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The 26th San Francisco Silent Film Festival was another joyous gathering of silent cinema fans, historians, scholars, and all stripes of movie buffs. Launched in 1995, the festival has grown from a single-day event to—excluding two years of Covid shutdowns—an annual, five-day celebration. It’s about the movies, of course, and this year Sfsff presented 20 features and seven shorts. But it’s also about the silent movie experience. All shows were accompanied by live music, from solo piano to small combos to a 10-piece mini-orchestra for the closing-night event, playing both archival music and original scores, many composed for the screenings.

Allan Dwan’s The Iron Mask, from 1929, opened the festival with a bittersweet farewell to the silents. The film, the swashbuckling final silent feature to star Douglas Fairbanks, has added resonance for Sfsff audiences because of the legacy of the Castro Theatre, the festival’s home for its entire 26 years.

With the Academy Awards just around the corner, it’s time to talk about the “who didn’ts” — the actors who never won an Oscas, let alone received a nomination-as well as classic films that never saw Oscar gold. And there are plenty of who didn’t filmmakers. Countless legendary directors didn’t win Oscars or even earn nominations.

Martin Scorsese, who is one of the most influential, acclaimed directors of the past 50 years has only won for directing 2006’s Best Picture winner “The Departed.” Though his 1976 masterpiece “Taxi Driver” was nominated for Best Picture, he didn’t earn an Oscar nomination for Best Director. He first got his first directing nomination for his 1980 masterwork “Raging Bull,” but lost to Robert Redford for “Ordinary People.”

Scorsese has received a lot of Oscar love. As far as producing, writing and directing, he’s received 14 nominations. And this year, he’s nominated...

So much time, so few movies to see. Scratch that. Reverse it.

Running a little later than usual this year, the 2018 Turner Classic Movies Film Festival gets under way this coming Thursday, screening approximately 88 films and special programs over the course of the festival’s three-and-a-half days, beginning Thursday evening, and no doubt about it, this year’s schedule, no less than any other year, will lay out a banquet for classic film buffs, casual film fans and harder-core cinephiles looking for the opportunity to see long-time favorites as well as rare and unusual treats on the big screen. I’ve attended every festival since its inaugural run back in 2010, and since then if I have not reined in my enthusiasm for the festival and being given the opportunity to attend it every year, then I have at least managed to lasso my verbiage. That first year I wrote about...

Ramon Novarro: 'Ben-Hur' 1925 star. 'Ben-Hur' on TCM: Ramon Novarro in most satisfying version of the semi-biblical epic Christmas 2015 is just around the corner. That's surely the reason Turner Classic Movies presented Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ last night, Dec. 20, '15, featuring Carl Davis' magnificent score. Starring Ramon Novarro, the 1925 version of Ben-Hur became not only the most expensive movie production,[1] but also the biggest worldwide box office hit up to that time.[2] Equally important, that was probably the first instance when the international market came to the rescue of a Hollywood mega-production,[3] saving not only Ben-Hur from a fate worse than getting trampled by a runaway chariot, but also the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which could have been financially strangled at birth had the epic based on Gen. Lew Wallace's bestseller been a commercial bomb. The convoluted making of 'Ben-Hur,' as described...

‘Hollywood Hero’ John Dewar remembered (photo: Anthony Slide wearing Tom Mix’s hat in 1976) Perhaps I have been around too long, but as I grow older I grow despondent that those who contributed so much to film history in the past are forgotten, with others often coming along and taking claim for their achievements. One such Hollywood hero is John Dewar, whom I met when I first came to Los Angeles in 1971. He was a curator in the history department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and introduced me to the museum’s treasures relating to film history, acquired before the creation of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — at a time when both institutions were housed together simply as the Los Angeles County Museum. Back in the mid-1930s, it was Ransom Matthews, head of industrial technology at the Museum, who had started collecting such materials.

"The movies in The Silent Roar, Film Forum's ongoing Monday-night series of silent masterpieces from MGM studios, all date from 1924 to 1929, the glorious last half-decade before the coming of sound," writes Imogen Smith for Alt Screen. "While the series includes some director-dominated films, like Erich von Stroheim's Greed and The Merry Widow, the line-up consists mainly of star vehicles constructed around singular personalities: Greta Garbo, Buster Keaton, Lon Chaney, and Lillian Gish. Each of these icons presents a case study in silent acting, and taken together, The Silent Roar makes for an excellent primer in this lost art." The series runs through February 6.

"2011 has been a good year for silent cinema on DVD," writes Kristin Thompson, presenting "an overview of some of the highlights."

Fandor's Keyframe is dedicated this week to "The Silent Artists."

Listening (18'49"). Kevin Brownlow talks about restoring Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) on the Leonard Lopate Show.

This coming Saturday, Not Coming to a Theater Near You presents Jia Zhangke's rarely screened 2007 documentary, Useless, at the 92Y Tribeca. Leo Goldsmith opens a new series, Jia Zhangke's Migrations, for which Not Coming contributors will be reviewing all of Jia's features:

Jia's vision of China is both a gritty appraisal of a lurching economy and massively destabilizing reconstruction projects, and a phantasmagoria of the intimate desires of its ordinary citizens. Documentary realism vies with the simulacra of contemporary life: cellphone daydreams explode in flash animation, UFOs rise above the Three Gorges Dam project, everyday banalities mix alchemically with the glimmering seductions of popular culture. Jia's is a cinema of contradictions, of fact against fiction, of bitter memory against the utopias of post-socialism. But most of all, it's defiantly a cinema of the present — not a forecast of the glories of the China to come, but an ode to a...

Renée Adorée, John Gilbert in King Vidor‘s The Big Parade (top); John Gilbert, Greta Garbo in Clarence Brown‘s Flesh and the Devil (bottom) John Gilbert on TCM: Queen Christina, Downstairs Here are my top recommendations for John Gilbert Day (in addition to Queen Christina, mentioned in the previous post): Victor Sjöström‘s touching, poetic He Who Gets Slapped (1924), which features my favorite Lon Chaney performance as a clown with a past — no, Chaney doesn’t play a politician; he’s a real circus clown. Both Gilbert and Norma Shearer are flawless in less demanding but just as memorable roles. Erich von Stroheim‘s The Merry Widow (1925), a megablockbuster that solidified Gilbert’s superstardom along with King Vidor‘s The Big Parade, released that same year. Mae Murray shines in the title role, while von Stroheim adds some welcome kinky touches. (C’mon, TCM, I know you have...

Mae Murray shows her legs in The Merry Widow At The Bioscope: Pordenone Film Festival Day I "The main event, though, is the Erich Von Stroheim version of The Merry Widow (USA 1925), introduced by Leatrice Joy Fountain and featuring a new orchestral score by Maud Nelissen. The film itself is almost a checklist of Von’s obsessions; militaria, aristocrats at play, wedding processions, grotesques, fetishes and matters of honour; how close it all is to the source material I’m not qualified to say, but it’s a superior piece of froth; the score, using Lehar lightly but effectively matched it to perfection. And every new film I see John Gilbert in, my perception of him changes; [...]...