Silent Film Festivals

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 and canned entertainment, this is the best time of the year to discover something very old yet always new. And if you already have a taste for silent films, now is the time to enjoy them in full.

Running June 27 through 29 at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival generally goes for obscure works of historical interest–almost all of them American. And as the name implies, there’s always something about Broncho Billy Anderson (real name: Max Aronson), the cowboy star who shot his westerns in and around Niles.

This year, the festival centers around the studios in the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). This Edison-led trust, made up of nine leading studios, controlled the American industry during some of its formative years. Most historians don’t look upon the trust favorably; its cautious policies slowed the art’s development and proved, in the long run, economically short-sighted. For instance, the MPPC decreed that no film could be longer than one reel (about 15 minutes) and that actors never get screen credit. [[6/27: I’ve been informed by the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum that my information isn’t correct. MPPC studios did make multi-reel features, and in some cases credited their actors.]] The independents who fought against and overran the MPPC became the major studios we know today.

But filmmakers struggling with the MPPC’s rules, including D.W. Griffith, helped develop the art. The festival will screen seven collections of shorts (no features), each from a different MPPC company, from Edison on Friday night to Essanay (of course–and yes, there’s some Broncho Billy in there) Sunday evening. Each series will be presented by a historian and accompanied by a member of the Museum’s regular stable of pianists.

Two weeks later, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival runs July 11 through the 13 at the Castro. As befits the venue, this is a bigger, fancier, and more glamorous festival. The SFSFF emphasizes features, some well-known and popular, and others perhaps deserving to be so. A free program will explore George Eastman House’s school for film preservationists, and contemporary director Guy Madden will introduce a late-night Saturday screening of Tod Browning’s macabre The Unknown. Although this Lon Chaney vehicle (he plays an armless knife thrower) is an American film, they’ll show a print with French intertitles–and read a translation out loud.

The festival kicks off Friday night with one of the best comedies ever, and the film that introduced me to silent films: Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother, accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Other films I know are worth seeing include The Soul of Youth, a sympathetic portrait of a juvenile delinquent; The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which is probably the first animated feature; and, for the closing show, the delightful Marion Davies vehicle The Patsy, directed by King Vidor.

There are plenty of other films I want to see but haven’t yet, including the German expressionist horror show The Man Who Laughs, Rene Clair’s Les Deux Timides (accompanied by the Baguette Quartette), and The Silent Enemy, about the pre-Columbian Ojibway native Americans.

Two wonderful weekends.