Children's Party (1938)

WHO: Joseph Cornell made this film, and gave it to Lawrence Jordan to finish shortly before his 1972 death. Jordan writes that he left the editing structure intact, and that his contribution was that he "made the films printable".

WHAT: I've seen quite a few of Cornell's collage films (and a few of his other, later collaborations with Rudy Burckhardt as well), but I don't believe I've seen this or the other two films that make up what is called "The Children's Trilogy" (Cotillon and The Midnight Party) before. I do know that, like the majority of Cornell's films, they were not screened publicly until decades after they had been conceptualized and created. Few sources seem to agree which year these films even belong to; I've seen them dated as early as 1930 and as late as 1970, and frequently using multiple years (presumably in reference to the time when they were originally made and when they were finally printed and projected) or, as in the Canyon Cinema catalog, a vague range (1940s). 

Girish Shambu has written on these films evocatively. An excerpt:

He inserts title cards but only holds them for a frame or two, with the result that they fly by in a flash and are impossible to read. On the other hand, he’ll take an ordinary image—a boy sleeping or a girl sneezing—and will freeze-frame it and hold it, forcing us to examine every inch of it with care. In other words, elements of the film that might provide information about plot, character, narrative causality, etc., are purposely de-emphasized, while our eyes are redirected to stay with ‘unexceptional’ images on their own and in conjunction with other images (through montage), so that they start to appear anything but banal.

WHERE/WHEN: Scheduled to screen at 6:45 and 8:20 tonight only at the Kadist Art Foundation's Mission District storefront.

WHY: Children's Party and its sisters in the "Children's Trilogy" screen, along with Michael Snow and Carl Brown's dual-projector Triage and Anthony McCall's seminal 1973 para-cinematic piece Line Describing A Cone (which I've been dying to see for years and especially since hearing Robert Davis & J. Robert Parks discuss it on a podcast last year), as part of the launch of a Canyon Cinema Pop-Up in which the Kadist space will become the site of a kind of temporary avant-garde cinema DVD rental store for titles you'll never find through Netflix or Redbox or probably even Le Video or Lost Weekend. More details on that here. 

If you can't make tonight's screening event, there will be three more events at the space in the next two weeks; a live performance of Kerry Tribe's tribute to Hollis Frampton's 1971 film Critical Mass this Saturday, an as-yet unannounced selection of humorous experimental films (that I strongly suspect will include Robert Nelson's The Off-Handed Jape) on the following Saturday, December 14th, and a presentation of films selected by Janis Crystal Lipzin and Denah Johnston on December 18th.

HOW: All of tonight's selections screen from 16mm prints from Canyon Cinema.

Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton (2013)

WHO: As you might guess from the film's title, San Francisco filmmaker and poet James Broughton is the subject of this documentary.

WHAT: I've yet to see Big Joy but it's getting rave reviews everywhere this week: Jackson Scarlet, MIchael Guillén, Dennis Harvey and even Peter Wong of the Chronicle all have made it one of their top picks of the Frameline Film Festival. And that's on top of the terrific reviews and interviews linked on the film's website. I don't feel I can add much to the conversation, certainly not before seeing it.

But having seen most of Broughton's films either in 16mm prints presented at local screening venues or on the Facets DVD, and hearing that Big Joy includes generous clips from his work, I'll talk a but about three of my favorites of his films, each from a different phase of his career.

Four In The Afternoon was made in 1951, just after the publication of his third book of poetry Musical Chairs. Each of its four parts places dancers in a different San Francisco location ("Game Little Gladys" is Telegraph Hill and "The Gardener's Son" is Sutro Heights) for a fine frolic reminiscent of the more balletic aspects of silent film comedy, accompanied by a soundtrack of lovely music and the voice of Broughton reciting one of his poems. Of particular note is the third section "Princess Printemps" in which dance legends Anna Halprin and 
Welland Lathrop enact a flirtation amidst the Palace of Fine Arts structures left behind by the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

High Kukus was made in in 1973, five years after Broughton's return to filmmaking (with the groundbreaking The Bed) after a fifteen-year hiatus. It's a very brief (3 minute) iris shot of a shimmering blue pond in Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden, casting reflections of the trees above and rippling with the rhythms of nature (we hear birds and frogs chirping) as Broughton recites what he called "cuckoo haikus" in homage to Zen poet Basho. Though the image brings to my mind the work of Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand and Nathaniel Dorsky, I've found that both experimental film diehards and people completely unschooled in the (here's a misnomer but handy one) "avant-garde tradition" get a great amount of joy from this one.

The Gardener of Eden is from 1981, during the "Joel Singer period" in which Broughton collaborated as a filmmaker with one of his San Francisco Art Institute students. Between 1976 and 1988 Broughton and Singer made eight films; this one was filmed when the couple were living on a Sri Lankan rubber plantation, and is so aesthetically dense and thematically multilayered as to deserve a full explication- perhaps book-length. But for now I'll just mention a few facts and formal generalizations: here Broughton's recited poetry is found only at the beginning and ending, bookending (after an opening thundercrack) a conch-shell musical performance credited to Antarjyami Muni. Between its pulsating tones and the rapid cutting and zooming of Singer's camera, upon palms and aloe vera leaves, upon dozens of young Sinhalese men and boys, but most especially on the piercing gaze of the elderly Bevis Bawa, the island nation's most famous horticulturist.

I don't know if these films will be excerpted in Big Joy or if more attention will be paid to famous films like The Potted Psalm, Mother's Day and The Bed. But I can't wait to find out!

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre at 4:00, as part of Frameline 37.

WHY: If Big Joy is as good as I'm hoping, it will be a great pump-primer for audiences to get excited about other experimental work at this year's Frameline festival. Though in an ideal world the festival would have included a full program of retrospective works by Broughton in the festival, or at least scheduled a screening of one of his shorts to play before this afternoon's Castro screening (though it may be that none are distributed on 35mm or DCP, the Castro's favored formats now that they no longer have a 16mm projector installed), I'm hoping this only means Frameline will co-present a retrospective to coincide with Broughton's centennial this November, perhaps with Canyon Cinema, which is co-presenting today's screening. 

