I'm oh-so pleased that I was able to convince sixteen other cinephiles to allow me to publish their lists of favorite repertory/revival screenings seen in San Francisco Bay Area cinemas and other exhibition spaces. Though I don't use this blog space for much anymore (if you want my latest quick thoughts on the Frisco Bay cinema scene and a few other topics I encourage you to check my twitter feed), I'm proud that I can still occasionally use it for something I think is still valuable: a collective "thank you" to the people who make Frisco Bay a still-vital site for audience re-appreciation of the world's cinematic heritage.
My own cinema-going year in 2018 was just about as exciting as ever, despite it being the first full year that I removed an active 35mm revival venue from my moviegoing itinerary; please read the first two paragraphs of this post to learn why I no longer attend the New Mission/Alamo Drafthouse. I do give an early-2017 screening there a nod in my make-up list of 2017 repertory cinema highlights at the very bottom of the piece you're currently looking at.
As usual, I focused the following selections on films brand-new to me, mostly because I'm usually so much more energized by falling in love with a new-to-me movie for the first time than by even the most fruitful re-visitation of an old friend. Although 2018 brought some very fruitful re-visitations, such as seeing 70mm prints of 2001: A Space Odyssey and West Side Story (the latter for the first time in that format), and 35mm prints of Eyes Wide Shut and Shadow of a Doubt (again, the latter for the first time in that format), all at the Castro, or revisiting Sátántangó in 35mm at BAMPFA and viewing an IB Technicolour print of All That Heaven Allows at the same venue. I even saw, under not-to-be-disclosed circumstances, a collector-held original-release IB Tech print of the first film I ever fell in love with as a young child, which was quite the nostalgia trip. But in most every way I appreciated all the following screenings even more:
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| Alexander Nevsky screen capture from Janus DVD |
Alexander Nevsky, February 16, 2018
Though this list is made up about equally of films I'd barely if ever heard of before they appeared on a local repertory calendar and films I've been wanting to see for many years, this early-year BAMPFA presentation not only fit squarely in the latter category, it was perhaps the most prominent and long-standing example of it. My desire to see Alexander Nevsky preceded my cinephilia, going back to my youthful days as a Sergei Prokofiev-loving prospective music major. My mother sang in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus when they accompanied it at Davies Symphony Hall in the 1990s, while I was attending college in the Midwest. Having missed that chance, I kept hoping for a reprise to be my first experience with Sergei Eisenstein's sync-sound debut, but upon seeing the Symphony's cinematic programming moving away from foreign-language masterpieces featuring music composed by concert-hall regulars, in favor of Hollywood hits, I decided to give up on such dreams and take the first 35mm opportunity I could get, which ended up being this extremely stirring screening. I'm actually glad I first saw this extraordinary 1938 work of form & emotion in a setting in which the music did not threaten to overwhelm image any more than it occasionally does, but then the push-pull of the two Sergeis in its creation is one of the most dynamic aspects of a film that shouldn't be categorized only as anti-Nazi propaganda, though it is of course that too.
Merrily We Go To Hell, March 14, 2018
No single 2018 series at the always-35mm Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto matched 2017's spotlight on five decades of Warner Brothers films in its breadth of satisfying films from various eras & genres, but the follow-up focus on 1930-1935 Paramount was at least as welcome, for its willingness to unearth more rarities (and to also include cartoons, in this case mostly featuring Betty Boop instead of Bugs Bunny). I caught five of the series double-bills including a knockout pairing of Mitchell Leisen's barely-known debut Cradle Song with Josef von Sternberg's severely underrated An American Tragedy. But the single-best new discovery for me of the set was director Dorothy Arzner's 1932 Merrily We Go To Hell starring Frederic March essentially reprising his Jekyll & Hyde role but through the avatar of a Depression-era dipsomaniacal journalist, and with Sylvia Sidney excelling in the audience-stand-in role of a young woman who falls in love with him. The film is proof that the appeal of Pre-Code Hollywood goes well beyond the "naughtiness" that often gets played up in promotions of the era's films, and that these early talkies were elegant vehicles for discussions of serious social problems in a serious (yet no less entertaining) way that tended to dissipate once the Hays Code became generally enforced in 1934.Road House, May 18, 2018
Another surprisingly serious take on the deleterious effects of alcohol, this time focused less on the over-indulgers than on the capitalists battling each other to control profits from one town's drunks, smuggled into the skin of a corny 1989 action movie in which a beautifully be-mulletted Patrick Swayze plays a nationally-renowned bouncer. (I clearly do not travel in the correct circles to know if such a characterization has any basis in reality). Ben Gazzara plays the corrupt local kingpin and Sam Elliott has a role not so far-removed from the one he's currently up for a A Star Is Born Oscar for. On one level this Razzie-nominated movie hits you repeatedly over the head with all the most shopworn cliches of Rehnquist-era cable-television staples, but on another level it perfects and transcends all the cliches, becoming a ballet of bodies in motion that was staggering to behold on the Roxie Theater screen. I don't know anything about Rowdy Herrington, but for these 114 minutes he became my favorite director, and I can't ask much more from a movie.
