Day of Silents Announced for Saturday, December 2

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has announced its annual "Day of Silents" will take place one month from today, on Saturday, December 2 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. More information may be found HERE.

Star turns by Anna May Wong, Rudolph Valentino, and Pola Negri! Centennial celebration of Harold Lloyd's Safety Last! A brilliant collection of animated shorts by Dave and Max Fleischer, Walt Disney, and other geniuses of the form! And a proto-noir featuring pre-Thin Man William Powell! All in our holiday-season live-cinema event A DAY OF SILENTS, coming to the Castro Theatre, San Francisco on Saturday, December 2. Like SFSFF's annual festival, A Day of Silents showcases a variety of superb titles from the silent era, all set to superb live musical accompaniment by the likes of Wayne Barker and Nicholas White, Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and the Sascha Jacobsen Ensemble!

Tickets and Passes are on sale now at silentfilm.org

 

THE PROGRAM:

Saturday, December 2, Castro Theatre

More information, tickets and passes at silentfilm.org

10:00 AM

OF MICE AND MEN (AND CATS AND CLOWNS)

A collection of animated shorts, 1908–1928

Some of the most creative films from the silent era came out of an inkwell! Our collection includes animated shorts from 1908–1928, films that outshine much of what followed. For sheer audacity and pure joy, these films by cartoon masters Including the Fleischer brothers, Pat Sullivan, and Walt Disney, can’t be beat!

Fantasmagorie (1908, d. Émile Cohl)

How a Mosquito Operates (1912, d. Winsor McKay)

Adam Raises Cain (1922, d. Tony Sarg)

Amateur Night on the Ark (1923, d. Paul Terry)

Bed Time (1923, d. Dave and Max Fleischer)

Felix Grabs His Grub (1923, d. Pat Sullivan)

A Trip to Mars (1924, d. Dave and Max Fleischer)

Vacation (1924, d. Dave and Max Fleisher)

Alice’s Balloon Race (1926, d. Walt Disney)

Felix the Cat in Sure Locked Homes (1928, d. Pat Sullivan)

Live music by WAYNE BARKER and NICHOLAS WHITE

12:00 NOON

THE WILDCAT (Die Bergkatze)

1921, d. Ernst Lubitsch

Pola Negri, Victor Janson, Paul Heidemann

Before director Ernst Lubitsch left Germany to ply his famous ‘Touch’ in Hollywood, he made a series of comedies that gave hints at what was to come. The Wildcat is his last German comedy and his most riotously zany. Subtitled ‘A Grotesque in Four Acts,’ Wildcat makes use of extravagant set design and eccentric frame shapes that lend a surrealistic edge to its antic energy. Pola Negri’s Rischka leads a gang of mountain bandits who ambush Lieutenant Alexis (Paul Heidemann) on his way to the local fortress, leaving him pant-less (and smitten) on the ice. Film writer John Gillett called the film “both an anti-militarist satire and a wonderful fairy tale.”

Live music by MONT ALTO MOTION PICTURE ORCHESTRA

2:15 PM

THE EAGLE

1925, d. Clarence Brown

Rudolph Valentino, Vilma Banky, Louise Dresser

Clarence Brown's rousing film displays a perfect blend of elements—romance, swashbuckling, a modicum of humor, and the great Rudolph Valentino! Not to mention the splendid production design by William Cameron Menzies and gorgeous camerawork by George Barnes. After Valentino's Russian lieutenant rejects the amorous attentions of Catherine the Great (Louise Dresser), she orders him arrested. Instead, he flees and becomes a masked avenger intent on righting the wrongs visited upon his father and his countrymen by loutish nobleman Kryilla Trouekouroff (James A. Marcus). But the nobleman has a beautiful daughter (Vilma Banky)...

Live music by WAYNE BARKER

4:15 PM

PAVEMENT BUTTERFLY (Großstadtshmetterling)

Germany/Great Britain, 1928/1929, d. Richard Eichberg

Gaston Jacquet, Anna May Wong

Luminous Anna May Wong goes from a fan-dancing carnival act to an artist garret and finally to the French Riviera where she accompanies a wealthy art patron around Monte Carlo, draped in haute couture. Wong left Hollywood in search of roles more fitting her talents than the racially-circumscribed ones at home. This Weimar title showcases her magnetism—when Wong is onscreen, you can't look away.

