17th Annual SF Silent Film Festival will be my fourth go round at what is generally considered the top film festival dedicated exclusively to the art of silent cinema in the United States.
Compared to the glories of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, the largest silent film festival in the world, and Il Ritrovato, the magnificent celebration of classic cinema in Bologna every years, SFSFF may seem modest at 15 features films and a couple of programs of short films over four nights and three full days. But from the opening night screening of Wings (1927), the very first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, on Thursday, July 12 through closing night film The Cameraman (1928) with Buster Keaton, the historic Castro Theatre in San Francisco comes alive with (mostly) glorious 35mm film prints preserved and restored by archives from around the world, with live scores by some of the finest silent film accompanists around at each screening.
I’ve seen many of the films before, though few of them on the big screen with live accompaniment, I’ve long wanted to see a few others, and there are few that are new to me (and I hope will be revelations). Philip Kaufman, the “guest festival director” this year, will present one of those: The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna, a 1928 German drama from director Hanns Schwarz starring Brigitte Helm and Francis Lederer, on Friday, July 13. Earlier on Friday is a screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Loves of a Pharaoh (1922) with Emil Jannings, the director’s final lavish German production before he left for Hollywood, considered lost for many years. It shows in a newly restored DCP print, one of the few digital presentations of the festival.
It’s a marvelous mix of landmark films with the greatest stars of the golden age, like Pandora’s Box (1926) with Louise Brooks and the original The Mark of Zorro (1920), the first swashbuckler that Douglas Fairbanks ever made, and rarities like The Overcoat (1926) from Russia and the original screen version of Stella Dallas (1925) from director Henry King, a giant of the silent, and actor Ronald Colman.
Here are some notes on some of the films I have seen before, and I hope to follow up with reports on the discoveries I make over the weekend.
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