How best to profess your love to your significant other on Valentines Day than to give the gift of silence? In their fourth annual mid-Winter edition, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival returns with four classics: Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality (1923) with live piano accompaniment by Philip Carli of the Flower City Society Orchestra; Sergei Komarov's A Kiss From Mary Pickford (1927) co-presented by the Mary Pickford Foundation and the San Francisco Film Society (with SFFS's own Steve Jenkins reading a live translation of Ukranian intertitles and Carli once more gracing the ivories); F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), co-presented by The Film Noir Foundation and accompanied by Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer (with an on-screen slide-show and program notes by Hell on Frisco Bay's Brian Darr); and—last but not least—Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary (1927), co-presented by Jesse Hawthorne Fick's Midnites for Maniacs, once again accompanied by Dennis James in tandem with Foley Artist Mark Goldstein.As Artistic Director Stephen Salmons specified in his press release: "We've taken two films which look at love as the motivator for comic mayhem, added a drama of tremendous artistic vision that depicts love as a mythological force of nature, and topped it off with the quintessential date movie—a scream-filled horror comedy about people going nuts in a scary old house. It should be fun for the whole family."
Cross-published on Twitch.