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.

Geek Love

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival finished yesterday. This was its twentieth straight year, fourteen of which I’ve attended, and I think it was my favorite so far: five days instead of the usual four, twenty-one program events, including sixteen feature films, all but one with live music. Fascinating movies, some stunning, some hilarious, from six nations, in every genre, all gloriously preserved and presented. And (much of the joy for me) suffused with the energy of passionate geeks wallowing joyfully in the stuff they love.
       The festival brings in a big audience. The evening performances usually sell out the 1400 seats of the Castro Theater. Even at its slowest moments (an obscure Blanche Sweet comedy from 1919 playing on a Monday afternoon) it can bring in 600 or 700 people. Not all of those people come in as aficionados of silent motion pictures. But the core of the community, the sources of the energy, the leaders of the audience responses, are people who live and breathe for the things. I like that kind of community. I haven’t really been part of one since I eased out of the comic book subculture fifteen or so years ago, but I enjoy visiting them. It’s like spending a few days with a very warm but rather peculiar family.
       Rituals are essential to geek families, especially in-jokes. The crowd didn’t waste any time creating new ones for this festival. When Mike Mashon of the Library of Congress, introducing the first movie, made a reference to it being restored on 35 millimeter film, a smattering of applause broke out. He made some wisecrack about how no other audience would applaud the words “35 millimeter.” This time the whole audience clapped. For the rest of the festival, assorted scholars and film restorers introducing the movies would milk “35 millimeter” as a laugh and applause line. 

      The full, geeky, inspiring unity of the family came home to me, though, on Monday afternoon, the last day of the festival, as I approached the theater. Every geek family creates its own parent figures. In comics, we made Jack Kirby and Will Eisner our collective fathers, our demiurges and role models. For the community of silent-movie restorers, collectors, historians, and enthusiasts, the ur-father is Kevin Brownlow. He had started collecting silent reels as a boy in post-War London, when hardly anyone had any interest in the things. In 1968, his book, The Parade’s Passed By, essentially created silent-film history. Through the decades since, he’s done more than anyone to find, rescue, and call attention to the films, culminating a few years ago in the restoration and international presentation of Abel Gance’s colossal Napoleon. 
       This was by no means the first time Brownlow had appeared on stage at the festival. He’s been there a few times, introducing movies and signing books, including last year. But this year, the 20th Anniversary year, his restoration of Ben Hur was scheduled as the concluding event. His name was invoked again and again as the festival went on. On the third night, when he came on stage to introduce Flesh and the Devil to a full house, he got a standing ovation. On the last night, before Ben Hur, he was interviewed on stage by Serge Bromberg, one of the younger heroes of film restoration. On the Castro’s marquee for that last day, Kevin Brownlow got the treatment that only stars and a few directors ever got in the heyday of the movie palaces: his name above the title.
       I love the movies at the festival. I love the music, I love the history, I love the theater, I love sharing it all with my friend Joe Filice (my annual companion and the only other person I know who’s willing to spend Friday watching silent movies for thirteen hours straight, then come back to do it again Saturday and again Sunday). But I think what makes me set the days aside every year to immerse myself completely in the experience is the quality it has of an annual family reunion. A loose-knit and diverse family, formed around an uncommon passion, but, like all the best geek families, held together by love.
       

They had faces then. Scary, creepy faces.

Every July I've been blogging about the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, one of the reliable highlights of my year. This year they've given us a lagniappe in the form of an additional three-day festival in June, this one a celebration of Alfred Hitchcock.

Yes, Hitch was young once, not very fat and with a full head of hair. He was also, at the age of 24, directing movies for Gainsborough Pictures. At the age of 27, after the release of The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog, he was pretty generally recognized as Britain's most brilliant director. He made ten movies in the 1920s, before recorded sound took over. Fortunately for us, nine have survived, a remarkable number given that the vast majority of silent movies are gone forever. Starting Friday the 14th, all nine of them will be showing at the splendid, battered, indestructible Castro Theater.