If you click the "experimental" tag on the Frameline website you get 37 titles listed, most shorts. Of these, the most promising to me seem to be the works by experimental video artists Kadet Kuhne and Texas Tomboy screening under the banner Sexperimental this Wednesday, and the Rats In Glitter compilation of new experimental shorts by Vika Kirchenbauer, Jonesy, and other modern makers. Both of these screenings happen at the Roxie.

Other experimental film screenings I'm aware of this summer (usually a comparatively dry period with school out and both Other Cinema and SF Cinematheque on seasonal hiatus) include a June 29th Artists' Television Access screening of films by Paul Clipson, and performances by Vanessa O'Neill and Kent Long (a.k.a. Beige), and by the aforementioned Kuhne at the relatively newly-formed Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland.

HOW: Digital screening.

The Two Eyes Of Brian Darr

Thanks for indulging my annual round-up of Frisco Bay cinephiles' favorite repertory/revival screenings of 2012. I hope you've enjoyed reading what I've posted here so far. The full list of contributions can be found here. 

I'm not quite done; this year, I'd asked respondents to name one brand-new film that they saw in a local venue in 2012, in which something about the venue conspired with the film to make for a particularly memorable and enjoyable experience. Not every contributor responded to this request, and  I decided to collect all the responses to this question into a single post, which I'll be putting up soon. 

But for now, here is my own list of ten favorite films from our cinematic past, revived on Frisco Bay cinema screens in 2012, in the order I saw them:

Underworld USA
2012 started off like gangbusters, literally, with the 10th Annual Noir City festival at the Castro Theatre, and particularly with this late (1961; some would say post-) noir by the iconoclastic Hollywood figure Sam Fuller. It immediately became my new favorite Fuller film, as it expresses both his cynical view of the connections between American crime and business, and his tabloid-headline expressionist approach to cinematic language extremely authentically. I now have the perfect starting recommendation for anyone wanting to explore the black-and-white precursors to Scorsese's & Coppola's gangland epics.

Four Nights Of A Dreamer
At the Pacific Film Archive's near-complete Robert Bresson retrospective I was able to plug several of the most yawning gaps in my experience with the French filmmaker. Undoubtedly, his films are challenging and I must admit I've in the past had better luck approaching an initially satisfying comprehension of them in the home video arena, with its pause and rewind buttons, than in cinemas. But these films were made for theatres, and for the first time I finally felt I had a cinematic communion with a Bresson print, truly sensing myself on the right wavelength with the film's every move. Perhaps it's because this 1971 film is Bresson's most impressionist work, or perhaps because I was previously familiar with his source material (Dostoyevsky's White Nights.) At any rate, I'm especially likely to treasure this rare screening as Four Nights of a Dreamer is reputedly troubled with rights issues holding up a proper DVD release. 

Wagon Master
When Quentin Tarantino made recent comments about hating John Ford, both the man and the filmmaker, for his racism, I instantly thought of the Ford films which (unlike, say, Stagecoach), present a far more complicated picture of his racial attitudes than is often acknowledged. Consider Fort Apache, which illustrates the folly of the U.S. Cavalry treating Chiricahuas as nothing more than an enemy army, or The Searchers, in which John Wayne portrays a racist as a kind of victim of his own psychotic, narrow hatred of The Other. Having seen it as recently as March at the Stanford Theatre, I thought of Wagon Master as a vessel for Ford's most explicitly anti-racist statement of them all. The scene in which a Navajo (played by the great Jim Thorpe) is translated (by the late Harey Carey, Jr's character) to proclaim that white men are "all thieves", might not be so remarkable if it weren't for Ward Bond's sympathetic character's agreement with the sentiment. But race is only a part of what this grand, lyrical, often heartbreaking 1950 film is about. Its band of travelers, each holding diverse values and goals but all sharing in the hardships of the road, is a beautiful microcosm for the tolerance and compromise we must learn to cultivate to exist harmoniously in this world.

Napoléon
Insiders have been indicating for a couple years, that we are now seeing the final days of film-as-film screenings. Some people have suggested that the film reel might make a resurgence as did the vinyl record did even after tapes, compact discs and ultimately mp3s threatened to wipe it out. I'm not sure if that's possible, but if it's going to happen we may need to see more creative uses of the film projector in order to realize that its operator (the projectionist) can be an artist equivalent to a great DJ. 2012 was a big year for me to experience multi-projector performances, from seeing the cinePimps and (full disclosure: my girlfriend) Kerry Laitala at Shapeshiters in Oakland, to a dual-projector ephemera duel between Craig Baldwin and Stephen Parr at the Luggage Store, an event poignantly held on the day Andrew Sarris died. Though this face-off had me imagining a beguiling future in which curator, performer and auteur become fused into one role, even it couldn't hold a candle to the Silent Film Festival's Paramount Theatre presentation of (to my knowledge) the first film foray into multi-projector "performance" spectacle: the final reel or so of Abel Gance's Napoléon, which I wrote about here. Though the three projectionists involved in this event were performing an act of 85-year-old reproduction and not new creativity, the precision of their coordination is something any performer might aspire to if they want to truly set audience's eyes agog. 

Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
Too many of the locations for these "best of 2012" screenings sadly sit dormant already in 2013. New People/VIZ Cinema is one; the year saw the end of the San Francisco Film Society's experiment with turning it into a year-round screening venue. A week-long engagement of this delightful Eric Rohmer film was a real highlight of the year for me; the fact that it's gone unmentioned by other "I Only Have Two Eyes" contributors helps me understand that the state-of-the-art venue never was able to catch on as a repertory venue. Surely I'm not the only one who would consider this 1987 comedy about two young Frenchwomen with opposing but somehow complimentary backgrounds (made piece-by-piece while Rohmer was waiting for the right weather/light conditions for The Green Ray, which SFFS double-billed it with) to be among his high-water-marks, despite its episodic nature. Can't we consider the collections of A.A. Milne to be masterpieces? Mightn't The Martian Chronicles be as great a work as Fahrenheit 451? 

