SFFILM 61 Day 11: To Be Or Not To Be

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival is down to the home stretch; it runs through April 17th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

Image from To Be Or Not To Be provided by SFFILM

To Be Or Not To Be (USA: Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
playing: 1:00 tonight at SFMOMA as part of the Mel Novikoff Award presentation to film scholar Annette Insdorff.

I often try to make it out to SFFILM's annual Mel Novikoff Award presentation to an individual or organization that has deepened the general public's understanding of world cinema, and last year's presentation to local hero Tom Luddy (which I wrote up in some detail) was one of last year's festival highlights. I must confess not being directly familiar with Insdorff's importance, but I trust the award committee to select someone worthy, and I'm excited to learn more about her at the event. She already gets points for making To Be Or Not To Be her carte blanche screening pick. If she has anything to do with it screening in 35mm she gets double points; I've been wanting to see it this way for years, as I wrote in a previous brief blog post, almost five years ago during a (vehemently) different Presidential administration.

Hollywood movies of the so-called "Golden Age" of the 1930s and 1940s are known for their glamour, for their stars, and for their maintenance of a consistent baseline standard of production quality. They're not often known for their boldness in speaking truth to power, To Be Or Not To Be might be one of the most noteworthy exceptions (not that it skimps in the glamour, star and production quality departments).

Filmed in the fall of 1941 and released just a couple months after the United States declared war on Hitler's Germany, To Be Or Not To Be combines a wartime spy-thriller plot with breakneck comedy, underlining the buffoonish aspects of Adolf Hitler and his beyond-brutal regime while drawing parallels between high-stakes politics and the little vanities and betrayals common in the show business world.

This improbably clever film follows a band of Warsaw actors who unexpectedly get caught up in a scheme aiding the underground resistance movement after Hitler's invasion of Poland. Radio star Jack Benny and Carole Lombard (in her final completed role before her plane crashed in early 1942) play the central pair of Shakespeareans; each turns in what is probably the greatest screen performance of their career. Though directed by a Berlin Jew who'd fled Germany not long before Hitler rose to power, the film's subject matter was seen as too raw at the time of its release for some critics and audiences. Others instantly praised it as the timeless comedy classic it has become.

SFFILM61 Day 11
Other festival options: Today marks the sole SFFILM screenings of the kid-friendly Shorts 5: Family Films program or the probably more adult-minded documentaries on Ruth Bader Ginsberg (RBG) and Joan Jett (Bad Reputation), all at the Castro; the last of these is expected to feature an in-person appearance by its subject as well as its maker; the others will have to settle for the latter. It's also your final chance to see SFFILM screenings of the excellent I Am Not A Witch at BAMPFA, of the Georgian film Scary Mother and an intriguing Swiss film by a director mentored by Lav Diaz and James Benning: Cyril Schäublin's Those Who Are Fine, both at the Creativity Theater, and of the festival's first selection from Kyrgyzstan in 20 years, Suleiman Mountain, at the Roxie.

Non-SFFILM option: I'm actually hosting this one myself. At 7PM tonight, I'm screening a new documentary called Parque Central, which premiered locally at the San Francisco Latino Film Festival last September, at a non-profit in the Tenderloin called the Faithful Fools (address: 234 Hyde between Turk and Eddy), and the filmmaker Ricardo Gaona, up from his home in Los Angeles for the weekend, will be in attendance. There will also be a short doc called Temporal Cities made right in the Tenderloin; its co-director Lizzy Brooks will also be in attendance projecting 35mm slides as part of the presentation. There will be a discussion following. Oh, and it's all FREE to the public.

Parque Central doesn't have distribution yet, as far as I know, but it isn't the kind of film you'd want to watch on a tablet, computer monitor or even a large television set, if you had the chance to see it projected on a screen like the one at the Faithful Fools. Seeing it large, it transports you to another part of the world: the ancient city of Antigua in the highlands of Guatemala, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most increasingly popular tourist destinations in Central America. Gaona shows us the beauty of the city not through the typical tourist gaze but through the daily routines of several children who live and work near the town square, called "Parque Central." Domingo, Eduardo, Hugo, Miguel and Yesenia shine shoes, sell refreshments, or braid hair for the plaza visitors and send the profits back to the cash-poor Mayan villages where their families reside. But thanks to Gaona's aesthetic choices, the documentary's tone is not one of sadness but of resilience, hope, and making the best of a difficult situation. His instincts are to observe and not comment, letting the audience come to our own conclusions about what we see. A counterpoint to his visual storytelling strategies is provided partway through with the introduction of an English-language narration voiced by a Bay Area-born tour guide, whose comments reveal the entrenched history of colonialism in the region.

10HTE: Brian Darr

If you've read the seventeen other contributions to by tenth annual I Only Have Two Eyes project attempting to chronicle a hefty portion of the San Francisco Bay Area's best repertory and revival venues and screenings then you know the scene is still robust even as it constantly shifts, opening up new venues as others shutter or pull back. Now it's time for me to (finally) unveil my own top choices from my 2016 filmgoing as experienced from my seat in the audience among friends and strangers.

As usual, I'm essentially limiting my choices to films I'd never seen before at all, as I particularly value the ability I have in the Bay Area to let my first viewings of great films come in the kinds of environments they were intended for in the first place. It was nearly a half-century ago that Jean-Luc Godard said to Gene Youngblood, "I would never see a good movie for the first time on television." I don't strictly hold to this doctrine but I find my home viewings increasingly compromised and theatrical viewings increasingly precious in this distraction-driven era. I could create a shadow list of viewings of films I'd previously seen on television or in an otherwise-unideal circumstance, which came more alive through a 2016 cinema viewing. (Here's a try: Dumbo at the Paramount, In a Lonely Place at Noir City, I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang at the Castro, In the Street at the Crossroads festival, When A Woman Ascends the Stairs at BAMPFA, How To Survive A Plague at YBCA, The Grand Budapest Hotel at the Roxie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me at BAMPFA, Early Spring at BAMPFA, and Halloween at the New Mission.) But without further ado, here are the ten I'm "officially" picking as my 2016 I Only Have Two Eyes selections. Thanks to all my other contributors, to all you readers, and of course to the venues and the filmmakers, dead or alive, whose work made 2016 another grand one for my continuing cinematic self-education and enjoyment.

