Silent films are an extinct art-form, alas, like the sonnet or dithyramb. Watching these 90- or 100-year-old relics of the past is a curious experience. We are swept up by the glamour, the art direction, the performances, all the while aware that the people, lifestyles, and landscapes we're watching are long gone. It's a bit zombie. Paranormally, there's no denying these ghosts are amusing. See for yourself during the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, playing May 28-June 1 at the Castro Theatre.
The opening-night film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, is a dreadful reminder that wars supposedly fought to end all war only pave the way to more wars. A very young, sensitive, and beautiful Lew Ayres plays a German soldier who, along with his pals in the trenches, has been recruited to win WWI. Poignant on reflection, the film was released as the Hitler gang was starting the cannonball rolling toward a war designed to restore Germany's honor after a hugely humiliating defeat.
The 7 p.m. show on each of the following four nights is a doozy. Friday night, German giant F.W. Murnau directs genius actor Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh (1924) as he experiences the humiliations of a swanky hotel porter demoted to washroom attendant. Saturday night, an incandescent Greta Garbo is a naughty femme fatale igniting John Gilbert's passionate lover-boy in Flesh and the Devil (1926), directed by Clarence Brown. Sunday, the iconic William Gillette is Sherlock Holmes (1916), a role he'd perfected onstage. Monday, Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) shows what happens when inspired Hollywood fantasists throw the budget out the window. Totally gay Ramon Novarro plays Ben, a crack charioteer.
Programs from many nations start at 10 a.m. and are not all that silent, being accompanied by live musicians, most of whom know how to rein in their genius and subtly enhance the main attraction. Stephen Horne is the exception, his overtly baroque detailing calling attention to his piano technique, detracting from the visuals. In such cases, earplugs are an excellent way to adjust the volume.
The green stuff
As these quaint old entertainments are resurrecting the past, the San Francisco Green Film Festival will be posing pertinent questions about our future. The most conscientious film festival of the year, raising our awareness of how humans simultaneously destroy the planet and figure out ways to mitigate the damage, is very Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The publicist made a "sad face" informing me these films weren't "happy," but frankly, I find it unbelievably positive that some of my species are taking seriously the challenges posed by how needy, greedy, numerous, and unrepentant we all are.
Opening night, the feature documentary Bikes vs. Cars (5/28, 8 p.m., JCC-SF) shows the worldwide struggle between two-wheels and four-wheels. Director Fredrik Gertten was responsible for the fantastic activist doc BANANAS!*, so I expect this film to be similarly intelligent, appealing, eye-opening, and inspiring. Closing night, Racing Extinction (6/3, 8:30 p.m., Roxie) will bring its audience up-to-speed on the Sixth Extinction, which some may have heard of but few take seriously enough to try to stop. Non-human species of mammal, bird, reptile, and amphibian are quite simply being wiped out by you-know-who, a process that will leave us alone with the invertebrates. Humans, pay attention!
Over seven days, 60 films attack day-to-day realities like recycling, wasted food, salt, sugar, biodynamic farming, fracking, plastic water-bottles, coal, butterflies, and forest fires. Two documentaries celebrate Greenpeace, an organization exemplifying the power of courageous nonviolent protest to derail life-threatening corporate practice. Jerry Rothwell's How to Change the World (5/30, 6:30 p.m., Roxie) features unseen archival footage of their 1971 infiltration of a nuclear test zone. After the film, stay to hear Greenpeace USA executive director Annie Leonard. Maarten van Rouveroy's Black Ice (6/2, Noon, Main Library) documents Greenpeace's protest of the first oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean, in 2013. Such documentaries are always bittersweet, equal part inspiring and dismaying, but denial isn't a viable option.
Golf, that trivial pursuit which should have stayed in Scotland, is a great destroyer of habitat to no purpose. Anthony Baxter's Dangerous Game (5/30, 7 p.m., Little Roxie) reveals how this over-hyped time-killer is used to mask the development of luxury resorts. Noah Hutton's Deep Time (5/31, 3:30 p.m., Little Roxie) puts our breakneck extraction of fossil fuels into paleontological perspective. For Bruce Dern fans, 1971 sci-fi classic Silent Running (5/30, 9:30 p.m., Roxie) depicts an ecologist forced to defend the last remaining vegetation.
SF Silent Film Festival, May 28-June 1, Castro Theatre, SF. SilentFilm.org.
SF Green Film Festival, May 28-June 3, 2015, various venues. greenfilmfest.org.