Hell on Frisco Bay (2005-2008 archive)

SFIFF: the Sundance Connection

2008-04-25T23:58:00.000-07:00

The 51st SF International Film Festival began last night, with a screening of Catherine Breillat's the Last Mistress at the Castro Theatre. Earlier tonight the festival expanded to its other venues, the PFA and the Kabuki, where it will stay for the next two weeks, drawing hardcore cinephiles and curious culture-watchers alike (the Clay and a few other venues broaden the festival's reach in the days to come.) The festival, more than any other film event of the Frisco Bay calendar year, feels like a party that the anyone in the city can join in, as long as they're willing to pay a $12.50 single-ticket admission price.

That price is a tad higher than most moviegoing around here will cost you, and with the elimination of matinee pricing this year there's all the more incentive for particularly active attendees to become a film society member (or, like me, a PFA member) to get a couple bucks lopped off each ticket price. However, all but a few specially-priced gala events will cost a non-member less than a ticket to, say, last year's Silent Film Festival, or an advance-sales ticket to a Sundance screening should you be in Utah when that festival rolls around. And, in fact, regular tickets cost less than certain screenings of non-festival fare at the Kabuki do, now that the theatre's been bought and made-over by the new Sundance Cinemas venture, with its amenities fees charged for assigning seats. While the SFIFF makes its home at the Kabuki, seats will not be assigned in advance and amenities fees will not be charged on top of the festival ticket price.

I've attended the Sundance Film Festival twice now; once as a member of the ticket-buying public, and once with a press pass that saved me a few hundred dollars in ticket costs. I have a press pass for the SFIFF too, but as usual I've purchased tickets to a certain few shows that I Absolutely Do Not Want To Miss (like Aditya Assarat's Wonderful Town), knowing that there is often greater demand for press tickets than there is supply. Though I honestly can only remember being shut out of a film once, for the Iranian film Iron Island, in the past five years that I've had a pass for the SFIFF, I don't like to take chances. Sundance is run differently; there's less incentive for press to buy advance tickets because their pass can be used to acquire a comp. ticket in any wait-list line.

Sundance is different from the SFIFF in many, many other ways, of course. For example, the programming at Sundance is far more AmerIndie-centric, leaving foreign films on the sidelines. Here's a good quote on the matter I recently found via the cinetrix, from former SFIFF director Peter Scarlet:

If you’re the maker of a foreign film and you accept an invitation to go to Sundance, it’s a little like getting a last-minute reservation at a trendy restaurant. You get a nice dish for you and your companion, you wear something sexy, but it turns out you’re seated at the tiny table right next to the restroom. I won’t even get into the aromas and whatnot.

It's a harsh statement, but there's certainly truth in it, as the lion's share of the attention at the Utah fest gets lavished upon homegrown productions. By contrast, the SFIFF and a good portion of its audience see foreign films, especially those directed by the world's master filmmakers, as a central piece of the festival mission. If not the core.

On my own trips to Sundance, I've attempted to swim against the tide and cover its foreign films with at least as much care and enthusiasm as the American offerings. One film I never quite got around to in my Sundance reports was the Jordanian documentary Recycle, which is also set to play at the SFIFF; an image from the film is featured on the cover of the festival's program guide. Recycle follows the routines of Abu Ammar, a resident of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's hometown of Zarqa. He drives his young son around the city, an industrial center in Jordan, picking up unused cardboard that he knows he can sell at a recycling center. It's a reminder that while recycling may still be seen as optional or even a luxury in opulent communities, the act becomes a necessity when poverty strikes. But Recycle's subject is not just recycling cardboard; he also saves notes to use in a book on religion he plans to write. He keeps sacks full of these paper scraps, and they're not the only evidence director Mahmoud al Massad presents that seems intended to make us wonder if Abu Ammar has been radicalized into a potentially dangerous fundamentalist along the lines of Zarqawi. Sometimes Al Massad's frustrating metaphor of a "recycled terrorist" seems at times heavy-handed and at other times vague, but the film is filled with enough sarcastic characters and absurd images, like a camel stand on the edge of town, or a cardboard eye becoming swallowed up by churning liquid at the recycling center, to make it much more than just a metaphor.

The other foreign films I saw at Sundance that also are set to play the SFIFF were all animated shorts that did not require subtitles: Madame Tutli-Putli from Canada and the Pearce Sisters and Yours Truly from the UK, which along with American Carson Mell's Chonto played a terrific Sundance shorts program that I reviewed here. As it features these four entires plus films by Kelly Sears, Stefan Mueller, Max Hattler and Aardman's Richard Goleszowski, I feel confident recommending the SFIFF shorts program the Human Kingdom. It plays tomorrow evening and Wednesday April 30th. I also enjoyed the Sundance screenings of a few short films playing on two other SFIFF shorts programs, for example the deservedly Oscar-nominated short documentary La Corona which plays the SFIFF as part of a program called the Feminine Mystique on April 28 and 29. Kelly Sears' the Drift and Leighton Pierce's Number One both play on Alternate Geographies; I intend to attend the program tomorrow, and I'll be glad to see them again, along with Bruce Conner's Cannes-bound Easter Morning, the highly-praised, much anticipated Observando El Cielo and more. That program plays again May 2nd.

Finally, a pair of American features I saw at Sundance will play SFIFF on the way to a wider release planned for this summer. Both films seem to brush up against the imaginary line between fiction and documentary, from either side of that electric fence. The fiction film, Ballast, uses non-professional actors all from the same Mississippi Delta region in which the film was shot, improvising dialogue to a predetermined scenario. The result is remarkably affecting and almost completely free from familiar character cliches. I spoke a bit more about the film with Robert Davis on his podcast here. The documentary, American Teen, in chronicling a year in the life of an Indiana high school, hand-picks four archetypal teenagers and follows them through their daily adventures, some of which seem quite possibly concocted by the teens just to add drama to their on-camera presence. I wrote a bit more about the film here.

Ballast and American Teen also provide an interesting case study for another issue that's been recently raised regarding the SF International Film Festival this year. The issue is that of digital projection vs. film projection, and has been extensively covered by Michael Guillen, who has provided a list of festival films expected to be screened using digital projection, gleaned from the Film On Film Foundation calendar; Guillen also interviewed Carl Martin from that group. The crux of the issue is that, for those of us who find something pleasurable, if perhaps somewhat ineffable, about the act of viewing a 35mm or 16mm film print, it's nice to know before we purchase a ticket to a screening and sit down to watch a film, whether the film we're about to watch is going to really be a physical film running though a mechanical projector, or else a digital projection. Likewise, those of us who are curious about the new frontiers of film distribution technology, and production technology with which it often though not always goes hand-in-hand, might like to know in advance what digital format a festival selection is being shown through as well.

Sundance, at least for the past two years, consistently marks the projection method, whether film or video, and what kind, in its program guide, but SFIFF does not. Thankfully, the Film On Film Foundation had the initiative to request that information from the festival, which was very helpful in agreeing to the request. The resulting list is pretty free of surprises; 1920's The Golem screened in a very nice-looking (if untinted) 35mm print for example, while Craig Baldwin's found-footage mash-up Mock Up On Mu will be shown digitally, as expected. It seems that most if not all of the films being projected digitally are the ones that were shot with digital cameras. I wrote about the way digital production and projection can open up a wider range of options for filmmakers and festival programmers in my SFIFF festival report three years ago (already a bit late to the issue). This year I feel confident saying that Ballast's pictoral virtues would be severely lessened if it were screened digitally instead of in 35mm, as is planned. Likewise, I can't imagine that American Teen could have been made as intimate as it is without the relatively unobtrusive presence of digital cameras. Everything has its place.

Wednesday Weeklies

2008-04-23T23:39:00.000-07:00

David Hudson of GreenCine Daily has handily collected extracts from and links to each of the articles in the Guardian's consummate coverage of the 51st SF International Film Festival. But what of the other local free weekly papers? The South Bay's Metroactive doesn't appear to be covering the festival, which is understandable now that the festival has retreated from its Palo Alto screening venue. Over in Alameda County, now freed from the shackles/pursestrings (depending upon your perspective) of Village Voice Media, the East Bay Express has published a fine festival preview by Kelly Vance. And here in Frisco, the VVM-owned SF Weekly has, like the Guardian, made the SFIFF its cover story.

The SF Weekly's coverage of the festival this year is more extensive than it has been in recent years. After an intro by Meredith Brody, there's a nice q-and-a between two Frisco denizens, Michael Fox and Barry Jenkins, the director of Medicine For Melancholy. Jenkins' film is a must-see for fans of films in which our city's locations and indie-rock scene play lead character status (not to take anything away from the excellent performances by the actor leads Tracey Heggins and Wyatt Cenac). There's a piece on the festival's music-oriented offerings by local musician and writer Ezra Gale. And there's a good set of capsule reviews by Fox, Gale, and other local writers like Frako Loden and Gregg Rickman.

But it was a little weird to open the paper to see my local film festival also being covered by out-of-towners. Certainly, J. Hoberman's critical perspective is welcome on films like Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra and Jia Zhang-Ke's Still Life, even if the SF Weekly capsules are edited down from longer reviews published at the Village Voice. And Nathan Lee is another of my favorite critics, whom I feel strangely honored to share the same age bracket with (don't really know why I feel that way about him, but it's true.) But he was controversially sacked by VVM a few weeks ago. I guess that, since he'd written an article on Asia Argento before clearing out his desk, someone at the SF Weekly thought it would be great to let it serve double duty as the paper's coverage of her "two featured movies" at the SFIFF this year.

Except, it makes Lee look a little foolish to Frisco cinephiles who by now are aware that Argento has three movies in the festival, not two. This is not Lee's fault but his editor's, of course; the original piece on Argento was published in the Village Voice to coincide with the New York release of Boarding Gate, which has already come and gone from my local theatres (I missed it.) But the piece has been customized for Frisco newsracks to focus almost entirely on SFIFF opening night film the Last Mistress, though it also mentions the festival's midnight selection Go Go Tales as well. But strangely, all mention of another festival "Late Show" starring Asia Argento (and directed by her father Dario) the Mother of Tears, has been excised from the original article. I can only surmise that the costs of printing an extra paragraph or two are simply too high for the SF Weekly to justify given that paper's current situation (a situation I can't resist speculating might have had something to do with Lee's pink-slip in the first place - the timing seems too precise.)

I don't have a clue how VVM contracts work, so I can only presume that Lee will be getting a paycheck to have his chopped-up Argento piece republished even though he's no longer on staff. I'd be happy to have the opportunity to get my thumbs stained by the ink from his criticism every week. But nonetheless, it felt a little eerie to see his byline in a paper owned by his former employer, for a piece I'd encountered on the internet a month ago. Though, to be honest, I didn't read it back then- the convenience of free newspapers and my backlogged web reading list draw me to read the printed words of those writers whose work is available to me in both formats. I may rethink this policy when it comes to the SF Weekly from now on, though. I want to get the full version of a piece of Hoberman or Scott Foundas criticism, not an item abridged to leave room for Sucka Free City or Red Meat (to name but two of that paper's features I've long since become bored with) or to conform to press restrictions on word counts (which I generally don't mind as a writer, but once in the mode of reader will subvert any chance I get.)

Back to the SFIFF, one of the ticket stubs I'm most excited about having torn off by a smiley volunteer is the one for this Sunday's screening of In the City of Sylvia, alongside an on-stage conversation between Kent Jones and Hoberman. The latter critic is quite deservedly following in the footsteps of Manny Farber, Judy Stone, Naum Kleiman, Andrew Sarris, Jonas Mekas, Pauline Kael and Donald Richie as a recipient of the Mel Novikoff Award, which annually honors a critic (or a programmer, distributor, archivist, or institution) that has "enhanced the filmgoing public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema." Hoberman is one of the remaining greats of a great era of newspaper film criticism, and I'm dying to hear what he's going to say about the state of criticism today.

But looking at this morning's SF Weekly was just another reminder of how much I value the internet in getting information and perspective about both the cinema scene worldwide, and about local film events and how they might connect to issues of particular concern to my friends and neighbors. Which is why I'm so grateful to my blogroll. Robert Davis has a terrific festival preview newly up on his site. Lincoln Specter and Tony An have been busy as well, and passholder Jason Weiner has revealed his tentative schedule. Michael Guillén has linked to sf360's rich coverage in a post at Twitch, though as of now, not yet to Dennis Harvey's piece on Asia Argento more tailored to Frisco readers. And on Guillén's own site, the Evening Class, he and Michael Hawley have provided a near-comprehensive view of the festival between them. Try here and here, just for starters.

Unveiled!

2008-04-21T18:32:00.000-07:00

I thought I could remain an elusive and shadowy figure, but you can never count on such things in the close-knit cinephile community here on Frisco Bay. If you ever wanted to know what an obsessed cinephile looks like, the photographic evidence of one, poring over the sacred tome that is the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival program guide like a scribe in a dimly-lit monastery, was recently identified by a site that will remain nameless. And I've decided that, since this cat's face is now out of the bag, I might as well put a better view up on my blogger profile.

Mark Your Calendar: Silent Film Festival and More

2008-04-19T23:18:00.000-07:00

I've left link hints in my previous two posts, but I'm not sure how many of my readers follow all the purple-font clickables in some of my more densely-packed entries (what say you, readers?). So I'd like to take a bit of time to point out some of what's going to be playing at the 13th Annual Silent Film Festival, to be held at the Castro Theatre this July 11th, 12th and 13th. As I did last year, I will be contributing an approximately 1200-word essay on one of the films to the festival program guide and developing a slide show presentation to be seen before the film begins. I've been attending biweekly meetings of the festival's Writers Group, where the essayists for each of the films compare research notes and drafts. So you could say I've been biased by hearing all sorts of fascinating things about each of the films in the program. But I was excited by all eleven feature films playing this year's edition from the moment they were revealed to the writers group a few weeks ago, and I honestly would have enjoyed researching and writing on any one of them.

But I'm thrilled that I'm getting to research what was my first choice from among the selections (picked by festival programmers Stephen Salmons and Stacey Wisnia.) The first Japanese feature ever to play at the festival, it's called Jujiro, or Crossways in English. It was directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa, perhaps best-known for his remarkable a Page of Madness made two years before Jujiro. I haven't seen the film I'm writing on myself yet, but I've been delving as deeply as I can into English-language sources on it, on Kinugasa, and on the context of silent-era filmmaking in Japan. Every day I feel more certain that I'm going to love seeing Jujiro projected in a reportedly astonishing 35mm print provided by the BFI at the Castro in a few months.

The weekend-long program will open Friday, July 11th with what happens to be my personal favorite Harold Lloyd film, the Kid Brother. Having seen it with organ accompaniment at the Stanford Theatre several years ago, I can attest that Lloyd's rural exploits in this film slay an audience in the mood to laugh. Another comedy showing during the weekend is one of the original flapper Colleen Moore's few surviving films, Her Wild Oat. I've only seen Moore in the talkie the Power and the Glory and interviewed in Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's "Hollywood" series of documentaries, but that's more than enough to make me eager to see her in a silent film.

I'm also eager to fill a few gaps in my knowledge of a pair of European auteurs, Carl Theodore Dreyer and Rene Clair. The Dreyer film being shown by the festival is his early gay-themed drama Michael, and the Clair film is his last silent Les Deux Timides, a comedy. Between Dreyer, Clair and Kinugasa, there's some very prestigious directing muscle behind this year's foreign film selections; there are actually other well-known directors on the program schedule besides those three, but if I'm going to finish this post before passing out tonight I'd better leave it at that for now.

Well, maybe just one more. Or two, really. Tod Browning is another favorite around these parts, and the festival is bringing him back this year along with his favored star Lon Chaney. The film is the Unknown, and it features Joan Crawford in one of her first film roles, possibly as young as 19 (various sources on Crawford reveal various birth years, the latest being 1908, hence the centennial tributes popping up this year.) It will be shown at a late Saturday night screening and, here's the kicker, introduced by Guy Maddin. Maddin has designated the film as his "Director's Pick," something new for the Silent Film Festival. Presumably, in future festivals other current-day directors will be invited to present a silent-era film they feel particularly fond of.

Of course, this will not be Maddin's first trip to Frisco in 2008. He's also expected at the 51st SF International Film Festival that opens this Thursday, attending the first two of the festival's screenings of his latest curiosity My Winnipeg on May 1 & 3. I've seen My Winnipeg and feel confident in assuring Guy Maddin fans that they will not be disappointed in this new film. Unless they have an unexplainable aversion to Ann Savage, who puts in a terrific performance re-enacting the part of Guy's mother. Or to shots of snow, in which case how could you be a Guy Maddin fan in the first place? My Winnipeg is also narrated by Maddin, and I've heard conflicting guesses from people who saw him narrate the film live in Toronto as to whether they expect him to repeat that performance for his SFIFF appearances.

In case you haven't noticed, I've segued out of talking about the Silent Film Festival and am on to other events. I'll try to be quick, getting down to only the bare essentials so I can go to sleep.

As I mentioned, the SF International Film Festival opens this Thursday and runs for two weeks. The (in part) festival-funded sf360 already has the most voluminous coverage from its crack team of writers. Once again I'd also like to point in the direction of Michael Hawley on the Evening Class, who anticipates attending a very similar selection of festival films to the schedule I hope to use. One film Michael leaves out, however, is Johnny To's Linger, which I'm thrilled to see programmed as I have as much interest in To's non-gangster films as I do in the Triad- and/or hitmen-themed films he's best known for. I'm at least as interested in To's thematic concerns and his mise-en-scene as I am interested in him as a genre interpreter.

Some may have wondered why Linger was picked for the SFIFF instead of the more-acclaimed Mad Detective, which appeared at the Venice Film Festival and others. Well, their chance to see Mad Detective comes with the release of the newest PFA calendar. It's not the most jam-packed calendar of the year, as the Berkeley venue will be closed for three weeks following its stint as a venue for the SFIFF, and will also not be running programs on Mondays or Tuesdays in June. But the calendar does include a 9-title series of To's action films, including Mad Detective, which I've not seen yet. Of the eight I have seen my favorite is the goofy Running on Karma. Throw Down is the one I most feel I should give a second chance to after not liking it as much as I'd hoped the first time around. I do wish a Hero Never Dies had been selected as well, as it's my very favorite To film.

Other newly-announced PFA programs include the entire Berlin Alexanderplatz in four parts May 30-June 7, an all-day marathon of Lynn Hershman Leeson video works June 1, a very welcome Joan Blondell series including the big-screen must-see Footlight Parade and John Cassavetes' Opening Night, and a pair of series devoted to filmmakers I've never heard of (any reader suggestions would be welcome): Austria's Axel Corti and Turkey's Zeki Demirkubuz. In conjunction with the BAM exhibition of Bruce Conner's Mabuhay Gardens photographs, there will be four guest-filled Thursday evenings of punk films culminating in a June 26 pairing of Penelope Spheeris' seminal Decline of Western Civilization (the first, best, original segment in the eventual trilogy) with Conner's influential Devo promo Mongoloid.

And before I finally sign off, I just want to pick out the very best of the latest calendars from Red Vic on Haight Street and the Rafael in Marin county. The Red Vic calendar, amidst its usual excellent mix of premieres and second-run "last chance before DVD" screenings, has a few repertory gems in its lineup this time around, most notably a June 10th screening of Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, which I've never seen before, and a June 22-23 short stand of Max Ophuls's the Earrings of Madame de..., which I've only seen on VHS but love dearly. While the Rafael will be hosting a Jimmy Stewart retrospective Sunday and Wednesday evenings from May 18 through June 18. Having never seen the Shop Around the Corner on the big screen and the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance at all you can bet I've already started scheming ways to secure transportation to and from San Rafael on June 1 and June 18, respectively.

Now Museum

2008-04-11T17:49:00.000-07:00

In my previous post on the Castro Theatre and its new direction I asked, "Is it possible that, with the fragmenting of niche cinema audiences, the existence of such a large repertory venue in town may actually be stunting the ability of smaller venues to develop interesting programming and interested audiences?" I don't know the full answer to that question, and I'd be curious to know what others connected to the local film scene think about it, but yesterday evening I got a partial answer, throwing into relief just how important cinema screens connected to established museums are to my life as a Frisco cinephile. Though a confluence of factors may make it difficult for a profit to be made on repertory even in the wealthy, culture-conscious cities here on Frisco Bay, we're very lucky to have a number of established non-profit organizations with the ability to help foster aesthetic and cross-cultural understanding using a variety of means, including the film projector.

My Thursday went as follows: I spent a productive afternoon inside the Berkeley Art Museum, doing research at the Pacific Film Archive Library for an essay I'm writing on Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro for the 2008 SF Silent Film Festival program (more titles announced here). I had planned to stay in Berkeley to watch Nagisa Oshima's the Man Who Left His Will On Film at the PFA Theatre just down the street, screening as part of a diverse film series preparing for the 40th anniversary of May 1968. But when my dinner plans fell through I remembered that the Oshima film would soon be screening at another May 1968 tribute at SFMoMA, and that this would be the only night for me to catch an even rarer Japanese film at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the kickoff to a four-night stand of Nikkatsu Action pictures from the 1960s, none of which are available on DVD in this country. So after stopping at the box office to buy tickets to tonight's Frank Tashlin and Orson Welles screenings at the PFA Theatre (because you never know what might sell out there on a Friday night) I hopped back on BART to downtown Frisco.

A Colt is My Passport was terrific, among what was pretty close to a sell-out crowd itself. This being my first experience with a Nikkatsu Action film (which according to Mark Schilling's introductary remarks was not just a studio style but a genre all its own -- perhaps analogous to "Universal Horror" or "Shaw Brothers Wuxia") not directed by the notoriously iconoclastic Seijun Suzuki, I can't be sure if I was reacting to the specificities of the film itself, or to those of the genre conventions it exemplifies. But a sense that this was going to be a film not quite like any I'd seen before was evident from the very first few shots, a trio of establishing shots advancing so rapidly that it was impossible for them to establish location at all- only mood and pace. It felt like a parody of the spatial transitions of Yasujiro Ozu, though Michael Grost points out that Mikio Naruse, and perhaps other shomin-geki directors, used similar shots.

Anyway, it was off to the races as hitman Joe Shishido efficiently completes his latest assignment, picking off his victim during a tea ceremony (another assault on tradition?) and angering his employer's gang nearly as much as its rival in the aftermath. Now on the lam, our chipmunk-jowled protagonist spends most of the rest of the film wharfside, eluding would-be captors with a sidekick played by Jerry Fujio, all with delightful phoney-baloney Morricone musical themes (composed by Harumi Ibe) as underscore. Late in the film there's a scene which felt to me like an homage to the astonishing ending to Tomu Uchida's 1965 Fugitive From the Past, but with a superheroic twist that led to one of the finest final shootout scenes I've ever seen choreographed -- on an empty field so there's no structures to orient the camera against! Great stuff, and I'm seriously contemplating eating tonight's PFA tickets in favor of a return trip to YBCA- otherwise the only other entry in the Nikkatsu Action series I'll be able to make is Sunday night's Velvet Hustler, and even that's iffy.

Thanks to Kimberly of CINEBEATS for first alerting me to this series, and to sf360 contributor Jennifer Young for reminding me of it again at the last minute. But especially, thanks to Joel Shepard, film curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, for bringing Nikkatsu Action to Frisco Bay audiences. The YBCA screening room is entering an extremely fertile period over the next few months, actually. An April 16th co-presentation with kino21, AIASF and Goethe-Institut of Schindler's Houses is the only opportunity to see one of the films playing the PFA's Heinz Emigholz series on this side of the Bay. May 8-10 brings a new print of Sergei Paradjanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Phillipe Garrel's I Don't Hear the Guitar Anymore plays a double-bill with Andy Warhol's the Velvet Underground and Nico: a Symphony of Sound May 15-16, and Garrel's the Virgin's Bed plays the 18th. A "Witchcraft Weekend" May 23-25 includes four films running the gamut from Disney to Dreyer to the William S. Burroughs-narrated Haxan.

