SFSFF Weekend Wrap

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival facilitated four tremendous days of cinephilia. So many rare opportunities to see films from the early part of the previous century (and even one from 1898) presented with live musical accompaniment with a knowledgeable and appreciative audience, and to talk to musicians, scholars, offspring of key players in silent filmmaking, and enthusiastic fans, made for a truly overstuffed weekend. I saw every "full-length" film shown, and most of the short films and public presentations as well. Some highlight memories of many from the past weekend:

1. Walking down Castro Street after Sunday's screening of The Shakedown, I saw the familiar face of Leonard Maltin approaching. I had to stop him to quickly thank him for his introduction to the film. In the course of interviewing its director William Wyler's three daughters, Catherine, Judy and Melanie, he spoke of Wyler's second film made outside the Western genre as a good, but not great picture. Watching it, I found the Shakedown to be more than just a terrific entertainment and a showcase for Wyler's developing skills as an inventive filmmaker. In the way it depicts con artists on the show-biz boxing circuit, it's a deeply meaningful look at the way acting a persona can envelop a performer's personal life and self-identity. The resonances of leading man James Murray (also of the Crowd) and his sad biography surely added to this deep feeling. On the other hand, his co-star Barbara Kent is one of the few silent-era players still living today.

I told Mr. Maltin how much I'd appreciated his approach to introducing the film: keeping audience expectations modest, so that we could in a sense "discover" the film's virtues for ourselves. This as opposed to the approach of praising a film to the skies to an audience just before we're about to see it, which seems unnecessary as we're not going to be buying any more tickets to it at that moment, and it may inflate expectations to the point where the film, no matter how good it is, can't measure up. Maltin's smiling response: "It's probably never played so well in its history." Surely a tribute to the receptive festival audience, and perhaps even more to Donald Sosin's virtuosic jazz piano accompaniment (Sosin really outdid himself with his three accompaniments this year, and the Shakedown was his best performance of the three, I felt.) But most of all to the nature of the Silent Film Festival, which is able to create almost utopian presentations of the films selected, by aligning all the right factors: venue, audience, accompaniment, and best available film print.

2. Saturday's presentation Variations On A Theme: Musicians on the Craft of Composing and Performing for Silent Films was not organized quite how I expected, and I'm not sure how the hour would have gone over for an individual ticket buyer, but for those of us with festival passes, it was certainly well worth staying in our seats for. We even got to witness a bit of friendly but sharp disagreement between the panelists! Classical musician/writer/radio host Chloe Veltman seemed natural and confident as moderator, even if a few of her questions to the gathered accompanists betrayed some inexperience with watching silent films with live music (though at least she'd seen the festival screening of The Cook, Pass The Gravy and Big Business that morning). But the best part of the presentation was when the musicians took a couple of questions from the audience. Audience q-and-a is always a crap shoot but in this case the questions elicited responses that got close to the heart of some very real philosophical differences between the panel members.

Authenticity is perhaps the key issue at stake in the variety of approaches taken by different accompanists. Pianist Stephen Horne (or should I say multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne, as he sometimes plays flute or squeezebox with one hand while the other dances upon the ivories,) spoke up for an approach that privileges an authenticity to the scene and its emotional resonance. By contrast, both Rodney Sauer of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and theatre organist Dennis James argued for an authenticity to music that audiences of the silent era might have been likely to hear when attending a film. Interestingly, these two, whose approaches might appear at first glance to be the most closely aligned amidst the group, engaged in the most contentious exchange of the panel. James argued for fidelity to the original sheet music commissioned by the director or producer of the film, whenever possible. Sauer countered that such cue sheets or scores were often abandoned or otherwise ignored by accompanists after an initial premiere performance or engagement in large cities, which is why his group favors compilations from the repertoire of compositions that would have been familiar to a typical salon orchestra of the 1920s. What became evident is that each accompanist does a certain amount of research into conventions of the time when producing a score, but that none of them are absolute purists in their approach. Even James will make certain allowances for the modern audience in defiance of the instructions of silent-era film music decision-makers. He'll ignore a cue sheet's suggestion of (for example) Rossini's William Tell Overture, because ever since the popularity of The Lone Ranger on radio and television, that theme takes audiences out of the moment. So don't expect to hear that familiar theme when Dennis James plays the Davies Symphony Hall organ to back John Barrymore in the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde this October 31st.

