Here are some brief bits of news - offered on a regular basis - from and about the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and the world of silent film:
1) You must read "The Silence of Silents: The heroic wiki project to identify lost and orphaned films." This article by former San Francisco resident Paul Collins (he now lives in Portland) appears on Slate, and tells of a German-based wiki-style website which not only documents more than 4,000 lost silent films - but also hopes to help identify numerous existing films and fragments of which little or nothing is known. Once you're done reading the article, be sure and visit the Lost Films website and start looking around. Maybe YOU know something about one of unidentified films highlighted on this website?
2) The Silent Film festival is less than a week away, and articles, mentions, blogs and shout outs have popped up in the media and on the web. A piece on the Huffington Post website delineated 15 reasons to attend the Festival - one for each year for which the Festival has been putting on its annual event. Elsewhere, the festival was given a long and thoughtful write up on the Hell on Frisco Bay blog. And another local blog, Strictly Vintage Hollywood, also gave the Festival a nice shout out. Locally, the Noe Valley Voice, a San Francisco neighborhood newspaper, ran a piece on the Festival and some of this year's films in their most recent issue. And from what we've heard, the Festival also got a splendid mention on Michael Krasny's July 1st "Forum" program, heard on the radio on KQED. On "Forum," Sura Wood, a freelance arts journalist and film critic, called the Festival "the event of the year."
3) As has been reported, the Silent Film Festival is celebrating it's 15th anniversary this July. Before the July 17th screening of Diary of a Lost Girl, SFSFF founders Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons will be honored for their efforts in having started the annual event - which has over the years has grown from a single evening co-presentation to a four day film lover's extravaganza and the largest silent film festival in North America.
Tickets for the Festival are selling briskly, according to all reports. And a couple of shows may sell out in advance! If you haven't already done so, be sure and click on over the Silent Film Festival website and pick a movie or program or two to check out. Might we recommend one of this year's international films, such as the 1929 avant-garde Soviet production Man with a Movie Camera (with live musical accompaniment with the Alloy Orchestra), the rarely screened 1931 Chinese production, A Spray of Plum Blossoms (based on Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona), the semi-expressionistic 1929 Italian masterpiece Rotaie (pictured below, with live piano accomapniment by Stephen Horne - all the way from England), or the 1924 French comedy, L'heureuse mort (the closing night film). Foreign films seldom fail to impress a date!
0 Yorumlar