San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Unveiling the New Napoleon Poster

2012-01-29T10:09:00.000-08:00

To announce its special presentation of Abel Gance's legendary silent epic NAPOLEON in March, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has commissioned this stunning poster by the legendary illustrator Paul Davis, perhaps best known for his iconic theater posters (Three Penny Opera, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide...) for producer Joseph Papp.

Posterswill be available for sale during all four NAPOLEON performance days at theOakland Paramount (March 24, 25, 31, April 1) and online prior to theevent.

Staytuned to SFSFF's website,Facebook page and Twitter for the on-sale announcement!

Or, sign upto be notified of poster availability by emailing lucia@silentfilm.org.

Kevin Brownlow on PBS

2012-01-22T13:48:00.000-08:00

Kevin Brownlow was on the PBS Newshour a few days ago speaking about the upcoming San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation of Napoleon (1927). Jeffrey Brown spoke with the Academy Award-winning filmmaker and film historian responsible for the restoration.

More information and ticket availability at http://www.silentfilm.org/event-special.php

Historic San Francisco film emerges after 95 years

2012-01-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

Robert Byrne, an East Bay film preservationist and President of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, was part of the team (along with David Kiehn, one of the founders of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum) behind the restoration of Twin Peaks Tunnel. This sponsored film from 1917 depicts a key moment in the development of the city of San Francisco.

In 2009, Byrne and Kiehn received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to restore and transfer the film from 28mm to 35mm.

On January 21, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont will screen Twin Peaks Tunnel. Saturday’s screening is the world premiere of a recently completed restoration of the historic film, which has not been publicly shown in 95 years.

Read more about this event and the history behind the film at SF Gate, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The fragment of film strip depicted to the right comes from the original 28mm print of Twin Peaks Tunnel. Coincidentally, the scene shown of the beginning of work on the tunnel at Market and Castro on December 5, 1914 was shot not far from the home of the annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which takes place every July at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.

Le Petit Caporal - Napoleon

2012-01-14T13:38:00.000-08:00

Last night's triple feature tribute on Turner Classic Movies to Le Petit Caporal (Napoleon) spotlighted the historical figure in three diverse features.

In the period epic, Conquest (1937), Charles Boyer plays the French conqueror and Greta Garbo plays his Polish mistress, Countess Marie Walewska. In the second feature, Love and Death (1975), Woody Allen's satire of Russian history and literature, Napoleon makes a cameo appearance (played by James Tolkan) in a plot about an inept assassin's attempt on the life of the famous general.

In the third feature, Anthony Adverse (1936), Napoleon was also in the background but central to the story in which a dashing young adventurer (Fredric March) gets involved in the slave trade as well as the Napoleonic Wars. The Warner Bros. costume drama was directed by Mervyn LeRoy and nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning four of them including Best Supporting Actress (Gale Sondergaard), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing and Best Music Score.

In conjunction with the showing of these Napoleon-related films, TCM has announced it will be serving as the official sponsor for The San Francisco Silent Film Festival's presentation of Abel Gance's 1927 masterpiece Napoleon on March 24, 25, 31 and April 1st at Oakland's Paramount Theatre.

The screenings, presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in association with American Zoetrope, The Film Preserve, Photoplay Productions, and the BFI, mark the U.S. premiere of the complete restoration by legendary film historian Kevin Brownlow and the BFI, as well as the American premiere of the orchestral score by Carl Davis, who will conduct The Oakland East Bay Symphony - the first time in nearly 30 years since Napoleon has been screened in America with full orchestra. No other U.S. screenings are planned.

For more information, read the official press release.

Silent era screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas dies at age 111

2012-01-08T10:12:00.000-08:00

Frederica Sagor Maas, a pioneering female screenwriter of the silent era who penned films for likes of Clara Bow, Norma Shearer and Louise Brooks, died January 5th. She was 111 years old.

The La Mesa, California resident was one of the last surviving personalities from the silent film era. A "supercentarian," Maas was considered the third oldest person in California. In 1999, at the age of 99, she was a special guest at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

That same year, at the urging of film historian Kevin Brownlow, Maas had published her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood (University Press of Kentucky). In the book, which features a forward by Brownlow, she recalled her life both in and out of Hollywood.

In 1999, Maas visited San Francisco to promote her memoir. She made a brief appearance at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, where she addressed a crowd of more than 1000, drew a thunderous round of applause, and signed copies of her book for her many new fans.

Following the death of Frederica Sagor Maas, a number of obituaries and articles have appeared on-line including those in the Los Angeles Times and Hollywood Reporter and on Alt Film Guide and examiner.com and Patch.com

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T16:54:00.000-08:00

Seen The Artist and loved it? Want more? Give heavily discounted

SFSFF 2012 all-program Festival Passes to the film lovers you love.

Until January 6, all Festival Passes are being offered at a very special holiday rate - even lower than our early bird rates! We're planning at least 17 programs at our July 2012 Festival - wonderful films with extraordinary musical accompaniment by musicians from around the world, so don't miss out!

For each pass you purchase, you'll receive a gift voucher card suitable for giving to your fellow film lover. And at the SF Silent Film Festival in July, you or your recipient can present the voucher card at the Will Call table at the Castro Theatre in exchange for the Festival Pass.

Members $150 | General $165

Members take their discount at checkout.

For questions, please email concierge@silentfilm.org

or call 415-777-4908 x 1

Happy New Year!

Hunchback of Notre Dame screens in SF New Years Eve

2011-12-30T22:35:00.000-08:00

For more than a few years now, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco has screened a silent film on New Year’s Eve. The tradition continues in 2011 when the landmark Episcopal Church offers two screenings of the 1923 classic, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

With legendary Lon Chaney in the title role, this early adaption of Victor Hugo's famous novel remains one of the most iconic films in cinema history. A critical and commercial blockbuster, The Hunchback of Notre Dame was one of the highest-grossing films of the silent film era. The film was a major production from the Universal Studio - where it was considered a "Super Jewel."

The Hunchback of Notre Dame tells the story of Quasimodo, a deformed, deaf and half-blind bell-ringer who lives in the famous Parisian cathedral. It was directed by Wallace Worsley and stars Chaney - "The Man of a Thousand Faces" - as Quasimodo and Patsy Ruth Miller as Esmeralda, his love interest. Also in the cast are notables Norman Kerry,Ernest Torrence, Tully Marshall, Raymond Hatton, and Gladys Brockwell.

The film is remarkable for many things, including its grand sets which recall Paris in the 15th Century. It is also remembered for Chaney's remarkable performance and spectacular make-up as the tortured bell-ringer. The film elevated Chaney, a well-known character actor at the time, to star status. It also helped raise the bar for many subsequent adaptations of horror films, including Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera just two years later.

Acclaimed organist Dorothy Papadakos will accompany The Hunchback of Notre Dame on the Cathedral’s 7,466 pipe Aeolian-Skinner organ. Papadakos came to international attention as organist at the world’s largest gothic cathedral, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, where she served from 1990-2003. Papadakos is also a member of the six-time Grammy Award-winning Paul Winter Consort, and is celebrated for her imaginative improvisations and compositions for theatre, film, television, and ballet - as well as for her silent film accompaniments.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a moving film – full of pathos, drama and atmosphere. And what’s more, the Gothic surroundings of Grace Cathedral and the film's musical accompaniment should lend themselves to a memorable viewing experience.

More info: Grace Cathedral is located at 1100 California (at Taylor) in San Francisco. New Year’s Eve screenings of The Hunchback of Notre Dame are set for 7:00 pm and 10:00 pm. The film runs 110 minutes. Additional information, including ticket availability, can be found at http://www.gracecathedral.org/cathedral-life/latest-updates/cathedral-news/detail.php?nid=89

Silent films among those named to 2011 National Film Registry

2011-12-28T21:34:00.000-08:00

Every year, the Librarian of Congress selects twenty-five American films - each "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant - for addition to the National Film Registry. The selection of films is based on suggestions from the library’s National Film Preservation Board along with those made by the general public.

Today, the Library announced twenty-five new inductees to the National Film Registry. This year's selection includes silent era masterpieces The Kid (1921) and The Iron Horse (1924), as well as a child labor exposé The Cry of the Children (1912).

Spanning the years 1912-1994, the twenty-five films named to the registry include Hollywood classics, documentaries, animation, home movies, avant-garde shorts and experimental motion pictures. Representing the rich creative and cultural diversity of the American cinematic experience, this year’s selections bring the total number of films in the registry to 575. More than a handful of the silent era entries have been shown at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

From the Library of Congress website, here are the four films dating from the silent era - along with their LOC descriptions.

The Cry of the Children (1912)
Recognized as a key work that both reflected and contributed to the pre-World War I child labor reform movement, the two-reel silent melodrama The Cry of the Children takes its title and fatalistic, uncompromising tone of hopelessness from the 1842 poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Cry of the Children was part of a wave of "social problem" films released during the 1910s on such subjects as drugs and alcohol, white slavery, immigrants and women’s suffrage. Some were sensationalist attempts to exploit lurid topics, while others, like The Cry of the Children, were realistic exposés that championed social reform and demanded change. Shot partially in a working textile factory, The Cry of the Children was recognized by an influential critic of the time as "The boldest, most timely and most effective appeal for the stamping out of the cruelest of all social abuses."

A Cure for Pokeritis (1912)
Largely forgotten today, actor John Bunny merits significant historical importance as the American film industry’s earliest comic superstar. A stage actor prior to the start of his film career, Bunny starred in over 150 Vitagraph Company productions from 1910 until his death in 1915. Many of his films (affectionately known as "Bunnygraphs") were gentle "domestic" comedies, in which he portrayed a henpecked husband alongside co-star Flora Finch. A Cure for Pokeritis exemplifies the genre, as Finch conspires with similarly displeased wives to break up their husbands’ weekly poker game. When Bunny died in 1915, a New York Times editorial noted that "Thousands who had never heard him speak…recognized him as the living symbol of wholesome merriment." The paper presciently commented on the importance of preserving motion pictures and sound recordings for future generations: "His loss will be felt all over the country, and the films, which preserve his humorous personality in action, may in time have a new value. It is a subject worthy of reflection, the value of a perfect record of a departed singer’s voice, of the photographic films perpetuating the drolleries of a comedian who developed such extraordinary capacity for acting before the camera."

The Iron Horse (1924)
John Ford’s epic Western The Iron Horse established his reputation as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished directors. Intended by Fox studios to rival Paramount’s 1923 epic The Covered Wagon, Ford’s film employed more than 5,000 extras, advertised authenticity in its attention to realistic detail, and provided him with the opportunity to create iconic visual images of the Old West, inspired by such master painters as Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. A tale of national unity achieved after the Civil War through the construction of the transcontinental railroad, The Iron Horse celebrated the contributions of Irish, Italian and Chinese immigrants although the number of immigrants allowed to enter the country legally was severely restricted at the time of its production. A classic silent film, The Iron Horse introduced to American and world audiences a reverential, elegiac mythology that has influenced many subsequent Westerns.

The Kid (1921)
Charles Chaplin’s first full-length feature, the silent classic The Kid, is an artful melding of touching drama, social commentary and inventive comedy. The tale of a foundling (Jackie Coogan, soon to be a major child star) taken in by the Little Tramp, The Kid represents a high point in Chaplin’s evolving cinematic style, proving he could sustain his artistry beyond the length of his usual short subjects and could deftly elicit a variety of emotions from his audiences by skillfully blending slapstick and pathos.

Annual selections to the registry are finalized by the Librarian after reviewing hundreds of titles nominated by the public (including some 2,228 films nominated by the public) and conferring with Library film curators and the distinguished members of the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB).

The public is urged to make nominations for next year’s registry at the NFPB’s website (www. loc.gov/film).

These Amazing Shadows, a documentary about the National Film Registry, will air nationally on the award-winning PBS series "Independent Lens" on Thursday, December 29 at 10 p.m (check local listings). Written and directed by Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton, this critically acclaimed documentary has also been released on DVD and Blu-ray.

Dizzy Heights: Silent Cinema and Life in the Air

2011-12-19T22:20:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival - along with the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, have joined together to present a series of films devoted to aviation. "Dizzy Heights: Silent Cinema and Life in the Air" is set to take place February 23 - February 26, 2012.

"For many years, the vehicle in which most people first experienced flight was not the airplane, but the movie theater. The new flying machines were still prohibitively expensive and often dangerous, but the vertiginous thrills they provided could safely be simulated with a fisticuffs-on-the-wing film like Dizzy Heights and Daring Hearts (1915). That is, when the idea of mechanical flight did not seem simply far-fetched. If a ship could actually fly, it was thought, well then anything might fly: beds, houses, people. The great silent fantasists — Winsor McCay, Georges Méliès, Walt Disney — all explored these possibilities."

"Others imagined how life might be lived in a world of commonplace flight. The London of High Treason (1929), a science-fictional “aerotropolis” of conspirators and saboteurs, suggests that such speculation was not without attendant anxieties. This was, after all, the first generation to see these machines put to war. In A Trip to Mars (1918), made at the war’s end, we find a pacific message gleaned from the new technology of flight. Above all, the new way of seeing — the aerial view — is savored in these films. In The Mystery of the Eiffel Tower (1927), director Julien Duvivier steals glances at the world below from every available purchase, possessed by the view from above — a harbinger of our present life in the air."

-- Patrick Ellis, Guest Curator

Thursday, February 23, 2012
7:00 p.m. A Trip to Mars

Holger-Madsen (Denmark, 1918) Archival Restoration! Introduced by Mark Sandberg. Bruce Loeb on piano. Part science fiction and part utopian fantasy, this silent film from Denmark combines the fascination for flight with a WWI-era imagination of a world without war—in this case, perhaps ironically, the planet Mars. (90 mins)

Friday, February 24, 2012
7:00 p.m. High Treason

Maurice Elvey (U.K., 1929) Archival Print! Live musical accompaniment by Peter Chapman. In a futuristic London, the Peace League must stage a popular revolt in the air force —and in so doing repair the romance between a pacifist and a soldier. A modernist Lysistrata, an English Metropolis: High Treason is science fiction for the Jazz Age. (75 mins)

Saturday, February 25, 2012
6:00 p.m. The Mystery of the Eiffel Tower

Julien Duvivier (France, 1927) Archival Print! Introduced by Patrick Ellis. Live musical accompaniment by Ken Ueno, Matt Ingals, Hadley MacCarroll. A palate cleanser for those who found Spielberg’s Tintin wanting, Julien Duvivier’s late-silent adventure masterpiece served as an inspiration for the original Tintin comics, and delivers much of the same charm, inventiveness, and visual delight. We are pleased to be screening the only known copy of this rare film. (129 mins)

Sunday, February 26, 2012
2:00 p.m. Fantasies of Flight: Animation and Comedy Shorts
Introduced by Patrick Ellis. Frederick Hodge on piano. The utter novelty of human flight during most of the silent period is hard for our post-jet-set age to fathom: this program aims to recapture an inkling of this lost sense of wonder. Included are the French comedy Airplane Gaze; Edwin S. Porter’s The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend; Winsor McCay’s The Flying House; Disney’s Alice’s Balloon Race; Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, and the Mack Sennett-produced aviatrix comedy, Dizzy Heights and Daring Hearts. (97 mins)

Patrick Ellis is a doctoral student in the Department of Film and Media at UC Berkeley. "Dizzy Heights: Silent Cinema and Life in the Air" is a project of the UC Berkeley graduate course in film curating taught by BAM/PFA curators Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid. With thanks to Doug Cunningham, Laura Horak, Luke McKernan, Alexa Punnamkuzhyil, Mark Sandberg, and Stacey Wisnia. Presented with support from the Graduate Film Working Group and the Department of Film and Media, UC Berkeley. We are grateful for the assistance of Marianne Jerris, Danish Film Institute; Fleur Buckley, British Film Institute; Marleen Labijt, Eye Film Institute Netherlands; Daniel Bish, George Eastman House; Marie-Pierre Lessard, Cinémathèque Québécoise; Serge Bromberg and Maria Chiba, Lobster Films; Nicholas Varley and Mark Truesdale, Park Circus; and Mary Tallungan, Walt Disney Studios.