Land of the Pharaohs 
Here's where I really go out on a limb- or do I? I saw a lot of very great Howard Hawks films last year, thanks to hefty retrospectives at the Pacific Film Archive and the Stanford Theatre, but none made such a surprisingly strong impression as this film maudit did on the latter screen. It's the director's 1955 take on Ancient Egypt and the building of the Great Pyramid. I cannot help but wonder how many of the critics, historians, and cinephiles who continue to perpetuate its reputation as the one time the versatile Hawks took on a genre he couldn't handle, have seen it projected in 35mm on a big screen, as it was clearly made to be seen. Though the director was reportedly none-too-fond of it, his frequent screenwriter Leigh Brackett once went on record calling it one of Hawks's greatest films. Whether or not I'm willing to go quite that far on only a single viewing, I feel certain that seeing this visually stunning story of hubris and political machination unfold in Cinemascope above my eyes was one of my greatest film-watching experiences of the year.

Five Element Ninjas
"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film." I don't wholly endorse this quote by Werner Herzog, as I love Godard (on most days, more than I do Herzog), but I can't deny that I got even more pleasure and maybe even more intellectual stimulation from watching this 1982 Chang Cheh tale of vengeance for the first time at the Roxie than I did from rewatching Week End at the Castro earlier in the year. Chang's output is more uneven than Godard's but his best films, and this is one of them I reckon, are as excited about the possibilities of cinema (here he gets some very eerie effects out of fish-eyed pans, and has a simple but brilliant solution to emphasizing ninjas' skills at silence) and steeped in complicated codes (in this case numerology and Chinese-style alchemy) as any canonized art film. I hope hope hope that collector Dan Halsted makes very many future visits to town with more of his rare Hong Kong 35mm prints in hand.

La Cérémonie
Another screening of a brutal masterpiece by a director with the monogram CC. Here it's Claude Chabrol directing Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert to the hilt in a slow-boiling tale of (mostly) quiet class warfare in a French village. There's a methodicalness to Chabrol's depiction of wounded psyches in a feedback loop hurtling toward catastrophe that makes this 1995 film seem like a model for the clinical works of Michael Haneke or Bruno Dumont. But nothing I've seen from either of those mens' ouevres quite approaches what Chabrol is able to coax out of Bonnaire and Huppert here. Like many local cinephiles I frequently find Mick LaSalle infuriating, but I'm so glad his recent book publication created the excuse to play this as part of a Roxie (and Rafael) series of actress-centric French films.

Only Yesterday
It was with great pleasure and a bit of wistfulness that I took nearly-full advantage of the Studio Ghibli series that played this fall at Landmark's Bridge and California Theatres, catching up with all the films that I'd never seen before (except one, My Neighbors the Yamadas) and revisiting most of those I that had. The pleasure is obvious to any fan of Hayao Miyazaki and his cohort; nearly all of these films are wonderful, unique blasts of color in motion, with not-too-saccharine stories that stick with you for days and weeks and months after viewing, even when in such a near-marathon viewing situation. The wistfulness comes from the fact that the Bridge seemed already on its last legs as a viable Frisco Bay venue, and in fact announced its closure a couple months later, and that Berkeley's California Theatre was on the verge of decommissioning its 35mm projection equipment in favor of all-digital equipment shortly after the series ended. Also from the fact that I knew that with this series I no longer have any more unseen Miyazaki features to view for the first time (until his next one anyhow). But to mitigate this, this series turned me into a fan of fellow Ghibli director Isao Takahata (who also has an upcoming film), largely on the basis of my admiration of his 1991 adaptation Only Yesterday, which I saw at the Bridge. As much as I love Miyazaki's fantasy mode, Takahata's realistic approach here is in some ways more impressive; he creates two totally distinct yet believable palettes with the lush rural setting of its lead character's personal awakening, and the more subdued watercolor-style of her extensive childhood memory flashbacks. He even bucked anime tradition in his voice casting, built around the decision to record dialogue before animating rather than post-dubbing as is Japan's animation norm. The result is a film reminiscent in beauty and theme of Kenji Mioguchi's lovely 1926 Song of Home.

Sonata For Pen, Brush and Ruler 
Last but not least, another kind of animation seen in a (less-sadly) decommissioned venue, the Exploratorium's McBean Theatre, a shiny-ceiling-ed dome inside the Palace of Fine Arts that hosted a wonderful array of screenings over that museum's long stay in that cavernous venue. The Exploratorium is gearing up to move to a new location on Pier 15, and promises to have a made-to-order screening space. But no matter how wonderful it is, I know I'll miss certain aspects of the old McBean, and I'm so thankful that the museum's Cinema Arts department hosted a short series of Canyon Cinema films during its last few months open, as a kind of goodbye. I was able to catch the first and third of these programs, and loved getting a chance to see rarely-shown pieces by Alan Berliner, Gary Beydler, Stan Vanderbeek, John Smith (whose films I also got to see at PFA in 2012) and more. But the most astonishing of these was in the December program: Barry Spinello's 1968 Sonata For Pen, Brush and Ruler. Spinello is a painter and experimental musician, but the 16mm film strip serves as his canvas and master-tape. I'd been impressed by a few of his later works before (one of them, Soundtrack, screens at the PFA shortly with the artist in attendance) but Sonata is so exhilaratingly expansive, so joyfully elaborate, and so recognizably the product of one artist's immense effort that I now have a clear favorite of his films. As he once wrote: "It is my brain, and for ten minutes I expect (I hope, if the film is successful) that the viewer's brain functions as my brain." I think it does.

Mark Wilson Only Has Two Eyes

It's impossible for any pair of eyes to view all of Frisco Bay's worthwhile film screenings. I'm so pleased that a number of local filmgoers have let me post their repertory/revival screening highlights of 2011. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from filmmaker Mark Wilson, who has some of his work available at Canyon Cinema.

in 2011, i attended mostly programs of experimental film, at the pacific film archives, san francisco museum of modern art, artists' televison access, san francisco cinematheque, and canyon cinema... seems it was an especially good year for viewing works with those organizations, and in particular, works made in 16mm. i wouldn't have predicted the opportunity to see as many new works in that medium as there were, as well as the return of so many from years past. in keeping with hell on frisco bay's repertory and revival theme for two eyes, this list only includes films made prior to the past year, which were not being presented for the first time. what follows are just some of the many works of "personal cinema" that struck me in one way or another in 2011. the ways in which each of these films moved me are as varied and complex as the works and artists themselves.

