Cheryl Eddy's contribution to the Bay Guardian's Year In Film issue published yesterday makes it sound like it's already happened, but the 73-year-old Bridge Theatre hasn't closed yet. It closes tonight, with a film I didn't have much initial interest in seeing but felt compelled to take a look at after learning it would likely be the last hurrah for one of Frisco Bay's few remaining single-screen cinemas. (That's assuming no other operator might want to take the Bridge over after Landmark departs tonight; an assumption questioned in this sfgate article). I liked it so much I plan to go back for the final show tonight; it's not a perfect film (it doesn't make my own just-published list of 2012's best commercial releases, but it would be a close runner-up. And I can't think of a better current film to close the curtain on the Bridge, which I attended dozens of times, at first to see modern "tradition-of-quality" films like the German sub movie Das Boot (my 1st Bridge excursion), but made my most enduring memories loyally attending Peaches Christ's midnight screenings of cult films like Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Carrie, and Showgirls. The film playing tonight includes a wonderful sequence tributing the midnight movie- specifically the Rocky Horror Picture Show and its live-casts that still carry the midnight tradition today, even if Peaches no longer stays up that late.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Lazy Sundays: The Sessions
Friday, November 30, 2012
Vertigo, Vertigo-ing, Vertigone.
Last week, San Francisco Chronicle columnists Matier & Ross reported that the owners of a house at the corner of Lombard and Jones Streets had recently completed a major remodel to the exterior of their home. Normally I wouldn't take notice of changes made to a private residence, but here the building in question has historic significance to cinephiles. It's 900 Lombard, the residence of Jimmy Stewart's character Scottie in Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo.
One would think the owners of the house, who apparently own a business dependent on the tourist trade, would want to honor the historic nature of their home. Surely they were aware of the movie connection when they moved in 23 years ago, as by this point it was a well-known fact, documented in Michael Oliver-Goodwin and Lynda Myles's 1982 San Francisco magazine article (reprinted in this book). But, according to Matier & Ross, they made the change precisely because they were getting too much attention from Vertigo location hunters.
It seems rather preposterous to me that there would be many cinephiles ringing the doorbell of a private residence, as if expecting a red-robed Kim Novak to answer the door. But what do I know. Maybe there are a lot more unmannered Hitchcock diehards out there than I realized. I do know that I've personally avoided mentioning the addresses of private residences when writing abut film locations (including Vertigo's) on this blog and elsewhere- until now. And when I've visited 900 Lombard I've been careful to respect the privacy of the owners by keeping my voice down and avoiding getting too close to the property, much less trespass.
Reading through the many reader comments on the Matier & Ross article at sfgate.com is depressing to someone like me. The general gist of most of them is: "it's only a movie", "private property rights trump all other concerns" and "film buffs are a pathetic and slovenly lot", although there are a few welcome counter-examples. I don't know. Maybe I'm sensitive because I recently wrote an essay about 1940s & 50s San Francisco location filmmaking for a book expected to be published next year (as part of this series.) Or maybe I've just seen too many Hitchcock movies and have gone overly suspicious, but I feel like there's something else happening here, and the Vertigo connection is more of an excuse than a reason for the remodeling.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I made an excursion to Jones and Lombard to take a look at the changes up close. I went with local filmmaker Sean Gillane, who earlier this month saw his ambitious narrative feature directing debut CXL get its world premiere screening at the SF Film Society's Cinema By The Bay festival. Another world premiere at this festival was Alejandro Adams's fourth feature Amity, which for me is his best picture since his own feature debut Around The Bay. Take that endorsement as you will, as in the past few years I've become friends with Adams, and he and his girlfriend Sara Vizcarrondo (another friend) once invited me to participate in an on-camera discussion of another of my favorite filmmakers (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) on their show "Look Of The Week". Likewise, Gillane (who re-used more than one Vertigo location for his CXL) suggested he film me discussing Vertigo and its role in the psycho-geography of San Francisco at the site, and so he did. I don't know what the fate of this footage will be once it's been edited, but I trust it's in good hands, and will certainly keep Hell On Frisco Bay readers posted.