Holiday Specials from the Silent Film Festival

2011-12-13T10:51:00.000-08:00

Holiday Specials from the Silent Film Festival

This is the perfect stocking stuffer for the holiday season! Give heavily discounted SFSFF 2012 all-program Festival Passes to the film lovers you love. Until January 6, all Festival Passes are being offered at a very special holiday rate - lower than our early bird rates! We're planning at least 17 programs at our July 2012 Festival-wonderful films with extraordinary musical accompaniment by musicians from around the world, so don't miss out!

For each pass you purchase, you'll receive a gift voucher card suitable for giving during the holiday season. At the SF Silent Film Festival in July, you or your recipient can present the voucher card at the Will Call table at the Castro Theatre in exchange for the Festival Pass.

Members $150 | General $165

Members take their discount at checkout.

For questions, please email concierge@silentfilm.org

or call 415-777-4908 x 1

American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) partners with San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF)

2011-09-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

A.C.T. AND SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL HOST SILENT FILM FRIDAYS FOR ONCE IN A LIFETIME

Free silent film screenings held at A.C.T. before Friday performances of Once in a Lifetime.

Director Mark Rucker participates in a postshow conversation with

SF Silent Film Festival Artistic Director Anita Monga on Friday, September 23.

American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) is excited to partner with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) to present screenings of short silent films before select Friday night performances of its season opener, Once in a Lifetime, the madcap Kaufman and Hart comedy about how the movies learned to talk. On September 30, October 7, and October 14, the SFSFF will host screenings of such silent short classics as Life and Death of 9413, A Hollywood Extra,and The Cameraman's Revenge, starting at 7:15 p.m. at the American Conservatory Theater before the 8 p.m. performance of Once in a Lifetime. The 30-minute screenings are free for all ticket holders. Additionally, on Friday, September 23, A.C.T. will host a conversation between A.C.T. Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker (who directs Lifetime) and SFSFF Artistic Director and local film luminary Anita Monga following that night's performance.

For more information on these events and Once in a Lifetime, please visit act-sf.org/once.

"The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has long been one of my favorite events of the entire year," said Rucker. "It's a real thrill to get a chance to partner with this organization for this show and to get a chance to have a conversation with Anita for our audience." Monga, who programmed San Francisco's famed Castro Theatre for 17 years, added: "A.C.T. has a long history of adventurous, high-caliber productions, and Mark Rucker's innovative approach to Once in a Lifetime is an ideal opportunity for us to collaborate. We are thrilled to be part of this production."

A.C.T. opens its 2011-12 season with the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy Once in a Lifetime. In this "a delicious Hollywood sendup" (The New York Times), a trio of down-on-their-luck vaudevillians head west to pull off the ultimate con: posing as vocal coaches to help Hollywood stars make their speaking voices as beautiful as their glamorous mugs as silent films evolve into "talkies." This witty satire by the Broadway greats behind such comedy classics as The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It with You will be directed by A.C.T. Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker and will feature an enthralling ensemble cast of 15 who will take on 70 roles. This unique production will incorporate period film clips and dynamic cinematic backdrops that meld the worlds of theater and film, redefining audiences' experience with "moving pictures."

Once in a Lifetime performs September 22-October 16, 2011, at the American Conservatory Theater (415 Geary Street, San Francisco). Press night is Wednesday, September 28, 2011, at 8 p.m. Tickets (starting at $10) are available by calling the A.C.T. Box Office at 415.749.2228 or at act-sf.org .

Pola Negri mania sweeping Europe!

2011-09-10T20:34:00.000-07:00

Pola Negri mania is sweeping Europe! As the Guardian (UK) notes, the rediscovery and restoration of the silent film, Mania: The History of a Cigarette Factory Worker, gives modern audiences the chance to be mesmerised by the melodrama of its Polish star. The restoration will premiere in Warsaw on Sunday, September 11th. It will then be shown in five other European capitols including Paris, Madrid, London, Kiev, and Berlin.

As the Guardian reports, "Made in the legendary Ufa studios in Berlin by director Eugen Illés in 1918, it has never been seen since its release. Mania – which is nothing to do with madness but the heroine's name – wasn't lost after all; a copy turned up in a Czech film collection. The Polish Film Archive has now repaired and digitally restored it, and presented it as a 're-premiere' in Warsaw on Sunday night, accompanied by the Wroclaw Chamber Orchestra."

The film - produced in Germany, directed by a Hungarian, and starring a Pole - tells a story of Mania, a cigarette factory worker, and her love for a talented composer named Hans – a love which springs from the girl’s fascination with music; it is a love strong enough to make her capable of the greatest of sacrifices. Mania’s beauty and enthralling dance incite passion in an art patron named Morelli, who wants to make her his mistress. In return, he promises to put Hans’ new opera on stage. Faced with a difficult choice, Mania decides to help her love make his dream come true, a choice that leads to a tragic finale.

As the Guardian also reports, "Mania is a gem, a tightly plotted melodrama of the kind they really don't make any more, but the real value of the film lies in its leading lady – Pola Negri, the first of many silent stars to be plucked from the European film industry and transplanted to Hollywood. Negri's Paramount years are Hollywood legend: marketed as a diva, 'all slink and mink', she was said to walk her pet tiger up and down Sunset Boulevard when she wasn't feuding with the studio's other queen bee, Gloria Swanson. And then there were the romances with Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino – marvellous gossip-column fodder, but when she was said to have flung herself, swooning, on the coffin at Valentino's funeral, it was clear she was too highly strung ever to be America's sweetheart."

So how did Negri catch Hollywood's eye ? The films that got her noticed were those she made at Ufa in her late teens and early 20s – including Mania.

Read the Guardian (UK) article here. Even more about Pola Negri, Polish silent film, and the restoration of Mania: The History of a Cigarette Factory Worker can be found on the Filmoteka Narodowa website. It is well worth exploring.

[Interested in early Polish film? Check out this September 1st article, Pictures and sounds of a gone world, on the SFGate website. Also, check out this 2010 article, Discovering a Polish Lulu, on examiner.com.]

The International Silent Film Festival

2011-08-22T07:31:00.000-07:00

This year’s International Silent Film Festival in Manila features silent movies from around the world, each with live musical accompaniment. For more information, check out this article on a local Philippine website. The line-up of films looks appealing!

A special evening with Harold Lloyd and John Bengtson

2011-08-19T21:47:00.000-07:00

Don't miss this special evening with Harold Lloyd and John Bengtson!

Our NEW YouTube channel

2011-08-14T16:05:00.000-07:00

Check it out! The San Francisco Silent Film Festival now has a YouTube channel. Click on over and subscribe at http://www.youtube.com/user/SFSilentFilm.

Walt Disney's silent roots

2011-08-07T19:49:00.000-07:00

Sounds of silent film star Baby Peggy

2011-08-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, Diana Serra Cary was interviewed by Mike Mashon of the Library of Congress about the recent discovery of a fragment of one of her once lost Baby Peggy films, The Darling of New York (1924). This video clip appeared on TCM (Turner Classic Movies) in April, 2011.

On Sunday, August 7th, Cary will be speaking about her life in Hollywood more than 85 years ago on the stage of the Koret Auditorium of the San Francisco Public Library. "An Afternoon with Baby Peggy" is set to start at 2 pm; the event includes the screening of one of the actress' short films. Afterwords, Cary will be signing copies of her book, What Ever Happened to Baby Peggy: The Autobiography of Hollywood's Pioneer Child Star.

Speaking of libraries, we recently noticed that the Library of Congress website has an audio recording of the early 1920's hit song, "That's My Baby." It's is performed by Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, one of the biggest musical acts of the time.

As can be seen from this scan of this vintage piece of sheet music, at the time of its release it was associated with one of Baby Peggy's films. (The song was recorded in October, 1923 and released as a 78 rpm recording in January, 1924). The diminutive dynamo is pictured on the cover of the sheet music.

Silent film star Baby Peggy celebrated in San Francisco

2011-08-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

There is a new article about Diana Serra Cary / Baby Peggy on the San Francisco Chronicle website. "The return of Baby Peggy" can be found at here.

Coming attraction slide courtesy of "Starts Thursday"

The piece was occasioned by Cary's upcoming appearance at the San Francisco Public Library on Sunday, August 7th at 2 pm. "An Afternoon with Silent Film Star 'Baby Peggy" will feature a Baby Peggy short film (courtesy of the actress), an on-stage conversation, and a book signing. A little more info about the event can be found on the SFPL website and on its Facebook page.

The library is expecting a good crowd. The SFPL Koret Auditorium holds about 150 people. By the way: be sure and check out the San Francisco Public Library homepage which features a lovely image of Baby Peggy front and center - http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=0400000001#

Also, if you plan on attending, be sure and check out the various silent film exhibits on display around the library. More info on these exhibits can be found at on the SFPL website. The exhibits run through August 28.

Earlier, at 1 pm, on Sunday, August 7th there will be a 30 minute informal guided tour of one of the exhibits, "Reading the Stars," with exhibit organizers Thomas Gladysz, Christy Pascoe and Donna Hill. A little more info at the tour can be had at http://events.sfgate.com/san-francisco-ca/events/show/196140225-guided-tour-of-reading-the-stars-exhibit

"Reading the Stars" features rare vintage books relating to silent films stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Louise Brooks, Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, Eric von Stroheim, William S. Hart, Sessue Hayakawa and of course Baby Peggy.

16th Annual SF Silent Film Festival A Glorious Success!

2011-08-01T20:31:00.000-07:00

After four days of packed houses and 18 extraordinary programs, the 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival ended on a spectacular note.

Alexander Payne introduces the Closing Night Film

Photo © Pamela Gentile

The festival concluded with Victor Sjöström's masterpiece HE WHO GETS SLAPPED and the brilliant accompaniment by the Matti Bye Ensemble from Sweden. In their excellent introductions of the film, Guest Director Alexander Payne declared himself a "Silent Film Festival lifer," and Leonard Maltin expounded on the festival's growth and success.

Four days earlier, the festival started on Opening Night with one of the more remarkable discoveries in recent years - the restoration of the lost John Ford film UPSTREAM, with accompaniment by the Donald Sosin Ensemble.

Kevin Brownlow illuminates his restoration of Abel Gance's NAPOLEON

Photo © Pamela Gentile

The excitement of Opening Night was doubled by the announcement that the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, in association with American Zoetrope, The Film Preserve, Photoplay Productions, and BFI, will present Kevin Brownlow's restoration of NAPOLEON at the magnificent Paramount Theatre, Oakland, with Carl Davis conducting the U.S. premiere of his orchestral score.

Brownlow went on to give an incredible presentation on Sunday morning detailing his life's masterwork of the complete restoration of Abel Gance's epic. Because of the scale and complexity of this production, this is the one and only opportunity to see this restoration in the United States. Napoleon tickets and information.

Executive Director Stacey Wisnia presents the Silent Film Festival Award to Jan-Christoper Horak of UCLA Film & Television Archive

Photo © Pamela Gentile

Saturday afternoon saw Executive Director Stacey Wisnia's presentation of the Silent Film Festival Award to the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Jan-Christopher Horak accepted the award onstage and introduced UCLA's recent restoration of THE GOOSE WOMAN, featuring Lousie Dresser's incredibly nuanced performance and accompaniment to match by Stephen Horne.

The Matti Bye Ensemble accompanies

He Who Gets Slapped

Photo ©Pamela Gentile

The fruits of the collaboration between the Silent Film Festival and the Headlands Center for the Arts to create a residency for Matti Bye and Kristian Holmgren culminated in the premiere of three beautiful scores at this year's festival. Their indelible accompaniment of THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE brought the audience to tears and received a standing ovation.

The festival struck many other high notes:

The premiere of the George Eastman House restoration of the Douglas Fairbanks romp MR. FIX-IT, with accompaniment by Dennis James on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer, the preeminent theater organ in the world.

Jonathan Richman introduces

Il Fuoco with his Golden Rule

Photo ©Tommy Lau

Jonathan Richman invoked his personal Golden Rule in his hilarious introduction of the Italian diva film IL FUOCO: don't give the film away! Stephen Horne's accompaniment of the film was infused with the ethereal voice of Jill Tracy.

The czar of noir Eddie Muller gave a rousing and appreciative introduction to the rare screening of THE WOMAN MEN YEARN FOR, Marlene Dietrich's first starring role, with lovely accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

This year's VARIATIONS ON A THEME panel sparked controversy with its sometimes heated and often eloquent discussion of different approaches to silent film accompaniment.

Giovanni Spinelli accompanies Sunrise

Photo ©Pamela Gentile

The Thursday night presentation of SUNRISE was accompanied by the world premiere of Giovanni Spinelli's electric guitar score. Spinelli performed onstage with the film, inspiring both rapturous praise and equally adamant detraction.

The very rare presentation of Mikhail Kalatozov's artful agitprop film THE NAIL IN THE BOOT featured music by Stephen Horne, who accompanied on piano, accordion, and flute (sometimes simultaneously!).

On Saturday morning, Leonard Maltin and J.B. Kaufman gave a tour of Walt Disney's first animated shorts, DISNEY'S LAUGH-O-GRAMS, which, with accompaniment by Donald Sosin and student musicians, delighted adults and children alike.

We loved seeing you there and sharing these films and programs with you, and cannot wait to see you again in March for NAPOLEON at the Paramount Theatre!

Kevin Brownlow profiled in the Guardian UK

2011-07-23T09:27:00.000-07:00

"Kevin Brownlow: a life in the movies" is the title of a new article in the Guardian (UK) newspaper which asks the question, "Kevin Brownlow has won a lifetime-achievement Oscar and made superb films. So why isn't he better known?" Find out more at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/22/kevin-brownlow-academy-award-oscar

And for a bit more about Brownlow and his remarkable achievements as a film historian, check out this article on on examiner.com More about Brownlow's "complete restoration" of Abel Gance's Napoleon can be found here . Below is a snapshot of Brownlow signing books at last weeks San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Post festival coverage

2011-07-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

The reviews are in, and by most all accounts, the thousands who attended the recently concluded 16th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival had a great time.

"Silent Films Soar In San Francisco" is the way Leonard Maltin put it in his recent post on IndieWire. The film historian concluded his extensive commentary with a feeling of "... joy for the celebration of silent cinema which continues to flourish, thanks to events such as this."Be sure and check out piece, which features a handful of snapshots from the event taken by Maltin. One of Kevin Brownlow addressing the crowd at the historic Castro Theater while his much younger self is shown on the screen is remarkable.

Elsewhere, www.indiantelevision.com posted a summation (all the way from Mumbai?) about the event at "Rare films mark Silent Film Festival." As did Jonathan Farrell writing for Digital Journal. His article is accompanied by a slide show. And lastly but not leastly, Sean Martinfield posted an interview with composer and musician Matti Bye, who accompanied three films at the Festival including the closing film, HE Who Gets Slapped. Martinfield's piece can be found on SanFranciscoSentinel.com

Additional comments and links can also be found at the SFSFF's Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/sfsilentfilm

2011-07-18T22:18:00.000-07:00

Don't be disappointed like Marat! And don't forget to purchase your tickets to the 2012 screening of Kevin Brownlow's restoration of Napoleon at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. Tickets are selling briskly. More info on our previous blog post and at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival website.