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| Patty Hearst screen capture from MGM DVD |
It appears May was a particularly strong month for 35mm prints of late-1980s American films with a touch (or more) of the exploitation film about them; just a week after Road House I saw Paul Schrader's 1988 docudrama about the inspiration for Citizen Kane's granddaughter and her infamous kidnapping into the Symbionese Liberation Army. But Patty Hearst makes its artfulness far more apparent, especially through Natasha Richardson astonishing performance and Bojan Bazelli's immersive cinematographic techniques. It didn't debut at Cannes for nothing, even if it didn't garner any prizes. Maybe it should have; for me it stands at least as high as Schrader's best-directed features like Blue Collar, Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters and First Reformed. Filmed locally in large part, Patty Hearst was part of a brilliantly-packaged set of films wrangling with "San Francisco's dark decade" that served as hangover to the Summer of Love at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; most unfortunately this was one of the final series programmed at YBCA by Joel Shepard before he and curatorial assistant David Robson were misguidedly dismissed by this shadow-of-its-former-self arts organization that appears bent on hastening its complete assimilation into the orbit of the nearby convention spaces that, like YBCA itself, rest on land that was until that "dark decade" home to more low-income residents than perhaps any other neighborhood in town. Tragically for cinephiles, YBCA's film program essentially doesn't exist any longer, replaced only by rentals from festivals and other organizations like SF Cinematheque, the latter a partnership I understand Shepard in one of his last acts encouraged to be continued in his absence.
The Lighthouse Keepers, May 31, 2018
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival continues to expand, this year for the first time moving its opening night to a Wednesday and running a full day of programming on a Thursday. That day wasn't easily-skippable stuff for cinephiles either, unlike some previous years' weekday programming choices; it included the Amazing Tales From the Archives program and two of my favorite films seen previously only in highly-compromised video copies: Carl Dreyer's Master of the House and Yasujiro Ozu's An Inn In Toyko. But the day ended with an eye-popping visual hurricane by a filmmaker I'd long wanted to acquaint myself with for the first time: Jean Grémillon, represented at the festival by his second feature film The Lighthouse Keepers from 1929. Presented in a rare 35mm print from the National Film Archive of Japan of all places, this cinematic approximation of an injured island-dweller's increasingly frenzied mental state also benefited from a dose of only-at-a-festival psychogeography. Set and shot on the Britanny coast, the film was accompanied perfectly by pianist Guenter Buchwald, who (I later learned) drew upon his young experiences living in and playing traditional music of that region. Buchwald has been a gifted SFSFF mainstay since 2013, but for me this was by far the best showcase for his talents I've seen, bettering even last year's SFSFF screening of Lubitsch's The Doll and that afternoon's Ozu presentation. (No coincidence, I suspect, that SFSFF percussionist Frank Bockius joined him on all three of these accompaniments; Bockius's contribution to An Inn In Tokyo particularly made me hanker to hear him anchor an entire score on his own sometime; perhaps another Ozu since he's typically so difficult to accompany). The Lighthouse Keepers cemented the festival's first jam-packed Thursday as the day to beat for the rest of the weekend, and though Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness on Friday, No Man’s Gold, Trappola and The Saga of Gösta Berling on Saturday, and perhaps especially the Serge Bromberg presentation and Stephen Horne accompanying Soviet phantasmagoria Fragment of an Empire on Sunday tried to give it a run for its money, I don't think any of them quite succeeded.