3. One moment that felt particularly gratifying to this blogger was the unveiling, during the second of two sets of presentations by members of the film archiving community, of a newly-preserved print of a 1912 one-reeler called The Better Man. The film is notable as a rare positive portrayal of a Mexican character in a Western, and features some notably effective camerawork, particularly an unexpected long tilt up a cliffside, revealing just how far one character has just fallen. Apparently the first new print struck from the trove of American films recently discovered in a Wellington, New Zealand film archive, The Better Man is also one of three two films whose preservation was funded through the efforts of the For The Love Of Film blog-a-thon organized by the incomparable Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn Ferdinand this past February. Whether or not even one person donated to the blog-a-thon fund after reading my own written contribution to that online event, I felt a little pride just from my connection to a community that made seeing this film possible.

In truth, everyone who buys a ticket to a Silent Film Festival program can feel pride that they help to support not only the presentation of, but also the preservation of silent films. The festival organizes its own annual fellowship through the L. Jeffrey Selznick school at Eastman House, and unless I misinterpreted what I heard announced from the Castro stage, this year's fellowship recipient will prepare the Douglas Fairbanks feature Mr. Fix-It for preservation, and presentation at the 2011 SFSFF. It's never too early to begin anticipating next year's program, and given that Allan Dwan directed Fairbanks in arguably his two best costume pageant films of the 1920's (Robin Hood and the Iron Mask), I'm excited to see this little-seen Dwan-directed film from Fairbanks's 1910s filmography.

According to the festival's own blog, another title already announced for the 2011 festival is Fritz Lang's second-most-famous science-fiction epic Woman In the Moon. I must have been in the popcorn line or something during this announcement, because I certainly would have remembered had I heard such an ingenious plan. I did hear Anita Monga announce that another Lunar silent, a Trip to the Moon would be forthcoming at the next festival. By then, a hand-colored version of the film will have been subject to a new restoration, and will be exhibited in a 35mm print that shall surely put to shame all of the Georges Méliès films that played from digital projections prior to festival features this year.

Other announcements made from the Castro stage over the weekend:

If you enjoyed The Iron Horse, you'll want to know that another John Ford film, this time a comedy from his F.W. Murnau-influenced phase, will have its "repremiere" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on September 1st. Normally I wouldn't mention screenings happening all the way at the Southern end of the state, but since Upstream is one of the films being repatriated from New Zealand along with the Better Man, and because John Ford fans are hoping this screening is a success and leads to more around the country (including, hopefully, here on Frisco Bay) it seems worth noting.

Closer to home, Susan Oxtoby of the Pacific Film Archive announced, as part of her introductory remarks on Man With A Movie Camera at the festival, that the PFA is planning a Dziga Vertov retrospective for that venue, most likely for September-October of 2011. The Alloy Orchestra seems too large and loud a group to fit into the Berkeley venue to provide a reprise of the frantic scoring we heard Sunday afternoon, so my imagination is running wild trying to think of how Vertov's 1929 masterpiece might be accompanied musically there; I've regrettably missed several chances to hear what Judith Rosenberg does with Man With A Movie Camera (though I got a sampling when she performed to a DVD snippet at the SFSFF's press conference back in May), but I'm also very curious about Dennis James's score for the film, last performed here almost fifteen years ago. And then there is recent rumor of a "definitive" soundtrack recording on the horizon. If anticipating screenings more than a year in advance is too exhausting, Frisco Bay Vertov fans will surely be interested in the work of filmmakers his theories inspired, some of whom are sure to be a part of the PFA's focus on Frisco Bay's avant-garde filmmaking history this fall in celebration of the long-awaited release of the Radical Light book. Another filmmaker influenced by Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, will have his first feature film on local screens for a week starting tomorrow. I've had a chance to see this new Rialto print of Godard's Breathless, with its new and improved subtitle translation unavailable on DVD, and it's certainly the upcoming week's cinematic must-see. Rod Armstrong of the San Francisco Film Society will introduce tomorrow night's screenings at the Embarcadero Center Cinema.

