FIERY EFFECTS | Given the choice between losing a film and being able to save it without color, many archives opted for the latter. And a good thing, too, or more of our silent film heritage could have been lost. But that choice resulted in a persistent misconception about the era’s films as … [Read more...] about Amazing Tales from the Archives 2022
Foolish Wives
A hundred years ago, and for most of a year, Erich von Stroheim commanded Foolish Wives, as writer, director, and star. Universal had allotted him $250,000 as a budget, but the “Von” took that sum as provocation. His previous film, Blind Husbands, had been costed at just $25,000, but he had spent … [Read more...] about Foolish Wives
25 Years: Napoleon Conquers Again
I was traveling on the BART to Oakland, where the Silent Film Festival was staging four special screenings at the Paramount Theatre. As a train approached, I checked the indicator above my head. It read: “DON’T MISS NAPOLEON!” What kind of organization had brilliant ideas like that, I thought. (I … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Napoleon Conquers Again
25 Years: It Begins
As founders of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Stephen Salmons and I are so pleased and surprised the festival has lasted twenty-five years! We’re proud that our hard work and that of our successors has paid off so well in keeping the art of silent film alive. Neither of us had run a … [Read more...] about 25 Years: It Begins
25 Years: San Francisco Dreaming
In the physical world I have only been once to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, in 2017. That visit is all the more memorable as it was on the occasion of Eye receiving the San Francisco Silent Film Festival Award, when we also screened 1915’s Filibus from the Desmet Collection. However, I … [Read more...] about 25 Years: San Francisco Dreaming
25 Years: Into the Unknown
By far my most deliriously delicious experience at SFSFF dates back to that enchanted night at the 2008 edition of the festival when I stood behind a microphone and narrated into the Castro nitrate airs the intertitles embedded in my favorite film of all time, also the most romantically … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Into the Unknown
25 Years: Dreamland
2018. If there was one film I wanted to see at the festival it was The Lighthouse Keepers (Jean Grémillon, 1929) in the gorgeous Japanese print from the Komiya collection. But our plane from Paris was delayed, and when Emile Mahler and I arrived at the hotel after long hours of travel, it was … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Dreamland
25 Years: Live Cinema Counterpoint
The first film I ever happened to restore (because we needed to program it and it was found no complete and good print seemed to exist) was Fedor Ozep’s Zhivoj Trup (The Living Corpse), a still forgotten, or underestimated, film starring Vsevolod Pudovkin, shot in Berlin in 1928. While I was working … [Read more...] about 25 Years: Live Cinema Counterpoint