San Francisco Silent Film Festival's 2013 Winter Event

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. 

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 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. 

silentfilm.org 

2012 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival returns this week with an eclectic and compelling program of movies from the medium's first golden era. From blockbusters to romance, from comedy to melodrama, from cartoons to documentaries, the festival, as it does every year, showcases the breadth and depth of film's first few decades.

Below are just a few of the festival’s highlights, followed by the complete schedule.

The 17th annual festival opens Thursday night with Wings, the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Directed by William Wellman, the plot concerns a love triangle set against the backdrop of the Great War. For the most part, the film hews to the standard romance-and-drama plotline, but it also features some astonishing scenes of World War I dogfights. No blue screens here: Wellman puts his camera in the planes and sends them hurdling, tumbling and diving through the skies to breathtaking effect. Wings features the “It” girl, Clara Bow, along with Gary Cooper and Charles “Buddy” Rogers. William Wellman, Jr. will introduce the film.

South

The festival reconvenes Friday morning for its annual Amazing Tales From the Archives program, a free-admission event that spotlights the important work of film preservation. The day continues with a program of foreign films and one rarely seen gem: Mantrap is another Clara Bow vehicle, this one based on a book by one of the decade's foremost American novelists, Sinclair Lewis.

Saturday morning cartoons start at 10 a.m. with a program of Felix the Cat cartoons. Later in the day the festival presents two of its best attractions: South is the story of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Antarctic expedition. His ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the ice pack, leaving Shackleton and his crew stranded a thousand miles from civilization. Shackleton and a skeleton crew crossed hundreds of miles of raging sea in small open boats and traversed towering glaciers in order to find someone to help him rescue his men. Frank Hurley was the expedition's photographer, and he created South from his photographs and motion-picture images of the voyage.

Saturday night features an encore showing of Pandora's Box, which anchored the festival a few years back. Louise Brooks is at her most alluring in G.W. Pabst's German classic.

Pandora's Box

Sunday begins with The Mark of Zorro, the first of Douglas Fairbanks' series of swashbucklers. To this point, Fairbanks had played a dapper young man bounding with the can-do spirit of the era in a series of light comedies. With Zorro, he shifted to period dramedy, forging adventurous drama-comedy hybrids that showcased his irrepressible energy and athleticism. Fairbanks served as the model for last year's hit film The Artist. In fact, in the scene where that film's main character sits alone and watches his own movies, he was actually watching footage from The Mark of Zorro.

Next comes one of the true masterpieces of silent cinema, Josef von Sternberg's shadowy tale of love and violence, The Docks of New York. Sternbreg’s trademark photographic brilliance is on display from the opening shots: Take a look at the expressionist lighting as men shovel coal into a ship's furnace, the bright fire rendering the surrounding darkness all the darker and starkly illuminating the men’s faces, lending the distinct impression that they are serving penance in hell.

Docks of New York

The program concludes Sunday night with festival favorite Buster Keaton in the final great comedy of his career. The Cameraman was Buster's first film after his producer sold his contract to MGM. Keaton went from the casual, comfortable confines of his own independent studio to the biggest and most factory-like of Hollywood studios. MGM was an assembly line — writers wrote the films, directors made them, and actors performed in them. The studio was only interested in Keaton as an actor, not as an actor-writer-director-stuntman.

They saddled Keaton with a subplot- and dialogue-laden film, but when the project ran into difficulty, Keaton seized the opportunity to prove himself to his new employers. He stripped the film of its extraneous subplots and added his own brand of humor and sight gags, as well his trademark athleticism and stunt work. The result was another in a decade-long string of classic Keaton comedies. In fact, MGM used The Cameraman as a training film for its comedians for years afterward, even wearing the print out from so much usage — indeed, several minutes of footage are still missing from the film for this reason. But MGM conveniently overlooked Keaton's contribution to the film, choosing instead to believe that the result proved that Keaton needed a tight leash, needed to be handed his material and ordered to stick to the script. This was effectively the end of Buster Keaton; having lost his career autonomy, his wife, and his children, he slipped further into alcoholism and indifference, sleepwalking his way through a series of inane MGM comedies before ultimately getting fired by the studio.

