Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014)

A scene from Diao Yinan's BLACK COAL THIN ICE, playing at the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23 - May 7 2015. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society

WHO: Liao Fan (last seen in Jackie Chan's dreadful CZ12) won the Best Actor prize at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival for his role in this. (He's the one lighting up in the above photo.)

WHAT: It's interesting to contrast this somber procedural, the third feature by Beijing-based filmmaker Diao Yinan, against an earlier wave of Chinese-language crime movies that came up in the post-film presentation with Film Workshop's Nansun Shi after her and her husband Tsui Hark's Taking of Tiger Mountain at the festival yesterday. In the late-eighties Hong Kong thrillers directed by the likes of John Woo and Ringo Lam, Hollywood stylistic influences are worn loudly and brightly (and taken to sometimes absurd levels), while cops exude a kind of glamorous cool even as they commit objectively despicable acts. It's elements like this that I feel may give some credence to James Naremore's suggestion that the North American vogue for Hong Kong action in the 1990s was "indulging in fin de siècle Orientalism," although I personally feel there was a lot more to it than that- a topic for another discussion at another time.

It may be overly-obvious to state that a film like Black Coal, Thin Ice feels far more attuned to international arthouse than pop cinema, both formally and thematically (although these inseparable realms in fact reinforce each other). There's far more ambiguity in this moral universe, and Liao's role as Zhang is that of a real neo-noir protagonist; one that appears more pathetic than glamorous. When we first meet him, he's at a train station seeing off his former wife, and can't help but try to force himself on her one last time before she leaves his life for good. It's like the opposite of a "save the cat" gesture intended to make audiences like an on-screen character better. For the rest of the film, we hang on the open question of whether we're going to find anything redeeming about this authority figure, as much or more than we wonder what the solution to the gruesome mystery at the center of the plot: who is chopping up human bodies and disposing of their pieces in a coal plant.

It's a grim film, but a highly compelling one, set in eye-opening industrial urban landscapes and punctuated by impactful moments contrasting with the rest of the methodical, clinical tone, such as sudden burst of violent action in the midst of a wrong turn in the investigation, or an almost tender close up on Zhang and a female character, chillingly coming right after the most overt visual reference to Carol Reed's The Third Man in the film, of the several noted by John Berra. Though Black Coal, Thin Ice isn't quite up to the standards of that landmark of British and indeed international cinema, it's a worthwhile genre piece that will be giving scholars much to pick over as it's discussed in the context of a rapidly-transforming nation in the coming years.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 6PM today at the Clay, and 9:15 PM Wednesday at the Kabuki as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF).

WHY: If you've been seeing just one SFIFF film per day following my daily picks, you haven't seen anything made outside of the United States of America yet. And this is supposed to be an international film festival? I haven't crunched numbers yet, but I do get the sense that U.S. (mostly independent and underground, not Hollywood, of course) films are taking a more generous share of the attention at the festival this year, and I'm sorry to perpetuate that. My excuse: wanting to write about films I've seen rather than those I haven't each day; I'll be able to weigh in on more foreign titles as the festival rolls on. Anyway, I'm glad to finally get the ball rolling with a film from China, which has five titles listed in the SFIFF's "country index" in the back of its catalog. Others include The Taking of Tiger Mountain (mentioned above and playing again on Thursday), Peter Ho-sun Chan's Dearest (also screening Thursday), an American-made no-budget documentary on the Chinese rail system called The Iron Ministry (screening again May 4). There are two more chances to see Red Amnesia, another thriller that seems a productive pairing with Black Coal, Thin Ice as it was made by a director (Wang Xiaoshuai) just three years older than Diao; their two films even share the same editor, Yang Hongyu!

HOW: DCP presentation.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today is the final festival screening of the German film Stations of the Cross and of Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno Live! with director Jody Shapiro, not to mention its titular cinema-royalty star, in attendance.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Roxie Cinema is screening a week-long engagement of the (human) injury-plagued 1981 cult classic Roar. Tonight it screens at the "Big Roxie" (as opposed to the smaller-screened "Little Roxie" two doors down) at 9:15.

Falling Flower (2012)

WHO: Song Jia won the Golden Rooster Best Actress award a month and a half ago for her role in this film, beating Zhang Ziyi's turn in The Grandmaster among other nominees.

WHAT: I have not seen this yet, and the trade reviews are not terribly enthusiastic about anything but the film's cinematography (for which it won an award at the 2012 Shanghai Film Festival), but the film, a biopic of novelist Xiao Hong made by the Fifth Generation director of Postmen in the Mountains, hasn't really been reviewed by many English-language critics beyond these two.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the 4-Star Theatre at 1:30 PM.

WHY: It's the final day of the 4-Star's annual Chinese American Film Festival.

HOW: I believe the entire CAFF program is digitally presented.

Street Angel (1937)

WHO: Yuan Muzhi wrote and directed this.

WHAT: I haven't seen this frequently-hailed landmark of 1930s Chinese cinema, but have been wanting to at least since Andrew Grant a.k.a. Filmbrain wrote an enticing review of it.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 5:30.

WHY: The last two films in Yang Fudong's Cinematic Influences look at cinema made in Yang's adopted city of Shanghai, including Street Angel from the 1930s when it was the greatest center of Chinese-language filmmaking, and Suzhou River, from the city's resurgence.

Other cities that have made an argument for being the international capital of great Chinese-languge filmmaking at various points in time include Hong Kong and Taipei. Both of them are highlighted at upcoming San Francisco Film Society-presented showcases this fall: Hong Kong Cinema next weekend and Taiwan Film Days this fall.

HOW: Screens as a 35mm print imported from the China Film Archive.

The Grandmaster (2013)

WHO: Wong Kar-Wai directed this.

WHAT: The Grandmaster is, like all of Wong's prior feature films (at least those that I've seen; I confess to having skipped his previous My Blueberry Nights and never having caught up with his first film As Tears Go By), constructed of beautiful images. If there were such thing as a device that could project a single, held, 35mm film frame onto a wall constantly, without incurring its destruction through the melting heat of the projector lamp, there's hardly a frame in the film that wouldn't be a lovely adornment to a darkened space, ripe for study of color, lighting, and composition within the frame. Of course, such a method of looking at the film would be in conflict with what Wong does with editing here, namely that he edits the hell out of his action sequences, making them into a furious flurry of movement without compromising their narrative function.

