AS IF TO give the Castro Theatre a quiet break between the highly opinionated audiences of each year's San Francisco International Gay and Lesbian and Jewish Film Festivals, yonder comes the lovely event that dare not speak, period. In its eighth year, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival offers a typically diverse array of works from around the globe. The programmers have even dug up a living silent-era star: Virginia Davis McGhee, who played the live-action title figure in Walt Disney's pre-Mickey series of semi-animated "Alice" shorts. She'll be interviewed onstage during the "Alice in Disneyland" program by film historians Leonard Maltin and Russell Merritt. Also hailing from the land of the living is Milford Thomas's very recent and very, very good Claire, an hour-long whimsy based on a Japanese fairy tale and shot with an antique hand-cranked camera. Aside from this, though, it's the art that's antique (in the valuable, rather than the decrepit, sense) in the festival's other, mostly octogenarian-or-older features. They include established Hollywood classics (King Vidor's 1928 quiet-desperation drama The Crowd, Buster Keaton's 1925 Go West), a lesser-known Lon Chaney vehicle (1920's The Penalty, in which he plays a legless crime lord), and an early Cecil B. DeMille spectacle (the 1915 Carmen, with opera legend Geraldine Farrar miming Bizet's heroine). A double bill of Mexican titles from the teens is made up of a two-reeler starring comedy duo Vicente Enhart and Antonio Alegria, plus Virgin of Guadalupe inspirational drama Tepeyac. Likely to provide the weekend's biggest discovery is a program of works by largely forgotten French avant-gardist Germaine Dulac, whose 1927 The Seashell and the Clergyman is perhaps the first instance of surrealist cinema. Preceding the climactic Go West screening is a panel discussion about the great silent comedians, with local comic luminaries Geoff Hoyle and Larry Pisoni. All screenings feature live musical accompaniment, ranging from the Castro's own Mighty Wurlitzer to an 11-piece mini-orchestra and the Latin folk sounds of trio Cascada de Flores. See Rep Clock for schedule. (Dennis Harvey)