Preservation on silent film fest’s agenda
Several years back, Rob Byrne, the board president of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, was at Amsterdam’s Eye Film Institute, looking over its collection. He came upon a film called “The Last Edition” (1925), which existed in only a single, delicate nitrate print. And no sooner did he start watching than he realized that he was looking at a San Francisco time capsule.
“It was shot on the streets of San Francisco,” Byrne says, “and inside the office of The San Francisco Chronicle” — at The Chronicle’s then-brand-new building on Fifth and Mission. That film became the first movie preserved under the San Francisco Silent Film Festival logo.
The Silent Film Festival has grown rapidly. Founded in 1996, by Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons, it debuted as a one-day, three-film event at the Castro Theatre. It has expanded every year since. In 2018, under Executive Director Stacey Wisnia and Artistic Director Anita Monga, the festival will take place over five days and feature 22 films. Though they’re not ready to release their lineup, at least one movie will be a film that the festival preserved.
“We really wanted to close the loop with silent film preservation and restoration,” says Byrne, who in addition to heading the festival’s board is a film restorer in his own right. “We were, in a sense, giving back, and giving these films back to the world.”
Film preservation, particularly of silent film, is necessary because silent films were shot on nitrate stock. The stock is highly combustible — many classic films have been lost forever due to fire — and even when it doesn’t burst into flame, it has a way of decomposing. Getting there quickly and copying the film digitally to safer, more durable stock guarantees that these films will continue to exist for generations to come.
Normally a full restoration of a silent film can cost up to $200,000. But Byrne does the most expensive work, the digital restoration, for free — because he loves doing it. That eliminates about $150,000 of the cost. What’s left are lab costs and the price of a new negative and a new print. “For a feature film of about six or seven reels, that’s between $45,000 to $50,000,” says Byrne.
The process for each restoration varies, but the outlines are the same. The festival has established its own preservation fund and raises money for it separately. “We need the membership to support our programming,” says Wisnia, “So we try hard not to go after the same pools of money.”
Once a project is chosen and the money raised, the preservation process begins. Much of the work is not strictly technical. “A huge amount of time goes into research,” says Byrne. For example, a recent project: A 1929 German film, an adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” turned up in a Polish archive with Czech intertitles. A team of researchers went to work and found the original German script, which contained the original German intertitles. Those titles had to be translated into English. And the look of the original German titles had to be reproduced. “All these people are working for free,” Byrne says.
Once the film is printed and ready, it is stored at the Library of Congress. There are 20-plus features and 25 shorts in the library, and all those films end up showing at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and also are available to archives and festivals throughout the world.
The festival is not only preserving film but publicizing the work of other organizations in the field. Among Wisnia’s first acts upon becoming executive director in 2005 was to institute the series “Amazing Takes From the Archives.” These programs take place on the festival’s first day at the Castro Theatre — as early as 10 in the morning. Admission is free, and the theater is always packed. The programs feature archivists from all over the world — from the Netherlands, the British Film Institute and the Cinematheque Francaise — talking about their work and demonstrating its results.