ARThound looks at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s Sunday line-up

Johann Sigurjonson’s classic “The Outlaw and His Wife,” newly-restored by the Swedish Film Institute, screens Sunday at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Edith Erastoff plays the strong widow, Halla, who falls in love with drifter Berg-Eyvind, played by Victor Sjöström. Image: courtesy Swedish Film Institute

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival wraps this Sunday with a program worth devoting the entire day to.  The festival’s spectacular historical footage of foreign lands and old customs is always a huge draw.  This year, they have outdone themselves.  Victor Sjöström’s The Outlaw and His Wife (1918), newly restored by the Swedish Film Institute, and German director Friedrich Zelnik’s The Weavers (1927), based on actual weaver uprisings of 1892, are both screening on Sunday afternoon. And just before The Weavers, the festival is gifting the audience with a screening of Aleksander Rodchenko’s newly discovered short trailer for Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year (1928), along with the world premiere of the musical score performed by Beth Custer and Ken Winokur. Sunday afternoon also includes the world premiere of the restoration of Emory Johnson’s The Last Editon (1925), focused around the San Francisco Chronicle and featuring rich historical footage of San Francisco.  The day begins and ends with two classic comedies—in the morning, Kings of Silent Comedy is a delightful pastiche of comedy clips featuring the titans of the silent era and, at 9 p.m., the festival close with Safety Last! (1923) featuring Harold Lloyd, one of the masters of silent-era comedy.

Johann Sigurjonson’s classic “The Outlaw and His Wife,” newly-restored by the Swedish Film Institute, is one of cinema’s great romances. Edith Erastoff plays the widow, Halla, who falls in love with drifter Berg-Eyvind, played by Victor Sjöström, and gives everything up to run away with him. Image: courtesy Swedish Film Institute

The Outlaw and His Wife (Berg-Ejvind och Hans Hhustru) (Sweden, 1918, ~105 min)

Adapted from a play by Johann Sigurjonson, director Victor Sjöström’s Berg-Ejvind och Hans Hhustru is one of Swedish cinema’s first major films. The 1918 silent drama features dramatic footage of vast expanses of wild nature and is one of the finest examples of Sigurjonson’s life-long exploration of the theme of spirituality’s connection to nature and the elements.  It is also hailed as a work of remarkable psychological complexity, which had a strong influence on the work of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer.  It stars Victor Sjöström (Bergman’s Wild Strawberries) as Berg-Eyvind, a drifter who begins working on the farm of a generous and extremely self-sufficient widow named Halla (Edith Erastoff).  The couple falls in love only to have it revealed that Berg-Eyvind is a thief on the run. When a jealous rival alerts authorities to Eyvind’s true identity, the lovers escape together into the mountains of Iceland where they manage to eke-out a rather enviable existence until they are discovered by another fugitive and the story takes a very dark turn.  “The film is incredible love story that takes place in a beautiful vista and it’s based on an old Icelandic tale, with amazing cinematography and story,” said SFSFF director Anita Monga.  “It just had its premiere last week at Il Cinema Ritrovato, the Bologna Film Festival, and now it’s here for its second-ever screening after its restoration.”  The Matti Bye Ensemble from Sweden provides musical accompaniment. (Screens Sunday, July 20, at 1 p.m.)

Friedrich Zelnik’s “The Weavers” (1927) (Die Weber) dramatizes a Silesian cotton weavers uprising of 1844 and features intertitles designed and hand-drawn by George Grosz. Pictured: Theodor Loos (in white shirt), Wilhelm Dieterle (in beret), Herta von Walther (bending), Dagny Servaes (woman on the right). Photo: courtesy of F.W. Murnau Stiftung

The Weavers (Die Weber) (Germany, 1927, ~ 97 min)

