Feature

From the beginning it was not an ordinary event. In its first year, the Telluride Film Festival featured two special guests: 75-year-old silent screen diva Gloria Swanson and controversial German director Leni Riefenstahl. Stage Struck, about a small-town waitress with big-time dreams, screened … [Read more...] about SFSFF Award 2012: Telluride Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents its 2005 Haghefilm Award, for distinguished contribution to the preservation and restoration of world film heritage, to the National Film Preservation Foundation. In 1997, Congress created the National Film Preservation Foundation as an independent, … [Read more...] about SFSFF Award 2005: National Film Preservation Foundation

4 JANUARY Hundreds of thousands of Berliners take to the streets in support of police chief Emil Eichhorn fired for refusing to use force to quash demonstrations in the wake of World War I. Rightwing mercenaries known as the Freikorps respond and the fray results in hundreds of deaths. On January … [Read more...] about 1919: A Decade Ends and an Age Begins

Golden Ages Come and Go Among the casualties of the First World War were many of the national cinemas of Europe, taking Italy’s silent divas and nearly everything French down with them. Denmark, neutral for the duration, lost its markets to war and, by 1917, its once flourishing Nordisk … [Read more...] about 1917: The Year That Changed the Movies

ESSANAY SNAGS CHAPLIN Charles Chaplin had started his career the previous year at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio but moved to the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company in January with a significant pay hike from $125 a week to $1,250. He made fourteen films with Essanay, many of which were filmed … [Read more...] about 1915: The Year in Motion Pictures

This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of Fragment of an Empire at SFSFF 2018 While silent cinema has its share of silk-hatted swells, champagne, and cotillions, the working class at the bottom of the income pyramid is by no means neglected. Miner strikes, child labor, … [Read more...] about Workers of Silent Cinema Unite!

I had two big passions when I was a boy in Stockholm—music and film. Every day I practiced classical piano and, in the evenings, I went to screenings at the city’s cinematheque. One day in 1989, a member of the staff asked me if I could accompany a silent film at an upcoming screening of … [Read more...] about Variations on a Theme: Matti Bye, Soundscape Artist

In Memoriam: Film Preservationist David Shepard (1940–2017) In January 2017, we lost one of our own, David Shepard, beloved champion of silent and classic film. Shepard began at the wee age of twelve renting Kodascope prints to run at home in his newly acquired Bell and Howell projector. When … [Read more...] about A Tribute to David Shepard