2012 has been quite a roller-coaster year for lovers of Hitchcock in general and Vertigo in particular. For every previously-lost film he assistant-directed made available for free on-line, there's a dreadful-looking, currently-in-theatres Hitchcock docudrama (which focuses its attention on Psycho and not Vertigo; I haven't seen it yet and am not sure I want to). I've mentioned here before that Vertigo unseated Citizen Kane in the most highly-regarded critical poll of the "Greatest Films Of All-Time" this August. It was an ascent 50 years in the making, as when Kane first took that honor in 1962, the four-year-old film Vertigo was selected by only three voters, all Frenchmen: Eric Rohmer, Jean Douchet & Jacques Siclier. From there Vertigo placed #12 in 1972's Sight & Sound Poll, #7 in 1982's, #4 in 1992's and #2 in 2002's poll before achieving top spot this year, being named among the ten best of all time by 191 critics and curators (including Flicker Alley founder and president Jeff Masino, who I interviewed for Keyframe recently.)
But it was hard for many Vertigo fans to properly celebrate this changing of the guard, knowing that one of the film's leading champions had died just days before. I wrote a bit about Chris Marker's Vertigo connection in my obituary for the cinephile and filmmaker, and linked to a pdf of his 1994 essay on Vertigo, but without comment. Though Marker's 1983 essay film Sans Soleil avoided using the 900 Lombard location, this essay references it, without mentioning the house number:
San Francisco, of course, is nothing but another character in the film. [screenwriter] Samuel Taylor wrote to me agreeing that Hitchcock liked the town but only knew ‘what he saw from hotels or restaurants or out of the limo window’. He was ‘what you might call a sedentary person’. But he still decided to use the Dolores Mission and, strangely, to make the house on Lombard Street Scottie’s home ‘because of the red door’.If Marker and the red door no longer exist, Vertigo and Sans Soleil still do. The former film will appear in 35mm at the Pacific Film Archive March 13th as part of the Spring semester's Film 50 afternoon screening and lecture series devoted to "The Cinematic City". The latter film recently played the same venue as part of a compact Chris Marker tribute which concludes tonight.
Shortly after publishing my Marker blog piece last July, I was honored to receive an e-mail from one of Marker's local allies: Tom Luddy. Though I never visited the Pacific Film Archive during Luddy's time as programmer there, in recent years I've seen him at local film events rather frequently, whether in the audience, on stage (as when he received an award on behalf of the Telluride Film Festival, which he co-directs, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival last summer), or even on-screen (as a key participant in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which after years of watching on VHS and DVD, I finally saw in a cinema this year thanks to SFMOMA). Luddy cleared up some of the information I'd written about Marker's film Junkopia. The print of this film which I'd seen twice at the PFA was in fact his print, on deposit at that institution. He has graciously allowed me to quote from his e-mail for readers:
Chris came to the Bay Area fairly often in the '70s and '80s, when I was at PFA ('72-'79) and Zoetrope ('80 to the present), sometimes on stopovers to Japan, and sometimes for the two major films that had sequences he shot in Northern California -- Sans Soleil and The Owl's Legacy. I helped him on both. He also did a little second-unit work on Rumble Fish for Zoetrope for a brief moment.
He always stayed in Berkeley, sometimes at my place and sometimes at the Hotel Shattuck. I drove him to SF many times in the '70s. He was fascinated by the Emeryville Mudflats and one day asked me if anyone had made a film on the ever-changing gallery of objects on display there. I said I did not think there was a film, and he said "let's make one".
So I recruited John and Frank from Zoetrope, and some equipment, and in no time we were shooting there. He was very generous in putting in the credits "Filmed by Chris Marker, John Chapman, and Frank Simeone." But in fact this is a film by Chris Marker in the authorial sense. He gave me a Credit for SPECIAL EFFECTS.... don't ask to explain what for?
He called his producer for many films --Anatole Dauman-- in Paris. Anatole agreed to cover all the costs of the film. Anatole wanted to pay me for my work on the film. I refused to take any money but I said it would be great if I could get a 35mm print as a kind of compensation. He said fine as he did on Sans Soleil as well. I have a 35mm print of Sans Soleil on deposit at PFA too.
