On New Shores: The 27th San Francisco Silent Film Festival

First, a bit of news from the front. Those who have been following some of the local drama outlined in my last dispatch from the San Francisco Silent Film Festival know that this year’s edition is the first in the three decades since the festival’s founding not held at the legendary Castro Theatre, concluding a multi-year battle between city activists, media conglomerate Another Planet Entertainment, and the local government to preserve the historic picture palace. Some events previously held at the Castro, such as Eddie Muller’s annual Noir City, have already sought refuge at other venues across the Bay. In the case of Silent Fest, this year’s edition was held at the Palace of Fine Arts, a bit to the north in the Marina District of San Francisco just shy of the Golden Gate bridge. Whether the move will be permanent is difficult to gauge from the outside. In an interview with Screen Slate published ahead of last year’s festival,¹ artistic director Anita Monga continued to express hope for future collaborations between Silent Fest and the Castro when it reopens, and a letter published on the festival’s website by Executive Director Stacey Wisnia ahead of the 2024 edition warmly refers to the change as simply “goodbye-for-now.”² However, the changes proposed to convert the theatre to a live music venue – including the removal of installed seating in the main auditorium and the film projectors from the booth – make it hard to imagine how such a collaboration might arise in the future. 

As far as replacements go, one could do worse than the Palace of Fine Arts. Originally commissioned for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, the theatre was added as part of the restoration of the building in the 1960s, boasting a comparable size of 960 seats to the Castro’s 1,400. Geographically, this new location takes the festival much closer to the parks covering most of northern San Francisco, in comparison to the chic neighbourhoods of the Castro district. Crossing from East Bay to the Castro was never an easy feat given the unreliability of San Francisco public transit – to say nothing of BART’s expensive pay-as-you-go fares – but when it works, it’s relatively simple. Now, in a part of town untouched by the subway system, it’s more cumbersome to attend. The bigger challenge facing this new location is that it simply isn’t designed for projecting films. The wide floor plan of the theatre is fine for live events – what the venue is primarily known for – but the angles of the seats on either end offer very limited sightlines to the screen. More disappointingly, as the theatre is not equipped to show films (the festival had to install a DCP projector itself), this is the first edition of Silent Fest to not project any of the 22 features on film prints, previously one of the festival’s signature qualities.

All the same, these changes seem to hardly deter the festival’s momentum as it enters its 27th year. As the US’s premier festival dedicated to silent film, Silent Fest offers a strong mixture of classics – including, this year, Ozu Yasujiro’s best-known silent film, Otona no miru ehon – Umarete wa mita keredo (I Was Born, But…, 1932), Victor Sjöström’s special-effects laden fantasy film Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage, 1921) and Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922), a cult classic revived in the ‘60s when it was released with narration by William S. Burroughs – alongside lesser known films, each accompanied by an original score performed live by a variety of musicians and ensembles. For those attending the full line-up, part of the fun is trying to identify the recurring motif bringing a number of the films together. Two years ago, in the slate helmed by Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922) and the explosive, King Vidor-ian The Fire Brigade (William Nigh, 1926), the theme was big, fiery set-pieces. Last year, it was floods, which seemed to crop up again and again. This year’s theme was swashbucklers, kicked off by the festival’s opener, the Douglas Fairbanks adventure film The Black Pirate (Albert Parker, 1926), a restoration funded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association at the suggestion of the American filmmaker Alexander Payne. 

The draw of a film like The Black Pirate is primarily its tech, filmed with a still-experimental two-strip Technicolor process especially good with greens and reds (good for gore, of which there is more than might be expected) but less effective with the rest of the colour spectrum. The impressiveness of the process was amplified by an informative presentation the following day by David Pierce, co-author of The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915-1935 (2015) with James Layton. Filmed with a lens outfitted with a prism splitting the light between two filters, one red and the other green, the images were printed on two separate negatives and then cemented together in postproduction. Fairbanks was quoted in one of the slides accompanying the preshow as stating he wanted the film’s light and colour design to resemble Rembrandt, and this influence is especially striking in the dark, where the colour is more targeted and powerful. Parker is otherwise not a director of much distinction: his only other credit of note seems to be his Sherlock Holmes adaptation starring John Barrymore, though he also directed Gloria Swanson in a number of films. But he handles big crowd scenes well and led me to wonder if there was any overlap between Fairbank’s interest in this subject-matter and his admiration of Sergei Eisenstein’s contemporaneous maritime film, Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), which he would help bring to New York for its US premiere later that December. 