Heaven's Gate screen capture from Criterion DVD

Heaven's Gate, February 28, 2016

Though I'll definitely be watching the Oscar telecast this year (with reservations) in the hopes that I get to see my old blog-buddy Barry Jenkins accept (or at the minimum, see some of his Moonlight collaborators accept) an award or two, even with the temptation of seeing a newly-more-relevant cinematic titan, and one of the films that inspired it, on the Castro screen, last year I skipped the show without the tiniest shred of compunction in order to catch an extremely epic double-feature in the aforementioned cinema. San Francisco's grandest screen was the ideal place to finally view Michael Cimino's notorious film maudit, which I'm not so surprised to report is now my favorite of his films made up to that point: his 1980 Heaven's Gate. (I haven't delved into Year of the Dragon through Sunchaser but was less-than-thrilled by his swan-song segment of To Each His Own Cinema). It's a sprawling, misshapen masterpiece full of wisdom and folly and a wagon-load of scenes I will absolutely never forget even if I never watch it again- which I certainly will, especially if a 35mm print of this 219-minute cut shows up somewhere again, as it surprisingly did for this Vilmos Zsigmond-tribute showing paired with the also exceptional America America which provided the Haskell Wexler half of the pairing in honor of two great, now-deceased cinematographers. That Cimino joined those two in the pantheon of departed masters only a few months later and that a President was elected who would certainly hate the pro-immigrant themes of these two films soon after that, makes the showing feel all the more special nearly a year later.

Foreign Correspondent, March 20, 2016

I made it back home from a weekend trip to Alfred Hitchcock's Sonoma County stomping grounds just in time to race to Palo Alto's Stanford Theatre for the final screening of his second Hollywood film, which is my second-to-last of his Hollywood films to view (I still haven't seen Topaz). Perhaps a decade or so ago I made a vow never again to watch a Hitchcock film for the first time on home video, and I've broken it only once since (for his silent Champagne, which I missed at the Castro in 2013 to catch a Stanford showing of The Ten Commandments). I'm glad I didn't and waited for this formative, pure entertainment whose 1940 thrills still feel so visceral on a big screen. I only wish I had been able to make it to the same venue in the fall when it showed the ever-rarer Waltzes From Vienna, which marks the end of the string of his British films (beginning with Juno and the Paycock) which, along with the much-later Jamaica Inn, I haven't been able to catch in a cinema yet and thus remain gaps in my Hitchcography. At least I saw several other excellent films from the Stanford's Vienna-themed series (including Spring Parade and Liebelei) and other great 2016 screenings (Hold Back the Dawn, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, A Midsummer Night's Dream) at my hands-down favorite south-of-San Francisco screening venue.

Black Sunday screen capture from Anchor Bay DVD

Black Sunday, April 7, 2016

A 2002 Yerba Buena Center For the Arts retrospective is where I first became acquainted with the visionary, technically audacious cinema of Italian master Mario Bava, whose films like Kill Baby Kill, Five Dolls For an August Moon and Twitch of the Death Nerve make him my personal favorite international horror director from the period between Jacques Tourneur's and David Cronenberg's peaks in that genre. But I couldn't see everything in that 15-year-old retro, so I'd never before seen his very first feature film as an uncredited writer and a credited director. It's appropriate that I return to the scene of the crime (YBCA) to finally view this eerie and intense 1960 film, which not only made a star out of Barbara Steele but also allowed Bava to emerge with a fully-formed style (honed by years as a cinematographer). YBCA's all-35mm Gothic Cinema series was an overall 2016 highlight, also allowing me a chance to finally see wonderfully spooky films like James Whale's The Old Dark House and Jack Clayton's The Innocents for the first time.

Quixote, May 22, 2016

Bruce Baillie is well-known as the founder of Canyon Cinema. He's also one of my very favorite living filmmakers and I'm so glad I had a chance to finally see two of his major works on 16mm for the first time in 2016. Though it was wonderful to see him down from Washington State introducing a screening of his first film On Sundays at New Nothing Cinema in September, an Artists' Television Access showing of his 1965 Quixote was even more precious. It was introduced by a more recent (though not current) Canyon executive director, Denah Johnston, who also showed a lovely film of her own called Sunflowers as well as the great Study of a River by then-gravely-ill master Peter Hutton, as examples of work inspired by Baillie's unique way of seeing. Quixote turns out to be truly monumental work of the proto-hippie counterculture, on the order of Baillie's post-hippie Quick Billy if not ever greater. Shot all over the American West and edited with the aplomb of the most skillful of the Soviet masters, it's Baillie's grand, righteous, sorrowfully patriotic/anti-patriotic statement all in one. Other 2016 repertory highlights in an experimental vein included 16mm showings of Thad Povey's Scratch Film Junkies' Saint Louise and Gunvor Nelson's Take Off at SOMArts (the latter also introduced by Johnston, the former by Craig Baldwin) and of Scott Stark's Angel Beach, Paul Clipson's Another Void and Rosario Sotelo's Flor Serpiente among other works at A.T.A.; both of these evenings were organized in conjunction with an undersung SOMArts exhibit called Timeless Motion that I had a very small hand in assisting in the installation of. I also loved seeing Ron Rice's The Flower Thief and Pat O'Neill introducing his Water & Power at BAMPFA, Caryn Cline showing Lucy's Terrace and her other films at the Exploratorium, Toney Merritt showing EF and many of his other films and Lynn Marie Kirby showing Stephanie Beroes's Recital at New Nothing, and Ishu Patel's Perspectrum and James Whitney's Lapis among others presented by Ben Ridgeway at Oddball (whose weekly screenings have sadly been put on hiatus). It was another good year in this regard.

Gate of Flesh screen capture from Criterion DVD

Gate of Flesh, May 28, 2016

I like the latest iteration of the Pacific Film Archive, now rebranded as BAMPFA, in its newly-built structure just a block or so from the Downtown Berkeley BART station. I don't love it yet, though, because it can't compete with fifteen years of memories made at the old corrugated-metal building further up the hill. It doesn't help that my approach to cinema-going doesn't seem to mesh quite as well with some of the patterns being established at the new venue; earlier showtimes, a reintroduction of the canon, more DCPs (the latter two may be related), etc. And I'm not quite used to the fact that though there are more seats, there also seem to be more sold-out shows; more than once I've arrived at the venue only to be turned away for lack of space, something that hadn't happened to me, no matter how spontaneous my arrival had been, in about a decade before 2016. But BAMPFA still allowed me to see some wonderful 35mm prints of films I'd never watched before, including several Maurice Pialat films, John Ford's The Long Voyage Home, Nick Ray's The Lusty Men, and a decent sampling of the Anna Magnani series that played in the fall. But my year's happiest personal discovery there was certainly that of Seijun Suzuki's 1964 Gate of Flesh, first released when he was a mere 41 (he's now 93 and counting!) It's a maximalist melodrama set in the world of makeshift brothels of post-war Tokyo at it's bombedest-out, filled with tremendous color and energy and some of the most inventive double-exposures made since the silent era.

