Skies Are Blue

If you're reading this here in Frisco: go outside. If you want to take advantage of this freakishly warm temperatures and see a movie too, check out the free outdoor screening of the Wizard of Oz tonight at dusk in Dolores Park, courtesy of the Neighborhood Theater Foundation. If the weather stays anything like the last couple evenings, you won't need to bring coats and blankets to keep warm. But such weather conditions are not likely to hold for the rest of the shows in the Summer schedule.

Sean McCourt on the SFIFF Golden Gate Awards Ceremony

It's impossible to attend everything at a large film festival like the San Francisco International Film Festival that ended last week, and which can have as many as six ticketed screenings and events running at the same time -- that doesn't include the more informal gatherings that crop up all the time in the hubbub of the Frisco Bay film community's biggest celebration of the year. Read this for a little perspective on the valiant struggle to see just about every film in the program.

So I'm very thankful that Sean McCourt has been another set of eyes and ears for Hell on Frisco Bay at the SFIFF, contributing articles like this one and the following article on the Golden Gate Awards ceremony in which most of the festival prize-winners were announced. Here's Sean:

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The winners of the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Awards were announced last Wednesday night at a ceremony that exemplified the independent attitude and outlook of San Francisco, with the actual announcements and formalities of the evening taking up a very short amount of time—no more than about 25 minutes—while the rest of the night was dedicated to socializing and enjoying the complimentary food and drinks. Imagine that taking place on Oscar night.

Guests arrived at the California Culinary Academy's Careme Room starting at 7 PM, and were greeted by a four-lamp rotating spotlight parked out front, marking the location and lending the affair a bit of that glamorous Hollywood premiere feeling —- though it was still a little too light outside at that point for the full effect to be seen in the sky overhead.

Once inside the high-ceilinged room, filmmakers, festival staff, media and film buffs mingled to the sounds of a live jazz trio while sampling some of the tasty foods that Academy students had whipped up for the occasion. Alcohol was flowing quite liberally as well, thanks to sponsoring brands Grey Goose vodka and Stella Artois beer—and based on the volume of excited chatter filling the room when SFFS Executive Director Graham Leggat stepped up to the podium to speak, it was clear that everybody was fairly relaxed and enjoying themselves.

After getting the crowd to settle down a bit, Leggat went through the expected motions of thanking everybody involved with the festival, and other such customs before reading through the list of winners for various categories not on the top of the bill for the evening. For the last few awards, however, there was the traditional naming of the nominees, then the announcement of who had actually won.

The winners were:

New Directors Award: Vasermil, Mushon Salmona

FIPRESCI Prize: Ballast, Lance Hammer

Chris Holter Humor in Film Award: Time to Die, Dorota Kedzierzawska

Documentary Feature: Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang (pictured above)

Bay Area Documentary Feature: Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, Dawn Logsdon

As Lolis Eric Elie, co-director of Faubourg Tremé, accepted the award, he told the cheering audience, "Winning this award is a statement that our message is being heard, even as far away here in San Francisco."

Aside from the awards, the other announcement that was made during the night’s festivities was that starting in June the San Francisco Film Society will start programming and showing films on one screen at the Sundance Kabuki Theater in San Francisco, keeping Bay Area film aficionados supplied with quality cinema throughout the year.

--Sean McCourt

On Film

After my last post on the Another Hole In the Head film festival raised the perennial issue of film vs. video projection at film festivals, I got a comment from Indiefest director Jeff Ross. He informed me that there are indeed five films in this year's HoleHead that will be screened in 35mm. In addition to the previously-mentioned Barbarella and Yaji & Kita, the screenings of Alone, Tunnel Rats and Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer will be shown on film.

As I've mentioned before, I tend to find horror films scarier when shown on 35mm prints in theatres. So this is welcome news for me, especially in regard to Alone, which I've decided I don't want to know anything more about until I get to see it for myself once the festival starts. Admittedly, it made me a tad less intrigued by Exte: Hair Extensions to learn that it would definitely be a video projection, at least until I read the last paragraph of this piece, which unearths the social critique in the film. I remind myself that perhaps my favorite Indiefest experience ever was seeing a well-attended digital screening of Takashi Miike's Visitor Q, which is packed with about as much disturbing social critique as a blistering Pasolini film. Sometimes the immediacy of digital can indeed be scarier than the terrible beauty of the most pristine horror film print.

This seems as good a time as any to put another plug in for the Film On Film calendar, maintained by the same team that presents screenings such as this double feature of Dennis Hopper's the Last Movie on 35mm and Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? on 16mm at the Roxie on June 4th, the evening before HoleHead settles in there. It's the best place I know to get the latest information on the upcoming Frisco screenings put together by exhibitors and programmers that almost certainly spent more on their print shipping costs than on publicity. Look at it right now; there's some interesting things happening this week in particular that I haven't mentioned here yet.