Cattle Mutilations (George Kuchar 1983); Daylight Moon (Lewis Klahr 2002): Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson 1951); Flight (Greta Snider 1997); Infernal Cauldron (in 3D! - Georges Melies 1903); Ingenium Nobis Ipsa Puella Fecit (excerpt - Hollis Frampton 1974); Kemia (Silt 1995); Late Spring (Yashiro Ozu 1949); Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Chris Marker, Alain Resnais 1953); Light Years (Gunvor Nelson 1987); Loretta (Jeanne Liotta 2003); Myth Labs (Martha Colburn 2008); Persistence (Daniel Eisenberg 1997); Razor Blades (Paul Sharits 1965-68); The End (Christopher Maclaine 1953); White Rose (Bruce Conner 1967); Yggdrasill Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind (Stan Brakhage 1997)

Adam Hartzell on Three Upcoming Documentaries

I'm slowly recovering from the busiest time of my year, Halloween. I haven't blogged in weeks, haven't tweeted in days, and am just about to get back into my cinephile swing. Today's the right timing, as tonight the new November-December Pacific Film Archive calendar launches with The Unstable Object, the first of four Alternative Visions screenings Wednesdays this month. The Castro Theatre screens four masterpieces in a Nick Ray centennial mini-fest today and tomorrow, and the Roxie chimes in with a fifth Ray (Johnny Guitar) Sunday as part of its Not Necessarily Noir 2 series. And the SF Film Society closes French Cinema Now tonight and opens Cinema By The Bay tomorrow; I'm intrigued by the screening of the 1926 silent The Bat and the films by Lawrence Jordan, Carolee Schneeman, etc. playing the Canyon Cinema spotlight. But my friend Adam Hartzell has just added three more upcoming films to my to-see list, each sampled at the Mill Valley Film Festival last month. Here, Adam writes on the discoveries made in his cinemagoing travels:

In order avoid adding to both our financial and carbon footprint debt, my wife and I have been limiting our plane-dependent vacations to one a year. And we never travel by car anymore. But we still long to 'get-away'. So we've been venturing around the Bay Area, to places that can be reached by ferry, train, or bus. And many of these advanced 'stay-cations' have been for film festivals. We've taken Amtrak to Sacramento for the French Film Festival where we got to see Alex Deliporte's Angèle & Tony and the Audrey Tatou vehicle Beautiful Lies before San Francisco French Cinema Now attendees did this past week. It was also in Sacramento that we got to see the wonderful scene where Je t'aime . . . moi non plus is first heard by Serge Gainsbourg's record company in Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life that opened at the Embarcadero this past weekend. We've also made the Tiburon International Film Festival an annual trip since it's such a green convenience to walk off the ferry right smack dab into the festival.
　
The Mill Valley Film Festival makes it a bit more difficult to travel to on a green stream. They do provide a shuttle from the San Rafael and Mill Valley venues, but we chose films showing in Mill Valley and there wasn't a direct bus from the Larkspur Ferry as far as we could tell, so we grabbed a cab to get to Mill Valley for our overnight stay. (We did take the shuttle to San Rafael in order to take Golden Gate Bus back, however.)
　
Although we didn't plan it this way, all three of the films we caught at MVFF will be released in San Francisco before the year is out. Coming to the Balboa December 2nd will be Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey's Eames: The Architect and The Painter. I had heard about the Charles and Ray Eames's marriage and professional partnership in a past podcast (the name of which escapes me), so I was ready for the most revealing aspect of Cohn and Jersey's documentary; that is, how important Ray Eames's work was to the success of their designs. They were a couple speeding past the Zeitgeist of the 50's, having to negotiate the respect Ray wanted and Charles wanted for Ray within the patriarchal narratives demanded of the times. The television clip where the hostess can't seem to integrate the female half of this couple is a very valuable moment of archival retrieval. Eames: The Architect and The Painter is an example of the value and necessity of what is often called 'revisionist history', a term sadly intended negatively by too many mindless talking heads. Much history is 'revisionist history' in that it is the applying of recently excavated information to create a new narrative that is hopefully more representative of what actually happened and why. In this way, Eames: The Architect and The Painter brings a lathe to refine the record of the impact of the Eames studio. It's no longer just Charles who gets a seat at the table since he wasn't alone in the creation of those seats and tables.

Our Saturday morning show, Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, was disappointingly lacking in the young folk hoped for as part of the DocFest just past or the Lumiere in SF or Rafael Film Center in San Rafael come December 16th. Or, as my wife suggested, perhaps the kids didn't want the magic of Elmo ruined by seeing the man behind him. The man that brought a voice and aesthetic to Elmo that no other puppeteers were able to bring, Kevin Clash, definitely makes an effort to move his body away whenever he meets kids in real life, as if his contortions are abracadabra gesticulations maintaining the magic. The film is about a dreamer, a geek picked on at school, who works hard at his craft and eventually makes his way to the big leagues as well as the respect of his peers. His parents support is endearing and tantamount to Clash's success, as is the public funding that contributed to Clash's career trajectory. Besides the public television funding that made Sesame Street successful along with the massive research and talent that was part of the Children's Television Workshop that Clash became a part of, military research has a place to play in a particularly puzzling aspect of professional puppetry for young Clash. (I'm going to be vague about it to allow for the pleasure of that reveal.) The public money behind Elmo provided opportunities for artists and researchers to leverage their interests, skills, talents and dreams, resulting in tremendous benefit for individuals, communities and economies. If you're cynical to the joy Elmo has brought to so many children, Elmo did, after all, do more than tickle the economy in all the ancillary products sold.
　
As much as I enjoyed the Eames and Clash documentaries, the best film I saw at MVFF will possibly be the best film I see all year. Judy Lief's Deaf Jam is a celebration of American Sign Language poetry that doubles as a primer of Deaf Culture, triples as a personal story of Israeli and Palestinian friendship, quadruples as a snapshot of the economic impact of our immigration law, and multiplies as many, many other things. This is truly a beautiful, powerful film, providing a mesmerizing experience that I have not had in a theatre for a long time. Lief's dance background is clearly on display in her framing of the hand, body and facial movements that make up the ASL equivalents of phonemes, words, and sentences. She gives us a precise primer on ASL Poetry and thrusts us into the world of ASL Poetry performance by taking the text of subtitles and swirling them around in the translation with such vibrancy that it truly works, rather than coming off as a gimmick. This effort to struggle with how to demonstrate the vitality of ASL through translation even includes a segment where the piece is left respectfully un-translated.
　
Deaf Jam's main subject Aneta Brodski is that charismatic individual many documentarians hope to capture. When we hear the immigration issues she runs up against, you can't help but see how the obstacles financially imposed upon Deaf folks will hit her even harder. Hopefully she will be able to negotiate the college education and later employment she deserves in spite of these obstacles, but you do worry that such a vibrant spirit might be hardened, if not squelched, considering what she will be forced to maneuver around in the future.
　
Screening in a truncated form as part of the Independent Lens series on PBS networks on Thursday November 3rd, Deaf Jam is an example of the tremendous value film festivals can provide through the different lenses they focus onto the world. (And Deaf Jam is another example of the huge benefits provided by public funding - thank you, ITVS!) Even with the chain of transit options we have to step on to get there, MVFF has consistently been a festival worth the journey.

