The Anita Monga Era at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

As I find myself with less and less of the time and (perhaps more importantly) the ability to direct my focus away from the world's turmoil to write about cinema as much as I'd like to, I become increasingly protective of my old articles and interviews. I'm not proud of this feeling; I know it's the opposite of how most wordsmiths far more talented than I feel about their older pieces; to generalize from discussions I've had with some of them it's clear that many of them can't bear to look at most of their prior work, and that this feeling of near-disgust is one of their motivations for continuing to push themselves to become better writers. 

But for me, even though I of course see turns of phrase and ideas in prior writing that I wouldn't choose to employ today, I still find value in many of my past musings. So it was very disappointing to learn last month that all of the articles I wrote for publication at the Fandor streaming service's Keyframe website between 2011 and 2016 had disappeared from the "live" internet (though a few, though not all, of them still existed in google caches and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, last I checked) as part of Fandor's rebranding. What's worse is that so much of the other, better writing by other cinephiles and critics on that site seems to have disappeared too. I'm so glad that at least David Hudson, who'd been such an essential voice at GreenCine (R.I.P.) and The Auteurs (now Mubi) before his time at Keyframe, has found a home worthy of his Daily dispatches, namely Criterion. 

When I contacted Fandor about the disappearance of my Keyframe articles, I was told that "all content" from Keyframe would soon be republished on fandor.com soon. While waiting for that to occur, assuming it ever really does, I thought I'd republish some of my older articles here on my otherwise-underused blog. Being that tonight is the opening night of one of my annual cinephiliac highlights, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, I thought I'd start with this 2014 piece in which I discussed the history of the festival and especially the changes that its Artistic Director Anita Monga has made to it since being hired in 2009. Obviously some of the references to years passed have dated during the three years since this piece was originally published at Keyframe/Fandor, and the particular films I'm highlighting in this article aren't screening this weekend. In fact, as Michael Hawley notes in his detailed preview of the 2017 festival, not a single one of the feature-length films showing this year have played at a prior SFSFF (he doesn't say that it's the first time since 2010 that the summer festival includes no repeats of feature films screened at previous summer or winter events; the only repeat I'm expecting is the four-minute-long The Dancing Pig as part of Saturday morning's Magic And Mirth program.) But there are plenty of films I'm extremely excited to see this weekend, foremost among them Ernst Lubitsch's The Doll, which I've been waiting a long time to see on the big screen, the always stirring Battleship Potemkin (pictured at the top of this post), with live music from the Matti Bye Ensemble, and pretty much everything screening on 35mm per the Film On Film Foundation's latest info. (Especially the rarities from Poland, Italy and the Ukraine.) I've also heard great things about some of the movies screening digitally like The Informer and Terje Vigen, and will probably want to revisit longtime favorites like The Freshman and A Page of Madness as well.

Without further ado, here's the republication of my May 29, 2014 article "The Anita Monga Era at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival", relatively unchanged other than the links and images.

Twenty Junes ago, San Francisco moviegoers were first made aware of something called simply the Silent Film Festival, described as "a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the art of silent film and its value as a record of early 20th century life." This tiny upstart, run by two people (co-founders Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons) out of a one-bedroom apartment, had yet to consummate its first actual festival. It was making its debut in symbiosis with an already established festival, the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, then in its 18th edition (and now running 38 years strong as Frameline). This launch was a single Sunday afternoon Castro Theatre screening of Ernst Lubitsch's 1919 gender-bending comedy I Don't Want To Be A Man, with Dennis James providing Wurlitzer organ accompaniment and Leigh Crow (a.k.a. Elvis Herselvis) on hand to recite the English translation of German subtitles. Sandwiched between showings of Dionne Brand's documentary Long Time Comin' and the posthumously-assembled Derek Jarman film Glitterbug, I Don't Want To Be A Man was a hit with the SFLGFF audience, and a tangible foundation had been laid for future success. 

It would be another two years of fundraising and community-building before the first actual San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) was underway in July 1996. Three feature films (Gretchen the Greenhorn, Lucky Star and Ben-Hur) and a program of shorts, fragments and trailers from lost films (including Lubitsch's Oscar-winning The Patriot) packed a Castro Sunday with 1800 attendees. Everything screened as superior 35mm prints played at the proper projection speed, with expert musical accompaniment. This has been the template the SFSFF has followed ever since. Initially slow-growing (the 1998 event actually scaled back to one film - Erich Von Stroheim's S.F.-shot Greed - and was billed as a benefit for the festival, but has retroactively been counted as the 3rd annual festival), SFSFF expanded from one packed Castro day to two in its seventh year, adding a third day to its summer festival and an annual winter screening in year 10. This weekend the nineteenth edition of the festival will screen more than twenty-five films in eighteen programs over four days, plus a free presentation of recent work from archivists Bryony Dixon and Dan Streible, and industry veterans Craig Barron and Ben Burtt at the "Amazing Tales From The Archives" showcase Friday morning. 

