San Francisco Silent Film Festival: 2025

As the Castro Theater is still closed for renovations, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival took place this year at the Orinda Theater. This is a much better choice than last year's location, the Palace of Fine Arts Theater, which is fine if a bit generic inside as a venue but too difficult to reach via public transportation & too isolated: the Festival tried to make up for that with some food trucks, but in general it was an uphill battle out there. I ended up not seeing many films (in fact, only one) because anything that was first or last on the schedule just didn't work out transit-time-wise for me. The Orinda Theater, by contrast, is easily accessible via BART (& has plenty of parking, if that's your thing) & surrounded by all kinds of restaurants (even more so than the Castro Theater, actually), as well as being large &, as an Art Deco exemplar, close to period appropriate. Even so, I only made it to a few programs this year, for a number of reasons (none having to do with the quality of the films),. This is what I saw:

The Wreck of the Hesperus

1927; directed by Elmer Clifton

This recently rediscovered & restored film is based on a poem by Longfellow about young lovers separated by her father, a ship's captain who bears a romantic grudge against the young man's uncle, but that drama is topped by the final storm at sea & the wreck of the captain's vessel. It's quite beautiful to look at & very well cast. I was particularly impressed with Ethel Wales as the captain's sister, assigned by him with looking after his stubbornly lovelorn daughter; it's a very small role, but you immediately see that she is not the sort of moony spinster who is going to sympathize with young love. Nor is she a dragon guarding the treasure, or a fussy old maid; she's just a sort of fretful & annoyed person who seems to wish everyone would just behave, or at least leave her alone, though she does of course her duty. 

The film was intended as a step towards stardom for the young romantic leads, Virginia Bradford & Frank Marion, though, according to the SFSFF's always richly detailed (& free!) program book, neither one took off with the public. I found this quite surprising, as both are very appealing. She is, not surprisingly, a beauty, with long dark curls & a demeanor earthy enough to make her convincing as the daughter of a flinty New England sea captain but with a touch enough of the fey so that she seems a bit out of the ordinary. He, too, is a curly-haired beauty, & as the movie was illustrated in both brochure & program book with a dreamy close-up of him, I'm apparently not the only one who thought so. The close-up comes from his first scene, when he is found adrift on the sea, the only survivor of a shipwreck (not the one of the title); once he recovers, we find that he has an engaging presence & a killer smile, so once again I am left befuddled by the taste or lack of it of the American public.

The storm & shipwreck scenes are quite spectacular, & though you can try to parse which shots are done with models, which with sets, & which with who knows what, it's all cut together seamlessly & with verve, so that you get caught up in the events rather than the technique, & it's all so much more convincing & more beautiful to look at than the computer-generated fakery, with its false pixel sheen, that we get these days. Our young hero, in a stylish & visually helpful ruffled white shirt (which helps him stand out against the dark lashing waves, the ruffles echoing both the waves & his curls) rushes towards the sinking ship to save his beloved, who is tied to the mast. It's an exciting & satisfying film. It was new to me (I'd never even heard of it), so I was very glad to have seen it. If it's ever released, I'd buy a copy.

KoKo!

a series of Fleischer Cartoons: Jumping Beans (1922), It's the Cats (1926), KoKo at the Circus (1926), KoKo in 1999 (1927), KoKo's Kane (1927), KoKo's Klock (1927), KoKo's Kink (1928), KoKo's Earth Control (1928)

The early Fleischer Brother cartoons are always delights of homegrown surrealism. This batch, only a few of which I'd seen before, features KoKo, the Out of the Inkwell clown maybe best remembered now as an occasional sidekick of the inimitable Betty Boop, a star of later Fleischer cartoons. It's nice to see him in his early days as a headliner. I read somewhere long ago that the Fleischer Brothers used to say, "If it could really happen, it's not animation" & that's a guiding principle here, as what's going on up on the screen stretches & shapes & contorts & changes from scene to scene, hung on the thinnest of storylines. That's a good thing. I also love the strongly blocked black-against-white designs of the cartoons. I'm going to continue my above dismissal of contemporary computer-generated films by contrasting these evergreen shorts with today's animation, most of which seems to be filmed on location in the Uncanny Valley. I'm not a big fan of the Pixar films (the only one I've really loved is Luca, about the boys who are sea serpents, though in fairness I will also admit I have not seen a lot of the more highly regarded Pixar films), & a lot of that is their look: they labor to make things look "realistic", but if it's that important to you to get hair so accurate you'd think it's real, why not just film real hair? Anyway this was a delightful set.

Song

1928; directed by Richard Eichberg

In a complete change of mood & aesthetic, the KoKo shorts were followed by Song (original title: Die Liebe eines armen Menschenkindes, which is, according to Google Translate, The Love of a Poor Child). This was Anna May Wong's first European film, when she felt her American film career was stalled & mired in stereotypical secondary roles. Earlier this year I read an excellent book on Wong (Daughter of the Dragon by Yunte Huang) so I couldn't remember if I'd actually seen this film or only read a description of it. It turns out I had not seen it. I gather it's sometimes spoken of a bit dismissively but I thought it was extremely good. Wong is, as most people know by now, just luminous, & subtle & convincing in her portrayal of a lonely young woman who falls in love with a circus performer, a knife thrower, (Heinrich George) who rescues her from an attempted rape by two men on the beach. He is not interested in her, though, as he is smitten with his former lover, a dancer (Mary Kid) who thought he had died & who has moved on anyway (she's an appealing character, not shown as bad or scheming or bitchy: just someone who's over someone who isn't over her). As is often the case, plot summaries make the film sound thinner & more melodramatic than it is; as portrayed by the actors & staged by the director, it's a moving portrait of a roundelay of misguided loves. Wong is naturally the big draw these days, & the theater was quite full for this one, but it has many good points in addition to its star.

Kohlhiesel's Daughters

1920; directed by Ernst Lubitsch

This is one of Lubitsch's early German films, though unlike many of those it's not an historical epic but a comedy, based (very loosely) on The Taming of the Shrew. It was one of his biggest hits in Germany but is little known here, apparently not even receiving a theatrical release at the time (which was too close to the end of World War I, when the boycott of German films continued in the USA). Even now, when Lubitsch is a presiding deity of Sophisticated Cinema, & many (most?) of his early films are easily available, this one isn't (Kino, where art thou?). Not surprisingly, it's a lot of fun. It's set in the Bavarian mountains & involves two sisters (both played by Henny Porten), the elder a foul-tempered frump & the younger a prettier & more conventional sweetie. As in Shrew, the father insists the elder sister must be married (& taken off his hands) before the younger one can choose among her suitors. Emil Jannings is the sort-of Petruchio, who ends up with the elder sister. It's all very good-humored; you never feel that the elder sister is being vilified or mocked, & her rampages are more comical than anything else. Porten gets laughs as the younger sister as well, which is more of a challenge than with the over-the-top older sister. As I said, lots of fun, &, again, as with all these movies, if it's released, I'd buy a copy.

