I was looking for Yoda when I bumped into Eadweard Muybridge. These are the circles film history moves in. This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the 27th, took place in the grandeur of the theatre of the Palace of Fine Arts, an elegant neo-classical folly of gigantic proportions, built as a temporary attraction for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition and then rebuilt in more permanent form 50 years later. Here, time is a pretzel. Like the architecture, cinema becomes both ancient and the modern: live performances of century-old works.
Before the films began, I ventured just a few yards from the Palace for a guided tour of the LucasFilm building, home of some of the film industry’s most cutting-edge special effects and beloved animatronic characters. Case in point: our meeting point was at the Yoda Fountain, just in front of the of the offices, a thrilling rendez-vous for anyone’s inner child. That’s when my jet lag and a tendency to meander led me to take a wrong turn into the 19th century, and the statue of Muybridge, the photography pioneer who discovered the secrets of motion in a series of still frames – cinema in its simplest form. Born in Kingston, Surrey, Muybridge began his photography career in San Francisco, and the city is justifiably proud of his work and its legacy. Somehow, my sense of direction led me right back where I started from.
As if I needed any encouragement, but I was inevitably thinking about early cinema, even when touring displays of Hollywood’s most cutting-edge special effects. And I was especially taken by the giant Howard Anderson optical printer, which allows artists to combine several images in one, as used to create composite visuals in everything from The Ten Commandments (Cecil B DeMille, 1956) and North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) to the Star Wars films. Not just because I have watched those films many times, but because I knew that this year’s festival was going big on multiple exposures.
The first optical printers for special effects arrived at the tail end of the silent era, so our filmmakers created superimposition effects the hard(er) way, rewinding the film through the camera to use it again, hoping everything lined up perfectly. The 2024 San Francisco Silent Film Festival showed some of the best examples of this craft in a rewardingly eclectic programme of (mostly) classic silents. Julien Duvivier, a master at the art of “photographing thought” opened up the mind of an abused and frightened child in his first adaptation of Poil de Carotte, from 1925. Even more than the flashy mirror shots, distortions and a POV compositions, superimpositions were the sharpest tools in his armoury, and it’s hard to forget young François (André Heuzé) cowerring in bed surrounded by floating images of his stern mother, chopping the air with her hands, or grimacing in a series of disembodied closeups.
This was one of the most powerful screenings of the festival, vividly accompanied by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius. I had the honour of introducing the film and so was lucky enough to have several followup conversations with members of the audience who had been moved by this story of marital discord and parental neglect, with its tentatively happy ending. The double-exposures here are vital to the storytelling: essentially the young boy sees the world differently to everyone else, is tormented by fears and threats known only to him. This way Duvivier allows us to share his uniquely tortured perspective.
Duvivier remade this film in sound in the 1930s, not long before he also tackled another work of literature famously adapted in the silent era and relying on some expert superimposition work: The Phantom Carriage. San Francisco screened the definitive 1921 adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf’s novel, directed by and starring one Victor Sjöström. This hard-to-categorise classic is form of soul therapy, in which a destructive alcoholic (played by Sjöström) is forced to confront his own imminent mortality, as well as the suffering he has inflicted on his loved ones, while literally standing in the shadow of death.
Here, musical accompaniment by the Matti Bye Ensemble enhanced the eerie beauty of those spectral quadruple exposures, the souls of sinners leaving their bodies. How better to illustrate the hauntings of the dead breaking into the actions of the living, the crimes of the past laying heavily on to the tragedies of the present? This was state-of-the-art work in 1920, an effect with both an aesthetic and narrative function. If you were to tell the same story today you would use more or less the same technique, just with more expensive equipment.
Those two films lay neatly next to each other, you might even say they overlap, but the programme was really quite diverse, with Euro glamour provided by The Joker (Georg Jacoby, 1928) and The Devious Path (GW Pabst, 1928), Weimar decadence ditto and Karl Grune’s epochal Die Strasse (1923), urban modernity ditto and two Manhattan melodramas East Side, West Side (Allan Dwan, 1927) and Dancing Mothers (Herbert Brenon, 1926), comedy by Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd in The Kid Brother (Ted Wilde, 1927), bizarre Ukrainian camel caper The Opportunist (Mykola Shpykovskyi, 1929), swashbuckling by both The Black Pirate (Albert Parker, 1926) and The Sea Hawk (Frank Lloyd, 1924), and the majesty of Ozu’s I Was Born, But… (1932) to provide both a lesson in human parenting (M and Mme Lepic in Poil de Carotte take note) and sheer silent film perfection.
By chance, as if to illustrate this breadth of styles, I clocked the same superimposition trick in two wildly different films. In William Wyler’s impeccable Hell’s Heroes (1929, accompanied beautifully by Gunther Buchwald and Mas Koga), a silent adaptation of Peter B. Kyne’s 1913 novel Three Godfathers (you may know several other versions), Charles Bickford marches in the searing heat of the desert towards the town of New Jerusalem. If the sun doesn’t kill him, the arsenic water he drank in desperation will, as will the Sheriff – he robbed the town’s bank just a few days ago. Hovering in front of his face, a superimposed hangman’s noose – inevitably, Bickford steps straight into the loop, an uncanny moment that allows us to join him in his grisliest imaginings.
By contrast, The Pill Pounder is a fairly obscure two-reeler from 1923, directed by and featuring a small appearance by two names that would soon become much more famous: Gregory La Cava and Clara Bow. When Charles Murray’s harassed pharmacist is tricked into believing, for a second, that his has poisoned his daughter’s boyfriend, he has the same thought as Bickford: a tiny gallows appears just next to his head. Is this nifty visual gag? A throwback to La Cava’s recent experience in cartoons and animation? A comic reworking of the terrifying shadows of death in imported films such as The Phantom Carriage? Or just an acknowledgement that most of us think in images as much as in words, and that our perception works like a piece of film or an AR headset, capturing both reality and our own mental projections at the same time?
That’s one fact of life that Muybridge couldn’t capture with all his devices, but every generation of filmmakers seems to understand. And Yoda too, I am fairly certain.
I had a wonderful week at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which has retained its joie de vivre and high-quality programming despite being uprooted from its home in the Castro Theatre (due to ongoing developments). It was wonderful to see the festival flourish on a new site, with the familiar sound of Ron Lynch’s voice booming from the projection booth. Congratulations to the team, Anita Monga, Stacey Wisnia, Rob Byrne, Kathy Rose O’Regan and Keith Arnold, and long may the festival continue, wherever it finds a home.
