Anniversary Tribute

I was traveling on the BART to Oakland, where the Silent Film Festival was staging four special screenings at the Paramount Theatre. As a train approached, I checked the indicator above my head. It read: “DON’T MISS NAPOLEON!” What kind of organization had brilliant ideas like that, I thought. (I … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Napoleon Conquers Again

As founders of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Stephen Salmons and I are so pleased and surprised the festival has lasted twenty-five years! We’re proud that our hard work and that of our successors has paid off so well in keeping the art of silent film alive. Neither of us had run a … [Read more...] about 25 Years: It Begins

In the physical world I have only been once to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, in 2017. That visit is all the more memorable as it was on the occasion of Eye receiving the San Francisco Silent Film Festival Award, when we also screened 1915’s Filibus from the Desmet Collection. However, I … [Read more...] about 25 Years: San Francisco Dreaming

By far my most deliriously delicious experience at SFSFF dates back to that enchanted night at the 2008 edition of the festival when I stood behind a microphone and narrated into the Castro nitrate airs the intertitles embedded in my favorite film of all time, also the most romantically … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Into the Unknown

2018. If there was one film I wanted to see at the festival it was The Lighthouse Keepers (Jean Grémillon, 1929) in the gorgeous Japanese print from the Komiya collection. But our plane from Paris was delayed, and when Emile Mahler and I arrived at the hotel after long hours of travel, it was … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Dreamland

That statement by pioneer Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov kept reverberating in my brain after my prime movie experience of 1996—watching his silent extravaganza Man with a Movie Camera (1929), with a score performed live by the astonishing three-man Alloy Orchestra, at the 1,500-seat Castro movie … [Read more...] about 25 Years: “Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!”

The first film I ever happened to restore (because we needed to program it and it was found no complete and good print seemed to exist) was Fedor Ozep’s Zhivoj Trup (The Living Corpse), a still forgotten, or underestimated, film starring Vsevolod Pudovkin, shot in Berlin in 1928. While I was working … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Live Cinema Counterpoint

I’ve had so many memorable experiences at the festival it’s hard to pick just one. Interviewing William Wyler’s three daughters on stage before the 2010 screening of The Shakedown is hard to top, but the one that springs to mind is the 2016 showing of Varieté with the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra … [Read more...] about 25 Years: At the Movies