That all said, the overarching narrative felt to me rather empty of emotion and import, unlike in his (according to me) best movies In The Mood For Love, Fallen Angels and even Ashes of Time. Watching The Grandmaster was unlike watching those films, or the "old-school" kung fu from filmmakers like Chang Cheh and Lau Kar-Leung who stripped down storytelling to archetypal forms to prevent plot complexities from overwhelming the urgency of their action. Wong is in dialogue with a very complicated history rife with Confucian and nationalistic themes, many of which I'm sure I couldn't discern on a single viewing. But watching it, at least on a 35mm print, was nonetheless extraordinarily pleasurable on a sensory level. I would like to re-watch the film after reading Shelly Kracier's persuasive review, in the hopes that I'd get more out of it on an intellectual level as well, knowing that even if I didn't, I would still have an eye-fortifying experience.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at cinemas around Frisco Bay, including the 4-Star Theatre. The latter is closed for a private event on Tuesday, September 10, however.

WHY: As I intimated in my recent piece on Drug War, the universe seems just a little bit closer to balanced whenever there's a Chinese-language film playing at the 4-Star. That goes double when it's a film by someone whose work I fell in love with there, like Johnnie To or Wong Kar-Wai (it's there that showings of In The Mood For Love and Ashes of Time and to a more intermittent extent 2046 made me swoon). And it goes triple when there's (unlike Drug War) one available to screen in a 35mm print, as the 4-Star is among the last Frisco Bay theatres keeping its actual film projectors running when possible. And The Grandmaster is indeed screening there that way this week (as well as English-language films The Way, Way Back and Fruitvale Station.) I don't know if the next Hong Kong production to come to the venue will be on 35mm, but I do know it's called Ip Man: The Final Fight and it comes from two key member of the team behind another film I first saw at the 4-Star, The Untold Story. That queasy film's co-director Herman Yau is the solo director behind this, and it reuintes him once again (they've worked together a dozen times) with that film's star Anthony Wong.

More Chinese-language films are being brought this fall to the Pacific Film Archive, and to the Vogue, which, thanks to the San Francisco Film Society will be hosting two brief mini-festivals devoted to films from Hong Kong (October 4-6) and from Taiwan (November 1-3). The line-up for the latter is as-yet unannounced, but I wonder if it's hoping too much for me to imagine it to be an opportunity to see the new Venice prize-winning film from one of Taipei's best filmmakers, Tsai Ming-Liang's Stray Dogs. Possibly, since we still haven't had a chance to see Tsai's prior feature Face on Frisco Bay cinema screens.

But the Hong Kong Cinema series has its line-up set. Johnnie To fans won't have to wait any longer to catch up with the prolific director, as his Blind Detective screens opening night of the festival. Another film fresh from Cannes 2013 is Flora Lau's feature debut Bends, which was shot by Wong Kar-Wai's former cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and which competed in the Un Certain Regard section of the French festival. 

Johnnie To's production company Milkyway Pictures also lent support to a film made by students at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts called A Complicated Story, which debuted at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival and whose director Kiwi Chow is expected to attend his screening at the Vogue. I'm also interested in the new film from Oxide Pang called Conspirators; Pang made a splash early in his career as one half of the co-directing team behind the original Bangkok Dangerous and The Eye but I was less impressed with the films he made without his brother Danny Pang (and vice versa) at that time. But ten years and a pair of forgettable Hollywood films later (including the Nicholas Cage-starring remake of Bangkok Dangerous) and it may be time to take another look at the Pang Brothers solo again.

Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, Hong Kong Cinema will bring two of the best kung-fu movies made by the great director Lau Kar-Leung (a.k.a. Liu Chia-liang), who died at age 78 this past June after two decades of battling with cancer. Lau's most famous work, the action-packed but near-avant-garde in its minimalistic plot 36th Chamber of Shaolin, will screen Saturday afternoon of the festival while Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, my own favorite martial arts movie of all time, screens Sunday. I believe these will be digital screenings, but it will be hard for me to resist attending anyway as I've never seen either film on a cinema screen with an audience. I hope the booking encourages the Roxie to book 35mm prints of Lau's films (of Dirty Ho and Eight Diagram Pole Figher, at the very least) that I hear are in the possession of Dan Halsted, who brought two kung fu double-bills to that venue last year.

HOW: The Grandmaster screens in 35mm at the 4-Star but digitally elsewhere. It was shot mostly on film, but high-speed action shots used a digital camera.

Drug War (2012)

WHO: Johnnie To directed and co-produced this.

WHAT: In his essay in the 2007 book Hong Kong Film: Hollywood and the New Global Cinema, Peter Rist proposes that Johnnie To is "the most prominent Hong Kong film director/producer not to have tried his luck in Hollywood". If prominence is measured in critical acclaim and festival acceptance in Euope and North America, it's hard to think of another candidate for this title. (If there are other measurements, then Stephen Chow, Ann Hui, and other possibilities might be considered.) Though Rist's piece suggests the director could fit right into the Hollywood filmmaking system, in six years after publication, To has still resisted such a call. Instead, he's been making advances into mainland China and its rapidly growing theatrical market, Drug War is, like Romancing In Thin Air,  a Hong Kong/China co-production, and was filmed in China, in this case in the cities of Jinhai and Erzhou.

David Bordwell has published a detailed analysis of Drug War with special attention given to several of its most memorable scenes, but I'm equally thankful for his publication of Grady Hendrix;s analysis of the film as a viewpoint on China vis-a-vis Hong Kong. An excerpt from his analysis (published as an addendum to Bordwell's article) follows:

The cops in the film are China personified: they have unlimited resources, massive numbers, infinite organization, but they are heartless towards outsiders, unforgiving, and they don’t trust anyone. The criminals are all the stereotypes of Hong Kong-ers: they are family, they are stylish and chic, they eat meals together (Hong Kong people love to eat, after all) but they are only interested in money.

Drug War is one of the best new movies I've seen all summer, and is highly recommended if you can squeeze in a showing.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens through this Thursday at the 4-Star at 1:00, 4:50, and 8:40 daily.

WHY: When I hear the term "neighborhood theatre" I think first of the 4-Star, located in the heart of the Richmond District, where I grew up. There were other theatres in my old 'hood, including the Balboa (which still survives and is currently running a Kickstarter campaign in the hopes of extending its survival for at least another decade), the Alexandria (which has been closed for nearly a decade now but still stand), the Bridge (which just closed last December), the Coliseum (which was gutted in 2000 and is now virtually unrecognizable as a Walgreens) and the Coronet (which was shut in 2005 and has since been demolished). But the 4-Star was the closest to my house and the one I walked past just about every day on the way to school. Mostly it played art films of no interest to an average kid, but I do remember occasionally attending for a special repertory screening of something like The Wizard of Oz. When I first began reading newspaper movie reviews and articles as a teenager I remember being thrilled to learn that my neighborhood theatre was to be showing Vincent Ward's The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey and I determined to be among the crowds lining up for a first-day showing as I had for Tim Burton's Batman a few weeks (if I remember the timeline correctly) before. I was surprised to be one of a small handful of people in the theatre at all. I didn't quite get that there was a difference in public awareness and acceptance of a Hollywood fantasy film vis-a-vis a foreign-made, independently distributed one.

