San Francisco Silent Film Festival Screens Rare Gems, Timeless Classics

This year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival starts off with a premiere of sorts. Last year a stash of rare American silent films, many long though lost, were repatriated back to the United States for restoration and preservation. Upstream, one of the gems of the collection and the first to be restored, will screen Thursday, July 14, as the opening film of the annual festival that takes over the Castro Theater through Sunday night.

Upstream is an early film by John Ford, one of the towering figures of cinema, American or otherwise. Made while the director was working for Fox, Ford admitted to having been captivated at the time by the work of F.W. Murnau, who had made a name for himself as one of Germany’s top directors with work as disparate as the horror masterpiece Nosferatu, the expressionist classic The Last Laugh, and a cinematic reworking of Faust. Hollywood was eager to recruit top European talent in those days and Murnau was a high-profile catch for Fox. Here, Ford was able to observe Murnau's methods firsthand, and though he wouldn't incorporate much of what he learned from Murnau until later films, Upstream, a melodrama that centers on a backstage love triangle among Vaudevillians, was produced during this period.

The festival will screen Ford's film along with Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the masterpiece with which Murnau brought Germanic technique and a palpable European sensibility to American filmmaking. Sunrise is celebrated for its roaming camerawork, its evocative set design, its emotional range and fable-like qualities. The plot concerns a young country couple whose happy home is threatened when the husband is tempted by a footloose city flapper. Murnau sets up dichotomies that are almost allegorical: between city and country, love and lust, virtue and temptation. It is melodrama raised to the level of poetry, a fable of love, devotion and redemption.

Murnau’s camera is almost constantly on the move, tracking characters along village paths, through marshlands at dusk, along the busy streets of a bustling city. Sunrise is a whirlwind of motion and emotion, from tense moments wandering in darkness, to a sun-kissed stroll that leaves the couple bewildered in the midst of a traffic jam, to the kaleidoscopic revelry of a nightclub sequence.

Saturday's highlight is Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born But..., one of the great Japanese director's early films, and one of his most beloved. Rather rather than employing his camera in bravura displays of pyrotechnic virtuosity, Ozu used it to simply observe his characters, to linger on their faces, on their homes, on their possessions—to look into the souls of everyday people under everyday circumstances. Ozu was both a naturalist and a rigorous formalist, a director who sought to capture life as it is lived, but within a framework of rigidly defined restrictions. He limited the camera’s range of motion and the angles from which it could gaze; he limited his editing to simple, direct cuts—no dissolves or fades; and dialogue was conveyed in simple master shots followed by alternating close-ups. This artistic code focused the viewer's attention on content over form, allowing character to reveal itself, allowing dialogue to breathe, and allowing revelatory spaces to open up between words and gestures and characters. Thus relationships and motivations and plot points gradually take shape before the viewer’s eyes. “Rather than tell a superficial story,” Ozu said, “I wanted to go deeper, to show ... the ever-changing uncertainties of life. So instead of constantly pushing dramatic action to the fore, I left empty spaces, so viewers could have a pleasant aftertaste to savor.”

Long before Ozu refined this method and distilled it into the austere approach of his later, more famous movies, he made many lighter films—comedies, melodramas, even Hollywood-inspired gangster films. One of the best of his early films, I Was Born But... displays the director's remarkable ability to blend comedy with poignant drama. The film examines the difficulties both of children growing up and of their parents in handling them. A man’s young sons brawl with the local kids in their new neighborhood to assert their dominance, and once they do they exercise their power without restraint. Later their father falls from his figurative pedestal as they witness him kowtowing to his boss, the father of one their schoolyard underlings. What follows is both a loss of innocence and a tough lesson in parenting, as the father tries to express the realities of adulthood, and the boys learn that there are other ways to get along than by thundering in the brush and pounding one’s chest like a baboon.

Evident in these early films are some of the techniques that Ozu would employ throughout his career: the floor-height vantage points that place his camera at eye level as his characters sit on the traditional tatami; and the alternating dialogue shots in which each character looks directly at the camera, placing the viewer right in the middle of the exchange, allowing stronger identification with each character, with each argument and with each perspective.

And herein lies much of the appeal of Ozu’s films: His calm, gently unfolding dramas give us time to not only get to know his characters, but also to deeply care about them—to enjoy their humor, to admire their strength and to forgive their transgressions—so that, when a film ends, there is often a feeling of regret that these characters are gone from our lives. “Every time I watch an Ozu film,” says actor Eijiro Tong, “I start to feel very sentimental as the end of the film nears. As I think back over the story, it’s like a flood of old memories washing over me, one after another.”

Also screening Friday are William Desmond Taylor's 1920 adaptation of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; Il Fuoco, an Italian femme fatale drama; The Great White Silence, a 1924 documentary about a British expedition to the Arctic; and the first of two editions of the festival's popular series, "Amazing Tales From the Archives," in which preservationists screen surviving fragments and trailers from lost films or excerpts from in-progress restorations.

