The Long Goodbye (1973)

WHO: Robert Altman directed this.

WHAT: Smack dab in the middle of Altman's unbeatable string of truly great films that ran from Brewster McCloud in 1970 to Nashville in 1975 (and that perhaps extended even longer on both ends for people who like MASH and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson a bit more than I do) is his version of Raymond Chandler, the missing link between (for instance) Murder, My Sweet and The Big Lebowski. It's been far too long since I've last seen it, though I've read a lot of writing about it in the meantime, including a great take by James Naremore, from whom I shall now quote:

The underlying concept is intriguing: Elliot Gould is intentionally miscast as Philip Marlowe, and the setting is updated to contemporary, dope-crazed Los Angeles, where the private eye becomes a ridiculous anachronism.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Phyllis Wattis Theatre at the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, at 7:00.

WHY: With SFMOMA shutting its revolving doors for an extensive remodeling project in a week and a half, the Wattis, one of the key venues for film projection in San Francisco, will be out of commission for more than two years. It's hard to think of a more aptly-titled film to mark tonight's final 35mm projection at the museum before the projectors are to be removed.

The good news is that tonight's "long goodbye" is really a "see you later," because the projectors are just going into storage for the extensive construction period, and are expected to be re-installed in time for the museum's reopening in early 2016. And when they are, they may get used more frequently than ever, as part of the museum makeover is the addition of a separate entrance to the theatre from the outside, so that screenings will be able to happen at times when the museum galleries are closed. Which means the Wattis, previously been limited to Thursday evening and daytime screenings, will have the flexibility to hold evening programs more than once a week upon reopening. So while a piece of the Frisco Bay specialty film-screening puzzle will be missed for a while, it has the potential to come back with more passion and power than ever before.

If you've been immersed in the Roxie's classic noir series (which ends tonight with a double-bill of Criss Cross and The Crooked Way) over the past two weeks, The Long Goodbye may be a good way to ease back into the modern world with a merely forty-year-old detective film rather than the sixty- or eighty-year-old films that made up the bulk of that series.

And if you want to see another Altman film on the big screen soon, try the Balboa Theatre, which will screen Popeye on June 8th as part of a weekly Saturday matinee series of kid-friendly films, that started last week.

HOW: 35mm print

Milk (2008)

WHO: Daniel Nicoletta was a historical consultant and still photographer for this film, performed in a cameo playing Harvey Milk's political aide Carl Carlson, and was portrayed as a young man by Lucas Grabeel (pictured above).

WHAT: You can nitpick its minor anachronisms or question some of the characterization and still find this Gus Van Sant-directed, multi-awarded biopic of San Francisco's first openly gay elected official to be a very moving film about a crucial moment in the city's, and ultimately the nation's and the world's,  movement toward freedom and equality. Sean Penn's performance as Harvey Milk is a career high, and one of the few recent Academy Award-winning impersonations of a historical figure that I think probably deserved all its accolades.

The decisions to shoot the film in San Francisco locations dressed to be as authentic as possible, and to fill the set with people who lived through the period depicted, available to help guide a younger generation of their own portrayers to verisimilitude, from the featured players down to the marching extras in mass protest scenes, may be foregone conclusions in retrospect, but they weren't the only approaches available to makers of films like Milk. And there's something very interesting about the kind of authenticity available and not available to filmmakers working this way. There's both a paradox and a beautiful expression of continuity that occurs when the audience sees a 25-year-old actor or extra in the same frame as the person he or she is portraying, who is now 55 years old and portraying an elder who may have inspired him or her at the time.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre, with showtimes at 2:00, 4:30, 7:00 & 9:30.

WHY: Every year since Milk came out, the Castro has shown it on Harvey Milk Day, which commemorates the life of the activist who would have turned 83 today had he not been slain. Today the screening also comes just one day after the announcement of the 37th Frameline Festival, which will come to the Castro and other Frisco Bay venues June 20-30. 

