I confess that I did not get the gestalt, and flat-out joy, of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival until I attended a program at the Castro. I was anticipating the quiet, respectful excavation of an embalmed, herky-jerky curiosity passed off as a lost classic — movies as medicine, or dusty history. Instead I found myself in the middle of a fully alive full house of folks thrilling to an epic undertaken without computer-generated visual effects, enraptured by an onscreen romance and touched by timeless human desire and fallibility.
Nostalgia is a small part of the fest’s appeal, admittedly, but it’s mostly for the clothes, cars, architecture and etiquette that appear more solid and comforting than the over-marketed accoutrements and rampant selfishness that define our disposable culture. As a rule, the festival staff chooses movies that stand up all these years later as art, which is to say the filmmakers explore universal situations with insight, inspiration and wit. Given our typical condescension to the past, a solid silent film can be a shock and a revelation. Believe it or not, in the 1920s people recognized the folly of war, distrusted politicians and had sex with someone other than their spouse.
“The Iron Horse”
The festival begins tonight with an ambitious 1924 Western from an already adept John Ford. The Iron Horse conveys the American aura of optimism and destiny that fueled the construction of the first transcontinental railroad 75 years earlier. Saturday’s lineup skips from China (A Spray of Plum Blossoms, a 1930s-dress transposition of Two Gentlemen of Verona) to Italy (the roller-coaster romance Rotaie) to Germany and the eagerly awaited (and probably sold out) local premiere of Fritz Lang’s visionary Metropolis, restored with a half-hour of newly discovered footage and backed by the Alloy Orchestra.
“Metropolis”