Asian Films at Another Hole In the Head

Another Hole In the Head. Of all of Frisco Bay's film festivals SF Indie Fest's genre outpost certainly has the most eye-catching name. Taking over the Roxie for two weeks in June, it offers an assortment of selections tailored for horror, science fiction, fantasy and superhero buffs. Few of the films announced for this year's program have been 'done to death' on the festival circuit, and nearly all of them have never screened in Frisco before. It seems unlikely that many will screen again here anytime soon, so if this sounds like your thing, mark your calendars for June 5-21.

I'm not familiar with the line-up's English-language titles, most of which are US or UK productions (though Tunnel Rats, an Uwe Boll film co-produced in Canada and Germany, is programmed as "closing night" film June 19th). It's the Asian titles that are catching the lion's share of my interest. Always on the lookout for Thai films in Frisco cinemas, I'm hoping to catch Alone, made by the directing pair behind the original version of Shutter, Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom. Peter Nellhaus notes the film's many connections to horror films familiar in the West, but recommends it as a quality production that rises above the usual lazy pastiche.

Though Another Hole In the Head has and deserves a reputation as a "horror film festival", the three Japanese selections in this year's line-up exhibit more diversity than that label implies. One film, Exte: Hair Extensions looks to be a straight J-horror film with the requisite ghostly long-black-hair imagery, in this case starring Chiaki Kuriyama of Battle Royale and Kill Bill, vol. 1. Thanks to my friend Seiko for pointing out Chiaki's involvement in this creepy-looking film!

Yaji & Kija: the Midnight Pilgrims, on the other hand, looks about as far-removed from J-horror as possible; it's apparently a fantastical twist on the samurai film genre that comes recommended by none other than Filmbrain. It's also notable as one of only two films explicitly mentioned in the Another Hole In the Head program guide as being shown in 35mm prints (the other being the 40th anniversary screenings of Barbarella just before midnight on the first two Saturdays of the festival).

The Another Hole In the Head programmers know that many of the most outré genre film offerings come from the rough and tumble world of digital filmmaking and distribution. The third Japanese festival offering the Machine Girl, which I viewed after the festival's press conference, typifies this. The film industry is unlikely to take a chance on using the expensive film medium to make and distribute something as bizarre, bloody, cheesily-acted and un-scary as the Machine Girl. Less a horror film than a blood-and-gore-saturated revenge comedy, the film has assets in its unflagging energy and its surfeit of money shots for gorehounds (including one shot that made the film a must-program for a festival called Another Hole in the Head.) But its greatest asset is surely its refusal to take itself seriously at all, a quality I suspect is a function of the cheap video technology being used.

Michael Guillén captures the Machine Girl's tone perfectly in his overview of Twitch's coverage of the film. I'd like to add my admiration for the brazenly illogical plot structure, in which an action-packed opening-credits sequence that I didn't think could possibly be lived up to (how wrong I would be) flashes back to Machine Girl's origin before she's sent on a "kill the foozle" revenge quest. I wasn't the only one in the audience to realize that writer-director Noboru Iguchi had made a film with two climaxes: one to grab your attention at the beginning, and a different one to send you out satisfied. Does it matter if the two sequences fail to reconcile in the film's narrative timeline? I'm not sure it does.

Easter Morning

My second dispatch to GreenCine from the San Francisco International Film Festival (which wrapped on Thursday) can be found here. It's about perhaps my very favorite film of the festival, Bruce Conner's 10-minute Easter Morning. Unlike Conner's most famous pieces like A Movie and Crossroads, the images in this film were shot entirely by Conner himself.

An excerpt from my GreenCine piece:

At some point near the halfway mark in the film, a bridge from the world of nature to that of the man-made is gently placed down, in the form of several shots of a floral-print carpet that leads to images of a loft - wooden floors and furniture, and a giant stone cross seen through the panes of the room's large windows. A nude woman emerges from a glass cabinet, as if reborn into a world of light.

Take the 5:10 to Meme-land

I've been tagged with a meme. Thom Ryan, the mastermind behind one of my very favorite blogs Film of the Year, has selected me, along with four other bloggers (a distinguished group, I might add), to follow some simple instructions for a post on my site, and to pass on the instructions to five more bloggers. Like a chain letter, except without the curse of bad luck at the end if the recipient doesn't participate.