I'm especially excited about a pair of June programs at YBCA: two sets of Apichatpong Weerasethakul short films June 5-8, and from the 26th through 29th Jia Zhang-Ke's Dong and Useless, finally bringing Frisco audiences up to speed on this acclaimed Chinese auteur after the 51st SFIFF screenings of his Three Gorges Dam film Still Life and that film's planned Roxie run. It's worth noting that the SFIFF's other Three Gorges Dam feature, the documentary Up the Yangtze was, as of yesterday, the first and only festival film to see all of its screenings sell out- Frisco's got China on the brain right now, so who knows, might Jia's film be another particularly hot SFIFF ticket? Now's the time to read Michael Hawley's tremendous preview, determine which festival films you absolutely can't miss, and starting buying tickets, if you haven't already. Those rush lines for non-ticketholders can sometimes get pretty long.

UPDATE 4/13/08: I spoke to YBCA programmer Joel Shepard after the Velvet Hustler screening, and he informed me that he's changing the dates of the screenings I mentioned in the last paragraph, so that Dong and Useless will play June 5-8, and the Apichatpong weekend will be June 26-29. And now, back to the original post:

The Pacific Film Archive is, as usual, in the midst of an incredible calendar, one that I haven't done justice to on this site, preferring to let Ryland Walker Knight, Michael Guillén, and Rob Davis's weekly "Where I'll Be This Week" feature do the heavy lifting this time around. Featuring the fullest slate of great programs and probably the highest projection standards on Frisco Bay, The PFA is certainly the local film institution I'd most want to see spared in the event of a flying saucer attack, even if it is located way over in Berkeley (anyone know of any reasonably-priced apartments there?) An unusual function the venue performs for me is that it helps me select from among unfamiliar SFIFF titles each year. Even if I'm less likely to cross the Bay Bridge in late April and early May than at any other time of the cinematic year, I weigh a PFA date highly when selecting which films to make sure to see at the nearer major SFIFF venues the Castro, Kabuki and Clay. I know from experience that I'm more likely to appreciate the films that the SFIFF programmers guess will play best for PFA audiences.

There aren't many clues as to what the PFA will be bringing to its screen after the SFIFF screenings end May 8th, though I expect the full May-June program to be revealed in a week or two. One clue comes from the mentioning of the venue as a co-presenter of SFMoMA's screening of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's entire Berlin Alexanderplatz throughout the month of June. Presumably that means the PFA will be showing the 940-minute epic soon as well, which is very good news indeed. Not only does it indicate more opportunities to fit every last episode into a screening schedule, but the PFA stamp of approval gives me confidence in the presentation at SFMoMA as well. Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled with the direction this Frisco museum has been going with its attempts to seriously program film. Last month my eyes melted in their sockets watching a gorgeous 35mm print of El Topo there, part of an imaginative Non-Western Westerns series. But I've heard that some other screenings in that series were sourced from DVD, so while I'm excited about seeing my first Glauber Rocha film, Antonio das Mortes, next week there, I'm remaining cautious about the experience. I know that 35mm prints of Yojimbo (April 26th) and, in next month's Around '68 series, Lindsay Anderson's If... and Phillipe Garrel's the Regular Lovers have been on the circuit recently. But then, I would have thought the same about For a Few Dollars More as well, and that one was shown on DVD. At least it was advertised as such in the program, a practice I heartily applaud. For more help discerning film from video presentations, I'm glad to have just found an informative calendar put together by the Film on Film Foundation. I hope they're able to keep this useful service up.

I'm brought back to the Man Who Left His Will On Film. When it plays SFMoMA on May 24th, will it be a digital or film screening? If not the latter, did I make a mistake in passing up a chance to see it on 35mm at the PFA last night? Probably not, as my chances of ever seeing a print of a Colt is My Passport again are probably next to nil. All I know is, it looks like I'll be too busy hopping from one museum screening room to another to even notice that the Castro is playing a film I'm not very likely to see. And that's a good thing.

The Big Screen Jones

2008-04-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I learned something that surprised me. I was not only surprised, but also surprised at just how much I was surprised. I learned it while at work, and I almost immediately had to take a few minutes just to collect my thoughts. And it's taken me several days to be able to collect them into bloggable form. Anyway, enough with the prelude: what I heard is that the Castro Theatre is planning to show Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from May 22nd until June 18th, the day before the opening of the Frameline festival.

With weeds growing on the site of the former Coronet, the traditional favorite place for the opening of a Lucasfilm production, the Castro has become Frisco's largest remaining single-screen theatre in operation. There's a lot of logic to this booking. A quick survey of friends who I know are eagerly anticipating this fourth installment of the popular series revealed that there's no place in town they'd rather watch the film on opening weekend than at the Castro, though none guessed that they'd actually get the chance to do so.

As exciting as this will undoubtedly be to a great many people, I must say that my initial reaction was not one of excitement and anticipation, but of anxiety. I pictured the Death Of Repertory in my city, which has for so long been a supportive home to revivals, retrospectives and just about all of that which makes up repertory film programming. It felt as if the other shoe of the 2004 Anita Monga firing furor, from which cinephile morale regarding the Castro was seemingly slowly, but surely, recovering, had finally been dropped. And somehow, despite various signs of warning, from meager attendance levels at bookings like the week-long run of Last Year At Marienbad to a widely read newspaper article, it was completely unexpected to me. The Chronicle article, written with that air of self-fulfilling prophecy that so many news articles on cultural trends often contain, and eloquently rebutted here, seemed to foretell changes at the Castro, but I would never have guessed them to include the booking of first-run would-be blockbusters. It appears I was lacking the imagination to envision the theatre as anything other than a "safe zone" from the latest and most-hyped Hollywood conglomerate-driven product.

After wallowing in pessimism -- an unverified rumor that left me in a funk for an entire evening -- I awoke to a more serene and open view on the matter. I realized that it's just a four-week booking, and an experiment of sorts. One that I'm about as curious as anyone to see the results of. The potential of the theatre to reach out to audiences that have never been inside its walls (how often it is that I'll mention the theatre to a fellow Frisco resident who has of course heard of it, but never attended) is exciting in that it could potentially even strengthen repertory in the long run.

The Castro is not only unique among Frisco theatres (in the ways I touched on here, and more) but also an aberration among the remaining theatres of its kind across the country- no other house its size is showing repertory and festival films for as many days out of the year as the Castro currently is. With a 1400-seat capacity, it's a bigger gorilla on the block than other cities with healthy repertory scenes, such as New York and Los Angeles, have to contend. Is it possible that, with the fragmenting of niche cinema audiences, the existence of such a large repertory venue in town may actually be stunting the ability of smaller venues to develop interesting programming and interested audiences?

I'm not sure I'm going to check out Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at the Castro or anywhere else -- the upcoming popcorn movie I'm more intrigued by is actually Iron Man, which is scheduled to be one of the first films to play at Frank Lee's re-modeled, re-christened Marina Theatre when it re-opens its doors in May -- but I will spread the word to people excited about the Spielberg-directed film that the Castro is the place to see it.

In the meantime, I hope to take great advantage of the Castro repertory bookings between now and late May. There's a Joseph Losey double-bill on Wednesday, and on Saturday three reunion gigs for the Club Foot Orchestra, once a perennial attraction for its performances of scores to the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other silents in that space. A 33-film tribute to United Artists for the studio's 90th anniversary opened last Thursday and runs intermittently through May 4th. As if to commemorate the life and death of Charlton Heston, May 6th and 7th will provide a chance to see the original Planet of the Apes in a brand-new 35mm print struck for the film's 40th anniversary. And May 9-15 will bring a week-long opportunity to see one of Jean-Luc Godard's greatest films, Contempt.

Even if the Castro management decides to go first-run on the strength of a successful Indiana Jones engagement, there are enough summer festival bookings that such a change doesn't seem likely to be immediate. In addition to Frameline (June 19-29), the Silent Film Festival (July 11-13, partial line-up found here) and the Jewish Film Festival (July 24-31) are going to be at the venue. And at Friday's MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS screening of John Carpenter's lo-fi sci-fi spoof Dark Star, Jesse Hawthorne Ficks announced a July 19 marathon of films in which animals attack humans, including Jaws, Phase IV, Alligator, and more.

Perhaps the film revival I'm most excited to see on the Castro screen in the next few months is John Stahl's Leave Her To Heaven, a so-called "technicolor noir" which has apparently been newly restored to its 1945 glory and is knocking film festival audiences dead. It's a film festival presentation here in Frisco, too, part of the six days that the 51st SF International Film Festival will be spending at the Castro during its two-week run here and in Berkeley April 24-May 8. Palo Alto has been cut out of the program, which I'm pleased about for purely selfish reasons- the result is more screenings of the films I want to see at the festival's Kabuki Theatre host venue, far more convenient to me than the Aquarius. South Bay residents will have to subsist on word that there will be a one-night SFIFF event in an unspecified South Bay location. If that doesn't do it for you, try the 2-down, 34-to-go Bette Davis centennial tribute running at the Stanford through June 6th. And of course there's always CalTrain.

Other SFIFF Castro screenings include, but are not limited to: Roy Andersson's You, the Living on April 25th shortly before Black Francis takes the stage to perform alongside the 1920 slice of German expressionism the Golem, the North American premiere of Jet Li in the Warlords on April 26 (right after Leave Her to Heaven) and the closing night film, Alex Gibney's latest documentary Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a screening which serves as a benefit for the Natural Resources Defense Council. That ought to put festival-goers in a partying mood on the last night of the SFIFF. The full SFIFF program was announced at a press conference last Tuesday, and I'll be pointing to more films I've seen or am excited about in the upcoming days. In the meantime, sf360 has an initial preview piece up.

SFIAAFF So Far

2008-03-15T01:32:00.000-07:00

When writing up my preview piece for the SF International Asian American Film Festival, or SFIAAFF, which opened on Thursday and runs through March 23rd, I focused on the directors in the International Showcase section of the festival whose films I'd personally been exposed to at prior editions of the festival. I neglected to mention two repeat-SFIAAFF directors in the section because I hadn't seen their films at this particular festival. India's Buddageb Dasgupta, whose the Voyeurs plays Monday, Wednesday and next Sunday, has had his prior films Memories in the Mist and the Wrestlers at the festival in previous years, but I've always missed them. I was first exposed to Korea's Hur Jin-ho when another local festival played One Fine Spring Day, and caught up with Christmas in August on DVD. I didn't realize that it had played the SFIAAFF in 1999. I believe that his last film, April Snow, has still never graced a Frisco Bay screen, but his newest, Happiness, is here to make up for that fact and then some.

Happiness is my favorite Hur film yet. It's remarkable how similar the film is to another SFIAAFF film, Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiro Yamishita's follow-up to the wonderful Linda Linda Linda, at least in certain respects. Both Happiness and Yamashita's a Gentle Breeze in the Village adopt the "city mouse /country mouse" trope, their bucolic settings assisting the emphasis of character moods as reflected in the changes in weather and light accompanying seasons (this is something that runs through each of the Hur films I've watched). Both films track a developing romance between an urban male and a female more settled in her rural community. And both films are exquisitely crafted. But in other ways the two films are like yin and yang. Happiness is an adult melodrama showing the co-dependent romance of a couple who meet at a curative retreat; he's there to heal his pickled liver, she for her weak lungs. It doesn't work out so well for them (yin?). A Gentle Breeze in the Village is a far lighter piece illuminating the joys and anxieties of teenage youth (yang?).

Speaking of Yang (bu-dum-pum), I have now seen more than one Edward Yang film. I just got home from watching his 1986 award-winner the Terrorizer. It's the kind of rich, crescendo-ing film that I want to see again as soon as I've finished watching it. Which makes it all the more discouraging that the film has never been released on video or DVD with English subtitles. I'll hazard a guess why this may be so: the complications of rights clearance for the American pop music that appears on the soundtrack, not only the iconic "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" usage that Hou Hsiao-hsien surely was tributing in his Three Times, but also songs by the likes of Kool & the Gang and (correct me if I'm wrong on this identification) Grandmaster Flash. If the Terrorizer were playing the festival again I'd see it again, but since it's not, I'll have to content myself with the other two Yang screenings in the festival's tribute: a Brighter Summer Day on Wednesday, and a revisitation to his swan song Yi Yi: a One and a Two on Thursday.

I can recommend Rithy Panh's documentary on Phnom Penh prostitutes Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers, (which I watched on a festival screener DVD at home) but only if you can brace yourself for something extremely heavy. It's hard to imagine that a director who has made a film about the Tuol Sleng prison might make a film that matches it in "downer" qualities. But Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers may even be more emotionally devastating than S21: the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, if only because it illustrates a current devastation, not one cordoned off by history books. In fact, while S21 felt almost cathartic in the way it allowed former prisoners an opportunity to confront their tormentors, and allowed the latter a chance to harmlessly re-enact the crimes they committed in the name of the genocidal Pol Pot regime decades ago, the unsmiling women in Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers display often harmful re-enactments that seem habitual rather than cathartic. Caught in an utterly tragic loop of shame and desperation, they are shown grinding up methamphetamine pills known as "ma" to smoke through a makeshift plastic pipe, displaying their razor scars, and conversing with each other about their abusive johns, abortions, and contemplations of suicide. The final thought of the film comes from a young woman who reveals a disturbingly irrefutable perspective on her plight when she matter-of-factly states: "Poor people can only expect to be guilty."

There are a few schedule changes and added screenings to the festival, so make sure to check the website for details. One added screening I can recommend is tonight's free outdoor showing of Hayao Miyazaki's first feature film as a director, the Castle of Cagliostro at 8PM on JapanTown's Peace Plaza. The animation master hadn't yet let his fanciful style fully flower when making this 1979 release, but it's terrifically designed and drawn, and a very entertaining adventure story with a European setting reminiscent of Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik. And it's free!

Finally, I saw Never Forever and Yasukuni at last year's and this year's Sundance Film Festival, respectively, and wrote a few words on them here and here. Though as you'll see if you click the links, I had serious problems with each film, I think they're both good choices for this festival, as they both represent a breath of fresh air on the conceptual level, and deserve the kind of dialogue SFIAAFF audiences can help provide. It's the muddled execution that troubled me in each case, and I'd love to hear a convincing argument that I'm missing something. Any takers? Or other tales from the SFIAAFF so far?

Around The Bay: an interview with Alejandro Adams

2008-03-03T23:43:00.000-08:00

Last Friday I had my first experience attending Cinequest in San Jose. Once I'd survived the transportation logistics of getting down there from the second-most populous city on Frisco Bay, I had a great time. Srdjan Golubovic's the Trap wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be, but everything connected to the experience (the presentation, the helpful volunteers, etc.) was very smooth. In the evening I finally sampled the restored California Theatre (no current connection to the Berkeley Landmark) for a screening of the Ozu masterpiece I Was Born, But... with Jim Riggs behind the organ controls. What a great theatre to experience silent cinema in! What a shame it's so rarely utilized for such. Cinequest is bringing Eisenstein's October and organist Dennis James next Friday night, and if I weren't already so mentally committed to attend the Peter Bogdanovich/Cybil Shepherd in-person tribute at the Castro that weekend I'd surely head down the peninsula for seconds. Who knows how soon another opportunity will pop up again?

Another Cinequest film worth going out of one's way to see is the first feature by local cinephile Alejandro Adams, Around the Bay. Michael Guillén has eloquently summarized the reaction to this confident debut in advance of its world premiere screening this past Saturday. The film plays twice more at the festival: Tuesday, March 4th at the Camera 12 and Saturday, March 8th at the San Jose Repertory Theatre. Adams showed me a version of Around the Bay last fall, and though skeptical going in I became quite taken with the film. When bumping into the director at the recent Terence Davies series at the Pacific Film Archive, I proposed interviewing him over e-mail. The resulting conversation follows:

Hell on Frisco Bay: Alejandro, I first became aware of you through your writing and editing the website BRAINTRUSTdv.com, where you assembled an impressive collection of essays, interviews, and other documents, primarily concerning new motion picture technologies. What is the relationship for you between writing about filmmaking and doing it?

Alejandro Adams: I have an ongoing debate with a friend about the notion of the artist who writes about art and also perpetrates it. He feels that if you're a sworn visual artist, you have to give up talking about it. I feel that talking about it is part of doing it. However, if you're hyperverbal, as I am, you can describe an idea for a novel in conversation and deflate your urge to write it. Or you can upstage your own film by doing an interview in which you reveal all the motivations behind every technique. I think there's so much in this film that I can talk about what I did intentionally and still allow people to have their own experience. In an interview I did with two critics a few days ago, I explained the title of this film, and within minutes after I explained it, they both talked about what the title meant to them--very valid, personal interpretations which I would never refute. And I think Around the Bay has the capacity to allow people into it, allow people room to enter it and move around freely.

But, yes, it's potentially dangerous to write about film and simultaneously make films. I think Bresson's little book is a great example of how to do it right. Very internalized, very process-oriented, not critical of specific films he hates in the world, but with every breath he answers those films to which he so vehemently objects. On many levels Around the Bay refutes those films to which I vehemently object, and that's something I would never do as well in writing.

HoFB: Well, thank you for taking time out of your busy premiere week to risk upstaging your film! I don't think what we discuss here will get in the way of audiences' experiences with Around the Bay.

I. Working With Actors

HoFB: Many ultra-low budget films feel to me like a wasted opportunity to serve as a window onto a kind of realism that the mechanics of Hollywood just can't reach. Wasted, I say, because so often actors seem to want to provide elaborate performances that overshadow the material and the setting of the film they're in. The actors in Around the Bay almost completely avoid this.

AA: I know exactly what you mean, and I agree, but you have me chuckling because there is a really flamboyant, overshadowing performance at the center of this movie. Five-year-old Connor Maselli gives a totally over-the-top take-no-prisoners performance that probably constitutes the only sensationalism to be found in this film, since there's no sex, no music, maybe two instances of profanity, and no violence, except for this kid's unique brand of terrorism--and there, I've said it, for those who want to see the political metaphors, which are as valid and present as anything else.

HoFB: The Noah character isn't what I usually think of as "sensationalism." Though he certainly operates at a different energy level from the other characters, it's very much in tune with and in service to the film.

AA: I should mop up a bit and confess that I tally instances of sensationalism in this film because to me sensationalism is anathema to storytelling. Sensationalism is melodrama. Sensationalism is gimmickry. To me, sex scenes and music are the same thing, a way to remove responsibility from the director to carry a character or plot forward without smoke and mirrors. Now, there are whole films built around sex which are perfect, or books like James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, which simply IS sex, and that's one of my favorite books. So this isn't puritanism I'm talking about, but a different kind of purity, a relentless character-making storytelling purity where the director is allowed no recess, no smoke break. There are no ambient shots in the film, no shots of trees or sky or water that aren't organically connected to a person. Ambient mood shots are like stuffing, like music, also a way of taking a break from the people who populate a film. I'm not saying I dislike Terrence Malick--in fact, he may be my favorite director--but for this film, I put a lot of that stuff in and just saw pretentiousness and bloatedness and a lack of rigor and vision. A diffusion of purpose.

HoFB: How does a first-time filmmaker find actors so willing and able to reign in the instinct to be larger-than-life in their characterizations?

AA: Think of how the contrast between Connor and the adult cast makes the courage of their quietness, their understatedness that much more palpable. If I were an actor, my insecurities would probably have driven me to over-act in order to compete. But here I think we see the opposite: restraint. I cast the movie very instinctively, having seen very few actors, knowing more or less before auditioning someone if I was going to cast them. Everything that happened between me and the cast happened at the casting stage. I couldn't have made the wrong actors into the right ones. That sounds hokey, but it's true. About actors wanting to be larger than life--well, the key roles were filled with actors who had no such inclinations. But even though I wanted that mutedness and pursued it and nourished it, the movie needed some contrast, and that's there too, I think. Some "bigger" acting in a few places, which serves to emphasize the general understatedness of the acting overall. You know, the exception proves the rule.

HoFB: I don't mean to imply that these performances are inert, or that the characters resemble inscrutable Bressonian figures. Daisy and Wyatt are selective about verbalizing their true thoughts and feelings but they're expressive nonetheless.

AA: I'm not sure everyone would agree that Steve Voldseth, who plays Wyatt, is expressive. I had a little flurry of debate with Phillip Lopate on this point. He had a very strong reaction to the Wyatt character, more or less took a flame-thrower to him, and Mort Marcus, when he talked to me on Cinema Scene, said he was yelling at the screen and called Wyatt one of "the most emotionless men ever to come to the screen." As far as I'm concerned, Wyatt expresses anxiety in the scenes in his car, which is his sanctuary, and I think if you look carefully you can almost see him making decisions there--right before the third act begins, for example. My wife says, "I only trust Wyatt when he's in his car," referring to the fact that he's too composed, smug, distant, dissimulating, manipulative when there are people around. The car scenes are vital to me because whether the viewer is aware of it or not, that's where this character graduates to a full-fledged human being. There have to be moments in which the viewer is allowed NOT to hate this guy, and it has to be done incrementally and subtly, with pinches of development rather than heaping tablespoons. Showing him in the car, though it's exclusively from behind--another distancing device--is a way of permitting the viewer to see him in his most intimate moments, as if he's in confession.

HoFB: What astonished me most about Conor Maselli's performance as Noah was just how un-"actorly", how unprecocious he came off. That is to say, he felt like a real kid. Can you talk a little bit about working with this actor? What's the difference for a five-year-old between acting in a film and "playing pretend"?

AA: We did a scene at the audition--totally improvised--in which he played scrabble with a Daisy and a Wyatt. He couldn't even read, didn't understand the game. The point was for the Wyatt and Daisy auditioners to use him as a pawn in some little competition they were having, to test the kid's loyalty, to see which of them he trusted. So they were saying "Put those letters together in the middle of the board" or whatever, and finally he just snapped and said, "Where!? What are you talking about!?" He wasn't aware of the harsh lights, the cameras, or me hovering over the whole thing. He didn't look at his mother in the audience. He was really in that moment, trying to play that game, and annoyed with these two people badgering him. He was already Noah. And the funny thing is that the two actors in that scene who were doing the Wyatt and Daisy roles were the ones who got the parts, too.

During production Connor would find his mother and say, "Please call me Connor. I want to hear my name." That will tell you how much acting was going on. Near the end of the production he called me into the back seat of his mom's van and said, "Can you give me more direction next time?" I think he wanted less responsibility for creating this character. He wanted someone he could blame it on. It's not that easy, just ask Steve Voldseth.

Another thing to point out is something else Mort Marcus said to me. We were talking about the distinction between a "child actor" and a kid just being a kid. He made the point that acting is creating something. If we'd had an unimaginative kid playing Noah, there would have been no material. If acting is creating a role, and improvisation is creating material, then there is no way to make this distinction. It's a semantic convenience. It robs something from Connor, something from me as director, and something from the gestalt chemistry of the cast if we say, "No, he was just running wild, he wasn't conscious of playing a role, and I hardly ever told him what to do." The same goes for him as for the adult actors--is it any different when Steve is driving or Connor is kicking in the pool? A camera is on and they have no lines and they're doing something they would do in reality, without the cocoon of a fictional character. Can we really make distinctions between what is so-called acting and what isn't, if the camera captures it?

II. Writing For the Screen

HoFB: Around the Bay is about a family. So are many highly successful films; I think it's because the family is the most interesting, and probably the most psychologically and politically important social grouping humans have. How did you come to make a film about this particular family?

AA: The short answer is that this is in no way autobiographical in the traditional sense. In autobiography we don't find stories, we find justification and condemnation posited as narrative, as a narrativity of experience, an often falsified description of how we became who we are--and, again, all that can result from that exercise is justification and condemnation, and I'm not sure that has value even therapeutically. I'm often irritated by openly autobiographical films and writing.

I've been a writer of novels and short stories--none published--for fifteen years. This particular story--of the young woman who comes to stay with her estranged father and helps care for her half-brother--was a story I tried to write intermittently for a year or so before giving up. I couldn't "see" the father character. He was much worse, much less sympathetic. I couldn't come to terms with this guy, but I had created him and in some way I needed to know him. I'm starting to sound like I have a Romantic view of the artist, which really isn't true at all. I've never felt particularly mystical about writing, but in this case it was just an unusual impediment, something I'd never faced. When I had a chance to make a feature it made sense to me to bring this vital, nagging story to the screen and see if I could meet this guy and get rid of him.

