Well, it was this afternoon that was so great. Yesterday we just stayed home and cleaned house. Dull, but necessary. This afternoon we picked Paul up from church (he was there late doing a baptism) and took him to the hospital to visit a family who had a tragedy--a car accident that killed the grandmother and put the boy in a coma. (He's awake now, though!) Paul is playing real parish priest this month, while the "real" priest is gone to Greece for the month.
Anyway, after all the church stuff got taken care of, we went to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (www.silentfilm.org). I would have liked to have seen more than one of these great films, but we only saw one: The Scarlet Letter. I have to say that while we usually think of silent movies as a thing of the past, how movies got started but they're irrelevant now, and that movies have gotten so much better. But this one was amazing. Lillian Gish rocks! She was truly amazing with her facial expressions. She communicated so much without words. She could say paragraphs just by opening her eyes wide.
There was a talk beforehand that we didn't know was going to happen....and in some ways was rather long-winded and boring. But we found out some things that were interesting and we wouldn't have known otherwise. Like, the guy who played Rev. Dimmesdale was Swedish. He didn't speak a word of English! So, what you see on the screen is Lillian Gish speaking English to him, and him answering in Swedish. And, as they lecturer said, what does it matter, in silent film? He was also very good--his eyes would get really wide, and his body would shake all over when he was afraid.
Another thing we learned at the talk was how hard they worked to get this one restored. They thought the original was lost for a long time, and that the only thing left was a poor quality, grainy, dark copy. But at last they found it and painstakingly restored it. What a great thing.
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