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.

Memberships

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The Crowd

How were movies made in the 1920s? Well, if you’re romantic about it, just imagine Irving Thalberg and King Vidor bumping into each other somewhere in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer building. Let’s say it was 1927. Vidor was thirty-three. His boss, Thalberg, was only twenty-eight. They had just made a … [Read more...] about The Crowd

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Love One Another

You play the cineaste game, and eventually you build an Andrew Sarris-style hierarchy, a pantheon of the great filmmakers over the long game, from 1890-whatever to the present. Limit the top tier to ten or twelve, say, and a few names from the silent era will consistently arise. Fashions come and … [Read more...] about Love One Another

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So This Is Paris

Ernst Lubitsch famously declared, “I’ve been to Paris, France, and I’ve been to Paris, Paramount. I think I prefer Paris, Paramount.” Among the many dazzling Lubitsch films taking place in his imaginary, stylized version of the French capital is So This Is Paris, a frothy sex comedy as light as the … [Read more...] about So This Is Paris

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Bookkeeper Kremke

“The machine replaces five workers.” The job-killer in question, the Mercedes Addelektra, resembles a huge and complex typewriter; it is trundled into an office where accountants in pince-nez and sleeve protectors toil at desks, filling ledgers with sums in ink. The scene is the same one that has … [Read more...] about Bookkeeper Kremke

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Blazing Days

Like John Ford, William Wyler served his apprenticeship in low-budget westerns for Universal, although a few years later. Both branched out ambitiously into other genres, but Ford kept returning to the western genre with which he became identified, while few think of Wyler as a western director. But … [Read more...] about Blazing Days