SFFILM 61: Day 8: I Was Born, But...

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began last week and runs through April 17th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

Image from I Was Born, But... supplied by SFFILM

I Was Born, But... (JAPAN: Yasujiro Ozu, 1932)
playing: 8:00 tonight at the Castro Theatre

What to say about I Was Born, But...? It's one of my very favorite Ozu films, one of my favorite silent films, heck, one of my favorite films of all time. As I wrote in my essay for the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival screening:

Usually described as a comedy, I Was Born, But… has been compared to Hal Roach’s Our Gang series. Yet it is much more, reflecting a tumultuous 1930s Japan being shorn of its traditions. The film focuses on the family of a typical white-collar worker (“salaryman”), his stay-at-home wife, and two school-age sons, who have just moved from Tokyo’s crowded center to an unfinished suburban development. As the boys struggle to find a place in the pecking order among neighborhood kids, they outwit the dandified young Taro and his bullying protector with their wily antics, only to be humiliated when their father plays jester to his boss, who happens to be Taro’s father. Ozu uses schoolboy politics to mock the hypocrisies of adult hierarchies. 

I haven't watched I Was Born, But... since that SFSFF showing, so I'm excited to finally revisit it tonight in 35mm. The musical accompaniment at the Castro is Blonde Redhead, a band I don't think I ever listened to in their 1990s heyday, but whose somewhat Sonic Youth-esque album Fake Can Be Just as Good I've been listening to a bit over the past year or so. I'm not sure how the pairing of a New York band with roots in noise punk, and a boisterous but thoughtful silent comedy are going to gel, but I'm almost always up for giving the San Francisco International Film Festival's annual silent film/indie rocker mash-ups a try in the hopes of another sublime night like Dengue Fever & the Lost World.

Since 2011, I've been pleased to have near-annual chances to see Ozu's silent films at the Castro Theatre, thanks to the SF Silent Film Festival. They showed Tokyo Chorus in 2013, Dragnet Girl in 2014, That Night's Wife in 2016, and it was just the other week announced they'll be showing another one, his final silent An Inn in Tokyo, on the second day of its now-expanded-to-five-day 2018 festival. As an Ozu completist I love having opportunities to see on such a large screen these also-excellent films, but I have to admit the loyalty to two Japanese directors (the other being Teinosuke Kinugasa, who has seen two films show over the years), as much as I like them, gives me second thoughts when I reflect that the festival hasn't shown any films by the likes of Mikio Naruse, Kenji Mizoguchi, etc. So I was thrilled to see that for the first time SFSFF will show two films from Japan in 2018: An Inn in Tokyo and Policeman, which for more than ten years I've regretted missing at the PFA's Tomu Uchida retrospective. This means there will be an unprecedented three films from Asia in this year's SFSFF, the third being A Throw of Dice from India. It looks like a truly wonderful festival for a silent film lover like myself, with only two features selected (opening night film The Man Who Laughs and An Inn in Tokyo) that I've seen before, and the latter only on a French-intertitled VHS tape from Le Video. According to the Film on Film Foundation calendar, ten of the festival's twenty feature-length selections, as well as one full shorts program, will screen in 35mm prints; these include the Ozu & Uchida films as well as some of my most-eagerly anticipated selections like Jean Grémillon's The Lighthouse Keepers, Rex Ingram's Mare Nostrum introduced by Kevin Brownlow, the Tom Mix Western No Man's Gold, and an Italian film called Trappola which will be screening with footage of Market Street footage after the 1906 earthquake, filmed by the same brothers who filmed the famous A Trip Down Market Street just a few days before; this newly-uncovered footage will re-premiere digitally at a long-sold-out Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum screening this coming Saturday.

SFFILM61 Day 8
Other festival options: Tonight's your last chance to see The Shape of a Surface: Experimental Shorts program of 16mm works by some of the great modern practicioners of hand-made, medium-specific analog moving images. I already mentioned how the pair of the late Paul Clipson's films in the program are substitutes for two films that couldn't be finished onto 16mm prints in time for the festival, after his shocking February death. Since then I learned that another two films in the program, Pablo Mazzolo's NN and Jennifer Saparzadeh's Nu Dem, were originally intended to screen in 16mm (like the other seven films showing tonight will be) but that the sole available release prints were damaged in one case and destroyed in transit in another, thus necessitating digital presentation at the Roxie tonight. The same venue hosts the final SFFILM screening of No Date, No Signature, which I profiled yesterday, tonight as well, while BAMPFA hosts the second of three SFFILM screenings of Mila Turajlić's The Other Side of Everything, which she is expected to attend along with her filmmaking subject: her activist mother Srbijanka Turajlić.

Non-SFFILM option: In addition to being an SFFILM venue tonight, BAMPFA is hosting another installment of its Wednesday afternoon lecture and screening series led by UC Berkeley professor Anne Nesbit. The theme of the series this semester has been "Eisenstein and His Contemporaries", complementing the evening/weekend Sergei Eisenstein retrospective at the venue that will wrap up April 21st with a double-shot of Ivan the Terrible Part I & II (with a few minutes of surviving test footage from the never-made Part III). I've been able to catch a few of the screenings and lectures, and got a lot out of both viewing and lectures for Pudovkin's The Battle of St. Petersburg and Eisenstein's The General Line, as well as the lecture-less showing of the Swiss-made rarity Misery and Fortune of Women (shown half digitally, half in 35mm). But nothing compared to finally fillng one of my greatest cinematic gaps Alexander Nevsky in a great 35mm print. This is the film & print that will be discussed and be screened at BAMPFA today at 3:10. If you're free at that time you should definitely go. It's been called a masterpiece enough times to be a cliché by now, but it's true.

The Golden Chance (1915)

Screen capture from Image DVD

WHO: Cecil B. DeMille directed, produced, edited and (with Jeanie Macpherson) co-wrote this film.

WHAT: This is one of my very favorite DeMille pictures, and I even selected it as object of study for a collaborative blogging project several years ago (that seems to have propagated an image to the wikipedia page for Japanese actor Yutake Abe, if nothing else more lasting). Later that year, my friend Laura Horak wrote an article about it and a pair of other Cecil B. DeMille films (as well as one directed by his brother William) released on DVD for The Moving Image journal. Here's an excerpt from her article:

The story follows Mary Denby (Cleo Ridgely), a "Cinderella of the Lower East Side," who escapes from grueling tenement life and her abusive husband, Steve (Horace B. Carpenter), for one magical night. The film is surprisingly explicit about the way money and sex are intertwined. Seeking work as a seamstress, Mary enters Mr. and Mrs. Hillary's "House of Enchantment," where they convince her to play the part of a socialite for a night, unaware that her real purpose is to charm a young millionaire, Roger Manning (Wallace Reid), into investing in Mr. Hillary's business venture. At first, Mary is happy to play her role in exchange for one night of luxurious clothes, shoes, and jewelry but, even after suspecting the nature of the exchange, desperate poverty forces her to accept the money. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Edison Theatre in Niles, CA, as part of the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival.

