San Francisco festival report?
Roger Skarsten
especially would've liked to have seen "Beggars of Life" again, with
that brilliant Mont Alto score. I still remember that one from the
Kansas festival in 2003.
Roger
Greta de Groat
have time to post a detailed report. Just suffice it to say that The
Godless Girl is truly a .. um... unique experience. Be sure to catch it on
the Treasures III set when it comes out.
greta
"Roger Skarsten" <rogers...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1184795131.6...@x35g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
Bruce Calvert
news:1184795131.6...@x35g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
Here's a good blog review of the SFSFF:
http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/2007/07/synchronized-silents.html
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archive
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
craig
First, the Festival staff deserves a sincere WELL DONE. The Festival
went very smoothly, had interesting film introductions by Leonard
Maltin, Robert Osborne, noted archivists and others. The musical
accompaniment for the films was singularly excellent, and featured a
who's who of performers.
Personal favorite moments:
Cottage of Dartmoor (1929, Great Britain) . Great Asquith jealousy
triangle thriller with intriguing editing and camerawork (lots of
German and Soviet influence it appeared). I Just don't expect Brit
films of 1929 to do that. The Stephen Horne accompaniment for Cottage
is easily among the Top 5 I have ever experienced. Simply perfect.
Loved seeing Milton Stills, sort of a poor man's Gary Cooper IMO, in
the Redwood drama Valley of the Giants and the small-town American
classic Miss Lulu Bett. Wish he had lived longer: like his acting a
lot.
DeMille's take-no-prisoners The Godless Girl had the audience ready to
explode (even though it played late on the last night).
The 4 Hal Roach shorts (including a Max Davidson one and one by Harold
Lloyd/Lonesome Luke) were fun.
Again, a magnificent festival, highlighted by the musical acc. of
Stephen Horne, the Mont Alto Orchestra, Dennis james, Donald Sosin and
Clark Wilson. GREAT attendance.
rod...@mont-alto.com
Well, this isn't a full report, because I didn't attend the entire
program.
Donna Hill has posted a partial review over at Golden Silents:
http://goldensilents.proboards46.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1184685622
And by searching the "blog" area of Google I found another review of
just Friday night, which the blogger promises to extend later. Search
and sort by date and you'll find a few.
The festival was extremely well-attended, with the auditorium packed
and I think occasionally sold out; and the Castro is a big place. The
audience was great, not laughing at awkward intertitles, and even
sitting quietly during the more outrageous bits of Camille. The Castro
was beautiful. One of the presenters -- was it the S.F. Chronicle
critic? Pointed out that a good silent film presentation is a
collaboration between film preservationists, musicologists, the
audience, and the architect. I would add the projection quality to
that as well. Excellence in all five of those categories makes the
S.F. Silent Film Festival the best film festival I have ever
attended.
To add to Donna's excellent summary, the new print of BEGGARS OF LIFE
was quite nice as far as I could see -- playing the music, one is
often buried in the score and I could only look at the screen from
time to time, but the boxcar scenes did not look as dark as I've
usually seen them in 16mm prints, and someone later said "did you
notice that when the guy moves the planks to hide Wallace Beery you
can see detail underneath? I've watched it on video and I've never
seen that!" Actually I hadn't noticed, but I was busy at the time. But
the print was also not pristine, with certain scenes showing scratches
and damage, and it was softer than other films shown that weekend. Our
score was very well-received (playing for one of the best films of the
weekend didn't hurt, of course) and we had a standing ovation
initiated almost immediately by Dennis James, who is a genuine
sweetheart as well as an excellent theater organist.
