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 Signal Tower

Universal Pictures was the sausage factory of Hollywood, churning out westerns and melodramas for rural audiences in the Midwest. But once in a while, they came out with a Special—they called them Universal-Jewels. Clarence Brown made three of the best, Smouldering Fires, The Goose Woman, and The … [Read more...] about The Signal Tower

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Rapsodia Satanica

In his witty introduction to film historian Angela Dalle Vacche’s seminal 2008 study Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema, Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin writes, “When on a shopping spree for anguish, rapture, martyrdom, comas, counts, rapes, bastards, orphans, dogaressas, philtres, … [Read more...] about Rapsodia Satanica

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Parla una spettatrice

This historical reprint was published in conjunction with the screening of Rapsodia Satanica and L'Inferno at SFSFF 2019 PARLA UNA SPETTATRICE In which the author addresses Italy's poets, novelists, and playwrights distressed by the lowbrow fare at the movies. I don’t deny that the novelist … [Read more...] about Parla una spettatrice

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The Oyster Princess

It took a Mexican filmmaker at the Oscars to remind Americans that one of the most essential creators of its national cinema is an immigrant named Ernst Lubitsch. Parent to both the American movie musical and the rom-com, the brilliant twins that sustained the Hollywood film industry in its lean … [Read more...] about The Oyster Princess

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Our Hospitality

You can read the program essay for our 2009 screening of Our Hospitality here Although The General (1926) is Buster Keaton’s best-known and admired film, his 1923 feature Our Hospitality is one of his most perfectly constructed works. A period piece, Our Hospitality is set against the unmarred … [Read more...] about Our Hospitality

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Opium

In 1920, Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss costarred in German Expressionism’s film clef, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Its stylized, distorted sets and sinister plot twists summed up for many the postwar dread after the German defeat in World War I. The Weimar Republic that administered a tenuous … [Read more...] about Opium

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The Love of Jeanne Ney

Some pleasures of silent film are less cerebral than others. And I must admit, I love a good movie orgy. Give me women tabletop-dancing in short skirts, give me lurid shots of slavering men, have them pass around enough prop liquor to give all the extras cirrhosis. G.W. Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne … [Read more...] about The Love of Jeanne Ney