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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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2009

January 16, 2020 By kathy

Our Hospitality

You can read the program essay for our 2019 screening of Our Hospitality here In a 1949 Life magazine article, James Agee described Buster Keaton’s deadpan face to an audience about to rediscover his talent. “[His expression was] an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to … [Read more...] about Our Hospitality

Filed Under: Essay

January 16, 2020 By kathy

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, 1927–1928

FILMS Trolley Troubles; Oh, Teacher; Great Guns; Mechanical Cow; All Wet; The Ocean Hop; Bright Lights; Oh What a Knight Created and Produced by Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, 1927–1928 Donald, Goofy, Pluto, and… Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. That’s how the list of major Disney animated characters might … [Read more...] about Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, 1927–1928

Filed Under: Essay

January 15, 2020 By kathy

Lady of the Pavements

Lady of the Pavements opened in 1929 to rave reviews. Although directed by the distinguished D.W. Griffith, recognized as a master even then, it was Lupe Vélez’s performance both on and off screen that got all the attention. While Griffith was reinventing his style with the emergence of sound, Vélez … [Read more...] about Lady of the Pavements

Filed Under: Essay

January 15, 2020 By kathy

A Kiss From Mary Pickford

When Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks visited Moscow on a vacation trip in 1926, they were the most famous couple in the world. Among the first Hollywood celebrities, they were idolized everywhere, even in the Soviet Union, where audiences preferred American and German films to groundbreaking … [Read more...] about A Kiss From Mary Pickford

Filed Under: Essay

January 15, 2020 By kathy

J’Accuse

Five months after the armistice was signed that ended World War I, Abel Gance premiered his epic J’Accuse in Paris. Called the Great War, WWI was also dubbed “the war to end all wars,” and Gance’s film was aimed at making that statement a reality. Many of his own friends had been killed in the … [Read more...] about J’Accuse

Filed Under: Essay

January 13, 2020 By kathy

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

Filed Under: Essay

January 10, 2020 By kathy

The Fall of the House of Usher

One evening in the mid-1930s Henri Langlois took Georges Franju to Montmartre’s Studio 28, where a few years earlier the first Surrealist films had played to riotous crowds. The program included screenings of Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher) and Buñuel and … [Read more...] about The Fall of the House of Usher

Filed Under: Essay

January 10, 2020 By kathy

Erotikon

Czech cinema is nearly as old as cinema itself. Yet with one dramatic exception, it did not gain international attention until the Czech New Wave dazzled the world in the 1960s. The exception, 1933’s Ecstase (Ecstasy), was part of an earlier modernist movement encompassing art, literature, and film … [Read more...] about Erotikon

Filed Under: Essay

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