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.

Become a Member

By

When the Clouds Roll By

You can read the program essay for our 2016 screening of When the Clouds Roll By here The image of Douglas Fairbanks is that of the swashbuckling hero from The Mark of Zorro (1920), Robin Hood (1922), and The Thief of Baghdad (1924). But the cornerstone of Fairbanks’s fame was as a popular … [Read more...] about When the Clouds Roll By

By

When the Clouds Roll By

You can read the program essay for our 2004 screening of When the Clouds Roll By here When the Clouds Roll By is a dazzling comic spree of action and fantasia. The second film Douglas Fairbanks released through his own distribution company, United Artists, it was one of the last of his “Coat and … [Read more...] about When the Clouds Roll By

By

What Happened to Jones

Reginald Denny created such a vivid image of the all-American man in his silent film portrayals that when the coming of sound revealed his very British accent, it nearly meant an end to his career. Instead, he was relegated to a series of bland supporting roles as upper-class Brits. But in the … [Read more...] about What Happened to Jones

By

West of Zanzibar

You can read the program essay for our 2019 screening of West of Zanzibar here “An outpouring of the Cesspools of Hollywood! ... How any normal person could have thought that this horrible syphilitic play could have made an entertaining picture, even with Lon Chaney, who appears in gruesome and … [Read more...] about West of Zanzibar

By

West of Zanzibar

You can read the program essay for our 2009 screening of West of Zanzibar here One of the great creative duos of the silent era was that between “Man of a Thousand Faces” Lon Chaney and his most frequent director, Tod Browning. The two came from similar professional backgrounds—on the low end of … [Read more...] about West of Zanzibar

By

The Wedding March

You can read the program essay for our 2019 screening of The Wedding March here Fay Wray spent the first three years of her life in Alberta, Canada, where her father ran a sawmill. The family came to America in 1911 and settled first in Arizona, then moved to Utah, following a reversal of family … [Read more...] about The Wedding March

By

The Weavers

In 1927 Weimar Germany, amid escalating social conflict, Friedrich Zelnik, known only for his genteel musicals, was the last person anyone figured to direct a film version of Gerhart Hauptmann’s classic The Weavers, a contentious and controversial play about a proletarian uprising. The story of the … [Read more...] about The Weavers