More random notes on the 2010 Silent Film Festival and upcoming related screenings:

The San Francisco Film Museum has posted the photos taken of SFSFF attendees disguised as the Maria Robot from Metropolis this weekend, so take a gander. For those who were shut out of Friday night's screening, the Castro will hold digital screenings of the restoration, albeit without live musical accompaniment, on August 13-15. Also part of the Castro's upcoming August calendar will be a screening of Fritz Lang's most well-known Hollywood film, the Big Heat, on August 30. The Jewish Film Festival is the next organization to bring a silent film with live accompaniment to the Castro, with this Monday's presentation of the 1922 film Hungry Hearts.

I always know I'll see some of my favorite local bloggers at the Silent Film Festival. Michael Guillén, Lincoln Specter, Jay Blodgett, Jason Wiener and shahn, who surely exaggerates when calling me a "local sensation". Then again, I am quoted on my experience watching Häxan by Jeremy Mathews in his article for Moving Pictures Magazine, and a conversation with Adam Hartzell is described in his piece for GreenCine Daily. I guess it's in the nature of being something of a blogosphere gadfly, but I'm a little embarrassed to find my name singled out in so many blog write-ups on the SFSFF when so many of my writers' group colleagues produced superior work on much more difficult subjects. For example, David Kiehn's essay on the Iron Horse is filled with drama and quotes from personal accounts, and avoids at least one oft-repeated but easily debunked myth about the film's masterful final scene. Megan Pugh's essay on the Flying Ace and Monica Nolan's on L'Heureuse Mort must surely be among the most substantial pieces written in English on these two previously-obscure films. I could go on and on. At some point all the essays should be available to read in the Silent Film Festival's website archive.

It was nice to be able to build upon the research I did for the festival for last December's Winter Event when writing an article recently published in the Australian journal Senses of Cinema on West of Zanzibar and its director Tod Browning. Please let me know what you think of the article if you get a chance to read it, either at the e-mail address found on my profile page, or in a comment below. I also recommend highly that anyone who saw Diary of a Lost Girl last Saturday (or, anyone who didn't!) take the time to read a truly remarkable essay on the iconic status of Louise Brooks, published in the same issue. The twenty-fifth anniversary of her death arrives this August 8th.

Disney Before Mickey (and more)

The San Francisco Film Society has just put on its 4th Annual S.F. International Animation Festival as part of its fall season of mini-festivals of various themes. There was French Cinema Now and Taiwan Film Days before it, and now it's in the midst of its long-standing New Italian Cinema series, which closes Sunday with Marco Bellocchio's Vincere. Coming up is the first winter presentation of KinoTek, in recent years a mainstay of the Film Society's biggest annual showcase, the San Francisco International Film Festival. 2009's KinoTek programs were cut back at the SFIFF this past Spring, so the upcoming December 12-13 event, a "multimedia dance, theater and projected video performance" by Catherine Galasso entitled Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice, is welcome.

This year's Animation Festival presented Frisco Bay premieres of a couple of anticipated theatrical releases, Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (opening later this month) and Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar's a Town Called Panic, coming to Landmark Theatres in January. It also screened numerous shorts and features with more uncertain futures in local theatrical venues. I caught a pair of programs: the opening night celebration, in which local avant-garde animation master Lawrence Jordan participated by showing his 1960s film Ein Traum Der Liebenden while improvising the frame rate to sync with the live musical accompaniment by Pale Hoarse, and a matinee program of silent-era Disney shorts at the Embarcadero.

Many Disney fans have only in recent years started to fully appreciate the importance of the studio's pre-Mickey Mouse creative output to the foundation of the most ubiquitous animation company of all-time. From 1923 through 1927, Disney's premier character was not a cartoon at all, but a little girl named Alice (not to be confused with the Lewis Carroll creation, though her first film played on the association in its title Alice's Wonderland.) A live-action girl placed in a cartoon world, she was played by four different young actresses over the years, starting with 4-year-old Virginia Davis. Seven of the Alice Comedies, as they are often called, have been collected on a DVD in the Walt Disney Treasures collections of shorts. Unfortunately, though there were indications that the line-up for the festival had not been locked down until shortly before the screening, as it turns out the program for this matinee was comprised entirely of the seven shorts on the DVD. I suspect the digital projection was in fact sourced from the DVD as well, as it the image quality was a far cry from the last hi-definition digital presentation I viewed at the Embarcadero several weeks ago, Passing Strange. It's more than the difference between a digitally-shot feature from 2009 and celluloid creations from over eighty years ago; there were tell-tale horizontal lines in the image that had nothing to do with film's tendency to degrade and everything to do with resolution of the digital image.

