S.F. Silent Film Festival moving to Palace of Fine Arts
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, one of the world’s preeminent events dedicated to showcasing and preserving pre-sound era movies, announced it will be moving its 2024 festival to the Palace of Fine Arts after calling the Castro Theatre home since 1996.
The move, according to Artistic Director Anita Monga, is hoped to be temporary. And, yet, she told the Chronicle, the festival’s traditional winter program “Day of Silents,” scheduled for Dec. 2, could conceivably be the organization’s final time at the Castro, which is expected to begin a $20 million renovation in early 2024, “for a long time.”
“If they do what they say they’re going to do, it will be workable for us,” Monga said. “We would like to be back at the Castro if we can.”
Monga was referring to plans by Another Planet Entertainment, which operates the 100year-old theater on behalf of the Nasser family, which has owned the theater since it opened in 1922. The Berkeley-based concert promotion company plans to remove existing seats, level the raked (sloped) floor and install a three-tiered removable seat system.
The plans are controversial. APE and its supporters say the renovations will provide the necessary flexibility to make the venue profitable as a concert and live music venue as well as a movie theater. Opponents say the raked floor and removal of permanent seating will ruin the theater’s historic interior, cut down its current 1,400-seat capacity and possibly impair sightlines — and that the venue could be a successful multi-use performing arts space with the seats intact.
After several contentious meetings at City Hall, APE won approval in June to proceed with its renovation plan.
While the company went through the approval process, it said it was open for booking through January 2024. Monga said the Silent Film Festival held out hope that the 2024 event, scheduled for April 10-14, could still be held at the Castro before renovations began, but was told that APE was not accepting bookings past Feb. 6.
An email from the Chronicle to an APE spokesperson on Wednesday, Oct. 25, was not returned by the following afternoon.
The S.F. Silent Film Festival, established by Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons, has become internationally famous in the film world. There is no comparable event in the United States; perhaps the closest in scope is the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Northern Italy, which wrapped its 42nd edition this month.
Part of the appeal of the San Francisco event is that silent films are screened with live musical accompaniment in historical theaters that actually showed such films when they were first released. In moving to the Bernard Maybeckdesigned Palace of Fine Arts, which was never a dedicated movie house, the festival at least is in a venue from the same era.
The Marina District treasure was built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition to exhibit works of art, and has since become an internationally known city landmark. Its current seating capacity is 960.
“We’re so pleased to be at the Palace,” Monga said. “The stadium seating is nice, and we have room for our live music.”
The Palace of Fine Arts also does not have the capacity to project 35mm films, which means the Silent Film Festival will be an alldigital festival next year. However, because of the nature of silent film preservation, the festival increasingly has embraced digital projection over the years. In December’s “Day of the Silents” event at the Castro, only one of the six programs — the 1925 Rudolph Valentino hit “The Eagle” — is scheduled to be projected on 35mm.
Tickets for “Day of the Silents” — which also includes the Harold Lloyd comedy “Safety Last!” — are available at silentfilm.org. The full program for the April 10-14, 2024, festival is to be unveiled in February.