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival continues to expand, this year for the first time moving its opening night to a Wednesday and running a full day of programming on a Thursday. That day wasn't easily-skippable stuff for cinephiles either, unlike some previous years' weekday programming choices; it included the Amazing Tales From the Archives program and two of my favorite films seen previously only in highly-compromised video copies: Carl Dreyer's Master of the House and Yasujiro Ozu's An Inn In Toyko. But the day ended with an eye-popping visual hurricane by a filmmaker I'd long wanted to acquaint myself with for the first time: Jean Grémillon, represented at the festival by his second feature film The Lighthouse Keepers from 1929. Presented in a rare 35mm print from the National Film Archive of Japan of all places, this cinematic approximation of an injured island-dweller's increasingly frenzied mental state also benefited from a dose of only-at-a-festival psychogeography. Set and shot on the Britanny coast, the film was accompanied perfectly by pianist Guenter Buchwald, who (I later learned) drew upon his young experiences living in and playing traditional music of that region. Buchwald has been a gifted SFSFF mainstay since 2013, but for me this was by far the best showcase for his talents I've seen, bettering even last year's SFSFF screening of Lubitsch's The Doll and that afternoon's Ozu presentation. (No coincidence, I suspect, that SFSFF percussionist Frank Bockius joined him on all three of these accompaniments; Bockius's contribution to An Inn In Tokyo particularly made me hanker to hear him anchor an entire score on his own sometime; perhaps another Ozu since he's typically so difficult to accompany). The Lighthouse Keepers cemented the festival's first jam-packed Thursday as the day to beat for the rest of the weekend, and though Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness on Friday, No Man’s Gold, Trappola and The Saga of Gösta Berling on Saturday, and perhaps especially the Serge Bromberg presentation and Stephen Horne accompanying Soviet phantasmagoria Fragment of an Empire on Sunday tried to give it a run for its money, I don't think any of them quite succeeded.
Sisters, June 28, 2018
The Castro Theatre is probably the ideal venue for any film festival aiming to bring revived classics to a large and appreciative audience, as proven not just by the aforementioned Silent Film Festival but also Noir City (where I had great first-time screenings of films like Address Unknown, Jealousy, Bodyguard and The Underworld Story), Frameline (which hosted a moving presentation of a newly digitized Buddies) and Cinema Italia SF (which included a rare showing of A Special Day in a Mastroianni marathon). But I'm equally appreciative when the venue screens, between its festival four-walls and second-run showings of recent multiplex and arthouse fare, great repertory selections programmed in-house. Some of 2018's highlights along these lines included my first big-screen viewing of John Boorman's Deliverance and my long-awaited first-ever viewing of Frances Ford Coppola's One From the Heart. Very enjoyable, but neither as gleefully enjoyable as my first-ever viewing of the breakthrough film by another New Hollywood director who happens to share my first name. I don't think that's the reason I find I have a particular affinity for Brian De Palma's films (well, not all of them, but the ones that hit me hit deeply) as I was a Carrie fan before I knew or cared what a director was. At any rate, Sisters was a film I'd wanted to see for many years but, like Alexander Nevsky, was willing to wait to catch in ideal circumstances. The Castro Theatre in 35mm, surrounded by sparsely-assembled but devoted Margot Kidder mourners, fit that bill. On twitter afterward I called it "the last horror movie of the pre-Roe v. Wade era", which may or not be technically true but feels spiritually so. At any rate, it's the earliest De Palma film I've seen that clearly has his Hitchcock-infused brand stamped clearly upon it.
