Pastorale (1976)

WHO: The most prominent filmmaker from the Caucasus state of Georgia, Otar Iosseliani, directed this.

WHAT: This is the film that spurred Iosseliani's emigration to France. It was suppressed by Soviet officials upon completion, and only began appearing in foreign cinematheques and festivals in the early eighties; its success at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982, where it won a critics prize, was followed by the director's move to Paris. I haven't seen it, so here's an excerpt from a review by Dennis Grunes:

As is his delightful wont, Iosseliani has fashioned a mostly silent film. (It is also in black and white, and beautifully cinematographed by Abessalom Maisuradze.) There is minimal dialogue. The sounds we hear in the film are mainly those of musical instruments and voices in song, and the squawking, mooing, oinking, barking and chattering of all kinds of animals—farm, domestic and wild.

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

WHY: One of the highlights for me of the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival was seeing Iosseliani's most recent film Chantrapas, an autobiographically-rooted story of Georgian filmmakers struggling to make films under the eyes of bureaucrats, contrasted with life as an expatriate Parisian artist. It was a lovely film, and a screening made even lovelier by the in-person question-and-answer session offered by its then-77-year-old director. But as much as I swooned over this film, I heard benign grumblings of mild disappointment from a few long-time fans of Iosseliani's work who felt it paled in comparison to earlier films like Pastorale. I'd only seen one of his prior films, the relatively recent (2002) Monday Morning. To this day I've seen only these two.

There aren't too many people who have the luxury of comparing the entries in Iosseliani's filmography. His name is respected but his work is generally obscure; most North American film festivals, including major ones like Toronto's and New York's, refrained from showing Chantrapas. And retrospectives are rare. If the Pacific Film Archive has shown more of his films than other venues over the decades, it's in large part because of the passion for his work held by George Gund III, the former board president of the SFIFF, and for whom the 2011 Chantrapas screening was a tribute.

As Gund died at age 75 earlier this year, the SFIFF had another tribute screening, this time of the Czechoslovakian masterpiece Marketa Lazarová, the print of which Gund had personally secured for the PFA.  Now the PFA is halfway through a more extensive tribute to Gund expressed by screenings of prints in their collection. All eight films in the series were made in the late 1960s and 1970s by filmmakers working in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the USSR; not the most famous names like Miklós Jancsó, Jiří Menzel or Andrei Tarkovsky, but other figures equally worthy of attention. In addition to Iosseliani's film tonight, Russian Nikita Mikhalkov's Five Evenings screens this Saturday, while the following weekend there's And Give My Love To The Swallows by Jaromil Jires (director of Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders) and The Maple of Juliana by Štefan Uher. The Hungarian films in the series have already screened, but it's worth nothing that the Georges Simenon series that begins tomorrow night concludes August 29th with a showing of Hungarian Béla Tarr's (by his own vow) penultimate film The Man From London.

Traveling back several decades, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will show a couple of films from the beginning of the second decade of the Soviet Union's existence, by all accounts and evidence a vastly different era for filmmaking than the 1970s. First, on Saturday July 20th, the festival will screen the PFA's print of the 1928 Boris Barnet comedy The House On Trubnaya Square, one of my most-anticipated screenings of that weekend at the Castro. And the festival has just announced that it will present the North American premiere of a just-rediscovered trailer for Dziga Vertov's The Eleventh Year (which I also saw in 2011- the film not the trailer that is). Apparently this trailer was prepared by Vertov's friend Alexander Rodchenko, who worked on posters, graphics and intertitles for the master documentarian, but who I believe does not have any films widely known to be able to be credited to him- this trailer may be unique in that regard. It will screen in 35mm with live accompaniment from Ken Winokur and Beth Custer, as a warm-up to a DCP showing of a brand-new restoration of the German film The Weavers.

HOW: 35mm print from the PFA's own collection.

Les Halles Centrales (1927)

WHO: Boris Kaufman, best known as a cinematographer who worked under Jean Vigo and Abel Gance in France, then under Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet in the United States.

WHAT: This 22-minute film about Paris's largest market provides the only directorial credit I'm aware of for the younger brother of Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman, who respectively were the director and title figure of the Soviet classic Man With A Movie Camera, which this film precedes historically.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at 6:00 tonight at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Les Halles Centrales is set to be the very first film screened in the newest PFA series, On Location In Silent Cinema. This series takes viewers from Paris to Shanghai, from Northern Sweden to Azerbaijan (standing in for South America), and from the jungles of Nan Province on the border of Thailand and Laos, to the grand landscapes of Arizona and California, under the guidance of directors like Victor Sjöström, Abram Room, and the far-flung duo of Merian C. Cooper & Ernest Schoedsack. Each evening of screenings is introduced by a film scholar, and tonight it's one of the series curators, Patrick Ellis. It's all a prelude to a fascinating-sounding three-day academic conference on silent cinema later in the month. But you don't have to be a scholar to enjoy a silent film with Judith Rosenberg performing the piano accompaniment.

Note that it is physically possible, though perhaps not sensible, to attend this screening and also catch all three films in today's Cornell Woolrich triple-bill at Noir City.

HOW: Preceding the feature-length city symphony Études sur Paris, both showing in 35mm prints from CNC.

Brian Darr Only Has Two Eyes

When I decided to roll out my annual round-up of reflections on the year in local repertory and revival screenings over the past week or so, I hadn't the faintest idea that it would sync up with a new flurry of Twitter conversation and media coverage of Time Warner shutting the doors to its vaults of 35mm exhibition prints in its holdings (which includes all First National and most classic MGM & RKO titles, as well as those produced with the Warner Brothers imprint.) It seems repertory theatre requests to screen The Shining (for instance) on film rather than on DVD are being denied. Although the Pacific Film Archive's current Howard Hawks retrospective and the quickly-upcoming Noir City both promise to screen numerous Warner-owned titles in 35mm prints, it may be that the prints all will be sourced from independent archives and not the studio itself. Such a trend may soon leave repertory as we know it in the exclusive hands of independent collections and not-for-profit organizations.

As bad as that sounds, as I hint at in my introduction to this year's "I Only Have Two Eyes" blog series, the eternal optimist in me feels convinced that both the demand for and supply of Frisco Bay repertory screenings will continue into the future, even if the process of connecting supply and demand shakes out into a new form. It's sad if a for-profit theatre like the Castro can no longer offer 35mm screenings of wonderful Warner-owned titles 2001: A Space Odyssey, Footlight Parade, Badlands, He Who Gets Slapped, Meet Me In St. Louis, etc. (all of which I re-visited in that space in 2011, some for the first time on the big screen) at everyday prices, without the muscle of a film festival's involvement in securing prints from a non-standard source. I look forward to seeing how it all plays out in the coming months, but for now, let me share with you my own top ten cinema screenings of films I'd never seen prior to 2011:

the Wrong Man
2011 began with a series that filled gaps in my cinematic experience I'd been quietly embarrassed about for years. Alfred Hitchcock films are a mainstay of the Castro Theatre programming; I love that the venue offers near-annual opportunities to see classics like Vertigo (which I savored once again during the venue's 70mm series in June.) But in January they showcased a dozen films that tend to be screened more infrequently. I was able to see nine of them which I'd never seen before on the big screen, in some cases never at all. All were various shades of great, and 1956's The Wrong Man proved to be the greatest. It centers on an ordinary man (Henry Fonda) thrust into extraordinary circumstances thanks to a mistake in identity. But the mistake leads not to the thrills and adventure of The Thirty-Nine Steps or North By Northwest, but to devastation. Based on a true story, and treated with utmost seriousness and even a Hitchcockian sort of realism, the film may be (perhaps barring the more personal Vertigo) the director's saddest, and most socially important work.