Friedrich Zelnik’s The Weavers is based on the 1892 play by Gerhart Hauptman dramatizing a Silesian cotton weavers uprising of 1844.  The film was once known as the German Potemkin.  It is a high budget German drama focused on class struggle, a subject matter that resonated closely with epic works of Soviet cinema.  The film has a strong sense of drama and tragedy and shows the poor workers being exploited by the rich manufacturers and the devastation which ensues when the crowd degrades into a mob which destroys the textile magnate’s manor and proceeds to break the textile machines which threaten the traditional livelihood of the weavers. Some of the workers refuse to participate in the revolt but are harmed nonetheless.  Its creators downplayed its radical message, but The Weavers resonated with viewers in 1927 whose social reality reflected a chasm between rich and poor.  “This is a very rousing film,” said Anita Monga. The incident itself had a major impact throughout the world and it was a touchstone for Marx and Engels writing the Communist Manifesto

The excellent 2012 restoration, by F. W. Murnau Stiftung and Transit Film GmbH, showcases the work of the great graphic designer George Grosz, from his animal vignettes in the opening credit sequence and continuing with the animated graphic design of the intertitles which goes further than in Metropolis: there is a 3D mobile approach to certain key sentences which become moving lettrist vignettes.  The standoff scene between the revolutionary crowd and the police and military are epic.  Musical accompaniment is by the acclaimed Günter Buchwald, the director of the Silent Movie Music Company and conductor of the Freiburg Filmharmonic Orchestra, which he founded in 1992. Buchwald has incorporated a very Brechtian folksong into the accompaniment. (Screens Sunday, July 20, at 6 p.m.)

Aleksander Rodchenko’s newly discovered trailer for Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year with the world premiere of the musical score performed by Beth Custer and Ken Winokur

Ken Winokur of the Alloy Orchestra made an amazing discovery while the orchestra was traveling in the Ukraine—a two-minute trailer for Dziga Vertov’s THE ELEVENTH YEAR, created by famed Constructivist artist Aleksander Rodchenko.  As a special gift to San Francisco, Winokur and Beth Custer will perform the World Premiere of their score accompanying Vertov’s trailer on Sunday, July 21, just before the 6 p.m. screening of The Weavers. (For ARThound’s previous coverage of this, click here.)

In 2011, the last surviving copy of Emory Johnson’s “The Last Edition” (1925), whose story is set around the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, was found in the Netherlands. The world premiere of the new restoration is Sunday, July 21, 2013 at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Image: courtesy SFSFF.

The Last Edition (USA, 1925, 105 min)

One of the few surviving films created by Emory Johnson in the mid-1920’s, The Last Edition stars veteran actor Ralph Lewis as a pressman at the San Francisco Chronicle who has been denied a well-deserved promotion by his boss, publisher Jerome Hamilton (Louis Payne).  The film’s last known screening was on November 28, 1930, in Utrecht, the Netherlands, so Sunday’s premiere of its new restoration is a cause for celebration.  This gem is filmed on location in and around the Chronicle pressroom with major footage of Market Street, Civic Center and Mission Street and includes a thrilling car chase throughout the City as newsmen valiantly tackle the forces of corruption.  The film was unearthed in an archive in the Netherlands two years ago and was in poor condition due to having been shot on highly-degradable nitrate film.  Its painstaking two-year restoration was a collaboration between the archive, Eye Film Institute Netherlands and the film festival.  Leading silent film accompanist Stephen Horne will be on piano. (Screens Sunday, July 21, 3:30 p.m.)

Harold Lloyd’s romantic silent comedy “Safety Last!” (1923) closes the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and includes one of silent film’s most iconic images—Lloyd clutching the hands of a giant clock while dangling from ledge of a skyscraper above moving traffic. Lloyd’s performance cemented his status as one of the leading figures in early motion pictures. The film’s title is a play on the expression, “safety first,” which emphasizes safety as the primary means of avoiding accidents. Image: courtesy SFSFF.

Full festival schedule—Chronological View and Calendar View

Details: SFSFFruns Thursday, July 12, 2012 through Sunday, July 15, 2012 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro Street (between Market and 18^th Streets), San Francisco. Tickets: $14 to $20; $180 to $215 for passes. Click here to purchase all tickets and passes. Information: (415) 777-4908 or www.silentfilm.org

Parking Alert: If you plan on coming by car, street parking is the only parking available. Plan to arrive 45 minutes early to leave sufficient time for parking and walking to/from the theatre.

