IOHTE: Brian Darr

First, a hearty thank you to the seventeen other participants in 2014's "I Only Have Two Eyes" survey of Frisco Bay repertory and revival screenings; please check the final update of the hub page for links to each of their exceptionally diverse entries. I don't believe any film was mentioned by more than three participants, but there are certain trends; I feel like film noir was represented more than ever this time around, in keeping with its status as the Bay Area's seeming favorite repertory film genre.

As for my own list. More than in other years, the bulk of it is made up of films I had little or no expectations for when I entered the cinema to see them. A good half of them were made by directors whose other work as director has eluded me so far, and I hold relatively few auteurist preconceptions about some of the other half's directors, either. I don't know why I cherished these surprises more than I did years-in-the-waiting screenings such as Don't Look Now at the Castro, other than to guess that expectations built up over too long a period of time can be impossible to fulfill; I did find Don't Look Now to be devastating and remarkable and if I'd seen it an earlier year I might well have placed it on my list even if the competition from other screenings was fiercer. But this year, I just feel more attached to the following screenings:

Never Open That Door (Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1952), Castro Theatre, January 30th, 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Eddie Muller.

Noir City's 2014 festival was my favorite edition ever of Frisco Bay's highest-profile annual exhibition of cinema heritage. The international theme wasn't just window-dressing but a meticulously-crafted argument against the jingoistic notion that film noir was in essence a Hollywood construction, and I couldn't resist attending, for the first time, every single film shown during those ten days, including the Japanese and British films I'd seen on the Castro screen before or the ones I'd recently watched to prepare my Keyframe Daily preview. Among the festival's high points was a final-day showing of Martin Scorsese's personal 35mm print of Josef Von Sternberg's Orientalist nightmare The Shanghai Gesture, but my very favorite experience of the 10-day chiaroscuro marathon was seeing the first of the three Argentine noirs presented for their first gringo audience in decades- if not ever. Never Open That Door is an elegant fusing of a pair of complimentary (one urban, one rural, etc.) Cornell Woolrich adaptations that simply oozed tenebrific dread and reminded me that John Alton spent several years working in Buenos Aires before making his mark on Hollywood; I don't know if this film's cinematographer Pablo Tabernero ever crossed paths with Alton, but I'm intrigued by his background; he appears to have been a German exile named Paul Weinschenk, who changed his name while making documentaries for the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War before heading to Argentina. I'm thrilled to learn via the Noir City Annual #7 that this film is being restored with English subtitles (this screening was soft-titled) and better yet, reunited with another Christensen/Tabernero Woolrich adaptation called If I Die Before I Wake, and that screening foreign-language films at Noir City is not a one-year oddity but a new tradition.

Rich Kids (Robert A. Young, 1979) Roxie Cinema, March 8th, 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Mike Keegan & Jesse Hawthorne Ficks.

San Francisco's longest-running cinema the Roxie has for various sensible (and regrettable) reasons moved away  from screening much 35mm and 16mm in the past year, putting its energy into creative approaches to running a digital-era cinematheque with programs like this upcoming one. But for five days, in anticipation of the local release of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Mission venue threw a 35mm feast of daily Wes Anderson features. This heartbreakingly hilarious and touching portrait of New York preteens from aristocratic but broken homes, an obvious touchstone for Anderson and/or frequent screenwriting partner Noah Baumbach, was nestled into the program one afternoon, and was a uniquely big-screen experience, as this reputed sole surviving widescreen print contains sequences cut from any panned-and-scanned video copies you might see floating around. Though directed by Young it was produced by Robert Altman when he was at the peak of his clout, and its approach to childhood feels more alien to modern filmmaking than Altman's own approach to environmental catastrophe that year (Quintet), and its showing helped set me on a path of Altman research and rediscovery that continued throughout much of the year and will pick back up again this month at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Passage à l'acte (Martin Arnold, 1993) New Nothing Cinema, March 26th, 2014. 16mm. Introduced by Mark Wilson.

As usual, a sizable portion of my viewing in 2014 was of the experimental film variety; screenings presented by familiar organizations like Oddball Films, the Exploratorium, the Pacific Film Archive and SF Cinematheque each had a distinct impact on my wider appreciation of cinema history. But there's nothing like a new venue, even if it's one that's been around for a while like New Nothing in SOMA. I'd heard about this space for years, but it wasn't until last March that I learned exactly where it was, what it might screen, and how I might find myself there. The occasion was the second in a year-long series of salons presented by Canyon Cinema filmmakers invited to draw from the collection of prints held by this stalwart film institution (which ended 2014 with some wonderful momentum). I attended far too few of these programs, but I'm so glad I made it out for my friend Mark Wilson's presentation of short investigations of human movement on screen. Martin Arnold in particular was a figure I'd long heard of but never seen for myself (like New Nothing) and to experience his optically-printed appropriation of an iconic Hollywood movie amidst great films by Ed Emshwiller and Jeanne Liotta felt like the ideal introduction to a master filmmaker's work. Although I do wonder how I would have reacted if I'd seen it when it was made in 1993, at a time I was immersing myself in industrial and other collage-oriented music but had yet to see my first Robert Mulligan film.