Beau Travail
I haven't done a full accounting, but my sense is that the Pacific Film Archive's Claire Denis retrospective last Spring, and Beau Travail in particular, received more mentions in this year's "I Only Have Two Eyes" wrap-up than any other selection. And no wonder. This poetic resetting of Herman Melville's story Billy Budd to the Horn of Africa is every bit the masterpiece I'd heard, and more. At the time it came out (at festivals in 1999, commercially the next year) I was living and working abroad, in a relatively remote (from cinephile culture, at any rate) region of the world, so I missed it even if I didn't miss all of the critical praise which (rightly) insisted that the big screen was the way to see it. So although I found a cheap copy of the DVD when a nearby rental store went out of business, I refrained from watching it until I could view it projected somewhere. It took a while. Sometimes waiting to see a film in a proper setting can set up disappointment, but not this time. My years of anticipation, and my decade of distance from my own time living in a foreign land, could only have made the film's strange beauty more profoundly and personally felt inside of me.


Ruthless
This, on the other hand, was something completely off my radar until the Roxie screened it in May as part of its third annual I Wake Up Dreaming series of Golden Age noir. Though I only attended a few, largely unmemorable films in this year's series, and picked Ruthless simply because it fit my schedule that week, it absolutely floored me with its technical virtuosity, its relative lavishness (for a 1948 Edgar G. Ulmer picture) and its sophisticated, lacerating assault on the "rags to riches" myth underlying our economic system. Critics have justly compared Ruthless to no less than Citizen Kane and I was equally reminded of, The Magnificent Ambersons, not just for shared thematics and aesthetics, but because, like that Orson Wells film, Ruthless manages to be a kind of masterpiece despite some very evident flaws that would sink most lesser pictures.

Carmen Comes Home
I spent many many hours during the first half of 2011 reading about, watching, and re-watching movies made by Mikio Naruse, Hiroshi Shimizu and particularly Yasujiro Ozu, to help me prepare an essay for the program guide of the Silent Film Festival, which screened Ozu's best-known silent film I Was Born, But... in mid-July. By the time the PFA's Japanese Divas series rolled around I'd completed my research, but I appreciated it nonetheless. Particularly this 1951 film by former Ozu apprentice Keisuke Kinoshita, starring the brilliant Hideko Takemine as a high-minded stripteaser who returns to her family's village, now notorious from her big city escapades. Japan's first full-color film and eye-poppingly so, Carmen Comes Home is a wonderful window into national values during the final year or so of the Allied occupation, and an opportunity to see some of Ozu's favorite actors (Chishu Ryu, Takeshi Sakamoto, Shuji Sano, etc.) hamming it up in a somewhat broader -and bawdier- comedy than Ozu's own comedies tended to be.

Three Ages
By reputation, the first feature film Buster Keaton directed (with his frequent early co-director Edward F. Cline) is not among his best. It's often repeated that its makers lacked confidence in its success, which is why it consists of three distinct stories intercutting between each other; if the film flopped as a six-reel feature, at least it could be reconstituted into three two-reelers, the form which Keaton was a surefire draw in. Assuming this risk-averse strategy was true, what's not often mentioned is that few slapstick comedians had successfully crossed over from shorts to features in 1923. Nor that the film Three Ages is famously spoofing, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, had been created with the very same sort of strategy; intercutting four feature films worth of material into an epic, and Griffith re-edited two of its four segments (the Babylonian and modern-day episodes) into stand-alone features released three years after the full film failed to ignite box office records in 1916. Three Ages, on the other hand, stood on its own financially, both in its day, and on a late Summer evening last year when a huge crowd packed the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto to see Dennis James beautifully accompany a 35mm print on the Wurlitzer organ. Watching it in such an ideal setting, and laughing along with almost every gag, makes the gap in quality between this and Keaton's top-tier features (The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and what have you) seem extremely small; perhaps non-existent.

Curse of the Demon
I didn't see any familiar Frisco Bay cinephile faces in the healthy-sized crowd when I went to see this last September; perhaps there are few regulars of the usual haunts (the other venues represented on this list) who also check to see what's playing at the UA Berkeley on Shattuck Avenue. The regular Thursday night screening series there generally screens prints of more recent cult "classics" like The Professional and Labyrinth, so I initially wondered if a listing for this rarely-shown horror film was in error. But a confirmation phone call led to a BART trip led to one of the scariest and most thoughtful explorations of the supernatural I've seen. And no, the above image (which has haunted me since seeing it in a book my elementary school library) does not represent the overall tone of the film, which is one of the few examples I've seen of 1950s cinéma fantastique to truly earn its earnest gravitas. I'm only sad that, after seeing his three films made for Val Lewton and this, I no longer have any "straight" Jacques Tourneur-directed horror films to look forward to. Although I suppose there's Comedy of Terrors...

Migration of the Blubberoids
2011 was shaping up to be a great year for local screenings of George Kuchar pictures (In my head I can hear him say the word: "pict-shas"), with a beautiful presentation of Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, restored, at Crossroads and an extensive dual-retrospective with his twin brother Mike at the PFA, just the latest of many tributes the man received from Frisco Bay film institutions over the forty years he spent living here (the MVFF, SFIFF, and, with Mike, Frameline, for instance). Then, so very tragically for everyone who had befriended him, or even met him or been touched by his generous artistic spirit, he died shortly after his 69th birthday. Several venues hosted posthumous screening events; the SF Cinematheque-presented set at SFMOMA was a particularly well-curated selection of lesser-known videos and better-known film work, and the Canyon Cinema screening at the 9th Street Film Center was an amazing set of some of his most rarely-seen 16mm films. But it was at Artists' Television Access where in October I saw the piece that shattered my preconceptions about career arcs: a city symphony from his late-eighties in-camera-edited video period with the unusual but not uncharacteristic title Migration of the Blubberoids. This alternatively lovely and anxious portrait of the Kuchars' native Bronx at Thanksgiving-time, set to music from (according to a 1991 interview) "some kind of a King Kong movie" deserves to be more widely known and shown, especially to anyone unsure of whether George Kuchar could make "pict-shas" as vital, innovative, and formally satisfying in the second half of his career as he could in the first.

