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San Francisco Silent Film Festival

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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Essay

October 6, 2020 By anita

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

Filed Under: Essay

April 1, 2020 By anita

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

Filed Under: Essay

April 1, 2020 By anita

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

Filed Under: Essay

April 1, 2020 By anita

Woman with a Movie Camera: The Films of Alice Guy Blaché

When she died in 1968 at ninety-five years old, Alice Guy Blaché believed that all but a handful of her titles were lost. In a career that began at the beginning of movies, Guy had written, produced, and/or directed about a thousand, including one hundred sound films long before talkies. After a … [Read more...] about Woman with a Movie Camera: The Films of Alice Guy Blaché

Filed Under: Essay

April 1, 2020 By anita

Redskin

One of Paramount’s last silent films, released in February 1929, is this spectacularly photographed tale of a Navajo caught between two cultures. By the late 1920s, debate about the relationship of Native Americans to the dominant society was reaching a turning point, as reflected in a … [Read more...] about Redskin

Filed Under: Essay

April 1, 2020 By anita

Fatty + Buster: The Comique World of Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton

Good Night, Nurse (1918), The Cook (1918), and The Garage (1919) Three shorts directed by and starring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle with featured player Buster Keaton One of the most consequential chance meetings in cinema history occurred on a rainy day in March 1917 in New York City. Or so goes … [Read more...] about Fatty + Buster: The Comique World of Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton

Filed Under: Essay

January 30, 2020 By kathy

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

You can read the program essay for our 2008 screening of The Adventures of Prince Achmed here At ninety-one years of age, Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed still has all the ebullience and self-evident pride of a prototype unveiling itself. In retrospect it’s no wonder that … [Read more...] about The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Filed Under: Essay

January 30, 2020 By kathy

The Wedding March

You can read the program essay for our 2000 screening of The Wedding March here Few people in the history of Hollywood have been as revered and reviled as Erich von Stroheim. Among studio magnates like Irving Thalberg, Stroheim’s inability or unwillingness to deliver a film at a usable length … [Read more...] about The Wedding March

Filed Under: Essay

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