The last picture show of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theater was Carl Th. Dreyer's 1932
Vampyr last Friday.
It was astonishing that a a rarely seen, 75-minute, black-and-white art film at $30 a ticket sold out the entire theater. A line to enter went around the block.
The SF Silent Film Festival has become a beloved institution over the last 28 years, with a growing, devoted audience. The good news is that the festival will continue at the Palace of Fine Arts in April (
click here), which is a pain in the ass to get to via public transportation, but it's been a good theater for films since its San Francisco Film Festival days.
The Castro Theater will close down for over a year on February 5th to be turned into one of Another Planet Entertainment's (APE) music halls, with lots of bars and a flat floor for the standing room only crowds. There are promises of a portable raked seating arrangement being installed for film events, but APE's track record of keeping promises is not good. Pledged improvements to Bill Graham Auditorium in Civic Center, for example, have never materialized.
The Silent Film Festival features live musicians from all over the world accompanying the films, and they are a major component of the festival's success. For
Vampyr, there was an entire orchestra from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music led by Timothy Brock, who has helped to restore the Wolfgang Zeller score.
The movie was accurately described in the scholarly handout as "a waking dream." The nightmare takes place at an obscure lakeside inn and a nearby country estate with a young hero encountering the occult everywhere he turned.
The destruction of the Castro as an old-fashioned movie theater strikes me as extremely short-sighted. Multiplexes may be dying because everyone can buy a monster flat screen at Costco and set up a home theater, but seeing a movie on a large screen with a large audience is only going to become more popular. Just look at the San Francisco Symphony events where the orchestra accompanies recent blockbuster movies like
Casino Royale or
Lord of the Rings. They usually sell out Davies Hall, with high ticket prices besides.
Stacy Wisnia, the executive director of the SF Silent Film Festival, promised from the stage that the festival would return to the Castro Theater after APE's renovation, but who knows what will happen?
I can't believe they are really doing this. I am sad. Glad I got to visit a few times for movies and live performances in the last few years. I have some real good memories. Especially a couple of visits to see Bowie movies after he died.
ReplyDeleteDear Sam:
ReplyDeleteI moved to San Francisco in 1974 when the theater was a rundown, second-run neighborhood movie theater, when there used to be such a thing. The Nasser family who had owned the place since it opened in 1926 didn't have a clue what to do with it and they finally gave the management to Mel Novikoff, who ran the Surf Theater out by Ocean Beach, which showed Serious Foreign Films. That ushered in a glorious period of revival cinema at the Castro in the days before Turner Classic Movies (which is another imperiled treasure). Anita Monga was responsible for much of the inspired programming over the next decades and she's still directly involved with the Silent Film Festival and the Noir Festival which has decamped to the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. You should check that festival out, by the way, because I believe it starts this Friday.