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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The Wreck of the Hesperus

The Wreck of the Hesperus most likely would have never been produced without the convergence of several closely timed events. The initial push came with the ousting of film director Cecil B. DeMille from the Famous Players-Lasky film company. DeMille had been with them since 1916, when Adolph … [Read more...] about The Wreck of the Hesperus

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The Flying Ace

Advertised as “The Greatest Airplane Mystery Thriller Ever Produced,” The Flying Ace stands as one of the best surviving examples of silent-era race cinema (films made with predominantly Black casts for exhibition to Black audiences). The Flying Ace represents both the ambition of race film … [Read more...] about The Flying Ace

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Partners in Preservation: Robert Harris and James Mockoski Team Up

Collectively, they’ve seen worse. Like the time audio was missing from a pivotal moment in David Lean’s magnum opus, Lawrence of Arabia, the actor who delivered the lines long dead. Or the painstaking patchwork that was necessary to make The Godfather into a cohesive whole when much of its negative … [Read more...] about Partners in Preservation: Robert Harris and James Mockoski Team Up

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The Gold Rush

Along with Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), The Gold Rush is one of the very few examples of the historical epic as slapstick. Standard procedure for most silent comedies was to exaggerate minutiae and the everyday to grandiose and absurd proportions—in the way a sales call gone awry leads to the … [Read more...] about The Gold Rush

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Nosferatu

There’s an image from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu that I can’t shake: a pallid, pointy-eared ghoul stares down at a camera that is positioned below the deck of a ship whose ropes and mast are shooting skyward behind him, framing his figure to evoke a kind of authoritarian menace. And then there’s his … [Read more...] about Nosferatu