As we see in Milk, Harvey Milk's political career arose out of his experiences running a camera store just a block away from the Castro Theatre. This was one of the sets recreated in its original space for the film, and Jenni Olson's beautiful short 575 Castro St. documents that space in moments when it wasn't being utilized as a location for shooting, in a manner intended to remind us of the importance of this store as a hub not only of political activism but artistic expression. In fact the two activities were (and, I would argue, are) intertwined inseparably. Perhaps there's no better example of this than the historical fact that it was Milk's increasing involvement in politics that necessitated his hiring of Daniel Nicoletta at the store, to take on duties he was becoming too busy to handle himself. Nicoletta's presence at the store (depicted in the screenshot from Milk above), which was devoted to small-gauge motion picture processing as well as still photography, put him in the ideal place to help found the first-ever "Gay Film Festival of Super-8 Films" in 1977, an event that over the next few decades transformed into the Frameline festival we know today. As Olson writes, 

For its first few years the festival showcased the modest Super-8 imaginings of such prolific but obscure gay filmmakers as Jim Baker, Bern Boyle, Stephen Iadereste, Ric Mears, Allen McClain, Billy Miggins, T.K. Perkins, Wayne Smolen, David Waggoner, Ken Ward and Christine Wynne as well as festival founders Marc Huestis and Dan Nicoletta and Names Project founder Cleve Jones. Many of these films explored gay themes, but a good percentage of the work (like many other experimental films of the era) focused on simple light and motion studies.

If you haven't been keeping an eye on the Wikipedia page for the Frameline Film Festival, you might like to know that it has recently exploded with historical information, particularly from the festival's first ten years. The page also points out that Frameline has scanned and made available all of its past program guides in a handy archive. From this archive, I've learned more about Nicoletta's own filmmaking than anywhere else. Some of his films shown at the first few "Gay Film Festivals" include a film, which he described as "an autobiographic film about my destiny, my love of San Francisco and life here", or Theatrical Collage: "a collection of theatrical footage from over the years" and Dancing Is Illegal, which is described as "produced for the stage by the Angels of Light".

Reading about this early festival history is a good reminder of the seemingly-humble beginnings that can lay the groundwork for a cultural movement (and considering Frameline is the longest-running and highest-profile LGBT Film Festival in the country and perhaps anywhere, I don't think it's overreaching to use terms like "cultural movement"). In the late 1970s, Super-8 was the most inexpensive motion picture medium around, and thus ideal material for use by independent-minded artists, especially those whose work would likely be systematically be excluded from traditional structures of creation and exhibition. 

Today the equivalently inexpensive medium is digital. It's something to keep in mind after learning at the Frameline press conference this morning that this year is expected to be the first time the festival doesn't screen a single new film on a non-digital format. There will be two 35mm retrospective programs (a matinee of Jamie Babbit's 1999 But I'm a Cheerleader with her 1998 short Sleeping Beauties, and a Peaches Christ-hosted midnight showing of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddie's Revenge) but, it seems, no prints of new titles.  

This may be an end of an era of a sort, but it's not at all unexpected. The ratio of film-to-digital presentations has been steeply declining at practically every festival I know of in the past few years. Last year I believe Frameline screened no more than a dozen films on film, and a good third of those were retrospectives. The good news is that higher-quality digital presentations are becoming more and more affordable for independent makers, so while those of us who take special pleasure in the illusionary intermittence of film projection may mourn the increasing scarcity of opportunities to watch it, at least we may be able to enjoy digital screenings more than we have in the past. I hope so, as there are quite a few new works at Frameline 37 that seem quite promising, including a ten-program regional focus entitled Queer Asian Cinema, and a new documentary on the great Frisco Bay poet and filmmaker James Broughton, appropriately entitled Big Joy after the kinds of feelings most of his experimental films can instill in an attentive audience. Perhaps another local venue will use this new doc as an excuse to rent 16mm prints of some of his films from Canyon Cinema and showcase them during or shortly after the festival.

HOW: Milk will screen as a DCP.

Twin Peaks: Pilot (1990)

WHO: David Lynch co-wrote and directed this pilot for his landmark television series.

WHAT: "Twin Peaks" must be the American network-produced television series most likely to be cited in a conversation with a hardcore cinephile or on a list by a serious film critic. Somehow giving us a first glimpse that the 1990s were to be both moodier and more absurd than the previous decade had been, it was a huge pop cultural sensation in its day, at least until its central mystery "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" was forced to be answered. I've long wondered if this was simply because the top brass at ABC was swept up in the national desire to learn what Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost had in mind, like any other fans of the show, losing sight of how important the unanswering of this question was to the show's narrative power.