WHY: The Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, while perhaps not as glamorous or public-transit-accessible (or expensive!) as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, deserves equal consideration from Frisco Bay silent film fans. Its film programming is in many ways just as strong- and for film purists stronger -, its musical accompaniments not as flashy but equally adept and professional, and its extra features, including a walking tour and a train ride, represent a world away from the hustle and bustle of Castro Street.

Additional screenings at this year's festival include rarities and proven favorites from the Essanay Studios which made Niles a movie hub for a few years a century ago, and a pair of films starring the Gish sisters, Nell Gwyn with forgotten Dorothy and a masterpiece (directed by Swedish import auteur Victor Seastrom) The Scarlet Letter with the legendary Lillian.

Of this year's festival screenings, I'm probably most interested in seeing Behind the Front, a Wallace Beery war film whose title seems to refer to the 1919 film that was the big discovery of the SF Silent Film Festival earlier this month for me and for quite a few other festgoers, Behind the Door. Beery played a villain in that, and stole the show out from under Louise Brooks in the festival opener Beggars of Life. I'm especially anxious to see it because it screens with Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret, a 35mm made-in-Niles production released just last year, but still unscreened in San Francisco (it's hard to find venues willing and able to show a modern-day 35mm silent short film). 

If you can't make it this weekend, the July Niles schedule has been announced and includes a Gary Cooper Western, a Clara Bow flapper film, a Lon Chaney circus tragedy, and much, much, much more. July schedules for the Stanford, the Castro, YBCA and BAMPFA are also online, so start planning your month if you haven't already!

HOW: Screens from a tinted 16mm print, along with 35mm prints of 2 Niles-produced shorts Broncho Billy's Wild Ride and Slippery Slim and the Impersonator, all with live keyboard accompaniment from Jon Mirsalis.

Brian Darr: IOHTE

Screen capture from Columbia DVD

Thanks for reading the 2015 edition of I Only Have Two Eyes, my annual survey of Frisco Bay cinephiles' favorite cinematic revivals seen in local cinematheques, arthouses, museum screening rooms, movie palaces and other public spaces between January 1 and December 31, 2015. The hub page for this year's results will point you to the selections and, in many cases, eloquent write-ups, by sixteen esteemed allies in appreciation of the screen, the programmers, and of course the films that could be seen in Frisco Bay venues last year. Though not all by one person, as the name of the survey should suggest.

I compile a survey that eschews new releases in favor of focusing on our cinematic heritage not because I don't have interest in new films (you can see some of my own favorites listed here), but because I feel there are plenty of others covering that ground. And, perhaps as importantly, because I feel that the usual film rankings often obscure the circumstances under which they're viewed. So many variables play into how a viewer receives a film: method of delivery, reaction (or lack thereof) of fellow viewers, preconceptions before viewing, mood of viewer, among others competing with "quality of the film" in shaping a judgment. I know there are fastidious critics who take care to rewatch a film multiple times, often in multiple ways, before committing it to a top ten list, but though I admire the approach, it feels too much like a vain attempt to cram opinions into boxes made for facts for me to adopt it myself. Rather I prefer to present a year-in-review that emphasizes the unique nature of every viewing of a film. In-cinema screenings of older films are easier for most of us to think of as unique, I feel (in part because they very often are!)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

I suspect the timing and placement of my first-ever viewing of The Honeymoon Killers couldn't have been better for appreciation of this exceedingly disturbing 1969 portrait of the murderous Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck. It was the final film shown at the January 2015 edition of Eddie Muller's Noir City film festival, pushing an audience who'd just taken in a week full of mysteries, thrillers and melodramas made in the classical Hollywood style (square frame, presentational acting style, continuity cutting, the works) out into the world on a completely different note. It's the only film written and directed by opera composer Leonard Kastle, with a few scenes filmed by a very young Martin Scorsese until the producers determined his methods ate up too much of the film's quick schedule and extremely low budget. Kastle created a raw and unflinching window into a notoriously lethal marriage, filmed mostly in long takes, in cars and in non-descript dwellings, giving the feeling of a nightmarish home movie exploding in widescreen on the the Castro screen. I felt shell-shocked after the screening and felt like I wouldn't want to watch another noir again for at least another year (although this wore off eventually, certainly in time for me to see the majority of screenings in the Castro's summer noir series hosted by Elliot Lavine.)

2015 was the last year, or should I say half-year, of the Pacific Film Archive's existence at its 16-year "temporary" location at 2575 Bancroft, across from a lovely Julia Morgan- & Bernard Maybeck-designed gymnasium. I witnessed so many outstanding screenings inside this corrugated shed, and though the new location holds great promise, I'm sure I'll miss the cozy purple-cushioned seats and the walks from the BART station through the forested campus quite a bit, if not as much as I'll miss some of the staff that was not invited to make the hyperspace jump to the new screening space when it opened this past week. Luckily I took great advantage of the old space during its final few months, sampling great retrospectives for filmmakers like Billy Wilder, Gregory Markopoulos, John Stahl, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Victor Erice. But I think my favorite PFA screening of 2015 was a mystical film completely unknown to me before viewing it in February: The Day is Longer Than the Night, with the director Lana Gogoberidze on hand to discuss her poetic, pictoral approach to national narrative (my tweet at the time), in a nation that didn't exist independent of the Soviet Union at the time she made it, and the fallout from its success at a crucial moment in Soviet film history. I wish I'd been able to take in a lot more of the PFA's monumental survey of Georgian film during late 2014 and early 2015, but I'm sure glad I at least caught this precious work.

Screen capture from Lionsgate DVD

There's no getting around it: now that I no longer live three blocks from the Roxie Theatre (since moving to Grant Avenue almost two years ago) I don't find myself there nearly as often as I used to. It may just be an optical illusion that has me thinking there's not quite as many can't-miss screenings happening there since I moved away- at least for a film-on-film proponent (though not purist). I did get to see perfectly-projected 35mm prints of Brandy In the Wilderness, Takeshi Miike's Audition, and a set of Quay Brothers shorts there in 2015, and am glad that Polyester screens in 35mm AND Odorama tonight (though I'll be helping present The Fall of The I-Hotel at the nearby Artists' Television Access instead). But my favorite recent-ish screening there has definitely been last March's showing of Kathryn Bigelow's solo directorial debut Near Dark, a post-punk vampire variant set in rural American states where, (as I tweeted after the screening) "blood flows as cheaply as beer & gasoline". I think it's my new favorite Bigelow film. The screening was presented by the Film On Film Foundation, which paired the film with the schlocky Stephanie Rothman grindhouser Terminal Island, but my mind really connects it with a more closely-kindred film seen at the Castro a month and a half before: Abel Ferrara's 1993 Body Snatchers remake.

