Silent Movies

Film historian Anthony Slide discusses The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, about the life and career of the world’s ‘first woman director.’

Legendary Broadway actor John Barrymore also enjoyed an impressive and enduring - yet vastly undervalued - movie career in the 1920s and 1930s.

Lillian Gish: The Birth of a Nation actress enmeshed in Bowling Green University controversy. Should Lillian Gish be labeled a racist because at age 21 she had one of the…

Antihero Ricardo Cortez in Symphony of Six Million, with Irene Dunne. Directed by Gregory La Cava, this 1932 family/romantic melodrama may have been one of Cortez’s favorite among his own…

How to be a Latin Lover: Ricardo Cortez, formerly known as Jacob Krantz from a working-class family of Austrian/Hungarian immigrants that had settled in New York City, succeeded in restyling…

“Latin Lover” Ricardo Cortez, who went on to play a series of all-American scoundrels and criminals, in addition to similar unsavory types of other nationalities. Although never as big a…

Starring the German Mary Pickford, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Doll movie is a satirical fantasy featuring inventive art direction and jabs at the Catholic Church.

Amazing Tales from the Archives: SFSFF spotlights unusual movie audio system, pioneering female documentarian and memorably inventive comedy fantasies.

One of cinema’s early comediennes, Dorothy Devore: between 1918 and 1930, the Ft. Worth-born actress was seen in nearly 100 movies, both features and shorts. Among them were Salvation Sue,…

Remarkable women’s suffrage movie Mothers of Men dismisses the notion that the female right to vote would destroy American families and society.

The first feature (co-)directed by Alf Sjöberg, The Strongest is a visually splendid Arctic adventure. On the downside, the narrative moves at glacial speed.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival highlights include hand-tinted color fantasies by Segundo de Chomón and Louis Feuillade in the days before Technicolor.

Ernst Lubitsch movies: Subtle, sophisticated ‘Touch’ all but gone from contemporary filmmaking. Ernst Lubitsch movies: The forgotten, passé ‘Touch’ Ernst Lubitsch and William Cameron Menzies were Turner Classic Movies’ “stars”…

Films such as those seen in the British Film Institute’s compilation Around China with a Movie Camera offer a magical window into the past.

Ben-Hur movie: Christian epic was biggest and most expensive Blockbuster until Gone with the Wind. Mexican Ramon Novarro played Jewish hero.

Rediscovering long-forgotten Silent Film Star known for ‘the most beautiful’ back reportedly insured for (an adjusted) million dollars.

Greta Garbo movies: The Kiss was her final silent film. Greta Garbo movies: Rare silent era star on TCM Greta Garbo, a rarity among silent era movie stars, is Turner…

Abandoned in post-production and long-forgotten, Bert Williams: Lime Kiln Club Field Day is a rare early movie about the lives of black people anywhere.

Frank Capra’s first all-talkie, The Donovan Affair is now a silent once again. In-house actors were thus needed to voice Jack Holt, Agnes Ayres et al.

SFSFF’s ‘Avant-Garde Paris’ movies Ménilmontant and the wholly abstract Emak-Bakia were offered to those willing to take a chance.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival program ‘Amazing Tales from the Archives’ discussed the discovery of the 1916 Sherlock Holmes.

First Best Actor Oscar winner Emil Jannings in ‘The Last Command.’ First Best Actor Oscar winner Emil Jannings, first Best Actress Oscar winner Janet Gaynor on TCM First Best Actor…

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s ‘A Night at the Cinema in 1914’ was the second best thing to a time machine. World War I and Charles Chaplin featured.

Sherlock Holmes with William Gillette. Sherlock Holmes movie found at Cinémathèque Française Sherlock Holmes, a long-thought-lost 1916 feature starring stage performer and playwright William Gillette in the title role, has…