Pictures in the Cinematic Cave

Thirty thousand years ago, Europeans painted horses on the walls of caves. That was their cinema. And it's still playing to crowds of curious tourists trying to understand the human experience. Here in town, you can enter a cave called Castro and lose yourself in the spell of black-and-white images flickering as if by firelight. There are some horses, chiefly ridden by scary Cossacks, and some horsepower in the form of elegant early automobiles. But mostly a line-up of films redolent, resonant, and relevant to our current crises. What better opiate than "A Day of Silents" from the Silent Film Festival people, Saturday from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. at the Castro Theatre.

Different from the Others (1919) is different from the other films in being agit-prop undiluted by aesthetic concerns. Yes, we have the magnificent ruin that is the face of young Conrad Veidt to gaze upon and marvel at, but the supporting cast and camerawork are uninspired except by earnest social-issue concerns. Magnus Hirshfeld, the great German sexologist whose library was the first Hitler burned, is present in a cameo to show he can't act. Anita Berber, the fiery cabaret genius of Weimar, is inexplicably excised from the surviving fragments of this historic document. Sit back and ponder 50 minutes of the downhill spiral of a concert violinist blackmailed for homosexuality, whose suicide is politically redemptive. (4:45 p.m., accompanied by Donald Sosin)

Sadie Thompson (1928) is a great character created by the very gay W. Somerset Maugham in a short story called "Rain," later adapted for the stage and screen. Again, we're treated to a fragment in this restoration, and alas, it's the final over-the-top switcheroo climax that's missing. Gloria Swanson co-produced this star vehicle enabling her to go from happy hooker to redeemed Madonna to prospective Australian domesticity. Director Raoul Walsh, before he lost an eye, co-stars jauntily, but Lionel Barrymore gives the great puritanical patriarchal performance. Filmed on Catalina but set in Pago Pago, a U.S. Navy outpost, this story blazingly skewers erotic hypocrisy. (9:15 p.m., Sosin)

"Strike" (1925) is the day's main event, being Sergei Eisenstein's first film, in which the high-art road for 20th-century filmmaking was established. Pre-Revolutionary Russia is dissected in this portrait of collective action by factory workers, and here's where the Cossacks come in, thrillingly, chillingly riding horses through buildings. This is agit-prop raised to a chaos of conflicting forces in which discourse explodes into kaleidoscopia. See footage of cattle being slaughtered intercut with state suppression of striking workers. Watch water hoses send peasants scurrying for shelter. Think about that pipeline on Native American land. Take a hip flask of vodka. (2:15 p.m., Alloy)

In a stunning juxtaposition, "The Last Command" (1928) is a requiem for Old Russia, given the bourgeois melodramatic treatment in an ironic Hollywood-studio framing. Emil Jannings, who has the heft of an opera bass and the sensitivity of a kitten, plays a Grand Duke who falls for a lady revolutionary and winds up as an extra on a film set. William Powell tries to look serious as a revolutionary who recognizes the Grand Duke's picture in a pile of headshots and casts him as the doomed general he was. Director Joseph von Sternberg, a Viennese Jew, revels in the contradictions of patriotism. (7 p.m., Alloy)

"So This Is Paris" (1926) is the requisite Lubitsch paean to happy-go-lucky husbands and wives whose marriages thrive on lies, wheedling, champagne, and fancy dress. The cast is fantastic, performing this souffle of romantic comedy with a lightness of touch indicating hidden core strength. In Eisensteinian mode, an extended montage features black jazz musicians and white-stockinged legs kicking up a delirious Charleston in a vast nightclub. (12:15 p.m., Sosin) "Chaplin at Essanay" (1915) features the master English clown in shorts. (10 a.m., Sosin) Far from being silent, all films are live-accompanied, and you can hear people laugh, cry, and eat popcorn.