In a Room Filled With Dancing Shadows

We went to a wonderful event last weekend. In conjunction with the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Mel Novikoff award was being given to Kevin Brownlow. To celebrate this, Mr. Brownlow gave a couple of lectures and screenings of silent film. We went to the one on Sunday evening, and it was fascinating.

Kevin Brownlow is a British filmmaker and film historian, and is a downright God in the field of film preservation and restoration. He has worked on a number of documentaries about the films and stars of silent films, and has worked on restoring a number of silent masterpieces. In many cases, he and his efforts were all that saved classic films from oblivion. It's a horrendous race against time...many early films were shot on nitrate stock, which is highly volatile. Out there are countless bits of cinematic history, silently dissolving into goo. Many have been lost already.

He didn't talk much, but instead chose to show a wide variety of film clips. Some from as early as 1900, and on into the late twenties. Some were just little oddities, whereas some were excerpts from longer works. He was making a case for showing the beauty of early cinematography; something that has gotten a bum rap for many years.

It was a great event, and a good warm-up for the Silent Film Festival, which will be happening in San Francisco in July. We tend to make a yearly pilgrimage of that.