In 2009 Anita Monga took the reins of Artistic Director over from Salmons. 'Peaceful Transition of Power' is an understatement here, as he was ready to step away from the organization he'd helped create, just as Chittick had a few years prior, and was overjoyed to be able to pass it to a beloved and veteran film booker (Monga oversaw the Castro's regular programming for sixteen years until 2004) with deep contacts in the distribution world. Since then the organization has been more ambitious and successful than ever, continuing the incremental annual expansion of its summer programs while mounting weekend retrospectives for individual silent-era directors (so far: Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin) and special events like, at Oakland's über-grand Paramount Theatre, Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc with a full orchestra and chorus and the to-date only four North American screenings of Abel Gance's triple-projector epic Napoléon in its full Photoplay restoration by Kevin Brownlow, with Carl Davis conducting his symphonic score. Annual attendance has grown to 18,000 and the festival has become at least as internationally significant as any silent film showcase outside Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Italy. 

Under Chittick and Salmons, SFSFF tended to avoid most of the silent film staples of Film History 101 classes in favor of films made, whether by auteurs or by skilled craftsmen and women, with entertainment rather than self-conscious artistry in mind. Though launched with a German film, the festival proper didn't feature a foreign-made film until its fourth year when Lev Kuleshov's By The Law was shown. Non-American films continued to be programmed but they were more likely to be lesser-known gems from Shanghai or Latin America than "warhorses" from Scandinavia or the Weimar Republic. Monga's arrival coincided with an explosion of European films in the festival line-ups, and this year's edition is the most impressively international yet, with two feature films from Germany and an unprecedented three from British producers, two from Sweden, two from the Soviet Union, and two from East Asia. Language barriers some filmgoers experience with subtitled sound pictures aren't an issue for silent pictures. "With silent film you don't have to be constrained because people aren't speaking in words; they're speaking in intertitles which can be easily translated." Monga reminded me when I interviewed her last week. "In the silent era everybody really sounds how you think they sound." 

Monga's shown a few extremely famous European silents when there's been a special reason to, like premiering Fritz Lang's Metropolis reunited with footage that had been missing from it for over eighty years, introducing San Francisco audiences to Swedish composer Matti Bye and his ensemble with a signature accompaniment for Häxan, or showcasing Pandora's Box in a new photochemical restoration. But for the most part she eschews the "warhorses" as well, in favor of demolishing audience stereotypes. For 2014 she's picked films by Kuleshov, Dreyer and Yasujiro Ozu, but in each case they're films that go against the grain of their auteurs' reputation. Ozu's gangster picture Dragnet Girl has been called a "film noir" by David Bordwell, and may be the only film the Japanese family drama/comedy specialist made in which a gun is fired. Dreyer's The Parson's Widow is an uncharacteristically ironic comedy by the ponderous and austere director of Vampyr and Ordet. And Kuleshov, best known for his theory of using editing to change audience perception of an individual shot, made only one feature-length comedy and it screens Saturday night. The Extraordinary Adventures Of Mr. West In the Land of the Bolsheviks, as scholar Vlada Petrić has noted, does indeed utilize the "Kuleshov effect" when it intercuts its American-in-Moscow protagonist with real archival footage of a Red Square march to make it appear as if the Harold Lloyd-inspired character is integrated into a space the actor never occupied, the scene resonates with comic absurdity. It's a proto-Zelig moment. 

Most of the other international selections are truly obscure, at least here in the land of Mr. West Coast. I'd be pretty surprised to learn that China's first international prize-winning film The Song Of The Fisherman (by Cai Chusheng, slightly better known for The Spring River Flows East) or late-1920s German dramas Harbor Drift and Under the Lantern, had screened in a Bay Area cinema since the silent era, or ever. Monga singled out Swedish actress/director Karin Swanstrom's The Girl In Tails as particularly (though of course not literally) "made for San Francisco". She told me "it interweaves all of these disparate stories and there's a retreat with a group of wild women: intellectuals and lesbians and women living apart from society, embracing their goofy nephew who comes with the transgressing girl in tails. It was a surprise to me and I think people will really love it." 

One signature of Monga's programming is the annual inclusion of some kind of documentary in the summer program. I use the term loosely to include an exhilarating formalist study like Man With A Movie Camera or an ethnographic slice-of-life like Legong: Dance of the Virgins, but there's no mistaking The Epic Of Everest for anything other than history in the making. Filmed by Captain J. B. L. Noel, formerly of a British Army regiment in North India and an explorer in his own right, this chronicling of a G. Leigh Mallory's climbing team attempt to summit the planet's highest peak is rich in slices of Tibetan life, mountaineering drama, and Himalayan views that would make even Leni Riefenstahl gasp for breath. It's also a triumph of filmmaking technology's ability to withstand extremely harsh natural conditions, much like Herbert Ponting's footage of Captain Scott's doomed mission to the South Pole, which greatly inspired Noel even before it was edited into the form shown at the 2011 SFSFF: The Great White Silence. 

