The Program Director of this year’s Festival has long fulminated: “If it’s the last thing I do in Mendocino, I’m going to show silent films, on film, with live musical accompaniment in Mendocino.” On the latter count, if not also the former, I have finally succeeded. Although we are also screening M, a contemporary film which was conceived without a soundtrack and, therefore, in its way, a silent film (even though it is quintessentially musical in its silence), the silent films produced in the first three and a half decades of cinema were rarely silent. From the neighborhood nickelodeons with their pianists (and, sometimes, violinists) to the picture palaces with their Wurlitzer organs and even thirty-piece pit orchestras, silent films were meant to be accompanied by music. Silent films with live music were a cinematic Esperanto, a true universal language, lost with the coming of sound-on-film and dialogue.