The appeal of nonagenarian movies is a weird voyeurism no longer constrained by their original purpose of "mere entertainment." I like them because they remind me of my grandmother, who taught Theda Bara how to swim on Balboa Island during the filming of Cleopatra (1917). You might appreciate scrutinizing old-fashioned fashion, technology, or relatively unspoiled Nature. On the negative side, you might be subjected to incidental glimpses of unrehabilitated racism and ethnocentrism. Such is the tangled web woven by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the venerable Castro Theatre, May 29 through June 1.
The word "silent" maybe should be replaced with "non-talking," since silents were always accompanied by lots of lush, loud sound. That's why there were Wurlitzer organs in movie theaters, with literal bells and whistles. But the Castro Wurlitzer will be a silent partner to the live musicians accompanying the SFSFF, including Guenter Buchwald and Stephen Horne on piano, the Matti Bye and Donald Sosin Ensembles, the Silent Movie Music Company, and Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. There's no thrill in the world like live acoustic music; to have it set to emotion-packed black-and-white images on a screen is a treat rarissime .
Festival programmer Anita Monga, who once ruled the Castro, has been choosing movies for other people to watch for 35 years, the last five for the SFSFF. She said seven titles will be projected using physical film: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), The Good Bad Man (1916), The Girl in Tails (1926), Harbor Drift (1929), The Parson's Widow (1920), Ramona (1928), The Sign of Four (1923). The other 11 are DCP, the latest iteration of digital.
Format fetishism
"I have to tell you," she scolded me in her breathy drawl, "I think that you should stop being a format fetishist. If you're going to say you're not going to see anything outside of 35mm, I challenge you to not see anything outside of nitrate. It's a desecration to see things on acetate." Touche, La Monga. We are, as you say, living through a format revolution in movies as radical as the shift from silent to talkie.
Speaking of radical shifts, The Epic of Everest (1924) is a relic of a British Empire on the skids but still swayed by its own colonialist propaganda. It's a boy's own adventure, climbing Tibet's sacred "Mother Goddess of the World" for God and Country. Shot with a static camera often two miles from its black-dot subjects moving across a screen full of white ice, Everest 's drama remains off-camera and unexpressed. Two brown men will die, unnamed; two white men will die and be publicly mourned; nobody gets to the top. Insults to indigenous people (beyond "conquering" their mountain for them) range from erasing Tibetan contribution (expert climbers become "faithful porters") to "comic" descriptions of villagers. The same white-skinned cluelessness (abetted by Nepalese government greed) led to the death of 16 sherpas on Everest in April.
White supremacist humor
Two comedies, by our own Buster Keaton and France's Max Linder, also suffer from a white-centric perspective. The Navigator (1924), in which Buster is funny on an empty ship, has been pulled from the Internet Archive over "issues with its content." I wonder if they mean the angry mob of cannibals that greets Buster on a beach. There's zero humor here, only woeful cliche. The low point comes when co-star Kathryn McGuire lies whimpering in a circle of savage black men, complete with funny hair, nose rings, and spears. There's a long sequence of attempted mutual destruction. Not even gags; just war. Ha, ha!
Max Linder, an international star who flopped in the U.S., was maybe too Old World elitist decadent roue for us. Judging by Seven Years Bad Luck (1921), he's a maniacal comic genius without heart, a fantastic physical comedian. When he slips a black silk stocking over his face to pass for a Pullman porter, though, it's somehow shameful. As is the big black mammy sight-gag. Keaton also has one of those. Spoils the fun.
The big event is Rudolph Valentino as a gaucho, on opening night, "to commemorate the 100th anniversary of WWI, the first world event the cinema was around to comment on," said Monga. "I asked Kevin Brownlow, 'What film do you think is its most expressive symbol?' He said, 'Of course, it's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.' We're using Kevin's print. It's a restored print. It's got the tinting and toning of the original. And Patrick Sandbury, Kevin's partner at Photoplay, will be in the booth, varying the speed as the film goes along. Because it was, of course, from the era of hand-cranking. They've determined it's not the same speed throughout. So your appreciation of certain scenes, including the famous Tango Scene, will be enhanced."
Tonight (May 29) through June 1, Castro Theatre, San Francisco. Tickets ($13-$20): www.silentfilm.org .