The Song of the Scarlet Flower

1919; directed by Mauritz Stiller

Lars Hanson stars in this Swedish film, based on a 1905 Finnish novel (Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasta by Johannes Linnankoski), which was popular enough to be filmed several times after this initial version. It's the tale of the headstrong son of wealthy farmers, who ends up leaving his family home in anger & working in a logging camp, before eventually maturing & marrying the proud daughter of another wealthy landowner. It's maybe less tidy than this makes it sound, as she falls for him, & her father opposes him, without knowing his privileged background, which he has kept from them; before he ends up in this class-appropriate coupling, we see the tragic effect he's had on a lower-class serving girl on his parents' farm. What most viewers are going to carry away, though, is the memory of his log-rolling towards dangerous river rapids, a bit of bravado made all the more striking (to continue a leitmotif of this post) because it's not faked with computer imaging as it would be nowadays. It's an emotionally satisfying film, full of beautiful vistas, though maybe a little more conventional than I was hoping for. A friend of mine thought that Hanson occasionally overdid the stalwart manliness, but I thought that was just who the character was, & it provided an interesting contrast with some of Hanson's more tortured roles (The Saga of Gösta Berling, The Scarlet Letter, & let's not forget his anguish in Flesh & the Devil). Again, I'd buy a release!

The next festival will be back at the Castro Theater, from 6 to 10 May 2026. Before that, there will be a special Festival screening at the Castro on 22 March of Clara Bow in It, with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. See you there!

SF Silent Film Festival: A Day of Silents

Continuing a wrap-up of last year with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's A Day of Silents:

The annual Day of Silents was held at the period-appropriate, gloriously ornate Castro Theater, & as in a few weeks the venue is being shut down for about a year & a half by its new owners in order to undertake extensive renovations (possibly, it has been suggested by many, ruinations), there was a nostalgic feeling in the air (though you will have one more chance to experience the Castro as a purely cinematic palace when the Festival presents Dreyer's Vampyr, with their signature live musical accompaniment, on 12 January).

The nostalgia was for the beloved & historic venue; there is surprisingly little nostalgia involved in seeing the films, some of which are well past the century mark in age. Perhaps nostalgia is limited to the remembered creations & moments from one's youth, & there can be few people still around who experienced silent film in its original moment. The six programs, which as usual with the Festival were wide-ranging & varied, could be seen & appreciated directly as art.

The first program, Of Mice & Men (& Cats & Clowns), with musical accompaniment by Wayne Barker & Nicholas White, was all animation, covering Émile Cohl's 1908 Fantasmagorie to Pat Sullivan's 1928 Felix the Cat in Sure-Locked Homes. Obviously Felix is the Cat referenced in the title; the clown is the Fleischer Brothers' Koko, who made an Out of the Inkwell appearance in A Trip to Mars & Vacation, both from 1924. I guess Koko was a star until he turned into a sidekick in the early sound era for the incandescent Betty Boop. Anyway, the films on the program contained an amazing level of technical innovation (mixing animation & live action, right from the start!), surreal wit, filmic cleverness, & impressive amounts of sheer though submerged labor (some of the earliest cartoons, including Winsor McKay's disturbing How a Mosquito Operates from 1912, required the artist to produce thousands of individual drawings). The designs tend to be much simpler than in the richly drawn cartoons of the 1930s. These cartoons are not the worse for that; there is a graphic boldness to them that looks clean & classic. I much prefer it to the Uncanny Valley of today's computer-produced, realism-driven works.

The second program was Ernst Lubitsch's The Wildcat from 1921, starring Pola Negri, with musical accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. I thought before going in that I had seen this film, but afterwards I was pretty sure I had not, as I can't imagine forgetting such a wild & fanciful foray. The set design alone (Ernst Stern & Max Gronau), with its swirling fortress in the snowy Bavarian Alps, is something that would stick in the memory. I loved the way many shots were framed so that we're mostly seeing things under arches or through circles or in some other eccentric configuration. Negri as the powerful daughter of the Chief of the mountain brigands assailing the fortress is as expected a vital & appealing force. Even if I had seen the movie before, I would would be happy to see it again: it's full of wild moments & surprises.

Next up was The Eagle from 1925, directed by Clarence Brown & starring Rudolph Valentino & Vilma Banky, with musical accompaniment by Wayne Barker. This was a lovely print & an excellent showcase for Valentino, who displays not only his graceful almost feline sexual charm but also great skill at light-comedy moments. It's based on an unfinished story by Pushkin & involves a son (Valentino) who seeks revenge on the ignoble Nobleman who has cheated his father out of his country estate. There's also Louise Dresser as a delightfully lusty Catherine the Great (someone should put together a film series of the cinematic Catherines; there's Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress & Elisabeth Bergner in the Korda-produced Rise of Catherine the Great & I'm sure there are others). She, like the audience, is drawn to the handsome young soldier. He is resistant, possibly because he's already seen golden-haired Vilma Banky, but honestly . . . Catherine is certainly older than he is, but not by that much, & she's quite attractive, &, you know, why not? But the plot requires him to flee her attentions. The sets for this one were also quite striking; designed by William Cameron Menzies, they reminded me of his elegant work for the Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad. There are certainly striking dramatic moments, particularly when Valentino is undercover in the house of the evil Nobleman (who turns out to be the father of Vilma Banky), & some striking cinematic moments, including a famous tracking shot down a banquet table that brought applause from our audience. These things, & the appeal of the characters, more than made up for some loose ends in the plot (the family estate never really does seem returned & the father avenged, but otherwise there is a happy ending all around).

Fourth was Pavement Butterfly, a German/British collaboration from 1929, directed by Richard Eichberg & starring Anna May Wong, with musical accompaniment by the Sascha Jacobsen Ensemble. Wong is receiving some long overdue recognition, & the theater was packed for this one (a friend of mine who came only to this program told me he had some trouble finding a seat). The audience included some members of Wong's family (she was a California native). Butterfly in the title might lead you to expect a story along the lines of Puccini's great opera, but though there is a lover who moves on while she stays faithful, the story is complicated in other ways & she does not die at the end – my recollection of the translation of her farewell subtitle in the film is that it was "I don't belong with you", but the article in the program book gives it as "I don't belong to you", which is something different. (The original words are Ich gehöre nicht zu euch & Google Translate agrees with the program book.) The setting is the Parisian / Monte Carlo demimonde of artists & wealthy patrons. As you might expect from a late-period silent film from Germany, the photography is stunning & the whole film is gorgeous to look at (I believe the film has only recently been restored). Wong is a subtle performer & an incandescent presence.

Since I mentioned the program book, I should emphasize that the Festival always does a wonderful job with them. They are substantial publications, with interesting articles on the programs & many attractive photographs. & the Festival doesn't charge for them!

I left after Pavement Butterfly. That had been my plan all along, as the fifth program was Harold Lloyd's Safety Last! & the final program, a melodrama titled Forgotten Faces, started late enough so that I didn't want to stick around before the MUNI/BART return to the east bay. I had some regrets about skipping Faces. The Lloyd I have seen before & if you have any sort of feelings about heights, it is difficult to watch. The first time I saw it was at the Pacific Film Archive when I was a student at Berkeley. By the time the film ended I was drenched in sweat. The second time I saw it was during the pandemic, when I finally watched the boxed set of Lloyd films I had bought years before. & though I admired Lloyd's ingenuity, & the impressive physical feat represented by the film (done though he was missing a thumb & forefinger! & those shoes he's wearing – those are regular dress shoes, with no traction on the soles!), I decided I didn't need to see the movie again. Since this is its centennial year, it made sense to have it headline the festival, but . . . not for me. When I read in the program book that when Lloyd came across the actual "human fly" who inspired the film, his "heart was in [his] throat" & he had to keep looking away. I felt considerable relief, as I was starting to feel a bit candy-ass about my inability to watch the film. I like Lloyd (though I prefer Chaplin & Keaton), but I'll stick to something like The Kid Brother.