Despite the disappointing picture quality of the presentation, the event was still enjoyable. The selections from the DVD showcase each of the four Alice actresses, though the majority feature Davis, including Alice's Wonderland, Alice's Wild West Show, and Alice Gets In Dutch. One film, Alice in the Jungle, cobbled together footage shot of her for previous films to create an entry in the series completed well after her contract with Disney had ended. Showing the films in chronological order, with in-person commentary from Disney researchers Russell Merritt and J.B Kaufman (some of it during the film, quasi-benshi-like), gave a real sense of how the Alice films progressed stylistically over the years. The earlier cartoons feature extensive live-action prologues before whisking Davis into the animated universe, for example, while the later films dispense with this conceit, focusing more on pure animation. They even go so far as to relegate Alice to a supporting role in some instances, while the antics of a Felix-esque cat named Julius takes center stage. Also Felix-esque is the tendency toward increased elasticity and mutability of objects and body parts as the shorts progressed chronologically. The biggest laugh of the program was found in Alice Gets In Dutch, when Julius inhales some "Cheyenne Pepper" and sneezes his face right off, onto the floor.

The most thematically fascinating of the films was one I hadn't watched before: Alice's Egg Plant, which features Alice (played by Dawn O'Day) and Julius as management of a chicken farm under Bolshievik revolt. In the film, striking chickens are shown to be under the influence of a Russian agent, purely a caricature of Communism. When a pair of roosters begin fighting, Alice and Julius get the idea to bust the union by bringing the combatants into an indoor boxing ring and charging their hens an egg a piece for admission. Knowing Walt Disney's later opinions on unions (especially after his own workers went on strike in 1941), I couldn't watch this sequence without wondering if he ever saw mass entertainment, or the distribution of his cartoons in particular, as a kind of "tax" motion picture companies could "levy" on workers needing a release from a day on the factory (or picket) lines. Russell Merritt, when asked about this cartoon in the q-and-a following the screening, said that Walt was at this point in his life "spectacularly non-political," for what it's worth.

J.B. Kaufman expressed that a program of other Alice shorts will play an unspecified future date at the Walt Disney Family Museum, this time with live musical accompaniment. I don't believe I've mentioned here on this blog before that this museum, which opened in October, has a charmingly decorated screening room with daily digital screenings - the venue is not at all equipped for 35mm projection, and Merritt in fact believes such a distribution method to be inferior in picture quality to a Blu-Ray transfer taken directly from the negative. Currently, the Walt Disney Family Museum is showing Sleeping Beauty on Blu-Ray daily; I'll reserve judgement until I see it for myself, but I'm sure it at least will look much better than the non-HD copy of Fantasia I watched there last month.

My first encounter with the Alice films was at the 2003 San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF), where Virginia Davis was present on the Castro stage to talk about her participation in the series, and six 35mm prints of Alice films were shown alongside a few other early Disney shorts, all accompanied by live music by the accomplished pianist Michael Mortilla. The SFSFF has long considered animation an important piece of its presentation mission; in fact the first film I ever attended at that festival back in 2001- an Italian silent favored by Frederico Fellini called Maciste In Hell, was preceded by one of the Fleischer Brothers' Out Of The Inkwell shorts that influenced Disney's creation of Alice. As returning readers may know, since 2007 I've been on the SFSFF's research & writing committee, tasked with creating educational materials for the festival: program book essays and informative, fun slideshows for each program screened at the festival. I haven't written on an animated program for the festival. (yet?)