More than fourteen years ago, after I saw my first Budd Boetticher Westerns midway through a Pacific Film Archive series, I started to visually devour as many as I could get my eyes on, whether via VHS tapes or Turner Classc Movies airings (at my neighbor's house, since I've never subscribed to that channel myself). But for some reason I'd always held that series opener The Tall T (pictured at the top of this post) at arm's length, in the hopes of another theatrical opportunity arising. Meanwhile, the movie was released on DVD, and then went out of print, and then back in again (this time only as an on-demand DVD-R), with no such screenings appearing in this cowboy-hat-averse region until this past April when the intrepid Yerba Buena Center for the Arts finally booked it as part of a very fine Western series (couched as "Noir Westerns" to help lure in horse opera skeptics). It proved itself to be the most formally and narratively "perfect" of Boetticher's Ranown films made with unassuming star Randolph Scott. A case in which my patience really paid off in a tremendous first-time viewing.

Screen capture from Parlour DVD

"If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You might as well be dead. You're not even a citizen of the United States." The greatest film I saw at the San Francisco International Film Festival this past Spring was a 45-year-old revival of the sole feature film directed by its star, who also wrote the screenplay and won an award at the Venice Film Festival back in 1970. There's not much new I can say about Barbara Loden's Wanda in a world where Bérénice Reynaud's essential Senses of Cinema article on the film exists, but I will add that Rachel Kushner's introduction to the Castro Theatre congregation not only quoted a passage from her novel The Flamethrowers that discussed the film, and gave shout-outs to Frisco's fallen repertory houses (the York, the Strand, the Red Vic), but debunked one notion in Reynaud's article: that Wanda never screened in the United States beyond an initial New York run. The SFIFF catalog refers to at least 1970 screening in San Francisco, and Kushner spoke eloquently of how her mother saw the film in an Oregon arthouse and always maintained it was the best film ever made. Watching with those words ringing in my ears, it was hard to disagree, at least for the 102 minutes it played, which is the most I can ever ask of a film anyway.

This past May's San Francisco Silent Film Festival was filled with gems, and I didn't even have time to see all of them, I'm sure. Most of my festival favorites (Ben-Hur, the Swallow and the Titmouse, the Bert Williams presentation) have been mentioned by other IOHTE contributors this year, but since nobody else mentioned another silent film event that happened earlier that month and opened my eyes equally wide to the place of pre-talkie cinema history in modern life, I'm going to use this slot to give it some attention. It's an experimental silent film called The Big Stick/An Old Reel by Massachusetts filmmaker Saul Levine, who made a rare Frisco Bay public appearance courtesy of an SF Cinematheque co-presentation at Oakland's more underground Black Hole Cinematheque, an admission-always-free screening space that will celebrate its fifth year of operation later in 2016. The Big Stick/An Old Reel is quite simply one of the most effective "found footage" films I've ever witnessed, and a 10-minute manifesto of how "old" films don't survive simply to be seen, but to be applied to our lives. Between 1967 and 1973 (it took him six years to perfect), Levine expressed this by splicing together footage of police trying to quell a mass protest, shot with his regular-8mm camera off a television broadcast, with fragments from 8mm reduction prints of pertinent Charlie Chaplin comedies. Namely 1914's Getting Acquainted, in which the Little proto-Tramp evades Edgar Kennedy's Keystone Cop as he interacts with Mabel Normand, Mack Swain, Phyllis Allen Cecile Arnold and Harry McCoy (strangely, much of the literature identifies this film as In The Park, which Chaplin filmed in San Francisco with an entirely different cast for Essanay in 1915), and 1917's Easy Street, in which Chaplin himself plays the cop- and a pretty outrageously abusive one. As if juxtaposing these three sources together didn't create an intense enough layering, Levine creates even more with additional interventions such as blackening parts of the image and varying the rhythm of the cuts. Indeed the very nature of 8mm splices, which leave a highly noticeable scarring on the frame (perhaps exacerbated when blown up to 16mm, as I believe the print I saw was?) creates more texture in an already-dense film. And context adds yet another level of layering. Watching cycles of violence so embedded into a film print in 2015 Oakland of all times and places felt like a particularly apropos summoning.

Screen capture from Universal Vault DVD

Last year the Stanford Theatre provided opportunities to watch all of the feature-length talking pictures Ernst Lubitsch directed up through 1939, and I took advantage of the opportunity to see the two from this period that had eluded me up to now: The Man I Killed, his sole pure drama during this period, and which is also known as Broken Lullaby, and the film I now think might be the summation of his powers, the 1937 Marlene Dietrich/Herbert Marshall/Melvyn Douglas love triangle Angel (which could also bear the title Broken Lullaby, as I noted in a post-viewing tweet). It was released after the longest period of apparent inactivity in Lubitsch's career as a director, which I can't help but notice coincides with the period of strict enforcement of the Hays Code (the precise date was July 1, 1934, two weeks before the end of principle photography on Lubitsch's prior directorial effort The Merry Widow). It's as if he needed a period of time to regroup and rethink how to extend his "Touch" into a more censorious Hollywood environment. He found some marvelous solutions, creating a masterpiece that walks a fine line between marital drama and aching comedy that somehow befits the strange combination of satisfaction and melancholy I feel at the thought that I'll never again see a 1930s Lubitsch feature for the first time. At least there are still a couple from the 1940s and a slew from the 1910s and 1920s I can look forward to making the acquaintance of...

The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco presented its third annual tribute to a filmmaker from "the beautiful country"; after Pasolini in 2013 and Bertolucci in 2014 this year's maestro was Vittorio De Sica, still world famous of course for Bicycle Thieves, but whose lesser-known works like Shoeshine and Miracle in Milan are more beloved to me personally. The second Castro screening that September day was another for me to add to that list: Gold of Naples, a wise and witty portmanteau film made on the streets of De Sica's hometown, featuring six (approximately-) equally-wonderful Giuseppe Marotta short story adaptations. Sofia Loren plays a philandering wife with a misplaced wedding ring. Silvia Mangano a prostitute who takes revenge on a self-loathing nobleman. De Sica himself plays an inveterate gambler (a role that his friends considered his most autobiographical) and Totò (another Neapolitan) a put-upon clown. Other segments portray a neighborhood problem-solver and a haunting funeral procession for a dead child. Each vignette could stand on its own as a top-notch short film; together they conspire to create a filmic work worthy of standing with Rossellini's Paisan and Pasolini's Trilogy of Life films as proof that Italians have understood the power of portmanteau better than anyone.

