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 Primrose Path

The Primrose Path gives us a blueprint of Jazz Age rendering of cinematic crime. Diamonds are the currency. In its event-packed screenplay, the bosses frame the foot soldiers when the authorities start snooping. There’s a hierarchy of big-time cheats and small-time hustlers, feds and nightclub … [Read more...] about The Primrose Path

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Below the Surface

Of all the restorations spearheaded by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, is any more shocking than 1919’s Behind the Door, which screened in 2016? The taxidermist turned World War I Navy captain (Hobart Bosworth) wreaks his vengeance on the German U‑boat captain (Wallace Beery) who has led the … [Read more...] about Below the Surface

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Foolish Wives

A hundred years ago, and for most of a year, Erich von Stroheim commanded Foolish Wives, as writer, director, and star. Universal had allotted him $250,000 as a budget, but the “Von” took that sum as provocation. His previous film, Blind Husbands, had been costed at just $25,000, but he had spent … [Read more...] about Foolish Wives

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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

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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

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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