More: Douglas Fairbanks in two-tone Technicolor, Sherlock Buster Keaton junior, Yasujiro Ozu’s ode to childhood, more
Two film festivals focused on our problematic offering and a sustainable future are coming soon: the Ecocentric Ocean International Festival, which will take place from Friday, April 12 to Sunday, April 14 at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater, and then online from April 15 to 22; and Monday 15 through Sunday 21, the San Francisco Urban Film Festival, featuring a variety of screenings, panel discussions, and more on network planning/history at various locations in San Francisco.
But a third annual event, also on the occasion of the calfinishar, is entirely committed to the afterlife, an event that is receding so that soon the entire era it enshrines will have come to an end more than a century ago. We’re talking, of course, about the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, whose 27th edition will be held from Wednesday 10 to Sunday 14. This year there is a big difference: the prolonged closure of the Castro Theatre for primary renovations means that the festival has had to move to the Palacio de Bellas Artes de la Marina. That means a loss of more than 400 seats (the Palace has a capacity of 960, compared to 1,400 in the Castro in the past), so it would possibly be necessary to arrive earlier than before for exhibitions that will surely be popular.
Otherwise, at first glance, the SFSFF’s 2024 program looks a lot like the 2023 program, in that it starts with Douglas Fairbanks and also features Buster Keaton, Laurel
As usual, the show includes titles that you probably wouldn’t have been able to see before, at least in perfect condition, as they have been recently rediscovered and/or restored. This includes The Pill Pounder, a 1923 short film starring Clara Bow, a pre-fame lapel luminary, a film that will be lost for a long time and will be screened for the first time in 101 years. It will take place on Thursday afternoon with another world premiere restoration, that of 1926’s Dancing Mothers. Although presented under his co-stars, this decisive role goes to the bubbly Bow, whose society of feral children offers a lush contrast to all the noble dramas that surround him. Soon it would not only be Paramount’s biggest charm for years to come, but it would also motivate a series. from pop culture triyets, from cartoon bombshell Betty Boop to songs by Prince and Taylor Swift.
Bow famously had the “It,” the coy euphemism for sex appeal at the time, as did several other stars restored to the big screen at Silent Fest. In fact, that screen is rarely very silver (or black-and-white), yet there’s a brilliant array of rich, earthy tones in The Black Pirate, which opens the show on Wednesday night. Fairbanks is in reliable athletic and charismatic form as the sole survivor of a ruthless pirate attack who manages to infiltrate the marauders’ own ranks for revenge. This recently restored period exhibit was only the third feature film shot in two-tone Technicolor, and perhaps the logistical difficulties imposed through this procedure are more of a suspenseful drama (albeit with plenty of action) than the star’s own old man. Free and friendly games. Fans of those whims should also check out Frank Lloyd’s The Sea Hawk (1924), an elaborate plot set in Elizabethan times, based on a novel by the writer of Captain Blood and Scaramouche, the following night.
There’s also a lot of market price on the East Side of Dwan, West Side in 1927, starring George O’Brien as an orphaned dock rat who becomes a boxing champion after being taken in by a Jewish family. Off-screen, the star (nicknamed “The Chest” for his impressive physique), son of the San Francisco police chief, as well as former boxer and regular feature film John Ford. It’s as charming as it is disjointed in this dynamic melodrama; The same goes for filming in New York.
A lesser-known protagonist (as well as a prolific director) who deserves to be rediscovered is Englishman Henry Edwards, who stars in German director Georg Jacoby’s 1928 Danish production, The Joker. He’s a smart headline guy (not to be with Batguy’s nemesis). ) who comes to the rescue of two sisters who suffer from blackmailers. The mix of soapy melodrama and visual extravagance is comparable to von Sternberg’s, with Edwards offering an engaging empathic element.
Helm of Metropolis is not afraid to arouse little sympathy, whose 1928 vehicle, The Devious Path, presents her as a charming but shallow and impulsive young woman, the wife of a wealthy lawyer, whose slight negligence leads her into “dens of iniquity. “(including the recommended use of heroin) in this stunning story, directed by G. W. Pabst just before his standout duet with Louise Brooks, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl.
Other resurrected luminaries of the era on display include Norma Talmadge, who makes a slew of dramatic paintings such as the beleaguered “Polly Pearl” in Frank Borzage’s 1925 tear-jerking 1925 Stella Dallas-style The Lady; and Syd Chaplin (yes, Charlie’s brother), whose comedic specialty of cross-dressing propelled the following year’s Oh!What a nurse! Gaston Glass, whose acting career was temporarily reduced to small roles in talkies, had a brief stint in the spotlight. He is the naïve male in James Cruze’s The Red Mark (1928), a recently restored film unusually set on a colonial island. of prisoners, and also among the many possible murder victims and/or suspects in Alfred Santell’s Gorilla (1927). This mystery was one of Olde Dark House’s many trendy comedy thrillers that thrived in the silent film era and the early sound era.
