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I discovered something about myself this weekend. I can only watch so many silent films in three days.
I attended all but two events at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival this weekend. I had a great time, but I feel like I fried my mind. A quick overview:
The General Vibe
There’s more to this festival than [...]

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Owning a movie on DVD shouldn’t keep you from seeing it theatrically. After all, if you love it enough to buy it, you should love it enough to leave the house and see it under the best possible conditions. I’m seeing three such films this week–four if you count Lawrence of Arabia.
Lawrence is a special [...]

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School is out, and parents yearn for quiet. What better time to get out of the house and watch a silent film?
Perhaps that’s why the Bay Area’s two big weekend-long celebrations of movies with live music come two weeks apart in late June and early July. If you’ve never experienced that unique blend of live [...]

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The cinematic art is just barely old enough for centenaries. After all, the oldest movie to still retain some popularity as entertainment, “A Trip to the Moon,” is only 105 years old.
On December 6, the Rafael will look back at the year 1907 in a collection of shorts that promise to capture that transitional [...]

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We think of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival as a summer event, but they’re taking over the Castro on December 1 for three presentations–two of them with live musical accompaniment.
There’s a good reason why the 11:00am show won’t have live music: It’s not silent. Warner’s Vitaphone short subjects were among the first widely-seen sound [...]

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If people know anything about Charlie Chaplin, they know he made silent movies. And if they know anything about silent movies, they want said movies to be accompanied by live music. And yet the upcoming Chaplin series at the Pacific Film Archive, screening nearly all of his features and all of his later shorts, has [...]

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This weekend the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum runs its three-day Niles International Film Festival. Actually, it would be more accurately titled the Niles European Film Festival, since the six features and seven shorts are all from that particular semi-continent. All films are silent, of course, with piano accompaniment. The George Melies short, “The Impossible [...]

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The Stanford’s new schedule is up, and the theme is Frank Capra. Of the 26 films they’ve announced, 18 are Capra’s.
Actually, they’re starting off Saturday night with a Billy Wilder double bill–Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. Great movies, but obvious choices that any cinephile has seen countless times. Still, if it’s [...]

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