Josef von Sternberg’s:THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK (1928, 75 mins). Experience this gorgeous cinematic spectacle with live piano by one of today’s leading silent film composers, Donald Sosin joined by vocalist, Joanna Seaton.
Doors, 8pm- Film begins 8:30pm
Tickets by Sliding-Scale $5-$20.
“Miles of docks wait day and night for strange cargo – and stranger men”
An elegant and haunting love story about battered souls at the bottom of the barrel, looking for their own slice of happiness and understanding in dark, foreboding places… Through their hopes, dreams and rivalries, Sternberg channels human flaws and desires such as greed, lust, love and recklessness, as well as the enduring idealism and heroism of a humanity manifesting itself inside a dark, gritty world of flophouses, gin-mills, back-alleys and docks.
Roughneck ship stoker Bill Roberts (George Bancroft) gets into all sorts of trouble during a brief shore leave when he falls hard for Mae (Betty Compson), a wise and weary dance-hall girl, in Josef von Sternberg’s evocative portrait of the working-class waterfront. Fog-enshrouded cinematography by Harold Rosson (The Wizard of Oz), expressionist set design by Hans Dreier (Sunset Boulevard), and sensual performances by Bancroft and Compson make this one of the legendary director’s finest works, and one of the most exquisitely crafted films of the era.
“As beautiful as anything in cinema are the shots conveying the raw power of the stokers feeding the ship’s boilers; the fluid grace of the camera gliding through a tavern full of raucous drunks; the luminosity of von Sternberg’s fallen angels, Betty Compson and Olga Baclanova, electrifying this dank demimonde with their louche eroticism; the thrill of a subjective point-of-view shot suddenly stained by tears; the many swift and lyrical dissolves, all suggesting an ineffable melancholy for time’s fleeting and fragile nature.”
-Eddie Muller, The San Francisco Silent Film Festival