Screen capture from Mileston/Oscilloscope DVD

I knew I'd be filling a major gap in my understanding of documentary history when I went to a 35mm showing of Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity at the Rafael Film Center. I didn't realize, however, just how much I'd learn from, be moved by, and even, dare I say, entertained by, this 1969 epic (over four hours, not including intermission) of cultural history and its intersection with "harder" political history. Ophuls, in San Rafael to receive a Mill Valley Film Festival tribute and to introduce a newer film as well as this one, sat and watched this one along with the audience, as if he hadn't already viewed it countless times before. Here he tears apart the myths associated with resistance in Nazi-occupied France, not as a radical but as a sly provocateur, using techniques that have since becomes hallmarks of successful documentary: the incorporation of disturbing "ephemeral" film footage (years before The Atomic Cafe solidified an American vogue for such), and of "enough rope to hang themselves" interviews like that of a merchant asked to explain why he took out an a newspaper ad proclaiming himself "100% French". Few of the interviews were as self-incriminating as this one, but they all wove together a damning self-portrait of a nation still unreconciled with its past. I'll never watch a Maurice Chevalier film in quite the same way again.

Finally, another French film that might never have been made without the unwitting participation of Nazi Germany: Fritz Lang's only film completed during his brief stay in Paris after fleeing Hitler's Germany (in style), albeit less abruptly than he'd maintain in later interviews. The film was Liliom, a 1934 adaptation of the same Ferenc Molnar play that Frank Borzage had made with Charles Farrell in 1930. The Stanford Theatre screened both back-to-back as part of a rapturous 100-year anniversary  tribute to the Fox Film Corporation, providing opportunities for me to rewatch rarely-revived personal favorites like the Borzage Liliom and Henry King's State Fair, and to see great works like John Ford's Steamboat Round the Bend for the first time. But none I'm as glad I made sure to trek to Palo Alto for as Lang's Liliom, which emphasizes the fatalistic elements of Molnar's play while presenting a "poetic realist" setting for its events to unfold in. Charles Boyer is particularly wonderful here as the title character, effectively differentiating his performance between different phases of life in a way that Farrell didn't even attempt. And the scene in which he watches his life unfold via a film projection is one of Lang's most inspired ever. Apart from a few late-career Satyajit Ray films co-produced by Soprofilms or Canal+, this is the first French film (made under the Erich Pommer-led Fox Europa) that I can recall the Stanford screening in the decade-and-a-half I've been paying attention to the venue's programming. I'd certainly be happy to see more.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

20th Century Fox DVD screen capture

WHO: William Fox produced this film and F.W. Murnau directed it.

WHAT: One of those rarities of cinema: a technical marvel with a living, beating heart. As I wrote in my 2009 essay on this film when it screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Valentine's Day event:

Charles Rosher, one of the top cinematographers in Hollywood, had spent time with Murnau in Berlin serving as an unofficial consultant on Faust, the director’s most effects-laden film to date. Rosher worked alongside Murnau as a student as much as an advisor, learning about the innovative German camera methods that amazed American critics and filmmakers. 

Rosher recruited Ben-Hur cinematographer Karl Struss to help him shoot Sunrise on Rochus Gliese’s elaborate sets. Gliese built a vast indoor city set designed to appear even larger through the use of forced perspective. It cost $200,000—nearly the entire budget of a typical program picture of the day. He also created a studio-bound marsh with an uneven floor that could not accommodate a dolly setup. Instead, tracks were attached to the ceiling and Struss filmed upside-down, a maneuver Rosher had observed on the Faust set. It was only one of many radical techniques used in Sunrise. Nearly every shot in the film involves a striking effect, whether from an unusual light source, a superimposition, or a complex camera movement. Yet each is motivated by allegiance to the story and its emotions. Murnau told an interviewer, “I do not take trick scenes from unusual positions just to get startling effects. To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind one is watching the events on screen.”

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Stanford Theatre at 3:50 PM.

WHY: The Stanford is halfway through its most appealing and ambitious program in at least the past 18 months: a tribute to the twenty year reign of the Fox Film Corporation, which began releasing films in 1915 and ceased in 1935, when it merged with the lesser-known upstart Twentieth Century Pictures. So far the series has brought little-screened films featuring stars such as Clara Bow, Will Rogers, Spencer Tracy, and Janet Gaynor, the luminous star of Sunrise who rose from her roots in San Francisco (where she went to Polytechnic High School and was employed by the Castro Theatre) to become the first Best Actress Oscar winner for this film as well as Seventh Heaven and Street Angel. All three of these masterpieces will be screened at the Stanford in 35mm prints as part of its Silent Sunday series, and I can hardly imagine a better introduction to most of these films if you've never seen them before, or to the Stanford if you've never traveled to Palo Alto to visit it before. Gaynor also features in The Johnstown Flood, the rarest of the Stanford's Silent Sunday offerings (on a double bill with Seventh Heaven December 6th) and Lucky Star, which screens with Murnau's lovely final film made in the United States, City Girl, to close the Fox Film Corporation series December 20th as the Stanford moves into its traditional Christmastime screenings: The Shop Around the Corner, It's A Wonderful Life, etc.

Dennis James, Wurlitzer organist extraordinaire, has been performing live music to all the Stanford's Silent Sundays screenings thus far, and will continue to do so for the final three Sundays of the series. Today he gets a week off, as the Stanford has elected to screen Sunrise not with live music but with the pioneering sound-on-film Movietone score that was prepared for the film's original 1927 release in the United States. This score is beloved by many fans of Sunrise but I find it merely adequate and more interesting as a historical curiosity than as an artistic statement. I'm swayed by Janet Bergstrom's research that indicates it was quite possibly not, as is frequently assumed today, prepared by famous composer Hugo Riesenfeld, who definitely composed the musical score for Murnau's swan song Tabu: a Story of the South Seas. To me, it sounds like a mostly-pedestrian compilation score whose tendency to be overwhelmed by non-musical sound effects destroys some of Murnau's poetic treatment of soundless sound in the film (such as in the scene of George O'Brien reacting to an off-screen dog bark, as pictured above). I always found it interesting that Dennis James has so frequently spoken of his insistence on performing originally-composed scores to silent films for which scholars have found them, but often ignores his own rules when it comes to Movietone or Vitaphone soundtracks, having played his own scores to Sunrise and to West of Zanzibar when at the SF Silent Film Festival in 2009. In the case of Sunrise, perhaps he feels (and if so, I agree) that the Movietone score that premiered in New York is less sacrosanct than the live score performed in Los Angeles would be were it not lost to the sands of time.

In fact more notable on today's Silent Sunday docket is the presentation of the almost universally beloved Movietone score to John Ford's heartbreaking, Sunrise-esque World War I picture Four Sons, which was to the disappointment of many excluded from the 2007 DVD release of the film. Rarely screened in any form, Four Sons will be for many attendees today the real gem of the program; I've only seen it once myself and never in a cinema, but still I can imagine myself being among them despite my deep, abiding love for Sunrise.