Saturday evening showcases two of the brightest stars of the era, Douglas Fairbanks and Marlene Dietrich. The Woman Men Yearn For shows Dietrich a few years before Joseph Von Sternberg transformed her into an almost otherworldly figure of mystery and beauty, and Mr. Fix-It shows Fairbanks at his charming, comedic best.

There were many stars in the silent era, but few could rival Douglas Fairbanks. The actor made a name for himself between 1916 and 1920 with a string of breezy, acrobatic comedies. His ebullience and his prodigious athletic abilities 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.

Around 1920, Fairbanks would take a new tack as his ambition swelled. As a co-founder of United Artists (along with three other powerful Hollywood figures: Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Fairbanks' wife, Mary Pickford), Fairbanks would gain complete control over his work and would introduce a new genre to the medium by combining 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 better 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 better part of a decade, enjoying much commercial success.

Saturday's screenings also feature a morning presentation of Disney Laugh-O-Grams; The Blizzard, a romantic melodrama by Swedish director Mauritz Stiller; Clarence Brown's The Goose Woman; and "Variations on a Theme," a session in which the festival's musicians discuss and demonstrate the principles and challenges of silent film accompaniment. The panel, moderated by Jill Tracy, includes the Matti Bye Ensemble, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, the Alloy Orchestra, Giovanni Spinelli, Stephen Horne, Donald Sosin, and Wurlizter maestro Dennis James.

Sandwiched between Sunday morning's installment of "Amazing Tales From the Archives" and a "Wild and Weird," a program of off-kilter short films, is Shoes, by Lois Weber, the most important female director of the era. Weber enjoyed a tremendous degree of artistic control over her films, which always managed to be entertaining while taking on some of the most challenging social issues of the day, from abortion and birth control to capital punishment, labor and prostitution. Later in the day, The Nail in the Boot, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, who would go on to make such cinematic treasures as The Cranes Are Flying and the monumental I Am Cuba, promises to be another excellent screening.

The festival concludes with He Who Gets Slapped, a confluence of four prominet talents. Lon Chaney was the premiere character of the day, the creator of myriad deformed and deranged figures; John Gilbert was on the rise as one of Hollywood's romantic leading men; Norma Shearer too was on the rise, a budding star who would go on to make some of the most sophisticated dramas of the Pre-code era; and Victor Sjöström (billed as Seastrom in America), the pioneering Swedish director who rivaled Griffith in his influence in shaping the nascent medium of cinema into an international art form.

For tickets, the complete schedule, and more, see www.silentfilm.org.

Fairbanks, Gish Headline 2009 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, now in its 14th year, screens a wide range of films each July at the Castro Theater, touching on various genres and styles from cinema’s nearly 30-year silent era. The festival starts Friday with a showing of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Gaucho (1927) and continues through the weekend with a program of a dozen screenings.

There were many stars in the silent era, but few could rival Douglas Fairbanks. Along with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, Fairbanks was at the pinnacle, one of the most beloved performers in the nascent medium.

Fairbanks 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.

There were naysayers, however. Some critics bemoaned the loss of brisk, breezy Doug; they complained that his films were becoming longer, slower and more ponderous, with the trademark Fairbanks action reduced to just one or two reels of a total of 10 or 12, even 14. The jaunty Fairbanks of the teens had become a stately, costumed, dramatic figure, his devil-may-care charm and athleticism only coming to the fore in the closing sequences.

Fairbanks may have felt the same way, for in 1926, he began edging back toward comedy. The Black Pirate saw him costumed and swashbuckling as usual, but the old Doug was back in action; the film did not take itself too seriously and it was full of stunts, smiles, and much broad, comic acting.

He followed with The Gaucho, a darker, more serious film, but still with much comedy and derring-do. Fairbanks shared the spotlight with Lupe Velez, making her first appearance in a feature film. And Pickford even showed up for a ghostly cameo, appearing as a vision of the Virgin Mary.

After nearly a decade as a heroic, swashbuckling figure, Fairbanks decided it was time to say goodbye. He would make just one more film along these lines, The Iron Mask, his last silent film. He and Pickford teamed up for his first talkie, The Taming of the Shrew, but his careered tapered off and he retired from the screen in 1934. He passed away a few years later, in 1939, at the age of 56.

Friday’s screening of The Gaucho will feature the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra performing their original score.

Other festival highlights

Bardeleys the Magnificent (1926) screens at noon Saturday. The film reunites director King Vidor with John Gilbert, who had starred in Vidor’s The Big Parade, the blockbuster that earned the director the clout to make a smaller, more personal film, The Crowd, which featured a strong and affecting performance by his wife, Eleanor Boardman. Bardeleys was made before the couple married, and features Boardman as Gilbert's love interest. Live music by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

Josef Von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927), one of the early gangster films, screens at 5 p.m. Saturday. The film helped cement the conventions of the genre, greatly influencing the explosion of gangster films of the 1930s. Live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne.

