SILENCE GETS SOUND

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A musician, compiler and composer explains how he scored a silent film for today’s audience.

by Rodney Sauer

The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra was commissioned to create two new scores for the 2017 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, one of which is the newly restored 1926 film Silence. It shows at the Castro Theatre on Sunday, June 4 at 12:00 Noon.

SILENCE - Glass slide (2400 dpi) [credit Robert Byrne].jpg

Glass Slide courtesy of Rob Byrne

One print of Silence is known to survive at the Cinémathèque Française. The Cinémathèque, Rob Byrne, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival collaborated to have the surviving print scanned, digitally repaired and cleaned, translated from French back into the original English, then printed to film for exhibition and preservation.

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Try This Path: John Sayles on Arhoolie Records and THIS AIN’T NO MOUSE MUSIC

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by John Sayles

The use of prerecorded music in movies is a form of alchemy. Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme come to mind as two of the most accomplished alchemists still working, the success of their efforts not in creating a name-that-tune familiarity with the track, but in finding the chanson juste that lifts a moment or a sequence in spirit and either comments on or cements the meaning of the on-screen action.

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THIS AIN’T NO MOUSE MUSIC: You Never Know — Greil Marcus on Chris Strachwitz

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by Greil Marcus

THIS AIN’T NO MOUSE MUSIC opens at theaters in New York, Los Angeles and around the country during September and October.

Everyone who has encountered Chris Strachwitz knows his generosity of spirit, his quiet eagerness to share sounds he’s long treasured or just discovered, and his easy sense of humor, which is mostly present in a grin. Continue reading →

It’s About Beauty, Man: My Film-Fueled Friendship with Jazz Legend Charlie Haden

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by Eddie Muller

Movies brought Charlie Haden and me together. Specifically, it was a Sunday night double-bill at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, May 13, 2001—a pairing of two John Alton-photographed noirs, The Crooked Way  (1949)  and Talk About a Stranger  (1952) , part of the original Festival of Film Noir I’d created for the American Cinematheque.  Continue reading →