gazette > News: January 10, 2010
Gazette
News: January 10, 2010
Melissa Cox and Frank Buxton before SHERLOCK JR.
5th Winter Event
a Resounding Success!
Dear Friend of the Silent Film Festival,
As we welcome 2010, we give thanks to you, for making our 14th annual festival this past July such a success, and for helping us close out the year in great form with our one-day Winter Event in December.
Before settling at the piano to accompany CHANG, Donald Sosin invited the audience to aid his score for this Drama of the Wilderness by providing noises to match the wild beasts onscreen. "What have I unleashed?" he wondered aloud, as the sounds of monkeys and lions filled the auditorium. Mark Vaz, biographer of director Merian C. Cooper, introduced the film by regaling us with stories of the pair's daring filmmaking adventures and expeditions. "Keep it distant, difficult, and dangerous," was "Coop and Shorty's" motto, and there was no better proof than CHANG, their thrilling "record of a lost world" in the jungle.
Abel Gance's J'ACCUSE was introduced by the Festival's own Robert Byrne, fresh from a preservation internship at the Nederlands Filmmuseum where this masterpiece was restored. He took us through the film’s history, from production in the trenches of WWI, to a mangled cut made for release in the United States, to our December 12th screening of “not just a beautiful restoration, but the North American premiere of Abel Gance’s original vision.” And what a vision it was, a glorious and heartbreaking pacifist epic brought to new toned and tinted life on the Castro screen.
Between the battlefields of France and the movie house of Buster Keaton’s imagination, we repaired to the mezzanine for the Winter Event Party. There we raised our glasses to silent film, accompanied by the merry strains of Odile Levault’s French accordion as she wandered through the celebratory crowd.
Introducing THE GOAT and SHERLOCK JR., Board member Frank Buxton said, “I want to congratulate you for being here…this is the way to see movies.” He then had the honor of interviewing Buster Keaton’s granddaughter Melissa Cox, who enthralled us with stories of lunches delivered poolside on her grandfather’s model train and of an elaborate mechanical nutcracker – four minutes to crack a nut! She also revealed the secret to Keaton’s extensive filmography: high-stakes bridge. When he lost, “he’d make another movie!” Keaton didn’t always clean up at the card table, and luckily for us, because we got to laugh and wonder at the genius of the Great Stone Face in these two indelible films, buoyed by Dennis James’ vibrant organ score and Foley artist Todd Manley’s live sound effects.
Program host Jesse Hawthorne Ficks would not send us off to WEST OF ZANZIBAR unwarned, saying, “I just want to prepare you: you are going to go to very dark places tonight.” And go we did, following Tod Browning and Lon Chaney on a late-night tour of a deranged colonial Africa and the depths of one man’s madness. True to Jesse’s dedication to “dismissed, underrated, and forgotten films,” Browning’s nightmare vision brought contemporary censorship to its knees, and in December, it brought us to the edges of our seats.
What a day! We are so glad you joined us on a journey through the jungles of Siam (present-day Thailand) and France during the Great War, through movies within movies, and the heat of the Congo. Thank you for your sharing your love of silent film with us!
We cannot wait to see you again in July for the 15th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
Warm Regards,
Stacey, Anita, Jeremy, and Lucia
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival
833 Market Street, Suite 812
San Francisco, CA 94103
Tel 415-777-4908; fax 415-777-4904
stacey@silentfilm.org
BECOME A MEMBER
By making your annual membership contribution today, you’ll receive discounts on admissions and party tickets for our 15th Anniversary Silent Film Festival in July and our Winter Event!! To renew, become a member, or review member levels and benefits, please click here.
OTHER SILENT FILM FESTIVAL NEWS
Our 15th Anniversary Silent Film Festival will be July 15-18, 2010. That’s right, we’re adding a day, and six programs! Make sure to mark your calendar now for our most ambitious and thrilling festival yet!
SFSFF ON THE WEB
Visit our new blog!
Become our fan on Facebook!
Check out the “Archive” page on our website for essays on past films we have presented. It is still a work-in-progress, but all of the essays will be online before too long.
UPCOMING SILENT FILMS IN THE BAY AREA
San Francisco Film Society
SF360 Film+Club
Steven Severin: Music for Silents
Tuesday, January 12 at 7pm
Mezzanine
A rare appearance by Steven Severin, performing his recent solo work Music for Silents live with video projection. The centerpiece of the new work is a soundtrack to the French avant-garde masterpiece The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), directed by Germaine Dulac and written by Antonin Artaud. This film, along with a selection of other rare silent shorts, will be screened in full and accompanied by Severin’s live musical performance. Dulac's surrealist classic was met by antipathy on its original release by the British Board of Film Censors, which wrote that it is “apparently meaningless … But, if there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.”
Please visit the San Francisco Film Society website for complete program information.
Pacific Film Archive
January 16, 2010 - February 27, 2010
Sunday, January 17
2:00 THE STRONG MAN (Frank Capra, 1926)
Judith Rosenberg on piano.
Sunday, January 24
2:00 Early Capra in the San Francisco Bay Area (Frank Capra, 1921–22)
Lecture by Joseph McBride.
Judith Rosenberg on piano.
Please visit the PFA website for complete program information.
Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum
Every Saturday at 7:30pm
Please visit the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum website for complete program information.
We are pleased to be able to bring you information about silent film screenings in the Bay Area and we thank our members for making it possible. To make a membership contribution in support of our activities, please visit our membership page or call our Development Director, Jeremy O’Neal at 415.777.4908.
About the organization:
The Silent Film Festival is a nonprofit organization promoting the artistic, cultural, and historic value of silent film. Silent filmmakers produced masterpieces and crowd-thrilling entertainments. Remarkable for their artistry and their inestimable value as historical documents, silent films show us how our ancestors thought, spoke, dressed and lived. It is through these films that the world first came to love movies, and learned how to appreciate them as art. They have influenced every generation of filmmakers, and continue to inspire audiences nearly a century after they were made.
The 15th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival will take place at the Castro Theatre July 15-18, 2010.
For information, please visit our event page in late May, 2010
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Lady of the Pavements (1929)