Hell’s Heroes is also more of an ensemble piece than a stellar vehicle, it’s not the first or last film edition of The Three Godfathers of Sci. But almost every single edition of this story, about Wild West outlaws turning a new page after getting caught. A dying frontierswoman’s baby is more tearful than William Wyler’s, which was filmed in the Mohave Desert for realism. Performed in silent and spoken editions (as many theatres had not yet switched to sound), it was a marvel of good luck in 1930 and still is. of the most productive Western dramas ever made.
Of course, there are plenty of foreign dishes on the menu this year, plus several well-established classics. Like Wyler, the Japanese master Ozu was just at the beginning of a very long career when he painted the ancient portrait of his formative years I Was Born. But. . . in 1932. (The Age of Silence expanded significantly later in some countries than in the United States. )The Extraordinary Haxan aka Witchcraft Through the Ages, 1922 to Christiansen is a quasi-documentary that traces the history of European superstitions. who doesn’t skimp on fantastical and sinister depictions. Equally whimsical is the 1921 Swedish film The Phantom Carriage, whose director Victor Sjostrom continued in cinema as a prominent actor after he stopped creating them. A secular global hidden in our everyday lives, this allegory has had a lasting influence on filmmakers from Bergman (who played Sjostrom 36 years later in Wild Strawberries) to Kubrick.
On the other hand, discreet realism is the tenor of two foreign feature films that are likely to be new to the maximum number of viewers at Silent Fest. Karl Grune’s 1923 film, The Street, can reproduce a certain degree of German expressionism in its stylized cityscape, built entirely on sound stages. Still, he anticipates neorealism in his story of a middle-aged employee who lashes out at his wife, intending to find some emotion. He discovers that there are too many, involving con artists, cowardly women, beloved nightclubs, and even murders. While the melodramatic plot is rarely too shaky, the finished production shows the craftsmanship of German studios at its peak, and as a bonus, Nosferatu’s Max Schreck plays a supporting role. Poil de Carotte, also known as Carrot Top, through Julien Duvivier was the first of several film adaptations of Jules Renard’s 1894 short story. Their hero, a red-haired boy, remains irrepressible despite the countless cruelties inflicted on him during his Dickensian childhood.
When silent films began to be enjoyed back in the 1950s, after at least a quarter of a century of general neglect, many imagined that it was more than just antics, as it was the curtain that worked most productively for new audiences watching it on television or television. revival theaters. Of course, we know that this medium has achieved a wonderful diversity and sophistication of expression in the pre-sonic era.
Don’t worry, though: this year’s SF Silent Fest has plenty of yoks on its schedule, though I’m pretty sure no cake is thrown around. There’s the return of Edward Everett Horton, whose mute career as a star actor (he was later a supporting character and immediately recognizable voice actor) was resurrected in an earlier short film show; this time, he gets caught up in the adventures of the 1926 movie Poker Faces. Laurel
Two of the greatest comedic talents of the era appear in what could be considered (at least I would say) his most important vehicles. There’s Harold Lloyd with 1927’s The Kid Brother, a rural underdog story that’s a lot of fun. But it also has a little more weight and narrative intensity than it dealt with. A few vulgar intertitles aside, it’s almost perfect. However, Buster Keaton’s 1924 film Sherlock Jr. is one of a kind, perhaps the ultimate test of his ingenuity: his hero in love, a projectionist, falls asleep and imagines himself stepping into the film his cinema is projecting. (This concept notoriously animated Woody Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo much later, and a climactic chase also notoriously provided a model for Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc?. )
Surreal jokes that persist are a natural stroke of genius. But in offering the first evidence that on-screen comedy can be too clever for general audiences, this dazzling film proved to be a flop: critics and audiences alike found it too confusing to be humorous. The disastrous trailers anticipate why the film is so short, just under forty-five minutes; Keaton continued to cut in an effort for better results. (It’s painful to believe how much celluloid gold ended up being edited and then casually destroyed. )It will screen with Keaton’s first solo directorial effort 4 years earlier, the short One Week, which in its own way is equally astonishing, not to mention hilarious, a set of complex and probably very unlikely jokes.
Perhaps you don’t expect a combination of wartime deprivation, socialist propaganda, and farce (plus a camel) to work, let alone be as funny as Hollywood titans at their best. However, such is the case with Nikolai Shpikovsky’s 1929 The Opportunist. , a lively parody set in Ukraine several years earlier, the civil war between the Bolsheviks and the White Army. Trying to make money in the midst of this chaos, dotted with occasional bombs, is a schlemiel-type anti-hero (Ivan Sadovskiy) who is as brazen as he is unlucky in his attempt to start a capitalist business. Despite all the laughs, the film manages to land on a festive final note of crop threshing: farming is the gripping ending of old Soviet cinema.
The 2024 San Francisco Silent Film Festival will take place from Wednesday, the 10th to Sunday, the 14th, at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in SF. For the full program, tickets and schedules, www. silentfilm. org
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