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.
       

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.