In 1992 the theatre operation was taken over by Frank Lee, who had grown up in the business of operating Chinatown theatres and was looking to expand Chinese-language cinema to a neighborhood sometimes called "New Chinatown" or "Second Chinatown". Since then Lee has frequently screened Chinese-language classics and new releases sent directly from Asian distributors, along with films distributed by American outfits. This is where I saw my first Milkyway Production, Too Many Ways To Be #1 (directed by Wai Ka-Fei), which instantly made me a fan, as well as many Johnnie To films including several which never had "official" US distribution but played for a week or more at the 4-Star: My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, Throw Down and (for my money To's greatest masterpiece) Sparrow come to mind. In the past several years the 4-Star's programming of Chinese-language films has become more sporadic than consistent, but I'm always glad to see when they program Asian films. I'm especially pleased that after Drug War's expected run ends Thursday, Wong Kar-Wai's latest film The Grandmaster will open for at least a week starting this Friday August 30th, in a 35mm print. I'll be surprised if this martial arts film, which was shot mostly on 35mm cameras, will be showing on 35mm anywhere else in the Frisco Bay region.

HOW: Drug War was shot digitally and is being projected digitally.

Bay Of Angels (1963)

WHO: Jacques Demy wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Demy's second feature film, and his only one made with the great Jeanne Moreau as Jackie (playing opposite Claude Mann as Jean), was the first of his films I saw, back in 2002 when the Castro Theatre gave it a full week-long run. I recall really liking this gambling-obsession tale but being disappointed with the ending. But it seems high time to revisit the film. Here's an excerpt from Johnny Ray Huston's dual review of Bay of Angels and Demy's debut feature Lola, that helped convince me to go in the first place eleven years ago:

Never one to be associated with the term "fancy-free," the rumpled Moreau brings a nervous undercurrent to Jackie's impetuousness, a quality that Demy further emphasizes in the casino scenes' sound design: stretches of tense silence interrupted by the clatter of chips and the skitter of the ball across niches on a roulette wheel. These noises rarely sync up directly with an image; most often Demy focuses instead on the faces of the gamblers, who – however outlandish their attire – look grimly preoccupied rather than celebratory.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:00.

WHY: In the Spring of 2006 the PFA held a small Jacques Demy retrospective: five of his feature films plus one about him directed by his widow Agnès Varda. More than seven years later and the venue is presenting a far more complete survey of the French New Wave-era pioneer's work. This time there are ten features and four shorts by Demy, taken from all phases of his career, as well as three films by Varda (including two not included in her own 2009 retro at the venue.)

I've been slow to warm to Demy. Though I found a good deal to admire in Lola (which screened last night to open this series), Bay of Angels and Model Shop (Demy's sole experience working in Hollywood, which screens August 2nd), it wasn't until seeing his 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (screening tomorrow & August 31) that I realized the director was as capable of making a great masterpiece as anyone of his generation. I now have a renewed interest in seeing and re-seeing his films, and am glad the PFA offers chances to see well-known titles like Donkey Skin (Aug. 4) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (Aug. 8 & 30), as well as more rarely-seen features like A Room In Town (Aug. 17) and his swan song Three Seats For the 26th (Aug. 24). The shorts and Varda features should bring even more richness to a very appealing series.

Speaking of appealing PFA series, the venue has recently added to its website the five Chinese cinema classics being added to Yang Fudong's An Estranged Paradise to make up the August-October series Yang Fudong's Cinematic Influences, mounted in conjunction with a mid-career survey of Yang's work at the Berkeley Art Musuem. Whether or not you're already familiar with the Chinese artist and filmmaker (perhaps best known in cinephile circles for his his Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest cycle), and whether or not you even care to be, you should know that this series is going to be special. Imported 35mm prints of seminal Chinese classics like the fifth-generation landmark Yellow Earth and the early Shanghai talkie Street Angel don't come around often at all, and as for the canonized "greatest Chinese film of all time", Fei Mu's 1948 Spring in a Small Town is such a rare masterpiece, impossible to see in even a decent home video version, I can almost forgive that it's the one title in the series expected to show via DCP.

HOW: Bay of Angels screens via a 35mm print. Though technically not a double-bill, there is a discounted admission to Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire, screening in 35mm at 8:45 as part of the Simenon and Cinema series, for anyone who also buys a ticket to Bay of Angels.

When Night Falls (2012)

WHO: Ying Liang directed this, following-up on his previous films Taking Father Home, The Other Half, Good Cats and the short Condolences.

WHAT: Sometimes the most austere movies can become political fireballs. This video-film about the repercussions of a young man's violent acts upon representatives of the Chinese state upon the man's mother Wang Jingmei, has created its own state repercussions on its filmmaker, documented up through October on this website. Now it finally has its first screenings inside the United States, and I was able to view it. Nothing I could say, however, would be as cogent as what Michael Sicinski wrote on the film last summer. A sample:

Part of what makes When Night Falls excel as a work of cinema, as well as a political intervention, comes from Ying’s harnessing of isolation and pathos for the express purpose of displaying, through spatial articulation and physical bombardment, what it feels like when the entire apparatus of the Chinese government bears down on a lone individual. A great deal of this results from Nai’s performance as Wang, whose slow, hunched movements through Ying’s deep, recessed compositions return a specific social valence to Antonioni/Tsai architectural imprisonment. One particularly fine shot finds Wang walking alone through a street towards the camera as an unseen loudspeaker trumpets the “splendid” Olympic Games. A woman bikes past her quizzically. The scene would be Kafkaesque except there is no paranoia, only bone-aching sorrow.

WHERE/WHEN: Has one final CAAMFest screening today at 3:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: If you haven't yet had a chance to sample the wave of micro-budgeted video features coming out of China, this is a good opportunity to start. Though some of Ying's prior films have screened at local festivals before, most of the examples of this wave seen by Frisco Bay cinema audiences have been documentaries like those presented at showcases at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and New People. Though I got a sense of Taking Father Home as less evidently excited about the possibilities of oppositional filmmaking than some of the best of these documentaries I've sampled (notably Ghost Town and Disorder), it helps round out a more complete picture of the kind of image-making being performed well outside the sanction of the Beijing government, and would give a newcomer to the movement a strong sample of the political and aesthetic strategies being utilized in the world's most populated country.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digital production.

Love And Duty (1931)

WHO: Ruan Lingyu, frequently called the Greta Garbo of the Shanghai film industry, stars.