Dennis' scores were one of the highlights of the event for me. His
STUDENT PRINCE used some themes from the Romberg operetta but didn't
play them to the point where you'd get sick of them (I actually could
have used a bit more of Golden Days, that's one of my favorite
operetta tunes). And in THE GODLESS GIRL he effectively used a lot of
Gaston Borch and Irenee Berge silent film cues to create a period-
appropriate score, used complete silence quite effectively at one
point, and managed to keep the agitatos growing and interesting
throughout the extended fire scene, which was exhausting for me even
though I wasn't playing. Unfortunately GODLESS GIRL is saddled with a
theme song that is completely unremarkable, but again, Dennis didn't
overuse it. The film overall was good, but gets mired in didactic
moralizing from time to time. It's films like this that make MISS LULU
BETT so refreshing. The audience cheered several of the early titles
regarding the dangers of extremism in either atheism OR religious
fundamentalism -- but by the end of the picture the pendulum settled a
bit too far towards an interventionist God than was really justified
by events in the picture. (Why would a just God allow Noah Beery?)
The COTTAGE ON DARTMOOR was very dark, claustrophobic in tone, and
looked great. It had a number of sequences of the "isn't this a cool
idea, aren't I a clever director" type that I really don't care for
(I'm not a big fan of Battleship Potemkin or Napoleon for the same
reason), but the strong points of the film more than make up for it.
There isn't much plot, but lots of stark lighting and melodramatic
builds in tension. The audience really enjoyed the bit in the film
theater. A couple goes to the "talkies," with a jealous lover sitting
in the row behind. Although we never see the screen, a program (and
audience reaction) indicates that the show opens with Harold Lloyd's
SAFETY LAST. We get a long montage of the audience and the film
theater orchestra (two violins, trombone, piano, drums) playing a very
lively jazz score. When the talkie feature comes on ("The Woman,
adapted from the play by Shaykespeare," according to the program), no
one in the audience can hear the sound -- apparently Asquith didn't
think much of talkies. And the orchestra, on break until the next
silent film, starts playing cards, drinking beer, and eating their
sandwiches. Stephen Horne played his excellent piano score --
alternating between technically difficult piano-pounding and ethereal,
sparse melodies -- that suited the film perfectly. It will be on the
later DVD release.
The Milton Sills VALLEY OF THE GIANTS was a weird beast -- some
absolutely exquisite cinematography in parts, while other bits played
like a cheap serial. The sped-up camera on the runaway train sequence
was quite obvious when compared to the similar close-to-live-speed
sequence in BEGGARS OF LIFE, but the actual crash was shocking -- a
huge flatcar with giant redwood logs crashes over a cliff directly
into the audience's point of view, showing either poor planning on
someone's part or an extremely clever camera placement and protection.
I was hoping that the camera was motorized and unattended! Views of
giant redwoods tumbling to the ground were a bit saddening, but having
the good guys preserve an entire valley for sentimental reasons was
nice to see in an age of clear-cutting for profit. I found the ending
a bit of a let-down after the big themes earlier in the picture --
somehow managing to install a railroad crossing is not quite enough of
a triumph over such a supercilious villain who deserved a more
interesting comeuppance.
Due to last-minute rehearsals on several films I missed the morning
programs, which was too bad as they looked enjoyable. Some of Serge
Bromberg's films I had seen on DVD, but they would have been much
better in the theater environment.
The unrelated Rafael Theater program was also quite well attended, and
I am hoping that we'll be invited back again next year. It was a great
tour for us.
Rodney Sauer
Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra
www.mont-alto.com
James Roots
> Again, a magnificent festival, highlighted by the musical acc. of
> Stephen Horne, the Mont Alto Orchestra, Dennis james, Donald Sosin and
> Clark Wilson. GREAT attendance.
No Jon Mirsalis???? That's gotta be a first for SF!
Jim
craig
even more
Lincoln Spector
"craig" <sle...@infionline.net> wrote in message
news:1184878349.5...@o61g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
> This blogger has several posts on the Festival and seems to be adding
> even more
>
> http://psychotronicpaul.blogspot.com/
http://bayflicks.net/silent-night-day-and-night-again.
Lincoln
craig
How will they ever top this?
The twelfth annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival concluded with a
special screening of Cecil B. deMille's, teenage exploitation tour-de-
force, The Godless Girl (1929), featuring the live accompaniment of
Dennis James on the Castro's 4/21 the Wurlitzer. This program offered
indisputable proof, to anyone in attendance, why this type of
presentation is so essential and could never be duplicated or replaced
by any facsimile, recording or live broadcast.
