The fun of a film festival is not only seeing the wonderful films, little-known ones in particular, but also meeting wonderful people. In the case of silent film festivals, we no longer get to see the film’s original casts or crew members because most of them died decades ago—still, unexpected and … [Read more...] about 25 Years: William Wyler’s Tokyo Holiday
25 Years: Forward into the Past*
When Melissa Chittick and I got up on the Castro Theatre stage to introduce Lucky Star at the first Silent Film Festival on July 14, 1996, Frank Borzage’s lost-until-1990 Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrell love story was sixty-seven years old, and I was thirty-eight. Today Lucky Star is ninety-three years … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Forward into the Past*
Soleil et Ombre
Musidora, like many of her female colleagues, is remembered primarily as an actress rather than a filmmaker. A producer and screenwriter, she was also director or codirector of four silent films, and some have credited her with an additional three. Her fame as Irma Vep, the anti-heroine of Louis … [Read more...] about Soleil et Ombre
Paul Miller
Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is an artist and composer with an affinity for silent film. In 2004 he premiered his live remix of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—Rebirth of a Nation— at New York’s Lincoln Center and has composed for Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of … [Read more...] about Paul Miller
How to Kill a Villain
This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of The Phantom of the Opera at A Day of Silents 2019 The version of The Phantom of the Opera that we see today does not share the melancholy ending of Gaston Leroux’s source novel. A villain dying of a broken heart did not satisfy … [Read more...] about How to Kill a Villain
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
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
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