Center for the Art of Translation at the SF Silent Film Festival
Castro Theatre | 429 Castro Street | San Francisco, CA
We’re thrilled to be sponsoring screenings of two classic French silent films at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Edward Gauvin (translator of The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome and others) masterfully translated the intertitles for René Clair’s The Italian Straw Hat (Un chapeau du paille italien) and Les Deux Timides.
The Italian Straw Hat is the story of a man on the way to his wedding when his horse eats the hat of a married woman who is having a secret tryst with a soldier, and the hapless groom must replace the chapeau or face the wrath of the lady’s lover. Pauline Kael called it “one of the funniest films ever made, and one of the most elegant as well.”
Live musical accompaniment by the Guenter Buchwald Ensemble
Saturday, June 4, 2016
7:30 pm
Castro Theatre
Ticket price: $22 general, $20 member
Les Deux Timides, René Clair’s last feature-length silent, features a bumbling young lawyer (a wonderful Keatonesque performance by Pierre Batcheff) defending a client who is accused of beating his wife. As he describes his version of what happened, it plays out on the screen in all its ridiculous, convoluted glory, with escalating hilarity. The lawyer and his brutish client later become rivals for the hand of a shy young lady.
Live musical accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra
Sunday, June 5, 2016
6:30 pm
Castro Theatre
Ticket price: $16 general, $14 member
Edward Gauvin has received prizes, fellowships, and residencies from PEN America, the NEA, the Fulbright program, Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, and the French Embassy. His work has won the John Dryden Translation prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and World Literature Today. The translator of eight works of prose fiction and over 300 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders. He is currently a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellow for his work on Pierre Bettencourt, whom he has written about at Weird Fiction Review.