In Spring
Hmmm. Two city symphonies in a row on this list. Except that this one, like its cinematographic predecessor Man With A Movie Camera, might equally be called a "country symphony", or better, a "nation symphony". Ever since researching Man With A Movie Camera (also for the Silent Film Festival) I'd been dying to see the film that Mikhael Kaufman, the eponymous "Man" in that film, both as actor and as cinematographer, had directed himself after disagreements with his brother Dziga Vertov caused a rift between the two. When a touring Vertov retrospective arrived at the PFA this fall, I was very pleased to discover that, hidden away as if an Easter Egg, In Spring was to screen as a second feature to a Vertov I'd never been able to track down, Stride, Soviet! Watching them together the Vertov felt overly deterministic and repetitious, but the Kaufman soared with visual lyricism. Pianist Judith Rosenberg improvised first-class musical accompaniments to them both (and to the other Vertov silents I saw in the series) but when the evening was through I began to wonder if the wizardry of Man With A Movie Camera might have been cast under its cinematographer's influence more than its nominal director's. Although the retro proved that Vertov's own talent shone through in some the sound films made after the dissolution of the brotherly collaboration: particularly Enthusiasm (which I'd only before seen on a terrible VHS transfer) and For You, Front!

Through The Olive Trees
It's getting late and this post has gotten long. So I won't say much about this 1994 masterpiece by Iran's foremost director Abbas Kiarostami, working at the peak of his powers. I will say I'm so thankful that the PFA provided an opportunity for me to finally catch up with it, as such opportunities are few and far between in this country without resorting to quasi-legal methods. Why? It has something to do with Muriel's Wedding of all movies, at least according to Jonathan Rosenbaum's book Movie Wars.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Just as I was sending out e-mail invitations for this year's "I Only Have Two Eyes" project, and putting the finishing touches on my own list, I went with moderate-to-low expectations to the Castro to see this 1964 musical on the third-from-last day of 2011. I knew it was the best-known film of Jacques Demy, a director I'd had mixed results exploring, and that its recitative musical style had been aped in at least one much more recent French film I'd seen, liked, and largely forgotten (Jeanne And The Perfect Guy). I was prepared for a pleasant time out at the movies: pretty music, pretty actors (Catherine Deneuve), pretty colors, a small French town, all there. I was fully unprepared to get so involved in the characters, for the waves of complex emotions the film would elicit, and for the brilliant ending, perhaps as heartbreaking as the finale to Demy's wife Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur, released a year later (and featured on my "I Only Have Two Eyes list from last year). One might say the French New Wave was about being inspired by the best Hollywood films to make something completely new and different and even subversive, rather than blandly aping Hollywood's worst traits on French sets, as the Cahiers Du Cinema crew frequently accused their forebears of doing. This, then, is a perfectly New Wave film. And, perhaps, a perfectly perfect one.

Terri Saul's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from artist/writer Terri Saul, who blogs at Sister-Rye:


1) GOD’S WEDDING (Portugal, 1999)
Directed by João César Monteiro
Seen at the Pacific Film Archive on October 9th, 2010, at 8:10pm
Part of the series Elegant Perversions: The Cinema of João César Monteiro

Monteiro (lead actor, writer, and director) plays a ravenous and emaciated bag of bones who lusts after a tin of sardines, then carelessly throws them in a river, like a satiated elitist who has never known hunger. An angel delivers power to our anti-hero João de Deus in the form of a suitcase full of cash. de Deus then leaves it behind, unguarded, to rescue a drowning woman and deliver her to a nunnery.

Later in the film the two reunite for a sumptuous meal she prepares for him (perhaps as a way of thanking him for saving her life). de Deus piles up food on his plate, bit by bit, arranging each piece carefully and with great anticipation. He then takes one bite and quickly sends it away, wiping his lips with a well-starched napkin as if he had eaten the entire mound. I wonder if he represents a ghost in purgatory, unable to consume earthly meats.

Like a more depaucherous Chaplin’s tramp, de Deus lives in the moment. Whether suddenly rich (by no fault of his own), or sleeping in the park (though not during a picnic), his devil-may-care persona remains intact and unshaken. When his merely visual appreciation of gluttonous delights is captured (leaving the audience to drool), or when the beginning of a sexual encounter is just getting hot, it turns out he cannot eat, perform, or experience orgasm.

Monteiro casts himself as an undeserving and unappreciative recipient of miraculous blessings he then tosses off, neglects, or abuses. From the Harvard Film Archive I learned that João de Deus is “named for the Portuguese-born saint of prostitutes, the infirm, and fishermen,” but that he is “a wholly secular figure.” At one point, de Deus experiences “a hard-on attack,” something like a magical boner that literally blows him over in a garden path, although he’s impotent while waiting for his lover in bed. In another scene, our hero consults the animated stone face of a Homeric-looking god who emerges from some sort of altar-hearth, referring to Monteiro’s appreciation of ancient myth, folklore, and poetry. Late in God’s Wedding, de Deus finally gives in to his cravings for food while erotically eating a pomegranate, ripping it open with his bony fingers, while engaging in a frenetic display, pomegranate juices dripping down his wiry beard.

Like other pictures on this list, disappointment and absurd hilarity drive our unconventional heroes or heroines to candidly explore long pauses, beautiful interruptions, shifting loyalties, unexpected gains and losses, and everyday breaks, with the cool gaze of an uncut and uncensored clip of film. A number of these movies are memorials to idiosyncrasy, uncommon hardships. Though sometimes tragic, they are never taken for granted by their solitary chroniclers.

Monteiro, and other directors here, remind us of the impermanence of wealth, governing bodies, flesh (Monteiro’s own wrinkled nudity contrasted with the youthful skin of his angelic lover is a prime example), sustenance, allegiances, and escape routes. I can’t help but scoff at the too many elderly male filmmakers who love to cast themselves opposite nubile young women.

During one episode of homelessness de Deus pretends to be a general in order to gain entry again to halls of power, reminding me of a film that comes later on my list, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, God’s Wedding being darker, containing more of the earthier bits, a film as outrageous as a fairy tale.

Moteiro prefers shooting in natural light. That being so, his photography has the natural glow of a Dogme shoot. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a great influence on the work of Pedro Costa.


2) RECOLLECTIONS OF THE YELLOW HOUSE (Portugal, 1989)
Directed by João César Monteiro
Seen at the Pacific Film Archive on September 18th, 2010 at 6:30pm
Part of the series Elegant Perversions: The Cinema of João César Monteiro

Monteiro, the director himself, plays João de Deus, a voyeuristic, dirty-old-man living in a boarding house in Lisbon, Portugal. de Deus battles canker sores, a testicle-attacking menace (bed bugs), and his own uncontrollable urges to spy on and assault his bon-bon addicted landlady’s daughter. His lechery and circumstances worsen as the film progresses, as do the greed and games played by those around him. Monteiro shows us the ridiculous, sublime, perverse, self-deprecating moments that are usually hidden.