There are, of course, plenty of American films in the 2014 festival program, including six features and a generous helping of short films of various kinds. The opening night film is one of the landmark Hollywood films of the early 1920s and the one that made Rudolph Valentino a screen giant: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Cited by no less an authority than Kevin Brownlow as "the greatest World War I picture" it's an ideal choice for the festival to commemorate the 100th anniversary of The Great War. Monga promised they'll be showing "Brownlow's own restored print. So Patrick Stanbury, Kevin's partner at Photoplay, will be in the projection booth, changing the speeds as the film goes. It's 132 minutes but it is not all the same speed." The musical accompaniment to this Argentine-centric film will be provided by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, who are celebrating an anniversary as well, as they banded together as the Mont Alto Tango and Ragtime Orchestra 25 years ago. 

For the fourth straight summer, the SFSFF will screen a film starring acrobat extraordinaire Douglas Fairbanks. Like Mr. Fix-It and The Half-Breed before it, this year's selection The Good Bad Man is one of the lesser-known of the eleven films he made under the directorial guidance of Allan Dwan (the better-known ones include A Modern Musketeer and Robin Hood). All three films were restored with direct support from the festival, in fact. Mr. Fix-It was aided by the SFSFF preservation fund, and both The Half-Breed and The Good Bad Man are in fact SFSFF restorations (aided by archival partners of course) outputted to 35mm presentation prints that require special projection equipment. "The Castro projectors have variable speeds, but they don't go down as slow as The Good Bad Man needs. That creates a lot of flicker on screen, so we have to replace the blades. It's a three-blade shutter instead of a two-blade shutter," Monga explained to me. "We control it at the Castro, so we know that the print is not going to be ruined with one turn through the projector. That's the fate of 35mm. You can wreck a really expensive print really fast." 

This fragility, and its effect on the policies of archives and distributors that supply films to a festival like this, is why the SFSFF is increasingly employing digital projection. About two-thirds of the 2013 summer festival program was screened on 35mm prints, while this year it's expected to be about half-and-half. All the slapstick comedy screenings, for example, are planned to be shown via DCP, for instance, including both of the Buster Keaton showings. A newly-discovered alternate version of his short The Blacksmith debuts as part of a program presented by Paris archivist Serge Bromberg (also including work by Roscoe Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin), and the festival closes with one of Keaton's biggest commercial successes The Navigator, preceded by an animated short from the Soviet Union called Pochta. Monga sounds particularly excited about this East-West program pairing. "There's something that is going to be perfect about putting it before the Keaton. In The Navigator particularly there's a kind of Rube Goldberg-ian aspect to the actions, and Pochta's forward momentum is all the letters being sent around the world in search of a guy who's one step ahead of the letter. You get to see this amazing progression." 

In fact every one of the SFSFF programs is a testament to the international cross-connections that informed cinema history as it was being made, and to those that continue to inform its rediscovery and restoration. The exportable nature of film has always defined it, especially in the years before recorded dialogue created obstacles to immediate comprehension of images across language-segregating boundaries. Every foreign filmmaker on display this weekend was directly influenced by American films, and it's fair to say all the Americans were influenced by international filmmakers as well. And it's through international archival cooperation that many of these films are being presented today. Midnight Madness, a DeMille Pictures production, was thought lost until it was repatriated from its hiding place in a New Zealand archive in 2010. A similar story involving the Czech Film Archive is responsible for the availability of the 1928 version of Ramona, starring Mexican import to Hollywood Dolores Del Rio and made by the most thoroughly American of the weekend's directors: Chickasaw actor-turned-director Edwin Carewe. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival's motto has long been "True art transcends time." It may be time to add a corollary. It transcends distance as well.

The Public Eye (1992)

WHO: This film was shot by cinematographer Peter Suschitsky. who was the Director of Photography on The Empire Strikes Back as well as on films for Peter Watkins, Tim Burton and M. Night Shyamalan, but who is probably best-known as David Cronenberg's regular cinematographer since Dead Ringers in 1988.

WHAT: I haven't seen this film, beyond a few short clips and enough of the uncharacteristically monochromatic opening credits, which feature photographs by Arthur Fellig a.k.a. WeeGee, the renowned New York photographer of the 1930s-1960s.  Joe Pesci plays a character based heavily on Fellig/WeeGee. I recently spoke to Eddie Muller, who programmed this film as part of tonight's Noir City festival opening. and had this to say about it:

I'm not gonna say that it's a modern classic or anything like that but there are parts of it that are absolutely spectacular. Mostly the stuff that captures WeeGee at work. That's what is just fabulous. Where he's driving around New York to Mark Isham's score, and he's finding things to photograph. It also fits the theme of this festival perfectly because it's about a newspaper photographer who believes he's creating art. There's a gimmicky crime plot and all this nonsense with Barbara Hershey being threatened by these gangsters, but that's just defined to follow this other thread which is about the difficulties he has having people take his work seriously as art.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 9:30 PM.

WHY: The "theme of this festival" Mr. Muller speaks of above is "The Art of Darkness", this year's organizing principle for Noir City, providing excuses to show two dozen films about morally questionable painters, writers, curators, dancers, musicians and filmmakers as well as photographers. Although Muller makes a strong case for photography as a particularly cinematic artistic medium in an excellent, brand-new podcast interview on the Cinephiliacs which touches on several of the same topics as my own just-published Keyframe Daily interview article with him: film restoration, his days as a student in George Kuchar's San Francisco Art Institute class, etc. Muller gives a great interview, and since quite a bit of what we discussed didn't fit into my Keyframe article, I plan to publish more excerpts from our talk over the next several days as Noir City unfolds. Stay tuned.