Antonin Artaud plays Marat in Abel Gance's silent film masterpiece, Napoleon (1927).

Silent Film Festival to present "Napoleon"

2011-07-15T06:32:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL TO PRESENT ABEL GANCE’S LEGENDARY MASTERPIECE NAPOLEON AT OAKLAND PARAMOUNT,
MARCH 24, 25, 31 & APRIL 1

U.S. PREMIERE OF COMPLETE RESTORATION BY ACADEMY AWARD®-WINNER KEVIN BROWNLOW & BFI

U.S. PREMIERE OF ORCHESTRAL SCORE BY CARL DAVIS, WHO WILL CONDUCT THE OAKLAND EAST BAY SYMPHONY

(July 14, 2011—Bastille Day) The San Francisco Silent Film Festival announces today that it will present the U.S. premiere of Abel Gance’s legendary NAPOLEON in its complete restoration by Academy Award®-winning historian, documentarian and archivist Kevin Brownlow, in four special screenings at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre on March 24, 25, 31 and April 1, 2012.

Albert Dieudonné as Napoleon

The Brownlow restoration, produced with his partner Patrick Stanbury at Photoplay Productions in association with the BFI, is the most complete version of Gance’s masterpiece since its 1927 premiere at the Paris Opéra.

The SFSFF screenings also mark the U.S. premiere of the renowned orchestral score, written over 30 years ago (and twice expanded since), by Carl Davis, who will conduct the Oakland East Bay Symphony.

The spectacular presentation at the 3,000-seat, Art Deco Oakland Paramount will be climaxed by its finale in “Polyvision”—an enormous triptych, employing three speciallyinstalled synchronized projectors, that will dramatically expand the screen to triple its width. The logistics and expense of screening Napoleon properly with full orchestra and special equipment have made it nearly impossible to mount. Gance’s Napoleon hasn’t been screened theatrically in the U.S. with live orchestra for nearly 30 years and there are no plans to repeat the SFSFF event in any other American city.

Says Stacey Wisnia, Executive Director of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, “This will be ‘the cinema event of a lifetime’ and for once that’s not just hype, considering that we may never have another chance to see Napoleon presented on this scale, and with Carl Davis’ magnificent score. But we’re also referring to the lifetime of passion that Kevin Brownlow has devoted to bringing Abel Gance’s original vision back to life.”

Mr. Brownlow, who last year became the first film historian ever honored with a special Academy Award, became fascinated with Gance’s film when, as a schoolboy in the 1950s, he ran two 9.5mm reels he had stumbled upon at a street market.

“I was stunned by the cinematic flair,” says Brownlow. “I was exhilarated by the rapid cutting and the swirling camera movement. What daring! I had never seen anything comparable—and I set out to find more of it.” That determination led to a lifelong quest. The first major Brownlow/BFI restoration culminated in a screening at the Telluride Film Festival in 1979, with 89-year-old Gance watching from a nearby hotel window. Under the auspices of Francis Ford Coppola and Robert A. Harris, a version of this restoration, accompanied by a score composed by Mr. Coppola’s father Carmine, was presented to great acclaim at Radio City Music Hall and other venues in the U.S. and around the world in the early 1980s. Mr. Brownlow and the BFI did additional restoration work in 1983.

Abel Gance and Kevon Brownlow in the late 1960s

The current restoration, completed in 2000 but not previously seen outside Europe, reclaims more than 30 minutes of additional footage discovered since the 1979 screening and visually upgrades much of the film. This unique 35mm print, made at the laboratory of the BFI’s National Archive, uses traditional dye-bath techniques to recreate the color tints and tones that enhanced the film on its original release, giving a vividness to the image as never before experienced in this country. Each screening of the 5 1/2-hour epic will begin in the afternoon and will be shown in four parts with three intermissions, including a dinner break. Tickets will be available online through the SFSFF website, www.silentfilm.org, beginning July 18.

Abel Gance’s NAPOLEON is being presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, in association with American Zoetrope, The Film Preserve, Photoplay Productions, and the BFI. Technical services will be provided by Boston Light & Sound.

Abel Gance's Napoleon (HD) from San Francisco Silent Film Festiv on Vimeo.

Founded in 1994, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has showcased the finest films of the silent era as they were meant to be seen: on the big screen with live music composed and performed by accomplished artists. While its annual July festival remains its flagship event, the SFSFF now produces special events throughout the year.

Says Robert Byrne, SFSFF board president, “This extraordinary presentation of Gance’s masterpiece is a major cultural coup, not just for our festival, but for the whole Bay Area.”

Silent Film Festival starts tonight: local coverage

2011-07-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

Both local newspapers here in the City by the Bay, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, have run articles about the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The excitement builds....

In today's Chronicle, G. Allen Johnson focused on Marlene Dietrich and the Festival's much anticipated screening of The Woman Men Yearn For. "S.F. Silent Film Festival: early Marlene Dietrich" also notes the excitement building over the Festival's opening and closing films, Upstream and He Who Gets Slapped.

And over at the Examiner, Lauren Gallagher profiled the larger experience of going to the annual Summer event. In "San Francisco Silent Film Festival reels in the years", Gallagher notes, "There are few places where a silent film can be viewed as it was originally intended. Watching Buster Keaton with your Netflix subscription on your laptop can’t compete with the Mighty Wurlitzer organ of the Castro Theatre, which will get a significant workout during the 16th San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which runs from Thursday to July 17."

Well put.

Other major coverage of the 16th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival has shown up online on SanFranciscoSentinel.com, Twitch and examiner.com.

Late breaking news from the SF Silent Film Festival

2011-07-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

Our Visiting Director has made his selection!

Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) will be presenting our Closing Night Film HE WHO GETS SLAPPED. We are thrilled that Payne is taking time to be with us for the entire festival between wrapping The Descendants, starring George Clooney, and scouting locations for his next film, to begin shooting in late summer!

Author, film critic, and long-time festival favorite Leonard Maltin

will present DISNEY'S LAUGH-O-GRAMS with film historian J.B. Kaufman (they'll also be signing books after the program).

Maltin will return to the stage on Closing Night to introduce Alexander Payne.

Check out some other Festival highlights at CityBrights on SFGate. The line-up of films and programs, including special guests and musicians for the 16th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival can be found at www.silentfilm.org. The Festival runs July 14 through July 17 at the Castro Theater.

Line-up of signings at the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

2011-07-10T22:33:00.000-07:00

Here is the line-up of signings at the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival. All signings will take place after the noted film. The schedule will be printed in the Festival program with approximate times. Admittance to individual signings is by Festival ticket.

Thursday, July 14
7:00 pm   Upstream
9:15 pm   Sunrise

Friday, July 15
11:00 am Amazing Tales from the Archives I
2:00 pm   Huckleberry Finn
-- William Wellman Jr., signs "The Man and His Wings: William A. Wellman and the Making of the First Best Picture"
-- Donald Sosin signs his CDs and DVDs
4:15 pm I Was Born, But…
-- Richie Meyer signs "Ruan Ling-yu: The Goddess of Shanghai" (DVD)
7:00 pm The Great White Silence
-- William Wellman Jr. signs "The Man and His Wings: William A. Wellman and the Making of the First Best Picture"
9:30 pm Il Fuoco

Saturday, July 16
10:00 am Disney’s Laugh-O-Grams
-- Leonard Maltin signs his books
-- JB Kaufman & Russell Merritt sign their Disney-related books
12:00 noon Variations on a Theme
-- Festival musicians sign their CDs and DVDs
2:00 pm The Blizzard
-- Thomas Gladysz signs "The Diary of a Lost Girl (Louise Brooks edition)"
4:00 pm The Goose Woman
-- Mary Mallory signs "Hollywoodland"
-- Karie Bible signs "Location Filming in Los Angeles"
6:30 pm Mr. Fix-It
8:30 pm The Woman Men Yearn For

Sunday, July 17
10:00 am Amazing Tales from the Archives II
-- Kevin Brownlow signs "The Parade's Gone By"
12 noon Shoes
-- John Bengtson signs "Silent Visions: Discovering Early Hollywood and New York Through the Films of Harold Lloyd"
2:00 pm Wild and Weird
-- David Shepard, Jeffrey Masino, and the Alloy Orchestra sign "Wild and Weird" (DVD)
4:30 pm The Nail in the Boot
-- Julie Lindow signs "Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Theaters"
7:30 pm He Who Gets Slapped

And of course, Books Inc and the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum gift shop will be on hand selling books and DVDs including many new releases. Further details along with the complete line-up of films (and accompanying musicians) can be found at http://www.silentfilm.org/event-home.php

Film Preservation Fridays #7: the New Zealand Project Films – An Interview with Leslie Anne Lewis and Brian Meacham

2011-07-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

Tropical Nights, 1924 - One of the New Zealand Project Films preserved at the George Eastman House

On Thursday, July 17, 2011 the 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival will open up with John Ford’s Upstream, one of the many American films believed to be lost that were recently “repatriated” and preserved thanks to the generous cooperation of the New Zealand Film Archive (NZFA). In preparation for this very special event, we will be joined by two of the individuals that were instrumental in making the entire New Zealand Project possible: Audio Visual Archive Specialist and Project Coordinator Leslie Anne Lewis, and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Short Film Preservationist Brian Meacham.

In a massive international collaboration overseen by the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), five major American Film archives have participated in the preservation of the films: the Academy Film Archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The success of the project has been due to the assistance of dozens of different archives, studios, laboratories and individuals. Upstream alone involved four organizations in addition to the Academy Film Archive: 20th Century Fox funded the project, the New Zealand Film Archive performed film mending and cleaning, the Park Road Post Production in Wellington, New Zealand completed the actual preservation work (read about the technical side of the preservation here), and the NFPF initiated and managed the entire collaboration. The five organizations share a joint award from the National Society of Film Critics for their work. The NFPF has raised money for shipping, project management and most of the preservation work. They also secured funding for Leslie and Brian to go to New Zealand through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

It also needs mentioned that without the stewardship of a several New Zealand film collectors, there would be no films to preserve in the first place. Projectionist Jack Murtagh, for example, safeguarded the print of Upstream and a number of other nitrate films involved in the project and passed them along to the NZFA for archiving. Today's audiences applaud their stewardship.

The interview with Leslie Anne Lewis and Brian Meacham follows below, with the individual respondent indicated at the beginning of each answer:

1. Could you talk a little bit about how the New Zealand Project has its roots in an earlier repatriation effort with the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia? How are the two projects similar and different?

Leslie: The Australia repatriation project (“Film Connection: Australia-America”) was a chance to test the waters on this type of project – an extremely focused effort to identify and select titles that would be of the most cultural, artistic, scholarly and historic significance to an American audience, and then preserve them through a collaboration between the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) and five American archives: George Eastman House, The Museum of Modern Art, Library of Congress, the Academy Film Archive and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

The Australia project was a success for all involved and everyone was enthusiastic about the possibility of future collaborations – I remember discussing it with New Zealand Film Archive curator Jamie Lean at the 2008 SEAPAVAA conference in Manila, and Meg Labrum (Chief Curator at the NFSA) frequently championed the effort, talking it up to her New Zealand counterparts. When Brian Meacham traveled to New Zealand in 2009 the pump was primed and his visit provided the perfect opportunity to get the project off the ground.

The main differences between the two projects are in terms of scale and the preservation path we’re taking. In Australia I inspected 42 titles and 8 were selected for preservation. The work was done at Haghefilm Laboratory in the Netherlands, preservation negatives and prints were deposited in the U.S. archives and the nitrate was returned to the NFSA’s custody. In New Zealand we’ve looked at over 300 titles and so far 75 have returned to the United States. With a couple of exceptions (such as Upstream, which was preserved at Park Road Post in Wellington, NZ) the preservation work on the New Zealand films is being done in the United States at Colorlab in Rockville, Maryland and Film Technology in Hollywood. Due to the condition of the nitrate prints, many of the titles are being scanned and worked on digitally before being output to 35mm polyester film for preservation purposes. In both projects, the end results for many of the titles are (or will be) available to view on the National Film Preservation Foundation’s website.

2. Can you describe your initial visit to the New Zealand Film Archive? Did you have any idea that films such as Upstream, otherwise considered lost, would be enjoying the custody of the NZFA as part of New Zealand’s cultural and viewing heritage?

The Better Man, 1912 - George Eastman House

Brian: My wife and I had planned a trip to New Zealand in the summer of 2009, and in preparing for the trip, I looked up the New Zealand Film Archive in order to see if I could arrange for a tour while we were there. At the same time, I’d been helping work on a repatriation project with the National Film Preservation Foundation and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, and it occurred to me that New Zealand might be home to some American film treasures, just as Australia had proven to be. I asked Annette Melville of the NFPF if I might suggest a collaboration with the NZFA when I was there, and she agreed that it would be a good idea. During my tour of the archive, I asked about the NZFA’s holdings of American silent films, and was told that indeed, they had quite a collection, and would be able to get me a list of the titles after I returned home. I didn’t know what to expect, but it seemed likely that they might have some films that would be of historical and cultural interest, especially the types of mostly forgotten newsreels, animated shorts, and one-reelers that would be of interest to film archivists. I wasn’t holding out hope that we would find a film like Upstream, which proved to be more significant and interesting to a much wider circle of people, but it was certainly a pleasant surprise when we did.

3. What sort of work did you initially perform on assignment in New Zealand? What did you learn about the initial batch of films in the inspection process, and how did this ultimately inform the selection of 75 titles for preservation and repatriation?

Brian: The first order of business was to wind through every reel of nitrate that had been pulled from the NZFA’s offsite nitrate storage area and determine the condition of the film and any information about title, director, cast, studio, and date that wasn’t already in the NZFA’s database. For the most part, the films were in surprisingly good condition, with nitrate decomposition present, but not as widespread or as extensive as we might have feared. We gathered as much information about the films as we could, in terms of both condition and cataloging, so we when we returned to the U.S., all of the participating archives could make informed decisions about what should be returned for preservation. The more we knew about each title, the easier it was to make a case for or against spending the time, effort, and money to return it, house it, and preserve it.

Idle Wives -1916

Leslie: We started by closely examining each of the 145 titles identified by the archives and scholars as being of potential interest. In many cases we were confirming that the title on the inventory actually matched the title of the film in front of us. I remember pulling out the first reel labeled Upstream and putting it on the inspection bench – one of the scholars had looked at the inventory list and said “You know, there’s a lost John Ford film with this title…”, but until we actually looked at the film itself there was always the chance that it was going to be a documentary on the migration of Alaskan salmon or something. I know I breathed a sigh of relief when it turned out to be about actors in a boarding house, not fish in a river! Upstream has gotten the most attention, but frankly there was something interesting in nearly every fireproof-box we brought into the inspection room – the archives and scholars had a difficult task narrowing down which would be brought back to the U.S. for preservation.

Each of the films was examined for completeness, and evaluated for physical condition and optical quality. We determined not only which films would be of the greatest interest, but also which were in most dire need of preservation due to damage and decay. We took well over 1200 pictures of individual frames to aid in the identification and selection processes. Though some had been well-used in their former lives on the exhibition circuit, we learned that the films were in generally good condition – thanks in large part to the New Zealanders whose care and commitment to the films in their custody has been nothing short of exemplary.

4. The list of titles for preservation and repatriation was circulated to the five major silent film archives in the United States for participation in the project. How did the Academy Film Archive decide which films to choose from this list?

