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“In my young days gentlemen did not smoke while conversing with ladies and they removed their hats!”

The Blot (1921) screens Sunday, Nov. 12th at 7:30pm at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. The silent film will be accompanied by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra. Also shown will be the 6-minute short Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber by Svetlana Cvetko. Ticket information can be found Here

The pioneering Lois Weber was one of the first women to direct films, and Sliff honors the filmmaker by screening a recent restoration of her silent “The Blot,” which addresses the all-too-relevant issue of income inequality. The local Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra has created an original score for the film and will perform it live. In the film, Professor Griggs teaches the unmotivated sons of the rich and powerful, but he fails to make a living wage.

'Amazing Tales from the Archives': Pioneering female documentarian Aloha Wanderwell Baker remembered at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival – along with the largely forgotten sound-on-cylinder technology and the Jean Desmet Collection. 'Amazing Tales from the Archives': San Francisco Silent Film Festival & the 'sound-on-cylinder' system Fans of the earliest sound films would have enjoyed the first presentation at the 2017 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, held June 1–4: “Amazing Tales from the Archives,” during which Library of Congress' Nitrate Film Vault Manager George Willeman used a wealth of enjoyable film clips to examine the Thomas Edison Kinetophone process. In the years 1913–1914, long before The Jazz Singer and Warner Bros.' sound-on-disc technology, the sound-on-cylinder system invaded the nascent film industry with a collection of “talkies.” The sound was scratchy and muffled, but “recognizable.” Notably, this system focused on dialogue, rather than music or sound effects. As with the making of other recordings at the time, the...

Back before it became apparent that movies could be big business and the industry was thusly taken over by men, there were a handful of women with quite a lot of power. Working primarily in the 1910s, Lois Weber is one director considered an equal in powerful and influence to D.W. Griffith, one of the other major directors of early American cinema. Sadly, Weber’s work seems to have been neglected by the canon in a way that Griffith’s hasn’t, and most of her filmography is lost to time. The four features and two shorts that are broadly available reveal a director of great technical skill and strong belief of film as a tool of social awareness.

Suspense (1913)

This thriller about a wife at risk from a vagabond is quite effective in telling the story in just ten minutes. More impressive is the technical display with the use...