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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.

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2019

April 1, 2020 By anita

The Phantom of the Opera

Before Dracula, before Frankenstein, before the Universal Pictures Corporation understood there was money to be made scaring the bejesus out of its audience, there was the Phantom. He is the unholy spawn of three mismatched parents: a French writer who claimed his fiction was fact-based, a brilliant … [Read more...] about The Phantom of the Opera

Filed Under: Essay

April 1, 2020 By anita

Acting Like Lubitsch

This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of The Marriage Circle at A Day of Silents 2019 A stage actor before he was a film director Ernst Lubitsch was notorious for acting out the roles for his performers down to the smallest gesture. As exasperating as it may have been to … [Read more...] about Acting Like Lubitsch

Filed Under: Feature

April 1, 2020 By anita

The Marriage Circle

Ernst Lubitsch’s marriage movies are sophisticated, witty, and timeless, and one of the best is his 1924 film, The Marriage Circle. It takes place in Vienna, “the city of laughter and light romance,” and it begins with an unexpected focus: a man has a hole in the toe of his sock. It’s a very … [Read more...] about The Marriage Circle

Filed Under: Essay

April 1, 2020 By anita

Woman with a Movie Camera: The Films of Alice Guy Blaché

When she died in 1968 at ninety-five years old, Alice Guy Blaché believed that all but a handful of her titles were lost. In a career that began at the beginning of movies, Guy had written, produced, and/or directed about a thousand, including one hundred sound films long before talkies. After a … [Read more...] about Woman with a Movie Camera: The Films of Alice Guy Blaché

Filed Under: Essay

April 1, 2020 By anita

History of a Location: Canyon de Chelly

This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of Redskin at A Day of Silents 2019  Ages before Douglas Fairbanks scrambled up its sheers to rescue a woman in 1917’s A Modern Musketeer and Richard Dix’s Wing Foot left its fertile valley to attend a white man’s college in 1929’s … [Read more...] about History of a Location: Canyon de Chelly

Filed Under: Feature

April 1, 2020 By anita

Redskin

One of Paramount’s last silent films, released in February 1929, is this spectacularly photographed tale of a Navajo caught between two cultures. By the late 1920s, debate about the relationship of Native Americans to the dominant society was reaching a turning point, as reflected in a … [Read more...] about Redskin

Filed Under: Essay

April 1, 2020 By anita

What Arbuckle Says…

This historical reprint was published in conjunction with the program of Roscoe Arbuckle short films—Fatty + Buster—at A Day of Silents 2019 “I make up my own plays. I don’t write them. I make them up as I go along. By the time I’m through I have about 15,000 feet of film—and all I need is 2,000 … [Read more...] about What Arbuckle Says…

Filed Under: Historical Reprint

April 1, 2020 By anita

Fatty + Buster: The Comique World of Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton

Good Night, Nurse (1918), The Cook (1918), and The Garage (1919) Three shorts directed by and starring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle with featured player Buster Keaton One of the most consequential chance meetings in cinema history occurred on a rainy day in March 1917 in New York City. Or so goes … [Read more...] about Fatty + Buster: The Comique World of Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton

Filed Under: Essay

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