The complete schedule is below. For more information and to order tickets, see silentfilm.org.

Thursday, July 12

The Cameraman

7 p.m.: Wings (USA, 1927, 141 minutes)

Cast: Clara Bow, Richard Arlen, Buddy Rogers, Gary Cooper. Directed by William Wellman.

Accompanied by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra with Foley sound effects by Ben Burtt. Introduced by William Wellman, Jr.

$20.

Friday, July 13

10:30 a.m.: Amazing Tales from the Archives: Into the Digital Frontier

Presentations by Andrea Kalas, Vice President of Archives at Paramount Pictures and Grover Crisp, Senior Vice President of Film Restoration and Digital Mastering at Sony Pictures. Accompanied by Stephen Horne on the grand piano. Free admission.

1 p.m.: Little Toys (China, 1933, 110 minutes)

Cast: Ruan Lingyu, Li Lili. Directed by Sun Yu.

Accompanied by Donald Sosin on the grand piano. $15.

4 p.m.: The Loves of Pharaoh (Germany, 1922, 100 minutes)

Cast: Emil Jannings, Dagny Servaes, Paul Biensfeldt, Friedrich Kühne. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Accompanied by Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer. $15.

7 p.m.: Mantrap (USA, 1926, 71 minutes)

Cast: Clara Bow, Ernest Torrence, Percy Marmont, Eugene Pallette. Directed by Victor Fleming.

Accompanied by Stephen Horne on the grand piano.

$15.

9:15 p.m.: The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna (Germany, 1929, 115 minutes)
Cast: Brigitte Helm, Francis Lederer, Warwick Ward, Lya Jan. Directed by Hanns Schwarz.

Accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Live English translation read by Frank Buxton.

$15.

Saturday, July 14

10 a.m.: Felix the Cat cartoons (USA, 1925–1929, 70 minutes)

Created by Otto Mesmer and Pat Sullivan. Accompanied by Donald Sosin and Toychestra.

$15.

12 p.m.: The Spanish Dancer (USA, 1923, 105 minutes)

Cast: Pola Negri, Antonio Moreno, Wallace Beery, Kathlyn Williams, Adolphe Menjou. Directed by Herbert Brenon.

Accompanied by Donald Sosin, keyboard, with Jim Washburn and Greg Smith, guitar.

$15.

2:30 p.m.: The Canadian (USA, 1926, 88 minutes)

Cast: Thomas Meighan, Mona Palma, Wyndham Standing, Dale Fuller. Directed by William Beaudine. Accompanied by Stephen Horne on the grand piano.

$15.

5 p.m.: South (United Kingdom, 1919, 72 minutes)

Directed by Frank Hurley.

Accompanied by Stephen Horne on the grand piano, with live narration by Paul McGann.

$15.

7 p.m.: Pandora's Box (Germany, 1929, 143 minutes)

Cast: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Carl Gotz. Directed by G.W. Pabst.

Accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble.

$20.

10 p.m.: The Overcoat (USSR 1926, 71 minutes)

Cast: Andrei Kostrichkin, Antonina Yeremeyeva, Sergei Gerasimov. Directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg.

Accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra.

$15.

Sunday, July 15

10 a.m.: The Mark of Zorro (USA, 1920, 90 minutes)

Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Marguerite De La Motte, Noah Beery. Directed by Fred Niblo.

Accompanied by Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer.

$15.

12 p.m.: The Docks of New York (USA, 1928, 76 minutes)

Cast: George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova, Clyde Cook. Directed by Josef von Sternberg.

Accompanied by Donald Sosin on the grand piano.

$15.

2 p.m.: Erotikon (Sweden, 1920, 106 minutes)

Cast: Anders de Wahl, Tora Teje, Lars Hanson, Karin Molande. Directed by Mauritz Stiller.

Accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble.

$15.

