2026 SF Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival began at the Castro Theater in 1996 and over the last 30 years has blossomed into the largest silent film festival in the Americas. This year's five-day festival marked its return home after Another Planet Entertainment spent years and millions refurbishing the place and ripping out its tiered orchestra seating for a flat floor better suited to a stand-up music venue.

After much neighborhood pushback, a compromise was reached that included tiered temporary seating in the orchestra section with the balcony retaining the original movie seats. The new temporary seating downstairs has good sightlines but feels like stacked sports bleachers that make for human bottlenecks in every passageway. The seats only go halfway up someone's back, so some true devotees who would sit through five different films in a day were decamping to the balcony for posterior support. Still, it's a happy miracle that the theater has survived and is not only thriving but continues to work with film festivals.

Two of the most essential people at the festival are the British pianist Stephen Horne who accompanies films with a lyrical, quicksilver responsiveness to what's on the screen, and Artistic Director Anita Monga, one of the greatest film programmers in the world.

I started at the festival with a wild double bill, "erotic melodramas" from Denmark. 1910's The Abyss was the debut of 18-year-old Asta Nielsen as a piano teacher who runs off with a faithless circus dancer which does not end well for anyone. She became an instant global movie star on account of a five-minute "gaucho dance" with her tied-up lover that is one of the lewder things I've seen on film. (Click here for the YouTube excerpt.)

This was followed by 1917's The Clown, starring Valdemar Psilander, the biggest movie actor of early silent films. Officially, he had a heart attack and died at the age of 32, though he probably either drank himself to death or committed suicide by other means. The film was another story of a faithless wife whose lust sets the eventual tragedy in motion.

The next day brought two Hollywood comedies, starting with Clara Bow in the 1927 Hula. She plays a perky tomboy on Maui who sets her sights on handsome engineer Clive Brook. He's a hero with the least personal agency imaginable, between a socialite trying to woo him, a wife trying to get money out of him, and the indefatigable Clara Bow blowing up a mountain just to keep him around. The plot was utterly ridiculous but funny, and Stephen Horne's accompaniment was delightful.

The other comedy was 1926's The Caveman, with Marie Prevost and Matt Moore in a class-based reverse Pygmalion story set among the swells of Manhattan and the Irish slums of the lower East Side. The gender politics were a bit creepy throughout, but Marie Prevost's strength and charm mitigated some of it.

I missed the opening night showing of Queen Kelly, Gloria Swanson's unfinished 1929 film directed by Erich von Stroheim, but managed to catch her in The Humming Bird from 1924. It was a weird mixture of Parisian underworld capers, religiosity, and patriotism, and about one third of the movie has gone permanently missing.

My favorite movie of the festival was the 1930 Polish film, Janko the Musician, taken from an extremely depressing 19th century story about a holy innocent peasant child who has a sacred connection with music before being beaten and dying after he steals a violin. In this version, the tale has been Hollywoodized and thank the Holy Virgin Mary for that. The twelve-year-old Stefan Rogulski played the sacred child with such luminosity that the name Tadzio came to mind and his adult version is played by actor-violinist Witold Conti, a one-time lover of Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. The musical accompaniment was a mixture of musicaL numbers recorded after the silent film was finished, and a live trio of pianist/violinist Guenther Buchwald, Mas Koga on woodwinds, and Frank Bockius on percussion. They were magnificent.

My final film was Ernest Lubitsch's So This Is Paris, a 1926 infidelity farce based on an 1851 German play that was the source for Johann Strauss's opera Die Fledermaus. Among attempted racy dalliances between two couples, there is a famous Charleston dance sequence at the Parisian Artists' Ball that is completely berserk. (Click here for a YouTube clip.) It actually made you want to live in the 1920s.