Anguish, August 9, 2016

When I first heard in April 2012 that the Alamo Drafthouse was going to be renovating the long-shuttered New Mission Theatre I was living just a few blocks away, and was excited but skeptical that I'd still be living there by the time it arrived. Sure enough, I was evicted and moved across town within two years and the venue didn't open for nearly another two. But I've still found the allure of another repertory venue filling some of the long-standing genre gaps in the Frisco Bay screening ecosystem too strong to resist. Alamo's New Mission has something of a reputation for catering to the gentrifying crowd epitomized by the condos next door whose construction were part of the deal to revive the old "Miracle Mile" movie house, and if you look at the prices of their normal tickets and food-and-drink menu items, it's hard to shake that perception. But the theatre's regular late-weeknight, usually-35mm screenings of our grindhouse cinematic heritage for only $6 a seat makes it a godsend for budget-minded cinephiles. The most successful series seems to be Terror Tuesdays, and though it tends to focus pretty strictly on films from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, I can't deny that's a pretty good time period to focus on when it comes to horror movies. Catalan filmmaker Bigas Luna's jaw-dropping 1987 Anguish fits right into that frame, and I'm SO glad I saw it for the first time in a theatre full of other movie lovers who, like me, didn't seem to know what was hitting them. I don't want to spoil a moment of this unique film experience, but I will say that Alamo programmer Mike Keegan (formerly of the Roxie) gave a pitch-perfect introduction that gave us a sense of the intensity of experience we were in for without tipping Bigas's hand in any way. If I could only pick one viewing experience to highlight on this list instead of ten, Anguish would be very much in the running. I've also enjoyed the Alamo's Weird Wednesday programming (especially Walter Hill's Southern Comfort) and, before the admission price more than doubled from $6 to $14, the Music Monday events (especially Donald Cammell's & Nicolas Roeg's Performance).

Manhunter screen capture from MGM DVD

Manhunter, September 3, 2016

I must admit that of all the active filmmakers I see many of my cinephile friends and admireds discussing with passion, Michael Mann is the one that I have traditionally had the most resistance to joining the cult of. Perhaps I've just seen the wrong films (The Keep must be for the advanced Mann-ophile). His 1986 Manhunter, on the other hand, is most definitely the right film. It revels in an eighties-era dread very different from (and to me, more appealing than) the 1990s guignol of Silence of the Lambs, which it technically precurses even if its shared characters are played by different actors, and does a better job at interrogating the wobbly line between society's desecrators and its guardians than any serial-killer movie I can think of. This was screened as part of Jesse Hawthorne Ficks's MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS series, which by the end of 2016 appeared to have departed from the Castro as its primary home for over ten years (after a healthy early-2000s stretch at the 4-Star) and taking up residency at the Roxie (where Manhunter screened) while occasionally venturing into the Exploratorium or the New Mission. The houses are more reliably packed and the films chosen more frequently diverge from my own personal perception of "dismissed, underrated and forgotten films" (this weekend is a tribute to Hayao Miyazaki, whom I love but whom I have a hard time imagining with those labels), but as Ficks has direct contact with a new generation of moving-image-obsessives in his position as a film history teacher at a local school, I'm willing to defer to his definitions. Especially when it means 35mm prints of great films get shown in nearby cinemas.

Viridana, October 14, 2016

What cinema fan doesn't love Luis Buñuel? Finally getting a chance to see his 1961 excoriating re-entry into filming in his homeland after 29 years, in a beautiful 35mm print, would be a highlight of any year. It's a tremendous, unforgettable film, perhaps Buñuel's most Buñuelian, tackling all his usual themes of hypocrisy, sexual obsession, class conflict, etc. with maximum fervor. As much as I love his Mexican and French filmmaking periods, there is something about his few Spanish films that sets them apart. The screening was held at SFMOMA on the second weekend of its first Modern Cinema series devoted to the Criterion Collection and to Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (its current series is Werner Herzog and Ecstatic Truth and its next series, in June, celebrates 100 years of Jean-Pierre Melville by grouping his films with those of one of his most ardent director acolytes Johnny To). After sampling the venue with Viridiana I was able to re-watch great films by Victor Erice, Hiroshi Teshigahara, and Apichatpong, who was on hand wearing a Canyon Cinema T-Shirt for certain showings. This series marked the relaunching of SFMOMA's film programming after over three years of expansion and refurbishment; the Wattis Theatre got a mild make-over in comparison to much of the rest of the building, a missed opportunity to provide more legroom between rows compounded by a new problem of noise from stairwalking museumgoers infiltrating the theatre space during museum-hours screenings of quiet films. Luckily Viridiana screened after hours, a new capability of the space now that it has a separate public entrance from the expensive-to-insure galleries, and I found one of the better seats in the house to view it from.  Despite its minor problems, I'm glad to have a key piece of Frisco Bay repertory reinstated after such a long absence.

So This Is Paris screen capture from youtube

So This Is Paris, December 3, 2016

Since instating an annual one-day Winter Event (or sometimes Fall Event) at the Castro Theatre as a supplement to its Summer (now moved to late Spring) multi-day festival more than ten years ago, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has gradually moved more and more to showing most of the latest restorations and rarely-seen archival gems in the summer while using the opposite end of the calendar to bring out well-known warhorses like The Thief of Bagdad or The General or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It's like a little favor to the many out-of-towners who attend the multi-day festival that they tend to shy away from showing too many films at the one-day event that they'll really regret missing. In 2016, however, their December Day of Silents may have been even more enticing to certain silent film fans than the June festival; it was to me. Although the latter let me see terrific unknown films like Behind the Door and a program of (minimum) 110-year-old hand-colored European films as well as re-viewing great work by Ozu, Wellman, Clair, Flaherty, etc, the Day of Silents seemed to be programmed right to my fondest viewing desires: a rare chance to see longtime favorites like Eisenstein's Strike and Von Sternberg's The Last Command on the big screen for the first time, a chance to see Raoul Walsh's wonderful (if sadly incomplete) Sadie Thompson for the first time ever, and more, nearly all of it (excepting an early-matinee Chaplin shorts set) in 35mm prints. The highest highlight, however, was seeing the last and probably the best of Ernst Lubitsch's Warner Brothers silents, So This Is Paris from 1926, with a tremendous piano accompaniment from Donald Sosin. Everyone talks about this film's bravura Charleston dance sequence, justifiably, but the rest of the film is also a supreme delight, spoofing the then-in-vogue romantic sheik figure, engineering a perfectly-interlocking love quadrangle based on the same material as the famous Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus, and suffusing the proceedings with a biting gallows humor. It immediately shoots to the top tier of American silent films most shamefully lacking an official DVD release, alongside Lubitsch's next great film The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (which I'm not sure how to explain the absence of on my very first I Only Have Two Eyes list from when I saw it at SFSFF in 2007).