Alice Guy-Blache: finding and funding

To answer the question asked in this kickstarter campaign, yes, I have heard of Alice Guy-Blache, and I have even seen some of her films, in Kino Lorber's second set of Gaumont Treasures. But I can't say I know a whole lot about her, and would really love to see the documentary that Pamela Green and Jarik van Sluijs are trying to make. So if you are so minded and have the cash to spare, you have until midnight (Pacific time) on Monday 26 August (coming right up!) to give way to your Medici impulses and help them out. Here's the link again, now that you're persuaded.

Birtwistle weekend in Berkeley

Cal Performances had a lot going on this last Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, and though I was tempted by the Joffrey Ballet down in Zellerbach Hall I ended up at two mostly-modern music concerts up at Hertz. Both of them featured works by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, whose music I had previously only heard on CD.

The Eco Ensemble, conducted by David Milnes, played Saturday night. I felt some trepidation as I saw many students filling up the seats, having vivid and unpleasant memories of the weird rude audience at the first Eco Ensemble concert, but this time, at least from where I sat (I slipped into the front row right before the concert started), the audience was attentive and appreciative. The Ecos ambled out and there seemed to be some mix-up or mishap with the set-up, since there was some low-key discussion back and forth and one of the players turned to us and suggested we talk among ourselves. They got it straightened out shortly whatever it was and launched into Birtwistle's Secret Theatre. It's a rich, dense, fun thirty or so minutes. About five wind instruments stood off to the right and jetted and fluted about above the thick, slower flow of the strings. At times I was reminded of some great slow river-beast crawling forward while the bright birds swooped above and around. Layering seems to be a major technique for Birtwistle, in ways that are easier to appreciate during a live performance as opposed to a recording.

After the intermission came a showing of Jean Epstein's 1928 French silent film La Chute de la Maison Usher, with a new score by Ivan Fedele (who came up afterwards to take a bow). The film is pretty artsy and weird and wonderful, as befits both experimental silent films and anything based on Poe, who has always been admired by the French (sometimes more than he was in his own country). Oddly and amusingly, though the very brief English synopsis at the beginning of the movie referred, as in Poe's original story, to Roderick Usher and his sister, the film changed her into his wife; according to the program, this was to avoid the overtones of incest, which I thought were kind of the point. (In fact I wonder if one reason Debussy was drawn to this story for his unfinished opera was because of such hidden links to Wagner's Ring: incest, complications of love, betrayal, and degeneration, followed by a cataclysmic finale.) The intertitles were in the original French. It would have been helpful to have a print with English subtitles as well; I got the gist of each title, but sometimes there were too many words and too little time. But that's a small matter.

I'm pretty sure Epstein took a very good look at Murnau's Nosferatu before making this film; there was a similar eerie carriage ride to a haunted destination, with the local villagers reluctant to go anywhere near; waving bare tree branches scraping like fingers across the gray skies; a soft ghostly grayness playing between the light and shade. There are abrupt transitions and unsettling cuts in the editing and sudden close-ups of hands or faces and pale candles dripping down low. Fedele's music is moody and circular and fits the film very well. Oddly there was less overt drama in this score for what is after all an intensely dramatic plot than in the Birtwistle piece, the theatricality of whose secret theater was very evident.

I was back up at Hertz on Sunday afternoon for pianist Nicolas Hodges. It was a recital of high virtuosity, but it's a virtuosity of a deeper dazzle than the flash and fireworks usually associated with the term. Though he is now bearded and therefore looking a little more Bohemian than the last time I saw him, he is still completely no-nonsense in his presentation: he strides out quickly, sits down and starts playing immediately, without swaying or rocking or humming or any kind of drama outside of the music he's making. He started off with Debussy's Etudes, Book 1, starting from the simple exercises with the amusing dissonant note insisting on inserting itself and then shimmering and dazzling through to the end. That was followed by Elliot Carter's tuneful Two Thoughts About the Piano, like a clear river.There was extremely enthusiastic applause from the audience when he finished and when Hodges came out for the third bow he extended his arms to each side to still the clapping and told us that that was the first time he had played Carter's music since his death late last year, making it the first time he couldn't call the composer up to the stage, so he asked us to give a round of applause "for Elliott." We obliged. I love it when artists do generous things like that. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Rolando Villazon because after he sang Dichterliebe at Cal several years ago he picked up the score and gestured to it, directing the applause towards Schumann.

After the intermission Hodges played Busoni's Giga, Bolero e Variazione, Study after Mozart, from An Die Jugend, Book III. It's based on a little dance tune from Nozze di Figaro. This twentieth-century spin on an older form led suitably up to the west coast premiere of Birtwistle's Gigue Machine (which was co-commissioned by Cal Performances and Carnegie Hall). As with the Secret Theatre, a bright, sharp set of high notes dart above a deeper, smoother, steadier base. The piece starts slowly with sort of a stuttering note and rapidly grows in complexity only to die back down and then start up again before dying back down for the final time. A lot of simultaneous motion is packed into a relatively short time (between ten and fifteen minutes). It actually sounded more organic than machine-like to me. I hope I'll get to hear more live Birtwistle soon. Debussy book-ended the recital, with Etudes, Book II following the Birtwistle. It was an excellent Sunday afternoon.

Abel was I

Here is some very exciting news! The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is presenting Abel Gance's astonishing 1927 film Napoleon, complete with three-screen finale and the Oakland East Bay Symphony performing Carl Davis's score, at Oakland's Paramount Theater on March 24, 25, 31, and April 1 2012.

I have seen the film twice before (once in the 1970s as a fund-raiser for the Pacific Film Archive and then again in Boston when it toured in the early 1980s) and didn't hesitate to buy my tickets -- that's plural because I'm going twice -- for this screening. The great historian of silent cinema, Kevin Brownlow, who has devoted much of his life to putting this film back together, has added in a missing 30+ minutes of film that have been discovered since the last tour, so this will be the most complete showing of the film since 1927 (and currently the Oakland engagement is the only showing planned in the United States). Because of the three-screen finale, Napoleon really does need to be experienced in a theater. It's unforgettable.

Napoleon is now 5 1/2 hours long and will be performed starting in the afternoon each day with three intermissions (including a dinner break). Tickets are available now through the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's website. It's reserved seating (for which I am grateful) and the prices range quite a bit, so you may want to think about where you want to sit before clicking, since it's Ticketmaster and you have bare minutes to complete each screen -- quite the D W Griffith climactic race.

I don't usually say this, but this is not to be missed.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: December

It’s sugarplum month, but we don’t need to let that stop us. There will be Christmas-tinged items on this list, but that’s hardly avoidable, even if I wanted to. I will proceed along my usual arbitrary and personal lines (no Nutcrackers, but the Hard Nut would be listed if it was being staged this year in these parts, which it isn’t being). There will be Messiahs! I know it’s one of the ultimate holiday chestnuts, but this is the season for chestnuts, and even though I should be tired of it I’m not. In fact I’m listening to it right now. Because I probably won’t make any of the live performances, due to conflicts beyond my control.