WHAT: I don't know anything about this film except that it's extraordinarily rare, and a personal favorite of Frisco Bay-born critic Kevin B. Lee, who knows a thing or three about Chinese cinema. (You can hear more about Lee's unique path into cinephilia and film criticism in this podcast hosted by by Peter Labuza.) He even included it in his entry for the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time Poll last year.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:00 tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: There are lots of reasons to see a Chinese silent film on a Wednesday night. Perhaps you're already in withdrawl from last weekend's Silent Winter event at the Castro. Perhaps you're ruing the negatively stereotyped Hollywood depictions of Chinese characters (played wonderfully, if broadly villainously, by Japanese actor Sojin and Chinese American Anna May Wong) in The Thief of Bagdad from that event, and want an antidote of Asian origin. Or perhaps you want to ring in the Year of the Snake in traditional style -- since the 4-Star didn't extend its long-standing tradition of showing prints of new Hong Kong releases for Chinese New Year, I believe tonight marks the first local unspooling of a 35mm print of a Chinese film in the New Lunar Year.

But the real reason Love And Duty is being screened tonight is because it's the eve of  a wonderful biennial Berkeley tradition: the Second International Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema, which runs from Thursday until Saturday and brings an impressive line-up of scholars to speak about topics relating to pre-talkie cinema from around the globe. I was able only to attend one of last year's lectures (from the dizzyingly brilliant Tom Gunning) but did catch some of the accompanying screenings. This year's overarching theme, "On Location" is of particular interest to me, so I hope to attend far more of the talks this year, and as many of the remaining screenings as I can. In addition to Love And Duty, which will be introduced by Berkeley's own Weihong Bao tonight, a pair of 1914 Westerns screen tomorrow with an introduction by UC Davis's Scott Simmon, and a fascinating-sounding, Soviet film called The Ghost That Does Not Return, that uses Azerbaijan as a stand-in for South America, will be shown and introduced by Anne Nesbet (also of Berkeley).

HOW: Love And Duty screens via a tinted 35mm print shipped over from the Chinese Taipei Film Archive, with Judith Rosenberg accompanying on piano.

No Time Like Cinema Time

The are only two days left to see Dogtooth on the San Francisco Film Society Screen at the Sundance Kabuki. I had hoped to write a full review of this remarkable, unsettling film about one family's bizarre home-schooling experiment gone to the extreme, which I was able to catch at the Greek Film Festival back in May. A modern-day application of classical Greek philosophy- particularly Plato's concept of The Cave, it's one of the best films I've seen all year, and it demands to be seen on the big screen, where one is held captive to cinema's traditional nature as a purely time-based medium (a quality compromised by the existence of the DVD player's pause function). Unfortunately time has not been on my side on this matter, so I must refer you to recent reviews by Cheryl Eddy and Dennis Harvey instead.

On Friday, Dogtooth will be replaced by Change Of Plans on the SFFS Screen, and also joined at the Kabuki by a weaker new opening, Zhang Yimou's A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop. The latter is a remake of the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple that is at least (at most?) interesting in that it's more faithful to the original film in some of its aesthetic approaches, including a long wordless segment that mirrors the Coens' achievement, and even a recurrent sound effect surely intended to replicate the Balinese chant on the original film's soundtrack, than it is to the overall milieu, plot, tone, or character design. More broad Chinese-style slapstick than we Westerners are likely to forgive makes this remake a rather jarring one, even if certain individual scenes are impressive.

As the SFFS begins unveiling its Fall Season, it's also trying to negotiate a takeover of the Clay Theatre on Fillmore Street, which was expected to close near the end of last month but was spared for the time being; a French film Mademoiselle Chambon opens Friday. Michael Krasny recently hosted a fascinating radio program on the fate of the Clay and other single-screen theatres on Frisco Bay, in which the SFFS's Graham Leggatt outlined his hopes for the 100-year-old venue. In the meantime, R.A. McBride and Julie Lindow's book Left In The Dark has begun appearing on the shelves of Frisco Bay bookstores (City Lights and The Green Arcade, for two). I was honored to be quoted in a piece by Sam Sharkey, formerly of the Clay, now of the Red Vic, on the future of moviegoing; other essays by Chi-hui Yang, Eddie Muller, Gary Meyer with Laura Horak, and Sergio de la Mora help make this book a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Frisco Bay cinemagoing, but it's the superb photography by R.A. McBride which makes it a must-own for anyone with a coffee table or a bookshelf.

Another Frisco bay-centric film book entitled Radical Light focuses on the many permutations of experimental cinema made and screened here over the second half of the last century. After purchasing it at the Berkeley Art Museum Store on Friday, I've only been able to get about halfway through it so far, but it's absolutely required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in American avant-garde filmmaking, of which Frisco Bay has been the major center for much of the time period covered in the book (1945-2000). And since, despite having twice as many pages as Left in the Dark, it's actually got a cheaper list price, at least in paperback, I have to say I'm even more satisfied with this purchase (as unfair as it feels to compare these two very worthy and exciting publications). The Pacific Film Archive and SF Cinematheque will hold a spectacular array of special-guest laden screenings in conjunction with the book release over the next several months, beginning with a PFA screening September 19th that I cannot recommend more highly. Aesthetically diverse masterpieces from Dion Vigne's North Beach to Bruce Baillie's All My Life to Chris Marker's Junkopia will play together, and filmmakers Ernie Gehr and Lawrence Jordan will appear in person. BAM will also open a gallery exhibition of documents related to the book and to the experimental film scene on October 6th.

Among other tasks that took up my time in recent weeks was a very enjoyable one: writing a review of the new Josef Von Sternberg box set published over a week ago at GreenCine Daily. As I begin the review, Criterion has traditionally not been a major force in releasing American silent films, but with this set (of Underworld, the Last Command, and the Docks of New York), and its upcoming Charlie Chaplin releases, it seems intent on becoming a major player in this field after all. Criterion's affiliated company Janus is bringing five days full of Chaplin films to the Castro Theatre later this month, and I can't wait to see these films on the big screen.

Although I must admit, I may be a bit exhausted by the time the Chaplin series begins with his still-underrated The Circus September 18th. I'll have just returned from over a week at the Toronto International Film Festival, my first-ever visit to this festival, or indeed this city. In fact, I'd better wrap up this post now if I want to make my flight! See you in a week and a half!

Silent Summer

This limited edition poster for Diary of a Lost Girl is one of three made by David O'Daniel to promote the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which takes over the Castro Theatre in one week. I've written before about my involvement in one aspect of the festival, and in the interest of full disclosure I don't feel it's proper to blog about my enthusiasm for the festival without mentioning that connection. But I assure you the enthusiasm is genuine; no one at the festival is in any way pressuring me to promote the event (they have their own fine blog for that) in addition to my other contributions there. But since the festival has been the centerpiece of my summer moviegoing for longer than I've been part of the festival's writers group, I feel moved to write about the programs I'm anticipating nonetheless.

The three feature films depicted in O'Daniel's posters are the three I've seen theatrically before, all at the Castro, though under very different circumstances than the way they'll be presented July 15-18. Diary of a Lost Girl was the film German director G.W. Pabst made with that great cult icon of the silent screen, Louise Brooks, directly after Pandora's Box. Critic Lotte Eisner was not the last to contend that it illustrated the development (a maturation, perhaps) of Pabst's technique over the more famous film he'd made the year before. Eisner wrote: "The film displays a new, almost documentary restraint. Pabst now seeks neither Expressionistic chiaroscuro nor Impressionistic glitter; and he seems less intoxicated than he was by the beauty of his actress." Many call Diary of a Lost Girl the better film, though I'm not sure I'm quite with them. It was my first exposure to Pabst or Brooks when I first saw and loved it at the Berlin and Beyond festival in 2002, but upon finally seeing Pandora's Box at the SFSFF a few years later, the latter's grand guignol overwhelmed my memory of Diary almost entirely, and Pandora is the one I now own on DVD. I can't wait to learn my reaction to seeing Diary of a Lost Girl again on the big screen, musically accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and introduced by SFSFF founders Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons.

With Berlin & Beyond no longer the organization it once was thanks to a well-publicized shake-up, I worry that the gulf between the theatrical exposure the great German silent film industry deserves, and what it gets here in Frisco might widen. At least this year, however, the Silent Film Festival is breaking precedent by showing two features from the same foreign film industry, and it is indeed Germany's. Along with Diary of a Lost Girl, the SFSFF will screen Fritz Lang's Metropolis in its closest-to-complete version since being cut for international distribution in 1927. There has been some consternation among film lovers in response to the fact that this screening will be, as all screenings of this newest restoration of Metropolis have been, sourced from a digital copy rather than a tangible 35mm print. The disappointing fact is that distributor Kino decided to eschew the expense of striking physical prints for circulation this time around. Even the (decidedly non-Kino-sanctioned) screening of the Giorgio Moroder version of Metropolis which the currently-running Another Hole In The Head festival has cheekily booked to play the VIZ Cinema shortly after the SFSFF, will be screened digitally. I don't suppose it's for nothing that James Quandt referred to a mythical Fritz Lang retrospective in his contribution to this year's Cineaste magazine round-table on the state of repertory in the United States. (It's a must-read article in both print and online form, by the way.) I have a feeling that the live score performance by the Alloy Orchestra will overwhelm most any consternation and disappointment among those who attend the sure-to-sell-out event at the Castro next Friday.

Alloy Orchestra, making its first appearance at the Silent Film Festival since 2000 (the year before I started attending), will also provide the music for the film I was honored to research and write about this year, Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera. What can I say: I loved this film long before I began my research, and I love it all the more now that I've read more than I ever knew was written about it. It's simultaneously the one film on the program I'd most heartily recommend to someone who'd never seen a silent film before, and the one I'd most strongly urge the most diehard silent film enthusiast to take another look at. A third opportunity to see the Alloys in action comes after the SFSFF ends, on Monday July 19 at the Rafael Film Center in Marin, where the group will perform to Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail.

Though it's a haven for fans of Old Hollywood, foreign films have been an integral piece the from the beginning of the Silent Film Festival. Actually, before the beginning- two years prior to the first annual festival in 1996, the nascent organization presented Ernst Lubitsch's German film I Don't Want To Be A Man at Frameline. Foreign silents have been part of every summer program since 1999, but this year they enjoy a particularly prominent place; a record seven countries will be represented by films at the festival. For the first time, the fest's closing night film is a foreign title (the French comedy L'heureuse mort), and an entire day of screenings (Friday, July 16) will be devoted to films from abroad: Metropolis will be preceded by A Spray of Plum Blossoms from China and Rotaie from Italy. I've seen neither, and had in fact heard of neither before being made aware of them by the SFSFF.

Akira Kurosawa was not the first filmmaker to transpose one of William Shakespeare's plays to an East Asian setting. In 1931, long before Throne of Blood or Ran, Chinese director Bu Wancang placed stars Ruan Lingyu and Jin Yan in a version of Two Gentlemen Of Verona, entitled A Spray of Plum Blossoms, that sounds positively psychotronic! Apparently a mash-up of The Bard, elegant 1930s Shanghai design, and a Douglas Fairbanks-style Western complete with a Robin Hood character, a Spray of Plum Blossoms seems sure to be the most rollicking of the four films from the Shanghai silent film industry that the SFSFF has presented thus far in its fifteen summer festivals.

The first screening I ever attended at the SFSFF was the Italian adventure film Maciste All'inferno, back in 2001. In 2006 another Maciste film screened. This year, Rotaie becomes the festival's first Italian program choice not featuring Bartolomeo Pagano's charismatic bodybuilder. Also known as Rails, the 1929 Rotaie was directed by Mario Camerini, according to Peter Bondanella one of two directors dominating Italian moviemaking in the Fascist-government period. However, all accounts label this particular Camerini film very atypical of the kind of artistry we expect to exist under a totalitarian state. Bondanella writes: "it is a psychological study of the complex interrelationships between two fugitive lovers." The film has been compared to that beautifully downbeat but ultimately inspiring film Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans. That's more than enough to make it a must-see for me.

While researching Sunrise for an essay I wrote accompanying its screening at the festival's February 2009 Winter Event, I found myself becoming fascinated by the Fox Studio and its head of production William Fox. For years he had the reputation of being the most frugal and aesthetically conservative of the majors, churning out low-budget, but profitable Westerns starring the likes of Buck Jones and Tom Mix. In the mid-1920s, however, he began to realize that to compete with MGM, Paramount and First National, he would have to produce films that could play in large movie palaces in cosmopolitan city centers, where audiences wanted more glamor and spectacle than his likable cowboy heroes could provide. This is what led Fox to put into production films like Raoul Walsh's What Price Glory?, Frank Borzage's Seventh Heaven, and imported auteur F.W. Murnau's Sunrise. Before these war movies and dramas, he had contract director John Ford test the waters with the first of Ford's big-budget epics of the Old West. Thus the Iron Horse paved the way for the period of intense artistry of the late 1920s that the Fox studio became remembered for. Though the film is available on DVD, I've been waiting to see it on the big screen, and am thrilled that the Silent Film Festival chose it to be their opening night selection, accompanied by the organ virtuosity of Dennis James. If next Thursday is too long to wait for a big-screen Fox Western, however, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont has selected a Tom Mix film entitled The Last Trail for this Saturday night's slot in its latest weekly silent screening schedule.

Certainly the least-known of the SFSFF's American features this time around is the Flying Ace, a film made at Richard E. Norman's Jacksonville, Florida studio in 1926. Norman cast his independent film productions exclusively with African-American actors, and expected his films to be seen largely by African-American audiences who in many regions of the country were excluded from the theatres, or at minimum the screening times, that white audiences frequented. It's exciting to be exposed to a film with little to no critical reputation in a more-than-ideal exhibition environment with what is sure to be a large and curious audience. There's no way I'm going to miss this one either.