I Gopher You, December 10, 2016

The Roxie Theater has really improved its repertory-screening game in my eyes over the past year or so, at least in my eyes. Perhaps it's a competitive response to the appearance of the Alamo Drafthouse a few blocks away. Perhaps it's a function of getting the right personnel in place on its staff and its non-profit board. Perhaps it's connected to the November 2015 passage of the Legacy Business Preservation Fund creation, which the Roxie was able to benefit from starting in August 2016. Perhaps all these factors and more contribute. But though the oldest (first opened in 1909) essentially-continuously-operating movie house in San Francisco, if not a much wider geographic area (it's contested), still has challenges to face, it's facing them not only by using creative tools like their current silent auction and upcoming off-site fundraiser, but also by reasserting itself as an essential piece of the Frisco Bay exhibition quilt through its screenings, more of which involved celluloid in 2016 than had been the case in quite a few years. I personally partook in great events like a September Sam Fuller series, a lovely Les Blank program in March, some of the previously-mentioned MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS showings like Manhunter, and more. None were more purely fun than the two all-35mm programs of Warner Brothers animation brought through the Roxie's monthly Popcorn For Breakfast Saturday morning cartoon showcase enthusiastically and knowledgeably hosted by Amanda Peterson. June's set of selections leaned heavily on the great Chuck Jones, and let me view 35mm prints of classics I'd only seen on TV before like Robin Hood Daffy and There They Go-Go-Go; that it was held twenty-four hours before a Castro Jones tribute made for a deeply-immersive weekend for fans of Termite Terrace's most celebrated director. But the Roxie's December dozen, while not ignoring Jones, gave greater attention to his 1950s studio-mates, particularly Robert McKimson. And the program began with a cartoon by my personal favorite of Jones's under-appreciated co-workers, Friz Freleng, which I'm 99% sure I never saw as a kid and 100% sure I hadn't seen as an adult, much less in a great 35mm print. Freleng's 1954 I Gopher You is the fifth cartoon featuring the hilariously over-polite Goofy Gophers voiced by Mel Blanc and Stan Freburg, and the first in which their nemesis is not an antagonistic pooch but the industrial agricultural system itself. "Mac" and "Tosh" find their farmland food supply raided by the mechanisms of post-World War II production, tracing a truck full of freshly-picked vegetables back to the Ajax processing plant. The mazes of conveyor belts and relentless canning contraptions makes for the ideal playground for Freleng's signature "anticipation gags" in which hearty humor derives from the expectation of the fulfillment of a pattern of violence and/or humiliation against a character. Much like the gophers themselves, this well-oiled machine of a film is seemingly small (at only 7 minutes), but packs a formidable wallop. It's available as a bonus on the Warner DVD of His Majesty O'Keefe, which you can rent at Lost Weekend Video.

Brian Darr: IOHTE

Screen capture from Columbia DVD

Thanks for reading the 2015 edition of I Only Have Two Eyes, my annual survey of Frisco Bay cinephiles' favorite cinematic revivals seen in local cinematheques, arthouses, museum screening rooms, movie palaces and other public spaces between January 1 and December 31, 2015. The hub page for this year's results will point you to the selections and, in many cases, eloquent write-ups, by sixteen esteemed allies in appreciation of the screen, the programmers, and of course the films that could be seen in Frisco Bay venues last year. Though not all by one person, as the name of the survey should suggest.

I compile a survey that eschews new releases in favor of focusing on our cinematic heritage not because I don't have interest in new films (you can see some of my own favorites listed here), but because I feel there are plenty of others covering that ground. And, perhaps as importantly, because I feel that the usual film rankings often obscure the circumstances under which they're viewed. So many variables play into how a viewer receives a film: method of delivery, reaction (or lack thereof) of fellow viewers, preconceptions before viewing, mood of viewer, among others competing with "quality of the film" in shaping a judgment. I know there are fastidious critics who take care to rewatch a film multiple times, often in multiple ways, before committing it to a top ten list, but though I admire the approach, it feels too much like a vain attempt to cram opinions into boxes made for facts for me to adopt it myself. Rather I prefer to present a year-in-review that emphasizes the unique nature of every viewing of a film. In-cinema screenings of older films are easier for most of us to think of as unique, I feel (in part because they very often are!)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

I suspect the timing and placement of my first-ever viewing of The Honeymoon Killers couldn't have been better for appreciation of this exceedingly disturbing 1969 portrait of the murderous Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck. It was the final film shown at the January 2015 edition of Eddie Muller's Noir City film festival, pushing an audience who'd just taken in a week full of mysteries, thrillers and melodramas made in the classical Hollywood style (square frame, presentational acting style, continuity cutting, the works) out into the world on a completely different note. It's the only film written and directed by opera composer Leonard Kastle, with a few scenes filmed by a very young Martin Scorsese until the producers determined his methods ate up too much of the film's quick schedule and extremely low budget. Kastle created a raw and unflinching window into a notoriously lethal marriage, filmed mostly in long takes, in cars and in non-descript dwellings, giving the feeling of a nightmarish home movie exploding in widescreen on the the Castro screen. I felt shell-shocked after the screening and felt like I wouldn't want to watch another noir again for at least another year (although this wore off eventually, certainly in time for me to see the majority of screenings in the Castro's summer noir series hosted by Elliot Lavine.)

2015 was the last year, or should I say half-year, of the Pacific Film Archive's existence at its 16-year "temporary" location at 2575 Bancroft, across from a lovely Julia Morgan- & Bernard Maybeck-designed gymnasium. I witnessed so many outstanding screenings inside this corrugated shed, and though the new location holds great promise, I'm sure I'll miss the cozy purple-cushioned seats and the walks from the BART station through the forested campus quite a bit, if not as much as I'll miss some of the staff that was not invited to make the hyperspace jump to the new screening space when it opened this past week. Luckily I took great advantage of the old space during its final few months, sampling great retrospectives for filmmakers like Billy Wilder, Gregory Markopoulos, John Stahl, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Victor Erice. But I think my favorite PFA screening of 2015 was a mystical film completely unknown to me before viewing it in February: The Day is Longer Than the Night, with the director Lana Gogoberidze on hand to discuss her poetic, pictoral approach to national narrative (my tweet at the time), in a nation that didn't exist independent of the Soviet Union at the time she made it, and the fallout from its success at a crucial moment in Soviet film history. I wish I'd been able to take in a lot more of the PFA's monumental survey of Georgian film during late 2014 and early 2015, but I'm sure glad I at least caught this precious work.