Live music by the SASCHA JACOBSEN ENSEMBLE

7:00 PM

SAFETY LAST!

1923, d. Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor

Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis

Harold Lloyd's bumpkin salesclerk comes up with a publicity stunt that will bring attention to his department store and earn him the money to marry his sweetheart—scale the 12-story building like a human fly! Shot in downtown Los Angeles, the stunt has given us one of the most iconic images of the silent era—Lloyd precariously hanging over the city street, dangling from a broken clock. James Agee wrote: "Each new floor is like a new stanza in a poem; and the higher and more horrifying it gets, the funnier it gets."

Live music by MONT ALTO MOTION PICTURE ORCHESTRA

9:00 PM

FORGOTTEN FACES

1928, d. Victor Schwertzinger

Clive Brook, William Powell, Olga Baclanova

Heliotrope Harry (Clive Brook) and Froggy (William Powell) are partners in crime—genteel armed robbery—at least until the cuckolded Harry commits an even bigger offense. Before Harry goes to prison, he leaves his baby girl on the doorstep of a wealthy couple to keep her out of the clutches of his no-good wife Lilly (Olga Baclanova) and tasks Froggy with keeping close tabs. But Froggy is no match for Lilly...

Live music by the SASCHA JACOBSEN ENSEMBLE

San Francisco Silent Film Festival Day of Silents Announced

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has announced its annual A Day of Silents event for Saturday, December 3 at San Francisco's Castro Theatre. True to its live-cinema tradition, the SFSFF is presenting six programs all with live musical accompaniment! Tickets and Passes are on sale now. More information, including a full rundown of films, may be found HERE.

 

"Comedy wins the day starting in the morning with KEATON'S MECHANIZED MAYHEM—three brilliant shorts by Buster Keaton—accompanied by pianist Wayne Barker. Following Buster is Ernst Lubitsch's effervescent FORBIDDEN PARADISE with Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra accompanying. The centerpiece show of the evening is King Vidor's Hollywood satire SHOW PEOPLE starring Marion Davies with cameos by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and John Gilbert—also accompanied by Mont Alto. But the serious doesn't take a back seat, three riveting dramas fill out the bill. SFSFF's restoration of Musidora's POUR DON CARLOS portrays the civil war in late 19th-century Spain. The Sascha Jacobsen Ensemble will accompany. Cecil B. DeMille's incendiary THE CHEAT—the film that made Sessue Hayakawa a star—will be accompanied by Wayne Barker. And the last show of the evening, THE TOLL OF THE SEA, is a restoration of this earliest-surviving two-color Technicolor film. Anna May Wong in beautiful color! The Sascha Jacobsen Ensemble will accompany."

 

 

Searching the Young Companion magazine for Louise Brooks

Speaking of Chinese magazines on the Internet Archive, I also came across a bunch of issues of The Liangyou (良友 The Young Companion) magazine, which was published in Shanghai and founded by Wu Liande (伍聯德). Aimed toward the youth market, the magazine's readers were evidently interested in modern life, movie stars, and contemporary culture from the United States and Europe. Some 174 issues were published through 1945. Captions on its many interior photographs were often both in Chinese and English. I don't read or speak Chinese, but that didn't matter, as the magazines are heavily illustrated and attractive to look though.

I looked over the page of covers and noticed three that featured the Chinese - American movie star Anna May Wong. (She is a favorite, and I have read a couple of books on her.) From what I could tell, the actress only appeared on the cover of the magazine. There did not seem to be any interior articles, except for a one-page illustrated piece in the January 1929 issue.

June 1927

January 1929

June 1930

I flipped through about a dozen issues dating from 1929 and 1930, hoping to find something on Louise Brooks, but came up empty handed. I did find other illustrated pieces on American movie stars, like those pictured below. Perhaps I will look some more and find something on Brooks. Is that Richard Arlen and Anita Page pictured below?

I also noticed this back cover to the August 1930 issues, which includes Lupe Velez. Can anyone tell me what this page is for? Is it a promotion or advertisement for something?