The Good Bad Man (Allan Dwan, 1916) Castro Theatre, May 31, 2014. 35mm with piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin. Introduced by Dr. Tracey Goessel.

As I noted in my preview piece on the 19th San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the SFSFF has been slowly but surely funding and presenting new restorations of the early collaborations between beloved superstar Douglas Fairbanks and still-neglected auteur Allan Dwan (they ultimately completed eleven films together, culminating in the 1929 part-talkie The Iron Mask.) The third of these restorations is the earliest of the collaborations presented so far; The Good Bad Man was only the second Fairbanks/Dwan picture, after The Habit of Happiness, but the restoration looked impeccable for a 98-year-old film screening at only 16 frames per second; it surely didn't hurt that pianist Donald Sosin performed the musical accompaniment as if he were trying to show up all of the weekend's other fine musicians after a year on the bench (I think he succeeded).  It also happens to be the best movie of the three, a perfectly balanced synthesis of Wild West action and romantic comedy. I've barely glimpsed Dwan's non-Fairbanks films, but with this I'm starting to get a sense of his spatial and structural sensibilities. It just so happens that another Dwan silent, this one starring Gloria Swanson rather than the King of Hollywood, screens this Saturday at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. Tempting...

Screen capture from Music Box DVD of The Story of Film

Crucified Lovers: a Story from Chikamatsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) Pacific Film Archive, July 30th, 2014. 35mm.

Mizoguchi made some of the most emotionally potent political films ever, and this one, which I'd never seen before at all, edged ahead of my first 35mm viewing of his 1939 masterpiece The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum as the summit of my visits to the Pacific Film Archive's hearty director retrospective last summer. The inexorability of unfolding events, each peeling another layer off the rotten onion of patriarchal feudalism, held me transfixed to the screen.

Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl, 1933) Stanford Theatre, August 31st, 2014. 35mm.

It seems incredible that two entirely different films could both share the same title; I saw Isao Takahata's coming-of-age animation from 1991 and put it on my IOHTE list two years ago, and now I've caught up with this pre-code Hollywood employer of the same English-language title, as part of a Stanford Theatre World War I weepie double-bill with Random Harvest. Calling Stahl's Only Yesterday a melodrama in today's age sounds like a dismissal, but in this case the heightened emotions of its characters, particularly the sublime Margaret Sullivan (in her debut screen role!) are transmitted directly to the audience, making for an intense experience akin to that conveyed by its later, more famous remake Letter From An Unknown Woman, (which I also saw at the Stanford in 2014).

¡O No Coronado! (Craig Baldwin, 1992) Artists' Television Access, September 19th, 2014. 16mm. Introduced by Craig Baldwin and Steve Polta.

In 2014 my only "official" filmmaker interview was a mind-melting discussion with underground archivist and iconoclast Craig Baldwin, who summons the Other Cinema screenings most Saturday nights at the increasingly incongruous (and thus culturally valuable) Valencia Street microcinema Artists' Television Access. I also finally caught up with most of his films that I hadn't seen before (I'm still on the hunt for the elusive Stolen Movie). I was able to see a majority of them on the A.T.A. screen, either as part of its 30-hour marathon (of which I survived about fifteen hours of before the dawn showing of Damon Packard's brilliant Reflections of Evil sent me stumbling home for much needed sleep- or was it sanity) or this pair of programs. ¡O No Coronado!, Baldwin's 40-minute sub-feature made to commemorate commiserate the Quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's famed voyage (by presenting the story of a very different conqueror), employs perhaps his most elaborate and "effective" staged footage, shuffled together with ludicrous and expensive Hollywood detritus. His juxtapositions pull the rubber mask off the history-as-mythology industry that seems to dominate our collective understandings of the past.

Screen capture from Kino DVD

Little Fugitive (Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin & Ray Ashley, 1953) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, September 22nd, 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Lynn Cursaro.

