Living Silents

One of the highlights of my year, every year, is the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Every year, my friend Joe Filice flies up from San Diego and we make a four-day orgy of it. It's also about the hardest of the things I love to describe adequately to other people. That the movies are hypnotically beautiful some people will believe, and more of them can understand that the live musical accompaniment is exciting and that the Castro Theatre is a spectacular showcase. What's difficult to convey, though, is that the showcase never feels like a museum. What we're celebrating never feels like a lost art form.
       For one thing, there's a quality of discovery for the vast majority of people in the audience, just because these movies are so rarely screened. I'd seen only two of the sixteen features at this year's festival, and several I'd never heard of. For another, the musicians are brilliant and innovative, entering living collaborations with the images on the screen that give new life even to movies I've seen before. But beyond that, there are new movies. One of the most exciting aspects of following the business of silent-film restoration is the fact that they keep finding films not seen in decades, films long thought lost. 
       Ever since I was a kid I've known of a Laurel and Hardy short called The Battle of the Century, famous for its monumental pie-fight sequence but surviving only in pieces. It was possible to see clips of it, but not the whole thing. But the pieces have been found in recent years, restored and assembled, and at this year's festival I got to sit there and watch that almost mythical movie whole for the first time.
       Another film shown this year, Behind the Door, had been known only in very incomplete form for several decades, and another, Mothers of Men, hadn't been shown anywhere in over ninety years. During "Tales from the Archives," the festival's annual presentation on what's up in the world of film restoration, came news of another great project in the world: a new edit of Abel Gance's monumental Napoleon, already restored to great fanfare a few years ago, that promises to bring it back, for the first time since its premier in 1927, to the director's original conception. I already spent a few years waiting for Kevin Brownlow's restoration of Napoleon, which finally arrived and more than pleased me in 2012. Now I get to wait a few more years for this one...and along the way, I know there will be more new discoveries from that extraordinary period of cinematic creativity, miraculously brought back to us from the past.