The best thing I found was this four page spread depicting various American movie stars of the time. It is titled "The Well Known Screen Actresses." It dates May of 1931. I thought Brooks might have been included, but she is not. (Certainly, her earlier American films were shown in China as much as any other American actress. But that was a couple of years in the past. Perhaps she had been absent for too long from American screens?) A few of these actresses - Kay Johnson, Mary Lawlor, Catherine Moylan, Molly O'Day  - are unfamiliar to me.

San Francisco Screening of Anna May Wong documentary

For PBS viewers in the San Francisco Bay Area: Join KQED and Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) for an Asian Pacific American Heritage Month celebration and film screening on Wednesday, May 21, 2014 from 6:00 - 8:30pm. The film to be screened is a 2012 PBS documentary, Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words, by Yunah Hong.

"Anna May Wong knew she wanted to be a movie star from the time she was a young girl—and by 17 she became one. A third generation Chinese American, she went on to make dozens of films in Hollywood and Europe . She was one of the few actors to successfully transition from silent to sound cinema, co-starring with Marlene Dietrich, Anthony Quinn and Douglas Fairbanks along the way. She was glamorous, talented and cosmopolitan—yet she spent most of her career typecast either as a painted doll or a scheming dragon lady. For years, older generations of Chinese Americans frowned upon the types of roles she played; however today, a younger generation of Asian Americans sees her as a pioneering artist, who succeeded in a hostile environment that hasn't altogether changed." For more information, visit http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c830.shtml

Report from the SFSFF

It was a wet and sometimes windy day on Saturday in San Francisco. But in the Castro Theater, thousands of silent film fans turned out for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's now annual Winter Event. I was among them. And so was big-time Buster Keaton-fan and Louise Brooks Society associate director Christy Pascoe (pictured to the left on a rainy Castro street).

We were all there to take in the day's worth of films and programming.

One of the splendid things about the festival is the sense of comradery and community it engenders. I saw many old friends (most all of whom I've met over the years at the Festival), and even made a few new ones. And, I connected with a few never-met-in-them- in-the-flesh-before-Facebook friends. Hello Joan Myers and the other "Daughters of Naldi" who were present.

Here I am engaged in conversation with Rudolph Valentino expert Donna Hill (pictured below to the right). I have known Donna for years. She runs Falcon Lair, the excellent Rudolph Valentino website located at http://www.rudolph-valentino.com/ and also  blogs about silent film via "Stolen Moments" - the only silent film podcast I  am aware of. Check them both out sometime.

Donna and I were chatting about some of the films we had seen earlier in the day - as well as the latest on our various silent film projects. Donna is continuing work on a new book about Valentino called Rudolph Valentino: The Silent Idol. I am very excited about this project, and can't wait till Donna is done. You can find out more about this new book by visiting this page.

Though we have spoken on the phone and corresponded via email for a number of years, I also had the chance to meet Elaine M. Woo in person for the first time. I was truly delighted. Here we are pictured to the left and below.

Elaine is a producer and documentarian responsible for Anna May Wong: Frosted Yellow Willows. That 2007 documentary has shown on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and has screened at Pordenone (where it premiered) and elsewhere around the United States and the world. And, it has drawn rave reviews where ever it plays. For more on this film, visit its website at www.anna-may-wong.com/

Like me, Elaine is an enthusiastic researcher. She has traveled all over the world in search of new material on Anna May Wong's career. Though she has completed her documentary, Elaine is still researching the iconic Chinese American actress and silent film star.  

Elaine and I chatted about libraries and microfilm and archives and film journals and newspapers and obscure publications and our own collections of research material and the challenges of getting at difficult to reach stuff. It was shop talk - and it was fun!

Though no Louise Brooks films were shown at the 2009 Winter Event, the actress did have a small presence at the day long event. This snapshot, taken from the balcony inside the Castro (a grand 1922 movie theater), shows an image from a slide show projected on the big screen. I think you may recognize the actress.

Next Summer's event will be four days! The 15th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival is set for July 15 - 18, 2010. Programs and special guests will be announced in the Spring. I hope to see you there.