Following their success with The Scarlet Letter, actress Lillian Gish again teamed with Swedish director Victor Sjostrom (“Seastrom” in America) for The Wind (1928), a stirring melodrama showing at 7:30 p.m. Saturday that plays to the strengths of each.

Gish, perhaps the silent era’s best actress, puts her pantomime skills to work in depicting a woman victimized by a tempestuous man and an even more tempestuous physical environment. Having left Virginia for the unruly Southwest, her tormented life is made manifest by the ceaseless and unyielding winds which batter her home and shift the sands of the desert landscape.

Sjostrom, in his distinguished body of work in his native land, where he established himself as a master of the medium to rank with D.W. Griffith among cinema pioneers, had emphasized the landscape, shooting on location among the stunning vistas of Scandinavia. The mountains, the sea and the skies gave context to his plots and added comment to his characters; with The Wind, he employs that sensitivity to the natural world in the creation of a punishing and relentless force that nearly pounds his heroine into submission. Live Wurlitzer accompaniment by Dennis James.

Sunday will start at 10:30 with a series of Disney shorts featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, predecessor to Mickey Mouse. Live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Quickly shifting gears, Erotikon (1929), a sensual Czechoslovakian film, will screen at 1:30 p.m. Live accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

It may be hard to believe, but Vaudeville veteran W.C. Fields did pretty well for himself as a silent film star, before the talkies immortalized the comedian’s snide, slurring wordsmithing. So’s Your Old Man (1926) will show at 4 p.m. Sunday. Live piano accompaniment by Philip Carli.

There were two great adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. One was a 12-minute short, an avant garde American film that owed a great deal to German Expressionism; the other, a feature-length version that deviates from the original in many ways but stays true to Poe’s vision of existential and supernatural terror, will screen at 6:15 p.m. with live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne.

The festival will close with an 8:15 p.m. showing of Lady of the Pavements (1929), D.W. Griffith’s last silent. The film stars Lupe Velez, Fairbanks’ co-star from The Gaucho, in a romantic drama that proved the great director hadn’t lost his touch. Live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

2009 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Friday, July 10 through Sunday, July 12 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.silentfilm.org.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

A rare event is coming to the Bay Area this next week. One of cinema’s greatest works of art will screen twice—once at San Francisco’s Castro Theater and once at UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall—accompanied by 200 singers and a 24-piece orchestra. UC Berkeley’s Alumni Chorus will present Voices of Light, an oratorio, as accompaniment for Carl Dreyer’s 1928 landmark film The Passion of Joan of Arc. 

Composer Richard Einhorn was kicking around New York’s Museum of Modern Art one day in 1988 when he came across a still from a movie, an arresting shot of a woman’s face from a silent film about Joan of Arc. Though Einhorn was a film buff and fairly knowledgeable about the medium’s history, he had never heard of this movie. He immediately requested a screening. 

“Some 81 minutes later,” Einhorn later wrote, “I walked out of the screening room shattered, having unexpectedly seen one of the most extraordinary works of art that I know.” 

He had long considered writing a piece about the 19-year-old martyr, and now inspiration had finally struck. The result, Voices of Light, is, as Einhorn describes it, “neither opera nor oratorio, but a mixture of both.” The libretto, containing Latin, Old and Middle French and Italian, is a pastiche of writings by female mystics of the Middle Ages, including Joan herself, the voices of the choir echoing the voices that spurred Joan on in her quest to unite France. 

Soldier, insurgent, terrorist, transvestite, schizophrenic, mystic, witch, saint, seer, martyr, feminist; the modern world could apply many words to this fascinating life, all of them containing a bit of truth but none of them wholly accurate. It is an extraordinary story, one that might have devolved into myth but for the plentiful documentation of her trial: a pious, illiterate farm girl, prodded by voices, rises up to lead an army and to consult with kings, and when captured stands her ground against her captors until breaking under threat of torture, then rises again to retract her confession before bravely facing death at the stake. 

“The piece explores the patchwork of emotions and thoughts that are stitched together into the notion of a female hero,” writes Einhorn. “Such a hero invariably transgresses the conventions and restrictions her society imposes.” 

Einhorn debuted the piece to critical praise in 1994, and though Voices of Light was not written as a score for the film, Einhorn often presented it that way. 

When Criterion released the film on DVD, the disc came with two options: The film could be watched with Voices of Light or in complete silence. The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the few films from the silent era that its director preferred to screen truly silent, without any musical accompaniment at all, but considering the options available at the time, Dreyer’s wish is understandable. While the larger theaters of the era could afford to use an orchestra, most theaters would have presented the film with improvised accompaniment on Wurlitzer organ or piano, and Dreyer probably felt that neither instrument could do justice to his film. He could not have imagined that his avant-garde masterpiece would one day get so lavish and respectful a treatment as Einhorn has provided. 

