This Charming Couple (2012)

WHO: Alex MacKenzie found this highly-distressed film fragment, and repurposes it as his own work of projector performance by running it through his analytic projector in reverse.

WHAT: I have not seen it, so here is MacKenzie's website description,

A water-damaged educational film, repurposed. Its original message of the risks of entering marriage without fully knowing your partner is visually abstracted, rendering a moral lesson into a shifting landscape of emulsion. Played in reverse, the couple in question slowly move apart, becoming less and less visible as the damage worsens at film's edge

WHERE/WHEN: On a program playing tonight only at the Exploratorium at 7:00 PM.

WHY: I wrote my general thoughts on the place of projector performance in cinema culture earlier this year when Vanessa O'Neill's Suspsension screened at the monthly Shapeshifters Cinema event in Oakland. This past Sunday it was MacKenzie's turn to project his piece Intertidal at the venue. If you missed that show (as I did) you get a second chance at seeing it tonight, along with This Charming Couple and Logbook, at the wonderful new Exploratorium screening space. 

Unfortunately, though they seem to me to be naturally connected, the local avant-garde film community and the archival/early/silent-cinema community are frequently split in two by conflicting screenings occurring at the same time. Tonight begins a two-night stand at the Rafael Film Center of archivist Randy Haberkamp and piano accompanist Michael Mortilla showing first rare Hollywood Home Movies and then The Films of 1913 via a hand-cranked 1909-era projector. These events force choices, and this week is a particularly good example of it.  You can't see both MacKenzie AND Haberkamp/Mortilla tonight, just as you can't see both Haberkamp/Mortilla AND (on the avant-garde side) the presentation of Paul Clipson-curated films in Napa tomorrow. Nor can you see both Clipson's Artists' Television Access screening of his own work AND Oddball Films' presentation of (Mostly) Strange Silents Friday. Nor can you see both the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's program including Mae Marsh in the D.W. Griffith-scripted Hoodoo Ann AND the free selection of films by Owen Land, Curt McDowell, Luther Price, etc. at the Canyon Cinema Pop-Up at the Kadist Gallery this Saturday. Well, that last one might be strictly possible if you have access to a fast car to get you from SF to Fremont.

Full disclosure: I'm also heavily involved (as in, performing live music) at a screening event tomorrow evening that I think would interest fans of both avant-garde and of early/silent cinema. Check it out if you can!

HOW: On a full program consisting entirely of live 16mm projector performance.

Memories To Light (2013)

WHO: Mark Decena (director of Dopamine among other films) has edited together home movies for the closing night presentation for this final evening of CAAMFest.

WHAT: I must admit I'm a bit unclear on some of the specifics here. I know that Decena has edited a film from his own family's home movie footage which is entitled The War Inside, as he talked about it on KALW radio earlier this week; the seven-minute interview can be heard here. 

But the Center for Asian American Media is also using tonight's event to launch a project they're calling Memories To Light, which intends to collect home movies from all over the United States for digitization and potential presentation. The rationale for this is best described on the still-under-construction website: 

Since the mainstream media has given us so few authentic images of the Asian American experience, home videos become the most real way to see how our grandparents, mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles lived their lives.

A more worthwhile and interesting initiative is hard to imagine; home movies can tell us so much that they weren't necessarily intending to communicate across time when they were filmed; not just about culture but about geography, ecology, fashion, and even the evolving relationship ordinary people have had with the camera over the decades. Although this project is Asian-American specific and I'm about as Anglo as they come, I'm tempted to dig back into my parents' reels of home movie footage to see if there are images of me playing with the many Asian-American friends I made growing up in the diverse Richmond District of San Francisco, that might be of use to CAAM.

I'm under the impression that CAAM already has collected quite a bit of home movie footage aside from Decena's, and that he may have been responsible for the editing of this other footage together for tonight's presentation as well as his own. Perhaps this compilation should be thought of as a film entitled Memories To Light, like the CAAM initiative. Those with tickets to tonight's event will soon be able to untangle all of this and report back; unfortunately I won't be able to attend myself.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at New People tonight only at 5:00 PM. Advance tickets are all sold but there may be "Rush" tickets available for attendees willing to wait in line at the venue about an hour beforehand.

WHY: The festival program gives special thanks to archivists Rick Prelinger and Antonella Bonfanti, both of whom I've become friends with over the past year or two, but that shouldn't make me, them, or you feel awkward when I decide to highlight their excellent work here on this blog. Bonfanti is interviewed about her role in digitizing home movies used in tonight's presentation in the organization's brief promotional video, which also features CAAM executive director Stephen Gong speaking about the project. 

Prelinger is Frisco Bay's, and perhaps even the country's, leading advocate for increased prominence of home movies in cinemas and in our conversations about moving images. He annually puts together the extraordinarily popular Lost Landscapes of San Francisco events at the Castro Theatre, and his passion for home movies is perhaps most succinctly and eloquently expressed in words in this Open Space blog post from last year. I'm very excited that on May 5th the San Francisco International Film Festival will host the hometown premiere of his brand-new film No More Road Trips? also at the Castro. This film (which I've seen a brief but powerful excerpt from) is compiled from home movie footage and intended to spark a dialogue about the connections between the car culture of the past century and that of today, whether it's sustainable into the future, and if not, what that means.  Preferably this conversation will be carried out during the screening itself among the audience, as like his Lost Landscapes shows, he has designed the presentation to be an interactive one for an audience encouraged to provide a kind of crowd-sourced benshi soundtrack of comments, questions, and other verbal expressions.

