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San Francisco Silent Film Festival

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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  • Event
  • San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2024

The Devious Path

Live music by Guenter Buchwald and Frank Bockius
Director
G.W. Pabst
Cast
Brigitte Helm, Gustav Diessl, Hertha von Walther, Jack Trevor

Beautiful, rich, and married, Brigitte Helm is restless. When she’s offered entry into a glamorous demimonde, she defies her controlling husband and leaps in. For this portrait of a marriage under strain, the acclaimed Austrian director applies his incisive eye for telling detail in the performances as well as in the shimmery world of sophisticated amusements.

  • 107 min.
  • Germany
  • 1928
  • DCP
Introduction
Cynthia Walk
Special Support
Sunrise Foundation for Education and the Arts
Copresenters
Berlin & Beyond, Film Noir Foundation

Live music by Guenter Buchwald and Frank Bockius

Conductor, composer, pianist, and violinist Guenter Buchwald is a pioneer of the renaissance in silent film music. He has accompanied silent films for thirty-eight years with a repertoire of more than three thousand titles and has conducted orchestras worldwide from Iceland to Romania, Tokyo to Zurich. In great demand as a composer, he has scored silent films as varied as Suzuki and Ota’s What Made Her Do It?, René Clair`s Paris qui dort, Chaplin´s Pawn Shop, and Murnau’s Nosferatu. A soloist known for his virtuoso improvisation, he has appeared regularly at film festivals in Berlin, Bonn, Bologna, Zurich, Pordenone, and Seattle. He is a lecturer at the Film Science Institute at the University of Zurich and resident conductor of the Freiburg Philharmonic Orchestra for Silent Film in Concert. He is cofounder of the Silent Movie Music Company and is musical director of Bristol’s Slapstick Silent Film Festival in England.

Versatile percussionist Frank Bockius specializes in jazz and is versed in medieval, flamenco, and Latin music styles. He has performed for dance and theater companies as well as in his own bands, including the jazz quintet Whisper Hot and the percussion ensemble Timpanicks. He joined Guenter Buchwald’s Silent Movie Music Company twenty years ago and has since performed for silent films at festivals in Kyoto, Pordenone, and Sodankylä, Finland.

Details

Original Language Title
Abwege
Country
Germany
Year
1928
Director
G.W. Pabst
Cast
Brigitte Helm, Gustav Diessl, Hertha von Walther, Jack Trevor
Runtime
107 min.
Source
Munich Film Archive
Format
DCP
Sun, Apr 14, 2024
5:00 PM
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
$20 general
$18 member
12 and under, free
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