Brian: The list was circulated among preservationists and archivists on staff who all added their suggestions and comments. We put the films in order of preference, based on a few criteria (though of course, it would be hard to turn down any of the titles up for grabs). First, we chose films that would add to our existing strengths, in subject areas that we specialize in. Second, we chose films that would add to an existing body of work by a filmmaker or actor in our collection. And finally, we chose films that would fill in holes in the history of filmmaking, where our collection lacked material from important filmmakers or studios.

5. What does your role as project coordinator entail?

Mary of the Movies, 1923 - Sony/UCLA

Leslie: Basically what I do is shepherd each of the films through the preservation process, from the time they reach U.S. shores until the nitrate and preservation elements are deposited in the receiving archive’s vaults and a new print of the original film is returned to New Zealand. I act as a liaison between the five U.S. archives, the various laboratories and the NFPF, keeping track of what stage each title is in, making sure they’re completed in a timely manner, etc. The first 75 films – which includes 11 features – will be preserved by the beginning of 2013, so we need to keep to a relatively strict schedule; at the moment we have about a dozen films in the preservation pipeline, with new ones starting every month. I also provide background research and notes for some of the titles.

What I’ve found particularly helpful is that because I inspected many of the films and provided the archives and scholars with the initial reports, I come to each title’s preservation knowing what is going to be needed, the amount of time it’s going to take and can coordinate with each archive’s preservationists on the best approach for that particular title. Each of the archives have a different approach towards preservation (such as the amount and type of reconstruction they will do if a title is incomplete or damaged, or differing philosophies towards restoring color or removing scratches) – its been interesting experiencing all of these at one time!

Dodge Motor Cars, ca. 1917 - the Academy

6. Other than Upstream, which has been preserved in collaboration with Twentieth Century Fox, could you mention one or two other films of special significance that the Academy preserved though the New Zealand Project?

Brian: So far, preservation has been completed on The Sergeant, a 1910 short film from the Selig Company that was one of the first films to be shot on location in Yosemite. A clip from the film is available for viewing (http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/the-sergeant-1910) and the complete film will be found on the NFPF’s upcoming DVD set “Treasures from American Film Archives Vol. 5: The West” (http://www.filmpreservation.org/dvds-and-books/treasures-5-the-west). We’ve also completed the preservation of The Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies—Episode 5, the Chinese Fan, a 1914 Edison serial about a young woman reporter who finds a kidnapped girl (and naturally, doesn’t inform her family until her paper gets to report the scoop). Just this week, work was completed on two industrial films from the New Zealand collection. One is called Dodge Motor Cars, ca. 1917, and shows in great detail the massive and complex production facilities that produced Dodge’s coupes, roadsters, and sedans. From forging the drive shaft to stuffing the seats with “curled hair,” we see each step of the production, and then watch as they cars are road tested on treacherous test tracks in the winter. Fordson Tractors (1918), a short produced by Ford Motors’ tractor division, demonstrates how easy it is to learn to drive a Fordson tractor, and how useful a tractor is in plowing large quantities of land quicker than a team of horses, a necessity in helping out with the war effort at that time.

7. What is the next stage of the New Zealand Project?

Leslie: Right now we’re in the midst of returning another group of films selected from over 160 titles I inspected in a second trip to New Zealand at the end of 2010. In terms of preservation, we have plenty to keep us busy! As we finish preserving films you can look for them to be shown at various festivals and venues (in both the U.S. and New Zealand, as well as internationally), and video copies of many of the titles will be available to view on the NFPF website.

8. What are the benefits of collaboration for the various parties involved?

Leslie: I think everyone would agree that this collaboration has been a good deal all around – for the archives, scholars, historians and fans alike: The U.S. archives are adding significant artifacts to their collections (and in some cases completing incomplete titles they already held), the NZFA will have screenable prints of many previously inaccessible titles in their collection, and a number of fascinating items have come to light that otherwise might not have had the chance to reach a modern audience.

(End of Interview)

I would like to thank Leslie Anne Lewis and Brian Meacham for taking time out of their schedules to answer questions and share images. Annette Melville of the National Film Preservation Foundation provided suggestions and Kyle Westphal of the George Eastman House brought the importance of collectors to the table by pointing me towards an article by Jane Paul and Steve Russell in Newsreel: the New Zealand Film Archive Journal.

Tropical Nights

Our final Film Preservation Friday will be put on hold so that another end-of-the-week preservation event can take center stage. At 11 am on Friday, July 15, as part of the 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Amazing Tales from the Archives I will feature presentations from archivists at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the George Eastman House and UCLA Film and Television Archive, not to mention Ken Fox’s presentation on Mr. Fix-It intertitle creation. This event is free and open to the public, and anybody in attendance will have a truly unique experience learning how film archives work with materials that resist identification and readily available historical context. Once the excitement of the Festival has receded, please check back for my final Film Preservation Friday posting. We will be looking at a very special project that has been years in the making, and is now in its final stages of completion. Thanks for reading.

Frederica Sagor Maas turns 111 years old

2011-07-06T08:04:00.000-07:00

Frederica Sagor Maas, one of the last surviving personalities from the silent film era and a special guest at the 1999 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, has turned 111 years old today.

Sagor worked with von Stroheim, wrote a handful of Clara Bow and Norma Shearer films, contributed to other films starring Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, and knew just about everybody - including a young Joan Crawford. Sagor was assigned by studio executives to greet the then new arrival at the train station when Crawford, then Lucille LeSeur, first arrived in Hollywood. Read more here.

Maas is considered the second oldest person in California, and the 18th oldest in the United States.

Giovanni Spinelli

2011-07-05T21:18:00.000-07:00

There is no such thing as a silent film at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Each feature and short is accompanied by musicians who in many instances will be performing an original score. One of the musicians set to perform at the upcoming Festival is Giovanni Spinelli.

Spinelli will accompany Sunrise (1927) on opening night, Thursday, July 14th. Below is a short excerpt from a documentary by director Brian Dilg on the making of Spinelli's score.

Sunrise: Scoring A Classic from Brian Dilg on Vimeo.

"Rock and roll meets the 1927 silent film masterpiece Sunrise when film composer Giovanni Spinelli is commissioned by renowned archivist and director Paolo Cherchi Usai to write and perform a modern wall-to-wall rock score - with only one electric guitar." More about this acclaimed composer and musician can be found on his website at http://giovannispinelli.com/

Musicians at the Silent Film Festival

2011-07-05T06:01:00.000-07:00

Music is an integral part of the annual San Francisco Silent Film. Every film - whether a feature or a short - is accompanied by live music, just as films were during the silent film era. Here are the musicians who will be participating in this year's Festival.

Alloy Orchestra

Alloy Orchestra is a three man musical ensemble, writing and performing live accompaniment to classic silent films. Working with an outrageous assemblage of peculiar objects, they thrash and grind soulful music from unlikely sources. Founded 20 years ago, Alloy scored 23 feature length silent films and more than 30 shorts. The group has helped revive some of the great masterpieces of the silent era by touring extensively, commissioning new prints, and collaborating with archives, collectors and curators.

Stephen Horne

Stephen Horne has long been considered one of the leading silent film accompanists. He is based at London's BFI Southbank, but plays at all the major UK venues and numerous international festivals in Europe and North America. Although principally a pianist, he often incorporates flute, accordion and keyboards into his performances, sometimes simultaneously. In the past year, Stephen has recorded several scores for the forthcoming Treasures From American Archives 5.

Dennis James

For over forty years Dennis James has performed historically authentic silent film score accompaniments utilizing the actual published musical source materials from the silent film era while incorporating the actual period performance practices with unwavering professional commitment to stylistic integrity. He tours internationally with his Silent Film Concerts production company performing to silent films with solo organ, piano, and chamber ensemble accompaniments in addition to presentations with major symphony orchestras throughout the world.

Matti Bye Ensemble

Matti Bye has been a music score composer and live silent movie piano performer at the Swedish Film Institute since 1989. He is also a regular performer at European film festivals, including the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, the Bologna Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä, Finland. The Ensemble includes Bye, Lotta Johansson, Kristian Holmgren. Guest performers include Sarah Jo Zaharako, Alex Kelly, and Lisa Mezzacappa.

Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra

The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra is a quintet based in Colorado that revives the sound of the silent film orchestra. Using an extensive library of “photoplay music” that once belonged to movie theater orchestra leaders, Mont Alto compiles film scores by carefully selecting music to suit each scene in the film. The ensemble—cellist David Short, clarinetist Brian Collins, trumpeter Dawn Kramer, pianist Rodney Sauer, and violinist Britt Swenson is versatile enough to play music ranging from Tchaikovsky to the Charleston.

Donald Sosin
Donald Sosin scores films for major festivals, archives and for DVD. San Francisco Silent Film Festivals performances include Lady of the Pavements with his wife Joanna Seaton, Prince Achmed, and many shorts. In February the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra premiered his octet for Harold Lloyd’s Now of Never. Other commissions: Chicago Symphony Chorus, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, MoMA, TCM. Donald is the proud father of Nick, RPI class of 2011, and baby Mollie, an emerging pianist/drummer/singer. They live in Connecticut.

Giovanni Spinelli

Born in England and raised in London, New York, Stockholm and Florence, Spinelli lives and works in New York City. His multicultural background is reflected in his music with influences as diverse as Arvo Pärt, Astor Piazzolla, Brian Eno, Henryk Górecki, Michael Nyman, John Adams, Ryuchi Sakamoto, Dead Can Dance, Joy Division, Radiohead, Interpol and Sigur Ros. The diversity of his music, which ranges from orchestral to ambient and electronica and from rock and pop to world music and from rock and pop to world music, is reflected in his work for film and theatre.

+ + + +

Following the Saturday afternoon panel, "Variations on a Theme: Musicians on the Craft of Composing and Performing for Silent Film," a number of the panelists will be upstairs on the Castro mezzanine were they will be meeting with the public and signing copies of their CDs and DVDs, which will be for sale. Its a great opportunity to say "Hello" and ask a question.

Music at the Silent Film Festival

2011-07-04T11:16:00.000-07:00

Music is an integral part of the annual San Francisco Silent Film. Every film - whether a feature or a short - is accompanied by live music, just as films were during the silent film era.

Composers-in-Residence

Three of this year’s programs feature scores specially commissioned by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in partnership with the Headlands Center for the Arts. In spring 2011, as part of a special collaboration between our two organizations, composers Matti Bye and Kristian Holmgren created new scores for The Blizzard (Gunnar Hedes Saga), He Who Gets Slapped, and The Great White Silence. In addition to working on the music, Bye and Holmgren were able to collaborate with other artists from the Headlands community, including both current residents and alumni, some of whom will accompany the Matti Bye Ensemble at this year’s festival. The two composers also appeared at a public event at the Headlands, "Sound and Silent Film in Nature," where they previewed a portion of The Great White Silence and spoke to a capacity audience about the artistic vision and creative process that guides them in composing for silent film. Major support for this residency was provided by the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME: Musicians on the Craft of Composing and Performing for Silent Film

All of the musicians at the festival will participate in this very special Saturday afternoon program that aims to shine a light on the process of composing scores for silent films. Composer/musician/performer Jill Tracy will moderate the panel, leading a discussion that will illustrate the various approaches our musical artists take.

This program includes members of Matti Bye Ensemble, Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and Alloy Orchestra, and Dennis James, Giovanni Spinelli, Stephen Horne, and Donald Sosin. Following the panel, a number of the musicians will be upstairs on the Castro mezzanine were they will be meeting with the public and signing copies of their CDs and DVDs, which will be for sale. More information about this special program can be found here. "Variations on a Theme" takes place on Saturday, July 16th at 12 noon.

Orphan films featured at festival

2011-07-02T16:18:00.000-07:00

Every other year an international conference takes place, where scholars, archivists, curators, and media artists devoted to saving, screening, and studying neglected moving images meet to discuss and share information. Their focus is often orphan films.

Narrowly defined, an “orphan” is a motion picture abandoned by its owner or caretaker. More generally, the term refers to all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream: public domain materials, home movies, outtakes, unreleased films, industrial and educational movies, independent documentaries, ethnographic films, newsreels, censored material, underground works, experimental pieces, silent-era productions, stock footage, found footage, medical films, kinescopes, small- and unusual-gauge films, amateur productions, surveillance footage, test reels, government films, advertisements, sponsored films, student works, and sundry other ephemeral pieces of celluloid (or paper or glass or tape or . . . ).

The Orphan Film Symposium’s Dan Streible has selected some fascinating orphan footage that the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will be screening before selected programs throughout this year's event. Newsreels, fragments of lost silent films, you never know what you'll see - and chances are, you won't have seen it before!

Film Preservation Fridays #6: Access to Archival Moving Images

2011-07-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

Part 1: Modes of Access

16mm flatbed

If they are doing their job correctly, film archives should actively attempt to make their holdings available to the public. The following activities broadly suggest existing modes of access to archival collections:

Theatrical Exhibition
Research Visits to the Archive
Access to Analog or Digital Video Surrogates

It is both likely and desirable that new paradigms of access will evolve to enhance or even supplant current methods, but that is another discussion. For now, I’d like to briefly address each of the above categories.

Theatrical Exhibition

From last week’s interview with Kyle Westphal, we have a sense of what is involved when an archive is committed to maintaining an in-house cinema for exhibition purposes. This has been the traditional interface between film archives and the public, along with print loans to other archives, repertory theatres and cinephilic bodies such as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Here at the George Eastman House, the Motion Picture Department maintains an incomplete listing of titles, rates and compliance procedures for borrowing prints. Reciprocal arrangements exist with other institutional members of The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) to keep the costs for all parties at a minimum. Interested exhibitors can pursue specific titles directly with the Film Loan Coordinator if they are able to meet the guidelines established around archival projection practices. Archival wisdom, at the Eastman House and elsewhere, advises the only titles which circulate are those which have been preserved, or which exist in multiple copies should something catastrophic occur during projection. “Archival elements” such as master copies are generally not projected or loaned because they will serve as the foundations for future preservation work.

Researcher Visits to the Archive

For users with some basic film handling skills, specific research goals and legitimate credentials (all of which can be controversial notions in themselves), other options have historically existed. Because in-person visits require an intermediary within the archive to act as a contact person, and possibly a technical mentor, such opportunities are not widely understood. In fact, this form of access can be so non-intuitive that Paolo Cherci Usai devoted an entire chapter in Silent Cinema: An Introduction to demystifying it, so that potential researchers could approach an archive in possession of reasonable expectations and courtesies (see Silent Cinema, Chapter Six: Histoire de Détective). The George Eastman House explains various tiers of research options here, and inquiries can be directed towards Jared Case, Head of Cataloguing and Access at filmstudycenter@geh.org.

People are occasionally surprised to encounter fees for the usage of 16 and 35 mm flatbed viewing devices and screening facilities, or to learn that they must give ample notice prior to arranging a visit. What they may not realize is that the associated fees will not completely offset the costs and the demands assumed by an archive, or that films need a significant amount of time to acclimatize after being in cold storage. Nevertheless, archives do have a responsibility towards the public and lack of resources should not be a convenient excuse for a denial of services.

Home Movie of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Ultimately, working directly with a film as opposed to a video surrogate can provide additional aesthetic and technical context. One can see the splices, perforations and the presence of identifying data on the margins of the image, all of which is absent when viewed over a monitor as a video signal (of course an accompanying catalog record or embedded metadata could provide this information as well, but the film handling experience would be absent). The following example shows at least three things that could not be easily determined from a video surrogate: 1) the gauge (16mm) 2) reversal stock (indicated by black borders) 3) shot on a Bell and Howell Filmo 70-D (indicated by the triangular proprietary marking on the border of the film).