UPDATE 11/3/11: I've just learned from Adam that Eames: The Architect and the Painter will also be opening at the Elmwood in Berkeley and the Rafael in Marin on December 2nd, the same day it comes to the Balboa. I'm glad this documentary is going to be spreading out to various Frisco Bay venues. Is it too much to dream that one or more of them might track down a print of one of Charles & Ray's own wonderful short films (Powers of Ten, Atlas, Blacktop, etc.) to screen prior to the documentary feature?

My Two Eyes

I've been so pleased with the participation in this year's "I Only Have Two Eyes" project, collecting lists of favorite repertory/revival film watching experiences had in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010 from 21 other Frisco Bay film-watchers. The entire set of contributions is collected here. But I haven't yet published my own list of ten. Here it finally is, in the order in which I saw them:

Pitfall
Outfitted with a series pass, I was able to catch more of Noir City 8 than any of its previous Castro Theatre editions. The best of the set, to my determination, was the this series opener, a still-underrated marital thriller directed by Andre De Toth. This searing critique of post-war America's stifling suburban ideal stars Dick Powell at his most embittered, with Lisabeth Scott and Jane Greer terrific in supporting roles. However, it's Raymond Burr who nearly steals the show as the extremely menacing villain of the picture, a role that prefigures his own future as one of filmdom's most effective heavies, as well as the terrorizing Burl Ives role that drives the action in De Toth's later masterpiece, Day of the Outlaw (which later in the year played the Roxie if unfortunately in a severely compromised 16mm print).

Trafic
Only two things could have enhanced this year's complete Jacques Tati retrospective, held on both sides of the Bay at the Pacific Film Archive and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (with other Tati screenings at the Red Vic and Rafael): a supplimental 70mm screening of Playtime at a venue equipped to show the increasingly-uncommon format, and a showing of Tati's first feature Jour de Fete at a time that didn't conflict with my unavoidable non-cinephile activities. The plus side of the latter "defect" in the otherwise tremendous undertaking is that I still have an unseen Tati film to look forward to. Trafic, which I also had never seen until YBCA's screening in early 2010, is something of a spiritual sequel to Playtime, and nearly as great. Where the 1967 film wanders through Paris like a seemingly-directionles tourist, this one takes a more linear road-movie approach to its playful but cutting jibes at modern transportation and leisure.

That Night's Wife
In 2010 I was thankful that the VIZ Cinema provided numerous opportunities to revisit some of the best films by perhaps my most consistent favorite of Japanese directors, Yasujiro Ozu: Late Spring, Tokyo Story, Late Autumn, etc. But this Pacific Film Archive screening of Ozu's 1931 silent That Night's Wife, shown with an accompaniment by the superb pianist Judith Rosenberg, trumped even those screenings in opening a window to a younger filmmaker's creative range; the sequence of a vigil in a cramped apartment space shows just how radical (and dramatically effective) Ozu's approach to cinematic temporality could get.

Dodsworth
More than any other cinema on Frisco Bay, the Stanford (or the St. Anford, as a friend recently re-Christened the venue) functions as a temple to one man's cinematic taste. Lucky for us, David Packard has great taste in 1930s-50s Hollywood (and British) cinema! I shuttled to Palo Alto more often than usual in 2010, and was particularly excited to see a 35mm print of the heartrending Make Way For Tomorrow, which I'd only ever seen on a bootlegged VHS tape before. That its previously-unfamiliar-to-me double-bill mate, William Wyler's Dodworth was nearly able to match Leo McCarey's masterpiece in its emotional pull, and even surpass it in its unpandering sophistication, seemed miraculous and still does months later.

Ran
I usually like to reserve slots on my own personal "I Only Have Two Eyes" lists for films I'd never seen before at all, but I had to make this exception this year, for this film that jumped most dizzingly highly in my estimation when finally viewed in 35mm. When I viewed it on VHS as a college student, it was my first exposure to Kurosawa and, indeed, to non-sci-fi Japanese motion pictures, though in fact at the time its 16th Century feudal mileu felt more alien to me than any animated robot or rubber-suited beastie. I'd never gotten around to revisiting it even after becoming a guarded Kurosawa fan, and still harbored the suspicion that it had been overrated by those who ranked it among his best films. But in 2010, "the Emperor"'s centennial year, when I was able to employ the VIZ & PFA to fill in a number of my Kurosawa-gaps (the Quiet Duel being my favorite new discovery) and revisit a couple favorites (Stray Dog, High & Low), it was the extended engagement of Ran at the Embarcadero which provided me with my most fundamental re-understanding of the master's bold artistry. It cannot hurt to know how closely the re-worked Lear story sometimes parallels Kurosawa's late-career struggles as a cast-off from the industry he did so much to build. It also cannot hurt to see those colors (all that blood-and-fire red!) cast in a glorious new print on a big screen.