Other upcoming Stanford screenings of particular note include the wonderful Me & My Gal this Wednesday and Thursday, my favorite Janet Gaynor talkie (heck, one of my all-time favorite films as well) State Fair on December 18-19, and most unusually a December 4-5 triple bill of the rumored-excellent Zoo in Budapest along with Seventh Heaven/Street Angel/Lucky Star director Frank Borzage's bizarre 1930 version of Ferenc Molnár's play Liliom as well as Fritz Lang's 1934 version (which I have yet to see). The last of these is a real surprise to see on a Stanford calendar, as it's not a Fox film at all but Lang's sole film made in France on his way out of Germany and into Hollywood. In my fifteen years or so of following the Stanford calendars I'm positive this is the first time I've seen a French film booked for a theatre that in my experience focuses exclusively on classic Hollywood and British productions with the two notable auteurist exceptions of Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. Given that I have to stretch to imagine any other currently-operating Frisco Bay cinemas willing to book a 1934 French film in 35mm, I welcome this development wholeheartedly.

Luckily, although the Liliom/Zoo in Budapest/Liliom bill screens on the same day as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's December 5th "Day of Silents", it also screens the day before, so it won't be necessary to miss a rare 35mm screening of the Anna May Wong vehicle Piccadilly, or the other offerings at the Castro Theatre that day. I'm excited to revisit Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate, this time with Alloy Orchestra accompaniment and introduced by Tracey Goessel, whose new Fairbanks biography The First King of Hollywood I'm in the midst of devouring. Also to see rare documentary footage of China and a Harry Houdini feature The Grim Game. And if you've never seen Marcel L'Herbier's L'inhumaine on a cinema screen it's worth it for the set design alone. Alloy Orchestra takes on musical duties for that one as well; the rest go to the terrific pianist Donald Sosin.

The Day of Silents is just the first cinephile-catnip program on a December full of goodies at the Castro Theatre. Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre with Michael Mann's The Keep, Noir City Xmas pairing The Reckless Moment and Kiss of Death, December 17th Stop Making Sense and Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave and a twisted Christmas booking of Brazil and Eyes Wide Shut are some of the more enticing all-35mm double-bills there this month. The venue also hosts the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco show December 9th and will ring in January with a set of Alfred Hitchcock masterpieces. But even more than all of those, I'm finding myself most excited for a digital presentation of a San Francisco cult classic that deserves to be far better known than it is. I'm speaking of course of Curt McDowell's Thundercrack!, starring (and scripted and lit by) the great underground film icon George Kuchar. It screens twice with director McDowell's sister Melinda and his frequent collaborator Mark Ellinger on hand at (I'm told) both shows, but only the evening show will be hosted by the one and only Peaches Christ. Even if you have no awareness of Thundercrack!, the most entertaining "Old Dark House"-style quasi-pornographic art film ever to get Fox News in a tizzy, this is a rare opportunity to see a Peaches Christ show for less than $20. Mark December 11th on your calendar- in ink!

There's a lot more happening in December at other Frisco Bay venues, but for now I'd better sign off. But in case I don't have time to put up another post before this Tuesday, December 1st, I want to point out that, with the help of other Artists' Television Access volunteers, I'll be helping to present a free 16mm screening of Curtis Choy's untoppably topical 1983 documentary The Fall of the I-Hotel at the Noe Valley Public Library, and I hope you can make it out that evening.

HOW: Sunrise screens on a 35mm double-bill with Four Sons.

Ménilmontant (1926)

WHO: This was written and directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff, and starred his wife Nadia Sibirskaïa who, according to Monica Nolan's just-published SF Silent Film Festival essay, may lay some claim to being a co-director on at least some of their collaborations.

WHAT: Though I just saw this a couple weeks ago, I'm in a rush, so let me quote my friend Jeremy Matthews, who just ranked this film #14 on a list of the 100 Best Silent Films which made me realize just how similar our tastes are (although he loves Buster Keaton far more than I even do):

Watching Ménilmontant is a deeply felt experience. Impressionist filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff takes the dreamlike qualities of silent cinema to their natural conclusion, letting the story float by alongside haunting imagery without any intertitles directing hot to interpret the story. Kirsanoff made only one other film before this bold work, which starts abruptly and brutally with a man murdering a couple, then follows a love triangle involving the dead parents’ two daughters once they’ve grown. For all his cinematic innovations, Kirsanoff is not too hoity-toity to to tug the heartstrings, and a scene with a kind old man on a park bench is one of the most touching you’ll ever see.

WHERE/WHEN: 7PM tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: The beginning of the month saw the tail end of the 20th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which I'm still in the midst of writing my final wrap-up report on. In the meantime, you can check out the preview pieces linked at Keyframe Daily and wrap-ups by Donna Hill, Meredith Brody, Mary Mallory, David Mermelstein, and, if you have the inclination toward the spoken rather than written word, the Cinephiliacs podcast, in which attendees Peter Labuza and Victor Morton discuss several of the screened films. Peter kindly name-checks me in this episode, even though I've been so lax in keeping this blog up-to-date that I haven't even mentioned yet the fact that I was honored to be a guest on a prior episode of his podcast in which we talked about my path into cinephilia, the San Francisco screening scene, and other topics but especially Christopher Maclaine's 1953 masterpiece The End.

I'd wanted to write a post of footnotes about the many points I in retrospect wish I could've expanded upon during our fast-paced discussion, but I have a feeling that's not going to happen which is just as well as I'm very happy with the way the piece came out thanks to Peter's editing, and humbled to be added to his illustrious guest list. I will say one thing about the podcast: that I hope no listener has the impression that I've programmed more than one film for YBCA, that being The Company during last summer's Invasion of the Cinemaniacs series, as Joel Shepherd is handily taking care of that himself (this month's New Filipino Cinema and the upcoming David Cronenberg series prove he knows exactly what he's doing). I've programmed only a little more than that for the San Francisco Public Library, but tomorrow afternoon's free 16mm "ATA @ SFPL" showcase at the Noe Valley Public Library is one I and my co-programmers are particularly proud of.

Steering back to Ménilmontant: it a highlight of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for many people, but I'm glad it's showing again tonight as the second program in the PFA's final 2015 calendar. Final because the PFA will soon be moving its screening space from the "temporary" location it's inhabited at the corner of Bowditch and Bancroft for more the fifteen years. It's final day in the purple-chaired classroom-style room is August 2nd, and the institution is expected to reopen in 2016 at a location on the West side of the UC Berkeley campus, closer to BART and Shattuck Avenue. Glad because it will be great to see it paired with another Kirsanoff/ collaboration Autumn Mists, put into greater context as part of an incredible centennial tribute to La Cinémathèque Française's legendary founder Henri Langlois that also includes rarely-shown films by Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Grémillon, Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Erich von Stroheim and many more, and woven into the fabric of eight weeks of PFA programming that shows its commitment to both expanding the canon and offering chances to reaffirm it in the best possible projection setting as well as ever. This weekend's launching series include tributes to comics W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy and a forgotten silent serial, and later on the venue will host a night of Indian video art and 35mm-heavy Andrei Tarkovsky, John Stahl and Victor Erice retrospectives, the latter paired with a hefty selection of his own favorites drawn from cinema history.