The Oath of the Sword

To regulars of the festival, it’s an open secret that one of the best parts of Silent Fest is the “Amazing Tales from the Archive” program, a free event usually opening the first full day of the festival featuring lectures by archivists and scholars on a range of new discoveries and research. In addition to Pierce’s lecture on early Technicolor processes, opening with a sequence starring Clara Bow in Red Hair (Clarence G. Badger, 1928) – her only appearance in colour – and a giant pelican, two other presentations were included in this year’s line-up. The first of these “Tales” was a presentation by BFI archivist Bryony Dixon on the early film career of Michael Powell, later the director of major English films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and The Red Shoes (1948, both co-directed with Emeric Pressburger). The highlight of this presentation was the series of comedy shorts produced by Rex Ingram – the unfairly neglected director of silent films, including the Balzac adaptation The Conquering Power (1921) – starring the young Powell in full safari getup, shot along the coast of the French Riviera. These “Riviera Revels,” directed by Harry Lachman, combine early cinema’s interest in travelogues with classic slapstick routines, and the second of two shown, subtitled “Fauny Business” (1927) already suggests Powell’s later interest in fantastical subject matter.

Another presentation by film scholar Denise Khor focused on the restoration of The Oath of the Sword (Frank Shaw, 1914), billed as one of the earliest-known Asian-American films made in the US. The film was produced by the Japanese American Film Company, established in 1913 by a group of Japanese-American businessmen, and stars a cast almost entirely comprised of Asian actors. Khor argued this film is an example of the difficulties of Japanese integration in the United States – a subject exacerbated by early 20th century xenophobia, especially targeting Asian immigrants – and this description is convincing. The film follows a young Japanese man who leaves his family and girlfriend to attend college in the United States. (The film notes identify the school as UC Berkeley, though I can’t recall any landmarks in the film itself that make this obvious.) While he’s away, his girlfriend becomes involved with another man, eventually giving birth to their child. Shaw cuts back and forth between these stories on different ends of the Pacific, ending dramatically with the man’s return home and discovery of his girlfriend’s infidelity. The structure of the plotline in many ways resembles the poet Lord Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden” adapted three years earlier by D.W. Griffith (Enoch Arden, 1911) whose knack for cross-cutting and watery location shots likely inspired the approach of the later film. Having languished in the archive at the George Eastman House for decades, the new restoration of the film is impressively crisp. 

The Kid Brother

For my money, many of the festival’s best offerings this year – whether classics or discoveries – were its comedies. Sure enough, several notable dramas were featured in the line-up: among those already mentioned include Karl Grune’s Expressionist classic Die Straße (The Street, 1923), Julien Duvivier’s Poil de Carotte (The Red Head, 1925), sappy but perhaps his most celebrated silent, and Allan Dwan’s East Side, West Side (1927), another demonstration of the American director’s command of mobile camera and gruff, manly drama. But the sheer number of comedies, featuring major performers such as Laurel and Hardy and more minor ones such as Edward Everett Horton, particularly stands out. 

Probably the most popular title programmed this year was Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924), the next in the multi-year project launched in 2015 by L’Immagine Ritrovata and the Cohen Film Collection to restore all of Keaton’s features, shown alongside his earlier short One Week (1920). Not far behind, I imagine, is Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother (1927) – the second-most famous film by the actor after Safety Last! (Sam Taylor, Fred C. Newmeyer, 1923), though there’s not a lot in common between them. Keaton and Lloyd are often considered, along with Charlie Chaplin, to be the three biggest names in American slapstick, a reputation aided in no small part by James Agee’s 1949 essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era”, which helped to revive interest in their work later in the sound era. More recent appraisals in the last decade have further launched interest in Keaton’s films, to such an extent that it has become fashionable to prefer his films to Chaplin’s (an evaluation Gilbert Adair dismissed succinctly back in the ‘90s when he noted that while Keaton belongs to film history, Chaplin belongs History). Lloyd’s films have, in comparison, received very little due in critical and academic circles, such that the gulf between him and the other two stars is a bit more unbridgeable. The fate of his reputation is unusual when remembering that, unlike Keaton, Lloyd managed to produce notable work during the sound era in films like The Milky Way (1936), directed by Leo McCarey, a fellow veteran of the Hal Roach studios, and Preston Sturges’ The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947, re-released in 1950 as Mad Wednesday), in part a sequel to Lloyd’s silent-era comedy The Freshman (Sam Taylor, Fred C. Newmeyer, 1925).