Thursday, December 2, the Pacific Film Archive, Paramount Theatre, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival unite to present Carl Theodor Dreyer’s astounding 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, accompanied by a live performance of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, an oratorio inspired by the film. Information here. Go and marvel!

John Adams and El Nino return to the San Francisco Symphony December 2-4. Later in the month there’s a little more Adams and a lot more Messiah.

Philharmonia Baroque presents Messiah on December 3, 4, 5, and 7, in various locales as is their wont. And American Bach Soloists presents Messiah on December 16, 17, and 18. If the calendar or location don’t decide for you, you can compare casts and other relevant information: here for Philharmonia Baroque, here for American Bach Soloists, and here for the San Francisco Symphony.

Magnificat mixes it up by presenting Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit, which uses old French carols as its basis, along with other seasonal music. December 17-19 in various locales; details here.

Berkeley Rep revives Mary Zimmerman’s fun production of The Arabian Nights, December 11-30.

Cutting Ball Theater extends its production of The Tempest to December 19 (my thoughts here, but in case you don't want to click through, it's a recommendation). And if you want more of the Elizabethans, Cutting Ball’s Hidden Classics Reading Series (which is free), has Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, on December 5. (Opera fans may know the play as the source for Richard Strauss’s Die Schweigsame Frau, though the opera is possibly done even less often than the play. I have actually seen the play staged, but never the opera.) By the way, can anyone explain to me why there is no good (that means affordable and scholarly yet meant for the public) complete edition of Jonson’s plays and masques? He must be fuming over how his rival Shakespeare has outstripped him.

I would be at Epicoene on the 5th if I didn’t already have a ticket for Elza van den Heever’s solo recital, presented by San Francisco Performances, part of their always worthwhile Young Masters series.

And Cal Performances has a full slate, including Christian Tetzlaff playing Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin on December 4, and Nicholas Hodges on the 12th, with the Hammerklavier and Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck X.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: July & August

These are the doldrums months for theater, and as such perhaps a bit of a relief, though there’s always something tempting:

Here’s some long-running fun: at the Exit Stage Left on 156 Eddy Street, starting July 8 and running Thursday-Friday-Saturday for four weeks, No Nude Men Productions is presenting a series of twelve staged readings of new plays, each based on one of the classical Greek deities. The website is here but also check out Marissabidilla’s more detailed entry here.

Festival Opera in Walnut Creek (at the Dean Lesher Center, a short walk from the BART station) presents Madama Butterfly (July 10-18) and Lucia di Lammermoor (August 7-15).

Berkeley Opera presents Legend of the Ring, a revival of its much-praised one-evening condensation of the Ring Cycle.

Old First Concerts at 1751 Sacramento Street (that's Sacramento and Van Ness) continues its regular series of concerts; the one that jumps out at me is early music vocal ensemble EUOUAE performing the Messe de Tournai, which they describe as the oldest polyphonic setting of the Mass to have been collected under one cover. They are also doing several other interesting pieces; see the full description here.

The 15^th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival runs from July 15 through July 18 at the Castro Theater. The big news here is Fritz Lang’s wild and wildly influential Metropolis, presented with 25 minutes of previously lost footage, but since Kino is releasing the new restoration on DVD this fall, I would rather see A Spray of Plum Blossoms (Yi jian mei), a 1930 Chinese version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona; or Rotaie, an Italian film from 1929 that sounds reminiscent of Murnau’s Sunrise; or L’Heureuse mort, a 1924 French comedy about a playwright whose alleged death makes him suddenly a valuable property. Oh, if I could stand the crowds I'd just stay in the theater from start to finish; all the films look enticing and they have some great live music from the Alloy Orchestra among others.

And the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is devoting its two top floors to its big summer show, Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection. Click here and here for SFMike’s two-part survey of Donald Fisher and his collection, complete with many lovely photos that give you a great sense of what's on view. I will say that since robber barons appear to be inevitable in our society, I’m grateful for any of them that direct their loot towards art, rather than running for political offices they don’t deserve to hold, and I'm talking about scum like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. You often hear it remarked (well, depending on the circles you travel in) that it’s puzzling that the public will resist modern music though not modern painting. I’ve wondered about that myself. There are a couple of points to consider though: one is that the audience for modern art need only be one person with enough extra cash, and live performance needs significantly more people for even a tiny audience, and all of them need to be available at the same time. The second is that if you want to establish your social credentials through art (or if you are in fact genuinely interested in it), the contemporary is often the only thing both available and affordable, whereas given the centuries of scores piled up, you have to be actively interested in contemporary music to choose to subsidize it rather than something less risky. Also, of course, it's easy enough to walk away from a painting on a wall, or to stare at it until you feel you "understand" it, which is a very different experience from being forced to sit quietly while strange sounds fleet by. Anyway here’s your chance to check out the new holdings even before SFMOMA builds its planned addition. There’s a beautiful room filled with paintings by Agnes Martin, though my favorite is still the one already in the collection (that’s the painting I’m looking at in my avatar up there).

I have no idea what's going on with the fonts in this entry, and why blogger won't let me fix them.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: April

April 8, 10, 11, and 13, Nicholas McGegan leads Philharmonia Baroque in Handel’s great opera, Orlando (one of the first operas I ever saw!).

Berkeley Opera offers Copland’s The Tender Land on April 10, 16, and 18.

As always San Francisco Performances has a lot of exciting stuff going on: On April 2, Alice Coote, recently announced as the replacement Charlotte in San Francisco Opera’s upcoming Werther, gives a recital. I was looking forward to hearing Garanca, whom I’ve never heard, but frankly I think Coote, whom I have heard, is going to give the audience a more interesting evening. On April 6, cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Lera Auerbach perform Shostokovich’s 24 Preludes for Piano (arranged for cello and piano by Auerbach) and Auerbach’s own 24 Preludes for Cello and Piano. The brilliant young pianist Yuja Wang gives a recital on April 22 featuring Schumann, Schubert, and Prokofiev. Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson read and perform from The Rest Is Noise on Saturday morning, April 24, and Yevgeny Sudbin performs Chopin, Stevenson, Liszt, and Ravel on April 25.

The Aurora Theater offers a rare chance to see Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. I’m already thrilled with this one – not only did my Tuesday night ticket cost me less than $40, but the play starts at the more rational weekday hour of 7:00, and not the standard 8:00. It can be a little tricky to call the box office, which has limited hours, but it’s worth it because the Aurora’s on-line system uses that horrible “best seat” system. I’ve decided I’ll only buy tickets on-line if the system shows me exactly which seats are available. I’ll decide which is the best seat available, thank you.

April 23-25 Magnificat performs Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine (in a different location each day).

