Amazing Tales from the Archives
Live musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne
Our Amazing Tales program began in 2006 as a way to highlight the importance of film preservation and to provide insight into the remarkable work done by film archives around the world. Since then, it has become one of the most highly anticipated programs in the festival. And it’s free!
Presentations include:
A London Particular: Fog, Film, and the Great Detective
The three series (of forty-five episodes!) and two feature films based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, produced by Stoll Pictures in the early 1920s, are currently undergoing meticulous restoration by the BFI National Archive. As the project rolls on, Bryony Dixon, silent film curator at the BFI, ponders the associations of fog, filmmaking, and London’s most enduring and reinvented screen character.
The Gold Rushes
When Kevin Brownlow and David Gill rescued Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 comedy from the rubble of history back in the early 1990s, they recognized that the uncovering of additional footage was not only possible but inevitable. More than thirty years later, the inevitable has arrived. Elena Tammaccaro, executive director of L’Immagine Ritrovato (Cineteca di Bologna’s film restoration and conservation laboratory), and Arnold Lozano, managing director of the Chaplin Office, discuss The Gold Rush’s complex restoration history on the occasion of screening their new one.
The Curse of the Canon
For decades, the great classics of Denmark’s silent cinema have cast their light and shadow over “lesser” films of the period. To justify the cost of a print, or a restoration, a film has to have been deemed important enough to return to audiences. Until now. With a grant from three major Danish foundations, all surviving Danish silent fiction films have been digitized and made freely available at stumfilm.dk. Were unknown masterpieces discovered? Thomas Christensen of the Danish Film Institute examines his country’s silent-film legacy anew and whether or not the project merits a rewrite of the canon.
Saving Paramount
The Film Preserve’s Robert Harris and James Mockoski of the Maltese Film Works have been let inside Paramount’s vaults, tasked with restoring the studio’s surviving silent features—celebrated titles and lesser-known treasures alike. As part of its new collaboration with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, they have so far unveiled restorations of The New Klondike, The Affairs of Anatol, and Beau Geste and will offer a sneak peek at what’s in store for 2026.
Image: Elzbieta Wysocka’s 2017 Amazing Tales presentation. Photo by Pamela Gentile