I don't strictly watch silent films, of course; I explore contemporary cinema frequently enough that I feel I can put together a respectable top ten list of new releases every year. The film I placed atop my list of 2009 Frisco Bay commercial releases last year was the animated feature Up, my favorite of the Pixar films so far. As I wrote after first seeing it, the film clearly exhibits its creators' affinity for silent story-telling technique. So what a treat it was to learn that Up's director Pete Docter will be part of this year's Silent Film Festival, presenting a Saturday morning program of two-reel comedy shorts: Laurel & Hardy in Big Business, the hilarious, underexposed Pass the Gravy, and the Buster Keaton/Fatty Arbuckle team-up The Cook. Directly following that program will be a festival first: a panel discussion on the art of silent film music composition and accompaniment that promises to be a lively intersection of the diverse array of the top-tier silent film musicians attending the festival this year. This in addition to the continued tradition of free-of-charge presentations by invited film archivists, this time expanded to two programs kicking off the festival days on Friday and Sunday.

I'm running out of writing juice, so I'll have someone else with infinitely more credibility than I provide brief comments on the remaining films on the program. I've plucked a few quotes from the many wonderful writings of filmmaker and historian Kevin Brownlow, who I've written on before, and who has surely done more than any living person to augment the reputation of silent cinema among film buffs, and whether they know it or not, among the general public as well. His many books, articles, interviews, film restorations, and documentaries speak for themselves as accomplishments. But they also speak for an artform that had no literal voice, in a way that speaks to everyone from academics to channel surfers. He's one of the few prolific film writers of any kind who I cannot say I've ever seen a negative word written against. And here are some of his words on films in the Silent Film Festival program this year:

On the director of all the short films that will precede many of the feature film programs in this year's SFSFF: "Georges Méliès used the cinematograph to extend his act as a magician, and he produced a series of enchanting films, incorporating camera tricks and sleight of hand which can still astonish."

On the Danish documentary-turned-cult-film Häxan: Withcraft Throughout the Ages: "bizarre and brilliant"

On William Wyler's boxing drama The Shakedown: "impressive"

On the first Norma Talmadge feature to be included at the Silent Film Festival: "I have just seen The Woman Disputed and it's a remarkable piece of filmmaking. The plot takes Maupassant's "Boule de Suif" to extremes, but it succeeds so well as a brilliant piece of flim craft that is MUST be brought back to life."

On the Frank Capra-directed comedy starring the so-called "fourth genius" Harry Langdon, The Strong Man: "Its tremendous climax matches that of the best action pictures...the picture stands today as one of the best comedies ever made."

Brownlow himself will attend the Silent Film Festival for the first time ever this year, along with Patrick Stanbury, his partner in his Photoplay Productions company, which is the institution receiving this year's Silent Film Festival Award. This award has previously been granted to David Shepard, the Chinese Film Archive, and Turner Classic Movies among other recipients. The 2010 award will be presented at the 4:00 Saturday screening of The Strong Man, and I wouldn't miss it for anything.

Exhilarating Sadness

More than ten years ago, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, then still located in Golden Gate Park, hosted a retrospective of the work of Taiwanese master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien. I was preparing an extended trip abroad myself at the time, and missed the entire cycle, but upon my return I often heard Hou's name spoken in hushed tones by local moviegoers, and determined to seek his work out. I began with a viewing of Flowers Of Shanghai, starring Tony Leung as a nineteenth-century opium den father in that port city. I was absolutely entranced by its calm power, even though I was watching it on a videocassette tape. I loved it, but knew I would have loved it even more if shown on a beautiful new print. Helped along by assurances of cinephile friends, I was convinced I had been exposed to one of the great living artists of the medium, and I vowed that I would see any film of his that screened in town in a good 35mm print.

Since then, Hou has completed four newer films (Millenium Mambo, Cafe Lumiere, Three Times, and The Flight of the Red Balloon), and I have been sure to see each of them in Frisco cinemas, more than once if I could. Only one film from his back-catalogue has made it onto local screens during this time: Goodbye South, Goodbye, which the since-departed Manny Farber selected to be screened alongside his appearance at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival, where the legendary critic received the Mel Novikoff Award and was interviewed on the stage of the Kabuki Theatre in an intimate afternoon event. It was great, but that was the end if my exploration of Hou's pre-Flowers of Shanghai work.

Until now. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has brought a glorious new print of Hou's 1989 film City of Sadness, also starring Tony Leung, this time as a deaf man named Wen-ching, for a pair of twentieth-anniversary screenings this weekend. Of all of Hou's films, City Of Sadness is the one that is often favorably compared to The Godfather, that most often perches atop lists of the great Chinese-language films of all time, and that gets spoken of with perhaps the most reverence. It's all deserved. I attended last night's screening, and I cannot urge my readers strongly enough to make sure to be at the venue's second and final showing on Sunday afternoon. Especially if you have seen City of Sadness only on imported or bootlegged video before (it has never had a commercial release of any kind in this country) you will surely be astonished by the beauty of the print YBCA is showing.

Last night's viewing was introduced by Manfred Peng of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, who gave a brief but helpful explanation of the political backdrop of City of Sadness. It's considered the first of Hou's "history trilogy" continuing with The Puppetmaster and Good Men, Good Women, all three of which were set against historical events in Taiwan. City of Sadness is set in that late-1940s period between the end of World War II and Japan's relinquishment of the island as one of its colonies, and the 1949 founding of the People's Republic of China. The film was made just a few years after the lifting of Taiwan's ban on mentioning the defining political event of that period, the "228 Incident" or "228 Massacre", still a contentious topic to this day.


I hope that any American politicians or diplomats now involved in relations with Taiwan and China understand the interrelations between various parties involved in 228 and its aftermath well enough to easily identify how all the characters in Hou's film are connected to the event on a single viewing. Even with Mr. Peng's aid, I could not, though I think with more reading on the matter and viewings of the film everything would fall into place for me. However, I do not think City of Sadness demands complete understanding of the events, as it is more about people tragically and capriciously impacted by 228 than it is about the event itself. Hou seems to have made a film where characters' perspectives on the political situation in Taiwan at the time matter less than the effects it has on their lives and those of their loved ones, and so we in the audience do not need to fully comprehend the history in order to comprehend the motivations and the emotions of the film's main players.

