Essay

You can read the program essay for our 2009 screening of Our Hospitality here Although The General (1926) is Buster Keaton’s best-known and admired film, his 1923 feature Our Hospitality is one of his most perfectly constructed works. A period piece, Our Hospitality is set against the unmarred … [Read more...] about Our Hospitality

Almost a century after her brief career and scandalous marriage, Helen Lee Worthing’s name means nothing. Yet in our own woke era, she deserves remembrance. Here was a woman persecuted, prosecuted, and pronounced insane because of who she chose to love. The Other Woman’s Story—her most substantial … [Read more...] about The Other Woman’s Story

FILMS Trolley Troubles; Oh, Teacher; Great Guns; Mechanical Cow; All Wet; The Ocean Hop; Bright Lights; Oh What a Knight Created and Produced by Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, 1927–1928 Donald, Goofy, Pluto, and… Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. That’s how the list of major Disney animated characters might … [Read more...] about Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, 1927–1928

In 1920, Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss costarred in German Expressionism’s film clef, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Its stylized, distorted sets and sinister plot twists summed up for many the postwar dread after the German defeat in World War I. The Weimar Republic that administered a tenuous … [Read more...] about Opium

Screened with Get Your Man at SFSFF 2017 NOW WE'RE IN THE AIR TRAVELS THE WORLD Silent films have a funny way of traveling the world. In 2016, the festival’s own Robert Byrne mentioned to English film historian Kevin Brownlow about a trip he was taking to Prague to visit the Národní filmový … [Read more...] about Now We’re in the Air

Four working girls sharing an apartment in the big city might sound more like the premise for a 2015 American cable series than a 1923 feature from Sweden. But not only is Norrtullsligan a silent-era film set in Stockholm, it was adapted from a serialized novel published fifteen years earlier. The … [Read more...] about Norrtullsligan

Tom Mix, the first true cowboy star, was at the height of his popularity when No Man’s Gold was released in August 1926. Unlike his major western film predecessors—the genially lunkish “Broncho Billy” Anderson (who seldom rode a horse) or the unsmiling former stage actor William S. Hart (age fifty … [Read more...] about No Man’s Gold