By Kyle Westphal

When the “Unseen Cinema” preservation project and touring package was conceived by Bruce Posner nearly two decades ago, it was situated as a curatorial corrective to histories of avant-garde film that began with Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and ignored almost everything that came before. The fact that such long-standing periodization now seems perfectly arbitrary and somewhat hidebound is the greatest measure of the success of “Unseen Cinema.” The revisionist act of historiography has itself become historicized.
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By David Kiehn

One of the most anticipated films of this year’s Festival is San Francisco, 1906, a newly-recovered film shot in the immediate aftermath of the great quake. The footage will be screening prior to Trappola on Saturday, June 2 at 2:45pm. In this guest post, historian David Kiehn of the NilesEssanay Silent Film Museum offers a deep dive into the production, distribution, and rediscovery of this invaluable record.  - Ed.

by Kyle Westphal

Long-time attendees of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival may feel that they’re on a first-name basis with our staff and board members, who are often front-and-center during the festival, introducing films and discussing the latest restorations. Among them is Rob Byrne, the SFSFF Board President, who also oversees several restorations for the Festival in a given year.
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by Kyle Westphal

Ernst Lubitsch’s first American feature, Rosita, premiered ninety-five years ago, but hasn’t been much seen since. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival will be presenting the West Coast premiere of a new 4K DCP restoration from the Museum of Modern Art on Friday, June 1. I recently spoke to Dave Kehr, Curator of Film at MoMA, about the new restoration, his lifelong love of all things Lubitsch, and upcoming preservation projects.
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by Alicia Fletcher

There are many great silent film programs beyond San Francisco. This week, we turn over the blog to a guest post from Toronto-based curator Alicia Fletcher, who offers a behind-the-scenes look at a recent series of silent fairy tale she programed, with special insight into the selection process and the practical work of tracking down prints. For more enchanted cinema, remember to check out Serge Bromberg Presents ... at the 2018 San Francisco Silent Film Festival - Ed.
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by Kyle Westphal

How has film culture changed as fans move from the video store to streaming services, and what’s been lost?

A piece in the New York Times earlier this month asked this increasingly familiar question, focusing on the fate of future filmmakers growing up today without access to the audio commentaries, making-of featurettes, and assorted extra that my generation took for granted.
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by Kyle Westphal

As much a showman as a filmmaker, Cecil B. DeMille purportedly stumbled upon his first religious epic through a publicity stunt in the Los Angeles Times.
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by Kyle Westphal Longtime collectors of silent films on home video remember such labels as Video Yesteryear and Sinister Cinema. Even if you could barely make out the film after adjusting the tracking three times, it felt like a privilege just to see the film in any form. We’re currently living through a golden age of availability, with regular silent film DVD and Blu-ray releases from Kino Lorber, Milestone, Olive Films, and the Criterion Collection. (Region-free collectors can also count on first-rate releases from Masters of Cinema, the British Film Institute, and Edition Filmmuseum, among others.) In addition to these boutique labels, the past few years have seen a handful of efforts from private individuals who have polished up archival holdings and released discs that can proudly stand side-by-side with more commercial efforts. Two recent releases, When Knighthood Was In Flower from Ben Model’s Undercrank Productions and Little Orphant Annie from Indiana-based Eric Grayson, exemplify this new frontier of collaboration between large archives and passionate independent producers. Neither film was lost prior to Model’s and Grayson’s efforts, but they existed in much diminished forms, shorn of elaborate tinting schemes, hand-colored effects, and even basic continuity. Both films to home viewers on DVD and Blu-ray; theatrical audiences can see Knighthood in DCP and Orphant in a newly-struck 35mm print.
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by Kyle Westphal

Does anybody remember The Artist?

Seven long years ago, Michel Hazanavicius’s glistening throwback was tipped to usher in a new age of silent film appreciation. Septuagenarian silent cinema fanciers celebrated it as a movie that would get the kids interested in something other than MTV or frisbees or whatever passing fad had seduced the younger generation.
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This is the third part of Christine U'Ren's series on early movies. Read parts one and two. 

But what was it like to be in one of those raucous phonograph parlors, back in the 1890’s? Well, if you’re anywhere near San Francisco, you can find out for yourself by visiting the city’s own Musée Mécanique on Fisherman’s Wharf.
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This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival line-up includes two recently restored features directed by women: Lois Weber’s The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916) and Dorothy Arzner’s Get Your Man (1927).

