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 Ghost Train

It’s one of those old-school, hypnotizing, daydreamy places very old movies can bring you—an occasion to think of movies “as places,” meta-locales, landscapes and rooms you enter into and loiter around inside: the haunted (or faux-haunted) house in a rain storm. It speaks to some primal pretend-play … [Read more...] about The Ghost Train

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Get Your Man

Preceded by surviving fragments of Paramount’s 1927 comedy Now We're in the Air, restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. How lucky are we to get to see the newly restored 1927 comedy Get Your Man? Starring the utterly delicious Clara Bow paired with the handsome Charles “Buddy” Rogers … [Read more...] about Get Your Man

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The General

No silent moviemaker ever engaged with the machinery of modern life as resourcefully as Buster Keaton did. From One Week (1920), his debut as a solo director after his apprenticeship with Fatty Arbuckle, to The Cameraman (1928), his final masterpiece, Keaton routinely sparred with the mechanized … [Read more...] about The General

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The Gaucho

In 1926 Douglas Fairbanks was beginning to sense his own mortality. His elder half-brother John had suffered a paralytic stroke and would be dead within the year. His storybook union to Mary Pickford was strained, her excessive drinking an affront to her husband’s lifelong abstinence. Yet “Doug”, as … [Read more...] about The Gaucho

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From Morn to Midnight

What we think we know about German Expressionism and how it began is ordinarily defined by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)—and that’s that. Cultural movements are slow-turning ships, though, and naturally Expressionism itself, as an aesthetic ideal, hearkens back to before cinema, as such, was … [Read more...] about From Morn to Midnight

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The Freshman

There are many great silent comedies worthy of a festival’s opening night, but Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman isn’t just funny, it’s foolproof. We all love to root for an underdog, and in this masterfully constructed feature Lloyd builds story and character hand-in-hand to a climax that has us cheering … [Read more...] about The Freshman

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Fragment of an Empire

“Fridrikh Ermler was one of the greatest masters in the history of Soviet and world cinema,” writes film scholar Peter Bagrov. “This was acknowledged by such filmmakers as Eisenstein, Chaplin, and Pabst … Why he is unknown in the West is a mystery.” In her 1992 book Movies for the Masses, Denise J. … [Read more...] about Fragment of an Empire