I actually enjoyed the whole series when I last took a look at it over ten years ago, but there's no question in my mind that the strongest two hours of the show, and arguably two of the artistically strongest hours of television ever broadcast over U.S. airwaves, are the original pilot episode. Unlike its successor episodes, it was shot on location in Washington State and was prepared to be released as a theatrical feature in case the show was not picked up by the network. I imagine its themes of small-town morality and the duality of celebrity (Laura Palmer was the town Homecoming Queen, after all) must play as powerfully as ever in the socially-mediated age we find ourselves in today.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Cinecave at 8:00.

WHY: Though I am a committed cinemagoer, I'm not one to avoid video stores. In fact I find them invaluable, especially when I'm in the midst of a research project involving films not already in my own DVD collection. I don't know how it would be possible to replace the value of the combined power of Le Video on 9th Avenue and Lost Weekend Video on Valencia Street; the former has a larger collection and the latter is more convenient to my usual routes (and has some titles Le Video doesn't carry). I was very pleased to hear New York City film programmer Miriam Bale give Lost Weekend a lovely shout-out as a formative influence in a recent podcast hosted by Peter Labuza. The browseable and personal-touch nature of an independent video store will never be replaced by streaming and downloading movies, and I hope these two institutions survive far into the future.

There is now a way to support Lost Weekend and be a cinemagoer at the same time: they have installed a communal screening space in their basement. Called the Cinecave, the venue plays host to screenings of rare VHS & DVDs, to live comedy and other performance, and to whatever else might be of interest to members of the Cinecave club. (Membership is free and automatic for any Lost Weekend Video patrons).

Starting tonight, the Cinecave is hosting screenings of "Twin Peaks" episodes every Tuesday into the foreseeable future. This is at least the second go-round of showing the series in the venue since it opened almost a year ago; last time I'm told there was pie offered at some (or perhaps all) of the showings. If you've never seen "Twin Peaks" this is a perfect opportunity to catch up on a major part of the David Lynch filmography. If you've seen it so many times you can't count them, and are looking for a fresh new way to do so, how about among a audience in the basement of a video store?

Note that on June 13 & 15 at the Camera 3 in San Jose will screen Lynch's theatrical film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. But don't see that until you've seen at least half of the produced television episodes unless you're not concerned with spoiling their surprises.

HOW: It will screen with the first episode of the series, as some sort of video presentation; I asked a Lost Weekend clerk whether it would be shown on DVD or another video format, and she was unsure.

Killer At Large (1947)

WHO: William Beaudine is known as "the Man Who Made 500 Movies" and this was one of the uncountable many he directed.

WHAT: A newspaper-themed B-noir starring Robert Lowery (who would soon play Bruce Wayne in Columbia's Batman And Robin serial- the first post-World War II screen version of the character) and Anabel Shaw (so memorable in supporting roles in films like Shock, High Tide and Gun Crazy). I haven't seen it.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie at 6:40 and 9:30.

WHY: When the Roxie calls this one "obscure" in their program notes they aren't kidding! Barely mentioned in any literature, including Beaudine's own biography, and possessing fewer than 5 user votes and only one user review at the Internet Movie Database, this is the kind of movie that makes Fall Guy and Club Havana seem like well-known titles.

HOW: 16mm print, on a double bill with Key Witness, another relatively unknown B picture screening on 35mm.

Autumn Leaves (1956)

WHO: Robert Aldrich won the Silver Bear at the 1956 Berlin Film Festival for having directed this.

WHAT: Six years before teaming (along with Bette Davis, of course) for What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? director Aldrich (coming off a pair of noir now-classics Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Knife) and actor Joan Crawford (who had just completed Queen Bee) made this film together. It casts Crawford as a woman approaching spinsterhood, who develops a romance with a young man with a past played by Cliff Robertson.

It's been a while since I first (and last) saw this, as part of a Pacific Film Archive Aldrich retrospective, so let me grab some words from a review by the always insightful Fernando F. Croce:

The brilliance of it, irresistible and perverse, lies in Robert Aldrich's plowing of melodrama for all the disturbances and neuroses within a "classy soap opera." The heroine (Joan Crawford) is a lonely writer, her bungalow exudes the fatality of Palance's house in The Big Knife, arenas of mounting hysteria both. A flashback during a concert lends the Electra complex, Oedipus later enters the equation via Cliff Robertson, the younger man who courts Crawford at the diner booth

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Roxie at 3:15 and 7:30.

