San Francisco audiences have developed a taste for silent cinema accompanied by accomplished theatrical organists and contemporary ensembles and three programs are coming down the pipeline that I'd be remiss not to announce.
Halloween night, as part of the 25th San Francisco Jazz Festival, F.W. Murnau's Faust (1926) will be screened at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre accompanied by the Willem Breuker Kollektief. Though health will keep Breuker from attending in person, his original score for Faust will be performed by his Kollektief.
The following night, Thursday, November 1, Aquarius Records, Arthur Magazine, and the Dead Channels Film Festival present two mindblowing and ultra rare "Czech new wave" vampire masterpieces—Jiri Barta's The Last Theft (1987) and Jaromil Jires' Valerie and her Week of Wonders (1970)—at the Castro Theatre with live-in-the-theater-accompaniment by telemagnetic soundtrackstars Spoonbender 1.1.1 and shimmering 10-piece touring ensemble The Valerie Project!
Also at the Castro on December 1 The Silent Film Festival offers a triplebill: Vitaphone Vaudeville, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), and Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Louis B. Mayer's Flesh and the Devil (1926), accompanied by Dennis James on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer.