Mark Sumner, director of UC Choral Ensembles, will conduct Voices of Light along with The Passion of Joan of Arc twice: at 7:30 p.m. Monday at San Francisco’s Castro Theater, and at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 23 at Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. A 24-piece orchestra will provide the music, while the Alumni Chorus will combine with the UC Men’s and Women’s Chorales and Perfect Fifth for a total of 200 singers. 

It will make for an unusual arrangement at the Castro. Sumner will conduct the orchestra in front of the stage, while the chorus will fill the seats off to the sides in the first few rows, behind the conductor. “It will be a challenge,” says Alumni Chorus Manager Karen Moore. According to Moore, Sumner may have to wear white gloves so that his hands can be seen by the choir behind him, and the singers have had to memorize as much of the multi-lingual libretto as possible in order to reduce their scripts to one page, so that the audience isn’t distracted by the sound of 200 pages flipping every few minutes. 

There will be differences between the two performances. At the Castro the film will be shown full screen in 35mm, and the choir will be joined by San Francisco’s Unitarian Church choir. For the Hertz Hall performance, the film will be shown on a smaller screen with the use of DVD projection, and the Unitarian choir will not participate. 

The Passion of Joan of Arc has a history nearly as turbulent as the life of its heroine. When the French learned that a Danish director, a non-Catholic, was coming to their country to make a movie about their recently sainted heroine (Joan was excommunicated from the church before her execution and was not reinstated and elevated to sainthood until centuries later, in 1920), they were outraged. They were further scandalized by the news that the lead role would be taken by an Italian (though not quite as scandalized as they had been over rumors that Joan would be played by American actress Lillian Gish). French authorities were unable to stop the production but were successful in demanding a few changes. Meanwhile, the producers went ahead with what they may have expected to be a commercial film, a sort of epic biopic; elaborate sets were constructed and a generous budget was approved. 

However, Carl Dreyer was not one to put commercial considerations before artistic concerns, and when he saw what he had in Renée Falconetti it was clear that there was little need for sets and high production values. This would be the only film performance for the successful stage actress, and Dreyer ensured that it would be an immortal one, recognizing that he had a great actress with a face that could carry the film all on its own. Dreyer contrasts the purity and beauty of that face with the harsh, corrupt and scheming faces of Joan’s interrogators in a film that largely consists of close-ups, alternating between the pious sincerity of the girl soldier and the fleshy, self-important visages of her persecutors. For Dreyer, form must follow function, and so he used the actual transcripts of the trial (condensed from several months into a single day) to stage a series of dramatic, face-to-face confrontations. He allowed his actors no makeup, and the walls behind them are almost uniformly white, accented here and there with windows, crucifixes and low-angle shots for a mise-en-scene as stark, as spare and as simple as Joan’s religious conviction. 

It is an avant-garde film, and its impact has hardly lessened over the years. Dreyer’s imagery is relentless, and his editing ranges from staid to rapid-fire, at times juxtaposing shots from multiple angles and culminating in a forceful and dynamic final sequence that rivals Sergei Eisenstein’s fabled Odessa Steps scene from Battleship Potemkin. 

However, the public never really got a chance to see this film. Upon release The Passion of Joan of Arc was shown just once in its original state. Soon after, it was edited by censors, and in fact was edited differently in every country it which it was shown, trimmed, rewritten and re-edited to fit each culture’s prevailing political winds. Consequently, the film Dreyer made was rarely seen at all, and, to compound the matter, at some point the original negative was lost to fire. Dreyer, devastated by the loss, was able to cobble together a reconstituted version using alternate takes, creating a shot-by-shot replica, but this version too was later lost to fire. Thus for decades afterward, the film existed only in bastardized forms: sound versions that imposed a narrator’s voice on Dreyer’s dramatic silent imagery; rewritten versions that softened Joan’s interrogators and even Joan herself; poorly paced re-edited versions that inaccurately gauged the projection speed, reducing the film to a dull, plodding pace. Thus critics over the years were hard pressed to claim that the film measured up to its legend. 

But once again, a resurrection. In 1981 a print of The Passion of Joan of Arc was discovered by a worker in, of all places, a storage closet in a Norwegian mental institution. Canisters were turned over to the Norwegian Film Institute, where they sat unopened for three years. When the film was finally reviewed, it was found to be a complete and nearly pristine print of the original version, unseen for nearly six decades. The mental institution’s director had been an amateur historian of the French Revolution and had apparently acquired the print for his personal use, his staff and patients perhaps among the privileged few to see Dreyer’s masterpiece in its original form. 

Voices of Light / The Passion of Joan of Arc

7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17 at the Castro Theater, San Francisco; 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 23 at Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Tickets available at the door: general admission $15; seniors $12. For more information, call (510) 643-9645 or see www.ucac.net. Co-sponsored by Pacific Film Archive. 