HOW: Memories To Light will be a digital presentation with live "performance controlled" music by Davin Agatep. I'm not sure if the audience will be encouraged to interject during this screening like they are at Prelinger's, but I'm sure they'll be told one way or another beforehand.

Vertigo (1958)

WHO: Alfred Hitchcock.

WHAT: In the moment from Vertigo frame-frozen above (though better discerned when in motion), Kim Novak casts two separate shadows on the bed in her Empire Hotel apartment. As B. Kite writes in the script of his video collaboration with Alexander Points-Zollo entitled The Vertigo Variations, Novak "steps out of the bathroom into a lime-green sea spray of light; a little intimation of eternity inducted through a neon sign." This scene that plays a crucial role in practically every analysis of Vertigo from Chris Marker's to Roger Ebert's to Kite's. But I've yet to come across a reading or review that mentions the twin shadows, despite their resonance with the themes of the film, the character, the scene.... These shadows are not simply Novak's of course; they are also Judy's and Madeline's and perhaps even Carlotta's. 

There's so much to say about Vertigo, so much to see in it. I know not everyone thinks of it as Hitchcock's greatest masterpiece, but I do. I always try to take advantage of opportunities to revisit it in a cinema setting.

WHERE/WHEN: Vertigo screens this afternoon at 3:10 PM at the Pacific Film Archive as part of a lecture & screening series; tickets for all screenings in this series are sold out, but to quote the PFA ebsite, "A limited number of rush tickets may be available at the door." It also screens there tomorrow evening at 7:00 PM, and also at the Stanford Theatre six times between March 21 & 24.

WHY: So far I've been using the PFA's Hitchcock series to see films I'd never gotten around to seeing before, like Saboteur and The Paradine Case. But, to quote B. Kite once again, "we only begin to see Vertigo when we already know it; when its plot holds no surprises. When every moment is already locked into a cycle of repetitions it assumes a living-dead weight comparable, for once perhaps genuinely comparable, to Greek tragedy." So although thanks in part to its Frisco Bay setting, it's probably the most frequently-shown Hitchcock film in these parts, it's also one I'm most eager to see again on the big screen, especially at the PFA. Read on...

HOW: Vertigo is screening at the PFA in a now-unusual format: an IB Technicolor print struck prior to the controversial 1996 restoration prepared by Robert Harris and Jim Katz. According to a Moving Image article by Leo Enticknap, Harris and Katz embarked on their project with the aims to create "preservation elements to take the film well into the next millennium" as well as "an entertainment which would work well with modern audiences." In their quest for the latter objective, the pair decided to make substantial changes to Vertigo's soundtrack, turning a mono mix into a stereo one and even re-recording sound effects. For many Vertigo enthusiasts, this tampering harmed (I've even heard one purist use the word "destroyed") the experience of watching the film. Yet the Harris/Katz restoration (should I put scare quotes around that word?) provides the basis for most versions of Vertigo that people see today, whether the 70mm prints that periodically come to the Castro Theatre, the 35mm prints that have played other venues in the past fifteen years or so, and even most DVD copies (a mono -soundtracked Vertigo disc is only available commercially to purchasers of a box set). 

So the PFA screenings of Vertigo this week are rare anomalies. Will they provide noticeably better viewing experiences for those who attend? I suppose that's a matter of opinion, but they'll surely be more authentic to the experiences audiences prior to 1996 had watching the film. If you don't believe it, take a test; attend the PFA this week and the Stanford (which is sticking with a print struck from the 1996 restoration) next week and see what you think.

Sunset Blvd. (1950)

WHO: Silent film star Gloria Swanson was re-immortalized with this picture, and this time it stuck.

WHAT: Oh come on. Everyone knows this film, right? Even if you don't know it, you know it. Have you ever been "ready for your close-up"? Ever repeated the notion that in Hollywood "it's the pictures that got small"? Or that silent films didn't need dialogue because they "had faces"? Sunset Blvd. is one of those Hollywood classics that has seeped not-so-subtly into the popular culture. Even a canon-smasher like Mark Cousins is forced to contend with it. It's so ubiquitous, you may already feel a little sick of it. If that's happened, you know it's time to see it again with a fresh set of eyes. This is one classic that deserves every accolade and echo into our collective psyche it gets. Well, except for its transformation into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical; no movie deserves that. 

WHERE/WHEN: At the Castro Theatre today only with two showtimes: 2:50 & 7:00 PM.

WHY: If you've been at the Castro this weekend you may feel a bit bruised and battered by the brutality, darkness & intensity of the films that have played so far. We've seen an adrenaline-fueled truck-driving duel that makes strong political points about competition, cooperation and corruption (Hell Drivers). We've seen a seedy-as-hell morality tale that whips the viewer into wanting the term "ex-convict" to be abolished, at least when applied to anyone resembling Lawrence Tierney's title character (The Hoodlum). We've seen two masterpieces from 1950, both of them based on true-crime events and both of them getting great mileage out of their application of a near-documentary style in certain sections (Gun Crazy and Try And Get Me). After all that, it's the perfect time in the festival to drop another 1950 masterpiece that's no less brutal, dark, or intense, but that applies these qualities a little further from everyday reality for most of us, focusing instead on the brutal, dark, and intense side of the Hollywood movie-making machine. Consequently, it's easier to enjoy Sunset Blvd. as escapism than it is to enjoy most of what we've seen so far that way.

