📅 Sunday, Nov. 22
⏲️ 1 p.m.-8:30 p.m.
📍 Bainbridge Island Museum of Art
You can hem and haw over your preferred venue for quality moviegoing, but if you go to any city in the world, the best movie programming will likely be any museum within arm’s reach. In this event’s case, it’s one ferry ride away.
Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s stellar curatorial committee has brought back the popular Frank Buxton Silent Film Festival. Named after the performer, producer, director and teacher who raised the island’s cultural caché over several decades, this year’s lineup is an educational deep dive into how music and cinema comingle to create magic.
You can come and go as you please between the three sections, but I’d personally recommend the whole kit and kaboodle. Because every single film will be scored live!
1 p.m.: The day starts with a trilogy of comedy shorts (“Pass the Gravy,” Laurel & Hardy’s “Two Tars,” and Buster Keaton’s “The Scarecrow”), as Dr. Andrew Shields demonstrates the role of live accompaniment and how a musician’s subjective take can make or break a film’s flow, humor and thematic continuity.
4 p.m.: We’re switching from comedy to action and adventure with Allan Dwan’s “East Side, West Side”(1927), a spectacular urban drama about privilege, wealth, boxing and even a certain famed sinking ship.
7 p.m.: The day concludes by returning to Buster Keaton — as much a revolutionary director as his famed stunt-based acting — with a double bill: the uproarious slapstick chaos of 1929’s “A Pair of Tights” and 1924’s sea-set “The Navigator,” a film that invented new ways to film underwater… all for the sake of a joke!