Screen capture from Lionsgate DVD

There's no getting around it: now that I no longer live three blocks from the Roxie Theatre (since moving to Grant Avenue almost two years ago) I don't find myself there nearly as often as I used to. It may just be an optical illusion that has me thinking there's not quite as many can't-miss screenings happening there since I moved away- at least for a film-on-film proponent (though not purist). I did get to see perfectly-projected 35mm prints of Brandy In the Wilderness, Takeshi Miike's Audition, and a set of Quay Brothers shorts there in 2015, and am glad that Polyester screens in 35mm AND Odorama tonight (though I'll be helping present The Fall of The I-Hotel at the nearby Artists' Television Access instead). But my favorite recent-ish screening there has definitely been last March's showing of Kathryn Bigelow's solo directorial debut Near Dark, a post-punk vampire variant set in rural American states where, (as I tweeted after the screening) "blood flows as cheaply as beer & gasoline". I think it's my new favorite Bigelow film. The screening was presented by the Film On Film Foundation, which paired the film with the schlocky Stephanie Rothman grindhouser Terminal Island, but my mind really connects it with a more closely-kindred film seen at the Castro a month and a half before: Abel Ferrara's 1993 Body Snatchers remake.

More than fourteen years ago, after I saw my first Budd Boetticher Westerns midway through a Pacific Film Archive series, I started to visually devour as many as I could get my eyes on, whether via VHS tapes or Turner Classc Movies airings (at my neighbor's house, since I've never subscribed to that channel myself). But for some reason I'd always held that series opener The Tall T (pictured at the top of this post) at arm's length, in the hopes of another theatrical opportunity arising. Meanwhile, the movie was released on DVD, and then went out of print, and then back in again (this time only as an on-demand DVD-R), with no such screenings appearing in this cowboy-hat-averse region until this past April when the intrepid Yerba Buena Center for the Arts finally booked it as part of a very fine Western series (couched as "Noir Westerns" to help lure in horse opera skeptics). It proved itself to be the most formally and narratively "perfect" of Boetticher's Ranown films made with unassuming star Randolph Scott. A case in which my patience really paid off in a tremendous first-time viewing.

Screen capture from Parlour DVD

"If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You might as well be dead. You're not even a citizen of the United States." The greatest film I saw at the San Francisco International Film Festival this past Spring was a 45-year-old revival of the sole feature film directed by its star, who also wrote the screenplay and won an award at the Venice Film Festival back in 1970. There's not much new I can say about Barbara Loden's Wanda in a world where Bérénice Reynaud's essential Senses of Cinema article on the film exists, but I will add that Rachel Kushner's introduction to the Castro Theatre congregation not only quoted a passage from her novel The Flamethrowers that discussed the film, and gave shout-outs to Frisco's fallen repertory houses (the York, the Strand, the Red Vic), but debunked one notion in Reynaud's article: that Wanda never screened in the United States beyond an initial New York run. The SFIFF catalog refers to at least 1970 screening in San Francisco, and Kushner spoke eloquently of how her mother saw the film in an Oregon arthouse and always maintained it was the best film ever made. Watching with those words ringing in my ears, it was hard to disagree, at least for the 102 minutes it played, which is the most I can ever ask of a film anyway.

This past May's San Francisco Silent Film Festival was filled with gems, and I didn't even have time to see all of them, I'm sure. Most of my festival favorites (Ben-Hur, the Swallow and the Titmouse, the Bert Williams presentation) have been mentioned by other IOHTE contributors this year, but since nobody else mentioned another silent film event that happened earlier that month and opened my eyes equally wide to the place of pre-talkie cinema history in modern life, I'm going to use this slot to give it some attention. It's an experimental silent film called The Big Stick/An Old Reel by Massachusetts filmmaker Saul Levine, who made a rare Frisco Bay public appearance courtesy of an SF Cinematheque co-presentation at Oakland's more underground Black Hole Cinematheque, an admission-always-free screening space that will celebrate its fifth year of operation later in 2016. The Big Stick/An Old Reel is quite simply one of the most effective "found footage" films I've ever witnessed, and a 10-minute manifesto of how "old" films don't survive simply to be seen, but to be applied to our lives. Between 1967 and 1973 (it took him six years to perfect), Levine expressed this by splicing together footage of police trying to quell a mass protest, shot with his regular-8mm camera off a television broadcast, with fragments from 8mm reduction prints of pertinent Charlie Chaplin comedies. Namely 1914's Getting Acquainted, in which the Little proto-Tramp evades Edgar Kennedy's Keystone Cop as he interacts with Mabel Normand, Mack Swain, Phyllis Allen Cecile Arnold and Harry McCoy (strangely, much of the literature identifies this film as In The Park, which Chaplin filmed in San Francisco with an entirely different cast for Essanay in 1915), and 1917's Easy Street, in which Chaplin himself plays the cop- and a pretty outrageously abusive one. As if juxtaposing these three sources together didn't create an intense enough layering, Levine creates even more with additional interventions such as blackening parts of the image and varying the rhythm of the cuts. Indeed the very nature of 8mm splices, which leave a highly noticeable scarring on the frame (perhaps exacerbated when blown up to 16mm, as I believe the print I saw was?) creates more texture in an already-dense film. And context adds yet another level of layering. Watching cycles of violence so embedded into a film print in 2015 Oakland of all times and places felt like a particularly apropos summoning.

Screen capture from Universal Vault DVD

Last year the Stanford Theatre provided opportunities to watch all of the feature-length talking pictures Ernst Lubitsch directed up through 1939, and I took advantage of the opportunity to see the two from this period that had eluded me up to now: The Man I Killed, his sole pure drama during this period, and which is also known as Broken Lullaby, and the film I now think might be the summation of his powers, the 1937 Marlene Dietrich/Herbert Marshall/Melvyn Douglas love triangle Angel (which could also bear the title Broken Lullaby, as I noted in a post-viewing tweet). It was released after the longest period of apparent inactivity in Lubitsch's career as a director, which I can't help but notice coincides with the period of strict enforcement of the Hays Code (the precise date was July 1, 1934, two weeks before the end of principle photography on Lubitsch's prior directorial effort The Merry Widow). It's as if he needed a period of time to regroup and rethink how to extend his "Touch" into a more censorious Hollywood environment. He found some marvelous solutions, creating a masterpiece that walks a fine line between marital drama and aching comedy that somehow befits the strange combination of satisfaction and melancholy I feel at the thought that I'll never again see a 1930s Lubitsch feature for the first time. At least there are still a couple from the 1940s and a slew from the 1910s and 1920s I can look forward to making the acquaintance of...