Le Bonheur
Speaking of color. It seems fitting that I caught up with what I now think of as Agnès Varda's greatest masterpiece (though I love Cleo From 5 To 7, Vagabond and The Gleaners & I deeply) thanks to a PFA series devoted to preservation. Not just because it seems miraculous that these natural, vivid but never gaudy hues and cries could have been photographed in the mid-sixties, and restored lovingly for us today. But also because, in its way this painfully truthful fable is all about the possibilities and impossibilities of preservation and restoration of love relationships and families. Just drawing the film up in my mind again months after seeing it, I find myself shuddering to the memory of its beauty and its ultimate, still shocking agony.

The Chelsea Girls
I've never held much truck with the frequent assertion that the proper role of music in film is: not to be noticed. Becoming something of an aficionado of live musical scores to silent films has only solidified my position. It's harder to dispute that the performative element the projectionist provides to a film showing should be unnoticed if it's to be appreciated. But there are clear-cut exceptions, and The Chelea Girls is the most prominent one. With two projectors running reels side-by-side on the screen, with a fair amount of latitude available to toggle between soundtracks from the control booth, it's probably fair to say there can (and should) be no frame-definitive version of this Andy Warhol film, making a screening (this one was at SFMOMA) feel something akin to a maddening, exhilarating, frustrating, but somehow also illuminating concert experience. "Everything is more glamorous when you do it in bed," Warhol once wrote. I would hope he'd make an exception for watching The Chelsea Girls.

Pastorale D'ete
I could easily have made a respectible top ten, or twenty, or thirty, culling only from the locally-produced experimental short films I watched and re-watched as part of the still-ongoing Radical Light series in support of the fantastic book published last year. Supplemented by a number of SFMOMA screenings in the Spring (and a couple in the Fall), the Radical Light project made 2010 the year the filmic floodgates really opened for me, and the trickle of knowledge and appreciation I had for Frisco Bay's storied history of avant-garde film scenes became a hearty river. Any year allowing me to finally see Will Hindle's Chinese Firedrill, Kerry Laitala's Retrospectoscope, John Luther Schofill's Filmpiece for Sunshine, Dion Vigne's North Beach, Barbara Hammer's Dyketactics, Sidney Peterson's The Lead Shoes (three times!), Jordan Belson's Allures, Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuttle, Dominic Angerame's Deconstruction Sight and Premonition, Dorothy Wiley's Miss Jesus Fries on the Grill, Allen Willis, David Myers and Philip Greene's Have You Sold Your Dozen Roses?, Chuck Hudina's Icarus, and Frank Stauffacher's Sausalito, and to rewatch Tominaro Nishikawa's Market Street, Bruce Conner's Looking For Mushrooms, Take the 5:10 to Dreamland and a Movie, George Kuchar's Wild Night in El Reno, Curt McDowell's Confessions, Hy Hirsch's Eneri, Chris Marker's Junkopia, Gunvor Nelson's Schmeerguntz, and especially Bruce Baillie's The Gymnasts and All My Life (and meet the man himself), and just as especially Christopher Maclaine's The End (and become involved in an intensive collaborative project attempting to retrace Maclaine's steps and talk to survivors of his cohort, most notably Wilder Bentley II) is simply an astoundingly rich one. But above even all of these, it was a new restoration of Hindle's first film Pastourale D'été whose nine minutes burned most brilliantly into my retinal hippocampus during its PFA screening. Shot in the kind of hillside landscape I'd always incorrectly imagined to be typical of the famous Canyon, California until I finally visited the forested town last September, and edited to an Arthur Honegger composition on equipment built by Hindle himself, this nature study is the clearest justification of the zoom lens I've ever observed. The first film made by a director (scarcely) better known for his more claustrophobic later works, it won an award at the 3rd San Francisco International Film Festival in 1959.

Times Square
One of the most heartening developments on the Frisco Bay film scene last year was the re-emergence of the Roxie as a genuinely adventurous, calendered, repertory theatre that can play excellent host to imaginative events. The only known print of this feisty teenaged melodrama set against the punk and new wave scene in 1980 Manhattan provides a unique semi-documentary look at a very specific historical moment, but the film is also special because of how seriously director Allan Moyle takes the relationship between his two leads. Nicky Marotta & Pamela Pearl may represent the 'bad girl' and the 'daddy's girl' but they bust out of their archetypes thrillingly.

Braverman's Condensed Cream of the Beatles
I'm slightly embarrassed that after hearing about the place for years, it took my April move into a loft space shockingly nearby to Oddball Film & Video for me to actually start visiting this unique film archive and screening venue. I took in four of the locale's regular weekend evening shows, including a Saturday-after-Thanksgiving pair of not-exactly themed shorts programs compiled by Lynn Cursaro and Carl Martin of the Film On Film Foundation. Amidst delightful rarities like Red Ball Express, Doubletalk, and Zoo was Charles Braverman's (and Gary Rocklen's) psychedelic collage of music and graphics tracing the birth, growth and public separation of the Fab Four. Constructed between the Beatles' break-up and the tragic assassination that quashed all hope of a real reunion, this nostalgia head trip seems unlikely to ever be cleared for a commercial release in these intellectually proprietary times. It brought me waves of joy and reminiscence to my boyhood in a house where The Beatles ruled the record player over The Stones, The Beach Boys, and practically everybody else.

The End of History, Geography, Cinematography...

San Francisco moviegoers, as a rule, love to see their city on screen. Many of us especially enjoy seeing how our streets, shops, and landmarks were captured by filmmakers of bygone eras. Even a glimpse of the stock-footage skyline in a Hollywood studio-shot film like John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon will usually earn a cheer from the assembled crowd when projected on a local theatre screen. At the last edition of Noir City, the double-bill of Frisco-set noirs (Red Light and Walk A Crooked Mile) was almost undoubtedly the weakest pairing of the festival, but it packed the Castro Theatre more thoroughly than perhaps any other program in the series. There’s something about seeing “Old San Francisco”, whether in a great film like Vertigo or Greed, or in a lesser one like House on Telegraph Hill or It Came From Beneath the Sea, that connects us to our collective histories, and many of us frequently seek that kind of connection.

