San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman’s The General almost stands alone among American silent films, as a work that’s both an institutionalized “classic,” as well as actually being universally beloved. Beloved today, and for the last eighty years of postwar film culture, that is—in its day, it famously did only average business and bored many reviewers

Looking at Clara Bow and the era that made her famous, it seems inevitable that she led the life she did. The daughter of an estranged, unloving father and an abusive mother, she escaped into the dream life of a Hollywood film star at the age of 17.

How were movies made in the 1920s? Well, if you’re romantic about it, just imagine Irving Thalberg and King Vidor bumping into each other somewhere in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer building.

You play the cineaste game, and eventually you build an Andrew Sarris-style hierarchy, a pantheon of the great filmmakers over the long game, from 1890-whatever to the present. Limit the top tier to ten or twelve, say, and a few names from the silent era will consistently arise.

Ernst Lubitsch famously declared, “I’ve been to Paris, France, and I’ve been to Paris, Paramount. I think I prefer Paris, Paramount.” Among the many dazzling Lubitsch films taking place in his imaginary, stylized version of the French capital is So This Is Paris, a frothy sex comedy as light as the most delicate soufflé.

The reprint was published in conjunction with the screening of Blazing Days at SFSFF 2026 An excerpt from The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History by Diana Serra Cary describing here in vivid detail how studios found former cowboys like her dad, Jack Montgomery, to work in […]

À PROPOS DE NICE Directed by Jean Vigo and Boris Kaufman, France, 1930, 25 minutes DCP source: Janus Films RIEN QUE LES HEURES Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, France, 1926, 44 minutes DCP source: Les Films du Jeudi/Les Films du Panthéon Since the early years of cinema, filmmakers have tried to capture the essence of a […]

This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of His Greatest Bluff at SFSFF 2026 Long before the term “action cinema” became commonplace, German filmmakers had already mastered its essential grammar. In the 1910s and ’20s, the so-called Sensationsfilm—a cycle of thrill-driven productions built around physical feats, daring stunts, a