The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco presented its third annual tribute to a filmmaker from "the beautiful country"; after Pasolini in 2013 and Bertolucci in 2014 this year's maestro was Vittorio De Sica, still world famous of course for Bicycle Thieves, but whose lesser-known works like Shoeshine and Miracle in Milan are more beloved to me personally. The second Castro screening that September day was another for me to add to that list: Gold of Naples, a wise and witty portmanteau film made on the streets of De Sica's hometown, featuring six (approximately-) equally-wonderful Giuseppe Marotta short story adaptations. Sofia Loren plays a philandering wife with a misplaced wedding ring. Silvia Mangano a prostitute who takes revenge on a self-loathing nobleman. De Sica himself plays an inveterate gambler (a role that his friends considered his most autobiographical) and Totò (another Neapolitan) a put-upon clown. Other segments portray a neighborhood problem-solver and a haunting funeral procession for a dead child. Each vignette could stand on its own as a top-notch short film; together they conspire to create a filmic work worthy of standing with Rossellini's Paisan and Pasolini's Trilogy of Life films as proof that Italians have understood the power of portmanteau better than anyone.

Screen capture from Mileston/Oscilloscope DVD

I knew I'd be filling a major gap in my understanding of documentary history when I went to a 35mm showing of Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity at the Rafael Film Center. I didn't realize, however, just how much I'd learn from, be moved by, and even, dare I say, entertained by, this 1969 epic (over four hours, not including intermission) of cultural history and its intersection with "harder" political history. Ophuls, in San Rafael to receive a Mill Valley Film Festival tribute and to introduce a newer film as well as this one, sat and watched this one along with the audience, as if he hadn't already viewed it countless times before. Here he tears apart the myths associated with resistance in Nazi-occupied France, not as a radical but as a sly provocateur, using techniques that have since becomes hallmarks of successful documentary: the incorporation of disturbing "ephemeral" film footage (years before The Atomic Cafe solidified an American vogue for such), and of "enough rope to hang themselves" interviews like that of a merchant asked to explain why he took out an a newspaper ad proclaiming himself "100% French". Few of the interviews were as self-incriminating as this one, but they all wove together a damning self-portrait of a nation still unreconciled with its past. I'll never watch a Maurice Chevalier film in quite the same way again.

Finally, another French film that might never have been made without the unwitting participation of Nazi Germany: Fritz Lang's only film completed during his brief stay in Paris after fleeing Hitler's Germany (in style), albeit less abruptly than he'd maintain in later interviews. The film was Liliom, a 1934 adaptation of the same Ferenc Molnar play that Frank Borzage had made with Charles Farrell in 1930. The Stanford Theatre screened both back-to-back as part of a rapturous 100-year anniversary  tribute to the Fox Film Corporation, providing opportunities for me to rewatch rarely-revived personal favorites like the Borzage Liliom and Henry King's State Fair, and to see great works like John Ford's Steamboat Round the Bend for the first time. But none I'm as glad I made sure to trek to Palo Alto for as Lang's Liliom, which emphasizes the fatalistic elements of Molnar's play while presenting a "poetic realist" setting for its events to unfold in. Charles Boyer is particularly wonderful here as the title character, effectively differentiating his performance between different phases of life in a way that Farrell didn't even attempt. And the scene in which he watches his life unfold via a film projection is one of Lang's most inspired ever. Apart from a few late-career Satyajit Ray films co-produced by Soprofilms or Canal+, this is the first French film (made under the Erich Pommer-led Fox Europa) that I can recall the Stanford screening in the decade-and-a-half I've been paying attention to the venue's programming. I'd certainly be happy to see more.

The Oyster Princess (1919)

WHO: Ernst Lubitsch directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: I haven't seen The Oyster Princess except in brief clips (such as those in Mark Cousins's The Story of Film) so I'll excerpt from Ian Johnston's fine review:

In Hollywood the director was famed for the so-called Lubitsch Touch, an amalgam of grace, wit, and sexual innuendo. The Oyster Princess doesn’t share the gracefulness, subtlety, and lightness of touch of Lubitsch’s best Hollywood work (is there a more perfect romantic comedy than Trouble In Paradise?), but then it’s a different kind of comedy – it explicitly characterises itself as “grotesque” – yet one that works superbly well in its own right. The setting is a strange never-never-land where some kind of German stereotypical fantasy of rich Americans is plonked down into a recognisable German world. The “oyster princess” of the title is Ossi, the daughter of the fantastically wealthy oyster magnate (whatever that may be) Mister Quaker.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Rafael Film Center at 7:15.

WHY: The 18th San Francisco Silent Film Festival ended yesterday. I saw a total of ten film programs plus the archival presentation, which means I missed six shows- a record high for me since 2005 when an unexpected disruption of my weekend made me miss most of the festival, including never-repeated opportunities to see Sangue Mineiro, Stage Struck, The Big Parade, The Sideshow, Prem Sanyas and It in 35mm prints (I have managed to see the last of these in 16mm at Niles in the meantime, but the others remain elusive- which is why I won't hold my breath for another shot at seeing The Joyless Street in a local cinema. At least I had a good reason for missing it). In the intervening years the festival has grown so much; it's almost doubled the number of festival programs (itself a more-than-doubling of the festival's four-program size the first year I attended) and added an annual Winter satellite program as well as special events like Napoléon and the Hitchcock 9. All this is in no small part due to the relationships the festival has built with the major European film archives, which provide them with the best possible prints of the newest restorations and raise international awareness of their work. And though it creates a gaping mid-July hole in the Frisco Bay festival calendar, it's nice we won't have to wait a whole year for the 19th edition of the festival, as a save-the-date slide advertised that next year's festival will run earlier: May 29-June 1st, 2014.

But the past weekend's bounty of silent film screenings has not quite ended. Though it's been a dormant one for a couple of years, the Rafael in Marin has had a tradition of inviting some of the musicians who fly in from out of state to perform at the Castro event to perform within a day or two of the SFSFF end. In 2010 it was Alloy Orchestra performing with Hitchcock's Blackmail and in 2009 it was the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra with Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother, for instance. Previously these events have featured films (relatively) recently brought in by the SFSFF or another local festival (Alloy had played for Blackmail at the 2004 San Francisco International Film Festival), but The Oyster Princess hasn't been shown by the SFSFF, and has only played once, at the Pacific Film Archive, in the many years I've kept tabs on the local screening scene. Two of the musicians from the Mont Alto Orchestra will accompany it tonight at the venue.

The Rafael's new calendar also includes digital 3D screenings of Alfred Hitchcock's (decidedly non-silent) Dial 'M' For Murder this Thursday and Sunday.

HOW: The Oyster Princess screens on a bill with Buster Keaton's Cops, with live music by Rodney Sauer & Britt Swenson. These will be screened via DCP as the Rafael is unable to run 35mm prints at frame rates other than 24fps, which is really too slow for many silents.

To Be Or Not To Be (1942)

WHO: Ernst Lubitsch directed this.