HOW: Today's Sunset Blvd. screenings are the first time in eleven years that Noir City is trumpeting the world premiere of a restoration not presented from a newly-struck 35mm print but a newly-created DCP drive. Sunset Blvd. is one of four such digital presentations at the festival, also to include Experiment in Terror on Wednesday and the pair of 3-D films on Friday. For some this may feel like the beginning of the end of an era for a festival that has almost never utilized digital projection for anything other than its pre-feature montages, and a betrayal of this year's terrific poster image and slogan "keeping it reel".

But Noir City, through its preservation offshoot Film Noir Foundation, is proving its continued commitment to striking 35mm prints of noir films by world-premiering three brand-new 35mm restorations that would not have been completed without their efforts (including the gorgeous print of Try and Get Me shown last night, the excellent co-feature for today, Repeat Performance, and the closing film High Tide). Not only that, but last night the FNF's Eddie Muller was joined onstage by the sister of film preservationist Nancy Mysel, who died far, far too young this past June, to announce that a fund in her name is being set up to train new preservationists and preserve more films.

Silent Connections

2011's Academy Award-winning The Artist is long gone from theatres, even discount theatres like the Cinedome 7 in Newark, and is now available on DVD and on the free outdoor movie circuit. Love or hate the film, pretty much everyone can agree that they hope the attention afforded this homage to 1920s Hollywood will translate into resurging interest in genuine silent-era movies among regular filmgoers and the general public. But few types of movies benefit from their presentation in restored prints at motion picture palaces as much as silent films do, especially when they're accompanied by live musicians (which, of course, The Artist wasn't, or should I say, hasn't been yet) as silent films do.

Fortunately, the 17th San Francisco Silent Film Festival begins tonight at the Castro Theatre- not this town's most opulent picture house built during the silent era, but certainly the grandest one that still plays movies. It's something of a homecoming for the SFSFF, which has rented the theatre twice a year since 2005, hosting a big summer extravaganza as well as a one-day winter event. This year the winter event was held at the Paramount in Oakland, and it was a production more ambitious as any the festival has attempted yet: a staging of a 5 1/2 hour version of Abel Gance's Napoléon complete with triple-screen finale and a full orchestra with composer Carl Davis flown in from London to conduct his score. But the festival's return to the Castro after twelve months is more than just a victory lap for Napoléon; it's also perhaps their most ambitious and exciting summer festival yet. Seventeen programs of films made  by at least seven national film industries, set on at least five continents plus the moon, backed by four small orchestras and at least three other expert musicians-- it will be impossible to know if any possible increases in attendance to this already-popular event might be due to interest sparked by The Artist or Napoléon, or just because the line-up is so strong.

If you're contemplating your first visit to the SF Silent Film Festival, be sure to read the Six Martinis And The Seventh Art blog for tips on how to survive the bustling festival atmosphere most comfortably. Those who desire more information about the provenance of the festival's prints than available on the festival website should be sure to read Carl Martin on the subject, bearing in mind he holds no quarter for digital projection or restoration techniques. Though I'm nowhere near as technically knowledgeable as Martin, I share concerns about the ongoing march into a digital-dominated cinephilia, discussed recently at an Italian film festival on a panel described here and available to view here. As I mentioned in my own previous preview, the SFSFF will be screening two of its features digitally (Wings and The Loves Of Pharaoh) and though I wish they were being presented on film, I'm certainly not going to skip these screenings on principle. Perhaps I'll even be convinced of the value of the new technology in certain circumstances.


It seems this year's free Amazing Tales From The Archives program is designed to convince the festival audience of the value of state-of-the-art digital restoration and presentation. As Michael Hawley notes in his excellent festival preview, Grover Crisp did a side-by-side comparison of DCP with 35mm prints in New York earlier this year, and he'll be doing a similar comparison Friday morning. Can we imagine a future SFSFF in which more than one or two programs are presented digitally? It may depend on how the audience reacts to this presentation.

Also on hand at the archival presentation will be Andrea Kalas of Paramount Pictures, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, and prepared a new digital version of its Academy Award-winning Wings as part of the celebration. With no less than five Paramount features on the program, this weekend ought to make a strong case for that studio as the top company in 1920s Hollywood. I'm a huge fan of Paramount's The Docks Of New York, and very curious about The Canadian, The Spanish Dancer, and Mantrap, all of which, I'm pleased, are screening on 35mm.


With so many Paramount silents in the program, perhaps there was no room for a film from another studio celebrating its centennial: Universal. Though most of the silent titles in this month's New York tribute to that studio have played at recent SFSFF editions, I long for a chance to see Paul Fejos's Lonesome on the big screen and hope its recent Criterion DVD release doesn't make local programmers shy away from it. The Pacific Film Archive has its own tribute to Universal on its current calendar (along with retrospectives for Raj Kapoor, Alexsei Guerman, and Les Blank among other series) but no silent films are included. 

Photo courtesy of Alpha-Omega digital GmbH

Silent films do, however, factor into the new Stanford Theatre calendar, which will have four Friday night opportunities to hear organist Dennis James accompany 1920s cinema sprinkled amidst a 7-day-per-week smorgasbord of films made between 1939 and 1964. Two of these are masterpieces previously brought by the SFSFF: The Wind and Seventh Heaven. I have not seen Son Of The Sheik or Way Down East before, but I'm sure audiences who can't get enough Wurlitzer action at the Castro this weekend as James performs for The Loves of Pharaoh and The Mark Of Zorro will want to take biweekly road trips to Palo Alto this summer.