I worked on films with great film-makers (Godard, Agnes Varda, Francis Coppola, etc) and with many more thru my work at PFA, Telluride, San Francisco Film Festival and so on.... Chris is/was the most impressive of them all -- a genius as a writer, photographer, film-maker, collage artist, sound designer, historian, poet...and a great human being.
Tom Luddy's print of Junkopia will screen at the PFA again tonight on a program with a chapter from Marker's 13-part The Owl's Legacy, and with two Marker works made well before his association with Luddy: Les Astronautes (pictured above) and La Jetée. Also screening is Emiko Omori's new documentary To Chris Marker, an Unsent Letter, which Luddy appears in along with other Frisco Bay-connected film personalities like David Thomson, Peter Scarlet, Erika Marcus and David and Janet Peoples. Be there!
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Adam Hartzell on Ping Pong
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Festival of Horror
There isn't a day between now and Thanksgiving in which at least one film festival can't be found somewhere here on Frisco Bay. This has actually been the case since the United Nations Association Film Festival began on October 18th. It ends tonight, while the Chinese American Film Festival ends tomorrow, and the San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now series runs until this Tuesday, October 30th (I can recommend the closing night selection Sister by Ursula Meier of Home notoriety, who will be on hand for the screening. Check Film-415 for more suggestions). The upstart Silicon Valley Film Festival comes to Santa Clara beginning Halloween night, and the venerable American Indian Film Festival begins here in San Francisco two days later. Before that's over, SF IndieFest's 11th Annual DocFest will have begun its two-week run at the Roxie and other venues. In the midst of all of these festivals are... more festivals, like the California Independent Film Festival in Orinda and Moraga, and the SFFS's Cinema By The Bay and New Italian Cinema here in Frisco proper. I count twelve in all, and that doesn't include Not Necessarily Noir III, the excellent series running through Halloween, where I've already seen brilliant neo-noir gems like To Live And Die In L.A. and Miami Blues as well as an extraordinarily rare 35mm print of Monte Hellman's 1974 Cockfighter. Perhaps I ought to think of that as a festival, as it self-identifies as on the Roxie website, as well. Anyway, after this dozen-festival (or baker's dozen?) streak ends on November 21st, we're likely to be in for a month or two of comparative festival drought, with only the Another Hole in the Head genre film festival and the touring Found Footage Festival detected by my feelers until Noir City opens in late January. Noir City's full line-up will be revealed at a December 19th Castro Theatre double-bill screening of as-yet-undisclosed titles.
With two big writing deadlines (for forthcoming publications, more details later) and other activities, October's been busy enough for me that I haven't been able to go out to the cinema as much as I'd normally like, much less post on this blog. Because I've got big plans for celebrating Halloween with a family member's wedding on that day, I won't be able to see any of the horror movies playing during the last few days of October, like the double-features playing the final two days of Not Necessarily Noir III, the one playing Tuesday at the Castro Theatre, the screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (and the Cameraman's Revenge) with live organ accompaniment at Davies Symphony Hall that night, or the screenings of the original John Carpenter Halloween at the Balboa Theatre Tuesday and Wednesday.
Luckily for a busy groomsman like myself, there will be many opportunities to celebrate Halloween belatedly with plenty of special horror movie screenings throughout November and even into December. Of foremost interest is probably the Stanford Theatre, which has just extended its published calendar until the end of next month, continuing with the Universal Pictures centennial celebration it began in September by moving from the 1920s & 30s into the 1940s. As I mentioned in my last post, Universal horror rarities Werewolf of London and Secret of the Blue Room will screen on Halloween, but also on the following day before being switched out for a print of the famous Lon Chaney, Sr. silent Phantom of the Opera on Friday, November 2. Now we know that Universal's 1943 Phantom starring Claude Rains will play November 3-4 alongside Cobra Woman, a film that rarely gets labeled a horror movie, but that in my mind connects directly to RKO supernatural thrillers of its era like Cat People and The Leopard Man. November 14-16 brings a double-bill of the Karloff-less 1940 reboot The Mummy's Hand and the Lon Chaney, Jr. star-maker The Wolf Man from 1941. The rest of November at the Stanford showcases Universal's range, bumping a Hitchcock thriller (Saboteur) up against a W.C. Fields farce (The Bank Dick), placing a Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes favorite (The Scarlet Claw) with an Ole Olson/Chic Johnson vehicle in which they make a cameo (Crazy House) , and devoting double-bills to Robert Siodmak noirs, or Abbot & Costello musical-comedies. A complete Deanna Durbin retrospective is promised for December at the venue.