A Moment of Innocence, September 6, 2018
How did I let myself go so long as a cinephile without seeing this metacinematic masterpiece made the year I first began actively turning my eyes toward non-mainstream cinema, 1996? I guess my excuse is that I was then still taking baby steps and films like Lone Star and Dead Man were my idea of "non-mainstream". Iranian cinema wasn't on my radar screen until a couple years later, and though I did enjoy early films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf like Boycott and The Cyclist when I caught up with them on home video, I never dove deeply into his complete filmography. So I was very glad for BAMPFA's Autumn showcase of films directed by Makhmalbaf as well as his wife and two daughters. I'd actually seen most of the womens' films before, but none of the five by Mohsen programmed; I was able to catch up with three of them, all via imported 35mm prints: his Istanbul-filmed Time of Love, the also-amazing Salaam Cinema and this investigation into the very hows and whys of making and re-making cinema. It's the kind of film that recalibrates your understanding of the arbitrariness of lines between professional and amateur, of spectator and maker, of documentary and fiction, etc. And the titular "moment" is just perfection. There was talk of a follow-up series of Abbas Kiarostami films coming to BAMPFA soon (perhaps this year?) but with the political impediments to bringing Iranian films into the US under the current culture-hostile regime, I'm not sure how likely that has become; I'm told a November screening of Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow was hindered when the new DCP was confiscated by our customs officials and BAMPFA was forced to track down an inferior transfer already within US borders to screen.
Forty-six films by Kurt Kren, September 22-23, 2018
Located just one block from the 16th & Mission BART station, The Lab is a crucial performance and art space that in recent years, under the direction of Dena Beard, has become an increasingly important square in the quilt of local film exhibition, especially of the "bubbling up from the underground" sort. In 2017 the venue hosted Frisco Bay's only guaranteed all-celluloid film festival, Light Field, and a March 2019 iteration has been unveiled as well. It was also venue for a years-in-the-making near-complete two-evening retrospective of the films of Vienna-born experimentalist Kurt Kren, with introductions by archivists, scholars and people who knew the filmmaker before he died in 1998. I don't know if I've ever had quite this kind of intensive immersion in a moving image artist's work before; one Saturday afternoon I'd seen just a single Kren film in my lifetime (31/75: Asyl) and less than thirty-six hours later I'd seen almost all of them. The forty-five that were new to me can't be summed up in a sentence or a paragraph as they ran the gamut of approaches and effects, and I didn't even like all of them; some went way over my head and others (especially the naked body-, food-, and fluid-filled "Action Films" documenting Otto Mühl performances in the mid-1960s) were varying degrees of repulsive. But finding that films as singular as 2/60: 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test and 47/91: A Party or 36/78: Rischart and 46/90: Falter 2, or 18/68: Venice Destroyed and 32/76: To W+B came from the same individual's camera was almost unbelievable and rather inspiring. I think my very favorite of the films was 3/60 Trees In Autumn, a kind of skyward update of Oskar Fischinger's Walking From Munich to Berlin that I was very glad to see again amidst a handful of Kren films a month and a half later at BAMPFA, alongside work by a modern-day filmmaker whose work owes much to Kren's: Tominari Nishikawa, whose Lumphini 2552 felt particularly connected to this botanical strand of Kren's work, as well as its use of its year of creation in its title as Kren always did (in the case of the Nishikawa the year number is the Thai solar calendar equivalent of 2009). Almost every major experimental film screening organization in town (besides Other Cinema I guess) had a hand in the Kurt Kren weekend; it was co-organized by Black Hole Cinematheque, Megan Hoetger & Canyon Cinema, the latter of which also put on contending highlights in its salon series (seeing Sky Hopinka present Peter Rose's The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough among other works was extremely memorable). And the community sponsors included SF Cinematheque, via which I also saw great 16mm revivals like The Hart of London and All That Sheltering Emptiness, and BAMPFA, whose Fall Alternative Visions series provided me with great big-screen experiences with new-to-me films by Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Enrique Colina & other Latin American avant-gardists, while First Person Cinema did the same with 16mm works by Ute Auraund, Margaret Tait & Marie Menken. It will take a similarly collective effort on a larger scale to save The Lab and the other non-profit organizations, writers and artists that make use of the historic Redstone Labor Temple from displacement in the face of the current real estate speculation boom in San Francisco. Please sign a petition and/or attend a FREE event if you want to be involved in keeping this space available for amazing events like the Kren immersion for the foreseeable future!