Collecting cast offs, de Deus (along with the camera) looks closely, meticulously at some piece of evidence the audience might find disgusting, using a magnifying glass, tweezers, a jam jar, or a monocle, to examine something as base as a discarded pubic hair. Our lowly hero lands in and out of mental institutions while remaining cool and fatalistic, emotionally detached. He seems always on the verge of escape from his ill-health, his insect-infested room, his poverty, his solitude, or the asylum populated with a false maniac and friend. Everyone in the yellow house is trying to avoid their own lives, the cash in their pockets, as well as the judgment of authority, the state, a deity, or the crowded community. Recollections of The Yellow House is well composed and poetically furnished, full of lyrical, dissonant magic and deserves to be his best-known film, although I responded with more enthusiasm to God’s Wedding. I wish I could go back in time and see the rest of the series.

3) MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (USSR, 1929)
Directed by Dziga Vertov
Seen at the Castro Theatre on July 16th, 2010 at 8:15pm
Part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, live accompaniment by Alloy Orchestra

This frenetically paced rhythmic early example of expressive montage, and postmodern self reflexivity (predating most examples of postmodernism), by the inventor of the kino-eye concept, and a day in the life of a city from sunrise to sunset, was flawlessly partnered with the crash bang sounds of Alloy Orchestra. Vertov’s fast cutting, bold juxtapositions, imploding of the Bolshoi, and dizzying games with scale and layering, all broke the boundaries of his “Kino-Eye” philosophy. The Castro was the perfect setting for experiencing Man With a Movie Camera beyond an academic setting.

From Senses of Cinema:
“Vertov proclaimed the primacy of the camera itself (the ‘Kino-Eye’) over the human eye. He clearly saw it as some kind of innocent machine that could record without bias or superfluous aesthetic considerations (as would, say, its human operator) the world as it really was.”
“Vertov’s concept of a self-reflective cinema, of the viewer identifying himself with the filmmaking process, would really only reappear at the end of the 1950s in the work of filmmakers like Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, or in America, Stan Brakhage.”
 
4) THE WOMAN DISPUTED (USA, 1928)
Directed by Henry King and Sam Taylor
Seen at the Castro Theatre on July 18th at 4:30pm
Part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival with live accompaniment by Stephen Horne on piano

A beautiful example of silent film clichés and Norma Talmadge’s eyebrows in all of their arching glory.

From Distant Voices and Flickering Shadows:
“The subjects of prostitution, sexual favors and suicide would be prohibited (in American films) after 1934, with the enforcement of the Hays Code by Joseph Breen, but the idea of requiring a young woman to sacrifice herself as Mary Ann is can be found throughout literature… However, while literature asks a woman to sacrifice herself on behalf of the beloved or a loved one, the film requires Mary Ann to make her sacrifice (in part) for people who have made no secret of their contempt for her.”

Live music always makes the night complete. Attending the very loud silent film festival made me wish I could hear a contemporary sound-filled film played live, every sound-effect replayed by foley artists on stage with tools in hand.

5) YOJIMBO (Japan, 1961)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Seen at the Pacific Film Archive on July 24th, 2010 at 6:30pm
Part of the Akira Kurosawa Centennial

I managed to miss most of the Kurosawa retrospective at the PFA because I joined too many book clubs, while I didn’t finish much of my book club reading last year because I watched too many movies, not enough of them in theatres.

A Japanese cowboy, Kurusawa’s antihero Sanjuro rejects the idea sacred to a samurai story—allegiance to a master and a band of fighters. Instead the tricky individualist rebel pits one rag-tag band of outsiders against another in order to save himself. The backstage-bin costumes, theatrical bloody make-up, Toshiro Mifune’s pout, and close-up swordplay are guilty pleasures.
Like Monteiro, Kurusawa is another filmmaker who is as influenced by art, literature, folklore, and poetry as he is by other filmmakers.

6) HOUSE (Japan, 1977)
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi
Seen at the Red Vic on May 7th, 2010 at 7:15 pm

Words cannot describe how awesome and twisted this horror-fantasy cult classic is, with its terrible special effects, a story partially written by an eleven year old, a demon cat, a child-devouring cannibalistic aunt, and an insatiable piano who eats a girl named “Melody.” House is as weird as it gets. I nearly passed out from laughing while covering my eyes in horror.

7) YOU, THE LIVING (Sweden, 2007)
Directed by Roy Andersson
Seen at the Red Vic on January 3rd, 2010 at 7:25pm

Because of shipping problems the 35mm print didn’t arrive on time, so for those willing to stick it out, we had to watch it on video with a watermark; all the Vic could offer was a screener. The RV offered us discounts and were good sports, explaining to ticket holders the pros and cons of either missing the film entirely; coming back the next night; or enduring its superficial imperfections. Nevertheless, the poor quality of the digital projection didn’t keep me from enjoying this absurdist Swedish film, with life-clogging traffic jams, one-take vignettes of undiluted dark, northern humor, and brilliant performances by amateur actors. You, the Living includes my favorite fantasy wedding dream sequence, about which I unearthed this piece of trivia from IMDB:

“As a child, Roy Andersson witnessed the moving of about 100 houses from the bay of Skarvik to Gothenberg to facilitate the building of a new harbor. This involved putting the houses on logs and then rolling them to their new location. This is the inspiration behind the vignette of the rock star and his new bride whose cozy domestic scene appears to be on train tracks.”

Someday I hope to see this film as it was meant to be seen, on film.

8) PLAYTIME (France 1967)
Directed by Jacques Tati
Seen at the Pacific Film Archive on January 15th, 2010 at 7pm

Another anti-hero, another actor-writer-director (and another character oft compared to Chaplain’s tramp) Monsieur Hulot, played by Tati himself lives in a city of glass and employs architecture and urbanity as partners in comedic crime. This inventive film, set within a scale model built by Tati and great expense (and from which he never recovered) gives us a very different view of the mechanized nature of modern city life than Man With a Movie Camera does. Although I find them both to be extraordinarily playful.

During a visit to Paris (where Cinémathèque Française was hosting a Tati retrospective) my local friend told me the story of an uproar caused by the design of a promotional poster in which Tati was depicted sans pipe because of new tobacco laws. To adhere to the rules the graphic designer was asked to delete Tati’s pipe at once, placing a yellow children's windmill in its stead. Cinémathèque never heard the end of it.

9) HOME MOVIE DAY (Historic home movie footage, various places and time periods)
Seen at the Pacific Film Archive on October 16th, 2010 at 1pm

Where among other treasures, I first saw my recently deceased grandmother’s home movie of my mother in Taxco, Mexico at age 15, the day before she sneaked off for her first kiss, secretly floating on a strange boy’s surfboard at sunset, later getting in trouble for her vacation mischief. Most of what I’m telling you was taking place off-camera, revealed during my mom’s narration of silvery and sparkling boating and fishing scenes. The film was chosen to be a part of the curated set. It’s always a pleasure to sit near the curly-headed star of the film, and to meet other home moviemakers in person.

