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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The Godless Girl

The films of Cecil B. DeMille offer a spectacle of extremes. Success was never more opulent than in a DeMille film, nor was poverty more grinding. Reared on Bible stories and the romance sagas that appealed to his preacher/playwright father, DeMille’s films relied on a pattern of sex, sin, damnation … [Read more...] about The Godless Girl

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Flesh and the Devil

You can read the program essay for our 2015 screening of Flesh and the Devil here Reflecting on a career that included 26 years at MGM and six Academy Award nominations, director Clarence Brown summed up the studio system under which he both thrived and bristled: “In those days we didn’t just … [Read more...] about Flesh and the Devil

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A Cottage on Dartmoor

British director Anthony Asquith is best remembered today for his elegant film adaptations of plays by George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Terence Rattigan, and also for the star-studded international melodramas he made at the end of his career, such as The VIPS (1963) and The Yellow … [Read more...] about A Cottage on Dartmoor

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Camille

She was a legendary Russian-born stage performer who studied with Stanislavsky, popularized the works of Ibsen and Chekov, and achieved acclaim as the first “modern” actress in the American theater. She became the highest-paid film actress of her era, and was also a true auteur with unprecedented … [Read more...] about Camille

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Beggars of Life

You can read the program essay for our 2016 screening of Beggars of Life here For today’s viewers, the “hobohemia” so vividly portrayed in Beggars of Life conjures an image of the vagabonds set adrift during the Great Depression. Yet, the movie was released more than a year before the cataclysmic … [Read more...] about Beggars of Life