Lincoln Spector's 2018 Eyes

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. 

Ten-time IOHTE contributor Lincoln Spector writes under Bayflicks, where a more extensive version of this list was originally published here.

Watermelon Man screen capture from How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (& Enjoy It) streaming on Kanopy

Watermelon Man, Modern Cinema/Black Powers: Reframing Hollywood, SFMOMA, archival 35mm print
My stepfather worked on Melvin Van Peebles’ only studio movie, so the experience of seeing it again was especially entertaining. Watermelon Man is a very funny movie, and a very pointed one. A white, a middle-aged, middle-class bigot (Godfrey Cambridge in whiteface) wakes up to discover that he’s suddenly turned black. The print looked glorious.

Serge Bromberg Presents…, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro, DCP
Serge Bromberg is not only an important film preservationist; he’s also a great showman – even in English, which is not his native language. This very fun program consisted almost entirely of early 3D films, with a focus on George Méliès’s accidentally stereoscopic movies. Just delightful. And, of course, Bromberg set a piece of nitrate film on fire.

The Big Heat screen capture from Columbia DVD

The Big Heat, Noir City, Castro, DCP
A cop commits suicide, and the first person the new widow calls is a mob boss. The mob runs the unnamed city and the police do what they’re told – except for the one honest detective assigned to the case (Glenn Ford). I waited years to see Fritz Lang’s morally ambivalent noir. The digital restoration looked damn near perfect.

A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven) & The Red Shoes, Castro, DCP & 35mm
A Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger double bill. In Matter of Life and Death, a British bomber pilot (David Niven) who should have died survives, creating a serious problem for heaven’s bureaucrats. But the pilot is newly in love and refuses to enter the afterlife. The great cinematographer Jack Cardiff mixed color and black and white in ways that seem impossible with 1940s technologies. I’ve seen the other film, The Red Shoes, many times, and it just keeps getting better. Although both films were digitally restored, only Matter was on DCP; Shoes was in 35mm. Some four months later, I saw an original, Technicolor nitrate print of The Red Shoes at the Nitrate Picture Show.

All That Heaven Allows screen capture from Cohen Media DVD of What Is Cinema?

All That Heaven Allows, BAMPFA, vintage Technicolor IB print
I’m not one of those cinephiles who gets excited at every screening of a 35mm print. But when it’s a vintage Technicolor IB print…well, that’s exciting. And it was the print, more than the movie, that drew me to see this 1955 romantic drama starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson. The movie was pretty good too, and historically fascinating with its story of people trying to break out of ’50s conformity. You can read my full article on the film and Technicolor’s technology.

Battling Butler, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro, DCP
Buster Keaton gives one of his most complex and subtle acting performances, while still being extremely funny. He plays a spoiled rich kid who pretends to be a professional boxer to impress his girl, and matures in the process. The spectacular stunts we expect from Keaton are smaller and more intimate here, but they’re still impressive and very funny. The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra provided a wonderful musical accompaniment.

Exit Smiling, San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s Day of Silents, Castro, 35mm 
print
The screamingly funny, beautiful, and all-around loveable Beatrice Lillie should have become a major film star; the camera just loves her. Thanks to her abilities, this backstage comedy makes you laugh from beginning to end. With Franklin Panghorn at his gayest. Wayne Barker did a wonderful job on piano; he even kept us entertained when the screen went blank and the projectionist had to fix something.

To Be Or Not To Be screen capture from Warner DVD

Mel Novikoff Award: Annette Insdorf & To Be or Not To Be, SFFILM, SFMOMA, 35mm print
Columbia University film professor Annette Insdorf discussed cinema, her life, and her expertise on Holocaust films, answering questions from Anita Monga and then the audience. Then they screened an unfortunately poor 35mm print of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942, dark, brilliant, anti-Nazi comedy, To Be or Not to Be (you can read my Blu-ray review). Nevertheless, the audience enjoyed it immensely.

2001: A Space Odyssey, Castro, 70mm; Metreon IMAX Theatre, 70mm; Castro, 4K DCP
Yes, three separate screenings of the same film, months apart, tie for my my best moviegoing experience of 2018.
Castro, 70mm: In May, I saw Christopher Nolan’s “unrestored” version projected on the very large (but not huge) screen at the Castro. I had lost my love of this film over the decades, but with this presentation, I fell in love with it all over again.
Metreon IMAX Theatre, 70mm:
2001 was designed to be shown on a giant, curved screen – something the Castro cannot provide. The huge, slightly-curved screen of the Metreon’s IMAX theater provided something closer to the original experience. Again, it was Nolan’s version, this time on an even bigger 70mm IMAX frame.
Castro, 4K DCP: This time, the Castro screened Leon Vitali’s new digital restoration. The colors were better, and there were no scratches or vibrations.