HoFB: There is a touch of melodrama in the set-up for Around the Bay once put into words: Wyatt loses his job and his girlfriend at the same time, and then he reunites with his long-lost daughter. However, the way you've presented all of this makes it feel less like plot than something intrinsic to his character; he's just the sort of guy who would have his life fall apart all at once.

AA: I think when you tell a real story, when you care about dramaturgy, you're going to be accused at some point of tending toward melodrama. I think there's a lot of vitality in Around the Bay. I think there's a lot of apparent randomness, a kind of restless energy that suggests there's no real narrative force behind it, that the chaos within the family at the center of the story is a reflection of chaos behind the camera. That feeling is erroneous. The dramaturgy is so sound, in fact, that the three-act structure is as transparent as in any Hollywood film. And I'm proud of that. I think low-budget indie films have been trying to avoid telling real stories, and I don't know why. Probably because if you have a kick-off like a guy losing his job and being dumped by his girlfriend, it feels melodramatic. But you've pointed out that the character is strong enough to withstand the plot I've burdened him with, so I think you're seeing the compromise I've struck between the bare necessities of an engaging plot and characters so dense that we can argue about their motivations and read emotions or sensations into their gaze. I wouldn't want to trade one of those things for the other.

HoFB: How much back-story did you write for each of these characters?

AA: Back-story was mostly left to the actors themselves. I would have been implicitly assigning motivation if I'd worked out too much back-story in advance, and that would have thwarted the complexity of what we were trying to do. I should mention that the short story I was trying to write was told in this same remote, non-psychologizing style, where none of the characters had a traditional point of view. I was reading a John Updike piece recently in which he talked about the New Novel of the sixties--Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet--and used the phrase "deadpan facticity." That's what the story had and that's the tone of this film, though the distancing devices in prose and cinema are totally different. It's almost impossible to prevent people from identification with characters represented cinematically, because of the syntax that's been created to facilitate identification--I'm headed toward Kracauer here, I think--whereas in prose you have to work to encourage identification. So you see things in Around the Bay that might not necessarily be revolutionary but that are used in ways we don't often see because very rarely is a film trying to modulate audience identification among three characters. Maybe there are three plotlines, and we care about someone in each plotline, but three characters constantly interacting with one another, where none is given the upper hand or the privilege of being the exclusive protagonist--that's much less common.

III. Technique and Distance

HoFB: Your film is filled with unexpectedly effective techniques such as blackouts and jump cuts. One would think these would be distracting but for me they helped to convey the characters' mental and emotional state and even tell the story. Were these techniques written into the script, or developed in the shooting or editing processes?

AA: Again, you're addressing something that's being modulated pretty carefully. I'm really glad to hear it works for you because it's risky to bring conspicuous technique--in this case, distancing devices--into something in which the characters are meant to be dense and real, not simulacra, not puppets of the plot. Not that I dislike Alain Resnais, but you can see where he's making the choice in Last Year in Marienbad to be totally impressionistic at the expense of presenting us with workable human beings. Around the Bay is elliptical and impressionistic by nature, and not all of those elements are distancing devices. A while back you told me that you recognized the practical function of the blackouts on a second viewing, but on a first viewing it had seemed like nothing more than empty technique--form over function. But you said you'd realized that they were used to convey specific information. I'm not sure everyone's going to get that, and I suspect there will be plenty of people who think it's just "experimental" for no apparent reason.

HoFB: Certain flourishes reminded me that great cinema can (must?) weave depictions of the actual with the imagined, hoped, feared, etc. Can you speak to your unusual approach to presenting dialogue?

AA: There are ways the sound is used in this film that might seem like aesthetic self-indulgence, but if you pay attention to the scenes in which those devices are employed, you may see a subtext of a sort of non-immediacy of experience, a shorthand for conveying a relationship in which the people seem to be communicating but aren't. On the other hand, sometimes certain words or phrases that are laid over the picture are made to coincide with specific gestures which reflect an immediacy of experience, of emotion--watch Daisy for instance. With Wyatt and Noreen, we hear hollow, repetitive dialogue, truisms about responsibility, and their scenes don't conclude. They are profoundly inconclusive, though not particularly vague. All the inconclusiveness was meticulously sewn in, as was the general, going-nowhere quality of the dialogue.

HoFB: Regarding distancing devices, as I suggested in my reaction piece (not for the spoiler-wary), I felt more distanced by the milieu- the fancy compound and the accoutrements of high-stakes Silicon Valley living. Technical devices were distancing insofar as they served to emphasize the barriers characters created out of the materials around them. Could I ever relate to Daisy's discomfort during the scene in which Noreen cooks her an omelette! But then, I related to different characters at different moments in the film (perhaps this is why I found Wyatt's gestures and physical cues expressive.) How does the film stylistically allow space for viewers to project and empathize at different points in the film?

AA: Distancing doesn't always have to be a matter of conspicuous technique. It can be a normal shot held too long or something done from a slightly different angle, which isn't particularly noticeable but is felt viscerally. I can talk about the omelette scene, since you brought it up. You certainly should feel for Daisy in that scene, but look at the last couple of shots and how they're constructed. A close-up of Noreen's hands washing dishes--when was the last time we saw Daisy helping with domestic labor?--and then Daisy eating this extravagant breakfast, as she calls it, and watch the shot of Daisy. Nothing unconventional, but think about how long it's held and compare that to the average shot length in the rest of the movie. After sympathizing with her, we see her stare disdainfully at the woman for whom domesticity is innate--staring, sizing up, chewing, staring, sizing up, chewing. I get a little creeped out by that shot because there's an unfamiliar quality in Daisy's eyes there, something like scorn rather than defensiveness, and maybe that's why it holds so much extra meaning and fascination for me. Noreen may be a textbook interloper in terms of plot, but things aren't that cut and dried. Which is the more idealistic response to the possible family combinations put before us--the Wyatt/Noreen/Noah model in which the kid has a functional mother figure who strives to hold father and son together, or the Wyatt/Daisy/Noah model in which a man tries to reconnect with his forgotten daughter but in execution it's essentially every man for himself? Isn't the best scenario the one in which Wyatt had never called Daisy in the first place? Don't we kind of wish for that on some level at the end?

IV. The Cinema Experience

HoFB: What was it like to finally see your film up there on the big screen?

AA: To be honest, I had very low expectations for our transfer from standard definition to HD, and I'd warned people involved in the production that the projection wasn't going to do it justice. But there it was stretched across that 40-foot screen, and it looked great in terms of resolution, way better than it had any right to look. And sound is at least as important as image in this case, so I have to point out that those inexorable or relentless sounds which are devised to toy with the senses literally felt like they were coming up through the floor, through the seats. I mean, those are the moments of "bigness" or grandiosity, when crickets are screaming at the top of their lungs, when CalTrain is at full speed, dozens of glasses and forks striking tables and plates to wash out the smallness of the human voices, the smallness of these lives. I was able to feel all of that for the first time, viscerally.

But most importantly, the whole movie played well for the audience on a screen that big, with massive sound, which surprised me. I considered this an intimate story, a film for an audience of one, but they proved that it could be consumed at the theatrical level. Even in the silent passages, which I expected to make people really uncomfortable and fidgety, they were rapt. With a sell-out crowd of 500, we had only seven walkouts. I told them afterward I was disappointed that we had only seven walkouts, that I was hoping about half the crowd would walk out--that way I could call myself a misunderstood genius. And I know it wasn't aloof politeness that kept them in their seats because they reacted very audibly to certain scenes. And the sensitivity and vehemence of the questions afterward--no one can fake that level of investment. Very perceptive, very in-tune. For a movie this oblique to register so deeply with a sell-out crowd, people coming and going, that is baffling to me. If you make something that you assume will alienate and frustrate everyone, and instead they're electrified--well, that just makes me want to stop talking about the movie in such proprietary terms because it's not mine anymore. It's theirs. It's kind of heartbreaking to say that because I made this movie for myself, in every possible sense. But now it's one against 500, and they've staked their claim. It's time for me to disappear.

HoFB: Once again, thanks for being willing to talk about your film here, Alejandro! I look forward to following how Around the Bay fares now that its journey onto festival screens has been launched.

Around the Bay plays at Cinequest in San Jose twice more: March 4th and March 8th.

SFIFF 2008 Director's Award Announced

2008-02-27T00:28:00.000-08:00

After tributing Herzog and Spike Lee,
an improvement is not very likely.
No one's heard of Suzuki.
Argento's too spooky.
But they picked a good one with Mike Leigh.

Adam Hartzell on Passion & Power: the Technology of Orgasm

2008-02-18T14:13:00.000-08:00

Adam Hartzell sent me a review of a new documentary, one that he saw at a film festival and placed at #3 on his 2007 top ten list. It's opening next Friday at the Rafael Film Center and the Roxie, a booking whose timing has turned out to be unexpectedly topical, as Adam will explain. Take it away, Adam:

My special moment at last year’s Mill Valley Film Festival was providing the rare Y chromosome in line along San Rafael's Fourth Street waiting to enter the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center and being approached by a curious older woman asking for which movie everyone was queued up. I smiled at this woman much my elder and said with a joyous lilt in my voice, "A movie about the history of the vibrator!" This is San Francisco, so she didn’t slap me. She said, "Oh?" with raised eyebrows and laughed slightly while walking away probably muttering in her head a modification of what I typed above (e.g., "Only in the Bay Area"). I’m sure she’s heard more shocking things during her time in Marin County than what I had just said.

The film we were queued up to see was one of my favorite films from last year, Passion & Power: the Technology of Orgasm by Bay Area filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori. Based on the book The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria", the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction by scholar of domestic technologies Rachel P. Maines, PhD, Passion & Power is "A brief history of the relationship of one simple invention – the vibrator – to one complex human experience, the misunderstood female orgasm." And this lovely film will be returning to the the Bay Area starting February 22nd at the Rafael and the Roxie. I urge even the most sexually squeamish to give this wonderful documentary a trial for the "tasteful" way the issue is approached. Symbolic visuals of jellyfish and flowers and arias in place of the sights and sounds of real genitalia underscore the conversations with scholars and businesswoman interviewed throughout the film. (Although it still presents a contradiction since the film praises the work of Betty Dodson whose infamous display of the various "styles" of women's genitals at a consciousness event is highlighted in the film. If you’re praising Dodson's choice, wouldn't you want to follow her lead and let it all spread out in your documentary as well?)

The pleasures found in this film are definitely in the scholarly details, how Maines' needlework scholarship "kept being distracted by these goofy ads" in old copies of Good Housekeeping and Modern Priscilla (tagline – "The Magazine That Helps".) The beginning of the tale will take you back 2,500 years or so as it chronicles the social history of women's bodies and their place in the evolving myths throughout the ages. From this history lesson we revisit Victorian ideals that demanded the "social camouflage" of orgasms by labeling them 'hysterical paroxysms'. This medicalization allowed doctors to prescribe medical massage treatments. But these doctors eventually sought out a treatment with greater efficiency, seeking something de-skilled of the arduous work involved in helping their patients paroxysm hysterically, leading the way towards advanced vibrator technologies. Vibrators then find their place in the early 19th century revolutions of rural electrification, the transport of goods, and the very advertising that distracted Maines from her initial research. It wasn't until another revolutionary technology, moving pictures, that vibrators were packed up in metaphorical shoeboxes in the back of the proverbial closet. As they began to appear in stag films doctors and sanitariums (what we'd call a health spa now) didn't want to be associated with this re-branding of the vibrator's image.

With such a topic, humor is a necessary safety valve, and this is wonderfully provided by the expert timing of the performance artist Reno (some might just call her a comic, but we forget that comics are also performance artists) and the editing of visual underscoring by Slick and Omori. (Omori is also the Director of Photography of the film and appears ever so slightly in the mirror in the background of some of the interviews, where you can just make out her signature presence, her gorgeously striking, long, white hair.) This humor is needed even more as the film follows the unnecessary tragedy of the arrest of a vibrator saleswoman in Texas. To avoid weeping, one truly needs to laugh in the absurdity of the false justice applied in Texas and other states where dildo ownership is curtailed while gun ownership is promoted. Thankfully, since the completion of this film, that absurdity has been addressed. As a wonderful Valentine's Day present to true justice, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently struck down the Texas law as a violation of the right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th amendment, doing so on the 14th of February of this year. With Louisiana, Kansas, Colorado and Georgia having similar laws declared unconstitutional, Alabama remains the only state exhibiting a perverted nonsense of justice.

So whether your Valentine's Day came to fruition in the form of a satisfying or unsatisfying evening, I couldn’t recommend this film any more highly than to tell you how happy this film made me. I had a smile throughout and after the screening, none of which had to do with physical stimulation but everything to do with intellectual stimulation. This is a celebration of our bodies controlled by ourselves while the powers that desire to be seek to supersede that control from us. In the end, Passion & Power is the true feel-good movie of the year.

Thanks, Adam! Also of note on the Rafael's current calendar are an evening with Ray Harryhausen, a shared booking of new prints of the 400 Blows and a Summer With Monika the week of March 7-13, and a David Lean mini-retro March 21-27. And the Roxie is a venue for numerous film festivals, including the upcoming Noise Pop Film Festival and Irish Film Festival, and of course the currently-running IndieFest, which has added encore screenings for this Thursday, of Stuart Gordon's Stuck and a local shorts program including Jay Rosenblatt's absolute must-see take on the banality of evil, Human Remains. Both venues are on the long list of venues where one can watch the Oscars on a big screen with a room full of strangers next Sunday. Last year I tried the Roxie's Up the Academy and it was a hoot. Presumably Passion & Power will move to the Little Roxie during the Oscars. I'm excited to check it out!

Direct From Asia

2008-02-16T02:00:00.000-08:00

I prefer to organize my viewing choices principally around following the careers of directors who intrigue me. (I know-- how boring! I'd surely be a much more interesting cinephile if I spent as much energy following boom operators' filmographies instead.) To this end, I love a local film festival with a sense of loyalty to the directors whose films it features. Facing facts, not every film on the festival circuit makes its way to a Frisco Bay screen. (Is anyone ever going to bring La Blessure around? I guess not...) So I'm thrilled when, after seeing a terrific film at a film festival, I get a chance a year or two or four later to see the director's next film at another edition of that festival.

I haven't crunched all the numbers on this, but my sense is that the SF International Asian-American Film Festival is currently the best in town at consistently showcasing new work by directors whose films have been programmed there before. As evidenced in the festival's newly-announced line-up, this loyalty applies to various sections of the festival; this year's Narrative Competition section, for example, brings local filmmaker Richard Wong back with Option 3. Two years ago, he had the biggest hit of the festival with his debut Colma: the Musical, which will be reprised this year at a special sing-a-long screening at the Kabuki Theatre. Gina Kim, whose Invisible Light screened the festival in 2004, returns with her latest Never Forever. In the Documentary Showcase section, I'm excited to see that Cambodia's greatest documenter Rithy Panh is back with Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers, his fourth film in five SFIAAFFs.

But the festival section where this trend is most notably evident to this observer is in the International Showcase section. This is usually the section where I focus most of my attention, and this year nearly half of the 15 films programmed come from directors whose films have been personal highlights of previous SFIAAFFs. Let me quickly look at these one-by-one:

881, which looks to put the "Sing" back into Singapore.
Director: Royston Tan, whose unflinching, gripping 15 played the festival in 2004.

Desert Dream, a family drama featuring North Koreans in Mongolia.
Director: Zhang Lu, whose heartbreaking 2006 festival film Grain in Ear suggests an affinity for putting Korean characters in spare, hostile environments outside their homeland.

Flight of the Red Balloon, a tribute to Albert Lamorisse's classic short the Red Balloon (which, to prepare you if you've never seen it, will play the PFA March 8th)
Director: Hou Hsaio-Hsien, the master Taiwanese filmmaker whose excursion to Tokyo Café Lumiere was a highlight of the 2006 SFIAAFF. This Paris-set film featuring Juliette Binoche marks Hou's first time working outside of Asia.

A Gentle Breeze in the Village, with its rural, teenage milieu, is from its program description bringing to mind certain films of the great Japanese auteur Mikio Naruse.
Director: Nobuhiro Yamashita, the man behind one of my very favorite SFIAAFF films, the 2006 selection Linda Linda Linda.

I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK, a strange-sounding romance between a kleptomaniac and a self-identified cyborg.
Director: Park Chan-wook, one of South Korea's hottest auteurs going right now. Truthfully, his 2005 SFIAAFF selection Oldboy was my own least favorite of Park's so-called "Vengeance trilogy", but now that he's finished with that project I'm very interested in what kind of elaborate camerawork and color schemes he'll use to showcase his critiques and characterizations next.

Three Days to Forever, described in the program mini-guide as a "controversial coming-of-age story."
Director: Riri Riza, whose work I last sampled with the 2003 SFIAAFF selection Eliana, Eliana, still one of the best Indonesian films I've encountered.

The Unseeable, a ghost story said to be a tribute to classic Hollywood takes on the supernatural.
Director: Wisit Sasanatieng, whose second film Citizen Dog played the SFIAAFF about a year prior to last year's long-awaited theatrical release of his debut Tears of the Black Tiger. The Unseeable is not expected to be as candy-colored as these previous films, but I've been hotly anticipating a chance to check out Wisit's new direction for over a year now.

There's a lot more to anticipate, but I would be remiss in ending this post without mentioning two more established auteurs whose films are to be featured at the 2008 SFIAAFF. Wayne Wang, whose Chan is Missing is probably the most-frequently-cited early success of the Asian-American filmmaking movement, will see his two new films a Thousand Years of Good Prayers and the Princess of Nebraska play the festival, and will also be on-hand for an on-stage conversation March 15th. Two of his previous films, the Joy Luck Club and Life Is Cheap...But Toilet Paper is Expensive will complete the Wang spotlight.

Much more bittersweet is the tribute to Edward Yang, whose untimely death last year at age 59 has inspired a touring retrospective of his films. SFIAAFF has selected three of them to play: the Terrorizer, a Brighter Summer Day, and his final masterpiece Yi Yi: a One and a Two. Yi Yi is the only one of his films I've seen before, but its beautiful universality convinces me that this tribute is likely to be the highlight of the festival for anyone who samples it. When voting for it in a fairly recent poll of the greatest foreign-language films of all time, I predicted that Yi Yi would go down in history as one of the great last films of all time, and I'm planning to reconfirm that claim with a big-screen viewing at the Pacific Film Archive on March 20th.

Speaking of the PFA (and now we're briefly going to move away from SFIAAFF talk, just because I can't resist scoops), though the new March-April calendar is not online or available in print yet, I couldn't help but notice something while attending a screening of Godard's Weekend last night. Before the film the venue showed slides advertising the upcoming programs to expect over the next couple of months: an artist-in-residence for Pedro Costa will begin March 1 (hot on the heels of the Terence Davies residency you probably already know about), retrospectives for both Orson Welles and Frank Tashlin (just as I was starting to sense a slight turn away from classic-era Hollywood in the PFA programs, they disprove my hunch), a series of films relating to the events of 1968 in Europe (most likely a touring version of this series), and of course the 51st SF International Film Festival, which runs at the PFA and several other venues April 24-May 8th.

No SFIFF films playing the PFA have been announced yet, but the festival has just announced the opening night film at the Castro: Catherine Breillat's the Last Mistress. SFIFF's annual silent-film/rock-star pairing has been revealed to be Paul Wegener's The Golem scored by Black Francis a.k.a. Frank Black a.k.a. frontman for the Pixies. This event will be held on April 25th, also at the Castro. Finally, the festival's KinoTek spotlight will bring performance artists Chi-wang Yang, Miwa Matreyek and Anna Oxygen to Kanbar Hall May 1st.

Anyway, back to the SF International Asian American Film Festival. Anything else in particular in their program that I shouldn't overlook?

Better Late Than Never: a brief 2007 review

2008-02-13T00:43:00.000-08:00

I finally finished up my coverage of the Sundance Film Festival at GreenCine Daily, and now I find myself in the midst of Frisco's festival season. We're in the middle of Indiefest, which I usually enjoy sampling a few titles from (as a big Dengue Fever fan I'm probably most excited by the documentary on that band's recent tour of Cambodia, Sleepwalking Through the Mekong). San Jose's Cinequest announced its program last week, and this is the year I'm finally going to attend this festival, after several years of simply eyeing their programming from afar. There's just no way I can let myself miss chances to see silent films by Ozu and Eisenstein I've only sampled on VHS before now; I'll definitely be making my first trip to the restored California Theatre for the delightful I Was Born, But... February 29th, and hopefully the monumental October (sometimes known as Ten Days That Shook the World) on March 7th as well. And there's other enticing options from the Cinequest lineup of recent films, such as Naomi Kawase's the Mourning Forest, which won a prize at the last Cannes film festival, and Esteban Sapir's the Aerial, which opened the 2007 Rotterdam Film Festival. I've already seen and can recommend a few of the films on the program; I caught the British-made noir-animation short Yours Truly at Sundance, and local filmmaker Alejandro Adams' Around the Bay on a screener. More on the latter later.

The SF Asian American Film Festival announced its lineup just yesterday, and as usual it's going to be hard for me to prioritize the anticipated titles at this, always one of my favorite festivals of the year. Again, more later, but for now, take a look at the lineup here, or check a new feature I just added to my sidebar, just below the "Frisco cinema" links. I'll highlight current and upcoming local film festivals in this slot, and try my best to keep it absolutely up-to-date, even at moments when I don't feel I have time to jot down impressions, hunt down urls, and publish new posts. Let me know what you think of this idea- I only wish I'd thought of it before!

But now, let me put the lid on 2007. Finally. Yes, we're already well enough into 2008 that this all might seem irrelevant by now, but since I didn't have my act together to contribute to the Senses of Cinema World Poll I where I usually house my year-end wrap-up of new releases, I figure I might as well put it here on my home turf. My top ten new-to-me and new-to-Frisco films of 2007 are as follows, in alphabetical order with superficial commentary but more substantial links:

Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, Canada) more than satisfied my craving for neo-silent extravaganza.
The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, USA) is an affectionate critique of the privileged Westerner's outlook on spiritual journeys in Asia.
Everything Will Be OK (Don Hertzfeldt, USA) represents a new level of achievement from one of my very favorite short-form filmmakers.
Forever (Heddy Honigmann, the Netherlands) is one of the most moving documentaries I've found.
Grindhouse (Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Edgar Wright, Rob Zombie, and Eli Roth, USA) transcended its retro-thrill-ride essence by yo-yo-ing audience expectations in a fascinating manner. All directors involved were in peak form for this one.
Opera Jawa (Garin Nugroho, Indonesia) is the film that, for me, most perfectly encapsulated the mission of the the New Crowned Hope film project, even though I loved
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand) and its expression of a favorite director's personal vision even more. Swap this title with the Wes Anderson film and this list becomes approximately preferential in order.
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA), speaking of personal vision, sent me home with enough of this year's most visionary moments to completely overwhelm the nagging that its director wasn't always exactly certain what he wanted to do with this film.
Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea) found Hong in autocritical mode as usual, but this time the characters felt less like props for each other than they sometimes can in his films.
VHS - Kahloucha (Nejib Belkadhi, Tunisia) was the year's most entertaining and enlightening peek into the worldwide phenomenon of DIY filmmaking, through the keyhole of a Sousse action auteur and his followers.

Runners-up, because I can't just limit my favorites to ten, would include Martha Colburn's Destiny Manifesto, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, Lev Yilmaz's How We Managed to Not Really Date Each Other, So Yong Kim's In Between Days, David Lynch's Inland Empire, Joel & Ethan Coens' No Country For Old Men, Jafar Pahani's Offside, Jessica Yu's Protagonist, Brad Bird's Ratatouille and Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light. Many of these, on another day, could easily have found their way on the "official" top ten list. But right this minute anyway, they feel like somewhat more minor works.

And here's where I apologize profusely to loyal and esteemed Hell on Frisco Bay contributor Adam Hartzell, who sent me his own top ten list for 2007 weeks ago, but has weathered my endless procrastinations but is still willing to offer his thoughts on the year to you readers. Please forgive the unforgivable delay, my friend. Here's Adam:

I purposely made the decision to watch fewer films this year, reducing my screenings of new films (that is, films new to me) by one-third. I reduced the number of films I saw for many reasons, but a big motivator was being aware one can only consume so much media or else risk getting matters all muddled up. Plus, as much as I make efforts to incorporate my film watching with my friendships, it can take away from that time as well.