2008 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Far from the ragged, blurry, jumpy images in the popular imagination, the silent era of filmmaking was an age of discovery, innovation and supreme achievement in the new medium of cinema. Motion pictures, at first treated as a mere novelty, came into their own between 1910 and 1920, growing from brief, flickering diversions into full-scale narratives. But it was in the 1920s that cinema truly blossomed into the great art form of the 20th century. 

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, now in its 13th year, showcases the breadth and depth of what was the first golden era of cinema, presenting the full range of film treasures—from slapstick comedy to gothic horror, from experimental animation to stately costume drama—as it was meant to be seen: on the big screen, in a beautiful 1920s movie palace, and with live musical accompaniment. 

This year’s program begins Friday night, July 11, at the Castro Theater with Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother and continues all day Saturday and Sunday with 10 more presentations from the peak of the silent era. 

Friday 

Harold Lloyd was not an inherently funny presence as a screen persona. Unlike Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, who rank among the most innately charismatic and unique cinematic artists of all time, Lloyd couldn’t command an audience’s attention simply by appearing on the screen. There were many such comedians struggling to climb their way to the top of the field, to challenge Keaton and Chaplin at the summit, but Lloyd was the most diligent and talented of them, and he alone managed to scale those heights. Through grit and determination he overcame his limitations as a screen presence and established himself as one of the most popular and enduring comedians of the silent era. In the 1920s he was second only to Chaplin in popularity. In fact, in box office receipts, the prolific Lloyd surpassed Chaplin, who only released a handful of films in that decade. 

Lloyd took a different and perhaps more pragmatic approach to his comedies than his contemporaries. Chaplin made relatively quiet, character-based narratives, punctuated here and there with explosive bits of slapstick. And Keaton let his films develop slowly, building steadily to dizzying climactic chases and daring stunt work. But Lloyd first and foremost aimed to please, and thus he filled movies with gags from start to finish, rarely allowing the audience much time to breathe. 

With The Kid Brother (1927), however, Lloyd altered his style somewhat, adopting some of the techniques of his competitors in pursuit of a more artistic approach. He put more time and effort into technical details, especially the photography, using warm lighting to capture the pastoral beauty of a life in the woods. And he put greater emphasis on pathos; more screen time was spent developing his character, showing us his hopes, his dreams and his humiliations. 

Lloyd didn’t make a bad film in the 1920s; all of them are good and many of them are great. Others made more money (The Freshman), crammed in more gags per minute (Why Worry?), or have enjoyed more lasting fame (Safety Last), but The Kid Brother may very well represent Lloyd’s crowning achievement, bringing greater artistry and subtlety to his workman-like career. Lloyd himself cited the film as his personal favorite. Friday’s screening of the film will feature live accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. 

Saturday 

Saturday’s screenings include The Soul of Youth (1920), a portrait of the fate of unwanted orphans in early 20th-century America; Les Deux Timides (1928), a comedy by René Clair; and Mikael (1924), a landmark film in the history of gay cinema, directed by the great Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr). 

German actor Conrad Veidt anchors the centerpiece film Saturday night, The Man Who Laughs (1928). Early in the 1920s, German émigré Carl Laemmle, head of Universal, brought Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame to the screen. Centering an epic film on a grossly disfigured lead character was considered a great risk at the time, but Lon Chaney, who would later become known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” used his formidable pantomime skills to create a sensitive and sympathetic portrayal. Laemmle and Chaney then followed Hunchback with The Phantom of the Opera and enjoyed similar success. 

Eager to keep the streak alive, Laemmle turned to his fellow countrymen for The Man Who Laughs (1928), enlisting the talents of Conrad Veidt and director Paul Leni for another Hugo adaptation. Veidt had become the face of German Expressionism with his roles in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and in Leni’s Waxworks, and Leni had recently parlayed his success in Germany into a contract with Universal, bringing the shadowy photography and psychological horror of Expressionism to the States with The Cat and the Canary. These silent classics formed the foundation of what would become a string of classic Universal horror films in the 1930s. Saturday’s screening of The Man Who Laughs will be accompanied by Clark Wilson on the Wurlitzer. 

Following The Man Who Laughs Saturday night is the first in the festival’s new “Director’s Pick” series. Director Guy Maddin will be on hand to introduce and narrate (translating the French intertitles) for Tod Browning’s strange and rarely screened film The Unknown (1927), starring Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford. Live piano accompaniment will be provided by Stephen Horne. 

Sunday 

Sunday’s screenings include The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the earliest surviving feature-length animated film; Her Wild Oat (1927), one of the few surviving films of Colleen Moore, among the most popular actresses of the 1920s; and Jujiro (1928), an avant-garde Japanese film. 

The festival concludes Sunday night with The Patsy (1928), starring the great comedienne Marion Davies. Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, had spent much of her career weighed down with the dreary costumes of the myriad period dramas that Hearst wanted to see her in. It was director King Vidor who finally freed the effervescent Davies from such stifling solemnity, and in The Patsy he gave her free reign to satirize her contemporaries, offering sharp and hilarious impersonations of such silent-era stalwarts as Lillian Gish and Pola Negri. Clark Wilson will again provide accompaniment on the Wurlitzer. 

