This feature was published in conjunction with a special presentation—Winsor McCay: His Life and Art—by John Canemaker at SFSFF 2013 Award-winning animator, historian, and educator John Canemaker was 12 years old when he first heard about Winsor McCay. Watching the Disneyland television program … [Read more...] about John Canemaker: The Pied Piper of Animation
It Just Has a Sound
Rodney Sauer and the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra Rummaging through a collection of musical scores at the University of Colorado for his ballroom dance band, Rodney Sauer came across some silent-era music cues donated by the widow of music director Al Layton. Leader at the time of the Mont … [Read more...] about It Just Has a Sound
The House on Trubnaya Square
Soviet filmmaker Boris Barnet made his entrance into motion pictures via the boxing ring, with an improbable set of skills that ultimately proved necessary. It took a lot of rolling with the punches to maintain and sustain a career that began in the post-revolutionary period all the way through the … [Read more...] about The House on Trubnaya Square
The Half-Breed
“Lo, the poor Indian,” wrote Alexander Pope in 1733, “whose untutor’d mind/sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.” Thus begins the poet’s famous contribution to the 17th century notion of the Noble Savage, a creature of the European enlightenment who is at once inferior and superior to the … [Read more...] about The Half-Breed
Gribiche
Article condensed from the notes accompanying Flicker Alley’s release of French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris (1923–1929). Belgian-born director Jacques Feyder became an overnight sensation with L’Atlantide, his film of Pierre Benoit’s postwar escapist bestseller about the mythical … [Read more...] about Gribiche
The Golden Clown
Alone in the center ring, a white-faced clown sings. Rather than making the crowd laugh, he draws tears. This trope is as familiar today as it was in cinema’s earliest days, when the circus and the cinema were more closely linked. According to Italian scholar Carlo Piccardi, “In its first decade the … [Read more...] about The Golden Clown
The First Born
A sexually provocative melodrama of upper-class decadence with surprisingly sophisticated stylistic flourishes, The First Born is the collaboration of two key players in the British film industry of the 1920s and ’30s whose work has largely fallen into obscurity, Miles Mander and Alma … [Read more...] about The First Born
Faust
Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe, known forever to gods and mortals as F.W. Murnau, is a towering figure in cinema’s pantheon. Unfortunately, Nosferatu (1922), The Last Laugh (1924), and Sunrise (1927)—the masterpiece he made upon his arrival in Hollywood—have come to overshadow the rest of the director’s … [Read more...] about Faust