The Castro Theatre itself is about to celebrate its own 95th anniversary, and includes two great late silent feature films, Sunrise and City Lights, as part of its impressively diverse slate of repertory offerings during an impressively-programmed August that I hope will continue in a similar spirit through the rest of the anniversary year. With no word on musical accompaniment for these screenings, it is likely that both will be, like The Artist, sound-on-film presentations of the kind that became popular if by no means exclusive after the arrival of The Jazz Singer in 1927. A third silent film not visible on the above link, but that word seems to be out about elsewhere, is a 35mm presentation of the newly-exhumed color version of A Trip To The Moon by Georges Méliès, which will play with a DCP version of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on August 26 & 27, with Bruce Conner's astonishing Crossroads on the bill on August 26th only. What a triple-bill for that giant screen!
  

A Trip To The Moon will also screen at the SFSFF this weekend, in color, and it will be accompanied by the extremely talented pianist Stephen Horne (who accompanies five other SFSFF programs this weekend!) This is part of the festival's closing night program, along with Buster Keaton at his most Dziga Vertov-esque in The Cameraman, with Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra providing music. British silent film fan Paul McGann, best known for his acting career in films like Withnail And I and Alien³, will read the text Méliès wrote to accompany A Trip To The Moon at fairgrounds and other 1902 screening venues. He will also be at the festival to narrate Frank Hurley's documentary on Ernest Shackleton's polar expedition, South, in the spirit of Shackleton's own presentations with the film in his day.

It's interesting to note which SFSFF films are co-presented by which local film organizations. Saturday night's The Overcoat is co-presented by both SF Cinematheque and by MiDNiTES FOR MANiAX, which tells me it should appeal both to fans of avant-garde filmmaking and to fans of under-appreciated seventies- and eighties-era gems like Car Wash, Phenomena, Assault On Precinct 13, and Halloween 3: Season of The Witch (to name the next four MiDNiTE movies I'm told to expect at the Castro on August 3, September 14, October 5 & November 2nd, respectively.) I've been hoping to see the film version of The Overcoat since seeing an A.C.T. Production years ago, but I really have no idea what to expect from it now. 

I'm also extremely eager for Sunday afternoon's screening of Erotikon, introduced by Jonathan Marlow of Fandor, and co-presented by the San Francisco Film Society, which usually presents a silent film or two at its own annual film festival or during its year-round calendar of events. So far they haven't shown too many silents on their SF Film Society Screen in Japantown, but they have been screening Mark Cousins' epic documentary The Story Of Film: An Odyssey over the past several Saturdays, with two more to go. And this summer has seen more repertory-style programming at the venue than we've seen in previous months, with more to come in August: Kinji Fukusaku's 2000 cult classic Battle Royale gets its Frisco Bay week-long theatrical premiere August 10-16 and the locally-made 1996 animation James And The Giant Peach plays a matinee August 11. The 1952 portmentaeu film Love in the City, with segments directed by a young Fellini, Antonioni, and five other Italian directors (including the still-living Dino Risi and Francesco Maselli) will screen August 17-23, and perhaps most exciting of all, Robert Bresson's neglected The Devil, Probably shows in a new 35mm print August 3-9.


I'm straining to think of Silent Film Festival connections to the current SFMOMA screening series, at which filmmaker Trent Harris is expected to be present for tonight's screening of his bizarre and brilliant "Beaver Trilogy", for the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts series of photography-connected short films by the likes of Agnès Varda, Arthur Lipsett, Ken Jacobs, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Hollis Frampton, Raul Ruiz, Jean Eustache, and others (also starting tonight), or for the music-centered documentaries sharing a screen at the Roxie tonight, Songs Along A Stony Road and Sprout Wings And Fly, which will also be attended by its filmmakers George Csicsery and Les Blank (respectively). But it's time for me to sprout a decent outfit and fly off to see Wings in a couple hours, so I won't strain any longer. Have a great weekend and hope to see you at the Castro!

Best Fests In the West?

It's that time of year again. For The Love Of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon is holding its 3rd annual outpouring of blog-love for the integral activity of film preservation, hosted earlier this week by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy On Films, and now by This Island Rod. For the third year in a row, the Blogathon is raising funds for a San Francisco-based preservation non-profit. In 2010 funds raised from For The Love Of Film went to the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve color-tinted versions of two hundred-year-old Western one-reelers, The Sergeant and The Better Man. Last year's donations went to the Film Noir Foundation to help pay for a new restoration of blacklisted director Cy Endfield's Try And Get Me, which is expected to be finished in time to screen at the January 2014(!!!) edition of Frisco's Noir City festival. Consider that a year-and-a-half early scoop (in the meantime, Endfiled's The Underworld Story screens at the Roxie next week). This year's blogathon is taking donations for, once again, the National Film Preservation Foundation, this time to make what remains of The White Shadow, a very early feature worked on by Alfred Hitchcock and until recently thought completely lost, available at the NFPF's online screening room with a musical score by Michael Mortilla.  Donate today to help further the world's knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock and British silent film!

Many of the blog pieces being written for this week's blogathon have focused on Hitchcock films and related subjects, and I considered writing about his Vertigo star Kim Novak, who will be returning to this city for a gala event June 14th to help kick off a week-long exhibition of Frisco Bay movie-making memorabilia at the Old Mint, put together by the SF Museum & Historical Society. Novak was in the news earlier this year, as you may remember, for objecting to The Artist's re-use of Bernard Herrman's iconic love theme from Hitchcock's love/hate letter to San Francisco. Well, less for objecting to it, than for using a very controversial word choice to express her objection. My own tweets at the time of the controversy expressed my feelings on the subject pretty well, I think.  I chalk the whole incident up to the usual Oscar-season mudslinging, and would never hold an isolated comment against an actress I admire as much as Novak, who is undoubtedly absolutely brilliant in Vertigo although I've barely seen any of her other acting work.