Access to Analog or Digital Video Surrogates

As we all know, depending upon user needs, it not always possible or even desirable to see films theatrically or to contact archives to view materials on a flatbed. Video transfers of films provide a number of enhanced access possibilities: they can be sent to out of town researchers for a nominal charge, they can be sold in popular consumer formats such as DVD and Blu-Ray, they can be loaned out at local libraries, they can be mounted online through various portals, and they can be exhibited in curated museum environments – just to name a few obvious options.

Not every film in a given archive has the luxury of existing simultaneously as a video. Pre-existing video “access copies” may be available for recent preservations or for heavily requested titles, but in other cases they need to be created on demand. Film is transferred to a video signal with the assistance of a telecine or data scanner. Depending upon the device and intended uses, the output can be standard or high definition video.

Archival institutions are becoming increasingly active creating infrastructure around putting content online. The George Eastman House has recently partnered with Kodak on a project known as Watch Rare Films from Our Vaults. This project showcases a number of recent preservations and restorations, including material done as student fellowship projects. Silent film fans will not be disappointed with the range of materials available, and the good news is that much more is to come. Filmographic and preservation details are loaded into a window after an individual title is selected for viewing. There are many similar initiatives worth mentioning, but for reasons of time and space I will stick to several relevant examples. The Library of Congress American Memory Project includes a wide range of moving image material including an entire collection around early San Francisco. The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s Panorama of Beach and Cliff House is a personal favorite. The UCLA Film and Television Archive has a page presenting examples of Preserved Silent Animation that is well worth a look. And finally, this will not be the first or last time that I mention the National Film Preservation Foundation, but for anybody not familiar with their online Screening Room, I suggest spending a bit of time there.

From Panorama of Beach and Cliff House

Part 2: Obstacles to Access

Generally speaking, archives (including manuscript based archives) can do much more to improve access to their holdings. Succeeding on these terms is intrinsic to the ethical underpinnings of the profession. It is also essential to the survival of archives at a time when funding has been radically curtailed, many jobs have been lost and the very role of archives and other cultural institutions has been repeatedly challenged in public discourse.

So, what barriers exist around providing access to archival holdings? Historically speaking, copyright issues have been extremely problematic. While an archive may have physical ownership of a given film, it may not enjoy the completely separate rights around disseminating or exhibiting that film. Real and imagined caution around this issue has impeded access in a number of significant ways, but it is not the final word: archivists continue to work within the constraints of copyright to provide access to a wide range of motion pictures. The Orphan Films movement is just one example of a creative response to copyright. Archives can also focus on creating access around the many materials which are in the public domain or which they do clearly hold the rights to.

Occasionally, providing access to archival materials can threaten the preservation of these very same materials. Objects may be so fragile that they can only be handled one last time, and ideally this would be for reformatting or transfer purposes. The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) addresses this dilemma in its code of ethics, charging custodians to: “balance the priority of protecting the physical integrity of objects/artifacts with facilitating safe and non-discriminatory access to them.” Often, and perhaps usually, preservation and access are complementary goals rather than competing ones. The master copy of film that is preserved (film to film) and simultaneously digitized for access purposes will receive far more attention (and far less handling) than a film that remains in a vault unpreserved.

Other obstacles exist, such as the nature of archival materials and their previously mentioned tendency to require a mediated experience with a reference archivist or other contact person. Institutional inertia can also negatively impact the potential user community - it certainly has in the past - but to be fair to archives, what is often perceived as complacency has more to do with lack of funding and staff. Making materials accessible requires establishing intellectual and physical control over those objects and collections. This is achieved though cataloging, and/or arranging and describing the materials, all of which takes significant time and staff resources. But it is time well spent: without accurate and informed description, the materials become difficult to retrieve and access.

I asked Jared Case, Head of Cataloging and Access at the George Eastman House the following question: “What work goes into creating a detailed catalog record, and how does cataloguing enhance the value of a film or archival document?” He replied:

Catalog record for Nitrate Print of Dudley Murphy's Danse Macabre

“A good catalog should reflect the organization it’s designed for, so fields will change depending on how the catalog is to be used. But the ultimate goal is to identify, select and locate the item you need. For us, a minimum amount of information is location (where to find the object), a unique identifying code, and a title, even if we have to give it one. Then we go from there, adding what we know about its physical aspects, filmographic information, content and condition.”

I hope that this entry has helped people to understand access issues at film archives a bit better. Jared Case answered a number of questions about cataloguing and explained Eastman House procedure and should be heartily thanked. Also appreciated is Maria Sharifutinova of the Selznick School who shared her picture of a flatbed machine in operation. And if you have managed to made it this far, I would like to extend a special thank you to anybody reading!

Next week we will be joined by several special guests to talk about the New Zealand Project.

Shhhhh! Silents in the Library

2011-06-30T22:34:00.000-07:00

Last week, the San Francisco Public Library (located at 100 Larkin St. in SF) opened a series of exhibits which celebrate the silent film era. And what's more, one of the exhibits celebrates the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. All of the exhibit run through August 28th. Here is some information about the exhibits from the SFPL website.

Shhhhh! Silents in the Library

Explore the silent film era through displays of rare books, ephemera and photographs. The Silent Screen in the City looks at the Bay Area’s role in silent film production, while Downtown Movie Palaces of the 1920s evokes a visit to San Francisco's lost theater landmarks. Reading the Stars showcases vintage books about the movies published during the era. Included is a nod to The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, one of the world’s largest silent film festivals, now in its sixteenth year.

Reading the Stars: The Silent Era

Just like today, the movie going public of the Teens and Twenties had an insatiable appetite for reading material about their favorite actors and films. Reading the Stars looks at some of the books published about the movies during the silent film era, including vintage biographies, pictorials, how-to titles and even novels, poetry and self-help works written by some of the biggest names in Hollywood. (Read more at City Brights.) Also, a guided tour of the exhibit will take place on Sunday, August 7 at 1 pm. Main Library, Steve Silver Room – 4th floor (curator –Thomas Gladysz)

The Silent Screen in the City

From the earliest days of movies, San Francisco was a star attraction and attracted stars. From the Golden Gate Park to Pacific Heights and Chinatown, the city served as the backdrop for hundreds of silent films drawing famous stars like Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Lon Chaney and Buster Keaton. The Silent Screen in the City explores these actors and some of the scenes, studios and scandals that occurred in San Francisco and nearby towns such as San Mateo, San Rafael and Niles. Main Library – 4th floor (curator – Rory J. O’Connor)

Downtown Movie Palaces of the 1920s

Follow the crowds! Follow the stars! Experience the lost landmarks of San Francisco's splendorous theaters built for and devoted to motion pictures, where a program entailed music, vaudeville, news views, and the feature silent photoplay (film) with live organ accompaniment. This mini-exhibit features portraits of silent film stars and ephemera documenting such theaters as the Lowes Warfield, Pantages Theatre and Granada. Main Library, San Francisco History Center – 6th floor

San Francisco Silent Film Festival

"Shhhhh! Silents in the Library" coincides with the 16th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which takes place July 14-17 at the Castro Theater. A presentation of images and past posters from the Festival are also on display at the SFPL outside the Steve Silver room.

And that's not all . . . .

Recently, the San Francisco Public Library acquired a set of programs from the Festival's first 15 years. The plan, according to librarian Gretchen Good, is to have the programs bound in book form. This unique volume will then be added to library's cataloged holdings, as well as to WorldCat, the online catalog of library holdings from around the world. As a bound volume, the SFSFF programs will prove valuable to scholars and film buffs alike, as each program contains extensive film notes as well as images.

Marlene Dietrich: The Woman Men Yearn For

2011-06-26T23:30:00.000-07:00

Marlene Dietrich is well known for her sound films, especially her collaborations with the director Joseph von Sternberg. Films such as The Blue Angel (1930), Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil is a Woman (1935) are well known and not infrequently shown or screened. Each is also available on DVD.

What's little known and seldom seen are Dietrich's silent films. On Saturday, July 16th, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will screen one of the actress' best early works, The Woman Men Yearn For (1929). This German silent, directed by Kurt Bernhard and originally titled Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt, stars Dietrich, Fritz Kortner, Frida Richard, and Oskar Sima.

As the Festival film notes suggest, Dietrich's performance in The Woman Men Yearn For prefigures her Sternberg directed "dances of passion and power."

"Without question, her charisma is in full flower, suggesting that she brought rather more to Sternberg than is usually acknowledged. Dietrich works her trademark stillness, economy and intensity, with all the centrality of a star, and from her striking entrance, she is photographed like a star, yet Bernhardt’s silent film was forgotten in the rush to talkies and the excitement of The Blue Angel, and Marlene herself was content to forget it."

The Silent Film Festival screening on July 16th is a rare opportunity to see a great actress coming into her own.

Though The Woman Men Yearn For marks Dietrich's first appearance at the Silent Film Festival, not so for the actress' co-star, the notable Fritz Kortner. He last graced the Festival screen in 2006, as Louise Brooks' co-star in another German production from 1929, Pandora's Box. Interestingly, The Woman Men Yearn For is based on a book by Max Brod, who is best known today for his friendship with Franz Kafka, and for having saving Kafka's manuscripts against the writer's wishes after Kafka's death. Brod's book was adapted for the screen by Ladislaus Vajda, who had also penned the scenario for Pandora's Box.

Want to learn more about Marlene Dietrich and her films? Be sure and check out the informative and in-depth Dietrich website at www.marlenedietrich.org Well worth subscribing to is their free email newsletter.

Film Preservation Fridays #5: Interview with Kyle Westphal, Chief Projectionist of the Dryden Theatre

2011-06-24T06:12:00.000-07:00

The Dryden from the Balcony

The Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House has been screening classic and contemporary films to audiences since 1951. It is the first - but not the only - line of access to the Motion Picture Department’s many completed preservations, restorations and other film holdings. In addition to fulfilling this function, Dryden programming efforts are consistent with classic, repertory cinema mode in which many hard to see prints are secured from outside parties for individual screenings and for incorporation into various curated themes and retrospectives.

As an archival facility, the Dryden adheres to a complex battery of film handling and projection practices designed to prolong the lifespan of prints and to ensure that films are seen in the most authentic conditions possible. Presentation, including matters of aspect ratio, musical accompaniment and projection speed, is approached with scrupulous attention to detail. The Dryden is also distinguished by its ability to handle nitrate screenings: the projection booth is one of just a handful of cinemas in the world equipped to show this inflammable material.

These issues and many others will be addressed below in an interview with the Dryden Theatre’s Chief Projectionist (and 2009 San Francisco Silent Film Preservation Fellow) Kyle Westphal.

1. Could you please begin by describing some of your cinematic interests and summarizing how you came to be professionally engaged in film preservation?

"Sure. I watched a lot of films in high school, but it wasn't until college that I began to understand how there was this whole infrastructure that dictated what I could and couldn't see. I did a number of jobs at my college film society, Doc Films at the University of Chicago, most importantly programming and projection. This was where I learned about finding 35mm prints, getting them to the theater, negotiating terms with distributors, working with archives, that kind of stuff. I wanted it all on screen. And ultimately, that meant going to the Selznick School, to get a sense of what was happening on the other side, to learn how preservation, collections management, lab practices, copyright, etc. impact what we sometimes blandly call 'access.'

I like all kinds of things. At one point, as a pro forma statement, I described my interests as 'avant-garde cinema, early talkies, and the history of non-theatrical distribution and exhibition.' Which is true enough, but it's not meant as a slight to silents or westerns or Japanese cinema or Frank Borzage. I love all those, too. I try to keep up with new releases--I was very impressed with Meek's Cutoff and The Strange Case of Angelica.

2. What are your responsibilities as Chief Projectionist of the Dryden Theatre?

My primary responsibility is assuring that we have something on screen six nights a week. This means making sure that 35mm prints are shipped to the theater on time when we're borrowing prints from outside sources (studios, indie distributors, collectors, other archives) or that they're pulled from the vault with plenty of time to acclimate to room temperature when it's a film from our collection. Once the print is in hand, I inspect every reel, making notes that help the projectionist to get a general sense of the condition and what to expect from the print. I repair perforation damage, remake bad splices, check the change-over cues--stuff like that. When it's a print from our own collection, I also record things like color fading, print generation, etc. when it can enrich our cataloging. I project most of the screenings myself on our Kinoton FP 38 E dual 35mm/16mm machines. That's the fun part. But I also have the invaluable assistance of three part-time projectionists--Steve Hryvniak, Darryl G. Jones, and Charlie Rance.

I also help our programmer Lori Donnelly in plugging holes on the calendar now and then. This summer we're doing a series about silent pioneer Maurice Tourneur and his son Jacques, cheekily called 'Deux Tourneurs' in the copy. We're showing five of Maurice's silents, including Trilby, a remarkably controlled 1915 effort that Eastman House has restored from a 28mm copy.

3. Many blog readers are knowledgeable around the fact that camera speed was not standardized in silent filmmaking. In the absence of documentation around a given silent film, how do you determine the appropriate projector speed for exhibition?

Aspect Ratios of Dryden Screenings

Documentation does exist, in some cases, in the form of cue sheets for musical accompaniment, which serves as the basis for much of the information in Kevin Brownlow's now-classic article on silent projection speeds. Even so, the confounding and exciting thing about silent cinema generally is that published figures rarely tell the whole story. As Brownlow explains, projection speed would often vary from one theater to another, even from one show to another at the same theater. To claim that any silent film has an official speed is a weary simulacrum of an order that we wish to impose on the past. Today projection speed--and projection generally--is standardized in a manner that silent era exhibition practice was not. A late show might have been run faster than advisable so that the theater staff could get home at a reasonable hour. Then as now, though, exhibitors wanted to find ways to hold as many shows as possible in a given workday, and pushing the projectionist to crank the show faster was certainly a very effective way of doing that. This was a recognized factor in the era--Griffith even remarked that the projectionist was effectively responsible for 're-directing' his photoplay, a mantel of responsibility and respect unimaginable today when most projection is done by poorly trained and poorly compensated box office staff.

When we run a silent film today, we're obviously recreating an experience that can never be fully recreated. We try to make things look natural and comprehensible to us--which may well mean projecting things slower than audiences at the time were accustomed to, but we can only get so far in pretending that we understand the immediate impulses and instincts of filmgoers a century ago. Before a show, I'll run a reel and try to find a speed that looks right to me. If Philip Carli is accompanying the film, I'll also get his input, which is invaluable. He and I both have certain baseline expectations about projection speed based on the country, the studio, the year of the film's release--they're imperfect parameters, but we start with those and then fine tune the speed as screen action directs us. As a musician, Phillip has a different sense of tempo than I do and he usually prefers slightly on the fast side. Many silents can look reasonably correct give or take a frame-per-second in either direction--a good accompanist can find an internal rhythm in the film and translate it musically in a way that makes the motion look natural.

I should also note that we're in a very privileged place, compared to few decades ago. Fifty years ago, it was nearly impossible to find a modern 35mm projector with variable speed capability. Archivists of that generation were faced with a choice: preserve films as they found them, knowing full well that this would result in some absurdly violent motion when projected at 24 fps, or utilize an optical printing trick called step-printing, where an odd frame would be printed twice. It did manage to slow the action to a reasonable speed, but in a herky-jerky way. It was a real bind--you wanted to present old films to a skeptical public that already harbored a considerable prejudice against them but the only two ways to do it were different sides of the same lie: silent films were either ridiculously fast and goofy, or they had this unnatural, unclean line of motion. Today it's standard for a cinematheque to have 35mm equipment that can handle assorted speeds. The only problem is that some safety preservations from now-vanished nitrate materials incorporate step printing and it's built into the negative--so we're left with prints with loud traces of a mediocre, if historically understandable, work-around that today's equipment renders unnecessary. On the Kinotons, I can run them down to 11 fps or so and all the way up to 32 fps, but we get few requests for that!