WHAT: Though it was a critical and commercial flop in its day, over the years To Be Or Not To Be has grown to join just about everyone's short list of Ernst Lubitsch's greatest comedies. Though its subject matter of a Polish theatre company contending with Hitler's invasion would seem to suggest a comic arena in which the Jewishness of its characters would be integral to the plot and the humor. And it is. But thanks to Hollywood protocols during World War II, the word "Jew" is never uttered in the film, and the characters' religions are identified only by cues such as star Jack Benny's widely-known Jewishness and lines like Felix Bressart's "What you are I wouldn't eat." Bressart plays a character actor named Greenberg, whose greatest wish is to portray Shylock in a production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. His character is fascinating from a perspective of seeking the Jewish essence of To Be Or Not To Be. There's a terrific essay on this topic by Joel Rosenberg which I shall excerpt the concluding paragraph of:

Lubitsch's aim of creating a film that would capture the complexity of the era and be remembered long after other films of the period were forgotten was, in a sense, perfectly realized. "What is the only picture," Lubitsch asked, "that is still remembered from the last war? It is not Griffith's Hearts of the World, or any of those sad ones. It's Chaplin's Shoulder's Arms." Lubitsch knew that laughter expressed the health of a society, and that the task of the filmmaker was to create a reality that violated the neat boundaries we tend to draw between comedy and high seriousness. And in offering us (or, I should say, offering up) Greenberg, Lubitsch made telling allusion to the doubly vanished Jew: the Jew who was then disappearing from Europe, and the Jew who, in that otherwise noble era of classic Hollywood cinema, ad all but disappeared from the American screen.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight's 7:30 PM screening ends a short run at the Stanford Theatre.

WHY: To Be Or Not To Be is far too infrequently revived on Frisco Bay cinema screens. It's played at the Stanford a few times over the years, but I can't recall it playing other venues for quite some time. It was even left out of a otherwise-substantial 2007 Lubitsch retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive for some reason. The most recent screening I can think of outside of Palo Alto was in 2004, when it screened as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Unfortunately I missed it then.

The 2013 SFJFF doesn't include any films from the classic Hollywood era, but it does have an expansive program of films (and television) by and about Jews from all over the world. Lincoln Spector has already previewed a few of the selections, but he hasn't seen the three films I'm most excited about, all of which coincidentally screen on the same day at the Castro Theatre, July 29th. These are Jerry and Me, an Iranian filmmaker's essay film on her personal connection to the comedy of Jerry Lewis over the years, which screens with another documentary about Jews in Iran Before the Revolution (not to be confused with the Bertolucci film from 1964.) And The Last Sentence, a drama about Sweden's shameful neutrality during World War II, directed by one of the most respected veterans of that country's filmmaking scene, Jan Troell, who is expected to be on hand for the Castro screening of the film- an event the auteur's fans will want to take a Monday afternoon off in order to catch. Last but not least, First Cousin Once Removed, an exploration of Alzheimer's made by one of America's most under-appreciated documentarians, Alan Berliner (his insomnia doc Wide Awake is tremendous, and what I've seen of his early experimental collage films are great as well). Berliner will also be at the Castro in person to receive the SFJFF's annual Freedom of Expression Award, and it's hard to think of a more deserving man.

HOW: To Be Or Not To Be screens via a 35mm print, on a double-bill with Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours.

Twenty Years South

Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive has a new calendar out, full of goodies. Oakland's Paramount has plans to show Wait Until Dark, The General and Captain Blood in March. San Rafael is getting a rare Jan Troell retrospective February 27-March 6. Even Sepastapol has its annual documentary festival March 5-7. And here in Frisco we've got a new SF Cinematheque season underway as well as festival after festival after festival: first Noise Pop, then German Gems, then the Disposable Film Festival, and then my own favorite festival of the season, the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival, which has been amply previewed by Michael Hawley. Before you know it, the San Francisco International Film Festival will be around the corner; Frisco Bay's most prominent film festival has already begun announcing festival events, namely the 1916 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Stephen Merritt, Daniel Handler & David Hegarty providing musical accompaniment, the presentation of the Kanbar screenwriting award (by John Waters!) to James Schamus, best known for his collaborations with Ang Lee; their film Ride With the Devil, will screen May 1st.

Where does this leave the South Bay? Well, the SFIAAFF does run one weekend of films in San Jose, at the Camera 12. And the Stanford Theatre is still in the first week of a diverse Akira Kurosawa retrospective, including some of his most famous as well as some of his most obscure films, samurai-centered and otherwise. The Seven Samurai plays through Friday, so you haven't missed any of the series (which ends March 30 with Ran) yet.

But you probably live under a rock, or else north of the southernmost BART stops, not to realize that the South Bay's biggest film festival of the year, the Cinequest Film Festival, begins its 20th anniversary program tonight with a screening of international co-production the Good Heart starring Brian Cox. Dennis Harvey of sf360 has written an overview of potential festival highlights, but let me add my own voice to the conversation, even if there's a good deal of overlap between his picks and mine.

Though intriguing films like Bong Joon-ho's Mother and Ilisa Barbsh & Lucien Castaing-Taylor's documentary Sweetgrass are promised to screen in Landmark Theatres around Frisco Bay, the majority of Cinequest films are not guaranteed to play anywhere else locally. That includes what must be the must-see of the festival, French master Alain Resnais's latest Wild Grass scheduled for a single screening on March 4th; though it has a distributor, a local theatrical release date has not been set yet. Babnik, the third feature from Alejandro Adams to play Cinequest in as many years is another important draw for those of us who've been intrigued to see what the maker of Around The Bay and Canary has in store next.

I've seen three of the films playing already. The two silent films Dennis James is slated to accompany behind the California Theatre organ are both seen far too infrequently. Erich Von Stroheim's the Merry Widow does not match his masterpiece Greed in either ambition or impact, but any of Stroheim's films are of serious interest to cinephiles. Ernst Lubitsch's the Student Prince of Old Heidelberg, on the other hand, may just be his greatest (and most delightful) silent film, as anyone who saw it open the 2007 San Francisco Silent Film Festival might be inclined to agree.

I've also seen, on a screener DVD, one of the new films in the lineup, with a title inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit. If you're sick and tired of the hip but nowheredly-mobile characters glorified by a certain movement of no-star, low-budget filmmaking that peaked in critical attention a couple ago (yes, that one that rhymes with 'Dumbledore') you may be in the target audience for Jarrod Whaley's Hell Is Other People (fully reviewed by Richard van Busack). There's no way around it: Whaley has created in underground psychotherapist Morty Burnett one of the most pathetic, non-glorified, unappealing characters I've seen on a screen in quite a while. He's likely to truly test an audience's sense of empathy. Though Hell Is Other People doesn't bear enough technical dissimilarity to prevent some observers from distinguishing it from the genre-that-must-not-be-named, those who've been paying close attention might just agree that Whaley has launched a counter-movement of his own, that now just needs a catchy name to spread like wildfire. So then, what rhymes with 'Voldemort'?