Full disclosure: of all the repertory/revival series of 2014, the one that loomed largest for me personally was one that I was honored to be chosen to be involved with myself: Joel Shepard of YBCA's gracious "Invasion of the Cinemaniacs!" series, the film component of the museum's triennial Bay Area Now focus on local artists and art communities. Shepard selected eleven local cinephiles (including six previous IOHTE contributors) to present a carte-blanche choice of a film at the YBCA's technically excellent, intimate screening space. I was humbled to be chosen, and humbled again to find that my buddy Ryland Walker Knight mentioned my selection (Altman's The Company) in his own IOHTE wrap-up this year. A few of the other Cinemaniacs selections have been cited by IOHTE 2014 participants such as Carl Martin and David Robson, but I'd like to single out a few that have been left unmentioned: Adam Hartzell's informed presentation of Korean drama Madame Freedom, Robson's lustrous program-closer The Brides of Dracula, and most importantly Lynn Cursaro's selection Little Fugitive, a wonderfully poetic, American-neorealist exploration of Coney Island through the eyes of a child who fears he might never be able to return home. Though co-directed by three filmmakers I was previously unfamiliar with, it's a film I've been waiting to see on the big screen for many years, ever since learning it was an early entry on the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Watching a 35mm print in a room (half) full of cinema devotees was worth the wait; this is clearly one of the great films of its time (when television was just growing out of being a seductive novelty) and place (on the opposite end of the country from Hollywood).

The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1993) Pacific Film Archive, November 14th , 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Kathy Geritz and Richard Suchenski.

This is the largest exception to the trend I mentioned in my introductory paragraphs: another film I'd been waiting for years to see on the big screen, in this case made by a director I already considered myself a committed fan of. In fact I'd hoped to see much more of the traveling Hou Hsiao-Hsien series brought by Richard Suchenski to the PFA in the last months of 2014 than I did; I'd have liked to attend every screening but scheduling consigned me to seeing only five films in the program. The Puppetmaster was the most revelatory for me of the five (although The Boys From Fengkuei came close) in terms of my understanding of Hou, and indeed (as I noted on twitter), in terms of my understanding of biographical storytelling modes in general. This no-admission screening was nearly full, which was especially gratifying after Suchenski noted that he'd essentially built the Hou series around his desire to see this film in 35mm, that it'd taken two years to negotiate to show it, and that it (and City of Sadness) would certainly become completely unavailable to view on that format after the tour concludes at the end of this year. Which has me giving sidelong glances to airfares after looking at the rest of the schedule...

Screen capture from Cohen Media Group DVD

The Book of Mary (Anne-Marie Miéville, 1985) Pacific Film Archive, November 29th, 2014. 35mm.

My favorite new film seen in 2014 was Jean-Luc Godard's 3D Goodbye To Language, which I saw three times (once for each dimension?) at the Rafael Film Center, the only Frisco Bay cinema it played in time for me to put it on my Top Ten list in time for Fandor's poll. (It screened at Berkeley's Shattuck Cinema in mid-December, and finally has its first showing in San Francisco at the Castro Theatre tonight). But my 2014 Godard experience was not limited to his newest work; the Pacific Film Archive provided many opportunities for me to fill gaps and revisit old favorites throughout the year, and I only wish I'd taken advantage of more of them (on the bright side the series is continuing through April.) Some of the films felt more impenetrable than wonderful, but they all had a touch of both qualities. Most pleasantly surprising, however, was the fact that my very favorite entry in the whole series was directed not by Godard, but by his longtime collaborative companion Anne-Marie Miéville, and screened, as it customarily does, before his 1985 release Hail Mary. It's a perfectly-realized short film, simultaneously naturalistic and expressionistic in its presenting a young girl's perspective on her parents' crumbling marriage (don't ask me why this theme recurs on this list.) Miéville is particularly gifted at framing her subject's body in motion, as in the above-pictured scene where she moves along to a section of Mahler's 9th Symphony. I attribute to The Book of Mary's effectiveness as a prelude the fact that I found Hail Mary to be my own favorite of the Godard films I saw at the PFA last year.

The Black Pirate (1926)

WHO: Douglas Fairbanks starred in, produced, and even concocted the story (under the pseudonym Elton Thomas) for this film.

WHAT: After the heights scaled by Fairbanks in his increasingly lavish 1920s films The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood and The Thief of Bagdad, the latter a financial disappointment in relation to cost, the self-determined star dialed down his ambition for his 1925 sequel Don Q Son of Zorro. When he turned again to breaking new ground in the capabilities of Hollywood moviemaking, he did so not by attempting to outdo previous films in opulence of design, but by introducing an entirely new dimension to his work: color. The Black Pirate was not the first two-strip technicolor film made by the motion picture industry, but with Fairbanks at the center, it became the most iconic of the silent era. It had the happy side-result of highlighting the star's athleticism to a degree that had been missed by some of his fans. Jeffrey Vance puts it well in his excellent Fairbanks biography: 

Technicolor's inherent limitations and cost at the time had the effect of unfettering the Fairbanks production from pageantry and visual effects, thus producing what is in essence a straightforward action adventure film. The result was a refreshing return to form and a dazzling new showcase for the actor-producer;s favorite production value: himself. Fairbanks is resplendent as the bold buccaneer and buoyed by a production brimming with rip-roaring adventure and spiced with exceptional stunts and swordplay, including the celebrated "sliding down the sails" sequence, arguably the most famous set piece of the entire Fairbanks treasure chest.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum on a program beginning at 7:30.

WHY: Blog round-ups of last week's San Francisco Silent Film Festival have been rolling in for the past several days. If you're so inclined, check out wrap-ups by Donna Hill, Philip Castor, Lincoln Spector, Jason Wiener, and Lara Fowler. I saw eleven programs, which is by far my lowest total since before the festival expanded to a four day affair. I skipped all but one of the digitally-projected presentations (The Weavers, whose restoration looked nice and cleanly-scrubbed if not filmic) and also found myself bailing on The Golden Clown and The Joyless Street. Missing all of the late-evening shows probably helped me better concentrate on the multiple daytime & early-evening shows I saw, but I do have some regret over missing what I heard from more than one friend was the best show of fest: The Joyless Street with the Matti Bye Ensemble. I don't always love this Swedish combo but I thought their inexorably-rhythmed score for the Outlaw and His Wife was the musical highlight of a weekend full of contenders; others included the Gamelan Sekar Jaya/Club Foot Orchestra's SFSFF debut Legong: Dance of the Virgins, Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra's setting for Gribiche, and everything I heard coming out of Stephen Horne's piano. 

Though I approve of the festival bringing in a certain amount of new accompanist blood, I don't think I'd be that excited for them to bring Günter Buchwald back again. Of the three films I heard him score, only The Weavers seemed particularly suited to his style. He's clearly a phenomenally skilled musician, perhaps the most impressive technique-wise of all the weekend's guests, but I felt his score for Tokyo Chorus often misunderstood Ozu (admittedly a tricky director to play for, but Horne and Judith Rosenberg have both done it quite successfully at screenings I've attended), and his turn at the Wurlitzer for Fairbanks's Western The Half-Breed had only fleeting moments of real effectiveness, most of them involving his use of a fiddle instead of the keyboard console. I was particularly distracted by his use of jazzy rhythms for a film set in 1880s California. I'd love to see the return of pianists Rosenberg, Phil Carli or Donald Sosin (and if the organ can be utilized, Chris Elliot, Clark Wilson or Dennis James) to the festival for their next Winter event, rumored to be expected this December.

If last weekend whetted rather than sated your appetite for more silent film screenings with live musical accompaniment, there are a good deal of opportunities to continue cinematic explorations of this still-underrated era of filmmaking. Tonight the Pacific Film Archive shows a rare 35mm print of the World War I film What Price Glory as part of its half-completed Raoul Walsh series, which I've been thoroughly enjoying - the last appearance of house pianist Rosenberg as accompanist at the venue until she takes on 9 Alfred Hitchcock silents next month. Tomorrow there's a Davies Symphony Hall showing of Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin with Cameron Carpenter at the organ, and a Berkeley Underground Film Society showing of the Harold Lloyd comedy Why Worry?, which he made just after SFSFF closing night feature Safety Last!

But there's only one Frisco Bay cinema that screens silent pictures every Saturday, week in and out, except for the one week off taken for the SFSFF. The Black Pirate reopens the Niles Essanay Silent Film Musuem in Fremont, CA after this annual screen darkening. It's a perfect choice to screen after least two of last Saturday's Castro programs. I enjoyed The Half-Breed but some I spoke to were disappointed that it didn't include enough of the free-wheeling, spirit-of-adventure "Doug" they were used to (the same reason Tracey Goessel gave for its commercial failure in its day during her introduction), so to see him as his "usual" self in The Black Pirate may be welcome. It's also a nice comparison piece to the two-strip Technicolor photography of the surprisingly good Legong: Dance of the Virgins, released 9 years later at the dawn of major feature film usage of the three-strip Technicolor process.

The Black Pirate is not the only upcoming Niles screening with connections to SFSFF programming, either. On the August slate, every Saturday program includes at least one comedy by Chaplin, Keaton, or Lloyd, who were all seen last Sunday on the Castro screen (I believe it's the first time the festival programmed films featuring each of these three clown princes of Hollywood in the same year). Additionally, those who enjoyed seeing Greta Garbo in The Joyless Street or Ralph Lewis in Emory Johnson's The Last Edition should mark their calendars on August 24th and 31st respectively, as Garbo reappears at Niles for Flesh and the Devil and Lewis stars in another Johnson film called The West-Bound Limited on those dates.

HOW: The Black Pirate screens in a technicolor 16mm print with live music by Jon Mirsalis, along with prints of Harold Lloyd in Never Touched Me and Harry Langdon in Plain Clothes. 

Dorothy Vernon Of Haddon Hall (1924)

WHO: Mary Pickford, one of the first and greatest stars Hollywood has ever known, but one that has become a rather unfashionable figure until very recently. She is currently enjoying a renaissance of attention from Frisco Bay cinema programmers, thanks to a new book by Christel Schmidt, who is brining rare film prints on a national tour.

WHAT: In 1922, Pickford's husband Douglas Fairbanks had successfully retooled his screen image from performances mostly in modern-day comedies and Westerns, to swashbuckling period adventures such as The Mark of Zorro and Robin Hood. "America's Sweetheart" was probably even more popular than her husband at the time, but she saw good reasons to expand her repertoire from the "little girl" roles she continued to play at age thirty, to more adult roles in films with more European flavor. She brought Ernst Lubitsch from Germany to direct her next film; at one point this was to have been Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, based on a 1902 novel set in Elizabethan England. Although Lubitsch balked and ultimately directed Pickford in Rosita instead, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall became her follow-up, with Lubitsch out of the picture and frequent collaborator Marshall Neilan in the director's chair for most of the shoot, until his alcoholism became too much to bear. Pickford herself ended up directing at least one of the film's Golden Gate Park scenes. 

WHERE/WHEN: 7:15 PM tonight only at the Roxie Theater.

WHY: You may have noticed that there are a lot of silent film screenings here on Frisco Bay this month. G. Allen Johnson wrote about a number (to be specific, 40) of them for sfgate this week, although he's incorrect in saying they'll all be projected in 35mm as the Silent Film Festival's Silent Winter includes one DCP presentation (Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad) among its otherwise all-35mm lineup, and quite a few films in the Niles Film Museum February schedule will show in 16mm prints. If you want to look ahead to March, Cinequest will present 35mm screenings of Safety Last! and Cops at San Jose's California Theater during that festival. I'm not sure how the Balboa's March 3 screening of the silent Peter Pan will be sourced.

But Pickford is definitely the queen for the month of February. Tonight's screening is joined by a focus on her early work tomorrow in Niles and a showing of My Best Girl at the Castro February 16th. If you consider Pickford's filmography as something of a personal blind spot (it is for me, certainly) there's no reason to delay trying to get up to speed on this star whose celebrity status was truly made by, and not forced upon, audiences. Just to make the deal more of a "sweetheart": tonight's film is extremely rarely screened, not on DVD, and shot partially in San Francisco.

HOW: A 35mm print imported from Belgium for the occasion. There will be live musical accompaniment as well; Daniel Redfeld will be performing his own piano score for the film.

Happy Bastille Day at the Silent Film Festival!

Only hours until the San Francisco Silent Film Festival begins, and word comes from the twitter feed of London-based composed Carl Davis, that he will be conducting the Oakland East Bay Symphony as they perform the score to the 1927 Abel Gance film Napoléon as the film unspools on the screen at the Paramount Theatre of the Arts in Oakland. According to the trailer linked to by Davis, the performances will be on March 24, 25, 31, and April 1st, 2012.

This is momentous news for silent film fans, as it represents the first official announcement that two of last year's special Oscar award recipients, Kevin Brownlow and Francis Ford Coppola. have found their way to collaborate after many years of being at odds over the rights to show Napoléon. This article helps explain why the film has not shown in a US cinema in nearly three decades, and why the version restored by Brownlow and scored by Davis has never been seen by American moviegoers.

For my part, I've never seen Napoléon, other than in brief clips like those seen in Brownlow's excellent documentary series (co-produced by David Gill) Cinema Europe: the Other Hollywood. Too young to have known about the screenings put on with Carmine Coppola's score until they'd already happened, and not well-heeled enough to catch this outdoor screening in 1997, I've always sensed that seeing it in a theatre, as opposed to on the VHS tapes available at Le Video and a few other surviving rental stores, would be worth the wait. It's been a long one, but there are only eight more months of it to go!