4. What sort of work and precautions go into a nitrate screening?

Threaded Century Projector with Magazine Open

Nitrate screenings are a funny thing. When nitrate was the standard exhibition medium, there were all sorts of regulations around it, right down to toilets in the booth so that no projectionist would ever have an excuse for leaving the machines unattended. There aren't a lot of venues lining up to show nitrate today, so there's no strict regulatory regime. Who's going to step up standards when they'd apply to five or six venues around the country? When we say that Dryden is a nitrate-capable venue, that means that we've made our best attempt to screen this material in a responsible and safe manner, based upon components of contemporary regulations. We run our films in 1000 foot reels, from Century C projectors that have enclosed magazines and heavy-duty fire rollers. We pump distilled water and coolant in from a barrel in the booth, which gives us water-cooled gates. In the event of a fire, all the port windows would automatically be covered with sheets of metal suspended from the ceiling of the booth, to protect the audience.

Obviously, when I'm inspecting a nitrate print, I'm extra cautious, checking every splice with more care and trepidation than I might usually apply. If the film breaks during a nitrate screening, it's really consequential, after all. (Even a small nitrate fire, one that's relatively isolated--say, a foot or two of film quickly snipped away from the roll--could still be enormously significant if it sets off the booth's sprinkler system and douses all of the projection equipment!) Generally, though, a nitrate print has to be in very good shape for us to even consider putting it on screen. Most of our nitrate collection is actually pre-print (i.e., negatives, fine grains, soundtrack elements), so it wouldn't be projection material anyway unless you had a funny idea about what you wanted to see on screen. If it is a projection print, we have to have preserved it already (or know that another institution has preserved it) to even consider projecting it--the danger of loss is just too great. So we've narrowed the pie a bit more.

What about silent prints? We're talking, often, about something that's positive-cut--that is, the negative was printed in tinting order and the print itself was re-assembled to continuity after the tinting was complete. Each and every intertitle was spliced into the print. It was a very cumbersome and labor-intensive way of creating release prints, though it made sense given the elements involved. Anyway, the point is that a bonafide silent nitrate print might have dozens, hundreds of splices in it, not because of damage but as a matter of design. That print is shrunken, the splices are buckling, it's a delicate artifact. I could screen that and have a heart attack every time a splice goes through.

Now, for all the above, we should still screen nitrate--from time to time. We have to have some idea of what these things looked like, without the mediation of modern lab work and modern print stocks. That said, how close are we really getting? If we're showing nitrate through a xenon lamphouse, as the Dryden does, we're only getting at half the experience. (All nitrate was exhibited with carbon arc illumination.) Are we using original lenses, with all the particular optical characteristics they possessed, for good and for ill? Everything is an approximation, to different degrees.

Threaded Century Projector ready to project

5. Please outline some of the fundamental aesthetic and technical differences between archival projection and contemporary platter-style film projection?

Does the latter activity constitute a threat to the health of film prints, and if so, should this prevent archives from engaging in loans to "platter houses"?

This is an academic question. From the time that feature films dominated the market in mid-teens until the late '60s or so, pretty much all film exhibition in America was done on a change-over system--two projectors, each one running a ten-minute, later twenty-minute, reel of 35mm film. Towards the end of one reel, changeover cues pop up in the top right corner of the screen ('cigarette burns,' as per Fight Club) and that signals the projectionist to start the other projector. If the projectionist is doing a good job, the switch is invisible to the audience. Often it is--people go to the movies their whole lives and never notice the cues until they've been pointed out to them.

This change-over system was very labor intensive--you had to have an operator threading each reel and standing by the projector ready to make the switch. When you're working with ten minute reels--threading them, rewinding them for the next show, waiting for the change-over--the feature goes by quickly. It was a system necessitated by carbon arc illumination, which could not be sustained for the duration of a feature. So, in addition to all of the above, the projectionist would also have to check and see how the carbon rods were burning, whether the rod was burning evenly, whether the rod needed to be replaced before the next reel started. Projection was a pretty complicated and skilled trade! And the exhibitors went along with it and paid projectionists very respectable union wages, because no one had a better system.

Then xenon lamps come along--it's a bulb and you replace it every 900 hours of operation or so. You can easily run a whole feature without worrying about the light source. Something clicks--hey, you could just splice each reel together and run it continuously from a horizontal platter on one projector, no change-over. It runs back onto itself, eliminating the need to rewind. The projectionist threads it up once at the beginning of the show, starts the movie, and then he just can go out and smoke a cigarette (or double as a ticket-taker, soda jerk, usher, etc.). This feat of automation leads directly to the twin houses, the triplex, eventually the multiplex. If the projectionist just threads it up at the start and then leaves, you could be running another film in the theater next door--just be sure to stagger the start times a bit so that the projectionist can start one film and then the next. It's thoroughly scalable--it works just as well with twelve screens as with two, no additional staff required. So let's say I'm being paid (something like minimum wage) to run twelve movies at once, all by myself. Another way you could say that is that I'm being paid to not watch eleven of them. I can't be at every screen at once--I can't monitor focus, sound quality, framing, all this important stuff. So the exhibition standard declines--it's not the projectionist's fault, it's management's.

Which is all background. Essentially, most film archives, including the George Eastman House, have a strict policy that prints on loan must be screened on traditional, two-projector, change-over equipment. There are good reasons for such policies--namely that it forces the projectionist to actually be there during the screening and maintain the integrity of the print by not cutting and re-splicing it at heads and tails of every reel. (Too, there's the fact, stated less often than the above but equally important, that platter systems generally have a much more complicated and circuitous threading pattern than the fairly linear change-over arrangements, which would result in more stress on the film as it twists and turns it way from the platter to the projector and back again.) All that said, in some ways, platter projection extends the life of a print; a film opens at a multiplex and it stays there for weeks. It screens dozens of times, but because it's all built up, there's less handling involved, less wear and tear and random damage in that each reel isn't rewound and threaded over and over every day. It's a perfectly logical way to make the economics of a multiplex work. But that doesn't mean that it's appropriate for an archival film where only three prints exist, rather than three-thousand.

6. Is digital projection a threat or an opportunity … or is it both of the above, depending upon the given institutional culture and values?

View of Kinoton threaded with 35mm film, looking out Port Window

Well, right now digital projection doesn't have very much to offer repertory cinemas or festivals like this one. There's a sense in which the implementation of DCI-compliant equipment is a very positive development--hitherto, digital projection in a theatrical setting meant using consumer products (i.e., DVDs and Blu-rays) or tape formats that were developed with production needs in mind (Digibeta, HDCam, etc.). We weren't using formats expressly designed for cinema exhibition. Now the idea is that theaters will receive hard drives with DCP (Digital Cinema Package) files that can only be played back through approved, calibrated digital projection equipment. It's not 35mm, in a number of nontrivial ways, but it's a step in the right direction. But DCP is, at present, used almost exclusively for new releases. The studios--as well as the archives--simply aren't distributing their libraries through DCP in any significant way. (Sony has been the most prominent, but we're still talking about a handful of titles.) It would mean not only digitizing all these old films (which there's some incentive to do anyway), but also encoding them as DCP files and integrating them into a digital distribution infrastructure. And right now repertory houses just haven't adopted DCP in a major way and it's not worth it for anyone to do that work--yet. Anyone who programs a robust and wide-ranging venue still needs 35mm--there are still so many obscure films available on 35mm that no one is rushing to make available digitally. And that's to say nothing of the aesthetic and material value of 35mm film.

At the same time, though, the equilibrium is temporary. If digital projection totally replaces film projection in first-run theaters, then a major problem arises. Would any company see enough profit in making raw print stock to please a handful of stubborn archives? (Jonas Mekas, by the way, advocates that each country set up its own film laboratory, to assure the continued production and processing of film as a matter of cultural heritage.) Once the economy of scale disappears, though, everything could change. How much is a print worth when a replacement literally cannot be made? How much do you insure that for? Who would you trust to project or ship it? It's a question that no one can answer quite yet.

One final thought on digital projection: not discussed so much, but a major component of this is the elimination of the projectionist altogether, which is already a reality in many of the newest venues. The digital machines can literally be run remotely, whether from the floor manager's office or elsewhere. In giving up film, we're giving up our autonomy and a sense that our labor is worth anything. If I want to thread up a film and run it at 3:30 in the morning, I can do that. With digital, that isn't so clear--the content provider can dictate when the program is run, how many times, under what circumstances. It brings cinema under the heel of proprietary, heavily-managed technology that is, in a serious sense, no longer ours. It's the last stop on the line that started with the incredible latitude and variance that characterized the silent era, through to the standardization wrought by sound, down to the devaluation embodied by platters. It's something we should be very conscious of.

7. What role do you see exhibition playing around the practice of film preservation?

Easy one: there's absolutely no reason to do preservation if it's not being exhibited. None. It would be an enormous waste of resources--human, monetary, cultural.

The challenge, though, is finding an appropriate way to disseminate preserved films. You could just dump them on the Internet and hope that people find their way to them. But films should also be seen with an audience, on film. I'm not sure that the two arenas--preservation and exhibition--talk to each other enough. You look at the preservation work that the National Film Preservation Foundation has been supporting--avant-garde films, amateur films, industrial films, the profusion of films by itinerant cameraman H. Lee Waters--and it doesn't quite fit in a standard cinematheque line-up. We're used to director retrospectives, national cinema surveys, series devoted to a particular star or genre. We still have a long way to go in making the full breadth and character of American cinema fit our standard models--if it doesn't explode them first."

I'd like to thank Kyle for his willingness to participate in this interview and Zuzana Zabkova for taking pictures of the Century projectors. Thank you everybody for reading.

Next week we will explore other means of access to archival holdings.

Preservation and the Festival

2011-06-19T10:06:00.000-07:00

Every July at the SF Silent Film Festival we celebrate both the films of the silent era and the people and organizations who discover, restore, and preserve them. It is because of their dedication and technical achievements that these films return to the glory of the big screen. This year, some of the top preservationists and archivists will share with us the stories and tricks of their trade.

For AMAZING TALES FROM THE ARCHIVES: ARCHIVIST AS DETECTIVE, celluloid sleuths from George Eastman House, UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Academy Film Archive illuminate the process of film identification. 2010 Silent Film Preservation Fellow Ken Fox will present on recreating titles for the recently rediscovered and restored Douglas Fairbanks film Mr. Fix-It. Musician Stephen Horne will accompany these presentations of cinematic discovery.

AMAZING TALES FROM THE ARCHIVES: KEVIN BROWNLOW ON 50 YEARS OF RESTORATION brings the esteemed and passionate film historian back to the festival, now as an Academy Award Honoree as well. With copious illustrations, and accompanied by Stephen Horne on piano, Brownlow will talk about his love affair with silent film and his crusade to return it to its public. This free event is not to be missed.

This year we will present the 2011 Silent Film Festival Award to UCLA Film and Television Archive in recognition of their commitment and contribution to film preservation. Jan-Christopher Horak will be in attendance to accept the award before a screening of UCLA's beautifully restored print of Clarence Brown's THE GOOSE WOMAN, featuring an extraordinary performance by Louise Dresser.

The 2011 Silent Film Festival Preservation Fellow is now an SFSFF blogger! Sean Kilcoyne's has written an excellent piece on the restoration of HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Now in its fourth year, the 2011 fellowship provides a recent L. Jeffrey Selznick School graduate the opportunity to cultivate relationships with archives, work with archive material in a festival setting, and conduct preservation research. We're thrilled to be working with Sean, and to introduce him to you at the festival. Sean will be blogging every Friday, so be sure to check back each week!

For the complete festival lineup, and to buy your tickets and passes, visit our website. And look for more news and updates - about special programs, guests, and awards - in the weeks to come.

Film Preservation Fridays #4: Title and Intertitle Re-creation

2011-06-17T05:45:00.000-07:00

Several weeks back, my post on the restoration of William Desmond Taylor’s Huckleberry Finn discussed some of the issues involved with title and intertitle re-creation. Because this work is an essential component of silent film preservation practice, it is important that archivists utilize an aesthetic, technical and historic framework to produce results that are both gratifying and consistent with some sort of overall governing logic. This post will use two examples – one completed and one in process – to illustrate some of the variables that must be considered.

First, 2010 Silent Film Preservation Fellow Ken Fox will provide readers with a brief look at his work on the recently unearthed Douglas Fairbanks comedy Mr. Fix-It. Although Ken is sharing a taste of what he has been up to over the past year, he will be presenting in much greater depth at the 16^th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s Amazing Tales from the Archives program on Friday, July 15 at 11:00 am. I encourage everybody to attend both that event and the restoration premiere of the Mr. Fix-It on Saturday, July 16 at 6:30 pm.

The second project that will be discussed is title and intertitle re-creation for Tod Browning’s Drifting, a film made in 1923 for Universal Pictures Corporation. Zuzana Zabkova, a student at the L. Selznick School of Film Preservation has been working in this capacity under the supervision of George Eastman House Preservation Officer Anthony L’Abbate.

Because of his considerable experience in these matters, Anthony has also been providing guidance to Selznick School student Clara Sánchez-Dehesa around her effort to write a general style guideline for title and intertitle creation. While I am unable to do this project justice in today’s blog entry, I would describe it as an attempt to create institutional best practices by standardizing terminology, advocating procedure and furnishing illustrations to accompany each step of the re-creation process. Clara’s research surveyed a number of historic and contemporary sources to arrive at an understanding of specific details like the difference between a dialogue intertitle and an exposition intertitle, or why, for instance, the convention of white letters on a black background is the rule. By creating a visual “title library” to serve as a reference source, she furnishes details of aesthetic patterns around things like margins, typefaces and studio copyright logo to provide GEH and the Selznick School with the sort of framework that I allude to in the opening paragraph.

Part One: Mr. Fix- It:

Douglas Fairbanks and Friends

As the 2010 Silent Film Preservation Fellow, Ken Fox has spent the past year recreating titles for George Eastman House (GEH) restoration of Mr. Fix-It. His summary of the project reads below:

“For years the only known extant print of this delightful romantic comedy belonged to Roberto Pallme, a Neapolitan film lover who over the years amassed an important collection of 35mm nitrate and 9.5mm prints. In 1998, 14 years after Signor Pallme's death, the entire collection was donated to George Eastman House where it has since provided invaluable material for a number of recent preservations. Mr. Fix-It was originally transferred from the original 35mm nitrate stock to color safety film in 2001, but an important step was still necessary before the film could be considered "restored." Like many films in the Pallme Collection, this particular print of Mr. Fix-It was designed for distribution in

Italy

; not surprisingly, all the intertitles were in Italian. Complicating matters was the absence of any surviving script that might have indicated what the actual original English dialogue and text might have been. All Eastman House had to work with were the Italian translations that had been edited into the Pallme print. With a careful ear to the timbre of the era, Eastman House senior curator Paolo Cherchi Usai translated each title back into English, thus recreating the missing script. However, it would not be until nearly 10 years later that the funding -- always the biggest challenge when it comes to film preservation -- necessary to transform that translation into nearly 165 recreated intertitles and strike a new negative and print would become available. Thanks to generous contributions from William and Nancy Goessel and the Goessel Family Foundation, the plan for a restored English-language Mr. Fix-It

finally became a reality.”

