• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer
San Francisco Silent Film Festival

San Francisco Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating the public about silent film as an art form and as a culturally valuable historical record.

MENUMENU
  • Events
    • Events

      Murnau’s Nosferatu May 23

      Festival 2025 November 12–16

    • Live Music

      Musicians
      Learn about our musical accompanists

    • Plan Your Trip

      Getting Around

  • Support
    • SUPPORT SFSFF
    • Ways to Support
    • Letter from the Director
    • Grantors and Sponsors
  • Preservation
    • SFSFF Preservation

      • The SFSFF Collection
      • Film Loan Applications
  • Library
    • Library

      • Browse the LibraryRead program articles from past SFSFF events
      • Our MusiciansLearn about SFSFF’s incredible musicians
      • Screening RoomWatch videos from SFSFF Preservation and past live events
      • Event ArchiveExplore past SFSFF events
Sign In Become a Member
Sign In

2017

January 30, 2020 By kathy

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

You can read the program essay for our 2008 screening of The Adventures of Prince Achmed here At ninety-one years of age, Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed still has all the ebullience and self-evident pride of a prototype unveiling itself. In retrospect it’s no wonder that … [Read more...] about The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Filed Under: Essay

January 20, 2020 By kathy

1917: The Year That Changed the Movies

Golden Ages Come and Go Among the casualties of the First World War were many of the national cinemas of Europe, taking Italy’s silent divas and nearly everything French down with them. Denmark, neutral for the duration, lost its markets to war and, by 1917, its once flourishing Nordisk … [Read more...] about 1917: The Year That Changed the Movies

Filed Under: Feature

January 20, 2020 By kathy

Two Days

Soviet silent-era cinema usually conjures images of the perspective-bending stylistics of its most famous maker, Sergei Eisenstein, whose startling camera angles, extreme close-ups, and breakneck rhythms have come to define the entire epoch. But among the Soviet films that survive today several were … [Read more...] about Two Days

Filed Under: Essay

January 20, 2020 By kathy

A Tribute to David Shepard

In Memoriam: Film Preservationist David Shepard (1940–2017) In January 2017, we lost one of our own, David Shepard, beloved champion of silent and classic film. Shepard began at the wee age of twelve renting Kodascope prints to run at home in his newly acquired Bell and Howell projector. When … [Read more...] about A Tribute to David Shepard

Filed Under: Feature

January 20, 2020 By kathy

Tol’able David

Tol’able David was released on the last day of 1921, on the eve of the year marking modernism’s breakthrough, the year of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Despite being a product of that most modern art, cinema, Tol’able David seems like an unspoiled fragment of pre-industrialized … [Read more...] about Tol’able David

Filed Under: Essay

January 20, 2020 By kathy

The Three Musketeers

Fresh off the career-defining success playing the swashbuckling man-for-the-people in The Mark of Zorro (1920), Douglas Fairbanks set to work to bring his hero of heroes, d’Artagnan of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, to the screen. More than any other character he portrayed, Fairbanks … [Read more...] about The Three Musketeers

Filed Under: Essay

January 17, 2020 By kathy

A Strong Man

One of the few surviving silent films made in Poland, A Strong Man (Mocny Człowiek) is also one of the most stylistically advanced. It opens with a stately pan along the riverfront of Warsaw—capital of the nation’s film production—blending into a montage of majestic old buildings. But something … [Read more...] about A Strong Man

Filed Under: Essay

January 17, 2020 By kathy

The State of Preservation

Mike Mashon of the Library of Congress Silent films, TV shows, screwball comedies, instructional films—they’re all welcome at the Library of Congress, the de facto national library of the United States. Mike Mashon, head of the library’s Moving Image Section, is the person who oversees the … [Read more...] about The State of Preservation

Filed Under: Interview

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 5
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

How can we help?

info@silentfilm.org 415-777-4908
MENUMENU
  • WRAPPER
        • True Art Transcends Time

        • ABOUT

        • About Us
        • Press Materials
        • Resources
        • SOCIAL

        • Facebook
        • Instagram
        • Subscribe

        • Photos by Pamela Gentile and Tommy Lau.
          Copyright © 2019 San Francisco Silent Film Festival Privacy Terms