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival. July 11-13 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.silentfilm.org.

2007 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

In today’s fully wired world of digital video and handheld viewing devices, it may be difficult to fathom a time when the moving picture was itself a revolutionary technology. In the first few decades of the 20th century, as the new medium was developed and perfected, it brought with it a radical cultural shift, bringing images from all over the world to neighborhood theaters.

The cinema essentially held a monopoly on mass entertainment, for this was before television brought the moving image into the home, and even before radio, which first brought the immediacy of live news and entertainment into the living room in the 1930s.

It was likewise before commercial aviation, a time when travel was more daunting, more arduous, and less accessible to the working class. Thus cinema provided a unique and engaging portal to the world for many who might not otherwise venture beyond regional borders.

The 12th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, running this weekend at the Castro Theater, is a portal of its own, taking audiences back to a time when film was establishing itself as the dominant art form of the new century. The festival’s mission is to showcase the art of silent film as it was meant to be seen, with quality prints presented at proper projection speeds and accompanied by period-appropriate live music.

In those early years, cinema, despite the tiredness of the cliché, was a new and universal language. Photography in newspapers and magazines could provide a glimpse of other cultures and other lives, but moving pictures, captured in faraway lands and projected on a screen, brought vivid images of a life beyond: clouds of dust kicked up by wagon trains moving west; waves unfolding on distant shores; the gleam of moonlight on cobblestones in a European village; the very ways in which people moved and lived throughout the world. It was a time when cinema was simpler in means yet just as rich in content, relying almost exclusively on image and motion to convey plot and import.

It was the lack of dialogue in fact which lent the movies much of their universal appeal, establishing film as a visual language that would be undermined once the images began to talk. For along with the advent of synchronized sound came the cultural barrier of language, a gap bridged only by such awkward translation devices such as dubbing, the falsity of which created a visual-verbal dissonance, and subtitling, which detracted from cinema’s impact by drawing the eye away from the image. Silent film instead relied on intertitles, an imperfect device to be sure, but one which at least had the virtue of separating the printed words from the image, leaving the visuals untouched and undiluted. And translation was simply a matter of replacing the title cards as a film crossed international borders.

This year’s festival presents something of the international appeal and range of silent-era cinema by bringing together an eclectic selection of films. The festival kicks off Friday with a mainstream American studio production, The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg. This is Germany by way of MGM, with big Hollywood stars Norma Shearer and Ramon Novarro directed with continental flare by the great Ernst Lubitsch.

Continuing with the international theme, Saturday will feature an afternoon screening of Maciste, an Italian classic that the festival’s programmers—Executive Director Stacey Wisnia and Artistic Director Steve Salmons—came across at the Pordenone Silent Festival in Italy. This was the first in a series of Maciste films starring Barolomeo Pagan as a heroic strong man rescuing damsels in distress. Sunday’s screenings include “Retour De Flamme” (“Saved From the Flames”), a program of early rarities by French cinema pioneers, presented, with his own piano accompaniment, by Parisian film collector Serge Bromberg, and The Cottage on Dartmoor, a British “psycho-noir” by director Anthony Asquith.

Another aspect of the Silent Film Festival’s mission is to educate its audience about the preservation and restoration of our rapidly disappearing cinematic heritage. Thus for the second year the festival is hosting “Amazing Tales from the Archives,” a free Sunday morning presentation on the effort to preserve that history. The program is the brainchild of Wisnia, who, despite the skepticism of her colleagues, thought last year’s presentation might draw a decent crowd. All were surprised when the turnout nearly filled the Castro’s main floor. This year’s program will focus on “peripheral” films—trailers, newsreels and shorts—and on obsolete formats, such as 28-millimeter, a format originally sold for use in homes and schools. Many 28mm films shorts will be screened throughout the festival, including travelogues, educational films and short comedies, even one of Harold Lloyd’s rarely screened “Lonesome Luke” films.

Though Wisnia and Salmons’ tastes may skew toward the lesser-known films from the era, they make an effort to fill a range of genres, from comedy to drama, from blockbuster studio productions to quieter, more experimental work, from star-studded large-scale productions to forgotten gems by actors and directors nearly lost to film history. Other films on the menu include:

• Valley of the Giants, a drama set amid the towering redwoods of the Sierra Nevada, featuring nearly forgotten actor Milton Sills.
• Beggars of Life, a follow-up to last year’s screening of Pandora’s Box, featuring the legendary flapper-vixen Louise Brooks. This time Brooks takes a radically different role, spending most of the film attired in men’s clothes in a story of hobos riding the rails in Depression-era America.
• The Godless Girl, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, one of the greatest showmen to take up film. His films were spectacles, full of melodrama and hysteria, and, more often than not, a steady stream of vice, usually denounced toward the end of the film to accommodate censors.
• Miss Lulu Brett, by William DeMille, a successful Broadway playwright and accomplished film director whose work was often overshadowed by that of his younger, brasher, more ostentatious brother. Miss Lulu Brett is considered his best film, based a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Zona Gale. William takes a quieter, humbler approach than his more famous brother, telling a tale of a small-town girl stuck as a servant in her sister’s household while looking for a path toward a happier and more meaningful life.
• Camille, a distinctive and innovative Warner Bros. production starring Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino.
• And every festival includes at least one program focusing on the silent era’s comic masters. This year spotlights producer Hal Roach, screening four short comedies from Roach Studio stalwarts like Charley Chase and the Our Gang ragamuffins.
  

