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.
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.
Tales of the Night (Michel Ocelot, 2011) courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival |
Thanks to the festival's timing on the "awards calendar" there's always a certain amount of "Oscarbaition" at Mill Valley, and this year Ben Affleck is expected to be on hand to excite people about his upcoming Argo and David O. Russell will be here with Silver Linings Playbook. But I'm much more interested in an Oscar-ineligible animated feature, silhouettist Michel Ocelot's first 3-D venture Tales of the Night, which screened in Frisco once last year, in French with English subtitles. I missed it with some regret but won't miss the subtitles when I catch it dubbed into English at Mill Valley this year. A recent viewing of the otherwise-excellent Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (which comes to the Castro next month) made me realize I haven't yet trained myself to read words on one focal plane while taking in stereoscopic action at the same time. Thoughtful dubbing is usually less damaging to animation than live-action work anyway. Note that Robert Bloomberg's 3-D short How To Draw A Cat, which screens along with Ocelot's feature, is, contra the festival catalog, not made by young Croatian artists. There is an animation workshop as part of the MVFF Children's Filmfest, and the other features in this sidebar will be preceded by shorts, but labeling How To Draw a Cat as such was a publishing error.
With all the treats in store, it may be a bit disappointing to learn that all the above-mentioned films will be screening digitally rather than in 35mm prints. This is the reality of film festival exhibition for the present and foreseeable future, however, and although the main MVFF venue, the Rafael Film Center, still retains its 35mm projection capability, they understandably also want to show off their recently-upgraded digital projection systems. To festival director Mark Fishkin's press conference promise that the festival screenings will look much better than the clips shown did, I can only say: they'd better! I feel it's worth noting the handful of titles that I'm told will be sourced from actual film reels and not DCP or other digital formats: the painter/film director biopic Renoir, Brazil's Xinga (also a biopic), Polish thriller To Kill A Beaver, and two of the selections in the shorts program entitled Crosseyed And Painless. And two of the retrospective presentations as well: the screening of
La Jetée that will accompany the October 6th (but not the October 8th) showing of Emiko Omori's tribute to its departed director, To Chris Marker, an Unsent Letter, and the October 7th 35mm screening of Yoyo, a 1965 comedy co-written by Jean Claude-Carrière, and directed by and starring the all-but-forgotten French clown Pierre
Étaix- a pair mentored and introduced by the great Jacques Tati. If
Étaix's name doesn't ring a bell his face may if you've seen Fellini's The Clowns, Oshima's Max Mon Amour, Iosseliani's Chantrapas, Kaurismäi's Le Havre, or (not bloody likely) Lewis's The Day The Clown Cried.
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...
Hi Brian; I love your word Oscarbaition! Re MVFF, Fat Kid Rules The World is at an inconvenient time up here in Calgary fest otherwise might have
ReplyDeleteseen, I,m doing 9 features in 3 days. Salient point on the film vs.
digital crisis is since a significant percentage of new releases are captured on video their subsequent showing that way
is less of an issue. But for the
others, we,ll have to disagree
That's one way of looking at it, but I think another, perhaps equally valid, is to recognize the systemic connections between the production and use of 35mm shooting stock and that used for distribution. When one end of the equation shrinks, it puts pressure on the other end to do so as well, thanks to economies of scale. So buying a ticket for a digitally-projected movie that involved photochemical film at any point during its production chain may do more to prolong the life and health of analog imagery than seeing a movie that was purely digital from birth to exhibition.
ReplyDeleteJust a thought. At any rate, it's clearly becoming harder and harder to be a film purist and still consider oneself reasonably current with motion picture trends, artists, etc. Compromises must be made and every film-as-film lover makes them differently.
Of the Nikkatsu films at PFA, Singing Lovebirds looks like a real treat, if just for the chance to see Takashi Shimura in a film made several years before teaming with Kurosawa.
ReplyDeleteI get your point, as for being reasonably current since we often have to wait a year or more in Bay Area to catch up with what,s been at various Euro and other fests, I,m content to see those that I don,t
ReplyDeletewant to pay for that way, a bit later on home video or the Internet,
much as I may read a book that
hasn,t just been published, Plus I
still have a century of film history to catch up with too!
Astute, articulate observation, Brian. Relocating to Boise has forced me to give up being a film purist and, in that, I imagine I have become like most people watching "film" in America.
ReplyDeleteTotally agree that this is the most exciting MVFF line-up in years, with lots of acclaimed films from the major festivals and fewer programmers' "discoveries" from obscure Scandanavian and Eastern European fests (not that some of those haven't been quite good). I went and bought a ticket for TABU (not on DVD screener and unwilling to take the chance of not securing a press comp).
ReplyDeleteJust read that the new Tabu, like Rivette,s
ReplyDeleteL,Amour Fou, was shot part in 16 part in 35mm, Wonder how much of his play on the texture of the
two film gauges will come across in
the pixelated version?
I don't know, and I hope a print of it shows up here sometime. But we'll see. It's distributor in this country is Adopt Films, which is definitely a new kid on the block.
ReplyDeletePeter, sadly I missed Singing Lovebirds last night. This series is just flying past busy old me...