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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.
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.
