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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Poil de Carotte

Precious few intertitles in the silent era, and just a handful of lines of dialogue across a near-century of “talkies,” are more portentous and heartrending than this: “François, the youngest son of the Lepic family, was born after the parents stopped loving each other.” And so we are introduced … [Read more...] about Poil de Carotte

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East Side, West Side

“When you’re in New York, you’re in the whole world. There’s nothing you can’t find in New York,” Allan Dwan told interviewer Joe Adamson in 1979. “I always had a great respect for it. It’s a dirty place, it’s this and that, but it’s the place.”  East Side, West Side was Dwan’s valedictory ode to … [Read more...] about East Side, West Side

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The Opportunist

Like most filmmakers of his time, Mykola Shpykovskyi did not attend film school. He was born in Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, and studied in Odesa, where he earned a law degree in 1917. Despite this unlikely start to a film career, he eventually became a respected colleague of upstart Soviet filmmakers, … [Read more...] about The Opportunist

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The Sea Hawk

What connection could there possibly have been between Rafael Sabatini and Buster Keaton? Sabatini was hailed as a brilliant writer of popular fare and, for the adaptation of his 1915 novel about a 16th century English nobleman who takes on a new identity as a fearsome corsair, Buster Keaton loaned … [Read more...] about The Sea Hawk

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The Lady

The 1920s was a time of great upheaval with people shaken and shattered by the Great War trying to forget and move on. Excess was the byword of the day, and women especially were experimenting with free love, free-flowing booze, and more economic freedom as the workforce absorbed them in large … [Read more...] about The Lady

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Oh! What a Nurse!

Recently, the mystery surrounding the biological father of Sydney Chaplin, Charlie’s older half-brother, has been solved. Researcher Barry Anthony has finally identified the apocryphal Sidney John Hawke, wealthy London businessman, as just this individual, lending credence to Sydney’s perpetual … [Read more...] about Oh! What a Nurse!

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Dancing Mothers

Preceded by THE PILL POUNDER (1923, d. Gregory La Cava, 14 mins) starring Charlie Murray and Clara Bow) No matter what they may say, there is such a thing as an overnight star—or close to it—but that wasn’t Clara Bow. When the legendary B.P. Schulberg made a deal that included an associate … [Read more...] about Dancing Mothers