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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1925

January 1 For her Harvard fellowship, twenty-four-year-old English-born astrophysicist Cecilia Payne publishes data revealing the universe’s most abundant element by far is hydrogen, upending bedrock science. She is obliged to insert a line that her results are “almost certainly not real” by an … [Read more...] about 1925

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Go West

Go  West is unique in Buster Keaton’s work, not only because of his most unusual “heroine,” a comely Jersey cow named Brown Eyes. It also is the only film in which “The Great Stoneface” combined comedy and pathos in a manner similar to Chaplin’s trademark approach in films such as The Gold Rush … [Read more...] about Go West

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Asphalt

 A film of shimmering lights and deceptive surfaces, Joe May’s Asphalt is a luminous work of late Weimar cinema. It epitomizes the Straßenfilm (“street film”) genre that emerged from the postwar fascination with urban modernity. This genre features the city as its central protagonist, depicting it … [Read more...] about Asphalt

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Song of the Scarlet Flower

“What’s missing from movies nowadays,” D.W. Griffith complained in 1948, “is the beauty of the wind moving through the trees.” That plein-air freshness he longed for is nowhere more abundant than in Scandinavian silent films, steeped in the elemental power of nature. It’s a quality that makes Song … [Read more...] about Song of the Scarlet Flower

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Kohlhiesel’s Daughters

Until recent years, the films Ernst Lubitsch directed in Germany have been little known in this country except for the post-World War I spectacles that made him prominent as an international director and led to Hollywood importing him in 1922. Even Lubitsch’s chief disciple, Billy Wilder, was under … [Read more...] about Kohlhiesel’s Daughters

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Trailin’

Only a true film star whose screen persona is practically etched onto the public’s consciousness could simply make a new film without their usual costume and have the novelty of it raise curious eyebrows. Imagine a 1920s audience accepting a Chaplin film without his baggy trousers and mustache, or a … [Read more...] about Trailin’