May 2016
ART DIRECTORS GUILD FILM SOCIETY SERIES 2016: THE BELOVED ROGUE
Co-presented by the Art Directors Guild Film Society William Cameron Menzies was likely the most celebrated art director in silent motion pictures for his work on such extraordinary films as THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1924). He won the first Oscar for Art Direction for THE DOVE (1927), and in 1936 directed the landmark sci-fi epic THINGS TO COME. In 1939 he took a step forward in filmic visualization so profound that an entirely new term had to be coined: production…
Find out more »July 2016
The Silent Treatment: So This Is Paris
35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress Featuring live accompaniment by Cliff Retallick! A glittering social satire staged safely abroad, So This Is Paris passes off the routine infidelities of Jazz Age blue-bloods as “the French way.” Teasing the audience with urbane good humor—and featuring a nigh-surrealist montage of an “artist’s ball” (read: nightclub) that superimposes throngs of dancing legs and arms into a proto-psychedelic rendering of a really good champagne high—this silent doesn’t shy away from wanton hedonism.…
Find out more »OUTFEST: Different From The Others
Different From The Others (German: Anders als die Andern) is a German film produced during the Weimar Republic. It was first released in 1919 and stars Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel. The story for Anders als die Andern was co-written by Richard Oswald and Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who also had a small part in the film and partially funded the production through his Institute for Sexual Science, with the aim of presenting the story as a polemic against the then-current laws under Germany's Paragraph 175, which made homosexuality a criminal offense. The cinematography was by Max Fassbender, who two years previously…
Find out more »Felix the Cat’s Silent Animation Spectacular
Celebrate the career of Felix the Cat, the No. 1 cartoon star of the 1920s, with a program including Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer’s “Felix in Hollywood” (1923) and other shorts featuring the fabulous feline. Plus such animated gems as Winsor McCay’s “The Sinking of the Lusitania” (1918) and “The Pet” (1921), Max Fleischer’s “The Tantalizing Fly” (1919) and “Koko’s Auto Ride” (1921) and more. With live musical accompaniment by Cliff Retallick. Screening format: 8mm | 100 min.
Find out more »August 2016
Silent Treatment: A Woman of the World
A chic European countess visits her small-town American cousin and wreaks mayhem with her liberated continental habits, like smoking cigarettes and seducing men of high ranking public office. Pola Negri is very good at imbuing small gestures with explicit suggestions, and, with eyelids perpetually at half-mast, exudes an attractive combination of contempt and boredom. As a reflection of and probably a comment on Negri’s experience with the American public as an exoticized object of controversy, A Woman of the World…
Find out more »February 2017
Lost Cleopatra Screening
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association & Hollywood Heritage Present: Evening at the Barn - THEDA BARA - LOST CLEOPATRA Please join us on Wednesday, February 8, 2017 for a special celebration of the silent 1917 epic "CLEOPATRA" starring Theda Bara. The movie was truly a masterpiece, unfortunately this film along with virtually the entire Fox Film silent archive perished in a vault fire. One hundred years since the initial release, filmmaker Phillip Dye has created an epic reconstruction bringing Theda…
Find out more »The Silent Treatment: Feel My Pulse
Archival print courtesy of the Library of Congress Featuring live accompaniment by Cliff Retallick This madcap tale of hypochondria and bootlegging is the work of the then up-and-coming director Gregory La Cava, who was – naturally – a former cartoonist. When his employer tanked, he started making features replete with comic strip style stories. This one stars Bebe Daniels as a wildly over-protected child – on the cusp of adulthood, followed by a flock of nurses supplied at the request of…
Find out more »Retroformat – Peck’s Bad Boy starring Jackie Cogan
Please join us this Friday evening at 7:30 p.m. for a special presentation of Peck's Bad Boy, starring the greatest child star of the silent era, Jackie Coogan, with live accompaniment by the one and only Cliff Retallick! See the attached poster for details. Later this year, we will be presenting Jackie Coogan and Lon Chaney in Oliver Twist, a special tribute to Buster Keaton by the great Paul Dooley himself, more D. W. Griffith shorts, and much more. Thank…
Find out more »March 2017
The Silent Treatment – The Salvation Hunters
Featuring live accompaniment by Cliff Retallick Josef von Sternberg’s first film – shot for less than $4,800 on location in San Pedro, Chinatown and the San Fernando Valley – was possibly Hollywood’s first “independent” production. The gritty realism of its locations, the lack of artifice in its story and the lower depths of its characters shocked audiences and the industry alike. The film remains thoroughly modern. Sternberg’s images thrive on composition and stasis. His ending resolves nothing and yet everything…
Find out more »October 2017
LON CHANEY: OUTSIDE THE LAW – OCTOBER 14th
As part of the RETROFORMAT SERIES at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood I will be performing live accompaniment for this silent gem! From the good folks at RETROFORMAT: Saturday, October 14, 2017, Lon Chaney returns to Retroformat in Tod Browning's Outside the Law (1920), with live accompaniment by Cliff Retallick. In his second collaboration with director Tod Browning, Chaney plays two contrasting roles: frighteningly malevolent gangster Black Mike Sylva, and kind-hearted student of philosophy Ah Wing. This film was important…
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