WHY: Autumn Leaves is, as I remember it, a great film. Probably my favorite of Aldrich's films and quite possibly of Crawford's too (though I still have plenty to explore in both filmographies). Certainly it's a more thoughtful film than the grotesquely enjoyable guignol of Baby Jane, bur it will surely never surpass that film in popularity with a wider public. Simply, Autumn Leaves takes the American family seriously as an institution to critique while the later Crawford-Aldrich pairing perversely, pleasurably smashes it. 

But although suspense is employed as an efficient narrative motor in Autumn Leaves, it is ultimately a romantic melodrama, a fatally unfashionable genre these days. It's a perfect cousin to noir, and placing it in a series like the Roxie's current I Wake Up Dreaming is a good reminder of the melodramatic underpinnings of the noir cycle- although crime pictures and so-called "womens' weepies" may have found the core of their appeal in gendered audiences, they were also meant to be able to function as fodder for opposite-sex date nights as well.

If you're not a genre purist, I can enthusiastically recommend Autumn Leaves, but noir fans who prefer their films to include gangsters and other underworld figures may get more enjoyment out of the rest of this week's noir series titles, screening lots of rarities involving criminals, and at least one mean little masterpiece of the 1940s crime movie cycle: Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross. They can also look forward to July and August, when the PFA brings a series devoted to films inspired by the work of Belgian mystery novelist Georges Simenon. It's a welcomely diverse set of noir and noir-esque films made not only in Hollywood and France but also Japan and Hungary, and representing almost every decade since his most famous character, Inspector Maigret, was first invented and adapted to screen in the 1930s. 

HOW: 35mm double-bill with another Crawford picture, Female on the Beach.

Rear Window (1954)

WHO: Alfred Hitchcock

WHAT: The Wikipedia article on Rear Window claims that "analyses, including that of François Truffaut in Cahiers du cinéma in 1954, center on the relationship between Jeff and the other side of the apartment block, seeing it as a symbolic relationship between spectator and screen." Not exactly. Perhaps this is why Hitchcock fans have created their own Wiki, where it's possible to read Truffaut's review in full, and see he in fact evokes a different relationship: that between a filmmaker and the world being filmed.

Whether one defines Rear Window as about the spectator/screen or the filmmaker/world relationship may ultimately depend upon one's self-identification as a viewer or as a director (although Truffaut had not yet made his first short film in 1954, he'd surely planned and hoped to by then.) I'd argue, however, that the difference between these two frames is in fact at the crux of the film. If Rear Window is about the spectator and the screen, then Hitchcock has created a number of miniature movies about L.B. Jeffries' neighbors for him to watch during his convalescence. If it's about the filmmaker and the world, then Jeffries (James Stewart) is Hitchcock's avatar in their creation: in this case the stories he and Lisa (Grace Kelly) tell each other about "Miss Torso", "Miss Lonelyhearts" etc. are projections, patterns, and ways of interpreting the world (or making a film). It's only by involving himself with the stories on screen, by "directing" his actors Lisa and Stella (Thelma Ritter) to enter the framed world, that he can discover for sure whether the stories he's watching unfold are his own creations or not. By intervening he verifies that (at least the Thorwald story) is not a product only his own imagination, while at the same time ensuring his own role of authorship in the conclusion of the narrative.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre at 2:00, 4:30 & 7:00.

WHY: When I last checked in on the Alfred Hitchcock screen scene over a month ago, two large retrospectives of the director's work were finishing up at different local venues. Now it's time for what I call "Phase 2" of the 2013 Frisco Bay celebration of the Master of Suspense.

The centerpiece of this phase is the "Hitchcock 9" a set of all but one of the first ten films directed by Hitchcock, each silent, recently restored thanks to the British Film Institute and its partners, and set to play two Frisco Bay venues this summer. First, the nine restorations' US premiere will be at the Castro Theatre June 14-16 thanks to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Musical accompaniment will be provided by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, as well as pianists Stephen Horne and Judith Rosenberg- the latter a local making her long-awaited debut as a silent accompanist at the Castro Theatre. I'm still unsure whether these screenings will be via DCP or 35mm prints; my best guess is that there will be a mixture of formats used over the weekend.

