Thomas Gladysz

Twice in the coming two weeks, the Cinéma du Parc in Montreal is screening a movie starring Louise Brooks as part of its 17-film salute to "The Artists" (through June 3).

The two films, both made in Germany and directed by G.W. Pabst at the end of the...

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has announced the line-up of films for their annual July event at the Castro Theater. And once again, they have put together a varied and interesting program.

The Festival opens with a special presentation of the air war epic, Wings, the first film to...

Louise Brooks made her first big splash in England in 1924, when she became the first person to dance the Charleston in London. That was at the city's famous Cafe de Paris, then only recently opened. Brooks, a precocious dancer and showgirl, was 17 years old at the...

These days, Frank Wedekind is best known as the author of Spring Awakening. His 1891 play about teenage sexuality was turned into a smash-hit by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. Their long running Broadway musical won eight Tony awards and has been performed all over the world.

Before Spring Awakening,...

Silent films have enjoyed a good deal of attention lately, thanks to the Academy Award-winning efforts of Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) and Martin Scorsese (Hugo). Each took the silent era as the subject of their recent work, and each of their films took home five Oscars. New fans to early...

Did you know that The Artist wasn't the only silent film to take home an Academy Award at this year's Oscars? The other was The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg. It took home the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

Beggars of Life is a film whose reputation is picking up steam.

Directed by William Wellman the year after he made Wings (the first film to win an Academy Award), Beggars of Life (1928) is a gripping drama about a girl (Louise Brooks) dressed as a boy who flees the...

When Kevin Brownlow's first restoration of Abel Gance's epic silent film, Napoleon (1927), played at the 6,000 seat Radio City Music Hall in 1981 it sold out. As a matter of fact, it sold out again and again and again as additional screenings were hastily added for what was then...

The Film Noir Festival currently underway at the Castro Theater in San Francisco concludes Sunday with a tribute to Dashiell Hammett. The author of The Maltese Falcon and other classic works of detective and crime fiction will be celebrated with the screening of six films based on his work. It...

What does a seminal gangster film like Scarface (1932) have in common with such screwball comedies as Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl Friday (1940)? And what do they have in common with an Oscar-nominated biopic like Sergeant York (1941), the Bogart and Bacall classic The...

It's now a holiday tradition.

For more than a few years, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco has screened a silent film on New Year's Eve. The tradition continues in 2011 when the landmark Episcopal church offers two screenings of the 1923 classic, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

With...

Charming and a little different, Caroline Preston's new novel, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt (Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers), is a hybrid work where the pictures do the talking.

One might describe it as something F. Scott Fitzgerald might have come up with for the Saturday Evening Post had he been a...

Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character returns to both the big screen and the Bay Area with a 35mm print of the actor and director's recently restored masterpiece, The Gold Rush. The 1925 comedy screens for seven days beginning December 23 at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

Set in...

Looking over some of the film books released in 2011, it's striking how many of the best of them -- or at least the most compelling and interesting of them -- are biographies, memoirs, or biographical career studies. If you have an interest in film or film history, there is...

This month, as they have every December for more than a few years, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont has put together a schedule of films which both celebrate the holidays and early cinema. This month's movies -- both silent and talkies -- include a holiday classic, a...

In the history of film, Kevin Brownlow is unique. The British documentary filmmaker, preservationist and author is the first and only film historian to have won an Academy Award.

Last year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Brownlow for his lifetime achievement alongside Jean-Luc...

There were naked men, and penises a plenty, men without their clothes -- plain and simple, and strapping young bucks ready to go. The occasion was not a gathering in the Castro, but a feminist-themed exhibit, "Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze," which is currently on display at...

Long before hard-hitting, news-making political talk shows cluttered television, and long before Occupy Wall Street challenged corporate greed, there was Lou Gordon. I remember watching his show on television as a teenager. Today, I wish he were still around.

For Detroiters who might not remember, Gordon (1917 -...

Despite the march of time, there still seems to be a good deal of interest in early Hollywood. Older films continue to be restored and screened and eventually released on DVD. Festivals devoted to classic cinema are popping up just about everywhere. And biographies of key figures in the history...

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we are lucky to have so many fine venues at which to take in classic cinema. There's the Castro Theater in San Francisco, of course, as well as the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Stanford theater in Palo Alto, the San Rafael in...