The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2018. An index of participants can be found here.
Five-time IOHTE contributor Frako Loden is an educator and writer, at www.documentary.org, Eat Drink Films and elsewhere.
1. The year-long Ingmar Bergman centenary program at Pacific Film Archive. I barely attended it—concentrating mostly on the remarkable 1940s
films—but it spurred me to watch all the Bergman DVDs I've collected and never
watched. I was astonished by my virgin viewings of Winter Light and the long-form version of Fanny and Alexander.
Le Trou screen capture from Cohen Media DVD of My Journey Through French Cinema |
3. The "Documenting Vietnam" series at PFA. The brief Whitesburg Epic (Appalshop, 1971) questions the citizens of a
small Appalachian town, suggesting that young people with nothing to do go to
war, especially when the town thinks that it's a good idea. The grueling
Interviewswith My Lai Veterans (Joseph Strick, 1970) lays bare the toll on five
young soldiers forbidden to talk about their experience of this pivotal
civilian massacre. Frederick
Wiseman's 1971 Basic Training shows how individual personalities and independent
thinking are erased during the prelude to sending these boys off to war.
Other documentaries
were even more brutal and timely: Peter Gessner's 1966 Time of the Locust and the Winterfilm Collective's 1972 Winter Soldier. The latter documents
a speak-in organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit, as one
bearded and longhaired veteran after another, GIs and officers alike, testify
to the cruelty and dehumanization of their fellow soldiers.
Saga of Gösta Berling image from San Francisco Silent Film Festival |
5. Wendell B. Harris, Jr.'s 1989 Chameleon Street at
SFMOMA's "Modern Cinema: Black Powers" series. What an amazing film!
It really hasn't dated in its themes, techniques or cultural references. There
are mentions of "black Barbie," obsession with Marvel Comics
("my Thor voice"), Cocteau's Beauty
and the Beast and Edith Piaf. It ends with a re-telling of the fable of the
scorpion and the frog, which is no different from the lyrics of the song
"The Snake" that Donald Trump likes to repeat in speeches to his
base. The film is based on the true story of Detroiter William Douglas Street,
Jr. (played by Harris himself), a con man and impersonator who over the years
pretended to be a Time magazine
reporter, surgeon and civil rights attorney. At the beginning of the film, a
psychiatrist notes Street's "complementarity": the ability to inhabit
whatever persona someone else wants him to be. He knows all the tricks of being
something that he isn't. It's a way of getting back at, or simply surviving in,
the white world that won't let him do things legitimately. He has to be a
trickster, a con artist. It's a major form of code switching. He doesn't just
use his "white voice" (like in Sorry
to Bother You)—he uses a kind of "white self," or at least a
black self that doesn't threaten the white powers that be and that gives him
entrée into their circles of privilege.
Personal Problems screen capture from Kino DVD |
I bookmarked more article from this website. Nice blog provided here. Awesome
ReplyDeleteVery great post. I just stumbled upon this blog and its excellent point.
ReplyDeleteThis is the right blog. Great stuff you have here, just great! Thankyou!
ReplyDelete