaton not only takes the role of stage performer, but plays every member of the orchestra and much of the audience. The Keaton program will be accompanied by Donald Sosin on the piano.
The Thief of Bagdad. |
Douglas Fairbanks takes to the screen at 2:30 in perhaps his grandest epic. The Thief of Bagdad (1924), directed by Raoul Walsh, is a two-and-a-half-hour romp, special effect-laden adventure adapted from One Thousand and One Nights.
Fairbank's favorite among his films, it was the fourth in a series of
swashbuckling adventures that made Fairbanks one of the biggest starts
of the silent era.
Fairbanks had first made a name for himself
between 1916 and 1920 with a string of breezy, acrobatic comedies. His
ebullience, prodigious athletic abilities and considerable charm were on
display in a series of brisk films produced at a brisk pace—four or
five a year, sometimes more—in which genial, dapper Doug took on the
world with gusto and a good-natured smile. He was the can-do,
all-American boy, a variation on the same theme adopted by Harold Lloyd
in his own screen comedies.
His first movie roles were under the
direction of D.W. Griffith, the foremost filmmaker of his day. But there
wasn’t much room for Fairbanks’ acrobatic and comedic talents in
Griffith’s vision of cinema, so he soon set out on his own. In just a
few short years he found himself at the top, one of the most universally
admired screen actors. And when he fell in love with and eventually
married Mary Pickford, the first true movie star, and still, at that
time, the biggest, they became the world’s first superstar couple, the
pair for whom the term “Hollywood royalty” was coined.
It was
around this time, 1920, that Fairbanks took a new tack. His ambition
swelled with the creation of United Artists, an independent company he
co-founded with Pickford, Griffith and Chaplin, that would give the
artists greater control over the creation and distribution of their
work. Fairbanks’ notion was to merge his acrobatic brand of comedy with
costume drama. He ditched the modern clothes for period attire, donning
the garb of musketeers and pirates. Abandoning the casual spontaneity of
his rapid-fire comedies, he followed instead in Griffith’s footsteps,
producing fewer films—just one or two a year—with greater production
values, more complex plots, more costumes, more sets, more drama.
Fairbanks had found a new formula, and he would stick with it for the
greater part of a decade, enjoying great commercial success. The Thief of Bagdad,
which will feature live musical accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion
Picture Orchestra, shows presents Fairbanks at the peak of his career.
My Best Girl. |
His
wife enjoyed a somewhat similar career arc. Her fame came early and
suddenly as "The Biograph Girl" in an era when actors were not given
screen credit. She, and her director, D.W. Griffith, were nameless
employees of American Biograph, churning out a string of short films for
the studio. But their talents did not go unrecognized for long as the
public clamored to learn their names. Griffith would soon become
cinema's most revered director, and Pickford soon became the medium's
first star actor. Once the public knew her name Pickford's career was
transformed as she took hold of the power that fame afforded her. Before
long she was calling the shots, selecting her material and handpicking
her directors. The artistry of her films steadily increased and her
popularity never waned until new technologies and new popular tastes
finally brought the curtain down on her career in the early 1930s.
The warmth and charm that endeared Pickford to millions is on full display in My Best GirlWings, the first film to win the Academy Award for
Best Picture, would become her husband in ten years' time, once her
fabled union with Douglas Fairbanks finally came to an end.
(1927), directed Sam Taylor, best known for his work with Harold Lloyd,
and accompanied here by Donald Sosin on the piano at 7 p.m. The film
was Pickford's last silent picture before briefly moving into talkies
and then soon retiring as an actress (she continued to produce films for
many years). The film might also be seen as a transition in her
personal life, for her co-star, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, fresh off the
success of of Wings, the first film to win the Academy Award for Best
Picture, would become her husband in ten years' time, once her fabled
union with Douglas Fairbanks finally came to an end.
Faust. |
The
festival closes with the artistry of F.W. Murnau, the great German
filmmaker responsible for some the most indelible movies of the silent
era. Murnau became one of the premier directors in the world on the
strength of such films as Nosferatu, The Last LaughFaust,
presented at 9 p.m. with live accompaniment by Christian Elliot on the
Mighty Wurlitzer. These films had a great impact on American producers
and director, and Murnau soon joined the ranks of European directors
lured to Hollywood by studios eager to harness the vitality of these
artists. Murnau's first American film was Sunrise, which won
the first (and only) Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Producton.
Faust reunited Murnau with actor Emil Jannings, with whom he had made The Last Laugh.
Jannings, as Mephisto, turns in another great performance, drenched in
the dark imagery of Murnau's expressionist photography.
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival's 2013 Winter Event
at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco.