Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

WHO: Maya Deren directed this.

WHAT: Coming as it does after her landmark psychodramas Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land, Ritual in Transfigured Time is still an under-appreciated Deren work. Acquarello describes the film's opening in her review:

an animated, approachable female figure (Maya Deren) alternately framed in high contrast against a pair of interchangeable doorways, beckons a seemingly naïve young dancer (Rita Christiani) into a large adjoining room to assist in an implied Sisyphean domestic ritual before being summoned by a striking, cosmopolitan figure (Anaïs Nin) awaiting in an opposite doorway.

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM tonight only at Oddball Films. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117.

WHY: The cost of striking and renting 35mm prints is reaching ever-escalating heights. If the Pacific Film Archive 's upcoming complete Pasolini retrospective is being charged the same amounts a friend programming in another North American city mentioned he was quoted to screen some of the Marxist filmmaker's key works, there's no way they're making up the cost in ticket sales the old-fashioned capitalist way. It's no wonder that for-profit venues like the Castro are becoming more reliant on cheaper DCP technology to source their screening content (though its excellent September calendar is thankfully relatively light on repertory titles screening digitally).

As bleak as things might get for continued 35mm distribution, however, I'm optimistic that film-on-film exhibition will not die before audience demand for it does. Networks of archives and collectors who recognize the unique qualities of the film medium will continue the tradition of screening reels of films through mechanical projection equipment. The selection of titles may become more limited geographically, consisting more and more of titles that don't have to be shipped in heavy canisters for thousands of miles, but in a place like the Bay Area, with its many collectors and official and unofficial archives, the number of available titles will still be practically inexhaustible, as long as support from audiences encourages collaboration between local collectors and venues. As the organic food crowd has gravitated to the sustainability of the locavore movement so too can cinephiles encourage a community-based alternative movement to massive and costly distribution. It just needs a good name. Perhaps someone can think of something better than "parokinal" (my awkward mash-up of "parochial" and "kino").

I don't know where the Vortex Room sourced its print of Car Crash last night, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a local collector. Local collections also form the backbone of programming at both the Niles Essnaay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, CA (which has revealed its September Saturday night schedule, and, via pdf, all its other screenings through the end of October) and the Berkeley Underground Film Society. The Psychotronix Film Festival is giving film purists a rare chance to see 16mm projections at the New Parkway in Oakland this Sunday. Even the Pacific Film Archive sometimes supplements its 35mm programs with 16mm prints of varying provenance; the Wendell Corey series starting there tonight is mostly in 35mm, but includes one DCP presentation (Sorry, Wrong Number) and two 16mm shows (Anthony Mann's The Furies tomorrow night and series closing Elvis vehicle Loving You).

But in San Francisco, Oddball Films is the king of the "parokinal" universe. A vast 16mm archive stored in a Mission loft that also houses its director Stephen Parr, Oddball has been screening selections from its collection weekly for years. Tonight's program curated by Scotty Slade is both typically diverse and notably deep. Entitled "Aligning the Trance Particles", Slade's selection includes experimental films like Ritual In Transfigured Time and Pat O'Neill's 7632 as well as ethnographic documentations like the 1964 Pomo Shaman and even a prize-winning scientific film made by Carol Ballard (of  The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf fame) called Crystalization which captures imagery through an electron microscope. I'm planning to go. See you there?

HOW: If tradition holds, all the films in tonight's program including Ritual in Transfigured Time come from Oddball's collection of 16mm prints.

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. 

The Iron Horse (1924)

WHO: John Ford directed this.

WHAT: It's not my personal favorite of Ford's silent films (that'd be, of those I've seen so far, Four Sons) but The Iron Horse is still a lovely example of one of the great American filmmakers' early access to the poetry of landscape. I think of it as something of a spiritual precursor to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo: a fictionalized version of a true story of 19th-Century "New World" economic expansion, that nonetheless was filmed in certain ways almost as if a documentary: Herzog's crew actually sent that ship over that mountain, and Ford's actually laid at least a mile and a half of railroad track while filming the story of the construction of the transcontinental railroad. In lieu of a Burden of Dreams-style documentary on The Iron Horse, do read David Kiehn's terrific article, written for the 2010 San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation of the film.

Another similarity between the Ford and Herzog films highlights what's probably their most fundamental difference: both have complicated- one might also say problematic- relationships to the Indian tribes that made up a good portion of each film's cast and crew.  Fitzcarraldo ends, intentionally, like an art movie, all tangled up in conflicted feelings about the relative success and failure of the white capitalist/art lover and the Campa-Ashaninka Indians to achieve their goals. 

The Iron Horse has a relatively traditional, happy, "Hollywood ending" for its characters, for American history, and certainly for its producers, as the film outgrossed every other US release in 1924. But a modern or so-called "enlightened" audience can also have conflicted feelings about this ending- these endings- especially from the perspective of the Paiutes who performed in the film. Ford films a simple scene of laborers reunifying with their fellows after being separated onto different work crews with such warmth and emotion, while the ceremonial conclusion of the film, with the driving of the Golden Spike, feels more like a tacked-on addendum, even with its wrapping up of the romantic plot. One wonders if this contrast reveals something of Ford's own feelings about the human stories caught up in the sweep of history. 

WHERE/WHEN: 4:00 PM today only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Musuem.

WHY: This afternoon's screening is part of LaborFest and its FilmWorks United selection of screenings happening at various venues around Frisco Bay throughout July. I believe this is the first year of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's involvement as a venue. Most of the FilmWorks United screening selections are documentaries (last Friday saw the local premiere of Ken Loach's latest, for instance) but there are three silent features as well, all of them involving the railroad, which seems apropos after last week's BART strike. Last night it was William S. Hart in The Whistle, also at Niles. Today it's The Iron Horse. And on Thursday July 18th (unfortunately the opening night of the SF Silent Film Festival) LaborFest will host a screening of Sergei Eisenstein's depiction of a 1903 locomotive factory Strike at 518 Valencia.

Also worth mentioning although not officially connected to LaborFest: The Weavers, about the Silesian Weaver Revolt of 1844, has been called the "German Potemkin" and screens at the Castro July 21st. And Potemkin screens this month too, on July 28th at Davies Symphony Hall with live accompaniment by organist Cameron Carpenter. Tickets start at $15 for nosebleed seats, but it's a pretty big screen.

HOW: The Iron Horse is a 16mm screening with live piano accompaniment by Bruce Loeb.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

WHO: Buster Keaton starred in and directed it. He also, though uncredited, was involved as producer and editor. Keaton's friend and filmmaking mentor Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, at that time his career in tatters, is thought to have been an uncredited co-director on the film as well, and a good deal of speculative evidence for this is collected in a documentary found on the most recent Kino DVD & Blu-Ray editions of Sherlock Jr.

WHAT: Even Keaton's most financially successful films (such as The Navigator) could not compete with the worldwide box office success of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. And Sherlock Jr. was not one of Keaton's hits. Like The General it went fairly unappreciated in it's time (in this case even receiving a withering pan from Variety magazine) and only later found its reputation rescued by other filmmakers, surrealists, critics, and ultimately by repertory audiences and home video enthusiats. Today these two Keaton films are not only his most widely seen and re-seen films but probably the two most highly critically-regarded silent-era comedies around. 

Of the two, Sherlock Jr. is perhaps slightly less beloved. Its briefer length may hinder it's reputation with certain people used to feature films being at least an hour and a half long rather than about half that. But the film's runtime economy just makes it that more of a potently concentrated laugh package. Seeing it with an appreciative audience and a skilled and sensitive musical accompanist should convert any doubters who think its meta-cinematic allusions and illusions somehow get in the way of the comedy.

WHERE/WHEN: 4 00 today only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

WHY: As the closer to the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival Sherlock Jr. drives home the "For the Love of Film" theme tying most of this year's festival's programs together. It's the third of three "backlot comedies" to screen this weekend, after His Nibs last night and Show People Friday. 

I enjoyed attending the festival yesterday for the first time, seeing a selection of one- and two-reelers starring Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson, all made in Niles in 1913. My favorite was The Making of Broncho Billy, an origin story for an already-popular character that reminded me of pretty much every superhero movie made in Hollywood these days, only far less portentous. I hope to make this festival an annual stop on my calendar.

In the meantime, there are lots of terrific films playing at the Niles Film Museum as part of their weekly Saturday silent screening series. For now I'll highlight a few Bister Keaton's on the July-August program I picked up yesterday (not yet available online): Keaton's funniest two-reeler One Week screens July 13th along with shorts starring Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Laurel & Hardy. Then, on August 17th, it's Keaton's The High Sign, this time with films starring Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, and Charley Chase.

HOW: On (I believe) 35mm with a screening of the work print of the 2013 shot-in-Niles tribute Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret. Pianist David Drazin accompanies.

Show People (1928)

WHO: King Vidor directed this and Marion Davies starred in it.

WHAT: The release of Seth Rogen's This Is The End earlier this month sent many websites back to previous examples of Hollywood celebrities playing versions of themselves in fictional scenarios on film. These articles dutifully listed some of the most memorable examples of this device: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Airplane!, John Malkovich and Charlie Sheen in Being John Malkovich, half the credit list in The Player, Cecil B. DeMille in Sunset Blvd. etc. But they could have reached back much further for examples. In 1923, for instance, James Cruze made a film called Hollywood in which an aspiring actress played by Hope Drown tries to break into the movies; he enlisted practically every big name in Tinseltown to portray themselves; a very partial list includes Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle", Baby Peggy, Charlie Chaplin, DeMille and his director brother William C. de Mille, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Nita Naldi, Pola Negri, Jack and Mary Pickford, Zasu Pitts, Will Rogers, and Gloria Swanson.  Unfortunately Hollywood is considered a "lost film" - Kevin Brownlow has called it his most-sought missing title - so there's little record of just how large, or how funny, each of these cameo performances might have been.

The next best thing, perhaps, is Show People, prints of which fortunately do exist. Said to be based on Swanson's career trajectory, this is another aspiring actress comedy; it follows Peggy Pepper, played by Marion Davies, as she attempts to launch herself as a serious motion picture actress, but finding she has more of a gift for comedy. Again movie studio verisimilitude is lent by star cameos: Chaplin, Fairbanks and Hart once more, and joined by John Gilbert, Louella Parsons, Norma Talmadge, the film's own director King Vidor, and others. Even Davies gets to tweak her own star image, appearing as herself and having her talent disparaged via intertitle by Pepper!

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight on a bill starting at 8:00 at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum.

WHY: Show People screens as part of the opening night of the 16th annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, a weekend showcase of silent-era filmmaking in the district of Niles (now a part of Fremont, California) where, a hundred years ago, the festival namesake Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson made a slew of one- and two-reel Westerns taking advantage of the small-town streets and rolling-hill landscapes. He wasn't the only star making films for the Essanay Film Company in those days, however; now-obscure performers like John Steppling and Arthur and Julia Mackley were among the others making films like Billy McGraph on Broadway and The Sheriff's Wife in 1913, and soon enough Charlie Chaplin would also be lured to Niles to make a half-dozen films including The Champion and The Tramp. Both Billy McGraph on Broadway and The Sheriff's Wife will screen with Show People this evening, and so will a brand-new film made in Niles using the technologies of 1913.

The Mercury News has just published an article on the festival that discusses this new film, originally to be called The Canyon, but now apparently titled Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret. It will screen again on Sunday to close the festival alongside Buster Keaton's meta masterpiece Sherlock Jr.  Between now and then about a dozen more films with screen throughout the weekend; Lotte Reiniger's feat of cut-out animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a five-film program of original 1913 "Broncho Billy" films, and a Colleen Moore vehicle directed by Gregory La Cava called His Nibs are among the notable highlights. I plan to attend this festival for the first time this year.

I first saw Show People at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which is also where I saw Davies and Vidor's follow-up film The Patsy, another underrated comedy gem from 1928. Niles researcher, programmer and projectionist David Kiehn wrote an excellent essay on the latter film for the festival program book when it played in 2008. Next month The Patsy reprises at the 2013 SFSFF, the only repeat-performance feature in a program of nearly two-dozen films made all over the world. All silent programs at both the Niles and the San Francisco festivals will be accompanied by live music. If you've never been exposed to the comic genius of Marion Davies you should at least attend Show People tonight and The Patsy July 19th. But it's hard to sample one silent program presented this way and not get the urge to stay for many more!

HOW: 16mm print, along with three short films screened in 35mm, all accompanied by Bruce Loeb on piano.

Easy Virtue (1927)

WHO: Alfred Hitchcock directed this, and appears in one of the first of his famous cameos, "strolling past a tennis court" according to Patrick McGilligan.

WHAT: Based on a Noel Coward play, Easy Virtue was Hitchcock's fifth film completed as a director, and it may have been the last time he directed a film based on a work written by someone more famous than he was. The program book for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation of the "Hitchcock 9"- the director's nine surviving silent films- says of Hitchcock's contribution: 

he excels himself in Easy Virtue. As he had in The Pleasure Garden and Champagne, he opens the film with an innovative trick shot. A giant mock-up with mirrors was used for the shot of the judge looking through his monocle, refelcting the actor standing behind the camera leading into a perfectly-matched close-up of the prosecuting counsel.

WHERE/WHEN: Today at 2:30 PM at the Castro Theater and Friday, August 30th at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Following up on yesterday's post discussing this weekend's Hitchcock 9 screening formats, I recognize there are divisions among silent movie fans about the best way to see a 1920s motion picture. Some prefer screenings that employ essentially the same technology cinemas used in the era these films were made: the 35mm projector and print, with the accompanying flicker and other characteristics of celluloid, including any dust, scratches or other marks on the frame left by previous runs through the projector. Others prefer the un-degradable, completely steady image projected by a high resolution video projector sourced from DCP (Digital Cinema Package) drives.

What practically every silent cinema aficionado agrees upon is that the best way to see these films is with a professional musical accompanist. Of the DCP projections I've seen at the Castro this weekend so far, I found Blackmail's and The Ring's to be a bit distractingly smooth for my tastes. But while watching The Manxman (probably an overall inferior film to either of the others) I was barely bothered by the digital quality while watching. Perhaps this is because more care was taken to create a film-like digital restoration and transfer. Or perhaps it's simply because I was too pulled into the story and its accompanying moods by the music to notice.

British pianist/flautist/accordionist Stephen Horne performed the music for The Manxman last night, with an assist from Diana Rowan on harp. He incorporated traditional Manx melodies beautifully into his own romantic playing style; at one point his arpeggiations brought to my mind Michael Nyman's celebrated score for Jane Campion's The Piano, but for most of the performance the music felt entirely connected to Hitchcock's film, and it alone. I expect I will have trouble being able to enjoy watching The Manxman with any other score, this one felt so close to definitive. I can't wait to hear his performances for The Farmer's Wife and The Pleasure Garden today, and his five accompaniments planned for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in July; Horne's scores are always among the sonic highlights of a SFSFF event in which they are featured.

The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra takes a fundamentally different approach to its scores, as we learned during the delightful digital slide presentation shown during the intermission of last night's performance of The Ring. Compared to Horne's approach, Mont Alto's is arguably more authentic to the historical record we have of what might have been performed by a chamber group at a silent movie house in the 1920s, and perhaps a bit more conducive to a more academic, less emotional, appreciation of a film's direction, editing mechanics, etc. (And perhaps the print quality as well.)  I really liked what they cooked up for Blackmail on Friday night, and was very impressed with their ability to shift between the classical tradition and jazz-style dance music for party sequences in The Ring.  They will perform for The Lodger this evening to close the weekend.

But I'm also excited to hear Judith Rosenberg perform for Easy Virtue today. Coming out of the world of dance accompaniment, she's a regular silent accompanist at the Pacific Film Archive (where in August she will perform for all nine of the Hitchcocks showing at the Castro this weekend) and the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum (where in two weeks she will perform for a set of European animated films as part of Frisco Bay's next big silent movie event, the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival.) But this weekend marks her debut at the Castro Theatre. Since I had to miss her performance to Champagne yesterday, I realize I've never heard her accompany a silent picture on a grand piano before! (Both the PFA and Niles are outfitted with uprights.) What's more I believe her appearance at the Hitchcock 9 marks the first time a SFSFF-presented event has featured a woman as solo accompanist for any of its films. (There are plenty of women who have performed at SFSFF as part of an ensemble, such as Britt Swenson and Dawn Kramer of Mont Alto, or who have joined with another performer like Rowen did with Horne last night.)

When the festival showtimes were first announced in March, Easy Virtue was to have been accompanied by an (at the time undetermined) organist. Within a few weeks, this plan had been changed because of the current physical condition of the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer, a problem which the theatre's regular organist David Hegarty is trying to raise funds to solve. While I love hearing the organ accompanying silent films, it's certainly true that not all films have an aesthetic quality that matches its timbral range; as I said to Anita Monga in our interview last week, A Cottage On Dartmoor would not work so well with organ accompaniment, while The Mark Of Zorro fits with the Wurlizter perfectly. Monga had this to say about the Silent Film Festival's use of the organ: 

We can't use organ at all this time because of vagaries with the people who own the organ and are going to be out of town. The organ needs major upgrading. We're not able to use it for the Hitchcocks. We have one show in the summer, with the proviso that if something happens we're able to switch to piano. 

When I followed up with a question about the likelihood of the Castro Wurlitzer being able to handle more SFSFF shows by July 2014, Monga replied:

We're just waiting to hear, but the Taylors are the family that own the organ, and they're retiring. It's really too risky for us to use it when they're not around. I've been at the Castro when the "oboe A" got stuck on, and no one can do anything. It's not like you flip a switch. You have to go up into the organ loft. That would be a disaster for us.

As much as I miss the organ, I'm very pleased that its disappearance from the Hitchcock 9 line-up made room for Judith Rosenberg to join the SFSFF rotation of musicians.

HOW: Easy Virtue screens from a 35mm print accompanied by Judith Rosenberg at both shows.

The Champion (1915)

WHO: Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, edited and of course starred in this picture.

WHAT: Of the five one- and two-reelers that Chaplin made while working at the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company's studio in Niles, California, this was one of the biggest hits of its time, and still gets laughs from audiences of all ages today. A boxing-themed picture that is sometimes seen as an early precursor to the astounding boxing sequence in Chaplin's 1931 City Lights, but perhaps not quite as meticulously timed for the proper frame rate (as I just heard silent accompanist Ben Model speak about) as he had the means and time to do sixteen year later. 

Joyce Milton's biography Tramp: the Life of Charlie Chaplin is not generally admired by Chaplin fans who are more interested in his artistry than his celebrity, but it does include some interesting information in its focus on his many lawsuits, scandals, etc. According to Milton, it was The Champion which inadvertently launched the famous wave of Chaplin imitators, when a legal attempt to block the distribution of a collage film mashing-up The Champion and a fantasy film called Daughter of the Gods provoked a soft decision from the judge: the pastiche film could be distributed as long as it was not advertised as a Chaplin picture. This judgement opened the door for imitators to make their own films; some of these imitators, Oliver Hardy and Harold Lloyd, for instance, would parlay their experience making such films into a successful career using their own more original characters.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today at 12:30 PM at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

WHY: This weekend has been the annual Charlie Chaplin Days celebration in Niles, California (a small town that became incorporated into what is now Fremont back in 1956. But almost hundred years ago it was for a few months the home of the most famous silent film actor ever, Charlie Chaplin.

Today, each of his five films made in town will screen, for a suggested donation of fifty cents apiece, at the Museum's Edison Theatre, the same room where Chaplin himself watched films when he was in town. They screen in chronological order, with his first Niles film A Night Out at 11:30 AM, and his last, The Tramp, at 3:30, with plenty of time in between showings to browse the museum or its giftshop, or to take in some of the other activities happening on Niles Boulevard today.

HOW: 16mm print, with live musical accompaniment.

The Valley Of The Giants (1927)

WHO: This was directed by Charles Brabin, who made over a hundred films in the silent and early sound era, most of them forgotten, and is now best-remembered as the husband of Theda Bara. At least his films have a higher survival rate than hers, which are mostly lost.

WHAT: The Valley of the Giants was one of the real unearthings of the 2007 San Francisco Silent Film Festival. A rip-roaring adventure film made with its married-couple stars Milton Sills and Doris Kenyon on location amidst the redwoods of Humboldt county, it's a wonderful film to behold on the big screen- which is the only place you're likely to see it, as it has yet to become available on home video. David Kiehn wrote an outstanding essay on the film for the SFSFF program book, from which I shall now extract the introduction (in the hopes that you will be intrigued enough to follow the link to read on):

It’s often lamented that only ten to twenty per cent of films made in the silent era still exist. So whenever a coveted film thought lost suddenly turns up, it’s just cause for celebration. But what of the many worthy films no one is looking for, their directors neglected, their stars forgotten, which may be sitting on a shelf in an archive, waiting to be shown? Given the sheer number of silent films produced – 10,000 features and 50,000 short films, conservatively speaking – one could theoretically see a silent film every day for thirty years without repetition. Of course, for many films just one viewing would suffice, but at the other end of the scale there are still wonderful rediscoveries; The Valley of the Giants is one of these, preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive from an original nitrate print in 1989.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Theatre in Fremont, on a bill starting at 7:30 PM.

WHY: David Kiehn programs and projects silent films in Niles every weekend of the year, except for one: the third weekend in July, when the entire silent film world casts its attention on the SFSFF at the Castro Theatre, which has become the premiere North American event for archives around the globe to showcase hidden treasures and new restorations of films from the pre-talkie era. From almost the beginning of the 17-year-old festival, the SFSFF has made room for the silent movie-making traditions from all corners of the Earth, screening films not only from the well-known foreign industries (Germany, France, Italy, the Soviet Union) but also from more unexpected lands: China, India, Mexico, Brazil. Since Anita Monga took on the artistic directorship of the event in 2009, the international component of the festival has grown tremendously, and with the newly-announced 2013 edition (given a fine rundown already by Meredith Brody) the international programs, with films made in nine different countries, actually outnumber the American ones. As the festival will come on the heels of a special June weekend showcase of Alfred Hitchcock's earliest films made in the United Kingdom, might it be time to add a letter to the festival acronym and call it SFISFF?

I'm all for this expansion of international selections at the festival, as some of the very best films screened each year are from foreign industries. Last year's The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna from Germany is a perfect example of a masterpiece that I'd barely even heard of before its Castro presentation. This year I've seen only two of the foreign selections before: Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Chorus and Victor Sjöström's The Outlaw and his Wife. Others, such as A.W. Sandberg's The Golden Clown (the first feature made by the robust Danish silent film industry to screen at SFSFF), are completely unfamiliar to me. But I should note that this expansion hardly comes at the expense of the festival's tradition of presenting well-known classics and little-seen obscurities made by Americans. If you count the Indonesia-set Legong: Dance of the Virgins, as it followed the lead of Nanook of the North and Chang in being filmed outside the U.S. but for an American production company (Constance Bennet's) and an American audience by an essentially American crew, there will be seven programs (the other six of them not at all "borderline") of U.S. films at this year's festival. This is no fewer than have screened at any SFSFF event except for last July's, when there were nine programs of American films. 

Though there are several relatively well-known titles among these seven, including closing night selection Safety Last! starring Harold Lloyd and The Patsy with Marion Davies and Marie Dressler (the festival's only feature being repeated from a prior festival, as it closed the 2008 festival on a high note), there are also films along the lines of The Valley of the Giants in that they're as yet unseen even by the most devoted fans of American silent cinema. Both The Half-Breed starring Douglas Fairbanks (shot in the redwoods of Santa Cruz County) and The Last Edition starring Ralph Lewis (shot in San Francisco) are newly restored by the festival itself in partnership with the European archives that held the only known prints of these American films: respectively, the Cinémathèque Française (which will also awarded the annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival Award at a screening of Jacques Feyder's Gribiche) and EYE Film Institute in Holland.

These partnerships reflect the fact that the silent era had the potential to be the most internationally cross-pollinating of all eras of film history, and in many regards it was. Watching a European or Japanese film with translated intertitles is barely any different from watching one made in the U.S. or U.K., and this made multi-continental careers all the more possible for the era's stars. So although for the first time ever the SFSFF opening night feature is a foreign one (the French Prix De Beauté), its star is the American Louise Brooks. Likewise Germany's The Joyless Street screens in the prime Saturday night slot (hopefully not as delayed a screening as in certain previous years) but stars a Swedish actor who is best known today for her Hollywood films: Greta Garbo. It's great to have a showcase like the SFSFF that intermixes films from Hollywood and from countries around the globe, letting us realize how universal the cinematic medium can feel.

The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum has a reputation for focusing the majority of its attention  on American silent film history, as is appropriate for an organization founded to particularly celebrate the legacy of the filmmakers who lived and worked in Niles itself. And indeed, by comparison only one of the six programs in next month's Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival (named for cowboy star "Broncho Billy" Anderson, who made films at and around his Niles studio precisely 100 years ago), is made up of films from abroad. But there's been an international flavor to the history of cinema since Britain's Eadweard Muybridge started photographing horses in motion in California in the 1870s. The most famous star to work at Niles was Charlie Chaplin (subject of his own Charlie Chaplin Days festival in Niles next weekend), who was of course British himself. And even a thoroughly American picture like The Valley of the Giants was directed by a man from Liverpool: Charles Brabin was born there and didn't emigrate to American until his was 18.

HOW: The Valley of the Giants screens on a bill with two shorts: Jimmie Adams and Doris Dawson in Swiss Movements and Charley Chase with Dog Shy, all in (I believe) 16mm prints, with Judy Rosenberg accompanying on piano.

Waxworks (1924)

WHO: Paul Leni was both director and art director on this film.

WHAT: Waxworks was the last feature made by German director Leni before he emigrated to Hollywood to make films like The Cat and the Canary and The Man Who Laughs, before an early death befell him at age 44, in 1929.

Waxworks has never been a particular favorite of mine from among the canonized classics of German expressionistic horror, but I suspect this may be because I've never seen it on the big screen. As a film, much like Murnau's masterpiece Faust, where visual design overwhelms narrative and character (even with a cast full of heavyweights: Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss and William Dieterle in main roles), it seems certain that to get the same kind of impact out of the imagery that the critics and filmmakers who canonized it did, one needs to see it on as big a screen as possible.

The film mirrors Fritz Lang's Destiny in presenting a frame story and three stories-within-stories. Jannings plays Harun al-Rashid, Veidt takes the role of Ivan the Terrible (in a sequence that Lotte Eisner claimed influenced Sergei Eisenstein), and Krauss is Spring-heeled Jack, while Dieterle portrays a writer hired by a wax museum to write narratives about these figures in his collection.

Eisner features the film prominently in a chapter called "Decorative Expressionism" in her essential book The Haunted Screen. Here's an excerpt, focusing on Leni's set design:

The low ceilings and vaults oblige the characters to stoop, and force them into those jerky movements and broken gestures which produce the extravagant curves and diagonals required by Expressionist precept. If the Expressionism in the caliph episode is confined to the settings, in the Russian episode it completely withdraws into the attitudes of the characters, as when the bloodthirsty Tsar and his counsellor move in front of a wall in carefully stylized parallel attitudes, with their trunks jack-knifed forward.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screening tonight only at 8:30 PM at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: I'm extremely excited to see Waxworks on the Castro screen, but I'm not sure I'd recommend the experience to everyone. The screening marks the SFIFF's annual experiment in presenting a silent film with a newly-commissioned score by musicians known for working in a musical idiom, and promises to be one of the most experimental entries in this tradition. Waxworks will be accompanied by vocalist Mike Patton (of Faith No More, Fantômas, and many other musical projects) and three percussionists (Matthias Bossi, Scott Amendola and William Winant), each known for pushing the envelope of musical expression. I've followed Patton's work for years and seen him perform live several times, so "I plan to go as a Patton fan and leave my German Expressionist hat in the closet."

That quote comes from a Paste Magazine article on tonight's screening, for which I was interviewed to provide perspective on the SFIFF's long tradition of presenting silent film screenings, and some of the hazards of making film-musician pairings when the latter are novices as playing for silent film. The author, Jeremy Mathews, also interviews Sean Uyehara, the SFIFF programmer who has been the caretaker of this series in recent years, as well as Bossi, whose comments make me optimistic that tonight's score will go down as one of the better SFIFF presentations. Although I have to say that even when these pairings fail to produce a stellar film-music combination, I sometimes enjoy the event quite a bit anyway; hearing Mountain Goats perform a lovely set on the Castro Theatre stage, and seeing a terrific print of Sir Arne's Treasure flicker on its screen, at a December 2010 Film Society event was very much worth my while, even if it was as if the two activities were happening in the same space and time without one having much to do with the other.

For those who desire a more authentic silent film & live music experience, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum continues to provide one weekly, and has just announced its May and June schedules as well as the line-up of its June 28-30 Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, which will include a Saturday matinee screening of a German silent from 1926, The Adventures of Prince Achmed with Judith Rosenberg on piano. And although the July San Francisco Silent Film Festival hasn't announced its program yet, but it's been leaking a few titles through various channels (most recently Safety Last! through Facebook), including a German title starring Werner Krauss, The Joyless Street. In the meantime they of course host nine early films by the German-trained Alfred Hitchcock at the Castro in June.

If you're not a Mike Patton (or Matthias Bossi or Scott Amerndola or William Winant) fan, and you're not sure you want to attend a classic film screening with a musical soundtrack likely to be incongruous to styles used during the jazz age, the SFIFF is screening three other classics of a far more recent vintage today. The 1971 Finnish made-for-television work Eight Deadly Shots screens for five and a half hours this afternoon. Meanwhile, the 1993 Best Picture nominee The Fugitive screens as part of a Harrison Ford in-person tribute. And in the evening, conflicting with the Waxworks screening, director William Freidkin will be at New People to screen his underrated 1985 thriller To Live & Die In L.A. 

HOW: Waxworks will screen via a 35mm print from Cineteca de Bologna.

Old San Francisco (1927)

WHO: Alan Crosland was the director of this film; in 1961 William K. Everson called him "sadly underrated by historians" and I don't think his stock has been rated much higher in the decades since then.

WHAT: By no means an example of silent-era movie-making at it's highest artistic level, Old San Francisco is nonetheless a fascinating curiosity, especially for anyone interested in how San Francisco's Chinatown and the 1906 earthquake were depicted in the silent era.

Beyond some stock photography of city views, the production was made entirely on Hollywood sets.  Old San Francisco was the last of a string of films including Don Juan and When a Man Loves, each made by Crosland as silents and then released with Vitaphone disc musical scores in theatres wired for sound. His next film was his, and Hollywood's, first feature to include sequences with synchronized dialogue: The Jazz Singer. It's notable that this used San Francisco (in particular, the famed speakeasy Coffee Dan's) as the setting for the first appearance of star Al Jolson's voice in the film. According to the Warner DVD commentary recorded by Ron Hutchinson and Vince Giordano, this scene was actually shot in Los Angeles, meaning that again San Francisco is only actually seen on screen thanks to stock photography.

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

WHY: For those more interested in films shot on Frisco Bay than in those merely set on Frisco Bay, tonight's screening is still noteworthy, as Old San Francisco is accompanied by two brief documentaries made in 1906 (A Trip Down Market Street and The Destruction of San Francisco) which together depict the vast changes to the cityscape in April of that year. Yes, this is the Niles Film Museum's annual earthquake-themed show, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the most cataclysmic minute in the city's history. The actual anniversary is this Thursday, but the Museum doesn't traditionally hold screenings on Thursdays. 

There are likely to be more Frisco Bay films screening at Niles soon, including some surely shot in Niles itself, as the annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival has announced its dates (June 28-30) and even provided a teaser of a few titles. King Vidor's top-drawer Hollywood satire Show People, Lotte Reiniger's beautifully animated The Adventures of Price Achmed and the Gregory La Cava-directed Colleen Moore picture His Nibs are among those being dangled in front of us before the full program is announced. None of these are, to my knowledge, set or shot in the Bay Area, but Broncho Billy always screens a number of films produced by the Niles Essanay studio which the museum is named for and primarily devoted to.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has also announced, if only through a fundraising letter to members and friends of the festival, that a shot-in-San Francisco silent film called The Last Edition is expected to screen at it's annual Castro Theatre event in July. Another film, Allan Dwan's 1916 vehicle for Douglas Fairbanks called The Half-Breed, will also have its world premiere in a new restoration at that festival; according to Geoffrey Bell's The Golden Gate and the Silver Screen it was filmed at least partially near Boulder Creek in Santa Cruz County. A third title mentioned in the mailing, The Joyless Street, was filmed in Germany, of course, by G.W. Pabst in his pre-Pandora's Box days. The full program is expected to be announced May 23.

If you can't make it to Niles tonight, there are quite a few Frisco Bay-shot films screening tonight at the Victoria in the San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival. These are not silent-era films, but some of them are hilarious. I got quite a kick out of the dark comedy in Robb Grimes's two entries, Come To The Bridge and So Long And Thanks For All The Popcorn, both filmed at the sadly-shuttered Bridge Theatre. In fact, I believe the marquee there still has the letters of the latter title emblazoned for everyone traveling down Geary Street to see.

HOW: Old San Francisco and The Destruction of San Francisco will screen from 16mm prints, while A Trip Down Market Street will screen from a 35mm print. All will be accompanied by Greg Pane at the piano.

Peter Pan (1924)

WHO: Anna May Wong has a very small but very memorable role as Tiger Lily in this.

WHAT: The silent version of J.M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up is for my money still the best screen adaptation of this famous tale. Yes, we all know the Disney version but the Paramount version directed by Herbert Brenon is far more faithful to Barrie's stage original. (Barrie scholars have written that the playwright in fact was dissatisfied with the film for being too faithful to his stagings; he was hoping Hollywood technologies would be used to further expand the scope of his play, but his suggestions went unused.)

One convention of Peter Pan performances was the casting of a young woman in the title role, for "purely practical" reasons as Heidi de Vries puts it: "girls were lighter in the harnesses that were required to lift them up into the air for the flying effects." Brenon's fidelity to staged versions extended to this convention, and 17-year-old Betty Bronson was given the Peter Pan role in his film. An in-the-know audience can't help but recognize the lesbian implications of this casting choice, given that both Wendy (played by Mary Brian) and Tiger Lily are more explicitly (if unrequitedly) romantically interested in Peter in this version than in Disney's. Although Anna May Wong has few scenes as Tiger Lily, in one of them she memorably rubs noses with Bronson affectionately, an action which is clearly meant to be a stand-in for a kiss. So while this isn't the first on-screen interracial, same-sex kiss, it may be the closest a 1920s film came to such a portrayal. At any rate it's probably the only silent film example of face-to-face contact between a white woman in male drag, and a Chinese-American woman in costume as an Indian from a fictitious tribe.

(Speaking of which, although the portrayals of the tribe is based on the stereotypes held by a playwright who knew of America only through what he read, such as the works of James Fenimore Cooper, there's nothing nearly as cringe-inducing as what the 1953 cartoon did with these characters. Still, if you bring children to the screening, it would be a good opportunity to talk to them about racial stereotypes and the use of actors of one ethnicity to portray another.)

WHERE/WHEN: Two screenings today only at the Balboa Theatre, the first a 4:00 PM "Family Matinee" and the second as part of the Balboa's annual Birthday Bash, celebrating 87 years of this stalwart movie house festivities starting at 7PM but Peter Pan starting well after that, if previous years are an indication.

WHY: The Balboa's Birthday Bash is one of the most underrated silent film events of the calendar year, especially when it comes to value for money. For a regular ticket price every attendee gets to see a feature film and shorts with live musical accompaniment, as well as other live entertainment as well as a chance to win terrific prizes for knowing silent film trivia. Not to mention the complimentary cake and door prizes, which when I attended two years ago were worth more than the ticket price to begin with!

If you liked seeing Anna May Wong shine in a small role in The Thief of Bagdad at the most recent San Francisco silent film event, the Silent Winter held two weeks ago, you'll definitely want to see a glimpse of her again here. Of course she's also in Shanghai Express at the Roxie today, but it's quite possible for a dedicated cinephile with a free Sunday to make it to screenings of both that and Peter Pan. The next chance to see Wong on screen I'm aware of will be April 13th at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's theatre, where she appears in an Earthquake-themed drama called Old San Francisco from 1927. The Niles calendar for March is also up.

Other silent film events on the horizon include this Friday's showing of Safety Last and Cops in the currently-running Cinequest festival in San Jose, and, just announced, the San Francisco Film Society's first announcement for its upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival: a May 7th Castro Theatre screening of the German expressionist showcase Waxworks with live music by Mike Patton, Scott Amendola, Matthias Bossi and William Winant. I'll admittedly be attending this less as a silent film fan but as a longtime fan of other musical projects these men have been involved in, including Faith No More, Mr. Bungle and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.

HOW: 35mm print, with music performed by accomplished silent film piano accompanist Frederick Hodges.

City Girl (1930)

WHO: F.W. Murnau directed this, his final of three films he shot in the United States of America.

WHAT: Originally intended by Murnau to be entitled Our Daily Bread, this film was substantially altered by the Fox Studio without the director's involvement, and released as City Girl, in both part-talkie and silent versions. Only the silent version remains extant, and although it's certainly the Murnau film that feels the most like other Hollywood films (it fits snugly into a tradition of films involving women uprooted by marriage and placed into a more traditional, rural setting, also including Mantrap, The Canadian, The Wind, and A House Divided, just to name a few from the late twenties or early thirties that I've seen or written about in the past several months) it retains quite a bit of the director's inherent poetry. It's not that strange that a certain minority Murnau fans even prefer it to his canonized masterpiece Sunrise, which it invites comparisons to as it reverses the latter's scenario in a few crucial ways.

WHERE/WHEN: Program starts 7:30 PM tonight only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont.

WHY: If you were among the several hundred people who watched the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation of Faust a week ago, your reaction to Murnau's final film shot in his homeland of Germany, may have been something along the lines of "More! Now!" (Yes, that's basically how the director's name is pronounced). If so, you didn't have to wait too long. 

HOW: With a pair of short comedies, the animated Big Chief Koko and the live-action Isn't Life Terrible, all on 16mm prints, with live music by Jon Mirsalis (a great podcast interview with Mirsalis is found here by the way).

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.