Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Silent film museum and movie theater in Niles district, Fremont, United States.
The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum is a film museum and working theater housed in the historic Edison Theater building in the Niles district of Fremont, California. It holds a large collection of early motion picture equipment, props, and films from the first decades of American cinema.
The museum occupies the Edison Theater, a Nickelodeon-era cinema about half a block from the former Niles Essanay Studios lot, where Broncho Billy Anderson and Charlie Chaplin made films in the 1910s. Staff member David Kiehn's research dated the San Francisco film A Trip Down Market Street to a few days before the 1906 earthquake. In 2011 the museum collaborated with Google on a Doodle short for Chaplin's 122nd birthday.
The museum screens silent films with live piano accompaniment, recreating the way audiences once watched movies in a theater. This practice keeps a nearly forgotten performance tradition alive in a working cinema space.
The museum is mainly open on weekends, so planning a Saturday or Sunday visit is the best approach. Allowing a few hours gives enough time to explore both the exhibits and catch a film screening.
The museum owns working original projectors from the silent era that are still used during screenings, not just displayed behind glass. Watching a film projected by one of these machines gives a sense of how fragile and mechanical early cinema really was.
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