       I've seen only two of the movies previously—or really one and a half, because the version of Blackmail I saw was the talkie, with muffled dialogue sequences jammed in during production (and I have faith that it will be even better with the gorgeous Mont Alto Orchestra accompanying it in its original conception). Both were dazzling and clever and chilling. If the other seven are only half as good as those, they will be fun and rewarding. And if they're not even that good, I know there will be at least those few moments of Hitchcockian ingenuity to make it all worthwhile.
       These movies were quickly made, a few a year, and without Hollywood budgets (which even then were vast in comparison to London budgets). There will be no dangling off the face of Mt. Rushmore or assaults by crop dusters or murderous flocks of birds. Which is a good thing, if you ask me. In this tighter, more intimate frame, he had to exercise his genius for finding the single, riveting, unnerving image. With the dreamlike, almost hallucinatory, quality of silent films, he could bring out that most visceral disquiet stirred by the human face. As I found when I pulled a few images from the movies in the festival:

 

So there will be great images, clever plots, beautiful music, the old magic of the Castro, and that fiercely enthusiastic crowd the festival always brings out. There will also be the presence of the British Film Institute, who saved and restored these movies, raising lots of pleasant memories for me of warm, breezy summer evenings on the South Bank of the Thames. It'll be a good weekend. And then just a month later comes the regular Silent Film Festival. Life is abundant.

Silent Choice

Life is full of hard choices. Should I take a chance on being a writer or stay in college and find a normal career? Should I go on living for my work or learn what it's like to be a parent? Should I send my son to a private school or have a tiny bit of money left to retire on?

      But life has never thrown a tougher choice at me than the one I face this month. For 28 straight years I've attended the San Diego Comic Convention. For 14 straight years (minus one) I've attended the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Together they've filled my birthday month with a double celebration of visual narrative, cultural history, and esoteric connoisseurship. 
      This year, though, some cruel, cruel person in San Diego decided to move Comic Con a week earlier and place it directly up against the SFSFF. My 55th birthday present turns out to be an agonizing decision.

      I've wrestled with this for nearly a year, but in the end I've chosen the silents. Ultimately I suppose it's like choosing the temple over the marketplace. Comics and comics-inspired media are so much a part of the daily texture of our culture that even the biggest comics convention on earth can never manage to feel like much more than an extension of our ambient noise. But that most elegant of film festivals creates an alternate universe that for four days moves according to the rhythms, chiaroscuro, and orchestral textures of the shortest-lived of all the great art forms. 

      Of course there's the argument that comics are still alive and silent films aren't...but I never experience silent films as dead. There are still so many movies discovered that were thought lost forever, so many dug from under decades of obscurity, so many restored so thoroughly that they become entirely new works. And then there's all the new music being performed with them, and the hot arguments between those who want cutting-edge sounds from the Matti Bye Ensemble or the Alloy Orchestra to bring the old images closer to the present and the like-they-were-meant-to-be-accompanied purists. I thought a fistfight was about to break out during last year's music panel.

      The film festival is prettier, too: colossal black-and-white faces enshrined in the Spanish/Javanese/Beaux-Arts hodgepodge of the Castro Theatre instead of crayon-colored Avengers grimacing at the bleak concrete of the San Diego Convention Center. It sounds better: I'll take avant-garde mini-orchestras and sumptuous old-school organists over hyperamped videogame soundtracks just about any time. It's for a good cause, too, supporting the rescue and restoration of those vanishing films.
      When even all that failed to bring me to a decision, though, I fell back on professional rationalization: I've written many comics in the past and will surely write more in the future, but right now I'm finishing up a book about the cultural upheavals and moral revolutions of the early 20th Century, the birth of new patterns of communication and even a new kind of individual out of the first wave of mass media. And that, more than anything, is what the silent movies themselves were about. This year, those four days under the spell of century-old light will be my celebration not only of being a year older but of drawing The Undressing of America, at last, toward its close.

      I confess that I'm going to cheat on this a little: since Comic Con starts a day earlier, I'll pop in for that one day to keep my 29-year streak intact on paper. But then I'll fly north. The silents will still know that they've won my heart.
      The festival, once again, is presenting some rare and magnificent works, including a new restoration of the breathtaking Wings, another Ruan Lingyu heartbreaker from the golden age of Shanghai romanticism, and an Ernst Lubitsch movie (love that guy) long thought to be lost. The schedule is here.