At the San Francisco Symphony, Edwin Outwater leads an interesting program April 7-11, featuring music from Whisper House, a new composition by Duncan Shiek (of Spring Awakening, which I haven’t seen or heard). Shiek’s piece replaces the previously announced Five Shakespeare Sonnets by Rufus Wainwright, which will allegedly happen next season. The program also offers Zipangu by Claude Vivier (I’ve heard a lot about the late composer and am very eager to hear this) as well as Gounod’s ballet music from Faust and Poulenc’s Suite from Les Biches. The wonderful Symphony Chorus gives its annual concert on Sunday April 11. On April 15-16 the symphony accompanies Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece The Gold Rush. Me, I’d happily stay at home and watch the DVD, but if you don’t have the DVD and a big screen TV and can stand to watch movies in a crowd, then go and have a wonderful time. This is probably my favorite Chaplin film, though my favorite Chaplin moment remains the last scene in City Lights, which I can’t even describe because I break down and sob helplessly. Since the symphony is accompanying the film, I assume this is the original 1925 silent version, and not the inferior version Chaplin released in 1942 with some cuts and his overly fey narration replacing the intertitles. April 29-May 1, Christoph Eschenbach conducts Schumann’s Fourth and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, with wonderful soloists in Christine Schafer and Matthias Goerne, and that brings us into May.

fanboy fever!

A couple of years ago I was re-watching Griffith's Intolerance and there was a close-up of some chickens, and I thought, "Wow. Those chickens are long dead!" So were most of the actors, of course, but something - perhaps it was their total ignorance that they were being immortalized - really hit me emotionally about those chickens scratching away for worms, and really brought home that silent films resurrect a vanished world in a way no other art form really does. Even old recordings (and I eagerly anticipate each new Marston release) aren't quite the same revivifiers; it's not so much that the sound requires some aural adjustment as that the repertoire performed (especially, alas, in the case of the operatic solos) is almost exactly the same repertoire that similar performers would record today, whereas silent films, though an integral part of film history, are also a completely self-contained and finished world of artistic achievement, often at a breath-taking level. A few years after sound became widespread you couldn't make a silent film without its being an hommage, or camp, or some type of artificial throwback of a highly conscious sort. Even Chaplin gave up after Modern Times in 1936.

As a teenager I read Kevin Brownlow's superb history of silent film, The Parade's Gone By, and that's where I first heard about the French director Abel Gance, and I became a fan without having seen a single one of his films. They sounded remarkable, a dazzling blend of the old-fashioned high Romantic style of the nineteenth century melodrama with twentieth-century technological innovations that everyone else took years to rediscover. He made movies that lasted four or five hours yet were famous and influential because of the rapid editing that later became known as "MTV-style". As with many of the mainstream operas and ballets, an otherwise extinct theatrical mode has been preserved because of the style used to tell it.

Or would have been preserved if so many films hadn't been unavailable or lost. I did manage while still in high school to see Napoleon as restored by Brownlow. I should find the poster I bought on the occasion to check the exact date and location. It was a theater in San Francisco, and one valiant organist played the mighty Wurlitzer for the film's entire five hour length, and because it was a special benefit for the Pacific Film Archive, admission cost an unheard-of five dollars, and I sure do feel like an old man talking about how cheap things used to be back in the day. Several years later, when Coppola paid to have the film tour America, I saw it again in Boston, and when the cheering died down at the end of the film, someone official came out on stage to inform us that Gance, by then in his 90s, had died that night in Paris (and thank you IMDB - it must have been November 10, 1981), but he at least had lived long enough to see his great masterpiece restored and celebrated.

It's a remarkable film, and just about the only one I can think of that doesn't work even better at home on a large screen, because the last half hour bursts onto three screens, and when you see a cavalryman's horse gallop from the far left of the farthest left screen right up to the camera and then off to the right of the farthest right screen, you understand physically the basic magic of movies. But the three screens aren't just used for their panoramic possibilities; they also break into triptychs and diptychs and a rhythmic explosion of swift shots and double exposures that pull you into accepting Napoleon as a great force of nature instead of the shabby little dictator he was. And all along Gance has used the amazingly fluid camera of the silent cinema to create an entire and realistic world through clearly artificial means. I love the scene where the Marseillaise is first sung. It's been so long since I've had a chance to see the film that I won't even attempt to describe it, but it ends with the singing crowd dissolving into a shot of Marianne, the female embodiment of the Revolution, joining in and swinging her sword wide, and I swear it wasn't until hours later that I realized that no one had actually been singing; that's how effectively the film and its instrumental accompaniment had created the vivid impression of vocal music.

Anyway, I have been looking for other Gance films for over thirty years now. I came close long ago, again in high school days, when SF MOMA announced a showing (appropriately enough, for a museum then located in the War Memorial building) of Gance's great anti-war film, J'Accuse, parts of which were filmed on the front with actual soldiers. My very wonderful mother (hi, Mom!) drove me there only to find out that the show had been canceled for reasons I don't really remember - maybe the print never arrived, or it wasn't the version they thought they were getting. Gance spent a lot of his post-silent-film life recutting J'Accuse and Napoleon. His was not a style that translated well to the static cameras required by early sound equipment, or to the changed tastes of self-consciously modern times. I have seen some of his sound films, and though he does some interesting things (particularly in his film about Beethoven, where he experiments with the sound to give you a vivid feeling of what it was like for the composer to go deaf), they are generally fairly minor. (Besides the Beethoven film, I've seen one he made about Lucrezia Borgia; there's also a shortened version of Charpentier's Louise, which I have but haven't yet seen.)

So here's my big excitement: I was trolling through upcoming DVD releases on Amazon.com, and saw La Roue, which is the name of another of Gance's great silent films. I'd never even come as close as an announcement to seeing this one. I was frankly kind of stunned it was being released, and thrilled to see it was being released by Flicker Alley, since I have (and have even watched!) several of their sets, and they always do an absolutely superb job. According to their website, "[t]his new restoration with a running time of nearly four and a half hours, accompanied by Robert Israel’s symphonic score, is the fullest presentation of La Roue to reach the public since 1923." Even though I found this through Amazon, I didn't buy it from them, since for some weird reason (they do this with Criterion sets as well - does Amazon just hate cineastes?) they do not offer their usual discounts with Flicker Alley sets. So I bought it directly from Flicker Alley, and if you have any interest at all in silent movies I encourage you to do the same. And they have a discount before the release date! Which is Tuesday, May 6, so don't even think twice. Just start clicking your Paypal account into service. And then, once you are a Gance fanboy as well, you can also get J'Accuse, which Flicker Alley is releasing in September.

Obviously I haven't actually viewed either of these sets (or even these movies) yet, but based on what I know and have experienced with both Gance and Flicker Alley I can guarantee these will be outstanding. And if you feel otherwise, please do not tell me. I would like to respect you in the morning.

The other thing that's sabotaged my "get out of debt" plans this weekend is the latest ArkivMusic weekend special: Bantock's setting for "gargantuan orchestra" and soloists of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat. The weekend sale price will no doubt be gone by the time you read this, but the idea of all those succint quatrains about the evanescence of life and the fleeting quality of beauty being presented in an elaborate three-hour Edwardian extravaganza is too whacked out for me to resist. I fully expect to enjoy this, but I'm not making any guarantees about this one - I can really only promise you one sure thing at a time. After all this high Romantic swirling I think I will watch some Ozu films to bring myself back into balance.

act like a man

I was interested in a couple of plays that Thick House Theater was doing this season, but I ended up subscribing to the whole series, mostly because their managing director, Hilary Cohen, was so incredibly prompt and detailed (note to arts groups everywhere – efficiency is appreciated!) in answering my e-mail asking where exactly the theater is located and how a non-driver would get there. It turns out to be quite easy – you just get out at the 16th Street BART station and take the 22 Fillmore to the corner of 18th and Connecticut, and then you walk down a hill. Frankly I was expecting a black-painted basement in a dicey neighborhood, but it’s a pleasant, fairly recently gentrified area of Portrero Hill, and the small theater is comfortable and even elegant in an understated way. I enjoyed walking around the area before the rain showers drove me into the theater lobby.

