A Balboa Birthday Bash!

Back in the 1920s, movies were the popular form of entertainment. Radio was only just beginning, and television didn't really exist. Just about everybody went to the movies on a regular, almost weekly basis. To meet demand, movie theaters were springing up everywhere.

Everywhere included San Francisco (and just about every big and small town across America), where first run movie palaces lined the major thoroughfares and smaller neighborhood houses of varying size dotted the city's outlying districts. Drive down Market Street, Mission Street or Geary Blvd. in San Francisco and you'll see the facades of a number of The City's once grand though now shuttered movie theaters.

Today, the Balboa is one of the last neighborhood theaters still operating in San Francisco. To celebrate its opening in February of 1926, the Richmond District theater is marking the occasion with the screening of a classic silent film along and other festive goings-on.

The Balboa's 87th birthday celebration -- presented in association with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival -- takes place on Sunday, March 3. The evening's entertainment kicks-off at 7:00 pm. Doors open at 6:45 pm. (A special family matinee will also take place earlier in the day at 4:00 pm.)

But first a little history. The Balboa Theater (located at 3630 Balboa Street near 38th Avenue) originally opened as the New Balboa Theater in order to distinguish it from the already open Balboa Theater then on Ocean Avenue. The New Balboa, part of a local chain owned by Samuel Levin, was designed by James and Merritt Reid, renowned architects who also designed the Cliff House, Fairmount Hotel, Spreckels Temple of Music in Golden Gate Park and numerous other theaters including the Alexandria theater on Geary. In the 1920's, a handful of films featuring Louise Brooks' were shown at the New Balboa. Those screenings include Love Em and Leave Em on June 12, 1927, Evening Clothes on July 11-12, 1927, Just Another Blonde on July 20-21, 1927, A Girl in Every Port on July 29, 1928 as part of a double-bill with When the Wife’s Away, and Canary Murder Case on September 18-19, 1929.

In 2006, as part of the Louise Brooks centenary, The Show-Off (1926) was screened with introductions by Peter Cowie and Thomas Gladysz. Also shown that night was a 16mm trailer for Overland Stage Raiders (1938).

On Sunday, the Balboa will screen Peter Pan (1924), Herbert Brenon's classic film adaption of the story of a boy who never grew up. Released by Paramount Pictures, this silent-era telling of Peter Pan was the first film adaptation of the famous J. M. Barrie play. The film has an "all-star" cast which includes Betty Bronson as Peter Pan, Ernest Torrence as Captain Hook, Mary Brian as Wendy, Esther Ralston as Mrs. Darling, Philippe De Lacy as Michael Darling and Virginia Browne Faire as Tinker Bell. Anna May Wong, a groundbreaking Chinese-American actress, plays an Indian princess named Tiger Lily. Brenon, as is well known, went on to direct Mary Brian and Louise Brooks the following year in The Street of Forgotten Men. That film, Brooks' first, include a visual nod to Peter Pan in a scene where Brian sits down at the piano to play a song and sheet music on the instrument can clearly be seen to be Peter Pan.

At the time of its release, the film was celebrated for its innovative special effects -- notably the illuminated fairy Tinker Bell and showing Peter Pan fly. The legendary James Wong Howe served as cinematographer. In 2000, the film was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The Balboa will screen a 35mm print of the film from the George Eastman House (former "home" to Louise Brooks), where the film was restored in the 1990s. Peter Pan will be accompanied by pianist Frederick Hodges, who will perform an original score, and preceded by a program of short subjects.

Also on the bill for this special birthday occasion will be a live vaudeville show featuring magician James Hamilton and songstress Linda Kosut. Audience members are encouraged to dress in their best period clothing had they attended a night at the movies in 1926. Vintage cars will be parked out front.

More info: The Balboa Theater is located at 3630 Balboa Street in San Francisco. Advance tickets are on sale at the Balboa and online at www.CinemaSF.com/balboa. Admission is $10.

Not Louise Brooks

For the millionth time, this ain't Louise Brooks, just a very pretty look-alike. I can't believe how often copies of this picture are posted on eBay as being "Louise Brooks." For the one millionth and one time, this is not Louise Brooks.

Louise Brooks - A Love Suicide - 1926

This YouTube video features footage from Louise Brooks' fourth film, It's the Old Army Game (1926). Many of these scenes were shot in Florida.

Vote: should Louise Brooks have won an Oscar?

With all the hoopla over the Academy Awards, it's time to ask, for which film should Louise Brooks have won an Oscar? Vote now!

Anaïs Nin on Lou Salome

The writer Lou Salome (1861-1937) was an inspiration to a handful of important early 20th century writers and thinkers, including Nietzsche, Freud, and Rilke. She was also their muse, and in some cases their lover. Salome also knew and inspired Frank Wedekind, the author of the Lulu plays. It is believed in some quarters that Wedekind based the character of Lulu (played by Louise Brooks in G.W. Pabst's 1929 film, Pandora's Box) at least in part on his relationship with Salome. Wedekind, it is also said, even based the name of Lulu on Salome's name.

Yesterday, February 21st, marked the birthday of the writer Anais Nin (1903-1977). Here is a YouTube video in which Nin speaks about Salome. And here is a video tribute to Lou Salome which I also came across on YouTube. Both are worth watching. For more on Lou Salome and other inspiring women (including photographer Lee Miller), check out Francine Prose's The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired.

Bay Area Becoming Mecca for Silent Film

The San Francisco Bay Area is becoming a Mecca for silent film. 