The Goddess, October 21, 2018
Another opportunity for diving into the filmography of an under-screened moving image artist was provided in the screening room at SFMOMA, which made Bengali auteur Satyajit Ray the focus of the seventh iteration of its recent Modern Cinema collaboration with SFFILM. I'm told the current "eighth season" was programmed by SFMOMA's Gina Basso on her own, and future sets such as a summer 2019 spotlight on book-to-film adaptations will be all hers as well, part of a much-welcome expansion of the screening program at San Francisco's most prominent artistic institution. But if the Ray series was the last of these triannual partnerships, it was apropos, as SFFILM's San Francisco International Film Festival provided the U.S. premiere and two prizes for Ray's debut Pather Panchali as part of its inaugural festival in 1957. It was also extremely valuable to someone like me, who'd seen a little more than a handful of Ray's films but was able to double my exposure to his work in the space of three weekends. New favorites included some of his delvings into the darker corners of post-colonial Indian society such as The Big City, The Coward, Company Limited and The Middleman, but I think the most powerful of them all was The Goddess, also frequently referred to as Devi. Arguably as cynical as any of those four but in a period setting rather than a contemporary one, this 1960 piece takes religion as its central theme and has the benefit both of Sharmila Tagore's magnetic screen presence and a sumptuous visual design unmatched in any Ray film I've seen other than (perhaps) The Music Room. It was the new-to-me highlight of one of 2018's deepest auteurist dives, just as The Spook Who Sat By The Door was the new-to-me highlight of a very solid summer series focusing on African-American directors, and Chocolat of an emotionally-fraught set of films by Claire Denis and her cinematic ancestors. It was during this February series that SFMOMA's lead projectionist Paul Clipson unexpectedly died, leaving a gaping abyss in the middle of not only the Bay Area film community, but in the wider circle of interlocked international communities of experimental film and music performances in which Paul traveled. Less than a week after his death SFMOMA organized a memorial tribute in which the five 16mm prints of Clipson's own magnificent film work held by Canyon Cinema were presented to a mourning public. Though I'd had the great pleasure of knowing Paul for several years, and seen dozens of screenings of the prolific artist's work in various contexts, I had never before seen one of his greatest single-channel masterpieces Union before; it's a stunner and perhaps deserves its own slot on this list, but somehow it feels more appropriate to honor a 35mm screening of a gorgeous Indian film, projected by Paul's protégés in the SFMOMA booth where he seemed so at home.
The Emperor's Nightingale, December 15, 2018
Frisco Bay cinemas provided a good number of director retrospectives that I unfortunately was unable to take advantage of as thoroughly as the previously-mentioned Kurt Kren or Satyajit Ray concentrations. Most of them were held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which is conveniently closer to BART in its now-three-year-old "new" location, but inconveniently tends to spread its series programming out across weeks, months, or even (in the case of a 2018-long Ingmar Bergman focus) a whole year. I'm sure this pleases the majority of BAMPFA customers, especially those who live in Berkeley and don't particularly relish seeing more than one movie a day, but still aspire to catching every screening in a given series. But as someone who lives across a bridge and likes to save time and BART fare, I miss being able to see more than one film in a series on a single trip, something that used to happen occasionally at the old Bancroft Way location, but now seems to occur only when a filmmaker is in town (like Ulrike Ottinger next month). On the other hand, I now am more likely to sample at least one program in almost every series programmed, at the expense of honing in on one or two per calendar. In 2018 I caught just a couple films in BAMPFA's Alain Tanner series (I particularly liked The Middle of the World), their Lucrecia Martel restrospective (The Headless Woman was wonderful to revisit), and their Frederick Wiseman spotlight (Belfast, Maine was a highlight), while finding time for just a single film apiece in hefty programs dedicated to Aki Kaurismäki and Luchino Visconti (La vie de Bohème and Conversation Piece both knocked me out), and just one program from a series dedicated to Czech animator Jiří Trnka. The Emperor's Nightingale, the main attraction in this two-film program, was quite simply one of the greatest stop-motion animation films I've ever seen, by a filmmaker I'd been barely familiar with previously and might not have sampled if this showing hadn't landed on a day in which two programs from other series tempted. Based on this 1949 film, it's clear that Trnka created an absolutely unique style influential to but not fully assimilable by descendents like Jan Švankmajer and Arthur Rankin Jr., and that (as I noted in a post-screening tweet) "calling it ‘puppet animation’ is too limiting, when lighting, lenswork and even film grain itself are as crucial the illusion of movement in this Fabergé world."
