SFSFF's 12th.

Not quite a decade ago, while I was briefly living in Berlin, I chanced a last-minute flight to Venice to attend a festival that I'd read about for years - Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, more commonly known as the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Presented each year by film historian/author/festival director David Robinson, every accolade for the event proved absolutely true. The week-long fest is the oldest and greatest of its kind, devoted exclusively to films created with unsynchronized sound (primarily, but not limited to, feature-length and shorter works from the period of 1935 and earlier). Along with Cineteca Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato, these two festivals place Italy among the forefront of countries to see the remarkable restoration work of film archives around the world.

Slightly more than a decade ago, a similar (if slightly smaller) gift to cineastes debuted in San Francisco. Founders Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons' Silent Film Festival, now spread over three days each July, arguably represents the best opportunity in the Americas to catch a sizeable dose of these remarkable works over a compact timespan (although it should be noted that there are regular Bay Area silent screenings at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Niles, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, and elsewhere up and down the coast from Seattle to San Diego).

Updated through 7/19.

For their 12th installment, Salmons and Executive Director Stacey Wisnia have collected an exceptional assortment of classics (Ernst Lubitsch's The Student Prince in Ole Heidelberg; William Wellman's Beggars of Life, starring Louise Brooks and Wallace Beery) and relative rarities (The Valley of the Giants and a program of French shorts "saved from the flames" by Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films). Add to this a pair of features by the DeMille brothers (William's Miss Lulu Bett and the better-known Cecil's The Godless Girl, soon-to-be-released in the aforementioned National Film Preservation Foundation box set); a quartet of comedies from Hal Roach Studios; a well-deserved tribute to Turner Classic Movies (with the Valentino-and-Nazimova Camille and hosted by the affable Robert Osborne); the Cineteca Bologna-restored legendary Maciste; and the Telluride-by-way-of-Pordenone discovery A Cottage on Dartmoor, directed by the under-rated Anthony Asquith and introduced by Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation (and due to direct a film of his own a few days later).

With such an outstanding assortment of films, it could be claimed that the SFSFF team have crafted their greatest program to date. Film aficionados would be richly rewarded by venturing to the Castro Theatre and spending this weekend in the dark.

- Jonathan Marlow

At the Siffblog, David Jeffers reminds us what a remarkable year 1927 was before turning his attention to one of its many jewels, "a breathtaking Ernst Lubitsch production, The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg. Also: Camille and another fine overview from Anne M Hockens.

More previews: Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where he also writes, "now as then, there can be only one Nazimova.... If Nazimova's personal life seems spun or at least exaggerated, it was all at the service of her queenish persona - something on prime display in Camille, thanks in no small part to [Natacha] Rambova's logic-defying art deco set designs. The many arches and frills that appoint bedrooms and ballrooms accentuate Nazimova's sinewy bends, beaky sneers, and bomber swoons."

"If for nothing else than A Cottage on Dartmoor, this year's Silent Film Festival would be a rousing success, but there is, of course, much more to look forward to," Max Goldberg adds at SF360.

Updates, 7/14: "I can think of worse ways of spending a weekend than sitting in America's premiere 1922 movie palace watching gorgeously restored 35mm prints of silent classics with live musical accompaniment." An overview from Michael Hawley at the Evening Class.

More from Adam Hartzell at Hell on Frisco Bay: "Of all the festivals in San Francisco, the Silent Film Festival is my favorite."

Mick LaSalle on The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg: "[T]his isn't about nostalgia - seeking the past in the present. It's about the opposite, finding the present in the past."

Update, 7/16: The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg "concentrates not on doomed romantic love but on personal sacrifice," writes Anne M Hockens, which is why she suspects audiences now react to the ending differently than audiences in the late 20s would have.

Updates, 7/17: "When attending nearly every program in a weekend-long film festival like the 12th Annual Silent Film Festival, it's impossible not to start noticing connections, coincidences, crossovers and synchronicities." Brian Darr burrows in.

"I have to share the most incredible cinematic experience I've ever had in a movie theatre." Shahn sees A Cottage on Dartmoor.

Update, 7/18: A wrap-up from shahn.

Update, 7/19: Michael Guillén's taken notes from Mick LaSalle's introduction to Student Prince and expands on them, too.

Posted by dwhudson at July 13, 2007 6:51 AM