Wednesday, February 04, 2009

SFSFF09—Valentines Day

How best to profess your love to your significant other on Valentines Day than to give the gift of silence? In their fourth annual mid-Winter edition, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival returns with four classics: Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality (1923) with live piano accompaniment by Philip Carli of the Flower City Society Orchestra; Sergei Komarov's A Kiss From Mary Pickford (1927) co-presented by the Mary Pickford Foundation and the San Francisco Film Society (with SFFS's own Steve Jenkins reading a live translation of Ukranian intertitles and Carli once more gracing the ivories); F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), co-presented by The Film Noir Foundation and accompanied by Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer (with an on-screen slide-show and program notes by Hell on Frisco Bay's Brian Darr); and—last but not least—Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary (1927), co-presented by Jesse Hawthorne Fick's Midnites for Maniacs, once again accompanied by Dennis James in tandem with Foley Artist Mark Goldstein.

As Artistic Director
Stephen Salmons specified in his press release: "We've taken two films which look at love as the motivator for comic mayhem, added a drama of tremendous artistic vision that depicts love as a mythological force of nature, and topped it off with the quintessential date movie—a scream-filled horror comedy about people going nuts in a scary old house. It should be fun for the whole family."

Cross-published on
Twitch.