The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is a film festival first held in 1996 and presented annually at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, California, United States. [1] It is the largest silent film festival in the United States, [2] although the largest silent film festival in the world remains the Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone, northern Italy. [3]
The 25th annual festival was held May 5 to May 11, 2021 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. [4]
The 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival was held at the Castro Theatre July 14–17, 2011, featuring 18 programs of films and presentations, all with live accompaniment by the foremost silent film musicians in the world. The festival opened with the new restoration of Upstream (1927) directed by John Ford and brought back last year to the U.S. from the New Zealand Film Archive, where it was discovered. As part of a collaboration between the Silent Film Festival and the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Matti Bye Ensemble performed three original commissioned scores to Mauritz Stiller's The Blizzard , Herbert Ponting's The Great White Silence , and the Closing Night Film, Victor Sjöström's He Who Gets Slapped . The festival's Visiting Director was Alexander Payne.
On July 14, 2011, the Silent Film Festival announced their presentation, in association with American Zoetrope, The Film Preserve, Photoplay Productions, and British Film Institute, of Abel Gance's Napoleon in March 2012 at the Paramount Theatre Oakland. The presentation features the U.S. premiere of the complete restoration by Kevin Brownlow and the U.S. premiere of Carl Davis' orchestral score, with Davis conducting members of the Oakland East Bay Symphony. The film's famous triptych sequences was shown in full Polyvision, with three simultaneous projectors and a 70-foot screen. Napoleon had not been screened theatrically in the U.S. with live orchestra for nearly 30 years.
In 2006, the festival added a one-day "Winter Event". On February 14, 2009, the 4th Winter Event presented the rarely seen A Kiss From Mary Pickford (1927) along with three other silent feature films. The 6th Annual Winter Event on February 12, 2011 featured the Marcel L'Herbier film L'Argent and three short films by Charlie Chaplin: The Rink , The Adventurer , and The Pawn Shop.
The Silent Film Festival includes a focus on film preservation. Each year the festival includes a free program titled "Amazing Tales From the Archives," during which film archivists screen and discuss rare and newly restored films and fragments. The festival also offers an annual Film Preservation Fellowship to a student at The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The recipient of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival Preservation Fellowship works on restoring a short film from the George Eastman House Motion Picture Collection, and then screens the preserved film at the San Francisco festival. [5]
Over the years, many people active in the film industry during the silent era, such as Fay Wray and Diana Serra Cary (aka "Baby Peggy"), have appeared in person at the Festival, in addition to those such as Sydney Chaplin whose family did. Live music is presented with each film, with pianists Stephen Horne and Donald Sosin, organist Dennis James, and the ensembles Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and the Matti Bye Ensemble among the frequent performers. The advisory committee for the festival includes such noted names as Kevin Brownlow, Bruce Goldstein, Guy Maddin, Leonard Maltin, Lee Mendelson, David Shepard, Paolo Cherchi Usai, and Terry Zwigoff, as well as festival founders Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons. Currently, the Executive Director is Stacey Wisnia and the Artistic Director is Anita Monga.
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound. Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements or key lines of dialogue may, when necessary, be conveyed by the use of title cards.
Napoléon is a 1927 French silent epic historical film, produced, and directed by Abel Gance that tells the story of Napoleon's early years. On screen, the title is Napoléon vu par Abel Gance, meaning "Napoleon as seen by Abel Gance". The film is recognised as a masterwork of fluid camera motion, produced in a time when most camera shots were static. Many innovative techniques were used to make the film, including fast cutting, extensive close-ups, a wide variety of hand-held camera shots, location shooting, point of view shots, multiple-camera setups, multiple exposure, superimposition, underwater camera, kaleidoscopic images, film tinting, split screen and mosaic shots, multi-screen projection, and other visual effects. A revival of Napoléon in the mid-1950s influenced the filmmakers of the French New Wave. The film used the Keller-Dorian cinematography for its color sequences.
The Castro Theatre is a historic movie palace in San Francisco that became San Francisco Historic Landmark #100 in September 1976. Located at 429 Castro Street in the Castro District, it was built in 1922 with a California Churrigueresque façade that pays homage—in its great arched central window surmounted by a scrolling pediment framing a niche—to the basilica of Mission Dolores nearby. Its designer, Timothy L. Pflueger, also designed Oakland's Paramount Theater and other movie theaters in California during that period. The theater has over 1,400 seats. The theater's ceiling is the last known leatherette ceiling in the United States and possibly the world. Another leatherette ceiling was demolished just a few years ago. To make the ceiling look as though it is leather requires a special technique regarded as lost today.
Abel Gance was a French film director and producer, writer and actor. A pioneer in the theory and practice of montage, he is best known for three major silent films: J'accuse (1919), La Roue (1923), and Napoléon (1927).
The Paramount Theatre is a 3,040-seat Art Deco concert hall located at 2025 Broadway in Downtown Oakland. When it was built in 1931, it was the largest multi-purpose theater on the West Coast, seating 3,476. Today, the Paramount is the home of the Oakland East Bay Symphony and the Oakland Ballet. It regularly plays host to R&B, jazz, blues, pop, rock, gospel, classical music, as well as ballets, plays, stand-up comedy, lecture series, special events, and screenings of classic movies from Hollywood's Golden Era.
