It’s June, and that means two weekends (and a few weekdays) of intense silent film activity. For those of us who love to read a movie’s dialog while listening to live musical accompaniment, summer brings added pleasures to the Bay Area.
The Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival runs Friday through Sunday, the weekend of 
June 24, at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. The themes this year are Keystone comedies and women action stars. It starts off Friday night with the 1924 Gloria Swanson vehicle Manhandled. Saturday will be devoted to the Keystone studios, with three shows presented by film historians Brent Walker and Richard Roberts. Sunday will treat us to a short and a feature starring action heroine Helen Holmes, with her great-granddaughter in attendance. The festival will close with a Baby Peggy feature called The Family Secret.
Four different pianists will accompany the shows.
But the big event comes three weeks later, when the San Francisco Silent Film Festival takes over the Castro from Thursday July 14 through Sunday the 17th. It opens Thursday night with a recently discovered John Ford film called Upstream, and closes with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s first film, He Who Gets Slapped. In between we’ve got F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise, Ozu’s amazing I Was Born, But…, a 1920 version of Huckleberry Finn, two Amazing Tales from the Archives presentations, a discussion on the craft of scoring silent files (the one from last year turned into a very lively debate), and much more.
The music for this festival is always something special. This year accompanists include the Sosin Ensemble, the Matti Bye Ensemble, Stephen Horne, Giovanni Spinelli, and my favorite such group, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.
But there’s something very sad about this year’s San Francisco festival: I’ll only be able to attend opening night.
Bayflicks 