By Kyle Westphal

The French film collector and preservationist Serge Bromberg is a long-time friend of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which has screened many restorations from his company Lobster Films over the years.
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By Kyle Westphal

The first biography of Lois Weber— Anthony Slide's effort from 1996, published fifty-seven years after her death—was subtitled "The Woman Who Lost Her Way in History." Two decades later, I'm not sure that she's found it again yet. 

One of the key filmmakers of the silent era, with work that is consistently powerful and skillfully crafted, Weber remains criminally neglected outside of academic circles.

Just in time for George Willeman's upcoming SFSFF 2017 Amazing Tales from the Archives presentation on Edison Kinetophones, Christine U'Ren has contributed a multi-part series on the earliest movies. This is part two. Read part one first!

Partly because of Kinetoscopes' high cost, other inventors began to sense opportunities in the motion-picture business.

Film archivist and programmer Kyle Westphal has mused for the SFSFF blog before—on music and silent-era film, Magnascope, and the Nitrate Picture Show, among other things—and now takes on the intertitle.

"Titles are regarded as the blight of silent pictures, an insurmountable obstacle to full enjoyment by a modern audience," lamented Kevin Brownlow in The Parade's Gone By in 1968. 

The situation has not much changed in the intervening decades.
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Just in time for George Willeman's upcoming SFSFF 2017 Amazing Tales from the Archives presentation on Edison Kinetophones, Christine U'Ren has contributed a multi-part series on the earliest movies. This is part one.
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By Christine U'Ren

At the SFSFF in May 2016, did you wonder why on earth a mere title designer got a special credit in Douglas Fairbanks’s When the Clouds Roll By? You’ll understand when you see some larger examples of Henry Clive’s work, like this gorgeous poster for 1922’s Beyond the Rocks.

Clive designed not only publicity posters but portraits, magazine covers, and even commercial products, such as this tin box featuring Pola Negri.
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Regular SFSFF blog contributor Christine U'Ren was inspired by the Mothers of Men program at SFSFF 2016 to write a series of posts devoted to silent films and suffragettes. This is the final part.

Regular SFSFF blog contributor Christine U'Ren was inspired by the Mothers of Men program at SFSFF 2016 to write a series of posts devoted to silent films and suffragettes. This is the continuation of part 2. For part 1, go here, and for the first section of part 2, go here.

KINETOPHONES

In its January 11, 1913, issue, Moving Picture News reported, "Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, one of the most prominent leaders of the Suffrage movement, is considering an offer from the Thomas A.
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Regular SFSFF blog contributor Christine U'Ren was inspired by the Mothers of Men program at SFSFF 2016 to write a series of posts devoted to silent films and suffragettes. This is part 2. For part 1, go here.
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Long-time attendees of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival should be familiar with the work of the Swedish Film Institute (SFI), which has been providing a feature film for each edition of the Festival since 2010. If you’ve enjoyed The Blizzard, The Outlaw and His Wife, or The Girl in Tails, then you have the SFI to thank. 

This year we’ll be presenting Alf Sjöberg and Axel Lindblom’s The Strongest at noon on Saturday, June 4.

The 21st annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival runs June 2–5, 2016, at the Castro Theatre. On Friday, June 3, Mothers of Men, the newly restored 1917 suffrage film, will screen with the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra accompanying. Regular SFSFF blog contributor Christine U'Ren was inspired by the program to write this first in a series of posts devoted to silent films and suffragettes.

The fight over "woman suffrage" was a hugely popular topic in the early days of silent film.
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We're cross-posting this essay by Kyle Westphal with the Northwest Chicago Film Society.

Like most people who grew up in a town without a dedicated repertory cinema, I couldn't afford to be picky about movies or the way I watched them. I sought out titles that I read about and didn't much care how I encountered them for the first time. A first-run movie at the multiplex? Great. A dodgy VHS copy of Hiroshima mon amour (1959) borrowed from the library? Not a problem.

Cinephile, film archivist, projectionist, and SFSFF guest blogger Kyle Westphal muses on music and silent-era film.

The first silent film that I ever saw was The Phantom of the Opera, a common entry point that I experienced in a most uncommon way, when I was fifteen. It was screened from an undistinguished 16mm print, projected in the concrete-coated, makeshift auditorium of the Towe Auto Museum in Sacramento.
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We're cross-posting this essay by Kyle Westphal with the Northwest Chicago Film Society, which is showing Old Ironsides on February 3rd, 2016, at Northeastern Illinois University.

Old Ironsides—the 1926 super-production, helmed by one of Paramount's most important directors, James Cruze—isn't much shown these days. It's never been released on DVD or Blu-ray, though it was briefly available on VHS in the late 1980s, when Paramount mined its silent library for a 75th anniversary promotion.
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