A more detailed appreciation of Novak in Vertigo will have to wait for another day, because I cannot resist using the blogathon as an excuse to talk about a few upcoming film festivals that feature preserved and restored films in their program. The NFPF screening room and the DVD sets it releases are wonderful boons to home viewing, but the importance of getting our film heritage in front of audiences in cinemas should not be understated. Sometimes the essential qualities of films made to be screened theatrically cannot be fully decoded in other settings. With the world of film exhibition under increasing pressure to conform to Hollywood studios' desires to turn cinema into a digital wonderland that threatens to be a digital blunderland and, as David Bordwell warns, a "freezing of the canon," film festivals may become one of the last remaining models for getting actual film prints on cinema screens. While certain local festivals have scaled back their retrospective screening components, it's heartening that others remain committed to giving past cinematic glories as much or more attention than the newest motion picture trends.


The National Film Preservation Foundation's aforementioned DVD sets cover a wide range of American filmmaking strands, from narratives of practically every genre and length to documentaries, animation, newsreels, home movies and even advertisements. But the bulk of these collections is given over to two general categories that tend to fall through the cracks for most commercial DVD-releasing enterprises: silent films and avant-garde films. Though their first set is perhaps their most eclectic in both themes and time periods, sets two, three, and five are almost exclusively devoted to silent-era filmmaking. The fourth set was given over entirely to this country's rich avant-garde filmmaking tradition, and the announced sixth set will be a sequel released next year. Correspondingly, there are three film festivals coming to Frisco Bay in the next couple months that celebrate silent films and avant-garde films: The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, and Crossroads.

Since it begins first- this evening, as a matter of fact- I'll take on Crossroads for a few paragraphs first. The third annual initiative on the part of venerable experimental film exhibition organization SF Cinematheque to program a full-fledged festival of artist-made film and video, Crossroads will screen more than fifty works from around the globe between now and Sunday. Many of today's most interesting truly independent moving image artists have work in the festival, from established masters like Scott Stark, Ken Jacobs, and Saul Levine, to rising talents such as Linda Scobie and Sylvia Schedelbauer -- I've seen Scobie's Craig's Cutting Room Floor and Schedelbauer's Sounding Glass and am certain both with make a strong impression on Crossroads attendees. Max Goldberg has written a fine preview focusing mostly on new works getting their Frisco Bay premieres at the festival.

Of great interest to the preservation-minded, however, is tomorrow afternoon's program of films made by Chick Strand, the co-founder of Canyon Cinema, the 1960s exhibition predecessor to SF Cinematheque that still operates as a distribution company today. Strand's film Fake Fruit Factory was included on the fourth NFPF DVD set and is available for online viewing in their virtual screening room. Last December, two years after Strand's death in 2009, the film was included on the list of new entrants to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry along with far more famous titles like Bambi  and Faces. I think it's great that she now has a film on the registry list, but am still a bit baffled as to why that particular one was chosen, fine as it is. The Crossroads festival will be screening two of Strand's (in my book) far greater masterpieces, her joyous 1966 film Angel Blue Sweet Wings and her 1979 tribute to Anne Frank, Kristallnacht. Also screening is her rarely-shown 54-minute 1979 film Soft Fiction, which I have yet to see. The program is titled Woman With Flowers after the name of a film that was originally also slated to screen; that title has been replaced with her 1979 found footage film Cartoon Le Mousse. I don't know the reason for the switch, but it's interesting that Woman With Flowers was completed by the filmmaker in 1995, yet she never created a distribution print. According to the website of the Pacific Film Archive, which screened the film last October, the Academy Film Archive completed post-production on the film posthumously, but that "no creative interpretation or intervention was necessary."

Contrast that statement against what preservationist Bill Brand has to say in the liner notes to the recent Criterion Collection DVD release of Hollis Frampton's films, which have been scarcely seen on Frisco Bay screens in recent years. Brand insists that preservation of avant-garde films invariably involves creative work, as film companies discontinue the stocks filmmakers originally used, and digital transfers demand compromises and aesthetic judgments. A 16mm print of the late Frampton's 1969 film Lemon plays the Crossroads festival on Sunday evening along with two other experimental film "classics": Bruce Baillie's simple yet breathtakingly rich 1966 film All My Life, and Morgan Fisher's Picture and Sound Rushes. All three have been programmed to compliment a five-film set of films by Basque filmmaker Laida Lertxundi, who comes fresh from the Whitney Biennial and counts these works among her influences. I haven't seen ant of Lertxundi's films yet, but I marvel at the programming of Lemon at a time slot coinciding with a rare annular solar eclipse. Lemon is often remarked on as an erotic interpretation of a citrus fruit, but the way its lighting scheme gradually shifts over the course of seven minutes recalls the (apparent) movement of a familiar solar orb around our own globe. Assuming the program runs continuously without extended breaks for introductions, the (partial in San Francisco) eclipse ought to peak right about the time when the films finish. But you probably won't want to race out of the Victoria Theatre to peek at it, for two reasons: looking directly at the sun, even during an eclipse, is far more dangerous to the eyes than looking at an on-screen lemon, and Lertxundi has been flown into town to speak about her work following the screening.