I'm also glad because...

HOW: When Ménilmontant screened at the Castro nearly two weeks ago it showed digitally with a score by the ever-reliable Stephen Horne. This presentation was strong enough to fool at least one filmmaker in the house into thinking it was 35mm, but tonight's screening is a chance to see the real thing: the Cinémathèque Française is supplying a print, which will be able to screen at 18 frames per second rather than the digital standard (unless you're a hobbit) of 24 fps. The musical accompaniment will be by another of my very favorite pianists, Judith Rosenberg, bucking the tradition of silent-era films shown in silence that Langlois is famous for. This is a tradition that barely exists in the Bay Area cinemas, and as a silent-film-music appreciator (and occasional practicioner) it's not one I'm particularly eager to see get a foothold. But I am curious why, if the PFA is not planning to employ Rosenberg to play music for Queen Kelly on July 24th anyway, they don't give us a little sample of this Cinémathèque Française sonic tradition, just to hear what it's like for once.

The Cranes Are Flying (1957)

Screen shot from Criterion DVD

WHO: Mikhail Kalatozov directed this.

WHAT: The Palme d'Or-winning film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958, and the only film from the Soviet Union to ever have won that festival's top prize, unless you count the festival's unusual 2nd year (1946) when eleven films (including Fridrikh Ermler's The Turning Point) shared what was then called the "Grand Prize". The Cranes Are Flying is a technical tour-de-force, especially the bravura cinematography from Sergey Urusevsky, but it's also an emotional powerhouse, its story of young lovers separated by World War II given great resonance through the performances of Aleksey Batalov (who later starred in Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears) and Tatiana Samoilova (who later played Aleksandr Zarkhi's Anna Karenina, and who passed away earlier this year) as the couple asunder.  

WHERE/WHEN: 5:30 today only at the Pacific Film Archive

WHY: Mikhail Kalatozov is one of my favorite filmmakers that I know almost nothing about. I've only seen four of his films, each of them masterpieces, and I know very little of his biography other than that he was born in Tbilisi, Georgia and got his start making silent films in that then-Soviet republic (such as Salt For Svanetia). His follow-up The Nail in the Boot got him in trouble with Moscow authorities, and his career was severely hindered for the next nineteen years (in which he made only three films) but that he made a resurgence in the 1950s, and that The Cranes Are Flying and its follow-up The Letter Never Sent (which I've never seen although it is available on a Criterion DVD) are considered quintessential films of the Khrushchev "thaw" era.  In 1964 he made the phenomenal I Am Cuba, which was denounced in both Cuba and the U.S.S.R. and unseen by the international general public until 1992 when it was presented by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola to agog audiences. By then Kalatozov had been dead nearly twenty years, his final film being a 1969 international co-production starring Sean Connery, Claudia Cardinale and Peter Finch called The Red Tent (another I have not seen).

The four Kalatozov films I'd seen before all screen in an 8-day period at the Pacific Film Archive this week as part of its extended focus on Georgian filmmaking. I unfortunately missed Salt For Svanetia and The Nail In The Boot last Saturday, triply unfortunate because the latter screened with a new-ish documentary on its director called Hurricane Kalatozov. This evening The Cranes Are Flying screens and tomorrow it's I Am Cuba. I was hoping The Letter Never Sent or others of his films might turn up in the next installment of this Georgian focus when it was announced online this week, but I'll have to wait to see if they turn up in the March-April conclusion to the series. Instead, the January and February installments of the series will spotlight the most famous living filmmaking son of Georgia, Otar Iosseliani, one of its most prominent female directors Lana Gogoberidze (who will be at the PFA in person with her films), and a few other odds and ends including reprises of films that particularly impressed PFA-diehards this fall, The White Caravan and Repentance.

The PFA's January-February 2015 schedule also includes the next (last?) installment of the archive's extensive Jean-Luc Godard series, featuring films from the 1990s up until 2010's Film Socialisme. I confirmed with curator Kathy Geritz that the PFA, like most local not-for-profit venues, does not have the technical capability to show Godard's 2 most recent films, which utilize (and indeed push the boundaries of) modern 3D technology. So unless someone brings it to the Castro, the Kabuki, or a link in the Landmark or Camera chains (all of which seem less-than-probable to me), Frisco Bay Godard fans will have to hope they can make it to one of the Rafael Film Center's dwindling screenings if they want to see his latest game-changer Goodbye To Language. Meanwhile there are still five more 35mm prints of Godard films (and a digitally-presented short film called Origins of the 21st Century) to play at the PFA in 2014, including Keep Your Right Up tonight after Cranes Are Flying and Hail Mary tomorrow after I Am Cuba.

Other PFA programs coming in the first months of 2015 include a Billy Wilder series featuring rare 35mm prints of Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend and four of his lesser-seen films, as well as digital presentations of a half-dozen of his most famous directorial efforts plus Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, which he wrote the screenplay for. The African Film Festival returns with a special focus on female filmmakers, including two programs devoted to rarities by Sarah Moldoror, the pioneering classmate of Ousmane Sembène who also worked on The Battle of Algiers before starting her own career as a director. In a separate but related mini-series Mati Diop, the niece of another Senegalese master director Djibril Diop Mambéty, will be on hand to present screenings of Claire Denis's 35 Shots of Rum, which she gave an indelible acting performance in, as well as several of the films she's recently directed. Eric Baudelaire will appear in person to discuss and screen his films.

The first part of the Spring semester's Documentary Voices program will include films by Robert Flaherty, Frederick Wiseman, and the late Harun Farocki. As usual in odd-numbered years, the PFA will host screenings as part of the third International Berkeley Conference on Film and Media, this time collecting silent film scholars to discuss the serial form in silent cinema and as it has captured our attention in the modern era. I can't wait for the screenings of Hollis Frampton's entire Hapax Legomena cycle and of Hazards Of Helen helmer J. P. McGowan's last silent serial The Chinatown Mystery, starring and co-written by John Ford's brother Francis. Finally, Emily Carpenter's Film 50 class, which as usual has a few spaces available to members of the public, involves enough intriguing and rare 35mm screenings that any cinephile with Wednesday afternoons free will want to secure their spots as soon as tickets become available next month.

HOW:  The Cranes Are Flying screens from a 35mm print.