I've been tagged with memes before, and though I've always felt honored to be thought of, I've also felt enough resistance to the idea that I've never complied. This time, I'm in the mood to do so, for several reasons. One, I've lately been more inclined to embrace the myspace-y, facebook-y aspects of the blogosphere rather than pretend that what I do here at Hell on Frisco Bay is so fundamentally different from the activity on those and other social networking sites. Two, with my blogroll currently missing from this blog while I complete my redesigned reconstruction, I'm more compelled than usual to give shout-outs to some of my fellow travelers (though I'm happy to report that my archive, and blogroll, has been recovered by blogger and can be found here until I complete the transition back to this url.) Three, this particular meme gives me an opportunity to point to a book I've been meaning to mention here since I bought it and started paging through it a couple months ago.

That's right, this is a book meme. Here's the instructions Thom sent:

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

OK, Thom!

1) So, when I received this tag, I was mere feet away from Scott MacDonald's Canyon Cinema: the Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor, filled with primary source material concerning the venerable Frisco Bay institution that grew out of Bruce Baillie's film exhibitions in Canyon, California by Redwood Regional Park.

2) I can't resist giving a little bit more context. The opposing page 122, it so happens, reprints a fan letter to Canyon Cinema filmmaker Bruce Conner (and a current research subject, the reason why this book was so close at hand this afternoon) from none other than John Lennon, in response to Conner's dazzling Looking For Mushrooms. As he explains in an interview later in the book, Conner sent the film to Lennon because it included a Beatles song as its soundtrack, and he wanted the composers' blessing so he could legally show the film.

3) It's page 123 that we're concerned with at the moment, however, and it's got a letter from a Frisco Bay filmmaker I'm less familiar with (having seen only one of his works, Six Loop-Paintings), Barry Spinello. He's writing about how his 1969 film Soundtrack was influenced by a 1938 John Cage text found in Silence.

4) The three sentences:

Any image (his example is a picture of Beethoven) or mark on the soundtrack successively repeated will produce a distinct sound with distinct pitch and value - different from the sound and value of any other mark. The new music, he says, will be built along the lines of film, with the basic unit of rhythm logically being the frame. With the advent of magnetic tape a few years later and the enormous advantages it has in convenience and speed (capacity to record and play back live sound, and erase) the filmic development of electronic music initially envisioned by Cage was completely obscured.

5) Now, to select the five bloggers I'm to pass this meme to. I'm going to stay local here...
Max Goldberg of Text of Light comes to mind because he wrote a terrific review of the MacDonald book a few weeks ago.
Michael Guillén of the Evening Class comes to mind next, as he's the one who let me know about Max's blog.
Sister Rye comes to mind because I wish she would post a little more often.
Ryland Walker Knight of Vinyl Is Heavy comes to mind because I owe him an e-mail right now.
Rob Davis of Errata comes to mind because he's only going to be local for another week or so. Frisco Bay's loss is Chicago's windfall.

Thanks again, Thom!

51st SFIFF Awards Announced

I didn't make it to the SFIFF awards night last night. As usual there was a film that took priority. This year it was Eric Rohmer's delightful, bucolic the Romance of Astrea and Celadon, very much a product of its director despite its fifth-century setting. Rohmer's Catholic worldview comes through in the oddest of places- I never supposed I'd ever see a film with a monotheistic druid in it.

Susan Gerhard has wrapped up the award-winners nicely though. Glad to see Ballast awarded the FIPRESCI critics' prize; I interviewed director Lance Hammer yesterday afternoon, and his film deserves all the attention it can get. I also liked that Aditya Assarat was mentioned by the New Directors Competition jury for Wonderful Town- by no means a masterpiece but a very promising first feature with a strong sense of place.

Though I didn't see all of the films they were up against in their Golden Gate Award categories, I can also heartily applaud Madame Tutli-Putli's capturing of the Animated Short prize, and Writing History With Lightning: the Triumph and Tragedy of America's First Blockbuster in the Youth Works category. The latter film is, as its title implies, a 10-minute historical documentary on the social impact of D.W. Griffith's a Birth of a Nation. I wonder if its director Charlotte Burger might have a future as a Kevin-Brownlow-in-the-making?

I did see all of the films vying for the New Visions Golden Gate Award, and though I was pulling for the formalistic brilliance of Jeanne Liotta's Observando El Cielo or Leighton Pierce's Number One or Thorsten Fleisch's Energy!, I see the jury preferred to award the work which had the most visible human presence on the camera (and not just behind it), Tod Herman's Cabinet. Cabinet also won the Golden Gate Award for Bay Area-made short, with Adam Kekar's paranoia-inducing On the Assassination of the President in second place.

Audience Awards are usually announced at the closing night screening at the Castro. Which I'll also be missing- Bela Tarr's the Man From London takes priority in this instance!