I'm excited to see The Public Eye tonight, although I wouldn't be surprised if a number of Noir City diehards are feeling more skeptical about the festival's first-ever full-color opening night double-bill (and closing day, come to think of it) and might be tempted to skip tonight in order to catch the Stanford Theatre's weekend presentations of Casablanca and Gilda in 35mm, or the Rafael's 35mm showings of (non-noir, but a big-screen must see) Foreign Film Oscar frontrunner Son Of Saul, which after Sunday is expected to screen digitally, as it's showing in every other Frisco Bay cinema despite its director's preference for 35mm presentation (which I agree with, especially for the format's tendency to exacerbate the disorientation of the opening moments). Because you don't want to miss anything screening Noir City on Saturday or Sunday, right? Especially not Saturday night's international noir showcase. But I'm lucky to have seen Casablanca, Gilda and Son of Saul in 35mm, twice apiece, so I'm ready, willing and able to start following Muller's art theme at the beginning and, hopefully, do my best to follow it to the end next weekend when it closes with 1960s photographic subversions Peeping Tom and Blow Up.

HOW: The Public Eye screens on a double-bill with Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Rear Window. The Public Eye will screen from a 35mm print. I'm not certain about Rear Window's format.

Suspicion (1941)

WHO: Joan Fontaine is the only person ever to have won an Academy Award for performing in a picture directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She won the Best Actress award over Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Greer Garson and, most famously, her sister Olivia de Havilland.

WHAT: Hitchcock's third film made after moving to California from England was set entirely in England but used some shots of Northern California in its construction, although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the actors never had to leave the studio, as every shot looks like it could have been completed using stand-ins, rear-projections and/or backdrops. I wrote a bit about the key scene in my Keyframe Daily write-up focusing on Noir City selections involving San Francisco and Monterey County settings:

In Suspicion, another Noir City 13 pick featuring Joan Fontaine, perilous Big Sur cliffs stood in for coastal England in the scene where Fontaine investigates a site where her deceitful husband (Cary Grant) has taken cheerful investor in a potential real-estate venture to inspect—or is it to be murdered?  No series of marriage-themed films could be complete without an example of Hitchcock, who returned to the subject repeatedly throughout his career

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 1:30 today only at the Castro Theatre, courtesy of the Noir City festival.

WHY: While all but three of the Noir City 13 selections (last night's Woman on the Run, tonight's The Suspect, and Wednesday's Crime of Passion) have never been screened before at the festival's San Francisco iterations, I believe that Suspicion is one of ten titles in the festival that go one further: they've never shown at Noir City events hosted in any city. I have a feeling that impresario Eddie Muller is just a hair more curious to see how Suspicion and the other nine films will play in front of an audience he's assembled than he is about some of the others which have screened at his events in Hollywood or elsewhere before. Those nine according to my (unverified) records: The Thin Man, After the Thin Man, The Set-Up, Clash By Night, The Sleeping Tiger, The Guilty, Les Diaboliques, Seconds and the Honeymoon Killers.

Today actually offers some tough choices for noir lovers, as there are no less than four films screening at the Castro, but also a 35mm print of Double Indemnity at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive as part of its half-film, half-digital Billy Wilder series. (The next 35mm print in that series is The Lost Weekend January 30). And the Alfred Hitchcock series at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto is showing one of his most noir-ish of films (perhaps even moreso than Suspicion), Notorious. At least that one repeats tomorrow, so a true obsessive could theoretically attend the Sunday matinees of Douglas Sirk's Shockproof and Sleep, My Love and then head down the peninsula in time to see the 9:35 showing of Notorious (you might even be able to make it to To Catch a Thief at 7:30). Being carless, I'm not going to do that myself, but I am trying to figure out how to squeeze a viewing of one of the last few Hitchcock films I've never seen before, Young and Innocent, into next weekend without missing too many of the Noir City festivities. Public transportation schedules won't allow me to see that reputedly wonderful Hitchcock film without missing out on either Edward Dmytryk's The Hidden Room on Thursday, the new Film Noir Foundation restoration of The Guilty on Friday, Luchino Visconti's Ossessione AND either Cry Terror! or Les Diaboliques next Saturday, or else The Honeymoon Killers next Sunday. Of these, I've only seen Ossessione before. Right now I'm leaning towards skipping The Hidden Room but if anyone wants to speak up for it I'm all ears. Noting that there's at least one strongly marital-themed Hitchcock film playing at the Stanford almost every weekend of its eight-week series makes me wish the latter venue had waited just a couple weeks to start their series out of conflict with Noir City: 'Til Death Do Us Part.

HOW: According to the Film On Film Foundation website, every Noir City selection this year will be screened on 35mm prints except for Friday night's No Man Of Her Own. Suspicion screens on a double-bill with Ida Lupino's The Bigamist.