Because I didn't run a "I Only Have Two Eyes" survey at this time last year, I also present (without commentary) my favorite repertory/revival screenings of 2017:
The Limits of Control, February 15, 2017, Alamo Drafthouse at New Mission Theatre
Goshogaoka, February 18, 2017, SFMOMA
Los Ojos, I Change I Am the Same, Filmmaker, Rumble & Peyote Queen among others, March 2, 2017, Exploratorium
Angels of Sin, March 5, 2017, BAMPFA
Until They Get Me, June 23, 2017, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum with Frederick Hodges accompaniment
Marie Antoinette, June 25, 2017, Roxie
Captain Horatio Hornblower with One Way Passage & Rabbit Hood, August 23, 2017, Stanford
Phantom Lady, October 2, 2017, Castro
Sweet Charity, November 11, 2017, YBCA
Spite Marriage, December 3, 2017, Rafael Film Center with Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra accompaniment
The Castro Theatre is probably the ideal venue for any film festival aiming to bring revived classics to a large and appreciative audience, as proven not just by the aforementioned Silent Film Festival but also Noir City (where I had great first-time screenings of films like Address Unknown, Jealousy, Bodyguard and The Underworld Story), Frameline (which hosted a moving presentation of a newly digitized Buddies) and Cinema Italia SF (which included a rare showing of A Special Day in a Mastroianni marathon). But I'm equally appreciative when the venue screens, between its festival four-walls and second-run showings of recent multiplex and arthouse fare, great repertory selections programmed in-house. Some of 2018's highlights along these lines included my first big-screen viewing of John Boorman's Deliverance and my long-awaited first-ever viewing of Frances Ford Coppola's One From the Heart. Very enjoyable, but neither as gleefully enjoyable as my first-ever viewing of the breakthrough film by another New Hollywood director who happens to share my first name. I don't think that's the reason I find I have a particular affinity for Brian De Palma's films (well, not all of them, but the ones that hit me hit deeply) as I was a Carrie fan before I knew or cared what a director was. At any rate, Sisters was a film I'd wanted to see for many years but, like Alexander Nevsky, was willing to wait to catch in ideal circumstances. The Castro Theatre in 35mm, surrounded by sparsely-assembled but devoted Margot Kidder mourners, fit that bill. On twitter afterward I called it "the last horror movie of the pre-Roe v. Wade era", which may or not be technically true but feels spiritually so. At any rate, it's the earliest De Palma film I've seen that clearly has his Hitchcock-infused brand stamped clearly upon it.
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| A Moment of Innocence screen capture from New Yorker Video DVD |
How did I let myself go so long as a cinephile without seeing this metacinematic masterpiece made the year I first began actively turning my eyes toward non-mainstream cinema, 1996? I guess my excuse is that I was then still taking baby steps and films like Lone Star and Dead Man were my idea of "non-mainstream". Iranian cinema wasn't on my radar screen until a couple years later, and though I did enjoy early films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf like Boycott and The Cyclist when I caught up with them on home video, I never dove deeply into his complete filmography. So I was very glad for BAMPFA's Autumn showcase of films directed by Makhmalbaf as well as his wife and two daughters. I'd actually seen most of the womens' films before, but none of the five by Mohsen programmed; I was able to catch up with three of them, all via imported 35mm prints: his Istanbul-filmed Time of Love, the also-amazing Salaam Cinema and this investigation into the very hows and whys of making and re-making cinema. It's the kind of film that recalibrates your understanding of the arbitrariness of lines between professional and amateur, of spectator and maker, of documentary and fiction, etc. And the titular "moment" is just perfection. There was talk of a follow-up series of Abbas Kiarostami films coming to BAMPFA soon (perhaps this year?) but with the political impediments to bringing Iranian films into the US under the current culture-hostile regime, I'm not sure how likely that has become; I'm told a November screening of Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow was hindered when the new DCP was confiscated by our customs officials and BAMPFA was forced to track down an inferior transfer already within US borders to screen.