Broncho Billy's Wild Ride (1914)

Publicity photograph provided by Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

WHO: Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson directed and starred in this.

WHAT: A short film featuring Anderson, Marguerite Clayton, True Boardman and a number of local schoolchildren from Niles, California where Anderson's studio was located. David Kiehn's page-turner of a history book, Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company, indicates that part of the story took as inspiration a real-life injury that would haunt Anderson well into his retirement. That book's short synopsis of the plot is as follows: "Billy, an outlaw on trial, escapes from court, but is caught after he saves the judge's daughter on a runaway horse."

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, at 7:30PM.

WHY: I wrote about Niles in a PressPlay/Indiewire article a few years ago, that has for some reason unknown to me be taken down:

Niles nestles against the hills of Fremont, California, 30 miles east of San Francisco and 350 miles north of Los Angeles. Filled with antique shops and humble residences, it’s a town steeped in motion picture history. The first cowboy movie star, G.A. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, and Charlie Chaplin were among those who encamped there to shoot pictures in the mid-1910s, before Hollywood became THE go-to site in California for filmmaking, 

Now, nearly a hundred years later, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum keeps the past alive with weekly Saturday evening screenings of silent movies backed by live musical accompaniments. It’s one of the few public venues where one can regularly see 16mm and 35mm prints of all kinds of American and occasionally European silents.

Tonight's Niles screening is the 500th Saturday night silent film show scheduled at the Museum's Edison Theatre since it was refurbished and reopened in 2005. 51 Saturdays per year (the only annual week off is the San Francisco Silent Film Festival weekend), film prints show on a very regular basis. Upcoming 16mm feature-film shows include The Lost World November 29th, and in December, parts 1 & 2 of Fritz Lang's epic Spiders (it's apparently the season for Lang's silent epics as the Castro shows Metropolis tonight digitally and the Berkeley Underground Film Society brings Die Nibelungen in two parts tonight and tomorrow), and finally for 2014, the delightful Colleen Moore film I dragged my family to the last time a Niles Saturday show fell on Christmas, Ella Cinders.

But one-reel and two-reel films that were the specialty of a studio like the one in Niles a hundred years ago, and programs made up of these are particularly popular today. Every month the museum programs at least one Saturday of silent comedy (November 22 is Chaplin in The Rink, Buster Keaton in The Boat, the Thanksgiving classic Pass the Gravy and Laurel & Hardy in Leave 'Em Laughing, while December brings Chaplin's Easy Street, Keaton's The High Sign and a pair of Christmas-themed shorts Their Ain't No Santa Claus and the anarchic masterpiece Big Business.) Tonight's program is an extra-special shorts program made up entirely of films shot in Niles, most around 100 years ago, including, in addition to Broncho Billy's Wild Ride, Arthur Mackley's The Prospector, the Snakeville Comedy Versus Sledge Hammers, and the first Chaplin film made entirely in the town back in 1915, The Champion.

The exception to the 100-years-ago rule is Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret, a brand-new silent Western shot in Niles with a genuine Bell & Howell 2709 hand-cranked camera (formerly used by John Korty) and starring Christopher Green, Bruce Cates, former silent-era child star Diana Serra Cary, and a slew of Western-garbed re-enactors. This film has screened in workprints and other preliminary versions before, but tonight is the official premiere of the finalized version at the Edison!

Tomorrow the Edison will host a screening of a independently-produced talking picture made in Niles in 2007. From the museum's press release:  

Weekend King is a romantic comedy filmed in Niles about a California dot-commer who buys a bankrupt town in rural Utah. Rupert is rich, but awkward, friendless, and loveless. In a quest to overcome his loneliness, Rupert expects to lord over the New Spring Utah populace, but ends up contending with people who don't buy into his newly invented confidence. But grappling with his bad investment turns out to be the key for finally finding friendship and love. See local characters in cameos in the local haunts including Joe's Corner, the Vine Cafe, the Mudpuddle Shop, and Belvoir Springs Hotel.

Before both days' screenings, there will be a free Walking Tour of Niles. This 75-minute tour will take you around downtown Niles and its neighborhoods, telling you tales of times gone by including film locations for the films being shown during the movie weekend. Nationally-recognized film historian David Kiehn, who is the film museum's resident expert on the Essanay film company, also knows his stuff about local buildings and historic sites. His walking tours always attract a crowd. This event is free but donations are gladly accepted.

HOW: All of tonight's films screen in 35mm prints with live music by Frederick Hodges.

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Screen shot from Kino DVD

WHO: Robert Weine directed this

WHAT: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is huge in cinema history and in my own personal history with cinema. It's frequently (incorrectly) cited as the first horror movie, and its iconic imagery has been borrowed shamelessly by other filmmakers from the silent era to Tim Burton and beyond. With few of its director's other films available for view, it generally frustrates auteurists, especially those highly influenced by the theories of realism put forth by the influential French critic Andre Bazin, who labeled Caligari a "failure" under his criteria for worthy photographic art. 

When I first became interested in exploring silent film history many years, ago, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was one of the first films from the era that made a very strong and immediate impression upon initial viewing. Though I was watching a rather muddy VHS transfer, I loved what I saw, and became a little obsessed. I read about every article or book I could find about it (including David Robinson's excellent monograph), purchased an 8mm print on ebay (my first and ever such purchase, even though I didn't have a projector at the time) and even dressed as the somnambulist for Halloween that year (immortalized in a photograph I've recently cycled in as my twitter avatar). 

WHERE/WHEN: 9PM tonight at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

WHY: Since my first viewing I've taken a few opportunities to see the film when it's screened in local cinemas (which happens less often than you might expect, actually), and have seen it projected from an even muddier video transfer at the Castro accompanied by the local ensemble Club Foot Orchestra, and have seen a 1950s-era retitled 35mm version at the Pacific Film Archive with Judith Rosenberg at the piano and accompanied by a lecture by film scholar Russell Merritt, who has just joined the board of the Silent Film Festival. 

None of these viewings, or of the DVD viewings I've also experienced in the interim, have been afforded use of a new 4K sprucing of the best original elements. This version premiered in Berlin earlier in 2014, and tonight is the US premiere. It's also the first time I'll be able to view a 4K digital file projected through the Castro's recent acquisition, a 4K projector to replace the 2K one they've had for several years and which had recently developed an "undead pixel" problem (which is even scarier than it sounds). Although I wish the Murnau Foundation would have made a 35mm print available of this new restoration, I'm curious to see what 4K projection at the Castro might look like when applied to a classic film that I'm very familiar with.