Woman on the Run (1950)

image supplied by Film Noir Foundation

WHO: Ann Sheridan (who was born 100 years ago this February 21st) stars in this, and was also an uncredited co-producer.

WHAT: As I wrote in a Keyframe Daily article previewing the Noir City film festival, published yesterday:

Ann Sheridan plays the hard-boiled spouse of a failed artist who has gone into hiding after witnessing a murder. She attempts to track him down using old sketchbooks of neighborhood inhabitants as clues to his whereabouts, while trying to evade detectives and newspapermen trying to get to him first. If her wanderings across city hills into various dives feel particularly authentic to San Francisco’s character, perhaps it’s because the cinematographer was a native son, Hal Mohr, who’d filmed extensively here. (His credits include the notorious The Last Night of the Barbary Coast for Sol Lesser in 1913.) Director Norman Foster, best known for his collaborations with Orson Welles, had also made his transition from actor to director in a 1936 San Francisco film called I Cover Chinatown. Woman on the Run is a completely unpretentious, excellent thriller and a genuine Noir City discovery making its long-awaited reappearance at the festival after the last copy was thought destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire.

Here's a link to my piece on the Universal fire at the time it happened, and more importantly, a candid 2010 interview with Eddie Muller about his exchanges with the studio after that event. I also must link to Brian Hollins's terrific Reel SF page for this film, which guides us through the specific San Francisco (and Southern California) locations where it was filmed.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:30 tonight only at the Castro Theatre as part of Noir City.

WHY: With yesterday's re-opening of the Pacific Film Archive for the Spring semester coinciding with a new Stanford Theatre Alfred Hitchcock retrospective, the new Frisco Bay repertory film year is now officially underway (although I've already seen some fine revival programs at the Exploratorium, the Castro, and Oddball Films, and regretfully missed some at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum)  I usually like to at least start my annual I Only Have Two Eyes survey of the prior year's repertory scene before the start of Noir City, but a combination of that festival starting early and my soliciting entries later than I'd hoped means that's not happening this year. But I'm hard at work compiling and you'll soon start seeing the results posted here. Just not before tonight's thrilling kick-off to ten days of 35mm noir heaven at the Castro.

As Noir City honcho Eddie Muller told G. Allen Johnson recently, tonight's festival opener Woman on the Run was the genesis of this year's "Unholy Matrimony" theme. I tried to avoid hinting at spoilers in my Keyframe article on the festival, so I didn't talk much about the marriage angle of the film in the above-quoted paragraph, but suffice to say (still eschewing revealing anything specific to those who might not have seen the film) Woman on the Run presents a really interesting portrayal of wedlock circa 1950. It's an ideal opener for so many reasons, and of the films in the festival I've seen before, it's the one I'm most excited to see again (followed closely by the Tuesday night Robert Ryan double bill and the Wednesday night Barbara Stanwyck bill, which is an exact duplicate of one I saw at the Stanford last April). Partly I'm so excited to see Woman on the Run on the big screen because in 2014 I moved into an apartment overlooking one of the locations where it was shot. To think Ann Sheridan was captured on film walking below my kitchen window sixty-five years ago! I can't wait to see that particular scene, and in fact the whole film again in what I expect will be a gorgeous 35mm print a zillion times more clear than the available DVD and youtube versions.

HOW: Woman on the Run screens from a newly-struck, never publicly projected, 35mm print on a double-bill with an archival 35mm print of what I'm pretty certain was Nicholas Ray's only film set in San Francisco: Born to be Bad.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)

screen capture from DVD release of Hugo (2011)

WHO: Rudolph Valentino became a star from his role in this film.

WHAT: One of the most widely-seen films of the silent era, it reportedly took in $4 million in box office grosses, around the same amount as Chaplin's The Gold Rush did a few years later. But it is far less-frequently revived today. I missed its last Frisco Bay screening ten years ago because I was foolish enough to let my family schedule a reunion the same weekend as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. I'm thrilled to get a second chance to see it tonight, as it opens the 19th edition of that festival, the only reprised feature in the weekend program.

WHERE/WHEN: 7PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: I was reminded by Mick LaSalle's SFSFF preview that Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was cited by festival founder Melissa Chittick as the film that inspired her to create a silent film festival, back when she saw it presented at the 1993 San Francisco International Film Festival with Dennis James accompanying on organ. It only took about a year for the festival to hold its first event in 1994, an early history of the festival that I describe in my own festival preview, just published today at Fandor's Keyframe blog. There's been a sea of advance coverage for the festival, including previews by Thomas Gladysz, Dennis Harvey, and Michael Hawley. I'm especially impressed by Carl Martin's thorough recounting of the provenance of all the 35mm prints for features being shown at the festival. I interviewed Anita Monga, who has now been the festival's artistic director for five years, for my own article. I hope you enjoy reading it, and seeing the films this weekend at the Castro.

HOW: 35mm print from Kevin Brownow's Photoplay Productions in England, with live accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. As Monga told me in our interview, "Patrick Stanbury, Kevin’s partner at Photoplay, will be in the projection booth, changing the speeds as the film goes. It’s 132 minutes but it is not all the same speed."