Forty-six films by Kurt Kren, September 22-23, 2018
Located just one block from the 16th & Mission BART station, The Lab is a crucial performance and art space that in recent years, under the direction of Dena Beard, has become an increasingly important square in the quilt of local film exhibition, especially of the "bubbling up from the underground" sort. In 2017 the venue hosted Frisco Bay's only guaranteed all-celluloid film festival, Light Field, and a March 2019 iteration has been unveiled as well. It was also venue for a years-in-the-making near-complete two-evening retrospective of the films of Vienna-born experimentalist Kurt Kren, with introductions by archivists, scholars and people who knew the filmmaker before he died in 1998. I don't know if I've ever had quite this kind of intensive immersion in a moving image artist's work before; one Saturday afternoon I'd seen just a single Kren film in my lifetime (31/75: Asyl) and less than thirty-six hours later I'd seen almost all of them. The forty-five that were new to me can't be summed up in a sentence or a paragraph as they ran the gamut of approaches and effects, and I didn't even like all of them; some went way over my head and others (especially the naked body-, food-, and fluid-filled "Action Films" documenting Otto Mühl performances in the mid-1960s) were varying degrees of repulsive. But finding that films as singular as 2/60: 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test and 47/91: A Party or 36/78: Rischart and 46/90: Falter 2, or 18/68: Venice Destroyed and 32/76: To W+B came from the same individual's camera was almost unbelievable and rather inspiring. I think my very favorite of the films was 3/60 Trees In Autumn, a kind of skyward update of Oskar Fischinger's Walking From Munich to Berlin that I was very glad to see again amidst a handful of Kren films a month and a half later at BAMPFA, alongside work by a modern-day filmmaker whose work owes much to Kren's: Tominari Nishikawa, whose Lumphini 2552 felt particularly connected to this botanical strand of Kren's work, as well as its use of its year of creation in its title as Kren always did (in the case of the Nishikawa the year number is the Thai solar calendar equivalent of 2009). Almost every major experimental film screening organization in town (besides Other Cinema I guess) had a hand in the Kurt Kren weekend; it was co-organized by Black Hole Cinematheque, Megan Hoetger & Canyon Cinema, the latter of which also put on contending highlights in its salon series (seeing Sky Hopinka present Peter Rose's The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough among other works was extremely memorable). And the community sponsors included SF Cinematheque, via which I also saw great 16mm revivals like The Hart of London and All That Sheltering Emptiness, and BAMPFA, whose Fall Alternative Visions series provided me with great big-screen experiences with new-to-me films by Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Enrique Colina & other Latin American avant-gardists, while First Person Cinema did the same with 16mm works by Ute Auraund, Margaret Tait & Marie Menken. It will take a similarly collective effort on a larger scale to save The Lab and the other non-profit organizations, writers and artists that make use of the historic Redstone Labor Temple from displacement in the face of the current real estate speculation boom in San Francisco. Please sign a petition and/or attend a FREE event if you want to be involved in keeping this space available for amazing events like the Kren immersion for the foreseeable future!
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| The Goddess screen capture from Music Box DVD of The Story of Film: an Odyssey |
Another opportunity for diving into the filmography of an under-screened moving image artist was provided in the screening room at SFMOMA, which made Bengali auteur Satyajit Ray the focus of the seventh iteration of its recent Modern Cinema collaboration with SFFILM. I'm told the current "eighth season" was programmed by SFMOMA's Gina Basso on her own, and future sets such as a summer 2019 spotlight on book-to-film adaptations will be all hers as well, part of a much-welcome expansion of the screening program at San Francisco's most prominent artistic institution. But if the Ray series was the last of these triannual partnerships, it was apropos, as SFFILM's San Francisco International Film Festival provided the U.S. premiere and two prizes for Ray's debut Pather Panchali as part of its inaugural festival in 1957. It was also extremely valuable to someone like me, who'd seen a little more than a handful of Ray's films but was able to double my exposure to his work in the space of three weekends. New favorites included some of his delvings into the darker corners of post-colonial Indian society such as The Big City, The Coward, Company Limited and The Middleman, but I think the most powerful of them all was The Goddess, also frequently referred to as Devi. Arguably as cynical as any of those four but in a period setting rather than a contemporary one, this 1960 piece takes religion as its central theme and has the benefit both of Sharmila Tagore's magnetic screen presence and a sumptuous visual design unmatched in any Ray film I've seen other than (perhaps) The Music Room. It was the new-to-me highlight of one of 2018's deepest auteurist dives, just as The Spook Who Sat By The Door was the new-to-me highlight of a very solid summer series focusing on African-American directors, and Chocolat of an emotionally-fraught set of films by Claire Denis and her cinematic ancestors. It was during this February series that SFMOMA's lead projectionist Paul Clipson unexpectedly died, leaving a gaping abyss in the middle of not only the Bay Area film community, but in the wider circle of interlocked international communities of experimental film and music performances in which Paul traveled. Less than a week after his death SFMOMA organized a memorial tribute in which the five 16mm prints of Clipson's own magnificent film work held by Canyon Cinema were presented to a mourning public. Though I'd had the great pleasure of knowing Paul for several years, and seen dozens of screenings of the prolific artist's work in various contexts, I had never before seen one of his greatest single-channel masterpieces Union before; it's a stunner and perhaps deserves its own slot on this list, but somehow it feels more appropriate to honor a 35mm screening of a gorgeous Indian film, projected by Paul's protégés in the SFMOMA booth where he seemed so at home.