All but the most devoted scholar of Frisco Bay film locations is certain to discover unseen camera perspectives on the region’s past by attending shows in the Radical Light series of independent films, both canonical and obscure, that dominates SF Cinematheque’s fall calendar. So far, in the first three screenings in the series (held at the Pacific Film Archive, at SFMOMA, and in an elementary school’s redwood grove in Canyon, California), we’ve seen Market Street in 1906, North Beach ca. 1958, the Emeryville mudflat ca. 1981, Richmond railyards ca. 1966, Transbay Terminal ca. 1961, Mission Creek ca. 1990, and much more, thanks to filmmakers like the Miles Brothers, Dion Vigne, Chris Marker, Bruce Baillie, Dominic Angerame, etc.

Tonight at 7:30 the Pacific Film Archive kicks off four successive Wednesday evening Radical Light screenings that take a chronological approach to Frisco Bay experimental filmmaking. Those of us lucky enough to attend will see a deep-sea diver dragged onto Ocean Beach in the Lead Shoes tonight. We’ll see a Frisco Bay trash dump accompanied to the music of Carl Orff and the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Have You Sold Your Dozen Roses on October 6th. We’ll see an S.F. Mime Troupe-inspired farce enacted all over town in Oh Dem Watermelons on October 13th. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; in addition to all the other films in these four programs, the chronological screenings are supplemented by thematically-curated programs on October 16-17 and a book launch party October 15th.

I'm particularly excited that tonight’s screening includes Christopher Maclaine’s 35-minute opus The End. This apocalyptic masterpiece incorporates more cuts than many feature-length films, but from even the briefest of its shots flickers a San Francisco quite recognizable to anyone closely familiar with the city, even if we arrived here decades after Maclaine made the film in 1953. I was born here twenty years later, for example, but upon taking an opportunity to see this long-sought rarity three years ago, I was startled to recognize my alma mater George Washington High School as a location in the film. This only served to cement the personal re-calibration of my cinematic senses the film seemed to be achieving. When I later had a chance to speak of the experience with Brecht Andersch, who had introduced the screening in his role as part of the Film On Film Foundation, we determined to tour the film’s many, many San Francisco locations.

This year, we’ve done our best to do just that, tracking down the places where Maclaine and cinematographer Jordan Belson pointed the camera whether in the touristed northeast corner of the city or the wild West sections of Frisco. Brecht has begun posting the initial results of our tour at the SFMOMA Open Space blog; so far there’s an introduction and an initial set of screencaps with description. There’s also a photograph I took of how one of the locations (Alta Plaza Park) looks in 2010; future entries in Brecht’s series will include many more of these.

Research begets research, and when Brecht made unlikely contact with Wilder Bentley II, one of the two heretofore-identified (in any publications we’re aware of, at any rate) actors in The End, we felt compelled and privileged to venture to his residence in Sonoma County to interview him. He is expected to attend tonight’s screening of The End and talk about Maclaine, Frisco’s Bohemian scene in the early 1950s, etc. It promises to be quite an evening; whether you've seen The End before, or not, prepare yourself for re-calibration!

Yes We Canyon

This weekend, I attended two out of three Frisco programs put together by experimental film writer/teacher/interviewer/programmer extraordinaire Scott MacDonald, in town for the first time since the publication of his book Canyon Cinema: the Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor. He proved to be, not unexpectedly, a very affable, approachable, and of course knowledgeable guest host at the 9th Street Independent Film Center where the legendary film distributor's Canyon Cinema's offices are currently located, and where the first two screenings were held.

The first screening was dedicated to the work of Canyon's two most instrumental filmmaker-founders, Bruce Baillie and Chick Strand. It's always a treat to see Baillie's Castro Street in a great 16mm print, and the other films were all new to me. In fact I'd never seen any Chick Strand film before now. MacDonald pointed out after the screening that though the two never collaborated on making a film together as they had collaborated so heavily on creating Canyon, some of their films seem as though they're speaking to each each other. For my part I noticed that Strand's Kristallnacht seemed to be connected in some ways to Baillie's To Parsifal- most obviously through the way each filmmaker photographs water. It was also interesting to see these homemade films speaking with the commercial cinema of their day as well; what does it mean that To Parsifal's images of seagulls are as crisp and full of movement as those found in Hitchcock's the Birds from the same year (1963)? Or that the man in the middle of a Mexican desert in Strand's 1967 Anselmo seems to beckon to Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West from a year later?

MacDonald said he divided the second and third programs along gender lines in order to show how the women Canyon filmmakers were in some ways responding to the mens' films. This made me particularly regret that prior commitments prevented me from attending the third set, which other than Gunvor Nelson's amazing Kirsa Nicholina and an encore screening of Kristallnacht was a completely unfamiliar slate: films by Abigail Child, Diane Kitchen, Anne Severson and Shelby Kennedy as well as others by Strand and Nelson that I have not seen. But I did get to watch the Y-Chromosome informed set, including more films by Baillie, rarely-seen works by Larry Jordan, Will Hindle, and Dominic Angerame, a pair of gut-busting films by Robert Nelson (my first exposure to his work), and two favorites by the man who initially sparked my interest in avant-garde film, Bruce Conner.

This was my first time seeing any of Conner's films at a public screenings since his death four and a half months ago. It was my fifth or sixth time seeing Cosmic Ray but it always feels like a new experience. This time I hung a bit on a lyric from the Ray Charles song used as the film's soundtrack, "See the girl with the red dress on." The fact that the singer cannot literally "see" a girl with a red dress on, or without one (like the go-go dancers in Cosmic Ray and Breakaway, the other Conner film on the evening's program) doesn't prevent him from singing about her with passion and enthusiasm. Neither can the origin of the disembodied voice be seen on the screen. The filmmaker controls the sensory experience of the audience, even from beyond the grave. This is basic stuff, I suppose, but it's rare to be reminded of it while watching such an exuberant, upbeat film.