Part Two: Drifting

Czech intertitle

Corresponding re-created intertitle

The George Eastman House recently began a restoration of Tod Browning’s Drifting, a 1923 crime drama starring Wallace Beery, Anna May Wong and Priscilla Dean. The roots of this project go back to 1991, when GEH received a tinted, nitrate Czech language print of Drifting in an exchange with Národní Filmový Archiv (the Czech National Film Archive). Although the restoration is still in its infancy, Zuzana Zabkova has re-created titles and intertitles for the film over the past several months. Her first step was to make a comprehensive inspection of the nitrate print. The poor physical condition of Drifting prevented its being viewed on any sort of sprocket driven equipment such as a flatbed or projector, so she wound through each of the seven reels of film on a manual rewind bench. She noted every scene change, photographed each Czech language title and intertitle, and recorded the entire tinting scheme of the film. She then created a text and image based document collating this information shot by shot.

Hoping to find a script that would have provided confirmation of the film’s order and original language, Zuzana contacted Universal Pictures and several other repositories without success. As a Czech speaker, Zuzana brought a certain degree of fluency to the translation of the text. Nevertheless, several additional language filters had to be balanced against one another: contemporary 1920s diction, the underworld slang of the characters, and a tendency towards a lyrical expression of the Chinese settings and characters.

Original Advertisement

Zuzana conducted extensive research into other Universal films of the genre and time period, looking at examples of the titles employed in those productions. She also consulted various newspapers and trades and located advertisements for screenings of the film. These provided a sense of the typefaces and layouts which characterized the initial presentation of Drifting to potential audiences. For instance, nearly every advertisement seemed to feature a diagonal display of the film’s title, so this feature was incorporated into the re-created main title card. Such advertisements would occassionally supply examples of the original intertitle text as well, as the example at the top of today's post illustrates.

The software used for title and intertitle re-creation at GEH is Adobe Photoshop. Ultimately, Zuzana chose the same typeface as Browning used in his 1920 film Outside the Law. One might wonder why she did not stick with the same typeface employed by the Czech language version. The simple answer is that it does not aesthetically correspond to the original domestic release of the film, but rather, it was a unique creation for the Czech print. Other nuances of presentation factored into graphic design. For instance, there are slight differences between the style employed by a dialogue card versus the style used in an exposition card. These subtleties are reflected in the completed title cards.

It is important that the desired screen time for each title and intertitle be calculated, so that the number of total frames can be determined before lab work begins. Ultimately, Zuzana created nearly 150 titles for Drifting, and when the rest of the film is restored, these titles will be sent to the preservation laboratory via File Transfer Protocol. The digital files will be transferred to film and integrated into a new, duplicate negative. Although the Eastman House strives to achieve a certain degree of historical authenticity, the status of the titles as re-creation is indicated by a logo noting the date and identity of the institution responsible for the work.

Anna Mae Wong in tinted Drifting scene

I would like to thank Ken Fox, Anthony L’Abbate, Zuzana Zabkova and Clara Sánchez-Dehesa for their assistance this week. And thank you readers.

Please tune in next week for an interview with the Dryden Theatre’s Chief Projectionist Kyle Westphal who will discuss archival projection and other subjects.

Special Guests at the Festival

2011-06-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

Each year the Silent Film Festival invites a contemporary film director whose work exemplifies a love for cinema history to pick a film from our program to present. Past years' directors have been Guy Maddin, Terry Zwigoff, and Pete Docter, who have graced the festival with wonderful presentations of their selections.

We are thrilled that Alexander Payne has accepted our invitation this year, taking time out from his busy schedule (Payne just wrapped his latest picture THE DESCENDANTS with George Clooney; and is in pre-production with a new feature, tentatively title FORK IN THE ROAD) to appear at the festival.

Payne, the director of CITIZEN RUTH, ELECTION, and SIDEWAYS, grew up watching silent films that he sent away for from the Blackhawk Films collection. Our invitation was just the excuse he needed to spend the weekend in San Francisco immersing himself in masterpieces from the silent era. Payne hasn't yet made the selection of the film he will present, but we will keep you posted!

The festival takes its motto very seriously: True art transcends time. Toward that goal, we put much thought into the musical accompaniment, and to the special guests who introduce select programs. We are pleased to welcome one of our biggest supporters, Leonard Maltin, back to the festival. Leonard will be on hand throughout the festival and onstage for several programs.

As a very special treat, musician Jonathan Richman, who has just translated the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini for City Lights Press, will introduce the rare 1915 Italian title IL FUOCO on Friday, July 15.

And, we welcome back last year's Silent Film Festival Awardee and Academy Award winner Kevin Brownlow, who will present our Sunday Amazing Tales from the Archives program: "Kevin Brownlow on 50 Years of Restoration."

More information about this year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival can be found at http://www.silentfilm.org/event-home.php

Film Preservation Fridays #3: Interview with George Eastman House Stills Archivist Nancy Kauffman

2011-06-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

The Stills, Poster and Paper Collection at the George Eastman House encompasses over three million objects related to the history of moving images, with items dating from the pre-cinema era to the present day. Although films are generally a moving image archives’ most celebrated holdings, the historical context of individual films is greatly enriched by having access to a variety of supporting documentation and objects. In fact, most of the collections are greatly instructive in their own right. Stills Archivist Nancy Kauffman will be joining us this week to talk about her work with the Stills, Poster and Paper Collection at the George Eastman House.

Phenakistoscope Disc

A non-exhaustive list of materials included in this collection includes the following “genres” of items:

· Photographs: publicity stills, celebrity portraits, negatives, keybook stills, transparencies

· Pre-Cinema Artifacts: Zoetrope strips, Praxinoscope discs, Thaumatrope discs, Phenakistoscope discs, magic lantern slides, Mutoscope reels

· Music: cue sheets, scores, sheet music, LP records, sound-on-disc, glass song slides

· Archival Collections of Provenance: Technicolor Notebooks, Louise Brooks Collection, James Sibley Watson, Jr. Collection, Warner Bros./First National Keybook Stills Collection, Paul Fejos Collection, Lothar Wolff Collection, Douglas Fairbanks Nitrate Stills Collection

· Advertising: Posters, lobby cards, press books, press kits, postcards, glass movie theatre slides, window cards

· Miscellaneous: George Eastman House department records, George Pratt oral histories, James Card’s recorded music for silent films (reel to reel tapes), scripts, scrapbooks, letters and personal correspondence, historic film cans

The interview follows below:

1. First, a little bit about you. What are your interests cinematically, and how did you get your start in this field?

My cinematic interests started out purely as a hobby, just a pastime. I was definitely drawn to the past at an early age. I grew up watching a lot of old TV shows after school, stuff from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and the Little Rascals shorts from the 1930’s. I was fascinated with that era of the Little Rascals shorts, as well as the Shirley Temple films that were shown on Sunday mornings – the contemporary ones that had to do with the pop culture of radio and vaudeville. A little later, in high school, I started watching a wider range of older films shown on television – our local PBS station in Phoenix had a great weekly film series – I started off with MGM musicals, then branched out from there to watch other films with the same actors I’d seen in those, making connections from one film to another. The circle just kept widening and covering more types of films. I’m still pretty firmly rooted in the classic Hollywood era of film production, for what I like to watch most. In terms of my formal education, I initially earned a B.A. in English at Arizona State University. I took a couple of general film classes – film history, rather than film theory – and one specific class that was exceptional: Silent Film. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, looking back from where I am now, I’d say it was probably the most influential part of my film education. It gave me a comprehensive introduction to the silent period, with particular attention to the historical and cultural factors that influenced the development of the film industry.

I’m amazed that I’ve been able to turn this hobby into a professional job. After working for about 13 years as a paralegal, I realized that I never really intended to be a paralegal – it was something I just fell into. And I decided I’d better make a change and do something I really wanted to do. I went back to school for a Masters in Library Science, and with my interest in the past, I was likewise drawn toward the archives track. While I was in library school, I found out about the Association of Moving Image Archivists, attended one of their conferences, and knew immediately that I had found my people! From there, I found out about the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House, and was accepted into that program right after I finished my MLS. It was a case of everything coming together at just the right time, in just the right order. And it couldn’t have happened any other way because none of these programs existed when I was fresh out of college in the late 1980’s.

Sunrise - Jumbo Window Card

I was hired at George Eastman House in the Motion Picture Department in the spring of 2006 as a Curatorial Assistant, mostly doing film inspections. About a year after that, I applied for the archivist position for the Stills, Posters and Paper Collections when it opened up, and here I am. What I really appreciate about the path I took to get here is how helpful my experience as a paralegal has been, as that job was all about organizing and inventorying voluminous amounts of documents for litigation cases – and being able to find things very quickly and efficiently for demanding attorneys! So I’m not intimidated by large collections here that need to be processed. I don’t have the additional trained hands at my disposal here for processing collections – it’s basically just me, with the help of volunteers and interns – but none of it seems insurmountable after being in that high-stress situation of working in the legal field. This job is a much relaxed version of what I used to do.

2. What are some of the characteristic activities in the workday of a Stills Archivist at the George Eastman House?

I typically give the highest priority to requests for access to the collections, whenever possible. This includes requests from people outside of the museum, as well as staff within the museum. I’m contacted by people all over the world – researchers, scholars, festival programmers, dvd producers, fans – mostly for images from films. But our paper collections get requested as well, such as music cue sheets for silent films and the papers of filmmakers.

I provide images to other staff within the museum that illustrate and support the activities of the Motion Picture Department – images used in the Dryden Theatre film calendar, on the website, in our publications telling about new acquisitions or about film prints being screened in other venues, and in the museum’s Annual Report. I also work directly with the students in the Selznick School, so there can be requests from the students to access the collections in connection with their coursework.

That’s me in “reaction mode.” Responding to such requests typically involves searching our database, pulling materials from the vault to review and select what best satisfies the request, and scanning the material, when appropriate. Once I get those requests under control and completed, then I can work on the processing of collections – new acquisitions as well as the backlog of collections that need more attention. “Processing” generally being inventorying, re-housing, and cataloging – or some combination of those. There’s often a fair amount of research I need to do about the collection or items, to best understand what I’m working with.

Other common things that might be happening in my day are just like anybody else’s – meetings, writing reports, reading and responding to emails – sometimes cleaning and vacuuming my office! I frequently give tours of the vault to visitors and prospective students, and I sometimes put out displays of collection materials for larger tours. I also provide a lot of support and input to others in the department working on exhibitions and writing grants.

3. Could you briefly describe a few of the most significant or interesting collections that you work with?

Rudolph Valentino, William S. Hart, and Douglas Fairbanks

I have a real attachment to the Douglas Fairbanks Nitrate Negative Stills Collection, and it’s one I wish more people knew about. Fairbanks’ son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., donated his father’s original still negatives to us back in the 1950’s – hundreds for each of his major films, and, although to a much lesser degree, stills from some of his earlier work, including scene stills, portraits, publicity shots showing visitors to his studio, shots of Pickfair, as well as set stills, costume, and other historical research.

We have a large collection of music cue sheets for silent films, in the Theodore Huff Collection. These cue sheets are useful not just for their continued use by today’s musicians accompanying silent film screenings, but they’re incredibly rich in information for film preservation work. In just a few pages, they tell us how many feet the film was when it was originally released, text of intertitles and descriptions of action give as cues to the accompanist (what he or she would be seeing on the screen), how long to expect to play a piece of music for a scene, and suggested sound effects for certain actions occurring on screen. This is a collection I would love to see digitized and made accessible online.

Show Girl in Hollywood Keybook Still

My favorite collection by far, given my taste for the classic Hollywood era, is the Warner Bros.-First National Keybook Stills Collection. This was Warner Bros.’ internal reference set of stills taken on all of their pre-1950 films. It’s presumably the most complete set of stills in existence for the Warner Bros films of that period (and also includes stills for First National films, which Warner Bros. bought in 1927). All the stills shot during the production of a film is included – scene stills, portraits, behind-the-scenes shots, theatre lobbies, publicity tours and other promotional events.

And although not a collection, our department records are what I love to get lost in! The correspondence files of the department, research done by James Card and George Pratt, film programming for the Dryden Theatre, special events like the first “George Awards” in 1955 and 1957, and the various ephemera collected into subject files – all these document our work as a film archive for more than 60 years. There’s a lot of history in there!

4. How does material in the Stills, Poster and Paper Collection support the preservation of actual films?

Our preservation staff typically looks to these collections for documentation we may already have on a particular film – anything that can help give them information about the film when it was made. Scripts, continuities, intertitle lists, stills, lobby cards, press books, theatre programs, and music cue sheets. All of these materials help give clues to how the film originally existed – how many reels, how many feet, the tinting and toning that was used, and what scenes were shot as stills. We’re pretty conservative in our restoration work in that we don’t just decide to tint a scene yellow because it’s daytime or blue because it’s night – we look for some kind of original documentation that actually shows that a scene was tinted yellow or blue or whatever in the release prints. We also check with other archives with similar materials – particularly for scripts and continuities – all toward the end of restoring a film with as much historic accuracy as possible. Stills and images from other materials from the collection are used frequently to illustrate preservation work that we’ve done, as well as to advertise screenings of preserved films at the Dryden Theatre and at venues all over the world.

5. What are some of the everyday preservation / conservation issues that objects in this collection face, and how do you prioritize those issues?

The objects in my vault are what I would call “mixed collections,” in terms of the materials and what they’re made of. The vault is separate from our film vaults, which are kept considerably colder. Anything that’s not film comes to me, and it’s a wide range of materials – paper, glass, metal, textiles, plastic, etc. I’m always looking at the big picture of the vault conditions, checking that the temperature and relative humidity stay as constant as possible, and just keeping my eyes open to any sudden or unusual changes in the vault conditions. No matter how prepared you are, there are still things beyond your control that can go wrong with a building’s mechanical systems. So, first and foremost, I keep watch over the vault conditions to identify any immediate or potential harm to the collections. Protecting what we have is the most important thing.

Cataloging materials in this collection can be challenging at times. There’s a specialized vocabulary that goes with motion picture materials that doesn’t get used to its full potential. A “still” is a photograph, but it has certain characteristics that make it completely different from an Ansel Adams print, with different access points that aren’t provided for in our cataloging system. I often feel like I’m trying to apply descriptive terms that really don’t get at the heart of what the still is, because the established terms come from the world of photography. The terms I want to use do exist – they were created by the industry that created motion pictures and these related materials – but they haven’t been incorporated into a typical museum’s cataloging system.

6. What sort of other challenges do you face in your work?

Teaching in the Selznick School! Seriously, we are an on-site school, which incorporates the everyday activities of the archive into the curriculum. So there are certain chunks of time – multiple days at a time – when I’m getting my work done, with students observing and participating, and trying to frame and explain everything in meaningful “teaching moments.” So there are a lot of times when I could get my work done much more quickly, without the students, but that’s not what we’re about here. It’s part of working in the Motion Picture Department, and we’re all committed to educating that future generation of archivists. Although it sometimes doesn’t seem like it while I’m living it, we do ultimately get more work done in the archive because we have students to help us, both in everyday activities and on larger projects that we haven’t been able to tackle ourselves. And taking the time to make things meaningful for the students makes a big difference – it’s the difference between telling them “do this for these reasons” rather than just “do this.”

Of course money is always a challenge, in any archive. So being able to make sound, responsible, yet frugal decisions about what you do with the collections and when is always at the forefront. Do you need to put every single item in mylar or individual sleeves? Absolutely not. Some things yes, some things no. Those costs for supplies add up quickly, so you have to be realistic about the scope of a project and spend the money you have as wisely as possible. You really have to do your homework and plan out exactly what you need. Just like in home improvement, the advice of “measure twice cut once” applies when figuring out your supplies – you don’t want to order the wrong size or quantity, especially if it’s a custom order. Yes, math is involved. You have to do be able to do math!

7. You received a million dollars exclusively for the Stills, Poster and Paper Collection. What sort of project(s) would you like to make happen?