There were two bonus plays added to the four-play season (six plays for $40 – that’s a bargain!). I subscribed just in time to miss the first one (five plays for $40 – still a bargain!), but I did get to David Greenspan’s Dead Mother, or, Shirley Not All in Vain at the Traveling Jewish Theater, which is actually trickier to find than Thick House, until I realized it’s just a ten-minute walk down from the 16th Street Station. I’m not quite sure why anyone would suggest the bus rather than walking; the sidewalks didn’t seem any more filled with annoyances than the 22 Fillmore, and you have to wait around until the bus shows up. I was glad to have the preliminary expedition, since Cutting Ball’s production of Endgame was also at the Traveling Jewish Theater before they make the Exit Theater their new home.

Dead Mother is the story of Harold and his family; Harold’s brother Daniel persuades him to impersonate their dead mother Shirley so that s/he can reassure Maxine, Daniel’s fiancée, that she approves the marriage. Harold’s wife Sylvia, Maxine’s Uncle Saul, and the widower Melvin are also involved; this is more Theater of the Absurd than Charley’s Aunt, though that reference may be part of the whirlwind of literary and dramatic references flying by in an ultimately distracting way: every minute your mind is annotating each scene and speech – there goes Twelfth Night, there’s Godot, Aristophanes, Dante, Don Juan in Hell from Man and Superman, Gertrude Stein, back to Dante, back to dozens that I noticed at the time but have now forgotten. . . .

I felt the constant annotation ended up emotionally distancing me from the action, which frankly is a little thin to start with; the assumption of Shirley’s persona frees Harold to speak the sort of forbidden truths that date quickly; shock has a very short shelf-life. Most of these terrible truths have to do with Harold’s troubled marriage and his attraction to other men, and to the racial prejudices of his middle-class Jewish father. After realizing what the painful family secrets amounted to, I suspected that this was not a new play; sure enough, it’s from 1991. It’s to Greenspan’s credit that the play avoids the cheap logic of therapy-think, where the family would be healed merely because someone dared to speak The Truth, or whatever cliché passes for it, but despite the excellent acting all around (particularly from Liam Vincent as Harold/Shirley) it was a somewhat unsatisfying evening.

A fluid presentation of truth is the strong point of Blade to the Heat, which is set in “the world of boxing” in 1959, shortly before boxing started to recede as a major sport and therefore metaphor in American life. Before that, boxing shows up in all kinds of surprising places, like silent comedies; there’s an extended sequence in City Lights, and it’s the focus of the entire plot in Buster Keaton’s Battling Butler, another of his brilliant, emotionally tortured comedies about a slight and effete man who goes up against a massive, physically confident and somewhat brutish opponent; the film ends with a surprisingly fierce and realistic boxing match. Ironically, the wiry and gracefully athletic Keaton is closer to our masculine physical ideal than his large but doughy opponents. Before I go back to Blade to the Heat, I’ll also recommend WC Heinz’s superb novel The Professional, which is like the novel Hemingway would have written if he’d been able to overcome his horrible boys’ school snobbishness enough to write a good novel.

Blade to the Heat gets described as “the gay boxing play” but it really is more about masculinity in general, a subject it examines with greater depth than just the usual panicked jokes (much like Fight Club, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both involve one-on-one fights). Anyone listening to the posturing tough talk that passes for our political discourse, or the swaggering attempts to justify our criminally insane and disastrous adventures in Iraq, must have noted our society’s need for such a discussion. It’s a psychological cliché to talk about “compensation”, but sometimes things become clichés because there’s a basic truth there: it’s difficult not to see America as the classic bully who swaggers and punches carefully selected weaker victims to cover his own weakness and fear. The iconic image of masculine panic from the last few years is of course our War-Criminal-in-Chief, who carefully avoided even his National Guard service during the Vietnam War, wearing a flight suit on the deck of a destroyer to declare our mission in Iraq accomplished. A (female) journalist at the Wall Street Journal, in one of the most truly embarrassing articles I have ever read, went on and on about how Our Leader “looked, well, hot” and how her tired middle-aged husband lying in his Barcalounger just couldn’t compete. My skin was crawling, but I read on in horrified fascination. It reminded me of a movie I saw years ago, called I think Paris Is Burning, about drag queens in Harlem. I only really remember one segment of the film, because it was so unbearably poignant: part of their traditional drag shows involved the guys dressing up and parading in the suits and ties that were standard business wear back then; here were men so alienated from any sense of normative masculinity that for them the standard male uniform was as exotic as their girly sequins and feather boas. And that’s why when I think of George W Bush, who loves to play dress up (I'm a cowboy! I'm a fighter pilot!), in the back of my mind I see black drag queens. The crisis in confidence is the same. (I should probably make it clear that I don’t have any sympathy with those who “blame” the feminist movement for the confused state of masculinity – obviously if you change the roles for one gender you affect the other, but it’s ridiculous to think that women should be held down because the manly men are threatened by them. Both genders have more than enough need to control and regulate others and more than enough delusion and self-destruction to go around. It probably all comes down to economics as much as anything else.)

Back to Blade to the Heat, which seems to be loosely based on the fight in which Emile Griffith accidentally killed an opponent who allegedly was taunting him for being homosexual, but so thoroughly is the incident thought through that it wasn’t until the end of the play that the connection occurred to me (unlike my experience with Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out, about a gay baseball player and filled with incidents obviously based on baseball’s recent past, such as John Rocker’s racist outburst; I kept thinking, No, that’s not quite how people really did react to that action. . . .). It’s a beautifully constructed play, conveying with complete naturalness a wide range of complicated emotional interactions and personified masculinities that come across not as markers across a theoretical range but as actual human beings, with a fluidity of identity that Virginia Woolf would have recognized and appreciated (a fluidity captured so much more effectively in this play than in Berkeley Rep’s ridiculous recent adaption of To the Lighthouse). Every time you think you have a character pegged, sexually, ethnically, or emotionally, he or she shifts a bit and shows you a different side, and it’s all handled in an amazingly rich and economical 90 minutes.

I know it’s obligatory to praise boxing dramas as “a knockout punch!” and suchlike, and I’d like to resist, but this really was a pretty outstanding evening of theater: sets, music, costumes, acting, and script all came together in a way that’s supposed to be standard but really isn’t. The boxing matches were not only convincing and exciting, which is pretty tough to do in a very small theater where you’re only about three feet away from the action, but they flowed seamlessly into the rest of the action instead of being obviously choreographed and practiced much more than the rest of the show, so here’s a big salute to Johnny Moreno as Pedro Quinn (the “gay boxer”) and L. Peter Callender as his rival, Mantequilla Decima, both of whom managed to maintain character even while throwing realistic punches.

