Third Street Summer Screenings

Two museum screening rooms on opposite sides of Third Street between Mission and Howard have posted more information about their summer film schedules.

On the East side of the street at SFMOMA, on Thursdays and Saturdays:

Throughout June, all fourteen episodes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz play. It may have been "made for television" but this 15-hour magnum opus first revealed itself at the 1980 Venice Film Festival, and played in U.S. movie theatres in 1983. I'm heading off to see the first three episodes as soon as I finish this post. SFMOMA now has a blog, and discussion of the film has begun there in earnest.

In July, Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy. Your opportunity to see Blood of a Poet, which inspired film artists from Jean Genet to David Lynch, on the big screen.

In August, in conjunction with the Frida Kahlo exhibition opening on Saturday and running through September, a series of Mexican film classics. Starting with Luis Buñuel's masterpiece Nazarín on Thursday July 31st, the series also includes great films I've only seen on video like Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Que Viva México!, Emilio Fernández's Enamorada (pictured above) and Paul Leduc's superb biopic (normally a paradoxical pair of words in my book) Frida, naturaleza viva. And of the films I've never seen before, I've heard great things about Alberto Gout's Aventurera, and I'm vastly intrigued by the rare silent film El Puño de hierro (The Iron Fist).

On the West side of Third Street, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, there are the videos by Jia Zhang-Ke, Michael Haneke and Apichatpong Weerasethakul this month. Thursday's screening of Jia's Useless was sans English subtitles, so it might be worth your while to call ahead before tomorrow's screening if such a thing matters to you. On the other hand, Dong (pictured) was subtitled and terrific.

In July, there's the Cinekink festival, the US premiere of Rotterdam Film Festival discovery a Listener's Tale, shot in Sikkim, India, and the Frisco premiere of a film seen nearby only in Berkeley, Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon on July 31st.

And, as I learned from Michael Guillén's interview with YBCA programmer Joel Shephard, the venue's Bay Area Now triennial celebration of Frisco Bay artists and curators will include films guest-programmed by some of the most creative film and video bookers on the local scene, including Oddball, kino21, the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (whose annual festival runs this June 13-15), Peaches Christ (whose Midnight Mass summer series at the Bridge has been revealed,) and more.