4:30 p.m.: Stella Dallas (USA, 1925, 120 minutes)

Cast: Ronald Colman, Belle Bennett, Alice Joyce, Jean Hersholt. Directed by Henry King.

Accompanied by Stephen Horne on the grand piano.

$15.

7:30 p.m.: The Cameraman (USA, 1928, 76 minutes)

Cast: Buster Keaton, Marceline Day, Harold Goodwin. Directed by Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton.

Accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

Preceded by A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès, with live narration by Paul McGann.

$20.

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.

Motion and Emotion in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise

In its first year—and only in its first year—the Academy Awards split its top honors for best film into two categories: Best Picture and Unique and Artistic Production. And, having made manifest the schism between the commercial and the artistic in American filmmaking, in which the latter so often suffered—and continues to suffer—at the hands of the former, the academy immediately discontinued the practice. 

The 1929 ceremony honored films made in 1927, a watershed year in cinema. Over the preceding three decades, the technology of the moving picture had matured into the dominant art form of the 20th century, growing from nickelodeon novelties to feature-length productions of every style and genre. Cinema, both commercial and artistic, as well as everything between, was reaching its peak. The late 1920s not only produced most of the best films of the silent era, it produced a generous share of the greatest films ever made. And yet the medium was on the brink of dramatic change as the technology of synchronized sound, launched commercially in 1927 with the Warner Bros. gambit The Jazz Singer, would soon bring an end to the silent film. 

The first Best Picture award went to a film called Wings, kicking off Hollywood’s tendency to reward films that are quintessentially American—big, bold, brassy, sentimental, optimistic, and above all, successful at the box office. Wings was a love triangle set during World War I that contained little in the way of originality, but which was big on showmanship, featuring spectacular fighter plane dogfights, shot by cameramen riding in the gunners’ seats. 

The award for artistic excellence went to Sunrise, a Fox production directed by German emigré F.W. Murnau and starring Janet Gaynor, George O’Brien and Margaret Livingston. The film will screen at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 14 at the Castro Theater as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s day-long winter program. 

F. W. Murnau 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 lured Murnau to America, where his varied interests would lead him to further expand his repertoire, directing “women’s pictures” and even documentaries. 

With Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Murnau brought Germanic technique and a palpable European sensibility to American filmmaking. The film 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. The sets that contain this choreographic display were vast, yet they appeared even more expansive through clever design, Murnau having continued his European practice of building them in forced perspective: Distant buildings were built very small, and the horizons were peopled not by adult actors but by children, even midgets, and often driving miniature cars. 

This level of craftsmanship was typical of German filmmaking; theirs was a highly architectural cinema, meticulously planned and structured in every detail. The talent of actors, though valued, was subservient to the craft of directors, photographers, writers and set designers. But Murnau’s films allowed a bit more room for his actors to breathe, to improvise and bring a greater range of interpretation to their roles. 

Sunrise is considered one of the finest films of the silent era, and Janet’s Gaynor’s performance is one its greatest virtues. Gaynor was best known for playing something of a waif, a wide-eyed innocent, fragile but with great moral strength. In a sense, she was like the second coming of “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, both of whom were beloved by audiences for their down-to-earth demeanor and pixie-like charm. Gaynor managed to take seemingly limited roles and imbue them with an expressiveness that demonstrated virtue and nobility as well as a delicate vulnerability. The acting awards in those days were given for a body of work, and the restrained naturalism that Gaynor brought to her role in Sunrise, along with her performances in two other films that year, earned her the Best Actress Oscar. It is a subtle and at times profound performance, as Gaynor’s graceful, demure character undergoes dramatic changes, from loving and devoted to wounded and disillusioned, from frightened, endangered and mistrustful to redemptive, forgiving and strong. Her supple face and soulful eyes convey a range of thoughts and emotions that pages of dialogue could only suggest. 

By contrast, Sunrise was something of a departure for George O’Brien, who specialized in action roles. Though his acting is not as restrained as Gaynor’s, he combined a degree of naturalism with elements of expressionism. His performance, combined with the low-key lighting and expressive camerawork of photographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, even hints at noir, as it traces the darker twists and turns of a man’s psyche under the influence of a destructive obsession. 