I trekked out to Traveling Jewish Theater one more time that week for Cutting Ball’s Endgame, and director Rob Melrose really outdid himself with this one. I’ve been going to Cutting Ball for years now, and this was one of their best productions and a welcome return to form after the somewhat disappointing Taming of the Shrew last summer. And lots of credit should also go to Avery Monsen and David Sinaiko as Clov and Hamm, reunited after their summer foray as respectively Grumio and Petruchio. I didn’t much like Sinaiko’s Petruchio or his Doctor in Wozzeck; I felt he relied too much on a manic energy that seemed more like shtick than anything the characters would actually do, and he seemed to be giving the identical performance with each character. But as Hamm he gave the best performance I’ve seen from him in many years of attending Cutting Ball shows – a modulated, subtle portrait, with his be-ringed fingers and insinuating air of authority, of the dandy at the end of days. Avery Monsen is a really exciting actor: I thought he stole Shrew with his high-energy commedia; here, it was his quiet and inward air of exhaustion and suppressed exasperation that made him compelling. At one point, Hamm starts off on an anecdote, and Monsen just silently closed his eyes for half a second at the beginning of the recital, and you knew immediately how many, many times he’s heard this same story, told this same way, and how patiently and inexplicably he puts up with Hamm.

I meant to write about Blade to the Heat and Endgame weeks ago, but events intervened and I couldn’t until now; the productions are over and their moments of insight and beauty gone; I can’t go back and re-view (or review) them the way I would a movie; they take place purely and poignantly in my memory now, along with a lot of my life; for me going to the theater is like the ancient Japanese samurai going to view the fleeting cherry blossoms, an aesthetic lesson in appreciating the essential quality of life.

O Absalom, my Absalom!

The trip to Camille at the Silent Film Festival was such a big success that I returned to the Castro Theater a week later, this time for a different silent film at a different festival: His People from 1925, presented by the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival with a live jazz sextet performing Paul Shapiro’s rousing and effective new score (I read an interview beforehand in the Chronicle in which the writer didn’t seem to understand that “silent” films were always accompanied by music – I thought everyone knew this, or is that just one of the many erroneous assumptions I make about what I consider general knowledge?). Somewhat surprisingly the audience was even more receptive and open to silent film style than the Silent Film Festival audience had been. You never can be sure how people will approach silent movies. In those sad days long-ago before DVDs, and even before VHS, I finally had a chance to see a movie I’d wanted to see for years, Griffith’s Way Down East (Gish on the ice flow!) but I went in with some trepidation since it was showing at the Harvard Center for the Visual Arts and I was figuring the likely viewers would consider themselves too sophisticated (see my previous entry for my opinion of sophistication in audiences) for what is basically a creaky melodrama. On the contrary, they were ideal. When the man who done her wrong suggests to Gish that she might want to move out of the neighborhood, she gives him an cold look and (via the intertitle) suggests that perhaps he should get out of town, and the audience erupted in cheers. Even the bumpkin comedy was warmly received. You should never underestimate the power of even the most ancient theatrical tricks. His People is somewhat similar to Way Down East in that it is also a melodrama, this time about the Cominskeys, a family of immigrant Jews in New York City, and in beloved Biblical and folkloric style there is a good son and a bad son. The elder boy Morris becomes a lawyer (he’s bookish, so the father favors him) and then tells his wealthy girlfriend’s family that he’s an orphan because he’s ashamed of his Old Country parents, a pose he maintains even when his sick father shows up at the fiancée’s house. The younger boy, streetwise Sammy, is a stand-up guy who provides the money for his brother’s school and his father’s medical bills by boxing professionally. When his father finds out that “Kid Rooney” is not some Irish brawler but his younger son, he is so shamed at his “box fighting” that he throws him out of the tenement. Nonetheless Sammy, his mother’s favorite, continues to support his parents and even stands in for Morris when he refuses to come to what might be his father’s death bed, like Jacob over Esau only motivated by love rather than trickery. Eventually Sammy drags Morris back home and forces him to apologize, to the cheers of the audience, which was so into the action that they even were harsh towards the fiancée, who actually has no knowledge of the deception and is portrayed sympathetically, with some hints that she’s getting a little old not to be married. The plot machinery of melodrama does its business but it’s always the actors who lift it up and make it memorable. In this case Sammy was particularly charming and appealing, managing to withstand even the constant smiling required of early leading men. He’s played by George Lewis, and after seeing this film I was surprised he didn’t become a better known star, but a quick trip to IMDB reveals that he was actually born in Mexico, so perhaps like Novarro he had an accent that handicapped him in Hollywood once sound came in. That might explain why most of his later credits are Zorro-related. But who knows the vagaries that fall on any career, let alone an actor’s. Best of all was Rudolph Schildkraut as the father; one of the film’s subtler touches was the speed with which he forgives his favorite Morris and the great unctuous condescension with which he lets generous-hearted Sammy back into the family. Some of the Festival publicity materials seemed surprised that the boxer was the good kid, but boxer over lawyer is not too unusual in a populist medium. I wish they had given us more background on the movie (there’s not a whole lot on IMDB either) –some of it, especially the opening scene among street peddlers, looked as if it was actually filmed on the Lower East Side, and the film was definitely made for a Jewish audience and assumed familiarity with Sabbath candle-lighting and other rituals, which made it strange that one intertitle helpfully explained that “ ‘Shabas’ is the Jewish word for Sabbath” which got a big laugh from the audience, which already knew. There is one Irish family in the neighborhood; the father doesn’t seem to be around and the mother is of course a big, good-natured washerwoman who frequently stands with her arms akimbo. She has a daughter named Mary (again of course), and one peddler informs us early on that “she’s so sweet you wouldn’t know she was an Irisher!” She and Sammy the boxer are in love, but there’s no Abie’s Irish Rose angle. There’s a charming melting pot moment when the Irish mother sends Mary over to the Cominsky place to find out how to prepare gefilte fish, since Father O’Malley is showing up for dinner on Friday (speaking of familiar rituals, this was back in “fish on Friday” times). The Jewish Film Festival featured Jewish boxers this year, and once there were many of them (read all about it in Allen Bodner’s When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport), but that was back when boxing was more mainstream and immigrant Jews weren’t. Like Sammy, some of them fought under Irish pseudonyms, though that seems like a lateral move for the time. In these days when athletic garb is street apparel it’s strange to see the fighters train by running through the snow in suits and dress shoes, though in the gym they wear trunks and tanks and the boxing moves are the same. I was hoping for a few more boxing scenes, but that’s not really the focus of the movie except for the big battle at the end (with very effective tympani accompaniment). Unfortunately the director shot the big fight with a faster camera speed to hop up the action, just the way TV shows today think people walking into a house or out to the car will be more exciting if it happens at high speed with rock soundtrack added, though regular boxing should be exciting enough. None of these tricks are new; I remember hearing about the MTV quick cuts back in the 80s and thinking, “What’s the big deal? Hasn’t everybody already seen all that in the films of Abel Gance?”

