Kings (and Queens) of the silent film circus

The programme at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is brilliantly balanced and varied.  Films representing a broad range of styles, dozens of different countries and multiple genres, from slapstick to space opera, all feature across the 25^th anniversary extended seven-day event. 

It’s testament to the SFSFF staff’s international status that their line up films, collaborators and guest speakers is so global in scope.  This spirit of international cooperation is key to the endeavour of film preservation – to complete the jigsaw of a film restoration you have to gather all the pieces together that might be scattered all over the place.  A case in point is The King of the Circus (1924, screened Saturday 7 May).  Founding Director of Lobster Films in Paris, Serge Bromberg (I must ask him one day why he chose the name Lobster…) presented Lobster cinematheque’s latest restoration.  Moving briskly past the salacious story of how the film’s star Max Linder killed his wife and himself shortly after completing this, his last finished feature film, raconteur extraordinaire Serge explained how the screening was made possible thanks to work on 14 separate film elements from eleven different film archives.  Serge described the results as a “Frankenstein reconstruction of a living thing from dead parts”… not perfect but as complete as possible.

Max Linder gazes adoringly at Vilma Bánky in The King of the Circus

‘Chapeau’ to Lobster for their painstaking work to resurrect this Missing Believed Lost gem and to Phil Carli on piano for his romping accompaniment to the circus shenanigans.  I enjoyed it very much – a flea circus never gets old, and the ‘acrobats for beginners’ sequence, which shows off Linder’s deceptively clumsy attempts at learning the ropes, was a hoot.

Silent film programmes tend to be dominated by American, French and German titles so it was a pleasure to see the magnificent Great Victorian Picture Show gracing the programme, and presented by Bryony Dixon (Curator of Silent Film at the British Film Institute National Archive) with fine musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius.  I had seen the programme of early large-format films from the tail end of the 19^th century at the BFI IMAX with John Sweeney’s live ensemble score but couldn’t pass up the chance to see it again on the Castro’s enormous (if not quite panoramic) screen.  With Bryony’s presentation we are given fascinating insights into the significance of this very early footage – allowing us to connect with each snippet with startling intimacy.  Since I saw it at the London Film Festival Archive Gala in 2018, Virtual Reality technology has got in on the act and we were treated to some documentation of VR and visualisation tests offering the potential to make the experience of going back in time through old images yet more immersive.  Wearing an Oculus, one can be transported to Venice’s markets and waterways as filmed by WKL Dickson in 1895. 

Me and My Two Friends (1898), in the BFI’s The Great Victorian Moving Picture Show

The event I had been most looking forward to was Rebirth of a Nation with live music by DJ Spooky (aka Paul D. Miller) and Classical Revolution with Guenter Buchwald on Saturday night.  The issues around presentation today of yesterday’s ‘problematic’ art-works, as explored by Miller, are perpetually relevant and played out across culture in all corners… this week the BBC censored their broadcast on Radio 6 Music of Bob Dylan’s 1976 anti-racist song Hurricane by editing out the use of the n-word.  Last week, in the USA, the Governor of Georgia signed into law the first Book Ban Bill in the State giving more power to school boards and parents in what books are available in schools.  Researchers in America have reported that, over the last nine months, more than 1.5 thousand individual books have been banned including Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and also To Kill a Mockingbird, after complaints of racist language. 

Described in the programme thus: “Miller’s live remix of the 1915 film that mythologized the slave-holding South… By deconstructing then reassembling The Birth of a Nation into a more truthful history, Miller demonstrates the awesome power of cinema right before our eyes.”  This is a film I have only ever seen in extracts… first in 1986 as part of a Film Studies ‘A’ Level in the context of D.W. Griffith as the “inventor of cinema language”, and latterly in the context of the film as an extended propaganda piece for the KKK.  I was keen to witness how such a toxic and contested film could be re-presented in such a way as to make it acceptable for an audience newly versed in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Miller introduced the film, striking an odd note straight away by saying he wasn’t “Will Smith about to smack anyone”.  He spoke about the irony of hip-hop artists like Grand Wizzard Theodore and Grand Master Flash taking their names from the ranks of the KKK, of cinema as a place where we debate the emotional issues of our times, and social media as the inheritor of film and media, taking up the role of manipulation and dispenser of misinformation.

For the screening Miller was live mixing a DJ score alongside the ensemble of classically trained string musicians.  From my scant knowledge of the original it appeared to be a condensed/edited down version of The Birth of a Nation with each intertitle card doctored to include Miller’s initials instead of Griffith’s.  At some points Miller had also superimposed architect plan graphics onto the image.

In the on-stage discussion afterwards, led by Wesley Morris (New York Times), Miller referred to Goethe’s attestation that “architecture is frozen music” but I couldn’t grasp what the significance was of this for the work we had just seen.  I also struggled to keep abreast of the conversation generally and was left with the impression of having failed to understand, possibly because Morris assumed his own level of familiarity with Griffith’s film and Miller’s work was matched by the audience’s own.  That being said, I am grateful to the SFSFF for boldly putting the raging debate at the centre of their programme.  It is challenging to curate work from an era that regularly foregrounds attitudes that are unacceptable today and the curators here have sought to face it front on rather than overlook or expunge.   Miller said he wanted people “to think about the crisis of narrative as it intersects with democracy”.  For me Miller’s intervention did not redeem Griffith’s film, but it did make me think which is a good start.

In a flamboyant change of tone, the next screening was Salome (1922) introduced by Tony Bravo: The San Francisco Chronicle’s Arts and Culture writer.  Bravo proclaimed the screening as a true homecoming for the film’s centenary in the Castro given the district’s rich cultural legacy and significance to San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ community and beyond.  An on-screen recorded message from Drag Queen Peaches Christ brought the message home and we were all set for this beautiful fever-dream of a film, starring highly flamboyant Russian star Alla Nazimova in an allegedly all-Queer cast.  The sparse music by the Matti Bye Ensemble gave plenty of room to the high camp on screen and we were all transported by the ravishing costumes and set.  A slightly trippy end to an extraordinary day.

PS. if anyone reading this knows how to get a message to Scotland’s own Drag Race Superstar Lawrence Chaney, do tell!  We’d love to welcome Drag Queen royalty to the Hippodrome for our next Lon Chaney screening.

Pamela Hutchinson has written an excellent programme note for The King of the Circus published in the SFSFF guide which I hope will be shared here soon along with the festival’s bumper back catalogue of notes and articles: https://silentfilm.org/library/

UK based folk can explore more of the BFI’s Victorian film holdings here: Search | BFI Player