This is the first year where most of the films I watched were not from South Korea, the cinema I primarily write about as a contributor to Koreanfilm.org. Instead, most of the films I caught were from the country I call home, the United States. This is likely due to the fact that I wasn’t able to attend the Pusan International Film Festival since I was helping out with the Korean American Film Festival in San Francisco. (This also likely explains why no South Korean films make my list this year, although the Lee Bang-rae retrospective of his films from the 1960s that I caught at the Pucheon International Fantastic Film Festival was a highlight of the year.) Also, my DVD consumption increased as a percentage of what I watched. It appears that complacency set in, that is, in not consciously pursuing a certain number of films to watch, I fell into the easiest films to access and easiest spaces to watch films, respectively the United States and my flat.

With that summary of my idiosyncratic year at the movies, here is my Top Ten from what I was able to catch in 2007. (Films eligible for my list are those released in 2007 or at the edge of the 2006/2007 border along with films yet released that I caught at film festivals.)

10) Endo (Jade Castro, 2007, Philippines)

I reserve my #10 as a reach, a stretch. A film I know might not be brilliant but I took such a liking to, I allow it to seep ever so slightly into my list of the best of the year. In this case, placing Jade Castro's Endo on this list is a stretch because I saw it without subtitles at the CineMalaya Independent Film Festival at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila while stationed at my company’s office there this past summer. I can't feel confident about this choice since I watched it un-translated. I know there are much better Pinoy films (see Noel Vera's list for way better guidance than I can provide), but I greatly enjoyed the mood of young adult ennui the film presented. What I couldn't understand I was able to bring to my co-workers who did their best to explain something they hadn’t seen but definitely an experience they all knew quite well. The title Endo is not referring to the BMX trick-riding term, but a term for contract workers at (mostly) mall stores and fast food establishments, working until the 'end of contract'. This information helped me better understand the long lines of manila folders (my co-workers don’t call them that in Manila) containing their resumes outside the malls on my walk home from work in the morning. The story follows two lovers who meet in their respective contract work and how they negotiate their futures considering the limited economic opportunities available to them.

9) Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007, UK)

Man this film was fun. I got the DVD from a White Elephant gift exchange at work. I had my gift stolen from me at the end and instead of continue the exchange stealing, I took the final remaining gift and I'm glad I did, otherwise I might not have caught this film until much later. The pace, dialogue, and ridiculousness of this 'model' village gone bad was a pleasant ride the whole way through. (Side note, one of my ex-pat co-workers is a firm believer in the 'greater good' of letting the underage drink at pubs claiming it helps reduce(?) teen pregnancy. Who knew a film like Hot Fuzz would generate such serious policy discussions?)

8) Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007, USA)

I was privileged to have the opportunity to see this treat in the lovely Pixar screening room where stars shoot above and cricket chirps surround before the fun begins. It says a lot that I still put this film on my list when I am truly sick and tired of the male-ego-enhancing trope of the unkempt/incompetent/uninspiring guy finding redemption when the together/talented/motivated gal takes an unjustified shine to him. (Thankfully, Juno was a nice corrective to the Superbads, Eagle Vs. Sharks, & Knocked Ups this year.) In spite of Ratatouille plotting through my political peeve, the film warmed my kitchen’s hearth like it did that of so many others.

7) Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007, Taiwan)

I understand that the Women Film Critic Circle listed this one amongst their 2007 Hall of Shame and I’m curious to read an article/essay that expands on that argument.
Personally, my feminist frame doesn’t find the film to be an Eve-is-Evil narrative. And the character falling for her rapist does not condone the rapist or the act of falling in love with a rapist but presents someone making constrained choices within a misogynist system, within a world lacking in full female agency, not a film approving of said misogyny. But I’m open to contrary interpretations. As I left the Lumiere in San Francisco, I felt discomfort. I felt at dis-ease. I was cautioned about my passions (political and otherwise) just as the film intended.

6) Romántico (Mark Becker, 2005, USA)

I saw this film early in the year, so my memory is fuzzy, but I recall the film treating its traveling troubadour subject with great respect. Rather than caricature the border-crossing of Mexican immigrants, it allowed us a glimpse into that which many of us refuse to see everyday on our streets and behind our neighbor’s, or our own, doors. And the fact that it follows a man in the very city in which I was watching the film, San Francisco (at the Opera Plaza), made it even more impacting.

5) Pao's Story (Quang Hai Ngo, 2006, Vietnam)

The Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose has not been good to me. One previous screening I attended abruptly ended when the print caught fire. And Cinequest again had a lot of print problems with Pao's Story, resulting in the programmers needing, mid-screening, to switch to an alternate format (DVD or Beta, I can’t remember). But in spite of all that, it’s to Pao's Story's testament that my friend and I were still impressed with this feminist tale of sisterhood solidarity still able to reach across the divide of a wife and the too often Other-ed other woman.

4) Live-In-Maid (Jorge Gaggero, 2004, Argentina)

This little tale of class-crossings was touching without being condescending and educational about modern day Argentina without being didactic. This excellent film slipped into the Opera Plaza in San Francisco with limited fanfare, but justified the fare of this fan.

3) Passion and the Power: The Technology of Orgasm (Wendy Blair Slick and Emiko Omori, 2007, USA)

This film made me so happy in its gutsy willingness to treat with such splendid serious, intellectual curiosity a domestic technology the importance of which is often ignored when not being slanderously scorned – the loyal vibrator. Just the right dashes of dildo humor make this the feel good movie of the year! I caught it at the San Rafael during Mill Valley Film Festival and SF Bay Areans can catch it starting February 22 when it revisits the same theatre.

2) Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, 2007, France)

The second film on this list I caught in Manila, the CineManila International Film Festival this time. It lived up to the hype, justifying the not so easy trip outside my sleeping schedule to catch the screening at the Gateway Mall.

1. Killer Of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977, USA)

Yes, I’ve seen this before, but it tops my list this year because it FINALLY got the release (and at the Castro nonetheless) it deserved when it was initially completed. See what a MacArthur Genius Grant can help accomplish?

Fresh Snow and Dark Rain

2008-02-01T14:13:00.000-08:00

I arrived back from Sundance nearly a week ago but am still putting together a proper wrap-up post. In the meantime, you can read my GreenCine Daily takes on James Benning's casting a glance, Ernesto Contreras's Blue Eyelids, the Animation Spotlight program, Michael Haneke's new Funny Games remake, and Isabel Vega and Amanda Micheli's 40-minute documentary La Corona. The latter is one of the Oscar nominees in the Best Documentary Short category, and I also contributed a piece for Nathaniel Rogers' the Film Experience revealing my current thoughts on that race, having seen three out of four of the nominees before they were announced last week. San Francisco State's Documentary Film Institute will be screening all four films, as well as the Documentary Feature Oscar nominees, February 19-21 at the Kabuki Theatre.

Whereas last year I focused almost entirely on documentaries, this year I had a somewhat more well-rounded Sundance, taking in at least one film program from each of the festival's ten sections. My top five favorite features overall were Ballast, Eat, for This Is My Body, my first major exposures to the work of Derek Jarman, Edward II and Derek, and finally, Baghead (which I urge you not to read about, just see when Sony Pictures Classics brings it out!) A top ten could be rounded out by Nerakhoon, Blue Eyelids, casting a glance, the inspiring the Women of Brukman, and, though it feels in some ways more suited to a gallery space than to a a cinema, Yang Fudong's Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part 4

Back in soggy Frisco, I've taken in a few programs at the Noir City 6 film festival, which is being covered extensively at the Evening Class website. The festival runs through Sunday, when it closes with the superb Night and the City, which I saw when it played as a late-addition to Noir City 3. Here's what I wrote on an online discussion forum at the time, and still stand by (though wincing slightly at the overuse of the word 'perfect'):

A perfect example of doomed noir complete with femme fatale, only set in London. Richard Widmark gives a magnetically frantic performance that I don't suppose I'll ever forget; he's like an overgrown child actor in this, which is perfect for his in-over-his-head character.

2007: I Only Have Two Eyes

2008-01-07T04:43:00.000-08:00

Since I've started paying attention, the repertory/revival offerings here on Frisco Bay have seemed just oh-so-slightly less inspiring every year. But I can never be sure if this perception holds due to a real, if gradual, decline in the number and diversity of local screenings of yesteryear's films, or if it can be better explained by my own increasing understanding of film history, and knowledge of what might be screening in other places but not here. I may complain that a place like the Paramount remains shamefully unutilized, or that the Stanford is becoming the only place in the area that plays not only the bona fide classics from the Golden Age of Hollywood, but also the somewhat more forgotten films from that era on a very regular basis. But who am I kidding? I still saw plenty of wonderful stuff in rep. houses this year, and the list of films I can't believe I actually let myself miss in 2007 is staggering.

That's why, when drawing up a set of year-end favorite repertory/revivals, I thought I'd invite other local bloggers and cinephiles to weigh in with their own picks as well. I saw a lot in 2007, but I didn't see everything I wanted to see, much less everything I didn't even realize I wanted to see. This compilation of lists from Frisco Bay filmgoers who generously agreed to participate is intended to remind everyone, including myself, of just how rich the options are around here for those who enjoy using the cinema screen as a portal to the past as much as they enjoy watching the newest releases.

I asked participants to list 5-10 favorite repertory/revival films seen in Frisco Bay theatres in 2007. Here's what these twenty eyes came up with, in order of submission:

Michael Guillén, dean of the Evening Class:

If not part of a genre-specific film festival, or San Francisco's annual Silent Film Festival, vintage and cult films still find their way to Bay Area screens, satisfying an ongoing hunger for rarely-screened gems. The value of our repertory theaters like the 4 Star, the Castro Theatre, and the Roxie Film Center and our archival film venues like the Pacific Film Archives and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room just can't be extolled enough. Here are 10 wonderful old movies I caught this year in neighborhood moviehouses.

1. Holy Mountain (La montaña sagrada, 1973); d. Alejandro Jodorowsky; Castro Theatre.

2. Kwaidan (1964); d. Masaki Kobayashi; Castro Theatre.

3. 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, 1967); d. Jean Luc Godard; Castro Theatre.

4. The Wild Pussycat (1968); d. Dimis Dadiras; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

5. Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975); d. Jamaa Fanaka; Roxie Film Center.

6. Spider Baby (1968) & Pit Stop (1969); d. Jack Hill; Roxie Film Center.

7. The Mad Fox (Koiya koi nasuna koi, 1962); d. Tomu Uchida; Pacific Film Archive.

8. A Flower In Hell (Jiokhwa, 1958); d. Sang-ok Shin; 4Star

9. Pyaasa (1957); d. Guru Dutt; Castro Theatre.

10. The World's Greatest Sinner (1962); d. Timothy Carey; Roxie Film Center

Michael Hawley, contributor to the Evening Class:

Spider Baby (1968) and Pitstop (1969), Dead Channels Festival, Roxie New College Film Center

In the wayward world I inhabit, this double-bill was THE Bay Area film revival event of 2007. Cult movie director Jack Hill spent a full Sunday afternoon sharing his personal 35mm prints of these two drive-in classics, graciously introducing each one and following up with illuminating Q&As. I walked away having learned all I’ll ever need to know about figure-8 stock car racing, not to mention an enthusiastic appreciation for the singular acting talents of Sid Haig. There were fewer than 50 people in the audience, for which San Francisco should hang its head in shame.

Yoshiwara: The Pleasure Quarter (1960) Tomu Uchida: Japanese Genre Master, Pacific Film Archive

Stunning, wide-screen color epic about a common whore’s rise to Grand Courtesanship, and the simultaneous plummet of the birthmark-cursed mill owner who finances it all. My favorite discovery of 2007.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948), Noir City, Castro Theater

Besides having one of the great film titles of all time, this nasty slice of Noir featured a hunky Burt Lancaster being stripped to the waist, tied to a rack and flogged. The Castro audience roared its approval.

Sátántangó (1994) Pacific Film Archive

Bela Tarr’s infamous, seven-and-a-half hour Holy Grail of Cinephilia did not disappoint. Unfortunately, I slept through the entire build-up to the little-girl-abuses-a-kitty-cat scene, meaning that one day I’ll need to watch this all over again.

Pavement Butterfly (1929) San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, Castro Theater

Along with a stunning performance by the vastly under-appreciated Anna May Wong, this late-era silent boasts a vivid portrait of Parisian bohemia and Riviera café society at the tail end of The Jazz Age. A true Francophile’s wet dream.

The Godless Girl (1929) San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro Theater

Christian and atheist high school students go to war and wind up in reform school in this silent Cecil B. DeMille potboiler. Over the years I’ve seen Dennis James give some grand performances on the Castro’s Mighty Wurlitzer, but this one truly took the cake.

Look Back at England : The British New Wave, Pacific Film Archive

The half-dozen selections I saw from this 17-film retrospective proved to me that Britain’s cinema in the ‘60s was every bit as vital as the nouvelle vague happening south of the channel. (Look Back in Anger (1958), A Taste of Honey (1961), The Entertainer (1960), Billy Liar (1963), Darling (1965), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960))

Tearoom (1962) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

William E. Jones’ provocative presentation and discussion of footage shot through a two-way mirror in a Mansfield, Ohio public restroom in the summer of 1962 (later employed to send 31 men to prison on sodomy convictions).

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) Castro Theater

This is Jean-Luc Godard in polemical, no-fun mode. But if I’m ever required to attend a costume party dressed as a movie character, I now have the perfect scheme – show up stark-raving nude wearing only a TWA or Pan Am flight bag over my head.

El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973) Castro Theater

Gorgeous new prints of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s insane psychedelic spectaculars, which I hadn’t seen in 30-some years (and won’t need to see again for another 30). This line from The Holy Mountain became my mantra for early 2007: "Your sacrifice completes my sanctuary of 10,000 testicles."

Adam Hartzell of koreanfilm.org, and a semi-regular contributor to this site:

5. Charlie Chaplin's LIMELIGHT (1952) and THE CIRCUS (1928) at the Castro
4. FRANZ FANON: BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK (Isaac Julien, 1996, UK) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Packed house on Valentine's Day for an obscure highbrow film?! How excellent is that?!
3. CHILSU AND MANSU (Park Kwang-su, 1988, South Korea) at San Francisco State University
2. The Hong Sangsoo retrospective brought by the SF International Asian American Film Festival
1. KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, 1977, USA) at the Castro

Ryland Walker Knight, creator of Vinyl is Heavy:

In chronological order, some rep touchstones of 2007. It's clear I go where I can, and where's easy, and that's usually one of three theatres; and of those three I frequent the one in my backyard more than either of the other two combined. I'd like to do better in 2008. I'll try, funds permitting. Luckily, the current PFA calendar is awesome and I want to go far too often.

1. Starting out yet another year with a sold-out screening of Pierrot le fou at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive was fun, despite my cough, as always. It's easy to forget what an experience it is to see that widescreen technicolor all big and bright.

2. Not sure if it counts but Killer of Sheep at the Castro, after a pretty delicious sushi dinner across the street with some good friends, kicked me in the butt real hard. I gasped three times. I may or may not have been moved to tears.

3. The two-day Out 1: Noli me tangre event at the PFA was the single greatest thing I did not write about this year. Still don't know what to throw down about it. May have a better idea after seeing Out 1: Spectre at the PFA in February.

4. Love Streams at the Yerba Buena Screening Room comes in close. I never really understood Cassavetes until seeing this picture, I don't think. Or I'd forgotten the joy he possessed and projected and lived. "I've got to get that goat!"

5. I always enjoy a good 70mm exhibition of 2001 at the Castro. Best movie ever? I always think so upon exiting. (The also-grand Lawrence of Arabia is more tiring than joyful these days.)

6. The last great rep film I saw was Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. I dozed twice, yes, but it sure is *something*. It lives up to Manny Farber's essay, "Kitchen Without Kitsch." Or, Farber's essay lives up to the film, as I experienced the words before the pictures.

7. The series I wish school hadn't prevented me from catching was the "Battle of the Andersons" that the Castro programmed. I would have loved to have seen The Life Aquatic and Punch-Drunk Love on the same screen on the same night.

Marisa Vela, painter and extremely tasteful filmgoer:

Colossal Youth, Kabuki, SF International Film Festival
Brand Upon The Brain!, Castro, SF International Film Festival
Cottage On Dartmoor, Silent Film festival
Wicked Woman, Noir City
Barbara Stanwyck Centennial -- There's Always Tomorrow, PFA at the Castro
Ingmar Bergman series -- Hour Of The Wolf, The Rite, PFA at the Castro
Silent Light, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Sátántangó, PFA
Aelita Queen Of Mars, PFA
Joseph Cornell Film Series, SFMoMA
Agua, Kabuki, SF International Film Festival
The World's Greatest Sinner, Film On Film Foundation at the Roxie

A trip to the Niles Essanay Film Center

Sad moment: Listening to audience members laughing loudly through a screening of Mouchette (The Jeff Wall series at MoMA was great, though).

shahn, the masterful mixologist at six martinis and the seventh art:

a cottage on dartmoor - castro theatre
the moment i realized i was learning forward on my seat to get closer to the screen, i glanced to my left to find that most people sitting in my row were also on the edge of their seats.

morocco -stanford theatre
the moment that i was not only sobbing audibly but ready to take off my shoes and walk out of the theatre after gary cooper.

noir city film festival -castro theatre
the moment when i was volunteering at the booze table and found out whiskey and film noir go really, really well together. i can't recall which film i saw but it was very enjoyable.

joseph cornell: films -sfmoma
the moment i found out that while my idol brakhage's film wonder ring was stupendous, cornell's version gnir rednow was so so so much better.

kevin brownlow -pacific film archive
when during the q&a some old blowhard answered his own question in order to show off, the moment kevin brownlow cut him off in the most respectful and informed way possible- proving that studying old films for years can provide one with tools of knowledge powerful enough to knock the wind out of an old blowhard.

also enjoyed:
footlight parade at stanford
pyaasa at castro
swing time at sfmoma
reckless moment at pfa
eraserhead at castro

Ben Armington, self-described "unrepentant film fanatic and professional explainer of rush lines":

1. Sátántangó (Pacific Film Archive)
2. Syndromes & a Century (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts)
3. Massacre at Central High (Castro)
4. The Mother & the Whore (SF MOMA)
5. Grin without a Cat (Artists' Television Access)
6. Crimes of the Future w/ Spoonbender 1.1.1 (Roxie)
7. Short films by Glenn Wait and David Enos, + music performances by Late Young and the Cones (ATA)
8. Scarlet Street (Castro) / La Chienne (SFMoMA)
9. Beggars of Life (Castro)
10. Stalker (PFA)
I know Beggars of Life is technically a festival film and Syndromes & a Century theoretically had a theatrical release in urbane New York City, but I felt they both deserved a spot because of how much enjoyment they brought me in comparison to other rep stuff.

Lincoln Spector of the terrific resource Bayflicks, with a somewhat more East-Bay-centric perspective than most of the other participants here:

Rear Window at the Cerrito (January)
I own this picture (my favorite Hitchcock) on DVD, so watching it in 35mm with an enthusiastic audience was a real reminder of how movies should be seen. Nothing can replace the thrill of watching a movie while surrounded by hundreds of your fellow homo sapiens.

Kevin Brownlow's Talk at the Pacific Film Archive (April)
A great overview of the silent era presented by the world's greatest authority on the subject. The clips presented, with accompaniment by Judith Rosenberg, included one certified masterpiece: Buster Keaton's two-reel One Week.

RiffTrax Presentation of Over the Top at the Rafael (May)
Okay, it was a lousy movie, but that was the point. And it was presented off of a DVD, but so what--it's a lousy movie. The running commentary by three Mystery Science 3000 alumni was hilarious, and once again, the audience made it better.

Beggars of Life at the Castro (July)
I caught several films at the San Francisco Silent film Festival, but but this tramp drama starring Wallace Beery and Louise Brooks outdid them all. So did the Mont Alto Orchestra in accompaniment. Another plus of the festival: Meeting Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies.

Patton at the Castro (September)
Beautiful, 70mm print of the last great big-format roadshow production. As drama, Patton works even on the small screen. But sitting in the Castro's front row, watching the amazing clarity of a 70mm print made from a 65mm negative, and it's a whole other--and much better--experience.

Thrillville at the Cerrito (October)
I finally made it to a Thrillville event (semi-regular occurances at the Parkway and Cerrito). Will, Monica, Mr. Lobo, and Queen of Trash put on a great live show, as did the band Project Pimento. Mint-condition 35mm prints of two mediocre horror movies made it a great night.

Dr. Zhivago at the Cerrito (November)
I've always liked more than loved Lean's follow-up to Lawrence of Arabia (admittedly a hard act to follow), but finally seeing Zhivago on the big screen helped me finally get this picture. I loved it.

Flesh and the Devil at the Castro (December)
Part of the Silent Film Festival's winter program. Christel Schmidt of The Library of Congress introduced the feature, and the always amazing Dennis James accompanied it on the Wurlitzer. It's always nice to be reminded just how hot a love scene can be, even if it was shot more than 80 years ago.

Robert Davis, who never need apologize for his Errata:

ONE
Killer of Sheep, Castro/Red Vic
Perhaps the best film I saw in 2007, period, a film of such simple/complex beauty that it overcomes any number of problems with projection, sound, or delayed distribution. Stunning. I saw it twice.

TWO
L'eclisse / Antonioni series, PFA
The Antonioni series at the PFA included both a favorite screening and a big disappointment. The spell of L'eclisse lingers -- the sound of the fan blowing Monica Vitti's hair -- but, surprisingly, so does the shock of showing up for Red Desert and seeing a mob of people crowding the box office. I didn't get in, but I left with a smile anyway, because droves of people had chosen to spend the evening with Antonioni's brown coats and red splashes. Five months later, he was gone.

THREE
Sátántangó, PFA
The DVD has been delayed, and I can only assume it's because they can't figure out how to fit it into the box. It's seven and a half hours of Bela Tarr whose ideas do not slip easily into thin disks. The girl with the cat. The man with the binoculars. The drunken dance drunken dance drunken dance. Thankfully, we have the PFA.

FOUR
Land Without Bread, SFMOMA
Although it was bookended by two lesser films projected on DVD, the 16mm screening of Land Without Bread at SFMOMA was the most unusual film-audience interaction by whose gale-force gusts I had the pleasure of being pummeled. Seven decades after he made the short, Buñuel proved again that he was a master of provoking collective discomfort, a maestro who conducted with a red hot poker.

FIVE
Kiarostami series, PFA
The PFA's extensive Kiarostami retrospective was not only a great chance to catch up with some of his least screened films but also a sad reminder of how exhibition has changed in the last decade: Homework was screened in a bowdlerized version and practically no one (including the staffs at the PFA and NYC's MOMA) noticed.

SIX
Stalker, PFA
Now that rare, small, and foreign films are readily available on DVD, I find that my favorite public screenings are of films that mirror the large, patient, hypnotic dreams of their creators, the ones that demand rapt attention. In the digital age, the world may be the cinephile's oyster, but I note that pearls are among the tiniest known orbs. Don't stir them with peas! They could easily be swallowed! Not so, Tarkovsky!

SEVEN
Threnody/Triste, SF Camerawork
Sometimes you want a guy to put a white rectangle on the wall, set up some folding chairs, and project a couple of silent meditations. Then you want the guy to stand up afterward and tell you about using celluloid to create objects, not just representations of something else, and you want him to be humble and mind-blowing at the same damn time. You want Dorsky, Nathaniel, at SF Camerawork. Sometimes called "Nick."

EIGHT
Tropical Malady, PFA (shot-by-shot)
Or sometimes you want a guy to sit down with one of his signature films and talk about each shot, stopping to answer questions along the way. Not always. Not just anybody. But if it's Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who gave me a whole new way to see Tropical Malady, name the time and the place. Can we get an encore with Syndromes and a Century, my favorite new film of 2007?