consumption

I normally avoid movie theaters, finding a big-screen TV and Netflix preferable to the ordeal that movie-going has become, but I was given passes to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (mille grazie to J and CF) so I headed on over to the Castro Theater, which is smaller than I thought it would be but just as bizarrely and extravagantly ornamented as I had hoped, to see Nazimova in Camille. The sets and costumes are by Natacha Rambova and are even more strikingly stylized than the notorious ones she did for Nazimova’s Salome, which were based on Aubrey Beardsley; the Deco fabulosity on view here (the time is updated to the 1920s) was all her own. Anything extravagant or stylized makes some people nervous, and the speakers introducing the film felt it necessary to caution us about what we were going to see. There were still some condescending chuckles from the audience, but that’s a hazard of seeing silent films, even at a Silent Film Festival. I don’t really understand this: acting styles were different in the early part of the twentieth century (more rhetorical, grander, more theatrical, if you will, than cinematic) and it doesn’t take too much expertise to see who is giving a good performance in that style and who is not. If you’ve grown up seeing Raphael Madonnas, would you burst out laughing at your first Byzantine icon? You might find it hard to adjust at first, but it’s just a different means of representation with its own standards. But people think it’s a sign of sophistication to laugh at silent movies. I don’t think much of “sophistication” for audiences anyway: the problem with sophistication is that it’s a series of accepted attitudes, and the need to stay current with what is considered sophisticated can keep you from seeing and feeling what is happening right in front of you. Nazimova does have an explosion of hair and bee-stung lips (not too odd for a courtesan), but she is also a great actress – just observe the regretful little shake back into her life she gives herself as she leaves her uncorrupted friend from the early days and goes back to her silly party. Let’s have some respect for the woman who studied with Stanislavsky and when in America not only insisted on performing Ibsen but made him big box office. Her Armand was Rudolph Valentino, just as Four Horsemen was making him a star, looking appropriately dreamy and sad. Nazimova’s Camille dies alone, imagining Armand, clutching the volume of Manon Lescaut he gave her. In my Camille mood I watched the Garbo version a week or so later and Robert Taylor’s Armand gives his Camille the same gift, one that I have to say seems remarkably tactless under the circumstances. I had forgotten what a magnificent actress Garbo is; her face is a poem and her eyes are epics and those should be enough, but she gives us more. It’s even worth putting up with the egregiously awful Lionel Barrymore (as Armand’s father) to watch her. In some ways this 1936 version is farther from our tastes than the 1921 film; I can picture a contemporary woman wearing Nazimova’s costumes, but not the absurd rounds of fluff that Adrian inflicted on Garbo (her pastoral costumes, featuring hoop skirts and yards of white lace, are particularly ridiculous, especially for a woman who was supposedly raised in the country with the cows and chickens). Robert Taylor also looks appropriately dreamy and sad and then jealous, but it’s all about Garbo. The only actor to come close, despite the best efforts of Laura Hope Crews as the aptly named Prudence, Camille’s greedy realpolitik procurer, is Henry Daniell as Baron de Varville. He’s not exactly likeable, but you respect his coldness and his strength. There’s a scene in which Camille gets him to pay her debts, and he knows it’s so she can leave him and go to the country with Armand, and he slaps her. It’s a very emotionally complex moment, and an impossible one in the movies these days, when hitting a woman signifies ultimate villainy just as much as did the twirling moustache of melodrama. (Not that I’m advocating slapping women, or anyone else, but the idea that you never hit a woman is based on the notion that all women are, by nature, smaller and weaker than all men; it’s a version of “pick on someone your own size.” Since women in movies these days, even period pieces, are all experts with sword and fist, it seems an odd relic that they’re supposed to be untouchable. I saw one movie in which the bad guy slapped the heroine and we were clearly meant to think this was the absolute worst, but since she had just cornered him with her skilled fencing, why wouldn’t or shouldn’t he fight back? There seems a basic confusion there.) And later on de Varville and Armand fight a duel, and I knew that if the movie were made these days the Baron’s aristocratic bravery would be stripped from him and he would have to be an abject coward on top of everything else. For all the post-Code censorship of movies, they were realistic about class and economics in a way that contemporary movies are not. This is not like the Raphael Madonna versus the Byzantine icon, because those are equally valuable means of representation and I’m talking about a willingness to face up to the hardness of life versus some deluded fantasy of entitlement. Somewhere after the tragic "Women’s Picture" we slipped into the smug self-delusion of the Chick Flick, and it’s not really to the credit of our ability to take in some of life’s complexity. The whole world and style of Camille may be too alien for us anyway unless preserved in the music of Verdi (somewhere Robertson Davies points out that nineteenth-century theatrical styles can still be seen, but only on the opera and ballet stages). Once I did see Camille performed live - when I was at Berkeley, Charles Ludlam played the famous courtesan in his Ridiculous Theater Company production, and that should tip you off that the play was so far out of the mainstream it was avant-garde. The performance was celebrated, and I sort of wish now that I had not left at intermission, which I have only done about four times in my life. I keep feeling I must have missed something. But it just seemed like a fat man in a dress, and not a particularly memorable one (man or dress) either. It wasn't done as camp extravaganza, but it wasn't quite done straight (pardon the expression) either. Maybe I'd have a different reaction now. Maybe not. Either way, I'm not going to have another chance, since that world too has gone into the theater scrapbooks.

Die Frau ohne Music

Last September I saw the Aurora Theatre’s revival of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. It was like a doughnut, rich and delicious and probably not as healthy as it should be. Also like a doughnut, it had a great big hole in the middle, which was a truly terrible performance of the lead role. Miranda Calderon has probably the greatest name for a performer since Siegfried Jerusalem, and we maybe don’t quite have the culture in which a young woman can weaken a man’s knees by offering to toss him a little green flower, but there’s got to be another way to convey Salome's attractions besides throwing tantrums and badgering the underlings. Her looks are fine, but not really enough to suspend disbelief that anyone would put up with her unrelieved harsh tones. Maybe because I was in Berkeley I kept picturing a slightly drunk sorority girl with an inflated sense of entitlement.

It’s too bad, because the rest of the production made a convincing case for seeing Salome without hearing Strauss. After all, what fades faster than yesterday’s decadence? Mark Jackson, the director, had the cast talk in clipped, stylized tones, which added enough Art Deco vinegar to undercut the overripe jeweled dialogue and renew what the Decadents would have called its strange fascination. Mark Phillips as Jokanaan, half naked for the duration, really did look like a fanatic carved out of white ivory. Best of all was Julia Brothers as Herodias; in fact, by the time Salome’s final monologue rolled around, after an odd, kick-boxy dance, I was so over her that I spent the whole long speech watching the subtle, understated play of expression on Herodias’s face: fear, contempt, horror, and finally amused indifference.

I had prepped by watching once again Nazimova’s 1923 film, one of those extravagant masterpieces of silent-film making. It’s notorious for the sets and costumes based on Aubrey Beardsley and for the rumors that Nazimova insisted everyone involved in the film had to be gay in tribute to Wilde, and also for bombing and thereby pretty much ending Nazimova’s screen career. But if you get past the Hollywood Babylon reputation it’s a wonderful and provocative production, not silly or camp. And Nazimova is fantastic – except for the occasional close-up you wouldn’t believe that the actress was a middle aged woman and not actually a selfishly petulant, seductive teen. And that’s decadence done right.