The Third Man (1949)

WHO: Graham Greene wrote the screenplay for this film.

WHAT: As Imogen Sara Smith recently wrote,

The Third Man possesses intoxicating style and at the same time dissects the ease with which style can trump substance in the movies—the way, in film noir especially, glamour and aesthetic bliss can set one’s moral compass spinning. In the film’s tilting, labyrinthine world, beauty and corruption, cruelty and charm blend as smoothly as coffee and cream. It’s a world of splendor and rubble, leprous baroque apartments in half-gutted buildings, bleak fairgrounds and tired gypsy cafes. Anton Karas’s famous zither score, jaunty and wistful, imbues a mood of wry detachment and haunting nostalgia.

WHERE/WHEN: Screen tonight only at 9:00 at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: Of all the films screening at this year's Noir City film festival running tonight through Sunday, February 2nd at its traditional Castro Theatre home, The Third Man is the most widely-known and critically-regarded. At least in the English-speaking world it is, that is. For the first time in the festival's history, it's showing a majority of foreign-language noirs among its program, fulfilling the wishes of cinephiles who have long hoped that films from France, Mexico, Japan, etc. might find a place under the festival's spectacular tent. I doubt I'm alone in hoping that this year's Noir City edition is at least as successful as ever with audiences, in the hopes that future editions might find more room for more noir from more countries. (Italy? Egypt? Finland? Thailand? I know they're out there.)

I've written about this year's festival and the international history of noir in an article published at Keyframe yesterday (other articles on the festival so far include Smith's, Sura Wood's, preview, and G. Allen Johnson's interview with festival director Eddie Muller), but my efforts to drum up interest in this year's festival won't stop there. Though I've sen The Third Man countless times (including a 35mm Castro screening less than two years ago) I plan to go again tonight. I imagine there will be folks attending who are excited to see the Third Man but may be on the fence about attending the rest of the festival because they're unsure about their interest in foreign-language films they may not have heard of before. I'm hoping my enthusiasm for favorites like Stray Dog, Quai des Orfèvres a.k.a. Jenny L'Amour, etc. might rub off on some of these fence-sitters and encourage them to take a chance on the rest of the program. The Third Man seems an ideal choice to open this international edition of Noir City, not only because it's a great movie that's never screened previously at Noir City, but also because Graham Greene is a perfect bridge to European noir for the Hollywood noir fan. Influential American films like This Gun For Hire and Ministry of Fear were based upon his novels, and are quite consistent with the British noirs he was responsible for once becoming a screenwriter: Brighton Rock (also screening at Noir City this week), The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man.

HOW: On a double-bill with Journey Into Fear, both screening from 35mm prints.

Kid Auto Races At Venice, Cal. (1914)

WHO: Charlie Chaplin starred in this.

WHAT: The second film featuring Chaplin ever to have been released, and the first in which he wore the outfit he's been best known for ever since. As I wrote in a new piece on Chaplin published at Fandor (where it and Chaplin's other Keystone films are available to stream) yesterday,

This was the first audience for Chaplin in what would soon be known as his Little Tramp costume, which he’d put together just days prior to film the first shots of Mabel’s Strange Predicament, and we see the crowd reacting to his wanderings on the track, near-misses with racers, and battles with Lehrman and others to get closer to the camera so he can mug more effectively. Most of them appear delighted by his antics, although some shield their own faces from the machine’s stare. They realize just as much as Chaplin’s “odd character,” as he is called in a title card, that the camera can document them for a certain amount of posterity (surely nobody guessed a hundred years), and have an opposite reaction.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today at the Castro Theatre at 4PM, and at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont at 7:30 PM.

WHY: Today is the precisely 100th anniversary of the day when a small movie crew including Chaplin and director Henry Lehrman went to a racetrack at the popular resort town of Venice, California, and shot this film. Chaplin's "Little Tramp" character had already been captured on film by now, in a few shots for Mabel's Strange Predicament probably taken the day before. But the "Little Tramp" had never been seen by the public until January 11th, 1914. And since Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. was shot in a single day it beat Mabel's Strange Predicament to the screen by a couple of days.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is screening Kid Auto Races At Venice, Cal. as one small part of its day-long Chaplin event today. For more reading on Chaplin produced for the festival, check out the link round-up on the SFSFF blog, and another Keyframe piece, Jonathan Marlowe's interview with Timothy Brock, who will be leading a small orchestra for two of today's three programs. You can also hear him speak about that on this podcast.

Meanwhile, the Niles screening tonight is the second installment in a year-long project to show every one of Chaplin's 1914 films in chronological order, in 16mm, at that venue.

HOW: Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. screens in 35mm at the Castro, before a DCP showing of The Kid with live music by Timothy Brock and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. It screens along with two more shorts, Ghost Town: the Story of Fort Lee and Crazy Like A Fox, as well as a feature film also celebrating its centennial, The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England , a 2012 inductee to the National Film Registry directed by Maurice Tourneur. All the Niles films will screen on 16mm with piano accompaniment by Bruce Loeb.