The audience was also treated to early shots of redwood forests near Eureka where a conservationist took a tour (sporting high heels, furs, and all) of the stands she wished to rescue. During a simple silent film in warm color of a suburban mother doing her laundry and hanging it out to dry in the bright Stockton sun, we heard live narration from the now grown daughter of the laundress about how happy she was to have captured her mother during a peaceful time in her life. Another piece of archival footage showed a Seattle family visiting the Olympic peninsula, shooting snow scenes with a very professional looking lens.

Home movie day is also a day where the audience and participants learn something about the archival process, how to preserve one’s personal celluloid.

SFSFF Weekend Wrap

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival facilitated four tremendous days of cinephilia. So many rare opportunities to see films from the early part of the previous century (and even one from 1898) presented with live musical accompaniment with a knowledgeable and appreciative audience, and to talk to musicians, scholars, offspring of key players in silent filmmaking, and enthusiastic fans, made for a truly overstuffed weekend. I saw every "full-length" film shown, and most of the short films and public presentations as well. Some highlight memories of many from the past weekend:

1. Walking down Castro Street after Sunday's screening of The Shakedown, I saw the familiar face of Leonard Maltin approaching. I had to stop him to quickly thank him for his introduction to the film. In the course of interviewing its director William Wyler's three daughters, Catherine, Judy and Melanie, he spoke of Wyler's second film made outside the Western genre as a good, but not great picture. Watching it, I found the Shakedown to be more than just a terrific entertainment and a showcase for Wyler's developing skills as an inventive filmmaker. In the way it depicts con artists on the show-biz boxing circuit, it's a deeply meaningful look at the way acting a persona can envelop a performer's personal life and self-identity. The resonances of leading man James Murray (also of the Crowd) and his sad biography surely added to this deep feeling. On the other hand, his co-star Barbara Kent is one of the few silent-era players still living today.

I told Mr. Maltin how much I'd appreciated his approach to introducing the film: keeping audience expectations modest, so that we could in a sense "discover" the film's virtues for ourselves. This as opposed to the approach of praising a film to the skies to an audience just before we're about to see it, which seems unnecessary as we're not going to be buying any more tickets to it at that moment, and it may inflate expectations to the point where the film, no matter how good it is, can't measure up. Maltin's smiling response: "It's probably never played so well in its history." Surely a tribute to the receptive festival audience, and perhaps even more to Donald Sosin's virtuosic jazz piano accompaniment (Sosin really outdid himself with his three accompaniments this year, and the Shakedown was his best performance of the three, I felt.) But most of all to the nature of the Silent Film Festival, which is able to create almost utopian presentations of the films selected, by aligning all the right factors: venue, audience, accompaniment, and best available film print.

2. Saturday's presentation Variations On A Theme: Musicians on the Craft of Composing and Performing for Silent Films was not organized quite how I expected, and I'm not sure how the hour would have gone over for an individual ticket buyer, but for those of us with festival passes, it was certainly well worth staying in our seats for. We even got to witness a bit of friendly but sharp disagreement between the panelists! Classical musician/writer/radio host Chloe Veltman seemed natural and confident as moderator, even if a few of her questions to the gathered accompanists betrayed some inexperience with watching silent films with live music (though at least she'd seen the festival screening of The Cook, Pass The Gravy and Big Business that morning). But the best part of the presentation was when the musicians took a couple of questions from the audience. Audience q-and-a is always a crap shoot but in this case the questions elicited responses that got close to the heart of some very real philosophical differences between the panel members.

Authenticity is perhaps the key issue at stake in the variety of approaches taken by different accompanists. Pianist Stephen Horne (or should I say multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne, as he sometimes plays flute or squeezebox with one hand while the other dances upon the ivories,) spoke up for an approach that privileges an authenticity to the scene and its emotional resonance. By contrast, both Rodney Sauer of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and theatre organist Dennis James argued for an authenticity to music that audiences of the silent era might have been likely to hear when attending a film. Interestingly, these two, whose approaches might appear at first glance to be the most closely aligned amidst the group, engaged in the most contentious exchange of the panel. James argued for fidelity to the original sheet music commissioned by the director or producer of the film, whenever possible. Sauer countered that such cue sheets or scores were often abandoned or otherwise ignored by accompanists after an initial premiere performance or engagement in large cities, which is why his group favors compilations from the repertoire of compositions that would have been familiar to a typical salon orchestra of the 1920s. What became evident is that each accompanist does a certain amount of research into conventions of the time when producing a score, but that none of them are absolute purists in their approach. Even James will make certain allowances for the modern audience in defiance of the instructions of silent-era film music decision-makers. He'll ignore a cue sheet's suggestion of (for example) Rossini's William Tell Overture, because ever since the popularity of The Lone Ranger on radio and television, that theme takes audiences out of the moment. So don't expect to hear that familiar theme when Dennis James plays the Davies Symphony Hall organ to back John Barrymore in the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde this October 31st.

3. One moment that felt particularly gratifying to this blogger was the unveiling, during the second of two sets of presentations by members of the film archiving community, of a newly-preserved print of a 1912 one-reeler called The Better Man. The film is notable as a rare positive portrayal of a Mexican character in a Western, and features some notably effective camerawork, particularly an unexpected long tilt up a cliffside, revealing just how far one character has just fallen. Apparently the first new print struck from the trove of American films recently discovered in a Wellington, New Zealand film archive, The Better Man is also one of three two films whose preservation was funded through the efforts of the For The Love Of Film blog-a-thon organized by the incomparable Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn Ferdinand this past February. Whether or not even one person donated to the blog-a-thon fund after reading my own written contribution to that online event, I felt a little pride just from my connection to a community that made seeing this film possible.

In truth, everyone who buys a ticket to a Silent Film Festival program can feel pride that they help to support not only the presentation of, but also the preservation of silent films. The festival organizes its own annual fellowship through the L. Jeffrey Selznick school at Eastman House, and unless I misinterpreted what I heard announced from the Castro stage, this year's fellowship recipient will prepare the Douglas Fairbanks feature Mr. Fix-It for preservation, and presentation at the 2011 SFSFF. It's never too early to begin anticipating next year's program, and given that Allan Dwan directed Fairbanks in arguably his two best costume pageant films of the 1920's (Robin Hood and the Iron Mask), I'm excited to see this little-seen Dwan-directed film from Fairbanks's 1910s filmography.

According to the festival's own blog, another title already announced for the 2011 festival is Fritz Lang's second-most-famous science-fiction epic Woman In the Moon. I must have been in the popcorn line or something during this announcement, because I certainly would have remembered had I heard such an ingenious plan. I did hear Anita Monga announce that another Lunar silent, a Trip to the Moon would be forthcoming at the next festival. By then, a hand-colored version of the film will have been subject to a new restoration, and will be exhibited in a 35mm print that shall surely put to shame all of the Georges Méliès films that played from digital projections prior to festival features this year.

