To enter the Castro Theatre is a thrill, to sit can be a competition, the vibes and the decor induce awe, the Wurlitzer provokes giddiness, and singing "San Francisco" might make you cry. And then there are the movies. Any movie will do, but when you get to time travel via assiduously preserved period document, well, that's a special kind of mass hypnosis. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is back for a limited run of four days, 16 features, assorted odds and ends, live accompaniment, and esoteric glimpses of "the international preservation scene," starting today, June 1.
Centenarian cinema is an acquired taste, which, once acquired, leaves you longing for more. Lucky us to have fabled cinephile Anita Monga, erstwhile programmer of the Castro on a nightly basis, in a return engagement as the monarch of all things flickering, black-and-white, tinted, believed lost, restored, cherished, carefully selected, and on occasion, even hand-cranked. Nothing, except maybe actual silver nitrate, is too good for her Castro audients. Once again, the amateur filmgoer is faced with a dizzying array of films from nations European, American, and Japanese, of every conceivable genre or mood, dating from 1912-27.
In the absence of dialogue, the image reigns supreme, sucking your soul out through your eyes to engage with a dancing shadow in a movement of emotions as intense as it is ephemeral. There's something about monochrome that focuses the mind and dispels distraction, rivets the attention and confounds the senses by reducing everything in the world to a rectangular composition of light and dark. Cinema killed vaudeville, for which I'll never forgive it, but the trade-off are these startling glimpses of great performers long dead adapting their shtick to the confines of the camera in order to reach a fickle public.
Today, we are that public, undreamt of 100 years ago, sitting and watching Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova as the mute sister of a rebel fisherman in "The Dumb Girl of Portici" (1916), based on the French grand opera "Masaniello" (1828), about the 1647 rebellion in Naples, Italy, against the Hapsburg Spanish occupation. Thus are European politics and art condensed into a tasty nugget to entertain and edify the masses. Pennsylvanian director Lois Weber was a prodigy of cinema who made 300+ films with a missionary's zeal for improving the lot of the starving. (6/2, 3:30 p.m.)
On the opposite end of the scale, there's "Filibus" (1915), a surreal serial exhibiting the exploits of an Italian baroness who enjoys dressing as a man and driving a detective mad with her innovative burgling techniques. Spoiler: she has a well-staffed dirigible that no one seems to notice in the sky overhead, allowing her to pop down onto balconies and cause all manner of consternation. The film's whimsical improbabilities bathe your frontal cortex in a dreamlike soup of suggestion until you feel as helpless to defend the categorical imperatives of time and space as the hapless detective. (6/3, 2:30 p.m.)
Before there was "Jurassic Park" (1993) based on Michael Crichton's novel, there was "The Lost World" (1925) based on Arthur Conan Doyle's. If I had to watch only one movie for the rest of my life, it might be this one, because of the Claymation brontosaurus whose wibbly-wobbly neck simply slays me. Proof that humans can cohabit with dinosaurs up there on the screen, thanks to intrepid adventurers who brave the Amazon to make contact with a lost tribe of Tyrannosaurus rex. Utter nonsense of the first order. Magisterial Wallace Beery and doe-eyed Bessie Love fight for your sympathy with pterodactyls. (6/4, 4 p.m.)
Info: silentfilm.org