September Song

My latest article for Fandor is about Uruguayan cinema, past and present, focusing particularly on three films from the South American country that have been made available by the Global Film Institute to watch on that site's streaming service: Whisky from 2004, Leo's Room from 2009, and A Useful Life, one of my favorite films seen in 2010. A film about the (fictional) closing of a cinematheque, A Useful Life has only grown more poignant in the 2 years since I first saw it, with the threat of mass closures of small cinemas and projectionist job loss looming ever larger on the horizon. The convenience of streaming services is a wonderful thing, especially for those who live in hinterlands where specialty cinema-going options simply do not exist. But I'm glad I live in a city which still cherishes diversity in its filmgoing options, and where this month I was able to once again watch A Useful Life in 35mm, this time on the Castro Theatre's giant, immersive screen.

Like many local cinephiles, I've been attending the Castro even more than usual in the past few weeks- at least considering that August has been a month with no film festivals there. I've made acquaintance with previously-unseen films like Phil Karlson's top-drawer noir Kansas City Confidential and John Huston's phenomenal boxing picture Fat City. I've revisited favorites like A Useful Life and Bruce Conner's explosive Crossroads. And those are just a few highlights I attended. The Castro kicked off its 90th 91st year of operation with its heaviest month of classic repertory in memory: dozens of golden-age Hollywood gems, with a smattering of foreign films and recent cinephile-bait. 3 of the films in the newest edition of the influential Sight & Sound Critics Top 10 announced this month have already played on this screen in August, and before the month ends the new #1 champ Vertigo screens- It plays in 70mm tonight through September 3, and there's no way I'm missing it.  In addition, a 70mm sneak-preview screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's new film The Master made a sell-out crowd of alert PTA fans happy on August 21- one day after the event was announced. If you missed it (like I did), you may be relieved to learn it was NOT the final chance to see Joaquin Phoenix in 70mm, as there is at least one Frisco Bay theatre with the capability to show the ultrasized format and that has it booked for a September 21st opening: Oakland's Grand Lake. And I wouldn't be surprised to see another Castro showing sometime in the future- though perhaps not for a few months or more.

If August's selections at Frisco's most beloved picture palace paid tribute to films from all nine decades of the Castro's history, the September calendar looks more to the recent past, present, and perhaps future, as it seems concocted to reach out to younger movie lovers with cult classics from their own lifespan. With the exceptions of the Vertigo booking (a holdover from August), a posthumous Ernest Borgnine double-bill (Bad Day At Black Rock & The Wild Bunch September 13), and a fascinating-sounding post-war, pre-Neuer Deutscher Film festival selection, every film playing the Castro next month was made after 1970. But it's not a return to the "bad old days" of giving underwhelming Hollywood franchise fodder (and the occasional quality mainstream movie) long runs  that edge interesting selections off the screen. No, the Castro is still programming creatively, like showing five square-offs between the films of Quentin Tarantino and the aforementioned Paul Thomas Anderson, in chronological order (reminiscent of a similar PTA vs. Wes Anderson series five years ago. Speaking of Wes, his latest Moonrise Kingdom plays in 35mm on Sep. 17-18).  There's also back-to-school Wednesdays, a brilliant pairing of new dance documentaries Sep. 25-26, and stints for a couple of festivals: Berlin & Beyond and the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival.

Yes, September brings festival season upon us, and if you check my updated sidebar to the right of this page, you'll see that I've linked to programs for no fewer than twelve Frisco Bay film festivals occurring in this one month. If you wanted to attend a festival every day in September, you'd only be stymied on the 10th, 11th and 12th of the month (and who knows what my detection systems might pick up on before then?) There's no way I can do justice to all of these festivals, but I have seen a few of the features they're bringing already. I saw the 3rd i opening night film The Island President, a worthy primer on the tiny Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives, and its intertwined political and environmental challenges, at Cinequest in San Jose. Also at Cinequest, I saw The Battle of the Queens, a slick Swiss documentary record of cow-on-cow face-offs that's more interesting than it sounds. This unusual Alpine rodeo showcase is part of Berlin & Beyond along with Alexander Sokurov's unpleasant but eye-popping Goethe adaptation Faust, the latest romantic fable entitled Baikonur by quirky German helmer Veit Helmer (who has failed to recapture much of the magic of his feature debut Tuvalu in 3 subsequent fiction-feature tries, in my book), and the Rainer Werner Fassbinder masterpiece Lola, Lola screened the Castro in a 35mm print at Berlin & Beyond 2 years ago, as a last-minute addendum. This time it plays digitally at the Goethe-Institute as part of a 4-film tribute to actor Mario Adorf, who will be on hand for premiere screenings of a "director's cut" version of The Tin Drum and of his newest film The Rhino and the Dragonfly. Perhaps the Berlin & Beyond film I'm most curious about is 4th in this Adorf tribute, which I referred to in the prior paragraph: Georg Tressler's 1959 Ship of the Dead. I know virtually nothing about West Germany's cinema prior to the earliest Herzog & Wenders films, so a chance to see this on 35mm is very appealing. Also of note: opening-night film Barbara by Christian Petzold was just chosen as Germany's selection for the next Foreign Language Film Oscar contest. 