Up Wednesday, July 24, the legendary Josh Groban performs with the Santa Rosa Symphony at Green Music Center’s Weill Hall

Josh Groban has sold more than 25 million records…his music famously puts women in the mood. He performs at Green Music Center on Wednesday, July 24, 2013, with the Santa Rosa Symphony, his only performance in Northern CA this summer.

Dubbed the “love me tenor” by adoring female fans, the dreamy-voiced Josh Groban performs with the Santa Rosa Symphony, led by conductor Sean O’Loughlin, at Green Music Center’s Weill Hall on Wednesday, July 24, 2013.  If you haven’t been to Weill Hall yet this summer, their summer concerts start a little earlier—at 7:30 p.m.—so there’s lots of natural light hitting the hall’s golden-hued wood interior, making a gorgeous setting for a charming crooner like Groban.

Now 32, the Los Angeles native, is  well known for his inspirational hits “You Raise Me Up,” “To Where You Are,” and “I Believe” (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever) and all of his records have topped the charts.  Of late, he’s been venturing from the semi-poperatic sound that catapulted him to fame in the late 90’s and early 2000 ‘s into new territory.  His latest album, All That Echoes, is an impressive crossover into pop and rock that promptly went to No 1. On the Billboard 200 right after its February 2013 release.  He not only sings but had a hand in co-writing seven of the of the CD’s twelve songs.  He’s really all about interpretation, finding the perfect way to express himself musically.  He garnered a lot of new fans with his hilarious 2011 appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” where he sat down to the piano and set Kayne West’s insane tweets to music.  He’s also known for his incredibly down-to earth stage presence and for taking a break at his concerts to chat with audience members.

Essential Groban—

Discovery:  In 1998, at age 17, Groban’s voice teacher connected him with world-renowned Grammy-winning producer/arranger David Foster who liked him and began to use him as a rehearsal singer for many high-profile events.  His big break came when he was stand-in for Andrea Boccelli at the 1999 Grammy Awards and rehearsed Foster’s “The Prayer” with Céline Dion.  Those who heard him, like the program’s hostess, Rosie O’Donnell, immediately booked him and his career was off and running.

Recording success: His first four solo albums (Josh Groban (2201), Closer (2003), Awake (2006), Noël (2007), have been certified multi-platinum, and in 2007, he was charted as the number-one best selling artist in the United States, with over 21 million records in the nation.  He has sold over 25 million records worldwide.

Grammy:  Groban earned his first Grammy nomination in 2005 for his single “You Raise Me Up” in the Best Male Pop Vocal Performance category.

Collaborations:  Recent collaborations include such artists as Sarah McLachlan, Adele, Josh Groban, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Janelle Monáe, Hall and Oates, Gloria Estefan, the Indigo Girls, Diana Krall, Itzhak Perlman, Natalie Merchant, Chris Isaak, Blue Man Group, Pink Martini, Brandi Carlile, The Decemberists, Martina McBride, Josh Ritter, Gloria Gaynor and others.

Olympics/ Obama: On February 24, 2002, Groban performed “The Prayer” with Charlotte Church at the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.  On January 18, 2009, Groban performed as part of the Presidential Inauguration ceremonies, performing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” in duet with Heather Headley.

You Raise Me Up

Groban’s Hilarious Spoof CD compilation of Kanye West’s Tweets

Details:  Josh Groban performs with the Santa Rosa Symphony is 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, July 24, 2013, at Weill Hall.  Tickets:  There is no remaining indoor seating.  There is outdoor and lawn seating $35-$55.  Recommend advance ticket purchase.  Ticket purchases can be made online at www.gmc.edu, or over the phone with the Sonoma State University Box Office at 866.955.6040 or in person at the GMC Box Office, adjacent to the courtyard of Weill Hall , which is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and one hour before all performances.