This announcement more than makes up for the fact that this summer marks the first SF Silent Film Festival since 2005 in which there hasn't been a program devoted to French films (although a few French shorts appear on the festival's sole all-digital program, Wild and Weird, including the hilarious Arthème Swallows his Clarinet.) Happy Bastille Day!

Brownlow, as you may have heard, will be returning to the festival this weekend after being awarded last year, will be back to speak at the 10AM Sunday morning event Amazing Tales From The Archives. Having seen the man speak at length on his love of silent film before, I predict that this is going to be the highlight of the entire festival for many (if not all) of its attendees. And it's free! Thomas Gladysz agrees, and he should know, having been involved in the silent film world far longer than I have. Get to the Castro Theatre early for this one!

Some more articles on or related to the 2011 SF Silent Film Festival, in case you still haven't decided what to watch:

Carl Martin on the provenance of the prints and restorations.
Michael Hawley has a comprensive preview of the line-up.
Dennis Harvey writes about A Nail In the Boot for the SF Bay Guardian and on Shoes for sf360.
J. F. DeFreitas on the line-up, with a special focus on Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But.... (which is the film I wrote on for the program guide. Be sure to arrive at the Friday, 4:15 show a little early to catch the slide show on Ozu that I've prepared!)
It's Silent Film Week at the Fandor Keyframe blog, and I've contributed a piece on Douglas Fairbanks. I can't wait to see him in Mr. Fix-It on Saturday!
The festival's own blog has begun collecting more links as well.

I would also be remiss in neglecting to mention a few other Frisco Bay screenings of note, for those whose budget is too tight to wrap around Silent Film Festival ticket prices. Lech Majewski's incredible digital opera The Roe's Room plays tonight at SFMOMA. The new Stanford Theatre calendar is up, and it includes four Friday evenings of Buster Keaton films accompanied by Dennis James at the Wurlitzer, starting tomorrow night. And the Pacific Film Archive's upcoming weekend is full of rarely-screened but highly-regarded films, most notably a new print of Bernardo Bertolucci's epic 1900.

Silent Film Linking, Part One

It's the day after the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and the blogosphere is already filling up with reactions from attendees. Now, to attempt to collect these links and contextualize them within my own experience of the festival. I attended nearly everything, and had a grand time watching films, mingling with friends, and luxuriating in the Castro Theatre. And somehow I find I have the energy to begin a blow-by-blow.

Friday night's opening film was Douglas Fairbanks as the Gaucho, the film in the program I was most familiar with, having seen it multiple times on DVD while preparing the slide show presentation seen on screen as the audience filled the Castro seats, and the 2 1/2 page essay I wrote for the festival's program guide. Of all the many sources I consulted in my research on Fairbanks, there is perhaps none I leaned on more heavily than Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta's biography of the superstar. So it felt particularly fitting for these "silent partners" to introduce The Gaucho (as it is more informally known), as well as give a running commentary track over technicolor outtakes of Mary Pickford's cameo as a Marian apparition screened prior to the feature. Michael Guillén has posted a recap of the duo's introductory remarks, and even excerpts from my essay. Thanks, Michael!

It turns out I was less familiar with the Gaucho than I had thought. Seeing it projected beautifully and grandly on a huge cinema screen revealed details I had overlooked in close study of the DVD. Of all the films in this year's festival, this one must have contained the most shots with multiple threads of action happening simultaneously. The upshot of this is that seeing its images tower above me convinced me that it's an even better, richer film than I had previously judged it to be. I hope the new MOMA print doesn't retire back into the archive for good after this screening; this film deserves to be seen in any theatre where silent film lovers congregate. More reactions to this showing of the Gaucho have been published at six martinis and the seventh art, and at Jason Watches Movies.

This screening of The Gaucho premiered a new score by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, which has been a favorite of the SFSFF since 2007. Last year, this quintet performed for the Kid Brother, Harold Lloyd's greatest film. They perform that score again tomorrow night at the Rafael Film Center in Marin, which was the first Frisco Bay venue to bring them in. Their scores are well worth hearing more than once, and if you've never seen the Kid Brother it's an absolute must, deserving to stand with the best of Chaplin and Keaton in the pantheon of silent comedy masterpieces. If you miss that, however, the Kid Brother plays again at the California Theatre in San Jose on July 24th, with Dennis James performing at that venue's sadly-underutilized organ. James also will perform at the California on August 7th for Fairbanks' 1926 swashbuckler the Black Pirate. The rest of the summer weekend at that theatre are devoted to 70mm films (talkies, natch) from the 1960s.