Conner's films have become difficult to see of late. They're no longer part of the Canyon distribution catalog- he withdrew them some time before his death, for reasons that MacDonald writes about in the Canyon Cinema book. The highly-pixelated video shrink-downs of certain of his films that were easily accessed streaming in cyberspace not so many months back have also scurried into their hidey-holes-- more information on that in these fascinating posts. So, though it's probably too late in the day for anyone reading this to act on it, it's worth noting that Cosmic Ray will play in 16mm again tonight, at a fourth Scott MacDonald-hosted event this time across Frisco Bay at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Most of the films on the program are repeated from one of the three Canyon screenings; for instance Kristallnacht, Castro Street and Robert Nelson's Oh Dem Watermelons.

And the PFA will also be tributing Conner with an evening solely dedicated to his films two weeks from tonight (December 9th). This is one worth purchasing advance tickets for as it spans a very diverse cross-section of his work: his debut a Movie, his longest film Crossroads, two rather rarely revived films Valse Triste and America is Waiting, and his last completed film Easter Morning.

Finally, Saturday, December 20th at Artists' Television Access, Other Cinema will remember Conner by including a clip from George Kuchar's Tempest in a Teapot, in which both filmmakers appear, as part of its program.

Bruce Conner (1933-2008)

Bruce Conner has died.

A local artist and filmmaker with global impact, his work meant a lot to me, and I feel lucky that I got to hear him speak before film screenings three times in the past several years. Though I'd seen a few samples of experimental/personal filmmaking before then, always on VHS tape, I can credit a viewing of Conner's film the White Rose at the De Young Museum in 1996 with lighting the fuse that would eventually explode my interest in exploring this particularly expansive cavern of cinema. My first visit to SF Cinematheque was to see a program of his films, and I've been back countless times.

Enough about me, though. Here's Conner talking about himself and his mid-1960's peers in a 2001 interview, as published in Scott MacDonald's indispensable book Canyon Cinema: the Life and Times of an American Independent Distributor:

A lot of the people involved with Canyon were living at a level that people working in film today would see as poverty. But many of us had decided that this was the life we had to live if we were going to be artists or filmmakers. It was almost like taking a vow of poverty in a religious order, and we had a faith that this was one of the more important things in life. We did not consider what we were doing as a career -- unlike people who go to school today and take film classes or video or art classes and consider this preparation for a career. That idea didn't exist then, at least not among us. We were people who were willing to suffer a lot of indignity and deprivation, and to withstand things that might damage our health or well-being or standing in society, to do this type of work -- we dedicated ourselves to art. There were people going to jail because of what they were doing as artists and filmmakers. It was a social environment that's very hard to convey to people now.

Image is from Easter Morning, shot in the 1960s, completed this year, and internationally premiered at the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, 2008. A collection of Conner's still photography is currently on display at the Berkeley Art Museum. I'll be visiting it soon.

Take the 5:10 to Meme-land

I've been tagged with a meme. Thom Ryan, the mastermind behind one of my very favorite blogs Film of the Year, has selected me, along with four other bloggers (a distinguished group, I might add), to follow some simple instructions for a post on my site, and to pass on the instructions to five more bloggers. Like a chain letter, except without the curse of bad luck at the end if the recipient doesn't participate.

I've been tagged with memes before, and though I've always felt honored to be thought of, I've also felt enough resistance to the idea that I've never complied. This time, I'm in the mood to do so, for several reasons. One, I've lately been more inclined to embrace the myspace-y, facebook-y aspects of the blogosphere rather than pretend that what I do here at Hell on Frisco Bay is so fundamentally different from the activity on those and other social networking sites. Two, with my blogroll currently missing from this blog while I complete my redesigned reconstruction, I'm more compelled than usual to give shout-outs to some of my fellow travelers (though I'm happy to report that my archive, and blogroll, has been recovered by blogger and can be found here until I complete the transition back to this url.) Three, this particular meme gives me an opportunity to point to a book I've been meaning to mention here since I bought it and started paging through it a couple months ago.

That's right, this is a book meme. Here's the instructions Thom sent:

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

OK, Thom!

1) So, when I received this tag, I was mere feet away from Scott MacDonald's Canyon Cinema: the Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor, filled with primary source material concerning the venerable Frisco Bay institution that grew out of Bruce Baillie's film exhibitions in Canyon, California by Redwood Regional Park.

2) I can't resist giving a little bit more context. The opposing page 122, it so happens, reprints a fan letter to Canyon Cinema filmmaker Bruce Conner (and a current research subject, the reason why this book was so close at hand this afternoon) from none other than John Lennon, in response to Conner's dazzling Looking For Mushrooms. As he explains in an interview later in the book, Conner sent the film to Lennon because it included a Beatles song as its soundtrack, and he wanted the composers' blessing so he could legally show the film.

3) It's page 123 that we're concerned with at the moment, however, and it's got a letter from a Frisco Bay filmmaker I'm less familiar with (having seen only one of his works, Six Loop-Paintings), Barry Spinello. He's writing about how his 1969 film Soundtrack was influenced by a 1938 John Cage text found in Silence.

4) The three sentences:

Any image (his example is a picture of Beethoven) or mark on the soundtrack successively repeated will produce a distinct sound with distinct pitch and value - different from the sound and value of any other mark. The new music, he says, will be built along the lines of film, with the basic unit of rhythm logically being the frame. With the advent of magnetic tape a few years later and the enormous advantages it has in convenience and speed (capacity to record and play back live sound, and erase) the filmic development of electronic music initially envisioned by Cage was completely obscured.

5) Now, to select the five bloggers I'm to pass this meme to. I'm going to stay local here...
Max Goldberg of Text of Light comes to mind because he wrote a terrific review of the MacDonald book a few weeks ago.
Michael Guillén of the Evening Class comes to mind next, as he's the one who let me know about Max's blog.
Sister Rye comes to mind because I wish she would post a little more often.
Ryland Walker Knight of Vinyl Is Heavy comes to mind because I owe him an e-mail right now.
Rob Davis of Errata comes to mind because he's only going to be local for another week or so. Frisco Bay's loss is Chicago's windfall.

Thanks again, Thom!