By Janine Gericke. During the silent film era, some of the most prolific and highest earning producers, writers, and filmmakers were women. Many of these films involved stories about issues such as prostitution, birth control, and abortion. Issues that continue to cause controversy today. Dorothy Davenport created a trilogy of […]
The “Fourth Face” of Silent Comedy – Harry Langdon: King of Silent Comedy by Gabriella Oldham and Mabel Langdon
September 5, 2018
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A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. Silent film great Harry Langdon died at sixty of a cerebral hemorrhage three years before Christmas day in 1944. He died broke; and Mabel, his third wife, with the help of a friend, managed to secure employment immediately at the Motion Picture Relief […]
Glory of the Silents Reborn: the 23rd San Francisco Silent Film Festival
By Janine Gericke. I’ve been going to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) for ten years. My first introduction to the festival and the Castro Theatre was Buster Keaton’s 1923 film Our Hospitality. It was the first time I had ever seen a silent film with live musical accompaniment. […]
Hobart Bosworth – Silent Cinema’s Sea Wolf: Behind the Door (1919) from Flicker Alley
By Tony Williams. Ever since seeing that unforgettable still in Kevin Brownlow’s The War, the West, and the Wilderness (1979), the grim-visage of Hobart Bosworth (1867-1943) in Behind the Door (Irvin V. Willat, 1919), wielding a scalpel with the shadow of his victim in the background, has occupied an ineradicable part of […]
F.W. Murnau’s Faust: A Dazzling Achievement in German Silent Cinema
July 1, 2016
By Jeremy Carr. There is the sense while watching the 1926 silent German masterwork Faust that director F.W. Murnau and company are showing off a bit. With a wealth of money at their disposal and a hefty allotment of time (an essentially unlimited budget, finally reaching a reported two million […]