The Emperor's Nightingale, December 15, 2018
Frisco Bay cinemas provided a good number of director retrospectives that I unfortunately was unable to take advantage of as thoroughly as the previously-mentioned Kurt Kren or Satyajit Ray concentrations. Most of them were held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which is conveniently closer to BART in its now-three-year-old "new" location, but inconveniently tends to spread its series programming out across weeks, months, or even (in the case of a 2018-long Ingmar Bergman focus) a whole year. I'm sure this pleases the majority of BAMPFA customers, especially those who live in Berkeley and don't particularly relish seeing more than one movie a day, but still aspire to catching every screening in a given series. But as someone who lives across a bridge and likes to save time and BART fare, I miss being able to see more than one film in a series on a single trip, something that used to happen occasionally at the old Bancroft Way location, but now seems to occur only when a filmmaker is in town (like Ulrike Ottinger next month). On the other hand, I now am more likely to sample at least one program in almost every series programmed, at the expense of honing in on one or two per calendar. In 2018 I caught just a couple films in BAMPFA's Alain Tanner series (I particularly liked The Middle of the World), their Lucrecia Martel restrospective (The Headless Woman was wonderful to revisit), and their Frederick Wiseman spotlight (Belfast, Maine was a highlight), while finding time for just a single film apiece in hefty programs dedicated to Aki Kaurismäki and Luchino Visconti (La vie de Bohème and Conversation Piece both knocked me out), and just one program from a series dedicated to Czech animator Jiří Trnka. The Emperor's Nightingale, the main attraction in this two-film program, was quite simply one of the greatest stop-motion animation films I've ever seen, by a filmmaker I'd been barely familiar with previously and might not have sampled if this showing hadn't landed on a day in which two programs from other series tempted. Based on this 1949 film, it's clear that Trnka created an absolutely unique style influential to but not fully assimilable by descendents like Jan Švankmajer and Arthur Rankin Jr., and that (as I noted in a post-screening tweet) "calling it ‘puppet animation’ is too limiting, when lighting, lenswork and even film grain itself are as crucial the illusion of movement in this Fabergé world."
Because I didn't run a "I Only Have Two Eyes" survey at this time last year, I also present (without commentary) my favorite repertory/revival screenings of 2017:
The Limits of Control, February 15, 2017, Alamo Drafthouse at New Mission Theatre
Goshogaoka, February 18, 2017, SFMOMA
Los Ojos, I Change I Am the Same, Filmmaker, Rumble & Peyote Queen among others, March 2, 2017, Exploratorium
Angels of Sin, March 5, 2017, BAMPFA
Until They Get Me, June 23, 2017, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum with Frederick Hodges accompaniment
Marie Antoinette, June 25, 2017, Roxie
Captain Horatio Hornblower with One Way Passage & Rabbit Hood, August 23, 2017, Stanford
Phantom Lady, October 2, 2017, Castro
Sweet Charity, November 11, 2017, YBCA
Spite Marriage, December 3, 2017, Rafael Film Center with Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra accompaniment
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