Tonight's screening is the capper to a full day of Silent Film Festival shows, the entirety of which have been enthusiastically rounded-up by my friend Michael Hawley of the film-415 blog (which I hope he never has to change to film-628). 35mm screenings for this all-day even include the 11AM program of Laurel & Hardy two-reelers, and the 7PM showing of Buster Keaton's The General with live musical accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra (who last performed this at the Castro in 2004- I was there and was very impressed by how a percussion-heavy score helps amp up the action-adventure elements of the classic Keaton comedy.) The Alloys' 3PM world-premiere presentation of their new, years-in-the-making score to Rudoph Valentino's allegedly best film Son of the Sheik will be sourced from a DCP, as will the BFI's A Night in the Cinema in 1914 show.

HOW: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari screens as a 4K DCP, with live music by the versatile keyboardist Donald Sosin. I've heard his eerie score for the Kino DVD and am very interested in hearing how he transforms it in a live environment.

The Unknown (1927)

 A scene from Tod Browning's THE UNKNOWN, which will screen with live musical accompaniment by Stephin Merritt at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8. Courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Tod Browning directed, and Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford star in this film.

WHAT: Eventually every film lover who digs deep enough into the most remarkable and unusual treasures of film history comes across The Unknown, a circus-set tale of obsession, blackmail, and revenge. It's best if he or she knows as little as possible about the plot specifics before watching it for the first time however. But I don't think it's a spoiler, or a risk of overselling it, to say that it contains Lon Chaney's most remarkable physical and emotional performance, and that I consider it one of the great cinematic works of the late 1920s, too-often unfairly relegated to sideshow status to the kinds of films that were considered for Academy Awards and/or received frequent citations in film history books. The Unknown barely even rated a mention in the 1957 Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces, in part because that film was made at Universal, which saw Chaney's Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame as far overshadowing the films he made with Tod Browning and others at MGM, and in part I suspect because its subject matter was still considered too hot to handle even in the waning years of the Motion Picture Production Code. That's all fine, as it helps The Unknown feel less like an old "warhorse" and more like a gem waiting to be discovered, even today.

If you do want to read more about the film, Sean McCourt wrote an article for this very blog about the last time it screened in the Bay Area almost six years ago.

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: I'm not going to earn any "cool points" from certain purists by admitting this, but I've attended just about every live music/silent film event the San Francisco Film Society has put on in the past fourteen years, and I regret attending none of them. Last year I was quoted in an article discussing the history of these screenings, and I'm afraid I came off as a little more curmudgeonly than I really feel. It's true that some of these events (Mountain Goats and Sir Arne's Treasure; Black Francis's The Golem) are really just music concerts with a 35mm print running overhead a band playing the kinds of songs it usually does, with little attempt to connect musical and film content beyond providing inspiration for the setlist. But I can certainly enjoy that kind of experience even if I don't necessarily consider what's happening "accompaniment" or a "score". Increasingly I'm just thankful to get to see silent films in 35mm, no matter what the sound in the venue is like.

These are unique events in that you really don't know what you're going to get when you walk into them. I had no idea what to expect last Tuesday when I went to see Thao Nguyen and her band the Get Down Stay Down, one of the few instances in which the SFIFF has presented one of these events with a band I was not already something of a fan of. I sat next to my friend Dakin Hardwick, who was covering the event for the Spinning Platters website, and has written an excellent summary of the event from the perspective of a Thao fan who'd never seen a Charlie Chaplin film before. A few seats away on my other side was silent film aficionado Lincoln Specter, a film-blogging colleague whose account I agree with almost completely, although I'd note that the low-budget classic The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra is as much influenced by Soviet film trends as German ones. I found the evening tremendously entertaining, and it was great to see The Pawnshop and several short newsreels from the National Film Preservation Foundation's haul of treasures recently repatriated from New Zealand (as well as 9413), in 35mm prints. 

Neither Dakin nor Lincoln really commented on the thematic unity of all the mixed-and-matched films and videos from various moviemaking eras, which only truly became apparent in the final of three short videos directed by Lauren Tabak and starring Nguyen, which made joking reference  to one of the Hearst Movietone clips screened earlier in the program. Nguyen is clearly aware of the historical demands of show business, in which women have found themselves offered as a commodity for audience consumption; performing on a stage built for nubile dancers to provide pre-film spectacle back in 1922 was a way to reclaim female power out of such a situation.

What Nguyen and company did was, again, not what I'd call a "score" for any of the films shown, but it was totally of a piece, and worked well as an evening's entertainment. Arguably better than some prior attempts by SFIFF-selected bands to compose or adapt music for a true film accompaniment. I thought last year's Waxworks score by Mike Patton, Matthias Bossi, Scott Amerndola and William Winant was possibly the most successfully realized of these attempts, but I know there are those who disagree with me even placing it in this category. Others, like Jonathan Richman's The Phantom Carriage and Stephin Merritt's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea were, for me, largely admirable attempts that suffered a few too serious problems to truly succeed. As the latter ended, I tweeted that I "overall enjoyed the audaciousness of it all. Applied to an inarguable non-masterpiece, it doesn't fell like a wasted opportunity." I hope that Merritt learned a few lessons from that night, since he's being brought back tonight to provide the music for The Unknown, and is expected to tackle a third silent sometime down the road.

Anyway, if it doesn't work out, the professional silent film accompanists will arrive in full force (minus any organists, sadly) for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival which comes sooner than usual this year. It runs May 29 through June 1, in a cost-cutting attempt to take advantage of cheaper air and hotel rates for festival guests than traditionally found in July. There's only three feature films in this year's program I've seen in full before, the lowest such tally in many a year. All three are well worth watching, even if they're not their director's respective masterpieces: Carl Dreyer's The Parson's Widow, Yasujiro Ozu's Dragnet Girl and Buster Keaton's The Navigator. Of the others, I've long been wanting to see 35mm prints of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Underground, and The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, and am crossing my fingers these titles screen that way. Most of the others I've never or barely heard of at all, and am excited just to experience however I can, but especially on the Castro screen with top-class accompaniment.

If you can't wait that long, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum hosts silent 16mm screenings with live musicians every Saturday and have just announced their line-ups for May and June, including their weekend-long Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival which includes showings of proven classic titles like The Big Parade, Gertie the Dinosaur and The Circus as well as many lesser-known films.

HOW: The Unknown will screen in a rare 35mm print, with live accompaniment by Stephin Merritt. It will be preceded by a Guy Maddin short film Sissy Boy Slap Party, the soundtrack for which Merritt and accordionist Daniel Handler hope to whip the audience into a frenzy of participation.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 13 hosts the last scheduled screening of Tangerines, a Georgian (as in former Soviet Republic of) film that I've heard nothing but praise about from festgoers who've had a chance to see it already. Among other options there's also Charlie McDowell's The One I Love, one of three programs happening over the next couple days that were added to the festival schedule after the program books went to press, as noted on Gary Meyer's new EatDrinkFilms website.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The New Parkway in Oakland holds a special screening of a 2008 documentary called Children of the Amazon at 7:00 with the director present tonight.