On the subject of flying in to film festivals, although it's undoubtedly too late to book a cheap flight to attend Crossroads, there's plenty of time for out-of-towners to plan to visit the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which announced its full program last week but doesn't commence until mid-July.  You'll hardly be alone, as scores of visitors from around the country descend upon the Castro Theatre every summer to join the thousands of locals in love with what has become the largest silent film festival in the country (and probably the largest one anywhere in the world that has yet to screen an Alfred Hitchcock silent film. Operative word, I hope: Yet.)  Continuing the aviation thread, the festival opens July 12th with the new restoration of William Wellman's World War I dogfight saga Wings, which will be accompanied by a live score from Colorado's Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and by Foley effects from renowned sound designer Ben Burtt (Star Wars). Though Wings, which stars Richard Arlen, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Clara Bow and Gary Cooper, is well-known as the winner of the Best Production award at the first Academy Awards ceremony - and often retroactively designated as the first Best Picture winner - few know that the other award the film won that year, for Best Engineering Effects, was designated equally for the film's ground-breaking visual effects and for the live sound effects that accompanied its gala premiere screening in Los Angeles. Silent films are by no means equivalent to silent screenings; though the prints include no sonic information, they have almost always been screened with musical accompaniments, sound effects, narration, etc. The SFSFF brings some of the best international accompanists to provide music for all screenings, and will experiment with narration for its July 14 screening of the 1919 British documentary South, for which actor Paul McGann will read from the diaries of the film's hero, Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, while Stephen Horne provides piano accompaniment. 

Clara Bow is represented at the festival not only by Wings but by Mantrap, a 1926 Paramount comedy released on DVD last year as part of the NFPF's fifth box set of Treasures From American Film Archives. Stephen Horne, again, will reprise the piano score he performs on that DVD, but the film will be screened on a 35mm print. Indeed, the SFSFF has a reputation of using the best possible 35mm prints for their screenings, and nearly all of the films in the 2012 festival are expected to screen on 35mm- the exceptions being Wings, Ernst Lubitsch's last surviving German film, The Loves Of Pharaoh, and the color restoration of A Trip To The Moon which screens before a 35mm print of Buster Keaton's The Cameraman to close the festival July 15th. Presumably, as in the few (I count three) other instances when the SFSFF has used digital rather than film prints, there are not 35mm versions of these restorations available for them to screen. The festival has screened Wings in 35mm before, way back in 1999. That was the first time I'd ever heard of SFSFF, and I unfortunately couldn't make the screening and have yet to see Wings on anything other than VHS. I hope the new restoration is worth the wait, and the presence of pixels.


G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box is the other repeat selection in this year's festival, and although I saw it last time around (in 2005), I won't want to miss it this time either, as it's an extended version with about 10 more minutes than any other available, it will be shown in a 35mm print of a full restoration funded by Louise Brooks fan Hugh Hefner, and will be musically accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble, the Swedish accompanists who are quickly becoming many fans' favorites of the SFSFF stable of musicians. They will also accompany Mauritz Stiller's 1920 Erotikon (not to be confused with Gustav Machaty's 1929 film with the same name, which screened at the 2009 SFSFF), which I've been wanting to see for years. 

And there's more- much more. Musicians I haven't yet mentioned include Wurlitzer organist extraordinaire Dennis James, who will accompany Douglas Fairbanks (not Jean Dujardin) in The Mark Of Zorro and  The Loves Of Pharaoh. The Alloy Orchestra will premiere a new score for Soviet co-directing team Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg's Nikolai Gogol adaptation The Overcoat- another film I've had on my to-see list for quite some time. Keyframe recently published an interview I did with Alloy co-founder Ken Winokur, if you want to know more about why I'm excited by this pairing. And pianist Donald Sosin will play for no less than four film programs including Chinese auteur Sun Yu's well-regarded Little Toys starring Shanghai's answer to Greta Garbo, Ruan Lingyu. He'll also back Pola Negri in a brand new restoration of The Spanish Dancer, and my favorite Josef Von Sternberg silent film The Docks Of New York (which I wrote about upon its DVD release here), but I'm most excited to hear his collaboration with local ensemble Toychestra for a set of seven Felix The Cat cartoons. Felix is undoubtedly my favorite silent cartoon star, and Sosin's keyboard style seems especially suited to his antics.


Might as well mention the three other films, which I knew little or nothing about before the SFSFF program announcement: The Wonderful Lie Of Nina Petrovna starring Brigitte Helm of Metropolis, with music by Mont Alto, and two more for the versatile Stephen Horne: Stella Dallas (no not the Barbara Stanwyck version) and The Canadian. Not to leave out the program perhaps most pertinent to this blogathon, the annual "Amazing Tales From The Archives" program, free to the public, in which archivists from around the world present some of the latest, most fascinating finds for an audience of peers and newbies. I've met people who decideded to enter the field of film preservation after attending one of these enlightening sessions, and it was at such a presentation nearly two years ago that I was lucky enough to be among the first participants in a For The Love Of Film Blogathon to see the fruits of the project's first stab at fundraising: a brand-new 35mm print of The Better Man, with Horne doing his first improvisational run-through of the piano score he'd eventually record for the NFPF's fifth DVD set.