In its near 20 year history, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has grown to become the leading and largest such event in the Western Hemisphere. Last year, it sponsored an epic, even historic screening of Napoleon that made news around the United States. And in June, it is putting on a three day event at which all nine of Alfred Hitchcock's silent films will be shown. 

Over in the east bay, the Niles Essanany Silent Film Museum has been showing silent movies every weekend for nearly 10 years. They also put on an annual Charlie Chaplin Days event and Broncho Billy Film Festival.

Silent films are also occasionally shown in the north bay, at the Rafael Film Center, in the south bay at the Stanford Theater, and in Berkeley at the Pacific Film Archive. And don't forget the Berkeley Underground Film Society, an all ages club for collectors, researchers, and film enthusiasts whose weekly programs of rarely projected, or otherwise obscure 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm prints includes a fair number of early and silent cinema.

Another east bay contribution to the local scene is The Second International Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema, which this year will be held from February 21-23 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Following the successful first Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema in 2011 (which had the theme "Cinema Across Media: The 1920s"), this year's conference similarly explores an aspect of film and film culture in the silent era. 

Each of the conferences is designed to advance research and promote public interest in silent cinema by combining a three-day academic conference (free and open to the public) with an evening series of screenings at the Pacific Film Archive related to the topic under discussion.

This year the conference focuses on the theme "On Location." Four plenary speakers, thirty invited presenters, and six introduced screenings will explore the ways in which films in the silent era created new possibilities for experiencing place in a cinematic way. 

This year's plenary speakers are Jennifer Bean (University of Washington), Donald Crafton (Notre Dame), Aaron Gerow (Yale), and Scott Simmon (University of California, Davis). Among the other speaks are Janet Bergstrom (UCLA), Mary Ann Doane (University of California-Berkeley), Anton Kaes (University of California-Berkeley), and Shelley Stamp (University of California, Santa Cruz). Each is the author of a notable book in the field of film studies. Doane, in particular, is the author of a 1991 book likely familiar to readers of this blog, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (Routledge).

More info: Click here to see the conference schedule. Click here to see a list of speakers. Or click here to see a list of films to be shown as part of the conference.

Unfortunately, the one Louise Brooks film made on location in Berkeley, Rolled Stockings (1927), is lost. Parts of this college comedy romance were filmed on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Other scenes from the film, which featured rowing competition, were shot on the San Francisco Bay.

Louise Brooks :: Without Bangs

Louise Brooks :: Without Bangs

Berlinale documentaries reflect the power of film

A new documentary, apparently, includes Louise Brooks. In Berlin, a showcase of documentary films at this year's Berlinale illustrates the medium's potential to reclaim the past and envision the future. One of those documentaries is Weimar Touch, which looks at the work of G.W. Pabst and others and the influence they had on film making around the world. That's according to the Deutsche Welle website, which goes on to state:

There are very few cities in the world so inextricably tied to the history, seduction and cathartic power of filmmaking than Berlin.

Late 19th-century film pioneers Max and Emil Skladanowsky invented the Bioscop movie projector here in 1895. Some of the most iconic movie stars of all time, Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Asta Nielsen, once padded around the studios in Weissensee, Woltorsdorf and Babelsberg.

Here is where Walter Ruttmann directed "Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis" - based on Dziga Vertov's theory of "Kino-Pravda" ("film truth") that reality can best be represented through cinematic "artificialities." In semi-documentary style, the silent film with a musical score portrays the life of a city.

Ruttmann was not alone in creating masterpieces either. The likes of Fritz Lang, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and Georg Wilhelm Pabst made their mark in the Golden Age of German cinema during the 1920s as well. And great thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer grappled with the meaning of these new mechanical, magical, moving images.

And then history took a catastrophic turn - with a Nazi dictatorship that took German cinema into its grip as well.

G.W. Pabst (second from the right) and others associated with Pandora's Box (1929). This picture was taken in 1928, not long after Brooks arrival in Berlin. At first, Pabst envisioned Lulu without bangs or a bob.

Philo Vance Murder Case Collection

First the good news. The Warner Bros. Archive Collection has released the Philo Vance Murder Case Collection, a 2-disc, 6-film collection featuring the famous suave dilettante detective. Philo Vance was the creation of writer S.S. van Dine, who authored a series of bestselling novels which were turned into popular films. The set includes The Bishop Murder Case (1930), The Kennel Murder Case (1933), The Dragon Murder Case (1934), The Casino Murder Case (1935), The Garden Murder Case (1936), and Calling Philo Vance (1940).

The bad news is that the set does NOT include the first film in the series, The Canary Murder Case (1929), which features William Powell as Philo Vance and Louise Brooks as the Canary. Not only did The Canary Murder Case start it all, cinematically speaking, it is also one of the better films in the series.

Why Warner Bros. Archive chose not to include The Canary Murder Case isn't known. That film was released by Paramount Pictures, as was The Greene Murder Case (1929), the second film in the series. The films included in the Philo Vance Murder Collection were released by Warner Bros., M.G.M, and First National. So, maybe it is a matter of rights. Other Philo Vance films are also absent from the collection. Most notable among them is the zany Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939), starring Grace Allen and Warren William.

Despite the set's incompleteness, I think it is worth checking out, especially if you enjoy period detective films like The Thin Man (which also starred William Powell) or original Perry Mason film series. Wikipedia has an informative page on the various Philo Vance books and films. Here is a brief clip from The Canary Murder Case.