Back to horror movies, the Napa Valley Film Festival is showing two of the scariest ones ever made alongside documentaries about them. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining screens November 7th just after the Frisco Bay premiere of Rodney Ascher's much-anticipated investigation into the film's cult and scholarly following Room 237, while George Romero's Night of the Living Dead screens after the last of three showings of what looks to be a more traditional making-of documentary, Year of the Living Dead. Less "traditionally" a horror movie, but no less horrific, and (in my view) no less great a film than Romero's, is Ted Kotcheff's Wake In Fright, which similarly finds one man up against a threatening army of individuals who want to turn him into one of their own (in this case brain-numbed alcoholic Australians rather than brain-eating zombies). It currently screens in 35mm at the Opera Plaza through at least November 1st. It also plays at the Shattuck in Berkeley, but I'm not sure that venue still has 35mm projection equipment on hand after a recent digital makeover, which I've been told has also left the California Theatre without 35mm capability, and the Embarcadero with only one of its screens 35mm-capable.
The films of Jan Svankmajer are frequently labeled as horror films, justifiably so, I think. There's little more cinematically unsettling than the visceral visions on display in films like Alice, Little Otik, etc. The Yerba Buena Center For The Arts devotes most of November in its screening room to the Czech animator, and is screening works by a perhaps-similar animator named Nathalie Djurberg in the galleries through January. The aforementioned Another Hole in the Head (HoleHead) festival has moved its festival from its traditional early-summer slot to bridge November and December, specifically in order to improve its position in the festival marketplace for for horror films particularly (undoubtedly the fest has made some spotty picks in the past), and is bringing such titles as The Killing Games, Road To Hell, and Deadball. The latter is HoleHead favorite director Yudai Yamaguchi's return to the scene of the crime of his first feature, Battlefield Baseball: the baseball diamond. San Francisco Giants fans should turn out in droves to see a splatter movie about a pitcher with a literally deadly arm, but note: one of Yamaguchi's previous film projects put him afoul of a Yomiuri Giant in 2005.
Atypically, the HoleHead offering I'm probably most curious about is actually not a film at all but the opening night party entertainment: a one-man Oingo Boingo cover act that goes by the name Only A Lad but is also known as Starbeast II. Oingo Boingo was one of the bands I saw perform live as often as I could in my high school and college days, seeing them six times before frontman Danny Elfman devoted his musical attention exclusively to composing film scores. It was a band formed out of the ashes of Los Angeles theatre troupe the Mystic Knights Of Oingo Boingo, whose sensibility was (so I understand) best documented by the 1980 cult-film oddity Forbidden Zone, which will screen at Terra Gallery before the opening-night party in a new colorized version. Director (and Danny's older brother) Richard Elfman will be in attendance to answer questions like: "why would you want to colorize Forbidden Zone?" He is known to be an excellent raconteur, and I confirmed this at an in-person screening (of the original version) at the Lumiere Theatre in 2004. Certainly one of the most memorable screenings I ever took in at the Lumiere, which sadly closed its doors as a Landmark-operated theatre just over a month ago, with no indication that it will find a new tenant to operate it in the time since.