More space in the vault and more work space, for starters. And of course more professional staff to process the collections. Those are the two things that are always in short supply in archives, and probably go without saying. But I said it. In terms of collections I would like to see money poured into, poster conservation would rank very high on the list. We have some amazing and beautiful posters, from the 1910’s and 1920’s, which are typically folded and crumbling and difficult to handle in any way without doing further damage to them.

Vault Photo Boxes

I would also love to see an improved technological infrastructure for getting collections online. That’s one of the first things people ask me, when they contact me about accessing the collections, if they can see online what stills we from a particular film. Nothing would make me happier than to say yes to that, but it’s still a ways off. Getting images of our collections out there for people to browse and explore will of course help increase interest and use of our collections. It is in the works, but definitely not happening overnight.

I would like to extend my gratitude to Nancy Kauffman for taking the time to do this interview. And thank you readers. Please check back next Friday for 2010 Silent Film Preservation Fellow Ken Fox on the subject of Mr. Fix - It.

From Mr. Fix - It Negative

Last call for authors for 2011 Festival

2011-06-04T15:19:00.000-07:00

The final pieces of the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival are being put into place.... We wanted to issue a "last call" for authors who might be interested in attending.

One of the longstanding traditions of the annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival is the book table and the accompanying author book signings which take place throughout the event. Over the years, the Festival has held book signings with many distinguished authors - with everyone from Arthur Lennig and William Drew to Emil Petaja, Mick LaSalle and Mark Vieira.

This year, the tradition continues.The Festival, which is mounting it's 16th annual event in July, would like to invite film historians, critics, biographers and others who write about film and who have authored a recent related book to participate in this year's Festival.

A handful of authors have already been booked for this Summer's event, which is set to take place July 14-17, at the historic Castro Theater in San Francisco. Among those already signed up are John Bengtson, Kevin Brownlow, Mary Mallory, Paolo Cherchi-Usai, Leonard Maltin, Karie Bible and others.

We think this year's Festival is going to be an event that no one who loves film and film books will want to miss. Additional information about the SFSFF can be found at http://www.silentfilm.org. Interested authors or their publishers should contact author coordinator Thomas Gladysz at silentfilmbuff {AT} gmail DOT com for details.

Film Preservation Friday #2: The Restoration of Huckleberry Finn

2011-06-03T05:16:00.000-07:00

Last year, with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation, the George Eastman House completed a restoration of William Desmond Taylor’s Huckleberry Finn, a Famous Players-Lasky / Paramount-Artcraft Picture from 1920.

The film will screen at 2pm on Friday, July 15, 2011, as part of the 16^th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival. As the 1000^th film preserved though the National Film Preservation Foundation, this special screening of Huckleberry Finn will be introduced by NFPF director Annette Melville, and it is not to be missed.

I would like to describe the restoration of Huckleberry Finn to blog readers, because the challenges and opportunities which accompanied this project are characteristic of many similar endeavors to return silent classics to the screen. Although critically and commercially popular at the time of release, this particular adaptation of the Mark Twain novel had been difficult to see for decades and was considered by many to be “lost”. Let me explain that word because it can be tricky. For numerous reasons, archives labored, with limited degrees of success, to make their holdings known to one another (and to the public at large) in the pre-internet age. Part of the reason that the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) evolved was to facilitate the sharing of information about film holdings by member archives (of course sharing the actual films was an even greater motivation). Therefore, many complete and incomplete motion pictures once thought “lost” have turned up in various archives or private collections over the years.

William Desmond Taylor’s Huckleberry Finn is one such film. A tinted, 35mm nitrate projection print with Danish language intertitles was repatriated from Denmark in the early 1960s. When the decomposition of the cellulose nitrate film stock advanced to the point that the film’s existence was threatened (circa 1980), the George Eastman House made a 35mm black and white duplicate negative on acetate stock, leaving the Danish titles untranslated. Although not an ideal solution, or a full restoration, this effort was congruous with archival practice during the era. With miniscule budgets, and extensive “preservation wish lists”, archives are constantly faced with the unpleasant task of having to prioritize preservation projects and negotiate their individual scales. Duplicating tinted and toned films without color on black and white negative was a quick and relatively cheap method of saving these films from the abyss. Most significantly, it bought time, creating a foundation that made it possible to do things “right” further down the road.

Dialogue supplied by lobby card: "By rights I'm a Duke!"

And happily, that is exactly what happened. When the National Film Preservation Foundation approved the restoration of Huckleberry Finn in 2006, the project was moved from the George Eastman House’s “preservation wish list” into the active work queue. With no continuity script to work from, it took staff approximately six months to complete a translation of the intertitles. Ulrich Ruedel, a student of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the time, made a preliminary translation from the Danish. Language was fine-tuned and made to conform to Twain’s vernacular by Ed Stratmann, Anthony L’Abbate, Nancy Kauffman and Dan Wagner, all archivists at the George Eastman House. Because the film tends towards faithfulness to Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, their efforts were aided by having recourse to the novel. In addition, the Stills, Poster and Paper Collection boasted a complete set of lobby cards, and some cards had the bit of dialogue which corresponded to that particular scene. As for the style and typeface of the titles, several reference points were used. Ultimately, another Paramount-Artcraft Picture served as the template: John S. Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, released immediately after Huckleberry Finn.

A “tinting record” was made from the decomposing nitrate print years ago. This document goes through the film scene by scene listing the color used for a given scene. Although GEH archivists were initially confused that the nighttime shots appeared pink, James Cozart, a colleague with the Library of Congress, explained that a particular shade of blue dye was known to fade in this manner. With the tinting record complete, and checked against individually numbered and named color filters used for the purpose of approximating tinting values, the 35mm black and white duplicate negative was sent to Colorlab in Rockville, Maryland. Here, original color schemes were restored to Huckleberry Finn through a process known as the Desmet method. This involves printing the black and white negative onto color print stock and then, before developing that film, making a second pass on the printer to “flash” the desired tint value onto the film. The results of this technique are highly convincing. The Desmet method provides the additional advantage of adding the color in the print stage; the preservation element – the negative – remains resistant to the sort of color fading which characterizes color negative film, and when new prints are required, the process can be repeated. There is much more that could, and should be said about Huckleberry Finn, but hopefully this posting gives a basic sense of the work that was accomplished in bringing this film to audiences and ensuring its long term preservation.

From a negative owned by Lewis Sargent

Next Friday blog readers will be treated to an interview with Nancy Kauffman of the George Eastman House’s Stills, Poster and Paper Collection. As a transition onto that topic, let me sign out with an example of something interesting from that collection, an excerpt (from a much longer interview) with Huckleberry Finn star Lewis Sargent, granted to George Eastman House Curator George Pratt in 1962:

“… They paid me $35 a week to make Huckleberry Finn. And incidentally, the picture, I was told, grossed three and a half million dollars. So when Paramount offered me this time $40 a week to do the picture, I said no, I wanted more money, a better salary. So I negotiated my own salary and I made them pay me $75 a week, which they did.”

Thanks for reading!

Film Preservation Fridays

2011-05-31T10:25:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody. My name is Sean Kilcoyne and I am the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s 2011 Silent Film Preservation Fellow. As many readers are undoubtedly aware, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has emerged as one of film preservation’s most distinguished supporters. Because archival work is ultimately justified by providing the public with access to our collective cultural heritage - cinematic and otherwise - archivists are especially fortunate to enjoy such a relationship. Since 2006, the Amazing Tales from the Archives program has provided film preservationists with an invaluable opportunity to share their work and to enhance public appreciation for film archives. Classic modes of providing access to archival films - screenings at festivals, making prints available to other venues through loan, creating home video versions of films - are all essential activities, but ultimately, nothing is more important than cultivating an informed and appreciative audience to sustain preservation activities now and in decades to come.

By partnering with The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation in offering the Silent Film Preservation Fellowship, the SFSFF has also provided the necessary opportunity and funding to enable recent graduates of The Selznick School to preserve several significant silent films. In 2008, the first year of the Silent Film Preservation Fellowship, Anne Smatla preserved Screen Snapshots (7th series). She was followed by Kyle Westphal in 2009, with McCall's Fashion News. Now, over the past year, Ken Fox has recreated the intertitles for the Douglas Fairbanks comedy Mr. Fix-It. Attendees of this year’s Festival will have the opportunity to see the world premier of the recently restored Mr. Fix-It on Saturday, July 16, at 6:30 pm.

As the 2011 Silent Film Preservation Fellow, one of my projects involves posting a regular blog every Friday between now and July 14, 2011, when the 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival officially begins. My entries will discuss some of the specific types of work that film archives do under the larger heading of preservation. I will also be focusing on the technical preservation backgrounds of several films in this year’s festival. If you are interested in learning more about these topics, please keep the SFSFF’s blog on your radar, and look for my posts every Friday between now and the 16^th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Thank you.

More on the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

2011-05-24T22:54:00.000-07:00

Here it is - the program announcement for the 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival! The eighteen programs coming to the Castro this July 14 - 17 feature beautiful new restorations, original commissioned scores, dispatches from the preservation front, masterpieces from the canon, and rarely screened gems. There's not one to be missed. Some highlights of this year's festival include:

What better way to begin than with the presentation of an amazing discovery: Upstream. For Opening Night, we celebrate the repatriation of this film to the U.S. after decades in New Zealand, and - most incredibly - the return of an early film from one of the great American directors, John Ford. This droll backstage comedy will play with another film from the New Zealand collection, Why Husbands Flirt, both accompanied by the Sosin Ensemble.

No matter how many times you may have seen Sunrise, this masterpiece is always a revelation. This July, we bring you F.W. Murnau's exquisite film in association with world-renowned silent film preservationist Paolo Cherchi Usai. Usai has worked with electric guitarist Giovanni Spinelli to create the exciting original score that Spinelli will perform in accompaniment.

Last year's "Variations on a Theme" panel set off hours of lively discussion and debate about approaches to silent film accompaniment. This summer's panel, moderated by Bay Area musician Jill Tracy and featuring all of the festival musicians, will continue and expand the conversation.

The Matti Bye Ensemble returns! In a collaboration between the Silent Film Festival and the Headlands Center for the Arts, the ensemble has been composing three original scores since their residency at the Headlands this spring. This summer, they will unveil their work in their accompaniment of The Blizzard, The Great White Silence, and closing night film He Who Gets Slapped.

And more, of course. The precision and quiet profundity of Yasujiro Ozu's work is in full form for I Was Born, But..., accompanied by Stephen Horne. Marlene Dietrich is entirely the Dietrich we know and love in The Woman Men Yearn For, with accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. An agitprop film condemned for its artistry, Mikhail Kalatozov's The Nail in the Boot, accompanied by Stephen Horne, is a rarely seen film that truly deserves the big screen. And for the program Wild and Weird, Alloy Orchestra accompanies an eclectic mix of fantastical shorts.

Tickets and Passes are now on sale. Look for more news and updates - about special programs, guests, and awards - in the weeks to come.

Line-up for 16th annual Silent Film Festival announced

2011-05-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

The line-up of films for this summer's San Francisco Silent Film Festival has been announced! The event will take place July 14-17 at the historic Castro Theatre in San Francisco.

The 16th Annual SF Silent Film Festival features eighteen wonderful programs of new discoveries and restorations, with extraordinary live musical accompaniment by top musicians in the field, including Alloy Orchestra, Stephen Horne, Dennis James, the Matti Bye Ensemble, Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and Donald Sosin. The Festival begins with John Ford's recently found Upstream and concludes with Victor Seastron's He Who Gets Slapped.

Some of the many special guests already set to attend include Academy Award winner Kevin Brownlow, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Leonard Maltin, David Shepard and others. The schedule of films can be found here; there are also links to program notes, musician bios, images and more. Here is the schedule in short.

Thursday, July 14	7:00 pm	Upstream
Thursday, July 14	9:15 pm	Sunrise
Friday, July 15	11:00 am	Amazing Tales from the Archives I
	2:00 pm	Huckleberry Finn
	4:15 pm	I Was Born, But…
	7:00 pm	The Great White Silence
	9:30 pm	Il Fuoco
Saturday, July 16	10:00 am	Disney’s Laugh-O-Grams
	12:00 noon	Variations on a Theme
	2:00 pm	The Blizzard
	4:00 pm	The Goose Woman
	6:30 pm	Mr. Fix-It
	8:30 pm	The Woman Men Yearn For
Sunday, July 17	10:00 am	Amazing Tales from the Archives II
	12 noon	Shoes
	2:00 pm	Wild and Weird
	4:30 pm	The Nail in the Boot
	7:30 pm	He Who Gets Slapped

And, as in past years, there will also be a book table (featuring all the new releases and DVDs), author booksingings, special surprises, special guests, and more.Don't miss this year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Festival Passes Now on Sale

2011-05-04T22:49:00.000-07:00

FESTIVAL PASSES for the

16th SF SILENT FILM FESTIVAL (July 14-17)

ARE NOW ON SALE!

Special Early Bird Discounts Until May 20

Lon Chaney joins the circus in He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

Festival Passes at Specially Discounted General and Member Prices

Available Online For a Limited Time

General: $190 ($200 starting May 20)

Member: $165 ($175 starting May 20)

Buy yours on the Silent Film Festival website today!

Your Festival Pass admits you to all of this year's eighteen programs,

including the Opening and Closing Night Films.

At more than 15% savings, plus the extra discount,

it's by far the best and least expensive way to see every film at the festival!

Look for the full festival lineup on May 20, when individual tickets go on sale.

For more information and to purchase, visit the Festival Page on our website.

To become a member, please visit our Membership and Donation Page.

Call for authors for 2011 Festival

2011-04-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

One of the longstanding traditions of the annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival is the book table and the accompanying author signings which take place throughout the event. Over the years, the Festival has held book signings with many distinguished authors - with everyone from Sydney Chaplin (Charlie's son) and silent era screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas to such acclaimed film historians and biographers as Jeffrey Vance, Anthony Slide, Emily Lieder and Robert S. Birchard.

Recent Academy Award winner Kevin Brownlow, silent film star
Diana Serra Carey ("Baby Peggy"), acclaimed preservationist David
Shepard, and popular author Leonard Maltin at last year's San Francisco
Silent Film Festival. Each signed their books at the 2010 event.

This year, the tradition continues.The Festival, which is mounting it's 16th annual event in July, would like to invite film historians, critics, biographers and others who write about film and who have authored a recent book to participate in this year's Festival. Heck, we've even had a few novelists over the years - that is, novelists whose stories related to silent film, i.e. Glen David Gold and others.

For authors, the Festival is a great opportunity to meet readers and fans. For publishers, the SFSFF is a great way to gain attention and sales for your titles. All in all, it's a great showcase before thousands of people - all of them passionate film enthusiasts. Books Inc., a local independent bookstore, will be on hand once again to sell books over the course of the weekend.

A handful of authors have already been booked for this Summer's event, which is set to take place July 14-17, at the historic Castro Theater in San Francisco. We think this year's Festival is going to be an event that no one who loves film will want to miss.

Additional information about the SFSFF can be found at http://www.silentfilm.org. Interested authors or their publishers should contact author coordinator Thomas Gladysz at silentfilmbuff {AT} gmail DOT com for details.

Buster Keaton, aka Grandpa

2011-03-29T22:29:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, March 27th, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a profile of Melissa Talmadge Cox, the grandaughter of Buster Keaton and a past guest at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Cox, an artist and a landscape gardener, lives in Cloverdale, near Santa Rosa. Check out the profile at http://cloverdale.towns.pressdemocrat.com/2011/03/news/buster-keaton-aka-grandpa/