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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Camille

She was a legendary Russian-born stage performer who studied with Stanislavsky, popularized the works of Ibsen and Chekov, and achieved acclaim as the first “modern” actress in the American theater. She became the highest-paid film actress of her era, and was also a true auteur with unprecedented … [Read more...] about Camille

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The Cameraman

You can read the program essay for our 2019 screening of The Cameraman here The Cameraman signaled the end of an era for Buster Keaton, the launch of a promising new one, and the dawn of a painful decline. It was another successful Keaton comedy, made in the informal yet efficient manner he’d … [Read more...] about The Cameraman

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The Cameraman

You can read the program essay for our 2012 screening of The Cameraman here You’d never know it, but The Cameraman was a bitch of a movie to make, being the first Buster Keaton made under his new contract at MGM, and the first with which he had to suffer the dumb know-nothing interference of a … [Read more...] about The Cameraman

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California Welcomes the World: The Centennial of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a golden age for world fairs, and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, held in San Francisco in 1915, is among the most celebrated. Officially, the exposition commemorated the completion of the Panama Canal and all that this new trade … [Read more...] about California Welcomes the World: The Centennial of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition

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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

If cinema came to be the troubled, fanciful, sensual, neurotic unconscious of human culture in the 20th century, feeding us lurid, wild images and scenarios in response to our twisted inner hungers and greatest fears as we simultaneously feed it history, phobias, narcissism, prejudices, and lust—if … [Read more...] about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

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Bust’d Buster

This feature was published in conjunction with the screenings of The Cameraman and Our Hospitality at SFSFF 2019 As a tyke Buster Keaton developed the necessary body calluses to take his own pratfalls. As one of Three Keatons on vaudeville, he was cast as the “Human Mop,” variously … [Read more...] about Bust’d Buster

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Bucking Broadway

John Ford’s name is inextricable from the myth of the American West. The caustic grand old man with an eye patch made classic westerns such as My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Searchers (1956), shooting in the iconic Monument Valley and helping create the larger-than-life personas of actors such … [Read more...] about Bucking Broadway