Every shot in the film is impeccably framed and lit, each scene impeccably staged, often in a way that stresses the relationship between the weight of history and the ordinary life of citizens living it. For example. As a group of students or intellectuals sit and debate politics, Wen-ching and pretty, young Hinomi (played by Xin Shufen) sit to the side of the room, exchanging notes with each other while a folk song plays on the phonograph. Hou situates his camera in the space between the table of students and the clearly smitten couple. It could be a point-of-view shot from the position of one of the debaters, but that seems unlikely. The students are swept up in their discussion and do not seem to be paying attention to the room's other occupants and their activities. No, this shot isolates the spirited discussion from the would-be lovers' attempts to lead a normal life unhindered by the intrusions of politics. At least for this moment, the two are able to exist in their own world; this sense is accentuated as the sound of the conversation subtly drops out and all we hear are sonorous musical notes as they are released from the record grooves. Wen-ching explains the origin of his deafness at age eight, and how it happened to him so young that it didn't feel like a tragedy.

Hou's own political perspective may be evident throughout the film as well, at least to someone knowledgeable on Taiwanese history. For those of us who are not, we can appreciate his form and technique. He is a master at expressing contrasts of energy, such as the way a violent scene spills out onto a quiet morning street. A scene starts as an interior, as two young men confront each other in a bathroom. Anger escalates until the pair are embroiled in a knife fight, chasing each other down hallways. Hou cuts to an exterior long shot of the town nestled below forested hills. For several seconds there is a decided pause in the violence and the viewer may wonder if it may have ended, but suddenly the combatants are now out on the street, bringing their chaos out into the public sphere. This is not the only scene staged along these lines. The film often gives the viewer opportunities like this to understand how the bloodshed of 228 affected day-to-day life on the island.

I'd be very curious to learn about the production history of City Of Sadness. If it was completely taboo to speak of 228 publicly in Taiwan until just a few years before the film was made (a situation that, by the end of the film, seems symbolically represented by Wen-ching's deafness), then was it Hou himself who chose to be the first filmmaker in his country to take on the topic, or was he approached on the basis of his critically successful earlier films (A Time To Live And A Time To Die, etc.) to apply his sensitive sensibility? These questions and others may be answered as I read more about the film. (Because I want to alert readers to the opportunity to see this new print as quickly as I can, I'm writing this piece relatively "cold", that is, without the benefit of delving into other articles as I usually am wont to do.)

I hope to revisit this film again many times in my life. The second screening at the YBCA is this Sunday, and should take precedence over any other film events happening in town for anyone who has not seen City of Sadness before, no matter their previous experience with Hou or Taiwanese cinema. However, this weekend coincides with Taiwan Film Days at the Opera Plaza, which provides Frisco Bay cinephiles with opportunities to see seven more recent films from the island. And with the Chinese American Film Festival coming to town later this month (featuring John Woo's Red Cliff 2, the allegedly superior sequel to the film opening at Landmark Theatres in November as well), this month is a boon for anyone interested in expanding their understanding of Chinese-language cinema.

24 City

Rejoice! The new Pacific Film Archive calendar for September & October is available online. Included are series focusing on undershown auteurs William Klein, Ermanno Olmi, and Julian Duvivier (I've seen one film apiece from these gentlemen, each quite solid). The Alternative Visions series starts back up again on Tuesdays, and is joined by tributes to avant-garde heavyweights Bill Viola and Robert Beavers, both of whom will appear in person, the latter in conversation with the legendary critic P. Adams Sitney. There's also a massive set of British crime films, a few titles overlapping with the ones being brought to the Castro Sep. 11-16, but you'll have to attend both venues to see them all.

Those may be the most high-profile series of the season, but the upcoming months will also be dotted by smaller series, one-shot events, and the reliable "non-series" A Theatre Near You, which returns director Jia Zhang-Ke's film 24 City to the site of his extensive retrospective one year ago. 24 City is also playing the Camera 3 in San Jose this week, inspiring me to dust off an unpublished capsule I wrote earlier this year after seeing the film at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (well before the director's controversial decision to pull out of the Melbourne Film Festival this summer). Here it is:

* * * * *
As Chinese director Jia Zhang Ke's stature on the international film festival circuit has increased with each release, his films have blurred the line between fiction and documentary in ever more intriguing ways. Perhaps because, as his auteur status has attracted attention from a censorious government that once officially disapproved of films like Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures, it's these frictions that provide Jia's best outlet for critique.

Jia's latest film 24 City takes the form of a documentary about the dismantling of a munitions factory code-named "420" in pre-earthquake Chengdu, to make way for a ritzy condominium complex. Interviews with former workers, conducted mostly in long, static shots, join together in an oral history going back generations. The clanging and hammering sounds of the factory's final, self-destructive task are often heard in the background. Sequences are bridged together by brief skits or by city-poems. Songs re-appropriated from films such as John Woo's 1989 The Killer and Peter Chan's 2005 Perhaps Love underscore the connection between recent Chinese history and its pop culture mirror.

But documentary conventions are questioned by the director's decision to have actors play interview subjects. Is the factory saleswoman who recalls how workplace gossip quashed her first love affair a Joan Chen look-alike, as she says she is? Or is she actually Joan Chen? (answer: yes.) By crossing the imaginary boundary between "real" and "constructed" cinema, Jia turns nostalgia into barely-veiled dissent, and creates a testimony filled with contradictions appropriate for our modern age.

Silent Film Linking, Part Two

My San Francisco Silent Film Festival weekend, Continued from Part One:

After missing most of the morning archival program (described here) and catching Bardelys the Magnificent with the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra (profiled in this podcast), it was time to settle in for perhaps the least-known feature in the program.

Wild Rose was directed by Sun Yu, perhaps the most highly-regarded of directors from Shanghai's silent film era, which extended well into the 1930s. Apparently the first Chinese director to have learned about filmmaking in the U.S., several of his films (not Wild Rose) have been released on DVD in the past few years. Still, his is still not exactly a household name, even among silent film buffs. Festival Writers Group members Victoria Jaschob and Aimee Pavy prepared a highly informative program essay and slideshow, respectively, which provided helpful context regarding the conditions in Shanghai under the Kuomintang in 1932, when Wild Rose was made. Most of us in the West have almost no knowledge of the filmmaking of this period, though the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is doing its part to try to rectify this, having now programmed three Chinese features in the past ten years and released the other two in DVD editions as well.

I hope Wild Rose follows the Peach Girl and the Goddess into home video availability. It's quite a lovely blend of 30's-style "realism", romanticism and patriotism, and features dreamy art deco sets and a pair of charismatic leads. The hero is Jin Yan, billed by the festival as a "Rudolf Valentino of China". Jin's widow Qin Yi was brought to the festival and interviewed on-stage by festival advisor Richard Meyer, who has just published a book on the star that includes a more in-depth interview. The female lead, Wang Renmei, is really the film's central character, however. In her excellent festival write-up, Donna Hill likens her to Mary Pickford, which seems pretty accurate. The plot has been summarized handily by Jason Wiener.

