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
Amazing Tales from the Archives 2022
FIERY EFFECTS | Given the choice between losing a film and being able to save it without color, many archives opted for the latter. And a good thing, too, or more of our silent film heritage could have been lost. But that choice resulted in a persistent misconception about the era’s films as … [Read more...] about Amazing Tales from the Archives 2022
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
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
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
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
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
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