San Francisco Silent Film Festival – Silent Autumn 2014: From The Great War to Charles Chaplin and Pearl White (image: Charles Chaplin in 'A Film Johnnie') Imagine, if you will, that you can go back one hundred years in time, when people were enjoying a new and pervasive art form: motion pictures. In 1914, the movies had already been around for a while, in peep shows, nickelodeons, and small screening rooms. But now movie theaters were springing up in every community large and small, where families could flock together and watch flickering images in comfort, with live musical accompaniment. On September 20, such was the experience provided by the 2014 San Francisco Silent Film Festival – Silent Autumn: "A Night at the Cinema in 1914." For a history buff like me, this was second best to getting into a time machine. True, the programs consisted mostly of films from the British Film Institute, but the variety content of newsreels,...
- 10/10/2014
- by Danny Fortune
- Alt Film Guide
Honorary Award: Gloria Swanson, Rita Hayworth among dozens of women bypassed by the Academy (photo: Honorary Award non-winner Gloria Swanson in 'Sunset Blvd.') (See previous post: "Honorary Oscars: Doris Day, Danielle Darrieux Snubbed.") Part three of this four-part article about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Honorary Award bypassing women basically consists of a long, long — and for the most part quite prestigious — list of deceased women who, some way or other, left their mark on the film world. Some of the names found below are still well known; others were huge in their day, but are now all but forgotten. Yet, just because most people (and the media) suffer from long-term — and even medium-term — memory loss, that doesn't mean these women were any less deserving of an Honorary Oscar. So, among the distinguished female film professionals in Hollywood and elsewhere who have passed away without...
- 9/4/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Funny faces to lost gems, war horses to strange censorship, silent film is a wondrous way to immerse oneself in history
A trip to the British silent film festival is a unique opportunity to wallow in some unfamiliar waters. Four days immersed in silent cinema is time spent in the company of many films that have been forgotten or misremembered, films that have only been seen before by archivists and researchers, and that may never get a public airing again. Some of these films are great, but even those that aren't are fascinating, as cinema history, and as a glimpse of what it was like to live in Britain 100 years ago.
1. "They didn't need dialogue, they had faces"
We're all familiar with Gloria Swanson's famous line in Sunset Boulevard, but she was talking about the blandly beautiful people of Hollywood. The faces of British silent cinema may not be attached to famous names,...
A trip to the British silent film festival is a unique opportunity to wallow in some unfamiliar waters. Four days immersed in silent cinema is time spent in the company of many films that have been forgotten or misremembered, films that have only been seen before by archivists and researchers, and that may never get a public airing again. Some of these films are great, but even those that aren't are fascinating, as cinema history, and as a glimpse of what it was like to live in Britain 100 years ago.
1. "They didn't need dialogue, they had faces"
We're all familiar with Gloria Swanson's famous line in Sunset Boulevard, but she was talking about the blandly beautiful people of Hollywood. The faces of British silent cinema may not be attached to famous names,...
- 4/24/2012
- by Pamela Hutchinson
- The Guardian - Film News
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