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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Silence

The 1920s were booming times for the American theater, with more than 200 new plays being produced on Broadway each year, peaking at 264 in the 1927–1928 season. Among the top playwrights of the time, Max Marcin, the author of the 1924 hit Broadway crime drama Silence, is largely forgotten today. … [Read more...] about Silence

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Sex in Chains

The author of Eros im Zuchthaus, the basis for Sex in Chains, wasn’t going to wait around for the world to change. Karl Plättner was well known to authorities as a troublemaker from his rebellious adolescence through his years as an ironworker and political organizer. Drafted at the start of World … [Read more...] about Sex in Chains

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The Rat

Devastatingly handsome and abundantly talented, Welsh-born Ivor Novello was one of Britain’s most dazzling matinee idols of the 1920s. Like his friend and contemporary Noël Coward, Novello was a writer, producer, actor, composer, a star of stage and screen—a multi-hyphenate before that term existed. … [Read more...] about The Rat

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A Page of Madness

When’s the last time you were surprised by a silent film? Impressed, dazzled, yes, but genuinely surprised? You’d think by 2017, with all the silent-era history scholarship behind us, that authentic, mutant-DNA “Holy Crap” moments would be rare on the ground, and, of course, they are. But there’s no … [Read more...] about A Page of Madness

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Outside the Law

Outside the Law stars the legendary “Phantom of the Opera” and is written and directed by the creator of Dracula and Freaks—but don’t expect a horror film. This movie has more in common with the pioneering crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, who became synonymous with stories set in the San … [Read more...] about Outside the Law

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Now We’re in the Air

Screened with Get Your Man at SFSFF 2017 NOW WE'RE IN THE AIR TRAVELS THE WORLD Silent films have a funny way of traveling the world. In 2016, the festival’s own Robert Byrne mentioned to English film historian Kevin Brownlow about a trip he was taking to Prague to visit the Národní filmový … [Read more...] about Now We’re in the Air

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A Man There Was

What’s immediately striking about Terje Vigen, released in the U.S. as A Man There Was, is the power of its imagery. Stripped to its bare essence, the film is a visual encomium to the sea, or rather, to a Romantic understanding of the sea’s might as wedded to man’s emotional state. Based on a poem … [Read more...] about A Man There Was