After staying too late at the festival's opening night party, I overslept Saturday and made it to the Castro only in time to catch the very tail end of the free Amazing Tales From the Archives presentation, where I heard Stephen Horne play piano for an Edison short, How the Hungry Man Was Fed. Horne has caused something of a sensation at each of the SFSFF events he has attended, providing knockout accompaniment to often-dark films like a Cottage on Dartmoor, Jujiro, and the Unknown. But when performing for a brief comic piece like this one, I become curious to hear what he'd come up with for a feature-length comedy. Anyone with me?

The next presentation was with the Mont Alto orchestra again, accompanying a long-missing link in King Vidor's oeuvre, Bardelys the Magnificent, previewed by David Jeffers of the SIFFblog. A fine action picture with noteworthy photography, including a vertigo-inducing fall from a balcony, the presentation was notable for two main reasons: it was the West Coast debut of a title that had been considered a "lost film" for decades, and it was the festival's first experiment in screening a feature in DigiBeta rather than 35mm. With no-one willing to assume responsibility for the cost of transferring the recently re-discovered print to 35mm, the "film" is only viewable in digital form. Again, Michael Guillén has details from David Shepard's introduction. The image looked clean if somewhat contrastry on that screen. Vidor's vision may have been suggested, but I for one was unable to forget that I was watching through a layer of technological remove. SFSFF acting artistic director Anita Monga makes a great point about the difference between DVD and 35mm screenings in this recent sf360 interview:

Just because I have a postcard of the Vermeer’s "The Milkmaid" doesn’t make me not want to see it in at the Rijksmuseum. Au contraire, it whets my appetite.

I hope that enough appetites are whetted by the digital screenings and DVD release of Bardleys the Magnificent that the powers that be determine that there's sufficient demand to justify the cost of returning the picture to its celluloid magnificence.

Here's Part Two

Silent Film Festivals

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has revealed its full program lineup for the 14th annual edition of its summer celebration of a glorious age of filmmaking. The festival runs July 10-12 at the Castro Theatre. For the third year in a row, I've been a member of the festival's research and writing group, each of us charged with writing an essay and/or compiling a slide show to accompany one of the films selected by the festival programmers. My film this time around has been the Gaucho, the penultimate silent film produced and starred by Douglas Fairbanks, the original cinematic swashbuckler. For the past few months I've dug deeply into "Doug" (as his fans nicknamed him), reading biographies, articles and essays, and watching seventeen of his thirty-eight silent films (six of which are presumed lost), including all the films contained on the recent Flicker Alley DVD release (now available at the SF Public Library). The Gaucho is not on that set, though it is available on DVD through Kino. Still, it's one of the least-seen of his costume adventure films, even though it was a hit at the time of its original release, and showcases a terrific feature debut performance by Lupe Vélez, the so-called "Mexican Firecracker".

The Gaucho is the festival's opening-night film, and it should be a delightful way to open a weekend of beautiful restored prints from around the world, live performances by silent-film music specialists, and general merriment. The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra will be appearing, for the third time at the festival, premiering a brand-new in-period score to the film. The screening is co-presented by the Mexican Museum, quite appropriately since though the film is set in a picture-book version of the Argentine Andes, many of the film's actors and extras in addition to Vélez were in fact of Mexican descent.

My essay will be available as part of a complimentary program guide presented to everyone who attends the festival. It may also appear online at some future date; the festival has recently begun making essays from certain previous programs available on its website. My essays for the festival's screenings of Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro in 2008 and William C. de Mille's Miss Lulu Bett in 2007 are among those currently viewable, though I highly recommend browsing the archive and reading essays by all the writers in the group; they are intended to be equally useful for people who have seen the films in question, and for those who haven't.

In addition to the Gaucho, this year's festival includes nine feature films, two presentations of shorts and rare fragments (a set of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons, and the annual free Amazing Tales From the Archives presentation), and almost every feature will also be preceded by a short film featuring a silent film star celebrating her centennial year in the cinema in 2009: Mary Pickford. I can particularly recommend two films I've seen at the Pacific Film Archive, but which should be particularly stunning on the Castro's towering screen: Josef Von Sternberg's prototypical gangster film Underworld, and Victor Sjostrom's most famous film the Wind, starring Lillian Gish.

I have not yet seen the other features, but I am extremely excited to see the version of Fall of the House of Usher directed by French critic-turned-filmmaker Jean Epstein, and the Chinese film Wild Rose, directed by Shanghai's perhaps most notable auteur of the era, Sun Yu. Wild Rose stars Jin Yan, the Korean-born matinee idol who played opposite tragic Ruan Ling-yu in the 2000 SFSFF film the Peach Girl. His widow Qin Yi will be in attendance at the screening.