Coming as it did toward the tail end of 1927, Fox released Sunrise in two versions, one silent and one with a synchronized score and sound effects. The latter version is available on DVD, but Saturday’s screening will be accompanied by Dennis James on the Wurlizter. It is one of four films showing at Saturday’s festival: Our Hospitality (1923), one of Buster Keaton’s first full-length features, based on the Civil War-era Hatfield-McCoy feud, shows at noon with piano accompaniment by Philip Carli; a Russian film, A Kiss From Mary Pickford (1927), shows at 2:40 p.m., again with piano accompaniment Carli; Sunrise screens at 6:30 p.m.; and The Cat and the Canary (1927), a comic haunted house film directed by another German emigré, Paul Leni, will show at 9:30 p.m., accompanied by foley artist Mark Goldstein and by Dennis James on the Wurlitzer. 

Sunrise (1927). Showing at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 14 as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s day-long winter program. 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. 

Harry Houdini: Movie Star...Briefly

Harry Houdini must have seemed an obvious candidate for movie stardom. Famous as a vaudeville performer and as a daredevil stuntman, he was a born showman, charismatic, daring and bold. 

Though limited as an actor, his appeal, then as now, is readily apparent. Short and rugged with piercing eyes, he comes across as an earlier generation's version of Edward G. Robinson, handsome in an unlikely way, tough and scowling, but able to convey a certain benevolent humor and grace. 

Kino has released a three-disc set of all that remains of Houdini's brief movie career. The set includes three feature films, a surviving fragment from a fourth, and nearly four hours of installments from a 1919 serial. Bonus features include newsreel footage of many of Houdini's straitjacket escapes, usually while dangling upside down over a public street before thousands of onlookers. 

But the main attractions here are Houdini's acting performances. The set starts with the 15-part serial, The Master Mystery (1919, 238 minutes), an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink action adventure in which Houdini, as Quentin Locke, battles a corrupt patents company involved in anti-trust practices, along the way battling a robot, rescuing a beautiful dame, endureing a string of torture techniques, and escaping from an array of deadly devices. The enormous success of the serial led to a contract with Famous Players Lasky/Parmount Pictures, which resulted in two feature films. 

Terror Island (1920, 55 minutes), the most lavish of the Houdini films, sees the magician playing an inventor whose state-of-the-art submarine is called into duty to salvage both treasure and romance. The film again affords Houdini the opportunity to display his talent for the escape, as well as his ability to hold his breath underwater for extended periods as he passes in and out of the submarine to stage various rescues and assaults on nefarious foes. 

During the making of The Grim Game (1919), two planes collided in mid-air, leading the producers to re-write the script around the material. The only fragment that survives of the film shows this accident, and though the filmmakers claimed that Houdini himself was hanging from the plane and survived the accident, the editing and re-shoots that sustained the illusion are hardly any more convincing today than they were then. 

After fulfilling his Hollywood contract, Houdini returned to New York to start his own production company, the Houdini Picture Corporation, producing and starring in two more films. The Man from Beyond (1922. 84 minutes) allowed Houdini to indulge his interest in reincarnation, playing a man unfrozen after 100 years who finds his true love of 1820 is alive and well in another woman's body in 1920. In Haldane of the Secret Service (1923, 84 minutes), his final film, Houdini stars as an undercover agent infiltrating a counterfeiting operation in New York's shadowy Chinatown. 

Despite his fame, Houdini's acting career was not a success. It turned out that the art of the escape required a flesh-and-blood performance to hold an audience's attention; cinema, with all its sleight-of-hand editing and shifting camera angles, robbed Houdini's stunts of their veracity and sense of danger. If an audience wanted grace and daring and swashbuckling charm, they had Douglas Fairbanks; if they wanted dangerous stunt work, cinematically presented and with no editing gimmickry, they had Buster Keaton. Though Houdini was one of the most famous men of his time, his fans preferred to see him not larger than life on the big screen, but on the stage, life size and all the more compelling for that fact that he was real.

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.