NINE
Fires on the Plain, PFA
The 50 years of Janus series played at both the PFA and the Castro, and I might have put Knife in the Water on this list except that I saw Fires on the Plain when the PFA brought it back. Ichikawa has such stunning control of his material that he pulls against every easy reaction to his satirical nightmare.

TEN
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, PFA
Rarely screened -- and even more rarely screened with such reverence -- Chantal Akerman's searing deconstruction of a woman's daily routine set the filmmaker on a career-spanning course of spatial examination, and it may even have prefigured the mise en scène of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Like Tarr and Tarkovsky and Antonioni, her confidence in the medium allows the film's slow and steady accumulation of ideas to end with an inevitable smack that simply would not thwack the way it should were it seen at home.

And finally, my own top choices for the year. I will admit that I didn't draw this up until after these submissions started coming in, so I may well have been influenced by others' choices. I was probably particularly merciless to screenings mentioned by someone else, as well as to films I'd seen before, or to those shown in a festival I volunteered for (which explains the lack of Silent Film Festival selections). But here's my own ten, in chronological order of viewing:

Sátántangó at the Pacific Film Archive, February. The act of watching it felt something like a rite-of-passage into a new phase of cinephilia. That endlessly-circling track over the villagers' faces is just one of many of this film's 172 shots I'll never forget.

the Lady Vanishes at the Castro, February. I'd never seen this British Hitchcock before, and it was all its reputation implied and more. Works to watchmaker's perfection on every level imaginable: as narrative, as art, as political commentary, etc.

Tropical Malady, shown as part of an April residency for Apichatpong Weerasethakul at the Pacific Film Archive; the film was shown in 35mm one day and then on DVD the next, with director Apichatpong behind a microphone performing an extemporaneous live commentary track and answering audience questions throughout the film. (By the way, this method of viewing will be attempted again when the PFA brings Terence Davies to talk about Distant Voices, Still Lives next month.)

Bruce Baillie's four-part epic of color and sound, shadow and "silence", Quick Billy, brought to Artists' Television Access by kino21 in April.

Killer of Sheep at the Castro in May. I also saw it improperly projected at a press screening, not held at the Castro. It was great both times.

The Film on Film Foundation's May presentation of Isadore Isou's masterpiece of cinematic insurgency Venom & Eternity, backed with Christopher Maclaine's The End at the Roxie. The latter film, shot in a Frisco very different from the one I was born in twenty years later, astonished me with its familiarity, its prophecy, its radicalism and its despair.

There was something about seeing the soft-core pornographic drive-in movie Revenge of the Cheerleaders as a MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS screening at the Castro in July. It's stuck with me. I still am trying to reconcile how such a lowbrow film could feel so thrillingly unformulaic even when mixing and matching the expected elements of sex, drugs, dancing and food fights. Talk about irrational exuberance.

The Abbas Kiarostami films shown at the Pacific Film Archive in July and August. I only saw a half-dozen of the features and a few of the shorts, but that still marked my deepest delve into a single retrospective in 2007. To finally see landmarks like Where is the Friend's Home and Close-Up for the first time, as well as early rarities like the Wedding Suit, nurtured me through several months of dread that my government might extend its saber's reach to Iran.

I had never seen Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep before and was delighted to confirm at the PFA in October that it's precisely the masterpiece of syncretism everyone had suggested it was. Having the director there in person was icing on the cake, and I only wish I'd been able to come back for more slices during his residency. (Note: Irma Vep plays the PFA again February 29th to wrap up a Jean-Pierre Léaud series.)

An SF Cinematheque presentation of 1940s-50s independent short films by Frisco filmmakers at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in November. The program included wonderful work by luminaries such as Sidney Peterson and Stan Brakhage, but my very favorite films on the program were a pair made by Jane Conger Belson: Odds and Ends and particularly Logos, a two-minute scintillation of cut-out animation backed by a vanguard electronic score by Henry Jacobs.

Anyone else have favorite experiences seeing old films in movie houses in 2007?

Intolerable Silence

2007-12-29T23:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a bizarre thought. Imagine if Martin Scorsese had filmed the Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, the Gangs of New York and the Departed back-to-back during a period of a year and a half. Instead of releasing them separately over the course of two decades, he edited parts of them together into a single epic-length film, stripping each story down to its essential plot, and cross-cutting between the four to emphasize parallels in their narratives.

What kind of film would this be? Well, it would certainly be an epic of epics, taking place over four distinct times and places. Would it bring forth the stylistic and thematic similarities between these four distinct Films By Scorsese? Or would it encourage us to look at their differences? I'm not exactly sure, but I suppose the closest we'll get to knowing the answer is to view the only film I know of, though not By Scorsese, that was made in this fashion: D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. The 1916 film was first imagined as a straightforward exposé of the societal injustice of the day, but upon the extraordinary financial success of the perniciously racist Birth of a Nation, that concept was combined with retellings of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, of the crucifixion of Christ, and of the fall of Babylon into a single film with a vast scope. It's like a one-film template for an auteurist approach to reading cinema. As cinematographer Karl Brown told it, the four stories were shot in succession and assumed by most of the crew to be destined for four different releases that for some whim of Griffith's happened to share the same title: the Mother and the Law. In fact, two of these four would indeed be re-edited and released as stand-alone films in 1919: the Fall of Babylon and the current-day the Mother and the Law.

The releases and various re-editings and theatrical re-releases of Intolerance were never able to put the picture in significant profit. A September 1928 Variety article reported a $1,750,000 total gross on the picture at the close of the silent era, relative to $1,600,000 in costs, which may well have been even higher (wikipedia suggests it may have come closer to $2,000,000). But the financial failure of the film neither prevented Griffith from continuing his career as a director, nor has it kept many critics from hailing Intolerance as an unmatched high-water-mark of the silent film era. Take one of the most influential institutions of critical canon-formation, the Sight & Sound Top 10, which since 1952 has compiled "Ten Best Film" lists from critics around the world. That first year of the survey, Intolerance placed fifth in both the tallied result as well as on a simultaneous reader survey (incidentally, though they aligned on Intolerance in this survey, as well as the top two choices, the readers were ahead of the critics on Citizen Kane, which was a runner-up on the critics' compiled list but #3 on the readers'.) Since that 1952 assessment, a selection of contributors who have put Intolerance among their chosen ten includes Henri Langlois, Dilys Powell, Jonas Mekas, Enno Patalas, Vincent Canby, Armond White, and since Sight & Sound began inviting film directors to participate, Sidney Lumet, Masahiro Shinoda and Roy Andersson among others.

Most recently, the American Film Institute, in its tenth anniversary of the AFI 100 swapped out Birth of a Nation (#44 back in 1997) for Intolerance (at slot #49). Still, in the age of DVD subscription services and laptop movie-viewing, I sense that a huge-scale film like Intolerance begins to become more and more marginalized by modern movie watchers. Which is why I was so glad to get a chance to see the film tower above me on the Castro Theatre screen earlier this month, courtesy of the SF Silent Film Festival and Photoplay Productions, whose Patrick Stanbury brought a tinted print from London, introduced the screening, and performed 42 manual projection speed changes to ensure that we had the best presentation of the film possible. What a revelation it was to see the film exhibited this way! For the first time, I felt I was starting to understand not only the technical scale and skill involved in the film's making, but also the way the four interlocking stories joined to create a unique and modern narrative. That the three historical tales end in disaster due to intolerance and lack of empathy, makes the 'contemporary' tale become a moving plea of hope that the tragedies of history might not have to repeat themselves. This may be obvious to most, but it's something I'd never grasped before, when trying to watch a home video version of Intolerance, admittedly half-bored, on a television set. Anyway, the film's ultimate message cannot be fully comprehended just by reading about it; it's the precise filmmaking techniques Griffith employs that give Intolerance its emotional impact.

Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell have marked the birth year of the "classical cinema" style in Hollywood to be 1917. Griffith's cinema in Intolerance, released a year earlier, bears many signs that it is a precursor to that style, in which the 180-degree rule is enforced and editing emphasizes match cuts on eyeline or action. Griffith has broken out of what Thompson and Bordwell refer to as the "tableau approach" that contains all the action of a given scene in a single shot. Still, I noticed in Intolerance numerous instances in which cuts between shots in a scene jarred because they were not matched on action, or even because they would repeat the same action from different angles. Kevin Brownlow, in his chapter on film editing in the Parade's Gone By... mentions a theory by Ray Angus that these double action mismatches were entirely deliberate, but doesn't go into specifics. Some of these actions are dramatic enough that I wonder if Griffith thought audiences would be excited by seeing them repeated, as for example Ong-Bak director Prachya Pinkaew clearly did when showing off Tony Jaa's most impressive Muay Thai moves from multiple angles. But that musing doesn't explain instances in which the repeated action is not particularly interesting, nor the other examples of oddly-timed cuts. The issue isn't that the Thompson/Bordwell milestone year of 1917 hadn't been rung in yet, as there are certainly examples of smoothly-edited films made before then; one I can recommend wholeheartedly is Cecil B. DeMille's the Golden Chance from 1915. Don Fairservice in his book Film Editing: History, Theory, Practice discusses several possible explanations, but gets to the heart of the matter, I feel, in this passage:

What must be acknowledged is that the jumps and mismatches in Intolerance generate a tension within scenes which transcends continuity, the jaggedness of the cutting contributing to the content. One of the main difficulties facing a modern spectator who brings to the experience of seeing the film all the accumulated baggage and conditioned responses of continuity cinema is that Griffith's work demands a different quality of understanding wherein the whole is infinitely more important than the parts...

There has been a recent discussion at girish's place about the function of musical accompaniment with a silent film. Let this screening of Intolerance stand as my Exhibit A in the argument for a terrific live performer providing music for a theatrical screening. It's interesting that I found myself registering cutting 'discontinuities' much less frequently in the action sequences, particularly toward the film's culmination as three of the four stories' narrative arcs (the Judean segment having become visually de-emphasized about halfway through the film) converged into a thrilling alignment. I have no doubt in my mind that Dennis James's unflagging Wurlitzer score had as much to do with my emotional involvement in Griffith's converging melodrama as any visual strategies of the director's own making. Does this mean I was manipulated by the music? Yes. But I'm pretty sure it was a manipulation Griffith would have approved of; he was always concerned with the quality of the musical scores sent to the orchestras in theatres playing his pictures, and I can't picture him wanting audiences to watch Intolerance in silence.

James's performance December 1st was all the more remarkable given that the previous night he'd been at the Stanford Theatre, playing to Frank Capra's the Strong Man (just days ago inducted into the National Film Registry) and that he would be providing music for Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil at the Castro that evening. As an example of the formally mature Hollywood style, released ten years after Intolerance, it's a superbly-made film. Yet it portrays an outlook on women that felt like a huge step backward from the strong heroines played by Constance Talmadge and, at least by the end of Griffith's picture, Mae Marsh. Luckily Garbo is a supernatural force that transcends roles borne out of a fear of female sexuality in the flapper era. But before this turns into another huge post topic entirely, let me turn away from my own thoughts on the film and recommend Anne M. Hockens' thoughtful analysis of Flesh and the Devil as a film noir predecessor (and speaking of noir...)

The Silent Film Festival's morning program gave Mr. James a chance to rest his hands and feet, as we were treated to a program of nine mostly-delightful, mostly-hilarious Vitaphone shorts featuring mostly-forgotten vaudeville stars telling jokes and playing music. If you're wondering why a silent film festival deigned to show a program of talking pictures, think of how many silent stars got their start on vaudeville stages (Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, "Fatty" Arbuckle, and Mary Pickford are a few names you might recognize), how many theatres (including the Castro) brought both silent films and vaudeville acts to their patrons, and how important the coming of sound is to an understanding of the history of silent film, and you'll get the idea. Also, the films are really entertaining, and this particular program had never been seen together, much less in Frisco where a theatrical audience for Vitaphone shorts might grow quite healthily. My personal favorites of the nine shown were the Foy Family in Chips of the Old Block, and the Norman Thomas Quintet in Harlem-Mania, featuring a truly unforgettable drummer, and some unexpected camera positions to help accommodate his gymnastics.

In case you haven't noticed, it's been a while since my last post, which I can blame on the busyness and distractions associated with a cross-town move and the holiday season. I'm going to be playing a bit of catch-up on Frisco film events over the next few weeks here at Hell on Frisco Bay before I head off to Park City, Utah. But for now, while I'm on the topic of silent-era films, let me just point out the upcoming screenings of silents with live accompaniment I'm aware of in the next few months.

Monday night at Grace Cathedral there will be two performances of perhaps the most widely-seen of all silent films today, the Lon Chaney, Sr. Phantom of the Opera. It'll be accompanied by Dorothy Papadakos on the sanctuary's Aeolian-Skinner organ. I've never seen a silent film playing in a functioning place of worship before (no, the Paramount doesn't count!) so I'm particularly intrigued to check this out. There will be performances at 7PM for those of you with parties to go to by midnight, and 10PM for those of you who want to end 2007 with a scary movie.

The Pacific Film Archive has a terrific calendar for January-February, surely their best since, oh, way back in September-October at the very least. There's too much to process in one flip-through of the calendar program, but four series are of interest to appreciators of silent film and live music. First, a trio of Sessue Hayakawa films that, as I mentioned in my previous post, screen in conjunction with a UC Berkeley conference on silent cinema February 8-10. Second, a kid-friendly set of Saturday afternoon matinees including a program of Georges Méliès delights January 19th and a February 9th screening of Harold Lloyd in Speedy. Third, an extremely impressive series of European classics, some silent and some not, called the Medieval Remake, including Fritz Lang's rarely-shown Die Nibelungen in two parts January 20th, Dreyer's the Passion of Joan of Arc (paired with Robert Bresson's 1962 interpretation) January 27th, and Murnau's Faust February 16th. Finally, the resuming of the popular Film 50 series of screenings and lectures on the history of cinema will start off in the silent era and include a February 6th showing of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

If you miss that screening, which you're likely to as tickets for Film 50 screenings are scarce, know that you'll get another chance to see Robert Wiene's expressionist masterpiece on this side of the bay in a few months. SFJAZZ has announced the April 12, 2008 return of the Club Foot Orchestra to the Castro Theatre, where the ensemble will perform the signature scores from their heyday: Nosferatu and Sherlock Jr. as well as the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. These folks haven't performed together here since before I was smart enough to realize how great silent films are; I'll definitely want to be on-hand for the reunion.

The Niles Essanay Film Museum has announced its Saturday evening program schedule through March, though not yet on its website. The year starts with Lon Chaney in False Faces January 5th, and continues with selections such as the Black Pirate January 26th (also expected to play the Balboa for that theatre's annual birthday bash February 27th), Charley's Aunt February 2nd, the Docks of New York March 15th, the Covered Wagon March 22nd, and much much more.

And just wait 'til you hear what Frisco's got in store when it comes to talkies!

Quick Flick Picks

2007-11-30T23:48:00.000-08:00

On the eve of a day-long movie marathon, I just wanted to get some items off of my to-blog list.

In my last post on silent film, I mentioned that the Berlin and Beyond festival will, as usual, be showing a German silent film as part of its 2008 program. It's just been revealed that the festival, running January 10-16 at the Castro Theatre, will present the 1929 comedy the Oddball with live musical accompaniment by Dennis James.

Some noteworthy though not-so-silent entries in Berlin and Beyond 2008 include Michael Verhoeven's the Unknown Soldier, and a three-film tribute to the recently-deceased actor Ulrich Mühe: along with his recent triumph in the Lives of Others the festival will screen a film from his East German film career, Half of Life, and his role in the Austrian Michael Haneke's 1997 Funny Games, just before the Sundance premiere of that director's apparently all-but shot-for-shot remake. The opening night film is the Edge of Heaven by Fatih Akin, contradicting the program guide on the Castro's website, which says it will be Yella. Christian Petzod's film will still play in the festival, but its opening slot was switched out for Akin's after the Castro schedules went to press.

Speaking of which, there's a lot to talk about on those Castro schedules, and I'm not even going to cover it all here. A MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS triple bill of Burt Reynolds films including Peter Bogdanovich's rarely-revived tribute to Lubitsch, At Long Last Love, plays December 7th, and another threefer starts with possibly the most heartbreaking summer vacation movie of my teenage years, which was also Winona Ryder's first film role, Lucas. That plays February 8th, the Friday before Valentine's Day (on which Marc Huestis brings Olivia Hussey for the 40th anniversary of Romeo & Juliet.)

There's another in the Castro's continuing series of classic films organized by composer, this time nine days (December 26-January 3) of double-bills scored by the great Miklos Rosza, including multiple collaborations with Billy Wilder and Vincent Minelli. January 4-9 brings the nine of the ten most well-known pairings of the "Emperor" Akira Kurosawa and his "Wolf" Toshiro Mifune. They made sixteen films together, and I wish the selection included Red Beard or some of the rarely-screened early films like the Quiet Duel and the Idiot, but I'm glad for the opportunity to see any of these again on the Castro's mighty screen. I've never seen the Seven Samurai, for example, on anything larger than a regular television set, which is probably enough to send me to the cinephile stocks.

If you're concerned about how to fit the new cut of Blade Runner playing at the Embarcadero into your schedule this week, know that it will make a return appearance at the Castro for a week starting February 15th. The early-eighties revival I'm most excited about seeing in a Landmark theatre is one I've never seen in any cut before: Jean-Jacques Beniex's Diva, which opens at the Shattuck in Berkeley as well as somewhere in Frisco December 7th.

The Roxie has a pair of films from this past spring's SF International Film Festival on its upcoming slate. One I've seen and can recommend: Les Blank's new documentary All in This Tea. Not being particularly interested in gourmet tea varieties, I was skeptical going in, but I found the film to be a fun but serious peek into the blossoming of capitalism in China. It opens December 14th. The other is one I missed in May but won't in January, when it opens on the 11th: El Violin from Mexico.

The Red Vic has its full December (highlight: the Draughtsman's Contract on the 16th & 17th) and January (highlight: the Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford on the 15th & 16th) schedules online, but its paper copy extends a bit beyond that, revealing among other things that the Battle of Algiers will play February 3-4.

More time-sensitive news is that two programs of British experimental films from the 1960s and 1970s will play at at the SF Art Institute this coming Monday evening, December 3rd. This tip comes from Jim Flannery, who left it on the cinephile bulettin board that is girish's blog. More on the series here. It's the beginning of a busier-than-usual week of public screenings at SFAI, where a cellphone film event called mini-PAH will take place December 7-8.

SFMOMA, which is currently reprising the Joseph Cornell films it showed earlier this fall as part of its exhibition on the collagist, has also been running a fascinating film series I'm sorry I haven't really mentioned here before. In conjunction with a Jeff Wall exhibition, the museum will screen John Huston's Fat City this and next Saturday afternoon, R.W. Fassbinder's proto-emo-fest masterwork the Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant December 13th and 15th, Ingmar Bergman's Persona December 20th and 22nd, and perhaps most exciting since I've never seen this legendary epic, Jean Eustache's the Mother and the Whore December 27th and 29th. Then, beginning January 5th with a screening of Point of Order, SFMOMA will run a retrospective of the films of Emile de Antonio. In the Year of the Pig plays January 19th and 24th.

The current Year of the Pig ends February 6th, 2008. You may know that the Japanese Zodiac is based on the Chinese Zodiac, though the Pig is replaced with the Wild Boar in Japan (in Thailand the Pig becomes an Elephant). But since Japan celebrates New Year January 1st like we in the West, not the Lunar New Year of the Chinese, the Year of the Boar will end sooner than the Year of the Pig. Have I lost you yet? Either way, the new 12-year Zodiac cycle will begin next year, on either January 1st or February 7th, with the Year of the Rat. Shortly after the latter there will be a Pacific Film Archive tribute to Japanese-American silent film actor Sessue Hayakawa, who was born in 1889 (the year of the Ox, like me only 84 years earlier). February 9th screens Hayakawa's star-making role in Cecil B. DeMille's the Cheat, and on February 10th the Devil's Claim and Forbidden Paths will be shown. All three will be accompanied by Judith Rosenberg on piano, and are presented in connection with a two-day conference on silent film called Border Crossings: Re-Thinking Early Cinema. Fascinating stuff, and I'm hopeful that there will be more Hayakawa films announced soon.

Time for a list

2007-11-25T02:38:00.000-08:00

Ten reasons to come to the Silent Film Festival's winter program at the Castro Theatre this Saturday, December 1st:

1. To experience three completely different facets of silent-era Hollywood in a single day. D.W. Griffith's Intolerance demonstrates the outer possibilities of feature filmmaking in 1916, when Hollywood was being built. Flesh and the Devil just might represent the quintessence of star-system filmmaking in 1926, when studios like MGM had grown into the same basic form they'd remain in for decades to come. And the Vitaphone Vaudeville program showcases silent-era experiments in audiovisual motion pictures.

2. Live musical performances from incomparable organist Dennis James for both Flesh and the Devil and Intolerance. The latter will also be accompanied by a second sort of live "performance" in the projection booth as Patrick Stanbury of Photoplay Productions monitors the changing film speed for the tinted print that will make its national debut at the event. Intolerance is, it must be admitted, too often thought of as an academic heirloom, but the unique conditions under which it's being screened on Saturday seem likely to maximize the film's entertainment value.

3. See the history of vaudeville in a theatre that began as a part of that history. Like the Golden Gate and the Warfield Theatre, I understand that the Castro was originally built in 1922 to showcase both movies and vaudeville acts. Watching these movies that are our best remaining preservations of those acts in a genuine former vaudeville venue- can you ask for a combination more natural?

4. The program can serve as the centerpiece of a whole winter season of watching silent films on Frisco Bay. It's a perfect warm-up for the Castro Theatre's retrospective of Charlie Chaplin films December 2-12, also currently ongoing at the Pacific Film Archive. The night before the event, November 30th, there's a screening of Harry Langdon in the Strong Man as part of the Stanford Theatre's Frank Capra tribute. The Rafael Film Center is hosting a December 6th evening of the Films of 1907, two hours of centennial-celebrating shorts including Pathé's the Dancing Pig, which played on the SFSFF's Retour de Flamme program in July, and the Red Spectre, which didn't. The 13th Berlin & Beyond Film Festival will show an as-yet-unannounced German silent during its festival in January. The Balboa has announced it will celebrate its annual birthday bash with a February 27 screening of the Black Pirate. And of course the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont continues its Saturday evening screenings, even during the holiday season while many local specialty screening venues are closed. In particular, here's a chance to see Intolerance at the Castro precisely two weeks before Buster Keaton's spoof on Griffith's film, the Three Ages, plays at Niles December 15th.

5. From the imdb credit listings for Intolerance: Douglas Fairbanks plays a "Man on White Horse." Tod Browning plays "a Crook." W.S. Van Dyke plays a "Wedding Guest." Eugene Pallette plays "Prosper Latour." Wallace Reid is a "Boy Killed in the Fighting." King Vidor and Frank Borzage have uncredited, unidentified extra roles. And that's just a sampling of the names familiar to cinephiles, who it will be fun to try to spot on the screen. Relatedly, I've recently been skeptically reading Anthony Slide's Silent Players, which is packed with gossipy mini-biographies of silent film stars who were a big deal ninety years ago, playing major roles in Intolerance and other films, but are all but forgotten today: Elmer Clifton, Miriam Cooper, Howard Gaye, Robert Harron, Seena Owen, Constance Talmadge, etc. Even Mae Marsh is not spoken of often any longer but gets a nice profile in this book. Which reminds me, the festival's Booksmith table is always a tremendous place to find relevant reading during the event.

6. For the listologists: three of the films playing are part of the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Intolerance was among the first 25 selections for the registry back in 1989. The George Burns & Gracie Allen Vitaphone short Lambchops made the list in 1999, and Flesh and the Devil was inducted just last year.

7. 2007 marks the 80th anniversary of the Jazz Singer, and the year has seen a cameo role for the film in Indiewood's upcoming the Savages, its first-ever DVD release, and an ensuing debate about blackface and the film's relevancy today. One thing's for certain: the Jazz Singer could not have been the sensation that it was had there not been a sufficient number of theatres wired for sound before its release. It was the increasing popularity of Vitaphone shorts that paved that way. Most of the selections on the Vitaphone Vaudeville program were made after the Jazz Singer, but you should be able to get a good sense of the genre from the varied set. Though a selection of Vitaphone shorts were released as extras on the Jazz Singer DVD set, only three of the films playing on Saturday are among them; the other six have never been released on DVD or VHS. A few were released on LaserDiscs which are now highly sought-after.