Another geographically-themed festival, the Hong Kong Cinema series, looks like an excellent set of films for both newcomers and aficionados of what some believe is still the Chinese-language cinema's most vibrant production center. 1990s landmarks (Fruit Chan's Made In Hong Kong, Peter Chan's Comrades, Almost A Love Story and The Longest Nite, from producer Johnnie To's Milkyway Studio) share space with enticing new films like To's Romancing In Thin Air, which has largely been shunned by American and European festivals, and Ann Hui's highly acclaimed A Simple Life. The latter played briefly at local multiplexes earlier this year, but I know I'm not the only Hui fan who found out about it too late, so I'm very glad the San Francisco Film Society, which hosts this festival as part of its Fall Season, is bringing it back. Along with a Brent Green installation in the Mission District, Hong Kong Cinema launches a new year of Film Society programming. Major changes are afoot for the venerable institution these days, as a new executive director (Ted Hope) fills the shoes left by Bingham Ray and Graham Leggatt, at the same time that one of Leggatt's most visible legacies, a year-round screening venue at New People Cinema, has been abandoned with the non-renewal of the lease. Nonetheless, several fall events including Hong Kong Cinema will occur at the venue.

Cheryl Eddy's fall film preview article from last week's SF Bay Guardian names more upcoming festivals not yet listed on my site, as their line-ups have not been announced. Her preview also hints at some of the seriously copious goodies revealed in fall screening announcements from institutions like the Pacific Film Archive, and SF Cinematheque. But I'm particularly intrigued by what her article mentions that doesn't appear on the internet otherwise. For example, hints from Craig Baldwin's yet-to-be-announced Other Cinema program (Damon Packard? yes!) and word from Yerba Buena Center For The Arts that in addition to the masterpieces by Luis Buñuel, Jacques Rivette, and Chantal Akerman listed (among other tantalizers) on the venue's website, they'll be hosting a retrospective of films by Czech animation demigod Jan Švankmajer in December. If it's like the retro recently concluded in Chicago it will include each of his feature films from his 1988 masterpiece Alice to his 2010 release (never before screened on Frisco Bay) Surviving Life (Theory and Practice), as well as several of his best short films. But we'll see,

Eddy mentions a venue I've still yet to attend (to my shame): the Vortex Room, which from what I can tell has no webpage other than its Twitter and Facebook presences. (Am I wrong?), and notes that the Rafael Film Center is gearing up for the Mill Valley Film Festival but is otherwise relatively quiet in terms of repertory & special events (as opposed to day-to-day arthouse). And she drops hints about the Roxie that have only appeared on that venue's website since publication. Now we know the full, jaw-dropping line-up for their Not Necessarily Noir III film series (or should I count it as a festival?) devoted to crime and horror films made between 1968 and 2005- "neo-noirs" one might say, if one thought such a term could apply to such diverse fare as John Woo's Hard-Boiled, Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, Carl Franklin's One False Move and Brian De Palma's Body Double -to list some of the better-known titles I've seen before. Rarities abound in this awesome set of films- nearly all sourced from 35mm prints.

What she must not have known before her article was put to press is that the touring series of 35mm prints of films from Japan's master animator Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli cohort, which has been making its way around the country all year, finally visits Frisco Bay in September. Starting September 7th, the Bridge Theatre plays 12 of these films over the course of a week- actually 13 prints, as the truly perfect My Neighbor Totoro will screen in both English-subtitled and English-dubbed prints on Sep. 8. Then, the California Theatre in Berkeley screens 11 of the films, as well as two others, between September 14th and 26th.  All nine of the Miyazaki-directed films, as well as Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday and Hiroyuki Morita's The Cat Returns screen at both venues. Takahata's My Neighbors the Yamadas shows only at the Bridge, on September 13, and his Pom Poko and Yoshifumi Kondo's Whisper of the Heart show only at the California Theatre, on the 25th & 26th respectively. The Bridge and the California are my favorite Landmark theatres in San Francisco and the East Bay, and knowing that the Landmark chain is planning to convert its theatres to digital projection only makes me wonder if this series may be a last hurrah for 35mm projectors at these venues. I hope not, but I plan to soak in as much of the series as I can on one side of the bay or the other.

One last recommendation before September arrives: if like me you are a fan of the films of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul you must take advantage of the opportunity  to see his installation Phantoms of Nabua at the Asian Art Museum. Made during the process leading up to his completion of his Cannes top prize-winning film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, this single-channel work is just as mysterious, beautiful, and medium-specific as any of his feature films. It has been streamed online, and may still be available to view that way, but it really demands to be seen in installation form, where the figures are life-sized and approximately level to the viewer.  Several friends and acquaintances, including at least one who had never encountered an Apichatpong work before, have told me of being so transfixed they watched the approximately 9-minute piece over and over several times before moving on to another part of the museum. It's such an important work that it inspired the Asian Art Museum name of its contemporary Asian art exhibit: Phantoms of Asia. Unfortunately the exhibit must come down after September 2nd, but fortunately the museum is free of charge on that day, as it is on the first Sunday of every month. I plan to go back myself. See you there?