Pittsburgh hosting its first silent film festival
Chad Hunter jokingly calls his car the “silent film-mobile,” and the first giveaway is its license plate.
It reads “SLNTFLM.”
The second giveaway is the poster that has been hanging in one of the car’s windows in recent weeks for the Pittsburgh Silent Film Festival, the first time the region has had a festival devoted to the movies of a century ago, when the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd ruled movie screens, and directors like D.W. Griffith were creating the basics of film grammar. The festival kicks off Sunday and continues through Sunday, Oct. 1.
Long in the works — Hunter had hoped to have a Silent Film Festival in Pittsburgh in 2020, but his plans were thwarted by COVID-19 — the festival will, in fact, be screening movies by Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, as three of their most noteworthy films celebrate their 100th anniversary this year. But there will also be showings of more obscure titles, a few of which have likely escaped the attention of even the most dogged movie buffs.
Hunter, a Mt. Lebanon resident, said he wanted to “find that balance” with the festival, appealing to both connoisseurs and the uninitiated.
“I kept that mind. I did not want to choose films that no one has ever heard of,” he said.
Seven feature films will be shown during the festival, along with two nights of short films, at eight different venues in the Pittsburgh region. It starts Sunday at Keystone Oaks High School in Dormont at 2 p.m. when the Keaton classic “Our Hospitality” will be screened with a live organ accompaniment. Then, at 6 p.m., Alfred Hitchcock’s most revered silent film, “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog,” is set to be shown at the Parkway Theater in McKees Rocks.
The festival starts again on Tuesday with a 100th anniversary presentation of the classic Lloyd comedy “Safety Last” at the Mt. Lebanon Public Library at 7 p.m. On Wednesday, avant-garde short films made by artists like Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp will be shown at Eberle Studios in Homestead at 8 p.m. The films will be accompanied by a score created by Pittsburgh musician David Bernabo.
The Pittsburgh Composers Quartet will accompany the landmark German film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” at the Lindsay Theater in Sewickley on Thursday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 p.m. On Friday, Sept. 29, at 7 p.m., the Harris Theater in downtown Pittsburgh will show a restored print of “The Johnstown Flood,” the 1926 drama depicting the catastrophe that hit Johnstown almost 40 years before. “Wings,” the first movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, will be at the Row House Cinema in Lawrenceville at 7:45 p.m., on Saturday, Sept. 30.
The festival will wrap up on Sunday, Oct. 1, with a showing of early short films based on Shakespeare plays at 2 p.m. at the Frick Pittsburgh, and a screening of Chaplin’s “A Woman of Paris,” exactly 100 years to the day after its premiere in New York City, will be screened at the Harris Theater at 7 p.m. It will be shown in 35mm, with Chaplin’s own score accompanying it.
According to Hunter, the festival was not only a way to celebrate silent film, but also support the regional venues that are trying to lure audiences back following the pandemic, as well as the musicians who were out of work for months on end. In choosing the titles, Hunter worked with the venues to decide which movies would be best at each location. The 100th anniversaries of “A Woman of Paris,” “Safety Last” and “Our Hospitality” also made them natural choices.
“There are just some things that happened organically with the program,” Hunter said.
Hunter’s interest in silent films stretches back to the 1990s, when he was an English major and film minor at the University of Michigan. Working in one of the specialty video stores near the Ann Arbor, Mich., campus, Hunter quickly exhausted the store’s supply of silent movies, and he would also watch silent films that were occasionally shown at an Ann Arbor moviehouse that screened classic films along with contemporary selections. He has worked in film preservation, managed the Hollywood Theater in Dormont and was the senior director of the Rangos Giant Cinema at the Carnegie Science Center. He is also the co-founder of National Silent Movie Day, which is marked every Sept. 29, and is recognized by the movie channel TCM with showings of silent movies throughout the day, and leads the Pittsburgh Silent Film Society.
Even though the heyday of silent films was 100 years ago, they are readily available to be seen from a number of sources, whether it’s TCM, YouTube, DVDs, or streaming services. Hunter maintains, though, that silent films are best appreciated in a theater.
“That’s the way they were meant to be seen,” he said. “They were pieces of art meant to be shown theatrically on a big screen.”
Additional information on the Pittsburgh Silent Film Festival is available at pittsburghsilentfilmsociety.org.