Since Forbidden Zone really is no more a horror movie than The Rocky Horror Picture Show is (its relationship to the weirdest pop culture artifacts of the 1930s is not dissimilar to that of Rocky Horror's relationship to 1950s drive-in movies), let me steer back on the track I keep veering off of: horror movies showing after Halloween. The Pacific Film Archive's November-December calendar actually includes a number of horror or borderline-horror films on it. Barry Gifford will be on hand on the last Thursday in November and the first two Saturdays in December, for a five-program tribute to his screenwriting career including the often bone-chilling Lost Highway and more collaborations with David Lynch and international autuers. And the continuing fall tribute to pre-nouvelle vague French filmmaking includes a pair of eerie, supernatural-themed classics and one authentique horror movie, Georges Franju's unforgettable Eyes Without A Face. One last note: when I first saw that the PFA would presenting three new restorations of diverse, masterpiece-level works by avant-garde filmmakers on Halloween night I wrote it off as counter-programming. But I recently remembered that Vincent Price narrates one of the three, the lovely Notes On The Port Of St. Francis by Frank Stauffacher. It's good that the horror movie master's sonorous tones will be able to entertain an audience that evening, even if I'm going to have to miss it myself.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
South And North
Since my previous post on the Frisco Bay screening scene, two major pieces of news have caught the eyes of cinephiles like myself. First, the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto quietly began a new multi-calendar series last week. It's an extensive centennial tribute to Universal Pictures, focusing attention on the oldest of the Hollywood studios, which mogul Carl Laemmle formed out of his company IMP (Independent Moving Pictures Company) and several others after emerging victorious in his legal battle with the 'old guard' of American motion picture production: Edison, Bioscope, Vitagraph, etc. a.k.a. "The Trust". The first picture made at his Universal City studio after this formation, At Old Fort Dearborn, was released on September 28, 1912, and was itself a centennial commemoration of a War of 1812 battle taking place where Chicago would eventually be founded. Though this film (if it indeed exists) is not announced for the Stanford schedule, there are three silent film presentations between now and the end of the calendar: two early entries in the famous "Universal Horror" series: the spooky Cat and the Canary this Friday September 21 & Lon Chaney's famous Phantom of the Opera November 2nd, as well as Erich von Stroheim's 1922 drama Foolish Wives on October 12th. All three will feature Dennis James at the Wurlitzer organ, and will hopefully be followed by more Universal silent films in subsequent calendars.
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The Good Fairy (William Wyler, 1935) screen capture from Kino DVD |
The other studio-focused series in Berkeley is the Pacific Film Archive's Nikkatsu centennial, which I'm sad to say I haven't been able to attend any of yet. (How could I let myself miss a rare Mizoguchi film?) There are still quite a few screenings left to go however, including a Daisuke Ito chambara from the silent era and three Seijun Suzuki selections from the 1960s. Like Universal, Nikkatsu is still in action today, releasing films like Rent-A-Cat, which will screen nearby next month. This brings me to screening news #2: Last Wednesday's press conference and announcement of the program for the Mill Valley Film Festival happening in various Marin County venues from October 4-14.
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In Another Country (Hong Sangsoo, 2012) courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival |
I'm also curious to see Nor'Easter and Fat Kid Rules The World, both first features from American directors Andrew Brotzman and Matthew Lillard, respectively. I believe these are the first films completed with some assistance from Lucas McNelly and his ambitious A Year Without Rent project (full disclosure: my roommates and I contributed a night on a couch to this project) to have public screenings in the Bay Area. There's also The Wall, which comes to Mill Valley after screening at the Berlin & Beyond festival this month, a fascinating Frisco-focused documentary called The Institute, and the annual offering from the prolific local legend Rob Nilsson, whose films rarely screen in San Francisco proper, even when they're made here. This one is called Maelstrom and is set in Marin, making MVFF an even-more ideal showcase than usual.
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Tales of the Night (Michel Ocelot, 2011) courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival |
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Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012) courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival |
All I know is, I'm determined to see e.g. Like Someone In Love in Marin County next month, even if it is going to be shown from a Digital Cinema Package (DCP). And if IFC distributes a print of it to a local arthouse sometime this winter or spring or later, I imagine I'll happily pay to see it again there as well. I mean, it's an Abbas Kiarostami feature set in Japan. Of course I'm going to want to see it at least twice! Now, off to buy my ticket befpre it goes to "rush" status...