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

Friday, July 13 through Sunday, July 15 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. (925) 275-9005. www.silentfilm.org.

2006 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

No one quite knew what to make of the new invention at first. The ability to capture motion on film, while a scientific breakthrough, didn’t seem to portend much for the future. Most deemed it a novelty, a toy which would quickly lose its appeal.

Few could have imagined in 1894 that these flickering images, first seen through an eyepiece at five cents a pop and later projected on a sheet tacked to a wall, would not only become a new art form, but the art form of the new century.

The next few decades saw the nascent medium grow at a rapid rate, in length, in maturity and in significance, expanding from 20-second clips to three-hour epics; from brief celluloid documents of real world events—called “actualities”—to feature-length documentaries; from amateurish filmed stage productions to feature-length narrative movies, rich in character and emotion; from sophomoric roughhouse comedy to the full-fledged visual humor of the great comedians, sophisticated in their use of the new cinematic language.

By 1927, the language of film as a visual medium was nearly complete and was just reaching its peak. The moving camera had been perfected; the potential of montage had been deeply explored; the power and emotion of the close-up had been exploited; acting techniques had evolved to suit the medium. A vast array of genres had been firmly established: the western, horror, drama, comedy, slapstick and farce, melodrama and satire, adaptations and original works, special effects, documentaries, instructional films, political films, avante garde experiments and mainstream entertainments. The breadth and depth of what was arguably the most universal of art forms was staggering.

But just as technology had made it all possible, so technology would tear it all down. With the advent of reliable sound technology and the dawn of the talking picture in 1927, 30 years worth of the medium’s range and diversity was almost instantly demoted to the status of a genre. No longer were they called “moving pictures”—now they were “silent.” From the lowest and crudest pieces of hackwork to the towering artistic masterpieces of the era, all were now thrown together in a single category, the name of which took on a pejorative quality. Films that had entertained, inspired and enriched viewers for three decades were now considered outdated, quaint, laughable, behind the times.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is an attempt to remedy that situation, to clear away the myths and misconceptions with quality prints presented at proper projection speeds and accompanied by live music. In other words, silent films as they were meant to be seen. Now in its 11th year, the festival runs Friday, July 14 through Sunday, July 16 at the Castro Theater.

Some of the those misconceptions stem from the moniker itself, for silent films were never silent; they were always shown with live musical accompaniment. The largest theaters featured full orchestras, mid-sized theaters featured Wurlitzer organs, and the smallest theaters employed a piano player. The musicians either improvised on the spot or performed a written score, often of their own composition or sometimes provided by the film’s producers.

Another misconception is that silent films were of poor visual quality, with high-contrast images of muddled blacks and grays, and always featured ham-fisted, overly dramatic acting and silly figures running about at abnormal speeds. The speed problem is simple: Silent films were shot at roughly 16 frames per second, as opposed to sound films, which are shot at 24 frames per second. Since the advent of sound, silent films have too often been mistakenly projected at sound speed, leading viewers to believe that they were manic and absurd. And most of the prints available over the years have been low-quality 16-millimeter transfers from the original 35-millimeter format, causing a loss of visual detail that was compounded by the deterioration of old nitrate prints.

If you’ve never seen a big-screen presentation of silent film, there is no better place to start than the Silent Film Festival. While there are several venues in the Bay Area which provide excellent presentations of silent films throughout the year, with excellent prints and live music, the festival goes a step further, providing historical context with informative on-stage interviews and panel discussions, trailers and outtakes and historical short subjects. Many of this year’s programs feature archival footage of the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, and even a “neo-silent” newsreel of this year’s centennial commemoration of the quake at Lotta’s Fountain, shot with an authentic hand-cranked silent-era camera.

This year’s festival could be rightly called the Year of the Woman, for most of its marquee evening presentations are starring vehicles for some of the silent era’s finest actresses. The festival kicks off with Seventh Heaven, starring Janet Gaynor in a performance which earned her the Best Actress Oscar at the first Academy Awards. Gaynor plays a street waife who falls in love with a sewer worker, played by Charles Farrell, only to see World War I intervene. The film was directed by Frank Borzage. (Borzage and Gaynor will each be the subject of retrospectives at Pacific Film Archive starting July 21.)