If I don't see you at Crossroads or at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, perhaps I will at the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, running June 29 through July 1st at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in the otherwise-sleepy town of Niles, California. This festival will also include a 35mm print of a film found on the fifth NFPF DVD set: Mack Sennett's The Tourists, starring Mabel Normand as a visitor whose stay in Albuquerque turns out to be longer and more exciting than she expected. And of a Clara Bow film: Helen's Babies, also starring Edward Everett Horton and Diana Serra Carey a.k.a. Baby Peggy (who, at age 93, will be in town for the festival). I've written about Niles and the unique screening venue for this festival before, and I usually make it out to their regular Saturday night screening series at least once or twice a year, even though it's not exactly simple to get there from San Francisco without a car. But I've never attended their biggest annual event. This year, as the festival celebrates its fifteenth year of existence, and the 100th anniversary of Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson's arrival in Niles to make some of the first cowboy pictures, I'm determined to attend at least one or two festival screenings. This year's line-up puts a particular focus on films made precisely 100 years ago, in Niles or elsewhere, including five films by Anderson, two by D.W. Griffith, and even one of the few feature length films made in this country that year: Charles Gaskill's Cleopatra.


But if you have a few bucks to drop on attending one or more of these festivals for your own enjoyment, why not also donate so that not only you, but anyone with an internet connection can benefit from film preservation. I just donated myself. I can't wait to see The White Shadow, through any legal channel available to me.

Noir Is...Noir Ain't

A pre-code exposé of municipal corruption. A 1964 made-for-television remake of a Robert Siodmak classic. An Antonioni-esque meditation on the futility of vengeance in a corporate-controlled culture. A glossy, multiple-Oscar-nominated whodunit with intense Freudian undercurrents and a relatively happy ending. A career-defining vehicle for the biggest star at Columbia Pictures, Rita Hayworth. A pair of out-and-out comedies. A Technicolor, Cinemascope interracial romance shot on location in post-Macarthur Japan. For those who hear the term film noir and immediately think of low-budget, fatalistic B-movies like Detour and D.O.A., none of my above descriptions (which I trust no-one will find too distorting) make the films they describe sound like they'd play at a film festival devoted to noir. Yet Afraid To Talk, The Killers, Point Blank, Laura, Gilda, Unfaithfully Yours, The Good Humor Man and House Of Bamboo are all among the films seen so far this week by attendees of the tenth edition of Noir City at the Castro Theatre.

For 2012, festival producers Eddie Muller and Anita Monga have put together the most diverse slate of films in the decade-long history of Noir City. From year one the festival has built a reputation of showing the best available prints of canonized classics of the genre as well as bringing to light some of the obscurities most deserving of being rescued from the cultural memory hole. Both functions are certainly in full force at this year's festival. What's different from previous years is that, more than ever, many of the festival selections represent the boundaries of noir, landing well outside the word's traditionalist definition. There are certainly films in this year's festival that fit snugly into the commonly-regarded parameters: chiaroscuro black-and-white photography, downward-spiraling trajectory for a doomed protagonist with possible assist from a femme fatale, post-World War II themes wrestled with by war vet characters, etc. Tonight's still-underrated Thieves' Highway fits into these very snugly, depending on your interpretation of the final three minutes of the film, that director Jules Dassin had nothing to do with. But many others don't.

Thanks to last Saturday's pre-code double-bill of Afraid To Talk and Okay, America (the latter of which I unfortunately had to miss) and the four early adaptations of Dashiell Hammett stories that make up the afternnoon portion of this Sunday's Hammett Marathon, there are more films from the 1930s than in any previous edition of Noir City. According to my calculations, the average year of release for a film at this year's festival is 1946- the earliest ever (other years averaged between 1947 and 1951). It took five early-1930s proto-noirs to balance out the record number of 1960s selections: The Killers, Point Blank, The Money Trap and Underworld U.S.A. (the latter two being, respectively, the weakest and strongest of the festival films I'd never seen before. So far.) Strange, if the noir period ended by 1958 or so, as many sources contend. Color is another sticky issue for noir purists. Noir City has shown the occasional color film before- Leave Her To Heaven and Slightly Scarlet for instance. This year there are three: The Killers, Point Blank and House Of Bamboo.

I'm interested in the heated debates about what qualifies as noir and what doesn't. Articles like this multi-parter that look at the historical roots of the term are sure to attract my attention, especially when they argue against enshrined classics like Laura and festival closer The Maltese Falcon as true noir. But I really don't have a dog in that fight. I don't attend Noir City because it celebrates noir, but because it celebrates film. Learning that a film is considered a noir doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to see it. Learning that it was made by a great director, or written by a reliable writer, or acted by a terrific cast, or shot by a favorite cinematographer, probably will. Learning that it has influenced other filmmakers, or that it has been unjustly locked in a studio archive away from public view for years, might tantalize me as well. But what I am ultimately interested in seeing is a wide sampling of interesting films from every genre, from every period of history, using every technological development and aesthetic approach available. Ideally under historically accurate circumstances, which means theatrically with an audience if it was something made before scare quotes began appearing around the term "ancillary markets". It's an unending and perhaps ultimately futile quest, but I'm thankful for local institutions like Noir City, the Stanford Theatre (which has just released its most impressive calendar in a couple years), and the Roxie (which brings a pre-code series in March) that help me remain on it.