Terry Zwigoff, maker of Crumb, Ghost World and Bad Santa has been invited to provide the "director's pick" this year, following up on Guy Maddin's selection the Unknown last summer. Zwigoff will present W.C. Fields in what is generally regarded as the comedian's finest silent film, So's Your Old Man. The festival will bring its first-ever film from the Czechoslovakian silent film industry, Erotikon by Gustav Machaty, who would later make Hedy Lamarr famous worldwide when directing her nude scene in Ecstasy. Also from Eastern Europe is the late-night pick co-presented by MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS, Aelita, Queen of Mars, a big-budget science fiction film made in the Soviet Union.

Douglas Fairbanks is not the only swashbuckler in the lineup, as John Gilbert plays one in Bardleys the Magnificent, a King Vidor film that had been considered a "lost film" until a short while ago when it was rediscovered and transfered to a digital presentation format; this will be the festival's first time showing one of its programs on anything other than celluloid, as there is no projectable film print available anywhere in the world. Finally, the weekend closes as it opened, with a Lupe Vélez starring role, only this time she plays the title character: Lady of the Pavements, one of D.W. Griffith's last and least-known features today, and said to be reminiscent of German Street Films of the 1920s.

Loyal attendees of the Silent Film Festival will recognize the names of the musicians coming to perform at the festival: Dennis James at the Mighty Wurlitzer, aided by Mark Goldstein providing electronic effects for Aelita (it seems the Wind will also include special sound effects as well; this is no gentle breeze). Pianists Philip Carli (So's Your Old Man), Stephen Horne (Fall of the House of Usher, Underworld and the archive presentation program), and Donald Sosin. Sosin will play for Wild Rose, for the Oswald program (and those who remember how he encouraged a delightful form of audience participation during last year's animation matinee Adventures of Prince Achmed will know that this should be a good match up), and for Lady of the Pavements. For the latter, Sosin's wife Joanna Seaton will provide a vocal performance in the spirit of the film's original 1929 presentation in a part-talkie form. And in addition to the Gaucho, the Mont Alto orchestra will provide scores to Bardleys the Magnificent and Erotikon. Then, two days after the festival ends, in San Rafael, they will perform to Buster Keaton's the Cameraman at an event put on by a wholly different organization, the California Film Institute, who introduced this quintet to Frisco Bay audiences several years before they began playing at the SFSFF.

Yes, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is not the only game in town for fans of watching silent films in a cinema setting with live musical accompaniment; in Fremont, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum has weekly screenings every Saturday of the year except for the weekend of the SFSFF. This weekend is Charlie Chaplin Days in Niles, an excuse for a screening of the Kid as well as a slew of Chaplin shorts at the museum theatre. And on June 26-28 the museum hosts its own three-day film festival, the 12th Annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival named for the cowboy star who made Niles the base of operations for his filmmaking nearly 100 years ago. This year the Broncho Billy festival follows last year's centennial commemoration of the Edison Trust with a focus on independent studios that defied the at-the-time majors. Some of these independents became major studios themselves; a program devoted to the beginnings of Paramount opens the festival, and another showcasing early Universal (including a screening of Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives) closes it. In between, there are programs devoted to less-remembered companies such as Thanhauser, Ince, and the American Film Company, as well as a program of comedies introduced by "Baby Peggy" herself, and a selection of Frisco Bay-made silents.

And to get everyone involved in the celebration of "independent" filmmaking, not just fans of silent-era film, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum is bringing (gasp!) talkies to its screen on other June evenings; specifically, independently-produced films by modern-day Frisco Bay filmmakers. I have never heard of the Weekend King, shot in Niles and playing this Friday June 5th, and I don't believe I'd ever seen a Scary Cow production before learning the production company would be featured with a screening on June 21st. But I'm very glad that Frisco Bay residents will on Friday June 12th have another shot at seeing the terrific debut feature Around the Bay from Alejandro Adams, who I interviewed on the occasion of its last local cinema screening at last year's Cinequest festival in San Jose. And I'm excited for the opportunity to hear Frisco Bay indie filmmaking legends John Korty and Les Blank present films and clips in a homey, intimate space. Blank's Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, surely the definitive documentary about Nosferatu's least favorite garnish, is planned to play with the director in person on Friday, June 19th. The screening is not advertised as being in "Smellaround" but neither was the screening held four years ago at the Castro where I swear my nose was sensing delicious aromas before the film was half over. Will we one day talk about "scentless" films like we now talk about "silents"?