Other announcements made from the Castro stage over the weekend:

If you enjoyed The Iron Horse, you'll want to know that another John Ford film, this time a comedy from his F.W. Murnau-influenced phase, will have its "repremiere" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on September 1st. Normally I wouldn't mention screenings happening all the way at the Southern end of the state, but since Upstream is one of the films being repatriated from New Zealand along with the Better Man, and because John Ford fans are hoping this screening is a success and leads to more around the country (including, hopefully, here on Frisco Bay) it seems worth noting.

Closer to home, Susan Oxtoby of the Pacific Film Archive announced, as part of her introductory remarks on Man With A Movie Camera at the festival, that the PFA is planning a Dziga Vertov retrospective for that venue, most likely for September-October of 2011. The Alloy Orchestra seems too large and loud a group to fit into the Berkeley venue to provide a reprise of the frantic scoring we heard Sunday afternoon, so my imagination is running wild trying to think of how Vertov's 1929 masterpiece might be accompanied musically there; I've regrettably missed several chances to hear what Judith Rosenberg does with Man With A Movie Camera (though I got a sampling when she performed to a DVD snippet at the SFSFF's press conference back in May), but I'm also very curious about Dennis James's score for the film, last performed here almost fifteen years ago. And then there is recent rumor of a "definitive" soundtrack recording on the horizon. If anticipating screenings more than a year in advance is too exhausting, Frisco Bay Vertov fans will surely be interested in the work of filmmakers his theories inspired, some of whom are sure to be a part of the PFA's focus on Frisco Bay's avant-garde filmmaking history this fall in celebration of the long-awaited release of the Radical Light book. Another filmmaker influenced by Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, will have his first feature film on local screens for a week starting tomorrow. I've had a chance to see this new Rialto print of Godard's Breathless, with its new and improved subtitle translation unavailable on DVD, and it's certainly the upcoming week's cinematic must-see. Rod Armstrong of the San Francisco Film Society will introduce tomorrow night's screenings at the Embarcadero Center Cinema.

More random notes on the 2010 Silent Film Festival and upcoming related screenings:

The San Francisco Film Museum has posted the photos taken of SFSFF attendees disguised as the Maria Robot from Metropolis this weekend, so take a gander. For those who were shut out of Friday night's screening, the Castro will hold digital screenings of the restoration, albeit without live musical accompaniment, on August 13-15. Also part of the Castro's upcoming August calendar will be a screening of Fritz Lang's most well-known Hollywood film, the Big Heat, on August 30. The Jewish Film Festival is the next organization to bring a silent film with live accompaniment to the Castro, with this Monday's presentation of the 1922 film Hungry Hearts.

I always know I'll see some of my favorite local bloggers at the Silent Film Festival. Michael Guillén, Lincoln Specter, Jay Blodgett, Jason Wiener and shahn, who surely exaggerates when calling me a "local sensation". Then again, I am quoted on my experience watching Häxan by Jeremy Mathews in his article for Moving Pictures Magazine, and a conversation with Adam Hartzell is described in his piece for GreenCine Daily. I guess it's in the nature of being something of a blogosphere gadfly, but I'm a little embarrassed to find my name singled out in so many blog write-ups on the SFSFF when so many of my writers' group colleagues produced superior work on much more difficult subjects. For example, David Kiehn's essay on the Iron Horse is filled with drama and quotes from personal accounts, and avoids at least one oft-repeated but easily debunked myth about the film's masterful final scene. Megan Pugh's essay on the Flying Ace and Monica Nolan's on L'Heureuse Mort must surely be among the most substantial pieces written in English on these two previously-obscure films. I could go on and on. At some point all the essays should be available to read in the Silent Film Festival's website archive.

It was nice to be able to build upon the research I did for the festival for last December's Winter Event when writing an article recently published in the Australian journal Senses of Cinema on West of Zanzibar and its director Tod Browning. Please let me know what you think of the article if you get a chance to read it, either at the e-mail address found on my profile page, or in a comment below. I also recommend highly that anyone who saw Diary of a Lost Girl last Saturday (or, anyone who didn't!) take the time to read a truly remarkable essay on the iconic status of Louise Brooks, published in the same issue. The twenty-fifth anniversary of her death arrives this August 8th.

What I'm Thinking About This Week

Ten years ago at this time I was living in Chiang Mai, Thailand, teaching English at a local high school. It seems like such a long time ago, but the impact of spending a year and a half living and working in a foreign country did so much to change my perspectives on the world, and my place in it, that I still feel very close to the experience. I'm sometimes wistful that I've lost touch with all of my former students and fellow teachers, and indeed most of the friends I made while living abroad, but returning to my native city where I've resided ever since, has not made me feel as if I've completely lost touch with Thailand. I cherish my mostly-fond memories of the country, and still try to keep up with major current events there, as depressing as they often may be (as they have been lately).

Cinema has been a major component of my feeling of connectedness. While in Chiang Mai I first tried my hand at criticism, penning a monthly video review column for a local English-language news magazine catering to the British/Australian/North American ex-patriot community. At the time, I wrote mostly about the latest Hollywood films, because they were the ones widely available in rental shops. It was easy to experience the cultural artifacts of my own culture while abroad. Now I'm lucky to live in a place where I can more than just vicariously experience some of the benefits of Thai cinema's resurgence and global emergence over the past decade or so. Between all of the film festivals and alternative screening venues that exist here on Frisco Bay, there are usually a few opportunities a year, and sometimes as many as a half-dozen or more, to view Thai films in 35mm prints on the big screen; of these I've missed only a scant few over the past decade. I've been able to keep relatively current with the work of directors I was first exposed to during my time in the Land of Smiles- Wisit Sasanatieng, Nonzee Nimibutr and Pen-ek Ratanaruang (the latter's latest Nymph was not among the best films I saw at the latest San Francisco International Film Festival, but I was extremely pleased for the opportunity to view it, and particularly its nearly-supernatural opening camera move, in a cinema in my own town.) I've been able to discover from afar the work of newer talent like Uruphong Raksasad, who makes his digital quasi-documentaries in the region of Thailand I'm most personally familiar with, or Anocha Suwichakornpong, whose Mundane History was my most truly transcendent highlight of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival earlier this year.

The constant Thai cinematic presence over these years as a Frisco guy who left some small piece of his heart in Thailand, however, has been Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who ten years ago was seeing his first feature film, Mysterious Object At Noon, travel the global festival circuit. I first heard his name in 2001, shortly before the film played to a small audience at the Pacific Film Archive. Since then, thanks to the SFIFF, SFIAAFF, and other local venues tapped into international cinephile dialogue, I've been able to watch most of his film and video work, much of it repeatedly. How much of a debt do I owe my affection for and fascination with Apichatpong's filmmaking to my stint in Thailand? I can't be sure, but it's been heartening to feel like I've been following this still-young director over the past decade as his visibility has increased among film-lovers everywhere. I was so thrilled and surprised on Sunday, when his latest feature Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the first such win for an Asian film since films by Shohei Imamura and Abbas Kiarostami shared the honor in 1997. Of course I have not yet seen Uncle Boonmee (although I was delighted to see his companion short video piece Letter to Uncle Boonmee at the SFIAAFF in March) and perhaps I'll even find it a letdown compared to his three masterful 35mm features, Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady, and Blissfully Yours. But I feel glad that this high-profile win will surely secure a chance for Frisco Bay Apichatpong fans to see the film eventually, and hopefully sooner than such an opportunity would otherwise be likely to occur.