Then in August, the Pacific Film Archive will re-screen each of these titles in their intimate screening room, each with regular accompanist Rosenberg performing at the venue's (upright, not grand, unlike at the Castro) piano. Dates and formats have just been announced for these screenings, with The Lodger, The Pleasure Garden, Downhill, and Easy Virtue screening on 35mm prints with the other five shown digitally.

But these silent screenings are not the only Hitchcock shows on the horizon. Oakland's Paramount has tapped North By Northwest to close its summer 35mm screening series August 23rd. And this month the Castro has paired two 35mm Hitchcock classics with new DCP presentations of recent films made by Hitchcock-inspired directors. Next Tuesday is Shadow of a Doubt with Park Chan-wook's latest film Stoker, while today's screenings of Rear Window prefigure a late-evening presentation of a new DCP of Brian DePalma's wonderfully sleazy 1984 Hitchcock homage Body Double.

HOW: Rear Window screens in 35mm, the final show being on a double-bill with a digital presentation of Body Double.

The Story of Hansel and Gretel (1951)

WHO: Ray Harryhausen directed, produced and animated this short film by hand, and who died at age 92 last week.

WHAT: In Alex Pappademas's lovely obituary, he writes of the feature films that the master worked on:

They were all conceived as showcases for Harryhausen's effects, and he was supposedly heavily involved in every stage of their production, from script to art direction to principal photography, but they tend to fall down a deep well entertainmentwise whenever the puppets yield the screen to people. "I could kick myself when I think of how I didn't insist on more from the director or the studio," Harryhausen once said, admitting that some of his finished pictures made him "heartsick."

It's true that, although Harryhausen's effects have a timeless quality to them, the feature films they appear in work better as entertainments for young children than sophisticated adults. Clunky dialogue and frequently unimaginative camera placement weigh down, say, 20 Million Miles to Earth or The 7th Voyage of Sinbad when Harryhausen's monster creations are not on the screen, and perhaps can only really be appreciated by discerning, aesthetically attuned moviegoers when they are able to summon their inner-child sense of wonder.

The lesser-known short films Harryhausen directed before his feature-film career, however, do not suffer from the same lack of artistic sophistication, perhaps because they were don't involve the blending of live actors with the animated environments. The Story of Hansel and Gretel, for instance, utilizes some creative camera angles and compositions in telling a very familiar story. It's an apparent paradox, because this short film was intended expressly for children while the later science fiction and fantasy films were aimed at wider audiences. But if you can appreciate the enclosed artistry of a Disney Silly Symphony or a Frank Tashlin cartoon, you may find more complete fulfillment from this film than from a Harryhausen vehicle in which his artistry is not evident in every frame.

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM tonight only at Oddball Films. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117.

WHY: Many commentators (most recently David Bordwell) have pointed to the increasing importance of film archives to allowing us access to our moving image heritage, in the waning days of 35mm as a mass distribution medium. Movie lovers now have so many convenient (if compromised) methods of seeing films on a whim, and the barriers to providing timely programming to cinema audiences seem to be increasing rather than decreasing as more and more screens go digital-only.

But archives, when they screen their own holdings, as Oddball does every Thursday and Friday evenings, can demonstrate a flexibility few other venues can have. I'm sure that upon Ray Harryhausen's death, programmers at the Castro and Rafael and perhaps other local venues with a history of connecting audiences with his film work, immediately began investigating the possibility of a tribute program. But though none have been announced yet, Oddball has already been able to tribute the stop-motion master twice, first with a film added to last week's Czechoslovakian animation program, and now tonight with The Story of Hansel and Gretel anchoring a program of tasty films that will also include a short featuring Woody Allen and the late Jonathan Winters, an excerpt from an I Love Lucy episode, and a rare showing of Ub Iwerks's 1934 cartoon Reducing Creme. 

Animation fans should also look forward to next week's Oddball screenings: a Devilish set including Betty Boop in Red Hot Mamma, and a Toy-fest that ranges from Gumby to Charles & Ray Eames.

The Bay Area's other big archive, Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, has also just announced its entire summer programming slate. Though there's a lot to peruse and comment upon, the two series most relevant to this particular post are the Sunday-afternoon, 12-film focus on Japan's greatest animation studio Ghibli, and a selection of screenings of Eastern European films from the archive's own collection, donated by George Gund III, and presented as a memorial to his long life, which ended earlier this year.

HOW: Tonight's Oddball program, including The Story of Hansel and Gretel, will screen virtually entirely in 16mm.