Synchronized Silents

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When attending nearly every program in a weekend-long film festival like the 12th Annual Silent Film Festival, it's impossible not to start noticing connections, coincidences, crossovers and synchronicities. Some seem to be deliberately planted by the programming team, and some are even mentioned from the Castro Theatre stage, or in the program guide (in the interest of full disclosure: I contributed to that document this year, and what you're reading is not going to be a critical piece on the festival, just a set of my own thoughts and reflections, that are likewise not in any way intended to represent the festival.)

Take a deep breath now...

This year's SFSFF brought films starring both of Hollywood's two great "Latin lovers" of the silent era: Mexican-American Ramon Navarro in the Student Prince of Old Heidelberg and Italian-American Rudolph Valentino in Camille, the film he made right before hitting top-tier romantic lead stardom in the Sheik, a film title that entered the American slang lexicon under the definition "a romantically alluring man," though that American Heritage Dictionary definition fails to capture the sarcastic, derogatory usage of the word when used by a Beery brother in either Beggars of Life or the Godless Girl, the latter of which was directed by Cecil B. DeMille several years after his older brother William C. de Mille directed Miss Lulu Bett, which featured a considerably less rugged Milton Sills than the one starring in the Valley of the Giants, which contained a wonderful comic interlude from Arthur Stone, whose Just a Good Guy was among the two-reelers shown in the Tribute to Hal Roach, as was the Charley Chase short Movie Night, which contained a tremendous extended sequence in a movie theatre, as did a Cottage on Dartmoor, previously mentioned by Adam Hartzell in his festival preview on this site, which sparked a comment linking to D.W. Griffith's Those Awful Hats, a short whose French DVD release came through Lobster films, the company founded by Serge Bromberg, who presented a program with the same title as that DVD, Retour de Flamme, which featured at least one film (Les Roses magiques) directed by the Spanish transplant to Paris, Segundo de Chomón, who later would devise special effects for the Italian epic Cabiria, the inspiration for Maciste and its numerous sequels.

Whew! That was a mouthful, but here are a few more synchronicities, that seem worth discussing at greater length than would be allowed if I tried to squeeze them into a single sentence:

I spent enough youthful summers in Mendocino County teaching teenagers about nature and environmental issues that I harbor no nostalgia about the timber industry. But I have to admit that some beautiful images were captured as a function of the destruction of the great groves of Sequoia sempervirens, or Coast Redwood trees. Such images abounded in the Valley of the Giants, an action-packed melodrama filmed by First National further up the coast in Humboldt. The truly astonishing, though brief, images came from a film transferred from a Spirograph disc entitled Oregon Lumber Flume, which played as part of the enlightening (and free) More Amazing Tales From the Archives program Sunday morning. Traveling on this redwood aqueduct above the misty treetops made for an exhilarating 1.25 minutes.

The Movie Night/a Cottage on Dartmoor connection mentioned above ought to be stressed further. Barring Tsai Ming-Liang's masterful Goodbye, Dragon Inn, I'm hard-pressed to think of a film with a longer, more elaborate scene depicting the way a movie theatre audience might behave than either of these two films display. A Cottage on Dartmoor's scene (following the film's third iteration of the priceless intertitle "Will you come with me to a talkie tonight?") serves a purpose in the story, but its primary function is surely to mourn the passing of the silent film era. The talkie in question is preceded by a Harold Lloyd film, which explains why the SFSFF played an early Lloyd short Lonesome Luke's Lively Life before a Cottage on Dartmoor as part of its weekend-long presentation of George Eastman House enlargements of 28mm films to 35mm. Stephen Horne's stupendous score, one of the real musical highlights in a weekend packed wall-to-wall with great, professional silent film accompanists, beautifully emphasizes the contrast between the joyful, immersing experience of watching a silent film with live musicians involved, and that of watching the average early talking picture, and helps to explain why it's so much more difficult to find rude audience members at the Silent Film Festival than at modern theatres that insist on using technological novelty rather than entertainment value as the primary selling point for the films exhibited.

Though I only saw the film a couple days ago, I already don't remember if it's ever made clear whether the film Charley Chase brings his family to in Movie Night, also made in 1929, is a silent or talking picture. Either way, great comic hay is made of obnoxious audience behavior (in this case, mostly Chase's). Another interesting connection, one mentioned by Rob Stone of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, is the film's depiction of a pre-show raffle similar to the one held for the first time by the Silent Film Festival this year. Though the prizes are quite different; Chase went home with a duck while one lucky SFSFF patron won a $5000 McRosky Mattress shopping spree, and another won passes to the 2008 Seattle Film Festival. In Movie Night, before Chase wins his lucky duck, a Jewish character wins a large ham, evidence that the contest was probably not as rigged as Chase's intertitle suggested. The raffle prize offered just prior to the Hal Roach tribute was two tickets to see the silent boxing film His People at the SF Jewish Film Festival next Saturday. Yet another synchronicity, I suppose?

Finally, two directors with reputations connected to their facility for staging large crowd scenes were featured in this year's festival: Ernst Lubitsch and Cecil B. DeMille. I've tended to overlook Lubitsch as a director of truly epic-scale productions, thanks to the more intimate turn his films took in the early 1930s. But his German historical extravaganzas like Madame Dubarry and Anna Boleyn were really what got the Hollywood studios interested in wooing him to these shores. Since I haven't seen any of these films yet, the Student Prince of Old Heidelberg is probably more dependent on large crowd scenes than any other Lubitsch films I've seen. In this film, his crowds seem very tautly choreographed, and not only in the scenes of rigid formality like the opening shots of huge groups of men removing their hats for the king. Even in the ostensibly looser scenes of tavern carousing shortly before the intermission, Lubitsch has instilled symmetries of motion that give the crowd a particularly otherworldly quality perfect for this half of the film's idealized tone.

On the other hand, DeMille's crowds in the Godless Girl, while undoubtedly carefully-choreographed as well, always seem on the verge of exploding into utter chaos. That is if they haven't already, as in the jaw-dropping "holy war in the stairwell" sequence. This is probably an obvious point, as Lubitsch is employing his crowds to make the viewer laugh or at least smile, while DeMille's aim is for the edge-of-the-seat thrill. I for one felt I truly didn't know what was going to happen next, or just how far a descent into the darkness of human nature DeMille was going to take the audience (the answer: pretty far, but of course only to set up a scene of redemption, a structure that gets repeated in the film more than once.) Contrast that with the crowd scenes directed by Charles Brabin for the Valley of the Giants. These were pretty much the only scenes in the film that really reminded me of the other Brabin film I've seen, the Jonathan Rosenbaum-approved Mask of Fu Manchu, where a sense of the chaos of crowds is quite evident, but also infused with an overwhelming sense of narrative doom.

So, how was your weekend? Notice any connections, coincidences, crossovers or synchronicities?