8. Greta Garbo's face, which was never intended to be seen on a television set, not even a discounted Black Friday HDTV set. No, it was photographed by William Daniels to be seen dozens of feet high and wide on a screen like the Castro's. If you've ever wondered exactly what the big deal about Garbo was/is, here's an opportunity for the answer.

9. In an age when major Oscar nominations and wins are going to films like Crash and the Hours, which unite superficially disconnected stories together under a single theme, it seems a particularly good time to look at the most ambitious experiment along those lines: Intolerance. What would Griffith have thought of Babel, I wonder? (And perhaps just as pertinently, what would Edward Said have thought of it?)

10. And of course, in order to obtain the customary program guide with in-depth essays on the films, and to see the informative and entertaining slideshows, all written by my fellow members of the Silent Film Festival research committee. Several of the points in this post sprouted from seeds planted in my head during our discussions over the past few months.

Of course this list is by no means exhaustive. Any suggestions for #11?

Adam Hartzell interviews the director of Host & Guest

2007-11-20T12:48:00.000-08:00

I have to hand it to the 10th SF Asian Film Festival and the 5th Korean American Film Festival, both of which ended for me Sunday with a screening of the 1963 Korean War movie Marines Who Never Returned. Its first ten minutes felt as eerily documentary-like a depiction of combat as any I've seen on film. It makes me glad I still live in the Richmond District not far from the 4 Star Theatre, though for some of the programs hosted there in the past week and a half I would certainly have traveled much longer distances. And I was delighted to learn last Friday that the venue had booked four more days of festival fun, starting yesterday and ending on Thanksgiving, in the form of a Chinese-American Film Festival. Along with films from China and the Chinese diaspora, there will be one more Korean film in the program. Sometime contributor to this site Adam Hartzell has more:

This year, when asked to help out with the San Francisco Korean American Film Festival, I decided it was time for me to do more than simply write the program notes as I have been asked to do in the past. And do more I did, much more than a guy who has a regular day job that requires him to wake up at 4:30 AM, work 10 hour days, and travel abroad from anywhere from a month to two months should really do, but that’s what you get sometimes for volunteering. Thankfully, I worked with a great bunch of people who equally worked their butts off. But regardless of how much you work, some things just don’t work out.

And one of those things that didn’t work out was we weren’t able to get Sin Dong-il’s (alternate Romanization is Shin) wonderful film Host & Guest into the festival. This had to do with coordination difficulties across the globe, conflicting country holidays and work schedules. Let’s just say I was working outside of my skill set. But thankfully, Director Sin intervened on my behalf and Frank Lee of the 4 Star Theatre offered to open up some slots amidst his Chinese-American Film Festival that began this Monday. Host & Guest will be screening this Wednesday, November 21st at 9:30pm, and Thanksgiving Day at 5pm.

It’s been over two years since I’ve seen Host & Guest, but it’s a film that's slowly grown on me as I've sat with the images and dialogue of the bizarre coupling of a bitter, arrogant film-less Film Professor and a conscientiously-objecting Jehovah's Witness. What I recall after two years away from the film (for thoughts fresh from my viewing the film at the Pusan International Film Festival in 2005 you can go here) is that I appreciated how, although strong in its contempt for the Cheney/Bush administration, the film didn’t focus its critique solely outward, but inward as well. Host & Guest is equally as critical of the South Korean government as it is the United States. Host & Guest is equally critical of itself as it is others. In this way, what might appear clumsy in less skillful hands was gently laid to grow within my thoughts and my emotions that followed me after sharing witness with Sin’s vision.

I asked Sin if I could do an interview with him of a few simple questions over email. I offered him the option to respond in Korean if he felt more comfortable speaking in his first language. He responded mostly in Korean with an exception I will note. Along with thanking Sin for taking the time to answer my brief, amateurish questions, I must also thank Kaya Lee for her willingness to translate under a tighter deadline than I’d prefer to request. I adjusted some of her translation for flow, but I wouldn’t have been able to do this without her. Equally helpful to bringing the film to San Francisco were the SF Korean American Film Festival director Waylon McGuigan, Frank Lee of the 4 Star Theatre, Kim Hee-jeon of CJ Entertainment, and Director Sin’s sister who lives in the Bay Area but whom I won’t name because time constraints don’t allow for me to confirm whether she’s comfortable with my posting her name here.

The following is the interview.

Adam Hartzell, for Hell on Frisco Bay: The title, Host & Guest, is an interesting one. What brought you to use that title for the film?

Director Sin Dong-il: I was building the story’s plot and surprisingly, the English title Host and Guest came across my mind before the Korean title. I really loved the English title; so, I chose one of the main characters’ names as “Ho-jun” from “Host” and the other’s name was “Gye-sang” from “Guest”. I felt so much interest in the idea that two characters who have totally different ideologies respectively on the surface meet each other as a host and an uninvited guest, that is, as a visitor. As their relationship proceeds, each character becomes a host and a guest as well, and it means both are the host of their own lives.

HoFB: Could you talk a little bit about military service in South Korea to give American audiences an understanding of it since an understanding of the obligation all young Korean adults have is important to the film?

Director Sin: Korean people have been considering men’s military service as an obligation that they should accept naturally without doubt because of ideological confrontation and military tension between North and South Korea which has been ongoing for more than 50 years. Such represents that nationalism is controlling Korean people’s consciousness. It is true that people who refused the military obligation under conscience demands for peace have not been known to the South Korean public. I believe nationalism is an anachronism as the cold war composition has already collapsed around the world.

HoFB: Being a first time film director, having one character be a film professor who has never made a film makes me wonder how much he is based on your own experiences. Does that character represent your life in any way? Or is he more the kind of person you are worried you could become?

Director Sin: My life experience helped in making the film. Unlike the U.S. film market, South Korea’s independent film industry is very vulnerable. It is very hard to pursue my original thought into film without negotiating with the commercial/business world. South Korea’s film industry is focusing on box-office value too much. Actually it will bring serious risks/result in the end. I débuted with a feature film, but making a feature film is too hard. I am so gloomy whenever I think about how to get financial support for my third film. If anybody is interested in my third work after watching Host and Guest, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I always welcome producers for my work… just like a host and a guest. [laugh] It’s half seriousness and half joke. In addition, even though Ho-jun is called a professor, he is actually a part time instructor.

HoFB: If there is any kind of statement about the film you wish to make, feel free to add anything else you might want to say.

Director Sin: [Here, Director Sin Dong-il chose to type in English.]

Most people see only what they want to see. This world labels you a stranger once you trespass the standardized rules of the society. I want to open the door that is shut fast to these strangers.

If you want to look at this film closely, I would like to call your attention to Ho-jun’s snobbish elitism, deeply ingrained in his personality. Ho-jun finds himself transformed into an enemy of himself after having gone through days full of breakdowns and failures. He then meets Gye-sang, another soul, who’s also wounded by the prejudice and ignorance of the world. Thanks to Gye-sang, Ho-jun finds himself again, no longer as a "visitor" in his own life, but as both "host" and "guest."

I dedicate this humble film to those who are dreaming of a different world.

Film Festival Frenzy

2007-11-09T23:22:00.000-08:00

It's common knowledge that Frisco Bay is home to a lot of film festivals. But this November is the busiest month for them in my memory. It's enough to make a body want to throw up its hands and stay away from even thinking about them all. Which, given the quietness here at Hell On Frisco Bay, may appear to be just what I've done. It's not true though. I have other excuses. But for now, let me just dive in and survey the festival scene to the best of my ability right now:

I'm excited by the return, after more than two years absence, of the SF Asian Film Festival, now in its tenth year at the Four Star Theatre. There are also screenings at the Castro: last night's opening film Genghis Khan: to the Ends of Earth and Sea and a closing day slate on Sunday, November 18th. Joining forces with the 10th SFAFF is the SF Korean American Film Festival, which, along with free DVD screenings of Korean films at SFSU's Coppola Theatre, will be presenting at the Four Star ten films programmed by Denise Hwang and Sun-young Moon of KOFIC as a nationally touring program. So far I've seen half of these ten films and can attest to the strength and diversity of a line-up including the jealousy-fueled road movie Driving With My Wife's Lover (which I saw at Sundance, pictured above), and Barking Dogs Never Bite, Grain in Ear, and the King and the Clown (which I saw thanks to various other Frisco festivals.)

But I'm most impressed with the rare selection of classic Korean films being presented in the line-up. There are a pair of Korean War films, 1963's Marines Who Never Returned and 1974's Wildflower in the Battlefield, and this afternoon I caught a screening of the 1958 a Flower in Hell. Not a war film, it nonetheless is set in the shadow of the American military presence on the peninsula, as it tracks the pathways of yang gongju prostitutes and black marketeers on a barb-wired army base. It's a somewhat similar, if inland, milieu to the Japanese coastal one Shohei Imamura depicted in Pigs and Battleships a few years later. The story of a fresh-faced outsider to this world becoming seduced by his scar-faced brother's femme fatale wife may seem familiar, but the particular details, as well as director Shin Sang-ok's stylistic touches, certainly won't. I was very intrigued by Shin's method of cross-cutting between simultaneous actions, temporally almost in the style of a flashback-and-return, though context makes clear that a flashback it is not, especially when we do get to see the film employ a flashback to a childhood memory, utilizing a technique I can't remember encountering before: the illusion of a single-shot pan from present to past. A Flower in Hell plays at the Four Star again tomorrow afternoon at 5:35 and is a rare opportunity to sample a classic that has stood the test of time in its native Korea. More information about the SFAFF and the SFKAFF can be found in Michael Guillen's interview with Adam Hartzell at the Evening Class.

On Wednesday I attended and mildly liked the Chilean improvisation-based film the Sacred Family at the Roxie Film Center. It's part of the Global Lens 2007 series of subtitled films, which plays at various Frisco Bay venues through November 15th. Unfortunately, I understand that Global Lens screenings at the Balboa are no longer planned despite the information on the festival website, and that all the remaining Frisco Bay screenings of these films will be video projections. More information on the Global Lens 2007 lineup is available here and here.

I haven't yet made it to this year's Latino Film Festival, running at various Frisco Bay venues through November 18th, but I hear that the laudable decision to screen on 35mm prints at the Castro was subverted by technical snags. I hope they don't deter future presentations in 35mm for this festival or others. More information about this festival can be found here and here.

This weekend marks the beginning of the SF Film Society's second-busiest season of the year (after the annual International Film Festival in the Spring, of course). Last night a documentary called the Pixar Story (on guess what Frisco Bay animation production company?) opened the 2nd Annual International Animation Festival, which is putting a trove of animated shorts and features on display at the Embarcadero over the next couple days. Here is a terrific interview with festival programmer Sean Uyehara. And as soon as the IAF is over, the Film Society's annual New Italian Cinema series begins, also at the Embarcadero. More here. After a breather for Thanksgiving, the Society resumes its year-round SF360 Movie Night November 29th with the French film Her Name is Sabine. Benefit screenings of Gus Van Sant's new Paranoid Park December 8th at the Letterman Digital Arts Center and the animated Persepolis December 12th at the Kabuki are also open to the paying public.

The 32nd American Indian Film Festival closes tomorrow at the Palace of Fine Arts with its awards show. Apologies for not having mentioned this festival in time to point to any of the film screenings. Hopefully you read this in time anyway.

The 3rd i South Asian Film Festival begins Friday, November 16 at the Victoria Theatre with a program of shorts made by Frisco Bay residents of South Asian descent, and then continues with the unconventional, quietly disquieting documentary John and Jane Toll-Free, a co-presentation with Konrad Steiner and Irinia Leimbacher's kino21. It's a peephole into the world of call centers staffed by the day-sleeping Mumbaikars who work long hours speaking to North Americans about things we'd rather not be bothered about, in language intended to keep us on the phone just a little bit longer than we otherwise would. First Aid Kits are sold as "Emergency Medical Systems" and the weather outside is "snowing" if anyone asks. But I'm not doing the depth of John and Jane Toll-Free's themes justice here. It's really something to see for yourself.

The next two days 3rd i moves into the Castro and then the Roxie. My most anticipated screening of the month (very narrowly beating out Jeanne Dielman next Tuesday at the PFA and the Phil Chambliss films at YBCA Thursday and Friday) is Guru Dutt's legendary Pyaasa, a fifty-year old film generally considered one of the great masterpieces of old Bollywood. I've never seen a single Dutt film, though I've wanted to for years. I'm thrilled I'm going to be able to see this one on the giant Castro screen on the morning of November 17th.

When November ends, festival season in Frisco does too, it seems. At least until January when Berlin and Beyond and Noir City arrive. But on December 1st, the Castro will host Frisco's last film festival hurrah for 2007, when the Silent Film Festival presents its third annual one-day Winter event. I must duly warn that I'm a volunteer for the festival, so I may be biased, but I think all three programs are must-sees. Flesh and the Devil is reputedly Greta Garbo's greatest Hollywood silent film, and the one that really confirmed her stardom here. The Vitaphone Vaudeville program contextualizes the technological developments of the late silent era, preserves the all-but-lost Vaudeville era into the modern era, and is certain to elicit laughter. And seeing the tinted Photoplay print of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance with Dennis James behind the organ seems like the ideal way to see this monument of cinema into the twenty-first century. But don't just take it from me, check out Anne M. Hockens' preview of the festival too!

Digression

2007-11-08T12:19:00.000-08:00

It's far too late for the Totally Unrelated Blog-a-Thon but I feel the need to talk about Halloween a bit. In my previous post, I bitched that the city leaders hadn't put together a plan for how to keep the revelry in the Castro safe. Now I'm not so sure. I'm impressed and a little chilled by how efficiently they were able to prevent much revelry at all. Though the late-breaking decision to close the 16th and Market BART station and the Castro MUNI station may have been made in a last-minute panic, I think it's more likely that the plan was hatched early on, but deliberately kept quiet in order to minimize the window of opportunity for public comment or organized protests. Add to these emergency-response-style measures a fear campaign, the strong-arming of "uncompliant" businesses, and a police presence even larger than last year's and it sounds like a recipe for a little taste of friendly fascism. Which might actually be considered a nice resume-builder for our newly-re-elected lame duck as he aspires to higher political office. I spent Halloween helping run a haunted house in an area of Frisco far from the Castro, so all of my thoughts on this topic come from hearsay and instinct. But yesterday's Bay Guardian article did a good job articulating and putting data to support some of the feelings I've had on the issue.

Maybe I'm seeing conspiracies everywhere because my role in the haunted house was that of a character called Major Canard, head of a corporate/military/scientific mobilization effort to control a zombie outbreak, though secretly responsible for said outbreak. Our concept was intended to point to hypocrisies and blurred lines between public and private, military and mercenary. And of course an excuse to have fun acting like zombies. I think we were successful in scaring the neighborhood. Anyway, my involvement in planning, building and tearing down this haunted house is one of the factors that has kept Hell on Frisco Bay so quiet for the past month or so. I can't guarantee that November will be a whole lot less quiet, but I do hope to have a new post on film up very soon.

Halloween in the Castro (and beyond)

2007-10-22T01:48:00.000-07:00

This October 31st I'm planning to be home for Halloween, spending my entire evening here in the avenues just as I have for the past several years. The last time I tried to attend Halloween in the Castro I found it a very unpleasant experience. Still, I think it's obvious that our city leaders have fallen down on their preparations for this event in the wake of last year's highly-publicized debacle, their strategy seemingly relying on the hope that potential revelers will be deterred by little more than fear and a lack of available toilets.

The Castro Theatre will be closed to the public on the holiday, just as it has been the last few years. I'd like to draw attention to the plethora of appealing film screenings happening at other venues around Frisco Bay on October 31st, 2007.

One of the most exciting events is presented by the SFJAZZ festival. Freidrich Wilhelm Murnau's silent film Faust, with a live musical accompaniment by the 10-piece Willem Breuker Kollektief. This will happen a few miles North of the Castro, at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, an excellent venue for silent film and live music, as the stage has the size to accommodate a large ensemble and still have great sight lines for a film. And what could be more Halloween than a film about a pact with the devil?

The "other" PFA, Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive (about 15 miles to the Northeast of the Castro), closes out October with a Vincent Price Hammer film I've never seen, the Last Man on Earth. Remade once with Charlton Heston as the Omega Man, and again with Will Smith as the soon-to-be-released I Am Legend, it looks just up my alley in so many ways. Since I'll be missing the screening, I'll have to remember to rent it sometime...it'd make a good two-for-one rental at Le Video on my next birthday, as I share that natal date with Price.

A kid-friendly film event in the East Bay is happening at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont (thirty miles Southeast of the Castro.) The downhome venue is hosting a Halloween afternoon matinee of kiddie cartoons from 4-5:30 PM. They're also showing non-kiddie Halloween movies on the weekend of October 26-28: the silent horror spoof the Cat and the Canary and the 1970s film the Milpitas Monster made in nearby, um, Milpitas.

Back here in Frisco, the Red Vic in the Upper Haight (about a mile Northwest of the Castro) will be showing the recent zombie comedy Fido October 31 and November 1, just after showing a couple of more established favorites of that micro-genre, Army of Darkness on October 29 and Shaun of the Dead October 30th.

The Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, about 18 miles to the North of the Castro, will be showing the 1970 Czech New Wave vampire film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders with a live score by a Philadelphia-based 10-piece group of musicians called, appropriately enough, the Valerie Project. The screening/performance will be repeated November 1st on the Frisco side of the Golden Gate at, where else? The Castro.

Indeed, it's not controversial to celebrate Halloween in the Castro, as long as it's not on the 31st. If seeing a horror movie is your idea of a good way to celebrate the season, the Castro Theatre has provided a host of opportunities this month. I missed the annual Shock it To Me festival, but this past weekend I took in another MiDNITES FOR MANiACS triple-bill of three films I'd never seen before: Flowers in the Attic (which I didn't really like), a gorgeous archival print of a Nightmare on Elm Street (which greatly exceeded my admittedly very low expectations) and an appropriately gritty, scratchy drive-in print of the Hills Have Eyes (which I'm still simultaneously skeeved out about and in awe of.) The horror continues this week with, of all things, one of the double-bills in the theatre's current Ingmar Bergman tribute. Not many of the late Swedish master's films can be slapped with the "horror movie" label, but Hour of the Wolf is one, and Persona is very arguably another. Both play on Tuesday, October 23 (and Persona makes repeat appearances at the Pacific Film Archive December 8th and at SFMOMA December 20th and 22nd.)

On October 26-28, the Castro will play host to a mini-series of horror films sprung from the mind of Stephen King. It doesn't include the two earliest, and almost surely greatest, films made from King's books, Carrie and the Shining, but those films get played somewhat regularly around here anyway (in fact, the Kubrick film plays the Clay midnights November 16th and 17th.) How often do we get a chance to see 35mm prints of John Carpenter's take on Christine, George Romero's Creepshow, or David Cronenberg's the Dead Zone? Watching the latter on VHS years ago, I concluded that it wasn't one of that Canadian auteur's great films. But I think I was disappointed in the relative lack of unforeseen orifices appearing on the characters' bodies; now that I've seen Spider, a History of Violence and Eastern Promises and have become convinced that Cronenberg can be just as masterful when depicting the transformation of a human personality as a human body, I'm eager to revisit the Dead Zone (and M. Butterfuly too, if any intrepid repertory programmers and/or DVD releasers happen to be reading this.)

On October 29th and 30th, there will be two showings per night of a brand-new print of Eraserhead. I've been waiting years to see this film, on film, with an audience. Jonathan Rosenbaum has called David Lynch's first feature film, which he began while a student at AFI, perhaps that organization's "only substantial contribution to film culture--American or global." He's also written that it "steadfastly refuses to provide a communal experience." I want to see for myself. Eraserhead also plays at the Rafael from October 26-30.

A few more horror movies, not playing at the Castro, that you might want to know about: The Last Man, the Lebanese vampire movie that's playing in Berkeley October 26th as part of the currently-running Arab Film Festival. Evil Dead 2 plays the Parkway in Oakland on October 25th, and though it'll be significantly after Halloween, the Esperanto-language devil-worship movie Incubus plays the Parkway's sister theatre the Cerrito on November 8th. More hair-of-the-dog films for your November horror hangover include the Wizard of Gore midnights November 2 & 3 at the Clay, with director Herschell Gordon Lewis in appearance both nights and Sick Nurses, a brand-new Thai horror film playing as part of the November 8-18 Asian Film Festival returning to the Four Star Theatre. I'm very curious to see Sick Nurses if only to see what kind of portrayal of medical professionals was tolerated by the same Thai censor board that banned Apichatpong Weerasethakul's poignant Syndromes and a Century for briefly showing doctors drinking alcohol and becoming sexually aroused.

It also feels worth mentioning a few screenings of non-horror films in this post before I go: Bruce Baillie will present two Día de los Muertos programs honoring "departed filmmakers who have given a piece of their souls to the noble cause of avant-garde cinema," including Stan Brakhage, Will Hindle and Marie Menken through SF Cinematheque on November 1 & 2. The Latino Film Festival opens November 2nd with a screening of Nonna's Trip followed by its own Día de los Muertos celebration.

Finally, the 1944 black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace is probably the closest thing Frank Capra ever came to making a horror movie. His films are generally considered antipodal to horror films. On December 15-18 Arsenic and Old Lace closes out (well, almost, aside from the traditional December 24th screening of It's a Wonderful Life) an impressive Capra season beginning November 2nd at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto.

Wuthering Heights

2007-09-30T23:59:00.000-07:00

How many ways are there to segue from a Blog-A-Thon on William Wyler to one on Luis Buñuel? More than you might think. Flickhead, the host of the latter 'Thon, has illustrated one pathway by posting a terrific photograph with the two men posed less than a yard apart from each other (Wyler's standing next to George Cukor, who's standing behind Buñuel). It was not the first time the directors had rubbed elbows. In 1971, in celebration the Cannes Film Festival's 25th edition, both men were among a group of twelve international auteurs honored. The others were Lindsay Anderson, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Rene Clement, Frederico Fellini, Vojtech Jasny, Masaki Kobayashi, Orson Welles (who was not present at the festival) and Serge Youtkevitch. You may say, "wait a minute, that doesn't add up to twelve!" Blame the New York Times article of May 13, 1971 from which I obtained this list, for coming up one short. Wyler biographer Jan Herman wrote that there were five directors honored, not twelve: Wyler, Buñuel, Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Rene Clair. Obviously further research on this gathering is merited.

Another clear path between the two directors is that they, with apologies to Yoshishige Yoshida, Peter Kosminsky, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Fuest, A.V. Bramble and Jacques Rivette, directed the two most enduring film versions of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights. It seems Buñuel had the idea first, as the book was a favorite of his surrealist crowd in the early 1930s. According to Francisco Aranda's Luis Buñuel: a Critical Biography he worked with Pierre Unik, and briefly with Georges Sadoul as well, to write a screen adaptation shortly after the completion of Land Without Bread in 1932. But Buñuel would not have the ability to get the project off the ground until after he'd established himself as a director of narrative features in Mexico. Wyler's Wuthering Heights was released in 1939, earning numerous Oscar nominations and establishing Laurence Olivier as an international star. Buñuel would not begin revising his old script until 1952. The film was shot in 1953 and released in 1954 under the title Cumbres Borrascosas (the title the Brontë book was known by in Spanish translations). Later it was retitled Abismos de Pasión.

Both the 1939 American version and the 1954 Mexican version of Wuthering Heights were filmed in their respective countries' Southwestern scrub desertlands. Wyler's version had its outdoor scenes shot in the still-rural outskirts of Los Angeles. Buñuel, according to biographer John Baxter, shot the film

at the hacienda of San Francisco de Quadra in the barren uplands of Guerrero, near Taxco. Critics noticed immediately that this was pretty odd country. Thunderstorms crash and flare each night, but dawn reveals a land as parched and bare as the slopes of Paracutin. Most of the trees are dead, but Eduardo, the effete Hindley character, still finds plenty of butterflies and insects for his collection.