The Master (2012)

WHO: Joaquin Phoenix deserved every accolade he got for his performance as Freddie in this film, in my opinion.

WHAT: The Master is a film that, in the words of my friend Ryland Walker Knight, is "practically all interiors, mimicking the space of the characters, and mapping it yet closer by living in the close up." This visual scheme makes it all the more audacious that its director Paul Thomas Anderson decided to film it in the large-format Panavision System 65 and to release it in 70mm to certain theatres, a treatment traditionally reserved for outdoor-oriented epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Cheyenne Autumn, and not tried since Kenneth Branagh's 1996 version of Hamlet. Anderson's camera goes about as far as physically possible to penetrate his characters' expressions in the highest practical resolution, as if to demonstrate the sensory limits to detecting the real motivations and computations of a complex human being. Apropos for a film about minds and their meetings, for all of these close-ups we never really get more than hints at what's really going on inside Freddie's or Lancaster's or Peggy's heads. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight and tomorrow at 8:00 at the Castro Theatre, with additional showings tomorrow at 2:00 and 5:00.

WHY: When I placed The Master at #4 on my list of top 10 films of 2012, published at Fandor, it was really a provisional ranking based on having seen the film only once. I missed the Castro's advance benefit screening of the film in August, and was only able to make it over to the gorgeous Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland to see it projected in 70mm once. I had little interest in seeing it projected digitally or even in 35mm knowing that a 70mm print was surely destined to show at the Castro at some point relatively soon. Now soon is now. I'm psyched to finally see The Master again and on a screen even bigger than the Grand Lake's.

HOW: In 70mm.

Seven Centimeters

What a spectacular shot. It's a dramatic moment in Lawrence of Arabia. We've been following a certain character through a particularly difficult, waterless ordeal in the desert. Then, off in the distance a tiny speck appears on the line between sand and sky, still too small to be confirmed as anything other than a mirage. But now, just as Maurice Jarre's triumphant score swells on the soundtrack, we can just barely make out that the speck has become a moving object, approaching the camera, surrounded by a screen-full, a world-full, of empty space. Here's a freeze-frame of the moment:

Oh, you say you can't see the speck on your computer screen? Funny, neither can I. Such are the limitations of standard DVDs. No Blu-Ray release of Lawrence of Arabia has occurred, nor is there any officially on the, ahem, horizon. It hardly needs reminding that for the overwhelming majority of us, home and mobile video have long since become the default methods of viewing movies more than a month or so old. No wonder; digital and video have made the alternative that used to be the norm, the theatrical revival screening, seem inconvenient and expensive by comparison. For those lucky few of us who live in places like New York, Paris, Berlin and even San Francisco, however, classic films still live and breathe in theatres, where their makers expected them to be seen.

It's hard to imagine a better time for a San Francisco movie lover to partake in the by-now almost subversive act of watching a great classic film in a cinema, than when our city's architectural pride and joy, the Castro Theatre, devotes its screen to a 70mm film series, as it will for eight days starting this Saturday night, when it plays West Side Story, which repeats on Sunday. Monday and Tuesday bring Jacques Tati's Play Time, which I'd like to see in 70mm at least once every year. Another movie I can never tire of plays Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The series wraps up the following Saturday and Sunday (June 11 & 12) with twice-daily showings of Lawrence of Arabia.

Yes, all four of these titles are available on DVD. One of them (guess which!) is even available as a Blu-Ray. But it's still a hotly-debated topic whether or not Blu-Ray can look as good as a pristine, well-projected standard (35mm) film projection. I don't want to get too technical here, but I'll just say that I'm aware of almost* no-one who's claiming that digital formats can compete with 70mm film, projected from strips about twice as wide as in a standard film reel, and with roughly four times as much resolution. The clarity of 70mm is simply unbeatable in my book.

The Castro is the only San Francisco theatre equipped to show classic films in 70mm, but this is their first such series in two years. It was intended to be even more ambitious as originally planned. Two films, Tron (which I've seen in eye-popping 70mm with a sold-out Castro crowd) and It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (which I've never seen) were hoped to be part of the series, but because the Castro's 70mm projection equipment needs an expensive repair before it can handle certain prints (getting technical again, they can only show prints with DTS Audio timecode at the moment) those two titles had to be canceled. I hope audience turnout for this series encourages the Castro management that there's an audience hungry for 70mm, making the prospect of shelling out for the repair a no-brainer. If all goes well, maybe we'll be able to see Tron and other films in 70mm relatively soon after all. Take that, DVD!