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
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
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
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
G.W. Pabst: A Survey
This historical reprint was published in conjunction with the screening of The Love of Jeanne Ney at SFSFF 2019—excerpted from the originally published piece in the December 1927 issue of Close Up. Mr. Pabst formerly worked a long time for the theatre. Four years ago he decided that as far as … [Read more...] about G.W. Pabst: A Survey
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
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
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