In the meantime, I'm all the more excited to plunge into the viewing opportunities that have been laid upon my table. One certainly doesn't need to be an Apichatpong Weerasethakul admirer to be excited by chances to see Andy Warhol films, but it supplies another reason; Apichatpong has often named Warhol, along with Frisco Bay experimental film legend Bruce Baillie, as favorite filmmakers and key inspirations for his work. SFMOMA will screen confirmed Apichatpong favorite The Chelsea Girls on July 8. And the longest-running lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender film festival in the world, Frameline, has announced as part of its upcoming program next month a large-scale focus on Andy Warhol. It consists of screenings of a new documentary, Beautiful Darling, the Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar, a clips lecture by Ron Gregg, and two programs of shorter Warhol films selected by Gregg, including Vinyl, which adapted Anthony Burgess's a Clockwork Orange with Gerard Malanga six years before Stanley Kubrick did it with Malcolm McDowell.

In addition to the Warhol films, Frameline selections I'm anxious to see include I Killed My Mother by Xavier Dolan and Spring Fever by Lou Ye, both of which come highly regarded by those who have seen them at festivals over the past year, and Géza von Radvány's 1958 version of Madchen In Uniform, screening as an archival selection. Frameline veterans from Cheryl Dunye to François Ozon to Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman each will have new films presented at this year's festival, but the full range of filmmaking, from documentary to short form to a robust selection of South America's New Queer Cinema cannot be adequately summarized in a paragraph of preview, so I urge you to browse the full schedule before finalizing your festival plans. I know I will.

June's going to be a crowded month of filmgoing however, even with Sex In The City 2 virtually* dominating the Castro Theatre from now until Frameline opens there June 17. After a near-month of hiatus, the Pacific Film Archive reopens this weekend. The venue's regular projection space (at least until 2014 or so) at 2575 Bancroft Way has its first screenings of the summer tomorrow evening, when a double feature of Whistler films you may or may not have seen at the Roxie's I Still Wake Up Dreaming B-noir festival, play. As does the 1975 King Hu martial arts extravaganza The Valiant Ones. The latter kicks off a remarkable series of recent acquisitions to the PFA film collection, which reminds us that Berkeley's most-revered film exhibition venue has roots much deeper than mere exhibition. (So that's what the 'A' stood for!) Films by Hayao Miyazaki, Agnès Varda, Alberto Gout, Robert Gardner, Judy Irving and others round out the eclectic series. Tributes to Mexican science fiction, the Romanian New Wave and the Residents ensure a little something for everyone, but surely the centerpiece of the PFA's summer is the complete Akira Kurosawa retrospective being held in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Completists are already drooling over the chance to see rarities like Sanshiro Sugata I & II and the Quiet Duel on the big screen, but Berekely is not the only place to get an A.K. fix in June. On this side of the bridge, the Embarcadero will screen a new print of Kurosawa's most famous color film, Ran for a week beginning June 4th. And four of the master's most noirish black-and-white films will play in 35mm prints at the still-new VIZ Cinema at Post and Webster Streets that same week: Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, the Bad Sleep Well and High and Low are the titles, not a samurai sword among them. The VIZ lineup for June is truly jawdropping for those of us who can't get enough classic Japanese cinema. After a week of Kurosawa films, the Japantown venue will bring four Yasujiro Ozu films including his most-widely-acknowledged masterpiece Tokyo Story, his following film Early Spring, and two earlier films I've been wishing to see return to Frisco Bay since I missed them during his PFA centennial six and a half years ago: The Only Son and Record Of A Tenement Gentlemen. As if that weren't enough, VIZ will screen four Kenji Mizoguchi masterpieces (I confidently say this not having seen all of them) June 19-24: Sisters of The Gion (pictured above), Ugetsu Monogatari, Street of Shame and Utamaro and His Five Women (the one I haven't seen yet). This is a truly special set of twelve films VIZ is bringing in June, each with multiple playdates, so go to as many as you can while you can, and tell your friends, if you want to encourage future screenings of Japanese classics on this side of Frisco Bay, where they've been pretty scarce in recent years.

VIZ Cinema, which until recently focused on screening the films of its affiliated DVD label almost exclusively, is obviously stretching its programming muscles, and if this keeps up it will rapidly become one of the most exciting venues on Frisco Bay. Also to play there in June are two programs with a South Asian, rather than East Asian, focus: 3rd i's Queer Eye, an outpost of LGBT films presented by the folks who bring the South Asian Film Festival to town every November, and the locally-made Indian diasporic film Bicycle Bride.

What else is happening in June? The previously-mentioned "I Still Wake Up Dreaming" series experienced rush line level crowds for some of its 35mm screenings, as well as some technical difficulties in the sound quality of certain of the 16mm prints it showed, so programmer Elliot Lavine and the Roxie Theater decided to reprise some of the affected films from June 4. I wholeheartedly recommend the June 6th double-bill in particular, featuring the two best films I saw at the festival: Phil Karlson's luckless boxer nailbiter 99 River Street, and the sultry policier Cop Hater. Everyone seemed to love the cameo-studded rat pack gangster film Johnny Cool but me; it plays June 4 if you want to see for yourself. (For me, it couldn't live up to its theme song.) The Fearmakers, Jacques Tourneur's 1958 expose of the communist infiltration of Washington, D.C. publicity firms is not among the director's great films, but it's an interesting time capsule worth a look in 35mm; it plays June 6th along with a 35mm print of Nightmare, which I missed the first time around. I also missed the three 16mm prints that suffered the worst sound problems, and which will play on a triple-bill June 7th, for free for those who attended their prior screenings and for $11 for the rest of us. Gustav Machatý's Jealousy sounds the most intriguing of the trio.