I know some cinephiles who avoid Noir City, or at the very least limit their attendance, because they dislike the atmosphere. Yes, audiences do dress up. They appreciate Eddie Muller's introductions, especially when he's accompanied by a special guest. They're not shy about expressing themselves during the film, whether to applaud Rita Hayworth's Gilda entrance or to laugh at dialogue about coffee shops in Underworld U.S.A. (Eric Beetner wrote about the laughter phenomenon in the Noir City Sentinal, reprinted in the first of three increasingly expansive, but not increasingly expensive, books available for sale at the festival or online.) I understand the desire for a more austere setting in which to view the work of great filmmakers, and I'm glad that, at least for now, the Frisco Bay region supports other venues when they showcase some of the same restorations seen at Noir City. But I take another view. I think it's great that we have in Muller an impresario with the deep knowledge and the show biz sense to annually attract to the Castro not only dyed-in-the-wool film lovers but also innocent bystanders who have never even heard of the films they're about to watch. Weren't we all there someday? And won't it take all of us working together to send a message to the studios that the preservation and exhibition of 35mm prints must not end?

I've often wondered if the success of Noir City and the Film Noir Foundation could be replicated with other Hollywood genres I adore. Imagine a comparable destination festival called "West County", for instance. Or a similar series devoted to musicals, or swashbuckling adventure films. Until somebody tries out the Noir City model on non-noirs, I'm grateful that Noir City can expand the umbrella of films it preserves and projects to include films that are (to borrow Elliot Levine's term) "not necessarily noir". Like pre-codes. Or 1960s films. Or comedies. Comedies?

I missed Tuesday's screening of Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours (which I've seen theatrically and adore), but it was a real thrill to experience the second half of the Noir City "Comedy Noir" night, The Good Humor Man. Not every gag works in this Frank Tashlin-scripted slapstick piece, starring Mildred Pierce slimeball Jack Carson as a lovable lunk who gets mixed up in murder plots while doing his daily ice cream deliveries. Some of Heinz Roemheld's music cues, in particular, were awkward and dated. However, the satire of suburbia was sharp and the laughs were abundant. Some of the film's violence, especially in the insane schoolhouse finale where every imagined elective from music and home economics, to physical education and woodshop, becomes a hazardous menace, seemed to outdo the brutality of even the grittiest mid-century noirs. I must wonder if censors didn't take their duties as "seriously" when evaluating comic violence as opposed to its dramatic counterpoint. Of course, Tashlin perfected his gag-writing skills while making Looney Tunes for the most mayhemic cartoon studio, Warner Brothers. The following evening while introducing a Sam Fuller double bill, Muller admitted to getting misty-eyed imagining what Tashlin would have thought if he'd seen an audience of hundreds roaring to bits he'd written over sixty years ago.

The Castro's new programmer Keith Arnold could, at least theoretically, book a series of Tashlin comedies without the help of a non-profit like the Film Noir Foundation to help secure prints. Theoretically, because certain studios are increasingly unwilling to rent out their own prints to repertory theatres, and archives traditionally don't lend directly to for-profit enterprises like the Castro. Still, I'm pleased with the direction Arnold's own programming is taking, and I hope mass audiences are as well. The venue's February schedule has many gems on it, including two films that have played previous Noir City editions: The Lineup on February 18th, and Ace In The Hole February 22.

A February 8th double-bill merits special mention: Robert Bresson's Pickpocket plays with a film by Bresson's most well-known American acolyte, Paul Schrader: American Gigolo. The calendar note for the latter film is marked with a warning: "URGENT INVITATION: This could very well be your last opportunity to see the film in 35mm – enjoy it while you can!" Presumably this message is a result of the increasing unwillingness I mentioned a paragraph ago, and its presence makes me pleased that at least there are no other February films with such a warning label. As for Pickpocket, I'm truly impressed with this booking. I can't remember a Bresson film gracing the Castro screen in the decade-plus that I've been obsessively paying attention. I've seen all my Bresson prints at the Pacific Film Archive, which is currently hosting a near-complete retrospective of the Frenchman's work. If you were sad at the prospect of skipping this Saturday's PFA Pickpocket showing in order to see that day's Noir City screenings and attend the party (or vice versa), it may be a nice surprise to have a second chance to see it so soon.

On Sunday, while introducing Laura, Eddie Muller held Keith Arnold's feet to the fire, relaying that the former Fine Arts Cinema booker had recently mentioned the possibility of bringing a Dana Andrews series to the Castro. A great idea. The fact that Muller was standing next to the Laura star's daughter Susan Andrews made the prospect seem all the more enticing, and possible, and maybe even a little embarrassing if it doesn't come to pass. It was all in fun of course, but I hope that there's the will to put together such a series, not to mention the audiences to attend it. Would encouraging people to dress up as occultists to see Curse of the Demon, or as trappers to see Swamp Water help get people who've never heard of Jacques Tourneur and Jean Renoir out to their pictures? If so, it might be worth doing.

I'm certain there will be plenty of people in suits and fedoras coming out to see The Maltese Falcon on the final day of the festival. Muller has gone on record predicting that this will be the last time a 35mm print of the landmark film will play the Castro. If that's true for the 1941 version, it's likely true for the lesser-known but in certain respects better-made 1931 version starring Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels in the Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor roles. Both films are owned by the same studio. I'm hoping to see both on that giant screen one last time. I'm also excited for the weekend's two Alan Ladd films, The Great Gatsby and The Glass Key; Ladd is the star of the 1955 Cinemascope, Eastmancolor gangster picture Hell On Frisco Bay, the namesake for this blog, which is generally seen only in poor-quality bootlegs; it's for obvious reasons a preservation project I'm personally very interested in. Every ticket to an Alan Ladd film bought in 2012 is a vote to see more Alan Ladd films in 2013 and beyond. So come join me and at least a thousand of my closest friends this weekend in celebrating film, or noir, or better yet, both!