Silent Footsteps — From San Francisco to Hollywood
Sunday, June 6, 12:00 noon Pacific Time
Author John Bengtson is an archeologist of early cinema, digging deep into the backgrounds of films by the great silent comedians—Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd—to uncover historical details captured on celluloid there. In his fascinating books on film locations—Silent Traces, Silent Echoes, and Silent Visions, Bengtson makes visual and informative comparisons between the movies and the locations as they exist today in a process the New York Times calls a “Proustian collage of time and memory, biography and history, urban growth and artistic expression.” A tenacious sleuth, Bengtson documents new discoveries on his Silent Locations blog and in his numerous lectures for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, TCM, UCLA Film and Television Archive and others.
On June 6, Bengtson will include a mix of locales from San Francisco to Hollywood, exploring the visual history hidden in classic silent film, including new, unreported discoveries from a colossus of the era—D.W. Griffith’s epic masterpiece Intolerance!