Oakland's Paramount Theatre begins its summer film series the same weekend, with a June 4 screening of the late Lynn Redgrave's defining film Georgy Girl. Other films scheduled to screen at Frisco Bay's largest, most opulent (if intermittently-utilized) movie palace are the original King Kong July 9, E.T. July 23, and the great Howard Hawks film To Have And Have Not August 6. The Rafael Film Center will play the 1937 Prisoner of Zenda as a special presentation with Oscar winners Craig Barron and Ben Burtt on June 13. SFMOMA screens Clint Eastwood's first directorial effort Play Misty For Me June 10. And the Red Vic has a new calendar on the streets with its usual combination of second-run, repertory, and special event bookings. The documentary on influential filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar (the latter of whom gets a rare solo show at Artists' Television Access June 5) called It Came From Kuchar makes its landing June 14 & 15. Bong Joon-ho's Mother plays June 16 & 17 (his The Host plays the PFA June 18), the sheepherding documentary Sweetgrass appears July 12 & 13, and Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop closes the door on this particular calendar August 6-9. Along with the theatre's annual anniversary screenings of Harold and Maude (July 25-28) the Red Vic celebrates its 30th year of operation by showcasing three winners of a recent audience poll of its favorite repertory films. The winners: Alejandro Jodorowski's El Topo (August 1 & 2) takes the bronze, Dead Man (August 3 & 4) the silver, and Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (July 18 & 19) the gold. I'm a deep admirer of all three of these not-quite-canonized films. Congratulations to Red Vic patrons on your discerning and non-conforming taste!

The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto still has a few more weeks left on its appetizing current calendar, which ends with a Josef Von Sternberg double-bill (Morocco and The Devil Is A Woman) June 16-18. The day after that, another southerly film venue plays another Sternberg film, this time one of his most highly-regarded silent films, the Last Command. The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, tucked in a lovely corner of Fremont, will present that Oscar-winning film with Jon Mirsalis providing musical accompaniment on Kurzweil synthesizer. It's part of the Silent Film Museum's busiest month of the year; the first weekend in June is given over to Charlie Chaplin Days, honoring the most well-known actor to have worked in Niles back when Hollywood's supremacy as California's movie-making hub was not yet secure. The Gold Rush and other Chaplin films will screen. The final weekend of the month brings a festival named for a cowboy star who was every bit as well-known as Chaplin in his day, but has become something of a footnote today. This year's 13th Annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival features seven different programs of features and short subjects starring figures once famous to all, but now forgotten to most moviegoers, such as Wallace Reid, J. Warren Kerrigan, and G.M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson himself. An early (1920) King Vidor-directed film, the Jack-Knife Man promises to be a high point of the weekend.

Frisco's own Silent Film Festival has announced its program as well; expanded to a four-day event for its 15th edition, the festival has really outdone itself in lining up well-known and rare silent films, musicians, and special guests for the July 15-18 event. I will surely have more to say on this festival in the weeks to come, but in the meantime, Lincoln Spector has covered some of the highlights. This marks the sixth time I've contributed a contextual essay for the festival's program booklet, a copy of which will be handed to every attendee at the Castro that weekend. "My" film, this time around, has been Dziga Vertov's magnum opus Man With A Movie Camera, which will screen on Sunday afternoon, July 18th, with the Alloy Orchestra performing its critically-acclaimed musical score based on Vertov's 1929 instructions. Familiarizing myself with the history of early Soviet film-making, and sorting through the mountains of material written on Vertov in particular, has made for one of the most challenging and rewarding research projects I've attempted yet. I hope that the end-products (a pre-screening slide show, as well as the essay) prove valuable to festgoers. I have no doubt that the screening and musical performance will be entertaining and eye-opening for people who have already seen Man With A Movie Camera, and for those who haven't. If there was ever a film that deserves repeat viewings, this is it.

While looking through libraries and archives, trying to better understand the conditions under which Vertov's films were screened for the public in his day, I found a collection of program notes from The Film Society Of London which thrust my imagination back into early 1930s art-cinema exhibition. The Film Society had been founded in 1925 by Anthony Asquith, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, and H.G. Wells among other original members. In early 1931 the group screened Man With a Movie Camera on a program with a Silly Symphony (Artic Antics), a set of color (excuse me, colour) photography tests from British and American companies, an Austrian puppet play (The Dragon Prince), and a section of Alberto Cavalcanti's Little Red Riding Hood. Later that year, the same venue played Vertov's first sound film, Enthusiasm with the director personally in attendance; this was two days prior to Charlie Chaplin's famous pronouncement: "Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to seem so beautiful...Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician. The professors should learn from him not quarrel with him." In late 1935 Vertov's following film Three Songs About Lenin screened on a bill with Cavalcanti's GPO documentary Coal Face and Len Lye's Kaleidoscope among other short subjects.

I find it thrilling to learn such details about a bygone era of cinephilia, in which leading playwrights, novelists, and economists rubbed shoulders with animators, documentarians, film technologists, and avant-garde filmmakers from home and abroad. I do wonder what the membership requirements of The Film Society of London were like-- did one have to be a living legend to gain access, or are those simply the member names that have been handed down to us? Is there an equivalent of that activity today amidst the film festivals and venues right here in this town? I know that there are others who would disagree with me, but I just love that the SF Silent Film Festival programs films of diverse types, from all the corners of the world it can, alongside the justly classic and unjustly obscure entertainments from the Hollywood studio era. An 'us vs. them' attitude about independent and foreign filmmaking no doubt existed among some American film producers of the era, but in some corners of film appreciation, it feels like boundaries (national, stylistic, genre, etc.) are being patrolled more fiercely than ever. The Film Society Of London appeared to smash these kinds of barriers in its day, and from what I understand, early programming at places like SFMOMA did the same in the 1930s, mixing the avant-garde, documentary, an popular animation from various countries of origin, all on the same program.

Eighty years ago feels like a world away, but another little discovery made it seem just a little bit closer: on the back of the program for the Three Songs of Lenin screening was a list of films that had their British premiere at The Film Society in 1934-5, and it included (along with Jean Vigo's Zero For Conduct and Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon) a title I saw at the Pacific Film Archive a year and a half ago, Douro by Manoel de Oliveira. A silent, poetic documentary that was clearly made by a man who was then a young contemporary of Walter Ruttmann, Joris Ivens, and Vertov, Douro is almost certainly the only remaining silent-era debut film made by a director who is not only still living, but still making films, at 101 years of age. And here was his name listed amidst those of long-dead filmmakers who it's hard not to think of as belonging to a long-dead era.

While Oliveira's latest film just debuted alongside Apichatpong's in Cannes (Dennis Lim found the pair comparable highlights), his previous one is poised to make its first appearance here on Frisco Bay, also in June, at pretty much the only major local film venue I haven't yet mentioned in this post, the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. Called Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, on June 24, 26 & 27 it wraps up what looks to be an extremely strong month at the venue that has allowed me to see more Apichatpong Weerasethakul films than any other. No, YBCA hasn't announced plans to screen Uncle Boonmee yet, but they will be showing, in addition to the Oliveira, three films any serious cinephile will probably want to experience: Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers June 3-6, Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay June 12-13 (both of which have been among the most contentious new films of the past year's film festival circuit) and Catherine Breillat's wonderful Bluebeard June 17-19. If Apichatpong, Korine, Mendoza and Breillat can be counted as contemporaries of Oliveira (and why not), and Oliveira was a contemporary of Vertov, Vigo and Chaplin, then the boundary between contemporary and "old" cinema is obliterated. What a refreshing thought!