From an aesthetic standpoint, Wild Rose bears signs of director Sun's interest in Frank Borzage. Like his film Daybreak (a film I have not yet watched, but that Miriam Bratu Hansen analyzes in the Fall 2000 Film Quarterly), it contains an allusion to Seventh Heaven in the form of a cutaway staircase shot, but there's also something very Borzagean about the relationships between characters. I was reminded of films like No Greater Glory and Three Comrades, both of which were made by Borzage after Wild Rose was completed. The likelihood that the Utah-born auteur was influenced by a Chinese film seems non-existent, and I'd rahter explore the idea that Borzage and Sun were kindred spirits across cultures, than chalk the connections up to coincidence.

Thanks to a much needed early dinner break, I missed the introduction to the next film, Josef Von Sternberg's Underworld. It was given by the Film Noir Foundation's esteemed Eddie Muller, and thankfully it has been transcribed by Michael Guillén at the Evening Class. I also missed the short film shown beforehand, but found a balcony seat just in time for the opening credits of the feature. My second time viewing this gangster film template in 2009, following a Pacific Film Archive screening six months ago, it was reconfirmed as more than just genre archaeology but a stirring, pleasurable film in its own right. Stephen Horne's score was another triumph for the pianist. Horne made appropriate use of jazz-age stylings but perhaps the action scenes were the most memorably accompanied. Generous with tone clusters at the left end of the keyboard, his simulated gunshots resonated in the hall without overwhelming the on-screen excitement. I recall that PFA accompanist Judith Rosenberg also proved her affinity for Sternberg in her music for his silents earlier this year, and I would love to see the Silent Film Festival give her a chance to perform at a grand piano in the Castro one of these years. In the meantime, she'll be taking on Sternberg's debut film the Salvation Hunters again August 16 when it plays as part of the PFA's Treasures From the UCLA Festival of Preservation series.

Stay tuned for part three...

So Many Festivals It's Almost Scary

Read of the week: Michael Guillén's piece inspired by the latest issue of the Film International journal, guest-edited by Dina Iordanova. I can't wait to get my hands on this issue myself. Michael cherry-picks quotes from its articles that help crystalize questions modern-day film festivals must tackle in the face of audiences who are finding other ways to see the stock-and-trade of certain kinds of fests; he believes "new strategies must be devised if these festivals are to survive." I half-wish Michael hadn't quoted me -- a big surprise midway into the article -- because it would have kept this paragraph from seeming a bit like an appeal to join a mutual admiration society.

But I'm ultimately glad he pointed to my piece on October's film festival glut here on Frisco Bay, for one because it provides an opportunity to point out that most of November is looking hardly less glutted with appealing festgoing options. DocFest and the SFJFF continue into the month, and I've also already mentioned that third i and the San Francisco Film Society are both bringing festivals the weekend of November 13-16. In addition, the SFFS's Animation Festival leads right into their New Italian Cinema presentation November 16-23, ending with the festival-lauded Gomorrah. After a chance to catch a Thanksgiving breath, it's followed by Quebec Film Week (titles as yet unannounced) December 10-14. 2008 has been the first year that I've sampled the SFFS's fall offerings, at the successfully-inaugurated French Cinema Now where a rare opportunity to see two early films by Arnaud Desplechin has sparked a re-evaluation of the filmmaker on my part. More on that on another day...

Two more November festivals begin on the same date: the Latino Film Festival and the American Indian Film Festival both start on the 7th day of the month. The AIFF has at least one program I really don't want to miss: Kent MacKenzie's the Exiles, a highly-praised 1962 film set in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles, that played for a week at the Castro Theatre this summer while I was out of town. The LFF brings the reputedly Guy Maddin-esque La Antena from Argentina and is tributing Gregory Nava's extremely significant El Norte (hopefully in a new 35mm print). More suggestions of titles from either of these festivals would be welcome.

Frank Lee is bringing back his Chinese American Film Festival to the Four Star on November 14-20 with titles including Johnny To's Sparrow, and an additional November 8th Marina Theatre screening of Ganglamedo, a Tibet-themed musical which also plays on the last day of the festival at the main venue.

Looking further into the festival crystal ball, the Berlin and Beyond film festival will run January 15-21, 2009 at the Castro and include an in-person tribute to Wim Wenders along with a presentation of his newest film Palermo Shooting. And it's already time to anticipate Noir City 7 (January 23-February 1st), a "newspaper noir"-themed special edition promising some of the most cynical print-stained newshounds ever to have collected a kill fee. Like Chuck Tatum from Ace in the Hole, or JJ Hunsecker from the Sweet Smell of Success. Lesser-known films from Fritz Lang and Anthony Mann (two apiece) and a repeat Noir City presentation of the 1946 B-picture Night Editor (did Joe Eszterhas see this before he wrote Basic Instinct?) are additional cursory highlights, but this is one festival in which its worth looking beyond the filmmaker pedigrees, so easy is it for all but the most committed noir-heads to feel like they've unearthed a forgotten gem (Night Editor was one such gem from Noir City 4, and I'm glad it's being brought back, this time on the Castro screen.)

In the meantime, other notable screenings and events not connected with film festivals keep popping up on the calendar. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has announced some more screenings through mid-December, including brand-new 35mm prints of five Alain Robbe-Grillet films (Last Year in Marienbad, which he wrote, and four he also directed) December 4-18. The new Pacific Film Archive calendar starts this weekend with the first films in a tremendous Japanese cinema series, beginning with post-war films from Kon Ichikawa, who died earlier this year, and Akira Kurosawa. Then it continues with screenings of career highlights from most of the major figures of the Japanese New Wave (Shindo, Oshima, Suzuki, Imamura) and beyond. I hope to say more on the November-December PFA calendar soon.

But I'll just wrap up this post with a shout-out to the Balboa Theatre, which is bringing some special-events to the Richmond District just in time for me- I've moved back to this corner of Frisco myself. This Sunday there will be two appearances by animation wizard Richard Williams. He's best known for his Oscar-winning work as animation director for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but has an extensive filmography in both theatrical and television, feature-length and short-form animation. He also created title designs for films such as Murder on the Orient Express, Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, and the 1967 Casino Royale -- and when Friz Freleng's outfit passed the torch after putting together the beloved title sequences for the first three Peter Sellers Pink Panther features, it was Williams who picked it up. Williams will be on hand for a noon show and another at 7PM, though the latter is already listed as sold out. Future special events at the Balboa also include an opportunity to watch Tuesday's election results on the big screen with an enthusiastic crowd (free admission to this one), and on December 10th, the horror host documentary Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong will have its Frisco premiere (it's shown in Oakland, Sacramento and elsewhere but not in this county yet) with a set of as-yet-unannounced guests in attendance.

Speaking of witch, Happy Halloween!