Silent-era Disney returned to the 2009 summer festival back in July, most prominently in the form of a kid-friendly matinee tributing Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the character Walt Disney lost creative control of in 1928, inspiring the birth of Mickey Mouse and of Disney's long tradition of aggressively protecting its subsequent intellectual property, even to the point of successfully lobbying for corporate welfare through endless extensions to federal copyright laws. I also made mention of Mickey Mouse in my own slideshow and essay accompanying Douglas Fairbanks As The Gaucho, noting that Disney selected this adventure film to spoof for Mickey's second-ever cartoon, The Gallopin' Gaucho.

After the summer festival, I had time to write about The Gaucho presentation as part of my partial SFSFF wrap-up here at Hell On Frisco Bay, but couldn't get around to Oswald or the rest of day three at the festival before my life began busying again. My quick-and-dirty version: the Oswald program was interactive fun, as pianist Donald Sosin encouraged the audience to join his family in vocalizing sound effects for the Lucky Rabbit's loopy adventures, though I could tell that some of the children in the audience (SFSFF tickets are always free to attendees under 12 years of age) grew restless from the verbal introductions to the films. The rest of the day was terrificly diverse, with an excellent Czechoslovakian drama Erotikon rubbing elbows with W.C. Fields in So's Your Old Man, two experimental versions of Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, and my favorite new discovery of the festival, D.W. Griffith's Lady of the Pavements, a criminally underrated tearjerker again with Sosin providing accompaniment. (My favorite revisitation being Lillian Gish in the Wind, which I'd never quite appreciated before but was a thrilling masterpiece with Dennis James behind the Wurlitzer organ.)

The SFSFF's annual Winter Event approaches --this year it falls on December 12-- and it promises to be equally diverse and rewarding. The day opens with Sosin playing for Merian C. Cooper and Ernest P. Shoedsack's Chang (the Thai word for 'elephant' rhymes with Kong), a pseudo-documentary filmed in rural Nan Province, on the border of Northern Siam (now Thailand) and Laos. Its frames filled with stampeding elephants, prowling big cats, and a comic-relief gibbon dubbed "Bimbo", this film is more than just a warm-up for Cooper & Shoedsack's 1933 pictures starring an iconic stop-motion giant ape or two. It's a grand entertainment in its own right, and ought to look splendid on the Castro Theatre screen. I'm particularly excited to see Abel Gance's World War I epic J'Accuse as I've never watched a complete film by the legendary French director, whose films have not screened on Frisco Bay in many years. This one is the U.S. Premiere of a new restoration. The J'Accuse score will be a keyboard arrangement of the orchestral score composed by Robert Israel, who will make his first SFSFF appearance with his performance at the Wurlitzer. Dennis James musically handles the final two programs of the day-long event: Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. paired with the Goat, neither of which I've seen on the big screen before, and Tod Browning's West of Zanzibar, which I caught in a Guy Maddin-programmed series at the Pacific Film Archive a few years back.

It's West of Zanzibar, starring Lon Chaney in another of his delectable misfit roles, and featuring supporting turns by Mary Nolan, Warner Baxter and Lionel Barrymore (making his first SFSFF appearance) that I've spent several weeks researching and writing program notes for this time around. Chaney and Browning are already quite familiar to loyal SFSFF audiences, so I elected to focus less on their partnership than on the climate of film censorship in the late 1920's; West of Zanzibar was a rare adaptation (from Broadway, of all places) for the Browning/Chaney duo, so its production was affected by "The Formula", a set of censorship guidelines Hollywood had in place several years before the Hays Code was put into place in the early 1930s. One might consider West of Zanzibar as a silent-era "pre-Code" film, in fact, thanks to the themes of the play (addiction, miscegenation, etc.) that were dialed down only somewhat for the film version.

This post has grown to a monstrous size, but before I press 'publish' let me mention a few more events connected to classic film and the Castro Theatre: Citizen Kane and the Magnificent Ambersons play there today. This weekend features a new print of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. December 2-10 the theatre holds a tribute to the producer Samuel Goldwyn, including a healthy number of William Wyler films and a Howard Hawks double-bill. From December 16-23 the space is given over to a Alfred Hitchcock series that includes many of the usual favorites from the director, as well as a few that haven't been spied on a Frisco screen for quite a while. And though the Berlin & Beyond festival of German-language film has been postponed until Fall 2010, January at the Castro will feature another beloved festival, the eight edition of Noir City, which has also revealed its lustful, larcenous program on its website.