......... (Long review follows)
craig
Booksmith
booktable at the Festival. The article can be found at
http://www.tcm.com/movienews/index/?cid=178014
It makes for fascinating reading, if I do say so myself.
craig
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2007/07/the_12th_annual_san_francisco.php
....
The third and last day of the 2007 Festival was exhilarating. Program
Seven, More Amazing Tales from the Archive, amused, with lively
anecdotes of rediscovered films and the organizations that restore and
preserve them, complete with film clips, from Patrick Loughney of
George Eastman House, Mike Mashon of the Library of Congress, and Rob
Stone of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, with piano
accompaniment by the inventive Donald Sosin.
Another clip show followed, Program Eight's Retour de Flamme (Saved
>From the Flames), an almost-too-generous array of twenty short films
and excerpts of mostly French origin, often with special effects and
hand-tinting. These were highlighting the preservation efforts of
presenter Serge Bromberg (who also provided his own piano
accompaniment) and his prolific, Paris-based Lobster Films. I asked
him afterwards where the name came from, and he said he'd thought of
Frog, after the American slang for French people, but it was already
taken. He came up with Lobster because he'd lived with a non-French-
speaking American girlfriend who asked him why he so frequently used
the word "langouste"; it was actually "l'angoisse" (anguish, or
anxiety) that he said, but Lobster stuck in his mind. "And," he said,
"I like Dali's lobster telephone, too."
Program Nine, William C. de Mille's Miss Lulu Bett, demonstrated one
of the great pleasures of seeing a decades-old movie today, with an
enlightened and mature audience: sharing an unabashedly sentimental
experience. It's a delicate matter: the success depends on a question
of tone. And much credit goes to the unsung Lois Wilson, a now-mostly-
forgotten actress of great skill.
My companions and I gave in to the realization that this year's
Festival, in order to pack extra programming into each day, had
eliminated the dinner break of previous Festivals, during which we'd
sampled the best of the Castro (including Home, and the Woodhouse Fish
Company). So, as Martine and I watched the thrilling, Hitchcockian-but-
more-stylized A Cottage on Dartmoor, by Anthony Asquith, with the
equally thrilling piano accompaniment by Englishman Stephen Horne, who
has performed his original score for the movie everywhere from the
Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy to the Telluride Film Festival
in Colorado, Hilary made the trek down Market Street to the Woodhouse
Fish Company to bring us back Woodhouse's exemplary lobster rolls.
(It's only as I write this that I note the coincidence with Lobster
Films. I wonder if that subconsciously encouraged our choice. I doubt
it. I note that whenever I am within range of Woodhouse, getting a
lobster roll there - or, even better, a whole lobster - occurs to me,
whether I complete the action or not. Recently I have also become
enamored of the excellent lobster rolls available at the North Beach
Lobster Shack, www.oplobster.com: the Maine Lobster Roll, lobster
mixed with Hellman's mayo and green onions, stuffed in a top-loading
bun baked especially for them, and the Naked Lobster Roll, just
lobster meat in the bun with sides of drawn butter and mayo, and
chunks of lemon. Yum.)
The fries have gone a little limp, but they're wonderfully potatoey,
and who cares, anyway: it's the most luxurious snack I've ever enjoyed
during a movie. And that movie is the last one of the festival, the
deliriously lurid, enjoyably over-the-top The Godless Girl, by Cecil
B. DeMille (and yes, he's William's brother, though they spelt their
last names differently). The wacky combination of high school kids
forming atheism clubs, rioting with Christian classmates, and members
of each faction being sent to reform schools that needed reforming
themselves, featured, in addition to Demille's trademark mix of sex
and sadism, the sexy, glowing performances of Lina Basquette and Marie
Prevost, way plumper and juicier than the Lindsay types who might play
such high schoolers today. Both of these lively girls went on to
rather poignant second acts after leaving show business.
After leaving the 12th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, I
felt poignant, too. But their December program is only five months
away.