There’s an image from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu that I can’t shake: a pallid, pointy-eared ghoul stares down at a camera that is positioned below the deck of a ship whose ropes and mast are shooting skyward behind him, framing his figure to evoke a kind of authoritarian menace. And then there’s his hands: curled like talons, preparing to swipe. You’re probably familiar with this scene if you know anything about Murnau’s early masterpiece. This single frame remains indelible for a go...| San Francisco Silent Film Festival
This feature was published in conjunction with Chicago at ADoS 2025 NEW FAMILY VALUES The silent era was a time of the New Woman, suffragettes, flappers, and vampires. Alice Guy-Blaché envisions a world of sexually aggressive ladies-about-town openly harassing timid house-husbands in the satirical comedy The Consequences of Feminism (1906), but movies also tackled the […]| San Francisco Silent Film Festival
This feature was published in conjunction with Children of Divorce at ADoS 2025 Today, “American Venus” is connected with Louise Brooks, a supporting player in the 1926 comedy of the same name. But in its day the term was associated with the film’s top-billed star: Esther Ralston. A graceful, sunny blonde equally at home in […]| San Francisco Silent Film Festival
This feature was published in conjunction with A Story of Floating Weeds at ADoS 2025 KEIAN TAIHEIKI A sign on the stage announces Keian Taiheiki, or The Keian Uprising, as Kihachi appears in the role of a ronin in revolt against the shogunate in the mid-1600s, but any Japanese audience in the 1930s would immediately […]| San Francisco Silent Film Festival
Nothing guarantees immortality for a murderer quite like getting away with it, as Lizzie Borden could have told you. And so could Beulah Annan, the woman who, in 1924, shot a lover foolish enough to announce he was leaving her. Despite, or perhaps because of sensational press coverage nationwide, Beulah walked out of a courtroom […]| San Francisco Silent Film Festival
The ink had barely dried on Owen Johnson’s novel Children of Divorce when Paramount bought the rights. Its transfer to film was fraught, and the script was tinkered over by no less than five writers. The resulting plot stayed faithful to the novel while transforming it into a quintessential silent screen melodrama. Its love triangle […]| San Francisco Silent Film Festival
The films of Yasujiro Ozu are rooted in a particular time and place—his own. But they bring to mind core elements of the human condition. Jealousy and desire, sacrifice, the family bond: elements that persist across cultures and the march of years, through changes in technology and outlook. We connect with his characters because we’re […]| San Francisco Silent Film Festival
By now, the world has come around: the decades and decades of Chaplin domination have finally receded, and we’re all newly-born Keatonians. Why exactly this has happened is harder to parse—perhaps Buster Keaton appeals to a savvier, mass-media-educated culture, less naïve than the more guileless early-century global viewership Charles Chaplin enjoyed? If we do indeed […]| San Francisco Silent Film Festival
A trumpeter and composer by training, London-based Ben Palmer is recognized as one of the world’s foremost conductors for “live-to-picture” performances, with a repertoire that spans the entire history of cinema. Personally authorized by John Williams, Steven Spielberg’s longtime composer, to conduct his scores live, Palmer has led orchestras for screenings of everything from the […]| San Francisco Silent Film Festival
This feature was published to celebrate the site of SFSFF’s 27th festival The Palace of Fine Arts lay just west of the central block of eight primary exhibition palaces built for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), which was held in 1915—about six months into the Great War in Europe and a mere nine years after […]| San Francisco Silent Film Festival