Saturday’s lineup features Mary Pickford in Sparrows. Pickford was the most successful and powerful woman in Hollywood in her time, one of the few stars with enough clout to eventually assume creative control of her films, selecting her material as well as her directors. Her films are not often seen these days, rarely showing up on television or at revival theaters. Sparrows represents a darker side of the Pickford cannon, depicting an orphanage where the kids are used as slave labor.

Saturday night will see a screening of Pandora’s Box, a German film directed by G.W. Pabst and starring the iconic American actress Louise Brooks. Brooks was not a great success in American films and she eventually made her way to Germany where she made three films in an effort to resuscitate her career. It is those films upon which her reputation rests today. Returning to America, she found herself blacklisted and never again had much success.

But later her talent for self-promotion, including at least one romantic relationship with a film historian, led to rekindled interest in her career and helped to retroactively establish Brooks as a great and important figure of the silent era. Her credentials as a great actress may be debatable, but her charisma, beauty and sexual appeal are undeniable, and Pandora’s Box presents her in her signature role as a seductive and dangerous woman who brings ruin to those she encounters.

The final show on Sunday night will put the spotlight on another great, if underappreciated, actress of the 1920s, the gifted comedienne Marion Davies. Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, was quite successful and well loved by movie audiences. Hearst, however, wanted to see her play more dignified roles, roles more suitable for the mistress of a great newspaper baron. He poured money into countless lavish costume dramas—clumsy, bloated productions that did nothing for her career—and relentlessly promoted them in his newspapers. Much of this was later satirized in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which helped to unjustly tar Davies’ reputation, rendering her as a mere pawn of Hearst, a no-talent chorus girl riding the great man’s coattails.

The Silent Film Festival will right this wrong with a screening of director King Vidor’s Show People, a light comedy that clearly demonstrates Davies’ charm and talents and features a number of silent-era stars in cameo roles as themselves.

There’s far more on display at the festival, however, and often it is the lesser known films that provide the event’s most fascinating moments.

• Bucking Broadway (1917) is one of only two surviving silent westerns directed by John Ford and stars the great western star Harey Carey. The film will be preceded by an onstage interview with Harey Carey, Jr.
• Au Bonheur Des Dames (1930) is an adaptation of an Emile Zola novel, about a young girl who takes a job in a vast Paris department store.
  
• “Amazing Tales From the Archives” is a free presentation detailing the hard work, passion and luck that goes into the discovery, preservation and presentation of cinema’s early works.
  
• Three of Laurel and Hardy’s silent two-reelers will be screened Sunday. Today the duo is probably better known for their sound work, but these short subjects demonstrate the pitch-perfect timing of their comic pantomime at its peak.
  
• The Girl With the Hatbox (1927) is a slapstick comedy from Russia that was deemed subversive by Soviet censors.
  
• The Unholy Three (1925), by Freaks director Tod Browning, is the story of a ventriloquist, played by Lon Chaney, who heads up a madcap scam to rob the rich in a wild, strange pulp story which gave Chaney an opportunity to poke fun at his horror film persona.
  

11TH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

www.silentfilm.org

Festival box office: 833 Market Street, San Francisco, Suite 812. (925) 866-9530.

8 p.m. Friday, July 14. $17.

Seventh Heaven (1927). Music by Clark Wilson (Wurlitzer organ).

A Trip Down Market Street (April 14, 1906). Narrated by Rick Laubscher. Music by Michael Mortilla (piano).

11 a.m. Saturday, July 15. $13.

Bucking Broadway (1917). 

San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (April 18, 1906). Music by Michael Mortilla (piano)

1:40 p.m. Saturday, July 15. $13.

Au Bonheur Des Dames (1930). Music by the Hot Club of San Francisco.

4:20 p.m. Saturday, July 15. $13.

Sparrows (1926). Music by Michael Mortilla (piano).

8:20 p.m. Saturday, July 15. $15.

Pandora’s Box (1929). Music by Clark Wilson (Wurlitzer organ).

11 a.m. Sunday, July 16. Free.

“Amazing Tales From the Archives,” a demonstration of film restoration processes. Music by Michael Mortilla (piano).

12:30 p.m. Sunday, July 16. $13.

Laurel and Hardy (three short films: The Finishing Touch (1928), Liberty (1929), Wrong Again (1929). 

Scenes in San Francisco (May 9, 1906). Music by Michael Mortilla (piano).

2:40 p.m. Sunday, July 16. $13.

The Girl With the Hatbox (1927). Music by the Balka Ensemble.

5 p.m. Sunday, July 16. $13.

The Unholy Three (1925).

Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco (1915).

Music by Jon Mirsalis (piano).

8 p.m. Sunday, July 16. $15.

Show People (1928).

Triumph Over Disaster (a 2006 “neo-silent”newsreel of the 1906 Earthquake Centennial

Commemoration at Lotta’s Fountain).

Music by Dennis James (Wurlitzer organ).