This lesser evaluation may owe in part to Lloyd’s refusal to sign his films as director, often attributing the films to other collaborators such as Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor (both credited for Safety Last!) or Ted Wilde and J.A. Howe (credited for The Kid Brother). Lloyd’s films do not have the ethical weight of Chaplin’s films nor the technical achievement of Keaton’s, but it can be easy to miss what’s nonetheless imaginative about them. Aged 34 by the time of the filming of The Kid Brother, Lloyd continued to stick to younger characters on the cusp of adulthood. At 5’10”, several inches taller than Chaplin or Keaton, his films continued to find ways to play down his height, finding a variety of visual tricks and cheats to make him appear small in the frame, often by playing up the size of ordinary objects or other performers. In this respect, I have always observed an unlikely kinship between Lloyd’s films and those directed by Tod Browning. Both filmmakers are fascinated with exaggerated bodies – in Lloyd’s films, finding huge muscular men to tower over him; in Browning’s films, using characters of radically different heights, like in The Unholy Three (1925) and Freaks (1932) or through special effects in The Devil Doll (1936). And, in fact, the comparison first occurred to me a few years ago while watching the finale of The Kid Brother, where Lloyd is chased onto a sinking ship by a hulking bandit and a monkey in a little sailor suit. It’s a scene of extremes, eyes and arms poking through portholes trying to grab at him. Hopefully one day, Lloyd will get more of his due.  

Oh! What a Nurse!

Notable among the lesser-known comedies was Mykola Shpykovskyi’s Shkurnyk (The Opportunist, 1929), which, like last year’s standout Stantsiya Pupki (Pigs Will Be Pigs, Khanan Shmain, 1931), offers another example of how funny the Soviet film industry could be. I had previously seen this film when its title was then translated as The Self-Seeker, though The Opportunist is a better, less clumsy choice. Set during the Russian Civil War between the Bolshevik Red Army, which had just taken power in Moscow, and the White Army allied with the Russian aristocratic classes, the film is an often-amusing send-up of the middle-classes trying desperately to hedge their bets around which side will win. Shpykovskyi was not a particularly prolific filmmaker; his most famous film is the comic short Shakhmatnaya goryachka (Chess Fever, 1925), co-directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin (who, colloquially, is often unfairly given sole credit). 

The biggest discovery of the festival for me was Oh! What a Nurse! (Charles Reisner, 1926), starring Sydney Chaplin, the older half-brother of Charlie. I dislike the gratuitously gossipy aspects to Scott Eyman’s recent biography Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided (2023), but one thing it does accomplish is to paint the relationship between the two brothers, much like Lisa K. Stein’s biography of Sydney earlier last decade (Syd Chaplin: A Biography, 2010). Born four years earlier than Charlie, he followed his younger brother to the Keystone Company in the early 1910s and developed his own comic personality in the ‘20s, a bit less bumbling and a bit more handsome. (The family resemblance is most apparent in the mischievous grin the brothers share when mocking someone behind their back.) As much of a Chaplin fanatic as I am, I must confess I’d never seen any of Sydney’s films, though the introduction by film programmer Jay Weissberg strongly recommended his earlier film, Charley’s Aunt (Scott Sidney, 1925) as his greatest. That film was the first of Sydney’s to involve a long sequence in drag, a gag shared in Oh! What a Nurse! As for the latter, it’s an excellent work of slapstick and chase.

The Dancing Mother / Dancing Mothers

No screening grabbed more headlines this year than the double-bill of films starring Clara Bow, both restored by the festival. The more notable of the two is a recently-rediscovered short The Pill Pounder (1923), directed by a young Gregory La Cava for the Irish character actor Charles Murray. Most of this attention focused on the circumstance of its rediscovery, recounted in detail by silent film historian Pamela Hutchinson in a recent piece for The Guardian.³ Found at a reduced runtime and without subtitles among a pile of reels sold for auction in Omaha, the version screened at the festival is complete enough to show off La Cava’s skill for balancing multiple characters within the frame at once, perfected in later sound films like My Man Godfrey (1936) and Stage Door (1937). Murray, who doubled as the lead in another festival title, The Gorilla (Alfred Santell, 1927), plays the titular role of “Pill Pounder,” slang for pharmacist. By my guess, most of the film seems to be intact: the only substantial ellipsis is the part connecting Murray’s early scenes at the pharmacy to the finale, where we catch up with him chased by an angry mob. 