But Buñuel's Wuthering Heights makes no reference to geography, and indeed changes the names of its characters so that Cathy becomes Catalina (played by Irasema Dilián), and Heathcliff becomes Alejandro (Jorge Mistral). If Wyler's version attempted a recreation of Brontë's Yorkshire, down to the vast quantities of Calluna vulgaris imported from England and planted on the hillsides, Buñuel's version seems set in its own unique landscape if not land, an arid one all the better to inflame the illogical passions of the characters.

Buñuel wanted to enhance the l'amour fou aspects of Brontë's novel, and one way he achieved this was by beginning the film at the moment of Heathcliff/Alejandro's return upon having made his fortune. By spending so much time with Heathcliff, Catherine and Hindley as youths, Wyler's film explains the tragedy of the romance quite plausibly. He shows how the connection between Heathcliff and Cathy is sown, and also how their class differences must keep them apart. Buñuel, by contrast, simply drops us into a world in which the fundamental bonds and barriers between the characters have long since been established, and insists we pay attention instead to just how they are resisted. As Sue Lonoff de Cuevas has so succintly put it, Wyler's version of the romance is "sentimental" and Buñuel's "anti-sentimental."

This despite a romantic-style musical score adapted by composer Raul Lavista from Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Buñuel had used this music before, in both Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or. When discussing these two films, and specifically in reference to the latter, Peter Conrad has written, "An orchestra happens to be playing Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which treats love as a mystical rapture; for Dali and Buñuel, it is more like a demented regression." In Wuthering Heights Wagner's themes are rapture and regression all at once, the Liebestod endowing the final sequence in particular with a great deal of its disturbing resonance. Watching it recently, I found myself wondering if it was at all possible that Bernard Herrmann might have seen Buñuel's film before being inspired to masterfully borrow the same theme to signify the l'amour fou of Vertigo. Vincent Canby, in his 1983 review of Buñuel's Wuthering Heights, suggests that the film had not played in New York City (Herrmann's lifelong home) until 1976, except perhaps at one of the city's Spanish-language theatres. It's intriguing to imagine the composer catching a Mexican Buñuel film at a place like the Elgin (which played only Spanish-language films in the 1950s), but the connection is most likely to be happy coincidence, I suspect. Yet, apart from its placement in the final scene, Buñuel was not happy with the music in Wuthering Heights. At least, he said as much later in life. Aranda quotes him:

It was my own fault. My negligence. I went to Europe, to Cannes, and left the composer to add the musical accompaniment; and he put music throughout the film. A real disaster. I intended to use Wagner just at the end, in order to give the film a romantic aura, precisely the characteristic sick imagination of Wagner.

But Baxter notes that the director did not leave for Europe until April 1954, after the music track for the film had already been fixed in place. And Aranda quotes Buñuel again, this time from an interview that took place while he was in Cannes that year serving on the jury that selected Gate of Hell as top prizewinner: "For Cumbres Borrascosas I put myself into the state of mind of 1930; and since at that time I was a hopeless Wagnerian, I introduced fifty minutes of Wagner." Here Buñuel seemingly is taking personal credit for the abundance of music in the film, and in the context of a discussion of how much he generally dislikes film music, too. So did he change his mind, or just his tune? Another subject for further research, it appears.

More reviews of Buñuel's Wuthering Heights well worth reading include: Ed Gonzalez's take at Slant, Fernando F. Croce's capsule at CinePassion, and a review newly-written for this very Blog-a-Thon by Robert Monell of I'm In a Jess Franco State of Mind.

And if you're in the Frisco Bay Area wondering when your next chance to see a Buñuel film on the big screen might be, it looks like you may have to wait until December 17th, when Belle de Jour will be brought to Artists' Television Access along with a post-film discussion. It's part of a series devoted to silver screen sex workers presented by Whore! Magazine to benefit the health care efforts at the Mission District's St. James Infirmary. This fall at ATA looks particularly busy with interesting screenings in general, including the Other Cinema fall program, the ATA Film and Video Festival October 10-12, a continuing series of Guy Debord films, a stint as a venue for the 11th Arab Film Festival (which has just released the full contents of its program), and an October 26th evening of music and film entitled Roman Meal that you really do not want to miss. Trust me on that one.

An Interview With Judy Wyler Sheldon

2007-09-23T23:48:00.000-07:00

André Bazin once called him "the consummate artist". James Agee said he was "one of the great ones." He was William Wyler, and this weekend has seen a confluence of celebrations, re-evaluations, and analysis of the work of this director, in the form of the William Wyler Blog-A-Thon hosted by Mike "Goatdog" Phillips.

William Wyler and Margaret Tallichet ("Talli"), his wife, named their first two children after characters in his films. The eldest daughter Catherine was, like a great many girls born in 1939, named after Merle Oberon's character in Wuthering Heights. She would executive-produce a documentary on her father called Directed By William Wyler, built around the last interview he ever gave, three days before his death in 1981.

The second Wyler daughter was born just before the 1942 release of Mrs. Miniver, and was named Judy after the on-screen daughter of Greer Garson's title character, who was played by child actor Clare Sanders in the film. Now, under her married name Judy Wyler Sheldon, she is the president of the board of directors of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, an organization that I volunteer for. To contribute to this Blog-a-Thon, I thought it might be fun to interview a Wyler family member. Indeed, it was a delight to experience Judy's warm humor over the phone, and to hear her share a few reminiscences about a man who, as David Cairns succinctly put it, was "interested in human experience in its entirety." Here is my transcription of the conversation:

Hell on Frisco Bay: Though we've never met, I've seen you on the stage at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. How did you become interested in silent films?

Judy Wyler Sheldon: I really was neither interested, nor did I know a thing about them until my siblings and I were invited to go to the festival in Italy - the other big silent film festival, called Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, which takes place in Pordenone every year up in the Friuli area of Italy. They were doing a retrospective of my father's silent films in '95, '96, something like that, and they wanted us to come over. I have two sisters and a brother, and we thought, "Oh! Film festival? Italy? Why not!" We were thinking it was going to be like Cannes or Venice: what are we going to wear, what jewels should we take...

HoFB: I hear it's a pretty down-to-Earth festival.

JWS: It's VERY down-to-Earth. Everybody was in blue jeans. So we went to the festival and had a wonderful time. I saw my father's silent films for the first time. He never talked about his silent films. He just considered that part of his schooling. We saw not only his but a lot of other people's silent films. It was a week-long festival. When I got back, I was talking about it, and a friend of mine said "Well you know San Francisco has a silent film festival. It's pretty young, and you should find out about it." I did, and I got involved a couple of years later, joined the board, and now I'm the president of the board. So that's how it came about, but until then I really didn't know anything about silent films. And of course seeing my father's films... you know he started very young. At Pordenone they showed the films that they had chronologically. They started with those two-reel Westerns, which we thought were perfectly horrible. I remember sitting in the theatre with my siblings and we're kind of elbowing each other as we saw one film after another, all kind of the same plots, terrible camera-work, and wondering "what are we going to say?" We knew we were going to be interviewed, and answer questions. Fortunately as he got a little more experienced they did get better, so the last few that they showed were okay.

HoFB: I think William Wyler is probably best-known today for all the Oscars and Oscar nominations his films were awarded. Did you watch the Oscar ceremony growing up?

JWS: Well, I don't so much remember watching them on television, but I did go to the Oscars a couple of times. I went the year that he was nominated for Roman Holiday but didn't win, and I went the year that he did win for Ben-Hur. Those were really exciting. Although it was embarrassing, as they'd always send a limo to take you to the Oscars. You'd collect into this long line of limos going to (wherever the Oscars were being held in those years), and there'd be fans there lining up to see the stars getting out of their limos. They'd come and look through the windows, which weren't smoked in those days. They'd peer in and they'd say "Oh, that's nobody," because my father wasn't recognizable except to a few people in the know. I just remember finding that so humiliating, that they'd dismiss us with "Oh, that's nobody" and go on to the next car trying to find some big movie star.

HoFB: I believe Roman Holiday is one of at least two of your father's films in which you can be seen in an on-screen role. Is that correct?

JWS: Right. There are only two, and the first one, which is the Best Years of Our Lives, I'm in for about three seconds in a scene in the drugstore. There are lots of clients in the drugstore, just sort of in the background, and I'm a child of five or so, with my sister.

HoFB: Is there any way we can recognize you if we play the DVD?

JWS: Gosh... I'm just a little girl in a dress, with my sister, who's three years older than I am. It's just fleeting, and I can't even remember which scene it is. It's obviously one of the scenes with Dana Andrews.

HoFB: I recently looked at those scenes and I think I spied a pair of little girls looking at him in the very first scene where he visits the store.

JWS: It could be that one. I'd have to go back and look myself, but it's really fast. In Roman Holiday I got a little bit more of a chance. It was maybe five seconds more (laughs) and I actually was supposed to mumble "don't take my camera," because I was wearing a camera and Gregory Peck wanted to take pictures of Audrey Hepburn getting her hair cut. His photographer friend Eddie Albert wasn't with him, so he goes out and sees a group of schoolgirls at the Trevi Fountain. He comes up to me and tries to take the camera from around my neck and I'm saying, "Don't take my camera." My sister, who was in the scene as another schoolgirl, calls the teacher. She says, "Oh, Miss Weber" and the teacher comes over and glares at him. We have a younger brother and sister who say that we did such a bad job in that scene that, as a result, none of us were ever asked to appear again in a movie. And my younger brother and sister were never in a movie. They blamed us completely!

HoFB: I read somewhere that there was an attempt to get them into Ben-Hur...

JWS: I don't remember that there was ever any attempt to get them in. They did both have these very elaborate costumes made for them by the costume department at Cinecittà. They were wonderful costumes. My brother and sister were six and eight. My brother had this wonderful Roman soldier costume made for him, with a helmet, you know, and the whole thing was just fantastic. My sister had a woman's kind of toga. The Roman soldier costume has passed around our family, and my two sons both wore it as a Halloween costume.

HoFB: Roman Holiday was notable for being shot on the streets of Rome, helping to take Hollywood out of a studio-bound mindset. Did you enjoy life on location with your family there?

JWS: Oh, yeah. Although I was in school in Switzerland for most of the time. I was in Rome during the summer, when he was first shooting the film. It was a lot of fun, and my father had lots of fun making that movie. It was the first movie he made in Europe on location, and I guess it was the first big Hollywood movie that had been made in Rome. I remember my parents saying how the city authorities leaned over backwards to make it easy for them to film there, closing off streets and all the stuff that's much harder to get done today. My father had just the most wonderful time, and my mother as well, living there while making this movie. They just had the best time, and my father ended up buying... well, I don't know if he bought it or if it was given to him... a Vespa, like Gregory Peck had in Roman Holiday . He careened around and then brought it back to the States with him. We were living in Beverly Hills when he had it. We had a weekend house in Palm Springs, and that's where he took it, and we have lots of home movies of the whole family piled on this Vespa: my father, my mother, the four of us. We even have one with the dog!

HoFB: I'd like to go back to the Best Years Of Our Lives, which is just a tremendous film. One of the very best of all the Oscar Best Picture winners. That film, and your father's direction in particular, have been praised as unusually sensitive in portraying a character who lost his hands in World War II. Your father lost most of his hearing in an accident while shooting documentaries of the war in Europe. Was his deafness something that was publicly known at the time?

JWS: It wasn't something that he was trying to keep a secret. He was deaf in one ear. He could hear in the other ear, so he wasn't totally deaf. He did come back from the war with that injury wondering if he'd ever be able to direct, because at first it was much more serious. I think that did give him a lot of empathy with the character you mentioned. And also just the experience of coming back and having to adjust to their old lives, or new lives. I think that made it very personal.

HoFB: Is it a coincidence that the Silent Film Festival uses American Sign Language interpreters for all the film introductions and q-and-a's? Was that policy something you brought to the festival?

JWS: No, no. That was not something I had anything to do with. In fact, I think it predated my being part of the festival. But it's such a natural for our audience because, I would guess, silent films could be very attractive to people who are hearing-impaired.

HoFB: In 2002 the festival brought the silent version of a William Wyler film called Hell's Heroes.

JWS: Yes, and that was the centennial of my father's birth, which is why they chose that one. And actually the year that I went to Pordenone for the first time with my siblings, they showed that.

HoFB: What was it like to bring Hell's Heroes to the Castro screen, and to the Silent Film Festival audience?

JWS: Well, it was wonderful, naturally. To get to see these films on a big screen with live music in an old movie palace. I mean, as you know, there's nothing like it! It was thrilling, and that year we were able to get Terrence Stamp to introduce the film. Obviously, he wasn't a silent film actor, but it's harder and harder to find any of those these days! It was wonderful to have him give some reminiscences about working with my father on the Collector. So, it was a wonderful, wonderful evening. Most of my siblings were there, and other family, and of course my kids were there, and my husband, and it was just great.

HoFB: Do you often watch your father's films?

JWS: I watch them from time to time. I have DVDs of most of them, the ones that are available. But there's just nothing like seeing a movie on a big screen. I have to say I much prefer seeing a film in a theatre, if it's possible. Of course, that's not always possible.

HoFB: Hopefully somebody will put together a full retrospective of his films one of these days!

JWS: Wouldn't that be nice? We'd love that! When I say "we" I mean the family. We would encourage that, and support that, and work for that in any way we could. That would be great!

HoFB: Is there anything else you think film buffs might like to know about your father?

JWS: Well, he was my father, so I'm biased, but growing up, I never thought that much about the fact that I was the daughter of this well-known film director. It's only in my adulthood that I've begun to appreciate what he brought to the craft. But as a human being, he was a really wonderful guy. He was not only interesting, he was funny, with a wonderful sense of humor. He was a humanitarian, and cared very deeply about all kinds of causes, and was just a great person. I feel very proud to have had him for my father.

HoFB: Well, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with me, and with the readers of this Blog-a-Thon!

JWS: You're very welcome!

The Mill Valley Film Festival is turning 30

2007-09-12T01:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I attended a screening of Tamara Jenkins' the Savages following a press conference announcing the full program of films, parties, and other events for the Mill Valley Film Festival, which celebrates its 30th year of existence this year. The Savages, which includes few human characters under 30, is one of the festival's two opening night films on October 4th. It kicks things off at the Sequoia Theatre in Mill Valley, while Ang Lee's Lust, Caution plays at the nearby Rafael Film Center. Not an "official" opening night film, but also playing the Sequoia on the 4th, will be Wes Anderson's the Darjeeling Limited.

I'm not supposed to write much about the Savages until closer to its theatrical engagement in December, which suits me fine. Well into watching the film, I realized I would probably need to see it again before I'd be able to make an evaluative judgment about it. For its first two-thirds, I found myself resisting the film's tone; it felt like a sneering dramedy designed to make the audience feel glad we're better than the "horrible, horrible, horrible people" played by Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. But by the final few reels, I'd started warming to the transforming characters, and surprisingly, to the film itself. I'm curious to learn how it'll play from the outset, knowing the narrative in advance...

In the meantime, I'm extremely excited about the October 7 & 9 performances of a Dmitri Shostakovich score for Battleship Potemkin by the Marin Symphony at the Veterans' Memorial Auditorium in San Rafael. Of course the film will be projected as well (I've never seen it except on VHS). More revival screenings of great interest are an October 8 screening of Wild Boys of the Road, William Wellman's pre-code talkie update of Beggars of Life (same train-hopping milieu, different actors and story) and an October 6th screening of John Korty's the Crazy Quilt.

The slate of new films at the festival looks like it holds a great deal of promise, particularly the festival foci on the recent cinema of India (7 Islands and Metro looks interesting), Germany (Yella comes praised) and Romania (the Paper Will be Blue, the Way I Spent the End of the World, and California Dreamin' represent this currently-fashionable national cinema). A documentary I've been greatly anticipating called Welcome to Nollywood will take a look at the thriving Nigerian videofilm industry. I'm excited that the film will also play here on the South Side of the Golden Gate Bridge, at the SF Art Institute October 9th. A comparatively big-budget Nollywood film called Laviva will also be part of the festival, playing in Marin on October 7th and 8th.

I'm also curious about the three new digital features by longtime MVFF stalwart Rob Nilsson. One of the three (I'm feeling too shy to say which one) could actually have a bit of footage of yours truly in it, as I spent a day as an extra on the set.

The list of 30th Mill Valley Film Festival programs is now available online. Take a peek and tell me what looks good to you in the comments below, if you like.

Steamboat Buster

2007-09-10T01:21:00.000-07:00

This coming Wednesday, the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, one of the very best venues on Frisco Bay to view silent films with live musical accompaniment, will screen a pair of Buster Keaton features with Christian Elliot performing at the Wurlitzer organ: Steamboat Bill, Jr. and the Navigator. Though it was filmed partially in this city, and is reputedly among his most crowd-pleasing films, I've never seen the Navigator. I've been saving it for just such an opportunity to be pleased by it among an appreciative crowd in a theatre like the Stanford.

Steamboat Bill Jr. I have seen, on video years ago as I was first acquainting myself with Keaton's work. I count it among my favorites and am really looking forward to finally seeing it in 35mm. In the meantime, I thought I'd contribute to Thom Ryan's current Slapstick Blog-A-Thon by taking a closer look at one particular gag from the film, one of the most renowned gags Keaton (or anyone) ever performed. Though calling it a gag may be inaccurate, as it's really more nerve-wracking than funny. In fact, Lincoln Spector says it's "probably the most thrilling and dangerous stunt ever performed by a major star." If you've seen Steamboat Bill, Jr. before, you already know what gag/stunt I'm talking about. If you haven't, and you want to remain oblivious to one of the film's most breathtaking surprises, you'd better not continue reading this entry.

The concept of Steamboat Bill, Jr. was generated by frequent Charlie Chaplin collaborator Charles Reisner, who then co-directed the film with Keaton. Reisner is in fact the only director in the film's credits, as Keaton often relinquished official credit for the films he directed. This was the final film he made with the independence accorded during his longtime professional relationship with his brother-in-law and producer Joseph Schenck, before signing up with MGM in a move that many claim led to Keaton's artistic and creative downfall. As Sherlock, Jr. had taken its title from the fictional detective Keaton's character wanted to emulate, so too was Steamboat Bill, Jr. named for a character best known from a popular song. I'm not going to recount the film's plot. For my current purposes, it's merely important to know that at one point in the film Keaton's character Willie finds himself in bed, with the walls and roof over his head torn off and blown away by a cyclone. The winds carry his four-legged craft down the street, in an image somewhat reminiscent of Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend or another Winsor McCay fantasy.

Soon the bed has been pushed in front of a large wooden house. Keaton has, as is his wont in any weather, fallen. This time, out of the bed and onto his head. The front wall of the house has been separated from the rest of the building, revealing a gaping crack and a terrified man on the top floor of the house. This bearded fellow jumps out of an open window, his fall softened by the bed sitting in the street below, and the would-be steamboat captain underneath it. The man runs away, and the bed is picked up by the wind and follows. No sooner has a rather battered and dazed Willie slowly stood up and staggered forward a few steps, than all two tons of the house's façade has crashed down all around him, the actor only saved from being crushed because of the open window he was perfectly placed underneath. The stunt, more than anything else he ever shot, emphasizes that aspect of the Buster Keaton screen persona which depends on an unwitting collaboration with fate or the forces of nature for his survival. And though Keaton-as-Willie survives through dumb luck, Keaton-as-actor's luck was not dumb; he knew what he was getting into. He had practiced a far less dangerous version of the gag using lighter walls in previous films Back Stage and One Week. He confidently, meticulously planned out the mechanics of the falling wall, giving himself only a few inches of clearance. Had there been the slightest glitch in the execution, Keaton would have been "Steamrolled Bill," and he knew it.

I heard about this sequence before I saw it. The way I was told, Keaton, who joked about suicide relatively frequently in his films (in Hard Luck and Daydreams, for example), was suicidal on the day of the stunt's filming. Several sources claim that just the day before, Keaton had been unexpectedly informed by Schenck that this would be their last film together. While crew members looked away, and even Reisner abandoned the set to pray in his tent, Keaton felt so despondent about his uncertain professional future that he was perfectly willing to risk, or perhaps even court, death. I haven't done the research to be sure if this version of events is the true one; it holds a ring of plausibility, but it may also be making more of a late-in-life quote from Keaton, "I was mad at the time, or I would never have done the thing," than was intended.

Whether or not the real turmoil inside Keaton during this stunt outmatched the simulated turmoil of the cyclone created by Keaton's production team, the result was iconic. Robert Knopf writes:

By showing the wall fall in one shot, Keaton emphasized his own performance: his ability to calculate and execute this stunt as well as his bravery (some would say his foolishness) in performing it himself.

The face-on, unbroken long-shot view is somehow reminiscent of the theatre, or at least it is until the moment of collapse. But again, "unbroken" may be a somewhat inaccurate descriptor. Though the camera holds its view of the entire house from before the moment its façade begins to tumble, until after it has landed, the impact of the shot is augmented by the shots preceding it. Though my research has been far from exhaustive, I have yet to find an analysis of this stunt that discusses the shots directly leading up to the death-defying one. Let me try a little, with screencaps.

Six shots prior, in the final profile view that puts the cracking façade and Buster in the same frame, we can clearly see the distance between the wall and the actor's position on the street. (He's under the bed.)

The next five shots do not contradict this geography, and the last of these is a full shot that ends with Keaton taking a few steps forward and away from the house. He still doesn't seem far enough from the building to escape being flattened should it fall.

But the next edit is a deceptive one. It's difficult to perceive this, even when analyzing the shots on DVD, but in the iconic wall-tumbling shot, Keaton is standing further from the house than he was just prior to the cut. He must be, or else he would be crushed.

I strongly suspect that even if we aren't anticipating the collapse, we on perhaps a less-than-conscious level assimilate this spatial discrepancy, and factor it into our horrified reaction of seeing the façade begin to come down, and our commensurate relief when our hero is spared by the open window. It makes the effect all the more impressive, and it exploits a dimension of the motion picture medium that, apart from certain observations by Rudolf Arnheim in his seminal Film as Art, I do not often encounter when reading film criticism: the control a filmmaker has over the perception of relative distances between objects in the frame, due to the nature of transposing three-dimensional space onto a flat surface.

A thrilling stunt like this one remains exciting to watch again and again. I'm not so sure a modern-day computer-generated effect can have the same kind of staying power, but that's a subject for another post sometime. It's no coincidence that successful silent-era comedians specialized in them. Chaplin would upon occasion perform a dangerous stunt, perhaps most memorably the Circus's high-wire scene in which he is beset by capuchin monkeys. And if there's any stunt sequence more breathtaking and iconic than Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr. heart-stopper, it's surely Harold Lloyd climbing a department store and dangling from a giant clock in Safety Last (which, Frisco Bay audiences take note, is opening a week-long classic film series at the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland on September 28th.)

But here's a legitimate question about some of these stunts that provoke more gasps than laughter: is it slapstick? Is it perhaps beyond slapstick? Our host of this Blog-a-Thon has proposed that the key to slapstick is that, though violence may be "unexpected, socially unacceptable [and] exaggerated for effect" it must be "staged so that we know that no one has sustained permanent injury." How does it work in gag situations in which there is threat of violence, but the violence is averted? Is slapstick funny because of schadenfreude? If so, are gags in which the victim escapes injury or humiliation as funny as those where he or she apparently (thanks to the illusion of film) doesn't?

What do you think?

Welcome Back!

2007-09-04T06:30:00.000-07:00

From wherever you were this weekend: Burning Man, Telluride, or just a three-day bender in your apartment. If you were out of town or otherwise out of reach, you missed an excellent MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS evening at the Castro Theatre to ring in the weekend. Can you believe I'd never seen Footloose before? I enjoyed it. I must have been in the mood to watch a game of tractor-chicken set to the music of Bonnie Tyler. The event included an in-person appearance with Rene Daalder, director of Massacre at Central High from 1976. He shared his thoughts about this caustic film about power dynamics in human social systems (which I'd also never seen before), including his fascination with gravity (the murder weapon for several of the most memorable slayings) and his disgust with the soundtrack imposed on the film (so bad he disowned the film and hadn't seen it all the way through in decades until now). MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS host Jesse Ficks revealed that, along with his two previously-announced upcoming events at the Castro in September, he'll be hosting a Wes Craven triple bill there in October, a disco nite in November (featuring Staying Alive, Fame and the Apple), and a Burt Reynolds three-fur before the year is out.

