May 8, 2026, San Francisco:

I had the very good fortune to attend the most amazing screening yesterday at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, with Duo YUMENO providing musical accompaniment for the silent films.

The screening was kicked off by Bucknell University Professor Eric Faden, a specialist in early cinema and recipient of the 2025 Sumie Jones Prize for Project Leadership in Japan-centered Humanities.  He talked about the Japanese Paper Film Project, that restores and digitizes rare, fragile Japanese films printed on paper (“kami eiga”) rather than celluloid.

Using custom-built scanning technology (Kioen), custom software, and machine learning, he and his team are working to preserve and restore the fewer than 200 or so surviving paper film works from the early days of 20th Century Japanese cinema, including rare early anime cartoons, nature films, wartime propaganda, and classic black-and-white films.  

You really almost had to be there to see how this was even possible to work as an actual functioning art form given the fragile nature of paper. But it did, and the results were charming, funny, moving, and an example of human ingenuity and creativity.

The program was a real crowd-pleaser for the sold-out audience attending the festival at the legendary and recently reopened Castro Theatre, following a two-year, $41 million restoration.  

I am always proud of what the Festival has achieved as the largest such festival in the United States focusing on the silent film age of cinema, having been the organization’s first legal counsel in the early 1990s and a long-time member of its Advisory Board.