Notizie

African-American film 'Bert Williams: Lime Kiln Club Field Day.' With Williams and Odessa Warren Grey.* Rare, early 20th-century African-American film among San Francisco Silent Film Festival highlights Directed by Edwin Middleton and T. Hayes Hunter, the Biograph Company's Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913) was the film I most looked forward to at the 2015 edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. One hundred years old, unfinished, and destined to be scrapped and tossed into the dust bin, it rose from the ashes. Starring entertainer Bert Williams – whose film appearances have virtually disappeared, but whose legacy lives on – Lime Kiln Club Field Day has become a rare example of African-American life in the first years of the 20th century. In the introduction to the film, the audience was treated to a treasure trove of Black memorabilia: sheet music, stills, promotional material, and newspaper clippings that survive. Details of the...

After the first screening of the restored Napoleon, Abel Gance’s beleaguered 1927 masterwork, at the Empire Leicester Square, London, on November 30th, 1980, the director of the British Film Institute Anthony Smith was quoted as saying “After Sunday the world will be divided into those who have seen Napoleon and those who haven’t.” The world of the haves over the have-nots expanded to the Us the following year when Francis Ford Coppola famously brought Napoleon to Radio City Music Hall to be performed with his father’s score, but in the intervening three decades the film has not been seen again in the Us. Come March 24th, however, thanks to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the world will once again be divided between those who have and those who haven’t when the film returns to the Us for four screenings of Kevin Brownlow’s complete restoration—accompanied by...