Carl Davis, is an American-born conductor and composer who has lived in the United Kingdom since 1961.
Too Much Johnson is a 1938 American silent comedy film written and directed by Orson Welles. An unfinished film component of a stage production, it was made three years before Welles directed Citizen Kane, but it was never publicly screened. It was shot to be integrated into Welles's Mercury Theatre stage presentation of William Gillette's 1894 comedy, but the film sequences could not be shown due to the absence of projection facilities at the venue, the Stony Creek Theatre in Connecticut. The resulting plot confusion reportedly contributed to the stage production's failure.
Kevin Brownlow is a British film historian, television documentary-maker, filmmaker, author, and film editor. He is best known for his work documenting the history of the silent era, having become interested in silent film at the age of eleven. This interest grew into a career spent documenting and restoring film. Brownlow has rescued many silent films and their history. His initiative in interviewing many largely forgotten, elderly film pioneers in the 1960s and 1970s preserved a legacy of early mass-entertainment cinema. He received an Academy Honorary Award at the 2nd Annual Governors Awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on 13 November 2010. This was the first occasion on which an Academy Honorary Award was given to a film preservationist.
Polyvision was the name given by the French film critic Émile Vuillermoz to a specialized widescreen film format devised exclusively for the filming and projection of Abel Gance's 1927 film Napoleon.
Dennis James is an American musician and historic preservationist who played "a pivotal role in the international revival of silent films as presented with period-authentic live music." Beginning in 1969, he presented historically informed live accompaniments for silent films, with piano, theatre organ, chamber ensemble and full symphony orchestras, throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico and overseas. He is now primarily active as a noted multi-instrumentalist, specializing on Franklin glass armonica and the theremin, prominently performing in New York at the Metropolitan Opera, for Hollywood film scorings, and repeat performances at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival plus performing at the Tanglewood Festival with the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing the intricate glass armonica complete part in the U.S. debut of George Benjamin's opera "Written on Skin".
The Club Foot Orchestra is a musical ensemble known for their silent film scores. Their influences include Eastern European folk music, impressionism, and jazz fusion; The New Yorker described their style as "music that bubbles up from the intersection of aesthetics and the id."
Le Giornate del cinema muto is an annual festival of silent film held in October in Pordenone, northern Italy. It is the first, largest and most important international festival dedicated to silent film and also is present in the list of the top 50 unmissable film festivals in the world according to Variety. The Pordenone Silent Film Festival is a non-profit association, whose president is Livio Jacob. The director from 1997 until 2015 was David Robinson. In 2016, Jay Weissberg became director. Other members of the festival board are Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, Piero Colussi, Luciano De Giusti, Carlo Montanaro, Piera Patat.
Victoria Theatre is a 480-seat theater in San Francisco's Mission District, which presents locally produced original plays, live concerts, film festivals, musicals, performances by international performing companies and other kinds of events. The theater is located at 2961 16th Street in San Francisco, California. It is not connected to the Red Vic, a now-closed repertory movie theater in the Haight.
David Ian Gill was a British film historian, preservationist and documentarian who documented the history of motion pictures and helped restore many early, silent films.
Thames Silents is a series of releases of films from the silent era produced by the British ITV contractor Thames Television. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill were the two main people involved in the project.
Mr. Fix-It is a 1918 American silent comedy film starring Douglas Fairbanks, Marjorie Daw, and Wanda Hawley, directed by Allan Dwan.
Photoplay Productions is an independent film company, based in the UK, under the direction of Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury. Is one of the few independent companies to operate in the revival of interest in the lost world of silent cinema and has been recognised as a driving force in the subject.
The Castro Organ Devotees Association (CODA) is an American nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and enhancing the tradition of live organ music in San Francisco's Castro Theatre. The theater is a popular San Francisco movie palace, built in the 1920s, which gained Historic Landmark status in 1976. The original Robert Morton organ was removed in the 1950s. The present organ, widely regarded as one of the finest theatre organs assembled, was assembled in the late 1970s using components from other organs, including its console, which was originally built in 1925 for the State Theatre in Detroit, Michigan to accompany silent pictures. The current console and organ were built by the Taylor family starting in 1979, and it has been owned and maintained by them since, but in 2014 they moved taking the console and one fourth of the pipework.
Matti Bye is a Swedish pianist and composer. He has composed music for over 30 films and TV series as well as additional scores for Theatre and Dance pieces. In 2014, he was nominated twice at Sweden´s Guldbagge Awards in which his soundtrack for the film Faro won the award. He also won a Gudbagge in 2009 for his score for the film Everlasting Moments. He has recorded and released numerous solo and collaboration records, include Hydra’s Dream, with Anna Von Hausswolff; Maailma, with cult Finnish songwriter Lau Nau; and has collaborated live with producer and musician Samuli Kosminen.
The Piedmont Theatre, located on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, California, is Oakland's oldest continuously operating movie theater.