On Saturday for the first time I attended the SF Underground Short Film Festival, which is the annual close of Peaches Christ's Midnight Mass series at the Bridge Theatre. As with nearly any shorts program, there were some duds among the selections, but the wheat-to-chaff ratio was higher than I'd expected. My favorites of the pieces made by people I don't know were the two installments of Winds of Time by Jose Montesinos, and I Know What Girls Like by Steffen Frech. But my main incentive in attending was to see the premiere of new work by a couple of filmmakers I'm friends with (who, as far as I know, don't know each other), Lev and Placenta Ovaries. It's funny you should ask, but no, that isn't his real name. And the only other one of his videos I've seen, I had the strong urge to walk out of during practically the entire movie. But his new bulimia comedy No Fatties, though of course completely offensive and wrong, is comparatively quite watchable. I only found myself wondering if I was starting to taste my own bile at one point during the video. As for Lev, well you likely already know that his Tales of Mere Existence cartoons are all terrific and genuine and funny and just right. His latest, How We Managed To Not Really Date Each Other, must be his most ambitious in the series, and it may be his best yet. His shorts received the heartiest applause of the evening, and deservedly so.

With the close of the Midnight Mass season, Landmark Theatre midnight movies now move to the Clay, with a line-up of films diverse enough to begin this coming weekend with a 21+ only "White Russian" night with the Big Lebowski, and include November 2-3 screenings of the Wizard of Gore with Herschell Gordan Lewis in person, and November 9-10 screenings of Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee. Palo Alto's Aquarius and Oakland's Piedmont (currently celebrating its 90th anniversary as a movie theatre) have new midnight movie schedules up too.

I also watched the hit film by Lee Sang-il, Hula Girls, at the Four Star, that theatre's latest offering of a Japanese film distributed by Viz Pictures. There was a trailer for the next one, the Taste of Tea, which opens October 5th. I absolutely must see this one. Hula Girls was a pretty conventional film in the dance/sport movie mold, and worked best as a showcase for some appealing actors. I was most impressed with Aoi Yu, who won the Japanese Academy Award for best supporting actress, and who you may remember from Harmful Insect and All About Lily Chou-Chou.

Thanks to a reader tip, I tried out a fun little free miniature golf course on the corner of Octavia and Hayes on Saturday. The course took me through the history of Hayes Valley, including a hole devoted to the great film shot there by Erich von Stroheim, Greed. A video projection of Greed (it has not yet been determined which version will be screened, though we can be sure it won't be the ten-hour-long one) will be held the location on the evening of September 29th.

It's been long enough since my last post that there are a lot more upcoming screenings to take note of. The first place to look is undoubtedly Johnny Ray Huston's big fall preview in a recent Bay Guardian. He notes coming film events at just about every venue in town, including highlights from brand-new calendars for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Cinematheque and Other Cinema. But I'd like to comment on a few particular items he's pointed out, and elaborate with a few more intriguing offerings that have appeared on the horizon since his deadline.

Most time-sensitive is a pair of screenings of the Soviet silent film My Grandmother with a score by Beth Custer, formerly of the Club Foot Orchestra. She and her merry band of musicians will be performing tonight at the Jewish Community Center in Berkeley and tomorrow at Dolby Labs (RSVP required at the latter), as a benefit to raise funds for a tour to Russia and elsewhere in Europe.

The Madcat Women's International Film Festival runs September 11-26, and will be showing at least one film I have seen and can strongly recommend. The Days And the Hours is a short, poetic documentary giving voice to some of the people who sleep on the pews at St. Bonaface Church, and it plays on a program entitled "At the Margins" at Artists' Television Access on September 14th. That's just one of 11 programs in this festival's annual celebration of films by women directors. Another program I'm particularly intrigued by is the September 19th tribute to the recently-murdered filmmaker Helen Hill, an outdoor screening which will take place in the backyard of the El Rio bar.

Huston mentions that the Arab Film Festival (October 18-28) will be screening a Tunisian documentary about the making of a video called Tarzan of the Arabs. That must be nothing other than one of my very favorite films seen at Sundance earlier this year, Nejib Belkadhi's VHS-Kahloucha. It follows a truly DIY filmmaker named Moncef Kahloucha, who puts together low-budget action films on the streets of his hometown, the seaside resort of Sousse. The film satisfies on just about every level imaginable: memorable characters including Kahloucha and his cast and crew, plenty of action and gut-busting comedy, strong production values including a pitch-perfect musical soundtrack, and even a peek into social stratification in Sousse, where Kahloucha and his friends live in a downtrodden neighborhood remote from the cash-infused tourist areas of town.

One of the Arab Film Festival's venues will be the Roxie, which for the first time in a year has a new glossy printed calendar available around town. More festival highlights found on this document include a September 22nd all-day reprise of award-winning favorites from this past June's Frameline Film Festival. This months-later recap is a tremendously good idea that I hope other film festivals take note of and try out; I missed all of these selections (including Red Without Blue and Glue) the first time around. The 10th United Nations Association Film Festival makes an appearance October 18th prior to its October 24-28 stint at Stanford University. From November 6-9 the theatre will host the Global Lens 2007 film series (including a chance to see Garin Nugroho's Of Love and Eggs. And on November 18th it's the Fifth Annual 3rd i Festival of South Asian cinema. In addition, the Roxie will have free screenings of Fernando de Fuentes films each Sunday morning in November, and on November 23-29 will host a week of recently-rediscovered RKO films from the 1930's, including several pre-code titles, and a film starring Irene Dunne and directed by William Wellman called Stingaree. I can't pass up a film with a title like that, especially when directed by one of my pet under-appreciated filmmakers.

Oh, and if that's not enough, look what the Castro has promised for select Tuesdays and Wednesdays in October and November: a 15 film Ingmar Bergman retrospective.

Cross That Bridge

2007-08-19T23:52:00.000-07:00

On two of the past three Thursdays, I've attended kino21 events at SF Camerawork. Unlike an unsuccessful attempt earlier this at watching Jem Cohen's Chain there as part of a projected-video installation, in which the soundtracks to three simultaneously-running videos kept tripping over each other, these were very cine-respectful evenings. The films were silent works by Frisco filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, who commented that the set-up, with a smallish screen positioned on the wall of a cozy room filled with folding chairs, reminded him of the way he screens his films in his living room. They were beautiful films. Alaya was a study of grain: both film- and sand- (I personally couldn't help but think of certain parts Woman in the Dunes, and hear Toru Takemitsu's sonic expressions in my head.) Dorsky described Triste as an early attempt to build a film about neither its subject nor its maker, but only about itself (or something to that effect; I wasn't taking notes.) Threnody and Song and Solitude were further explorations down this clearly fruitful path. They're filled with images that seemingly dissipated just at the moment that they were about to become recognizable signals of a concrete object or place. All to the constant whirr of the 16mm projector behind us. I was rapt. I'm looking forward to October 18th, when kino21 returns to the space to show Perfect Film by Ken Jacobs and RocketKitKongoKit by Craig Baldwin. In the meantime, they show Guhy Debord's In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni at Artists' Television Access on September 27th.

Those of you who missed these screenings will get another chance to see Threnody and Song and Solitude, as well as hear Dorsky speak on them at the Pacific Film Archive on September 4th. As an added lure, on the same program will be a film by one of the filmmakers discussed in his wonderful little book Devotional Cinema, Yasujiro Ozu. The selection is Late Spring, probably my own current personal favorite of Ozu's films. It's a very auspicious beginning to the PFA's fall semester Alternative Visions series. The series is packed with tempting programs every Tuesday, other potential highlights being a September 25th program of autobiographical films by Maya Deren, Carolee Schneemann and Su Friedrich, an October 9th pairing of Michael Snow's Wavelength and Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity, a selection of Bruce Conner films including his newest, a perhaps "post-music-video" called His Eye Is On the Sparrow, and another selection devoted to the Christchurch, New Zealand-born pioneer Len Lye.

Of course there's a lot more to the PFA's September-October calendar. The venue will be hosting tributes to the British New Wave, Sergio Leone, and Tomo Uchida, a Japanese director that, ever since reading Quintin's terrific article on Uchida and modern-day cinephilia, the "bulimic" in me has been particularly curious to sample. There will be more special guest filmmakers, as "Hindi New Wave" director Shyam Benegal brings three of his films including Ankur and former Cahiers critic Olivier Assayas brings five of his films including demonlover, which will be screened alongside David Cronenberg's Videodrome for comparison's sake. Other Assayas films will be paired with classics by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Beware of a Holy Whore) and Ingmar Bergman (Monika--so far the only Bergman film I'm aware of being scheduled for a Frisco Bay screening since the Swedish master's death last month.)

There's much more, including a matinee screening of Buster Keaton's Seven Chances, three international animation programs, and the continuation of a Theatre Near You, this time with Aki Kaurismaki's Lights in the Dusk, Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon and Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes, which is still hanging on at the Lumiere but probably won't be by October 14th.

But the series I'm most excited about is one called Girls Will Be Boys. It's curated by Laura Horak, who I served with on the SF Silent Film Festival research committee earlier this year (she researched and wrote the program guide essay for Beggars of Life), and it includes a very healthy selection of silent features and shorts, as well as several relatively early talkies, as it delves into the history of female actors dressing in male drag in European and American films. Among the women featured are Asta Nielsen as Hamlet September 21 (shortly before the film plays at the New York Film Festival), Renata Müller as Viktor und Viktoria, also September 21, Katherine Hepburn as Sylvia Scarlett September 23, Marion Davies in Little Old New York and Greta Garbo as Queen Christina, both September 28, Mary Pickford as Little Lord Fauntleroy on September 29, and Marlene Dietrich in Morocco September 30. The piano accompanist duties for the program's silent films will be traded off between Judith Rosenberg and Bruce Loeb, and each film will be introduced by someone who's done a whole lot more thinking about film and gender than I have. For example, Jenni Olson will speak about Sylvia Scarlett, Patricia White will provide context for Queen Christina, and Horak will introduce Little Lord Fauntleroy, Morocco, and the Danish "white slavery" film Shanghai'et!

Another film programmer who I had the pleasure to regularly talk silent film with as part of the SFSFF research committee was David Kiehn, who researched and wrote a fine essay on the Valley of the Giants on top of his duties at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, which hosts terrific film programs in the prettiest corner of Fremont I've ever found myself. Highlights of its current film calendar are another upcoming NYFF retrospective selection, Josef Von Sternberg's Underworld September 15th, a hand-colored 35mm print of Cyrano De Bergerac on September 29th, and a special September 7th fundraiser dinner and screening of Lon Chaney in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and a screening sans dinner September 8th.

And while I'm mentioning upcoming films in Berkeley and Fremont, how can I leave out Oakland and the Parkway Speakeasy Theatre? My favorite place to see a movie while drinking a beer always has a bevy of diversely-programmed special screenings squeezed into its everyday schedule of second-run film options. Right now I'm eyeing a September 13th offering of Pam Grier in Black Mama, White Mama, and the Found Footage Film Festival on October 7th. And up by the El Cerrito BART station, the Parkway's sibling Speakeasy Theatre the Cerrito has Cerrito Classics chosen for Saturdays and Sundays through the end of the year. There's film noir throughout September, Universal monsters in October, and more.

So there you have it. A bunch of excellent reasons for Frisco film lovers to cross the Bay Bridge in the next few months. Or for East Bay film lovers not to.

Fall Out

2007-08-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was the 85th Anniversary of the Castro Theatre, and though I meant to mention it here at Hell on Frisco Bay beforehand, at least I wrote a little something about the theatre, as part of a tribute put together by Michael Guillen at the Evening Class, also including terrific reminiscences from Jenni Olson, Jonathan Knapp, Frako Loden, Tavo Amador and Michael Hawley. On Saturday I was there to attend the closest modern approximation I've seen of an old-style "kiddie matinee": a Laurel & Hardy comedy featurette (1937's Way Out West) preceded by a selection of unannounced classic cartoons by Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and more. The biggest highlight of the morning for me was definitely seeing Tex Avery's 60-year-old MGM short King-Size Canary in 35mm for the first time, its images of unnaturally-hulking funny animal bodies projected as large as could be imagined. Best of all, as a throwback to the ticket prices of 1922 when the the theatre opened, the event only cost a quarter! Sorry if my failure to highlight this event (or the other events the venue hosted during its celebratory weekend) caused any of my loyal readers to miss out; let it be a reminder to keep clicking the links on my sidebar to the left when I seem overdue for a new post.

Another tribute to the theatre was written up by Evan James for the latest A.V. Bay Area section of the Onion newspaper (not available online). It's the only recent article I've found that devotes a few paragraphs of ink to the changes the Castro has undergone during the last three years or so, since the venue's longtime programmer was removed from her position at the theatre. As James puts it:

Some of the theater's troubles - including the loss of film festivals and the reluctance of distributors to do business with them - undoubtedly came from the controversial events of 2004, when veteran programmer Anita Monga was fired, provoking outrage from parts of the film community.

That characterization of the events seems bit understated from my point of view, which I suppose is fair enough in a piece of journalism that relies heavily on an interview with the Castro's new president and CEO Don Nasser. But as I recall events, it seemed that practically everyone who knew Monga, even if "only" through her work as a programmer, was beyond outraged at her firing and at the way it went down.

Three years later, it appears to a relative outsider like myself that events of late 2004, while not forgotten by Frisco cinephiles, are at least not quite as heavy a cloud hanging over our last remaining movie palace. The Castro's approach to programming has improved markedly from the low point it hit in early-mid 2005. The Noir City film festival had a successful return to the venue of its birth earlier this year. Monga herself has been spotted in the building, at least while it's been four-walled by a film festival showcasing a one-of-a-kind event. And James' article observes that "distributors who once refused to give [the Castro] film are now having a change of heart." Indeed, the venerable Kino International, which cancelled a 2005 revival booking of Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild and hasn't shown its films there since, will be letting the Castro play a new print of the film perhaps most closely associated with the company's image as a distributor, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, August 24-30.

That's by far the oldest title on the theatre's upcoming slate of films. Most of the revivals on this latest calendar are of the cinematic hits and re-evaluation-worthy misses of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Though tonight's screenings were canceled due to a print traffic snafu, a sign on the theatre box office apologizes and promises a can't miss double bill of Werner Herzog's early-seventies reputation-earners Aguirre: the Wrath of God and the Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (a.k.a. Every Man For Himself and God Against All) tomorrow. Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos from 1962 plays for a week starting this Friday. A William Friedkin series runs September 4-6, and is followed by a week-long engagement of that director's most notorious film Cruising, from 1980. September 15 brings a chance to see the 1971 car chase classic Vanishing Point alongside the Quentin Tarantino film that has given it so much recent exposure, Death Proof (sans Planet Terror, for all you zombie-averse moviegoers out there). A 70mm festival includes usual suspects such as 1962's Lawrence of Arabia (Sep. 22-23) as well as an oddity like Tobe Hooper's 1985 Lifeforce (Sep. 21), the latter brought to you by Jesse Hawthorne Ficks of MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS (which will also take over the Castro on August 31 and September 14th). The calendar concludes with a September 28 through October 4 tribute to the average film score fanatic's favorite film score composer, Jerry Goldsmith.

Two things to note: the calendar warns that the print of Papillon scheduled to play with the Ballad of Cable Hogue on October 3rd is "not up to our usual high standards but because of its place in the Goldsmith pantheon it is included." Hopefully, for such a composer-centric series, the print's problems will be in the image rather than sound quality department. Also, the September 7-13 run of Cruising will be projected digitally. I very much appreciate this kind of honesty in advance. It's much more ethical, in my view, than the "film festivals" which neglect to play much actual film at all, instead opting to show most shorts and features on DVD, without any warning in the program guide.

It's here than I mention that SFMOMA, which for the past ten months or so has really started trying to flex its muscles as an important filmgoing venue here in Frisco, alerted attendees who picked up a program of its still-ongoing Jean Renoir series (and read the small print) that Boudu Saved From Drowning and the Lower Depths were to be shown on DVD instead of film, since prints with English subtitles were not available. It was a bit surprising to learn, as I'd seen English-subbed 35mm prints in New York City only a few years ago. But it was rather dismaying to learn that such information was not to be found on the museum's website. If more DVD presentations are planned in the future, I hope there is sufficient advance warning online for any of us who might decide to trek over to 151 Third Street to see the venue's enticing Fall programs such as the films by Joseph Cornell in conjunction with the upcoming exhibit there, and a rare focus on East German cinema.

Not that I am philosophically against digital, or even DVD screenings. They're certainly a lot better than no screenings, especially when they're free. The SF Performing Arts Library and Museum is hosting free documentaries on performers, in conjunction with its continuing exhibit on the hungry i nightclub each Thursday this August, some with in-person guest appearances. This Thursday August 16th they show the fascinating Oscar-nominated documentary from 1998, Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth. Call the venue in advance to reserve seats.

Another free digital screening is the local Film Society's annual SF-in-SF event, Film in the Fog. This time the selection is Creature From the Black Lagoon. You could pay to see the film in 35mm at the Stanford Theatre August 22-24, or at the Bridge (in 3-D, with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark as guest host) at Midnight Mass August 24th, if there are still tickets left to buy, that is. Or you can wait to see the SFFS's outdoor projection of it in the Presidio for free on September 29th.

But it warms my heart to see new organizations committed to showcasing motion pictures on film formats meeting with success at various venues around town. I'm specifically thinking of kino21, which, as you hopefully read about in Max Goldberg's excellent sf360 interview with Konrad Steiner and Irina Leimbacher, has been putting together terrific programs at Artists' Television Access (which will open its Other Cinema programs September 15th with a screening of films featured on the Xperimental Eros DVD.) But kino21 has also been trying out SF Camerawork as a venue. A week and a half ago a roomful of us swooned over a 16mm print of the beautiful, longing Song and Solitude by Nathaniel Dorsky, who answered audience questions after the screening. I hope to make it back there this Thursday for two more Dorsky films, Threnody (his tribute to the life and death of Stan Brakhage) and Triste. Maybe this time I'll get up the guts to ask him how his poetic work might possibly relate to the exploitation film he wrote the screenplay for: Revenge of the Cheerleaders, which I also recently saw for the first time thanks to MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS. Or maybe I won't ask.

Another upstart filmophile organization is the Film on Film Foundation, who screened Isadore Isou's Venom and Eternity at the Roxie this past May, just in time for me to get to appreciate this singular, trailscorching artist for a few months before he died. The Film on Film folks are bringing the Japanese New Wave film Eros Plus Massacre to the Pacific Film Archive on September 16th.

Awkward segue alert: it's currently Japan week at the Red Vic Movie House, which hosts a last-chance cinema screening of the Satochi Kon anime Paprika tonight and tomorrow, and opens a five-day engagement of the politically-singed, bizarrely entertaining "Pink film" the Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai on Thursday. More upcoming items on the Red Vic calendar include Killer of Sheep August 26-27, Brand Upon the Brain! August 28-29, and six days of Werner Herzog in September. Linas Phillips' secular pilgrimage to this most inspirational filmmaker Walking to Werner is shown on the 9th, 10th, and 11th, with Fitzcarraldo on the 16th & 17th and Les Blank's truly incredible making-of documentary on the latter, Burden of Dreams on the 18th.

On the film festival front, there's the Dead Channels Festival of Fantastic Film running right now through Thursday, the Madcat Women's International Film Festival (September 11-28) which has announced its schedule of films, and Docfest (September 28-October 10) which has not as of yet.

I must say it's a good thing that there's all this activity on the festival, repertory and underground cinema front. Because honestly the latest SF Landmark Filmcalendar looks like that chain's least-exciting slate of week-long film engagements in quite some time. I've pegged one film, Vanaja (October 5-11) as a must-see, but on an initial look all the others range from "looks completely uninteresting" to "wait-and-see (what the critics have to say)". And then there's the film I already have seen, at this year's Sundance: For the Bible Tells Me So. Extremely well-intentioned, it may appeal to Frisco filmgoers who like to scout out possible documentaries for their Red State relatives to put into their rental queues in the hopes of opening their minds up a bit. But honestly, I bet most will end up wishing they'd skipped the step of actually watching the film before recommending it, as it's likely to be 100% old news to almost anyone in this town who views it. Just another reason why, after the last few goodie-packed Filmcalendars from Landmark, this one feels like a letdown, though I'd love to be convinced otherwise.

My Two Andersons

2007-08-04T03:16:00.000-07:00

Royal, the Royal Tennenbaums:

I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield. I'm talking about taking it out and chopping it up.

Barry, Punch-Drunk Love:

I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.

In this corner, weighing in at 111 pounds and wearing aqua blue trunks, the only man to have tamed Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston, the Wilson brothers and Kumar and Dipak Pallama, ladies and gentlemen lets hear it for the man they call the "Next Scorsese," Wesley Wales Anderson!!!

And in this corner, weighing in at more than 82 pounds and wearing frog-green trunks is the one man who could conquer William H. Macy, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, and of course Philip Baker Hall, please give a roaring welcome to the "Commando from San Fernando", Paul Thomas Anderson!!!

They're both writer-directors under the age of forty, saw their first feature films hit the big screen in 1996, and have developed their distinct styles in three more features since. They each have a new film coming to screens this fall. And they coincidentally share surnames. Some would say Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson are already champion filmmakers, while others would say they're both still up-and-coming challengers. Still others strongly prefer one over the other. And some haven't made up their mind yet. For four nights starting tonight, Frisco will host matches between the two filmmakers' films on the big screen. Ringside seats will be at the Castro Theatre. It's a chance to see these films on the big screen again and discover how the last few years have treated them. I know I've seen a few of these films over and over, but most just once, and perhaps even then only on home video. But that's not going to stop me from trying to make predictions on the outcome of each bout:

August 4: Boogie Nights vs. Rushmore. I think this is likely to be the most decisive match-up. A KO by Rushmore in an early round. For me, Boogie Nights fell into the trap of the overly-sprawling period piece trying to cram too much history into a single film's running time. The salacious content of the history couldn't save it from its unfocused structure. While Rushmore is currently my favorite film directed by ANYone named Anderson (yes, including Lindsay Anderson, whose If... was surely an influence on this "school film"). Still, I haven't seen Boogie Nights in nearly ten years so who knows...

August 5: Magnolia vs. the Royal Tennenbaums. This is a tough one. I'm wondering if Magnolia might win on points in a late round, maybe even the twelfth. On first viewing, I found the three-hour film to be intelligent and cathartic, but I was living in a foreign country and pretty much starved for any movies that might be a change of pace from blockbuster action and lowbrow comedy. Since then I've read almost nothing but dismissals of the film when it comes up, written by critics I usually trust, to the point where I've really begun to wonder about my own initial opinion. On the other hand, While I liked the Royal Tennenbaums and even rewatched it once or twice, I've also found it a bit of a cold, uninvolving film, in a way that Rushmore certainly isn't. So we'll see how that plays out.

August 7: Hard Eight vs. Bottle Rocket. Though in neither case were these films my introduction to their respective makers, in both cases I've seen them only once and have only a rather foggy memory of a few scenes, and a general feeling that I liked them. They say it's a bad idea to bet on the draw though, so I'm going to give a slight edge to Bottle Rocket to win on points.

August 8: Punch-Drunk Love vs. the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. For this one I'm going to say Punch-Drunk Love. Quite possibly in a knockout or a T.K.O. Though Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performance is way too over-the-top and under-motivated for me, it's a small part that barely mars this bold, sweet film. The sound design alone would have convinced me to follow PTA wherever he's going next, as long as he's bringing Jon Brion along with him. On the other hand, the Life Aquatic made me wonder if Wes Anderson might be treading brackish water, recycling elements from previous films and just plopping them onto the larger canvas of the open ocean. It deserves the second look I never gave it when it came out, but my expectations are not high.

Still, any of these match-ups could end up in an upset. I might not be able to attend each bout, but if you do, why not share how they turn out in the comments below?