Bow’s role in The Pill Pounder is minor: in the existing version, her part – the girlfriend of Murray’s son – is limited to two scenes. More substantial is her supporting role in Herbert Brenon’s The Dancing Mother/Dancing Mothers (1926), perfecting her Jazz Age flapper persona just a year before her star-making lead performance in It (Clarence G. Badger and Josef von Sternberg, 1927). Here, Bow steals every scene she’s in, even if her co-star Alice Joyce, fresh off a supporting role in Henry King’s melodrama Stella Dallas (1925), gives her a run for her money in the lead role. In fact, the conflict between the two, in the roles of mother and daughter, is part of what makes the film interesting. I seldom find Brenon an interesting filmmaker, even if film historian Richard Koszarski is right that he tends to get good performances out of his actors. At least here, the film makes full use of its relatively brief runtime of 63 minutes in building the tension between the two overlapping love triangles. Joyce, here playing a caring mother, is left at home while Bow and her father hit the clubs every night, pretending to be busy with work and school. Joyce catches wind that Bow’s new boyfriend is a notorious bad boy and serial heartbreaker. Hoping to spare her daughter, she decides to try and seduce the boy in order to break off their engagement, unaware that his other girlfriend is also having an affair with Joyce’s husband. By the time this is revealed, the triangles have become so knotty it’s hard not to be completely hooked.

The Lady

My most anticipated screening was the restoration of the American director Frank Borzage’s The Lady (1925), and this anticipation proved to be well-deserved. By the time of its release, Borzage had been directing consistently for just over ten years – his IMDb profile lists over one hundred credits as director – and was nearing the peak of his career with films like 7th Heaven (1927), for which he received the inaugural Oscar for Best Director, and Street Angel (1928). The Lady, adapted from a stage play by screenwriter Frances Marion (described in the festival booklet by Marilyn Ferdinand as one of the most-regarded and prolific woman screenwriters of the 1920s) and starring the great melodrama actress Norma Talmadge, begins in Marseille during the First World War. Two English soldiers start a bar fight to the consternation of the barmaid (Talmadge), who recounts her life story to another patron. Formerly a successful dancer at a nightclub, Talmadge marries a rich English aristocrat. His father’s disapproval at their marriage brings the couple to France, and the husband’s infidelity splits the couple. Penniless, she returns to a small cabaret show in Marseille, where she gives birth to the couple’s child in secret. When her former father-in-law arrives at the cabaret to claim the child – revealing his son died of causes left unrevealed – she arranges for the baby to be taken in by another woman on the condition that he be raised “by a lady.” 

The Lady is one of two recently-completed restorations of Borzage’s films. The other, a complete restoration of his Depression-era masterpiece Man’s Castle (1933) reincorporating around eight minutes cut from the film by censors, was completed by MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in 2023 and debuted last spring at TCM (Turner Classic Movie) Fest in Los Angeles. Between these films, Borzage would have the chance to meet the German director F.W. Murnau, brought to the United States by the Fox Film Company, and this encounter would prove formative for Borzage’s approach to his later melodramas. But The Lady, completed before the two directors joined Fox, demonstrates the autonomy of his artistic strengths. Borzage’s age places him squarely within the Lost Generation alongside artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and it’s not surprising that the years of his greatest success overlapped with many of the great achievements of those novelists. Like them, particularly Fitzgerald, Borzage’s films grapple with the dreams and disappointments of his generation. A filmmaker like Federico Fellini allows his characters to dream, but more often than not for the pleasure at being the one to tear them down. Borzage takes no joy in this, though neither is he the kind to play it too much for drama, either. It’s too easy to stack the deck with this kind of material, but Borzage isn’t that kind of filmmaker. He wants to see their dreams fulfilled, which doesn’t mean forsaking the hard way. The ending to The Lady develops into a powerful drama around recognition, anticipating the famous ending to Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), and we might say of Borzage what François Truffaut once said of the latter: “The humanity of [his] films is made of the same stuff: the necessity of three meals a day, to find work, to be happy in love.”

San Francisco Silent Film Festival
10 – 14 April 2024
https://silentfilm.org

Endnotes