Present Tense (2012)

WHO: Belmin Söylemez directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: This film, about a Turkish fortune-teller named Mina, with dreams of emigration, just won the San Francisco International Film Festival New Directors Prize, an award previously given to promising auteurs like Jia Zhang-Ke (for Xiao Wu in 1999), Miranda July (for Me and You and Everyone We Know in 2005), and Pedro González-Rubio (for Alamar in 2010). 

I have not seen Present Tense yet so let me excerpt from an absolutely fascinating article that uses this digital feature as an example of the kind of film being crowded off even Turkey's screens thanks to homogenization pressures created by wholesale DCP conversion of cinemas, written by Emine Yildirim:

Mina could be the epitome of many women living in this country -- aching for a better and more independent life in the midst of uncertainty and economic destitution. The fortune telling sequences in which Mina's predictions are juxtaposed with the faces of many different women promises to become a classic in Turkish cinema; for those of us who live in this culture always want to hear the same future: a way out of our brooding existence into a refreshing place with certain happiness and good fortune.

WHERE/WHEN: Final San Francisco International Film Festival screening this afternoon at 2:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: It's the final day of SFIFF, and there are still plenty of movies left to watch; it would be absurd to imagine someone having been able to see them all. I can certainly recommend The Search For Emak Bakia (which also screens post-festival at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco a week from tomorrow) and Leviathan if you haven't seen them yet. Or, if you want to end the festival on an enormously satisfying cliffhanger, the official closing night offering Before Midnight.  I don't think that's a spoiler; anyone who has seen the previous entries in this continuing Richard Linklater/Julie Delpy/Ethan Hawke serial, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, should know what to expect in the way of narrative structure even if they're sure to be surprised by the details.

But with most of the festival's awards now announced (audience awards are usually revealed during the closing night film presentation), there are a few more recommendations of films on today's festival slate, made by the festival's various juries of filmmakers, curators and critics. In addition to Present Tense, one of the two New Directors Prize runners-up, the Peruvian The Cleaner also has a final showtime today. The other runner-up La Sirga and the FIPRESCI Jury pick Nights With Theodore have no further festival screenings.

Then there are the Golden Gate Awards, the longest-standing of the SFIFF awards given as they go back to the 1957 inaugural festival's prizes for Pather Panchali, Uncle Vanya and The Captain from Köpenick. It was fifty-one years ago that The People Vs. Paul Crump, a documentary about a death row inmate, won a Golden Gate Award for its young director William Friedkin, just starting out on his filmmaking career. Friedkin returned to SFIFF this year to give a master class and screen his terrific 1985 film To Live & Die In L.A. If you missed it at the festival, I've recently learned it will circle back to Frisco Bay this September when it's included in a six-film Pacific Film Archive retrospective for the director, also to include The French Connection, Cruising and (in my opinion) his greatest film Sorcerer, the latter along with an in-person conversation between Freidkin and my friend Michael Guillén.

But back to this year's GGAs and their winners (any of whom might be a future Freidkin?): The Documentary Feature GGA went to Kalyanee Mam's introduction to social and environmental issues in Cambodia entitled A River Changes Course. It has no more SFIFF showings but will screen at the just-announced SF Green Film Festival on June 1st. The Bay Area Documentary Feature GGA went to Dan Krauss's The Kill Team, which you may have heard about via On the Media; it screens one last time at SFIFF tonight at 6:00.

Twelve different shorts were also winners or honorable mentions for GGAs in various subcategories: narrative, documentary, animation, youth works, family films, etc. If you missed out on seeing these on this year's shorts programs, there's still one chance to see three GGA winners (and four other shorts) on the Shorts 4: New Visions program this evening. The New Visions category winner was Alfredo Covelli's single-take documentary of the aftermath of a violent event, Salmon, and both the first-prize and second-prize winners in the Bay Area short category also came from the New Visions section: 3020 Laguna St. In Exitum, Ashley Rodholm & Joe Picard's enigmatic documentation of an unusual Cow Hollow art exhibition won first prize, while Jonn Herschend's hilariously uncomfortable spoof of the in-house industrial video, More Real, took second. All three of these screen at 8:30 at New People.

HOW: Present Tense was shot on video, and will be screened on video, as will all the other screening titles I mention in this post. Except for, I'm hoping, the Freidkin films coming to the PFA in September.

CXL (2012)

WHO: Sean Gillane directed this, and is also credited as cinematographer, editor & co-writer. Full disclosure: I've known Sean personally for a few years now, mostly through his twitter persona and his annual coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHAT: CXL is an unusual movie with an equally unusual title- it's a bookselling industry term indicating indicating a cancelled order, which somehow seems quite appropriate for a work that forces the audience to scrap all its expectations about where the plot is going. Fine performances, a strong music soundtrack, exquisite digital photography of familiar (and unfamiliar) Frisco Bay locations, and some impressively seamless low-budget visual effects work make this worthwhile viewing for anyone willing to follow a narrative down unusual paths.

What CXL ultimately amounts to is harder to say, at least after only a single viewing. On the occasion of its single local screening last November, Michael Fox put it well:

CXL [...] is a puzzle movie that I haven't cracked. A second viewing would certainly help, and that's anything but a dig: I happily left Antonioni and Bergman films with swarms of unanswered questions. I'll advance the proposition that CXL is a kind of urban coming-of-age story about a protagonist who isn't as certain in his identity as he'd like others -- or himself -- to think. He's a good guy, and he's trying to do his best, but life is more of a conundrum than he can perhaps handle.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie at 7:15.

WHY: Yes, the San Francisco International Film Festival is still running for another two days, and there are certainly some worthwhile screenings happening at SFIFF venues today (I can particularly recommend The Strange Little Cat, which I wrote about here.) But it's time to start thinking about other local cinemas we may have been ignoring during the festival, perhaps foremost among them the Roxie, to my knowledge the longest-running cinema in the area- perhaps the entire country (an abbreviated history going back to 1909 can be read here).


The Roxie has been running the excellent feature Upstream Color and the intriguing documentary The Source Family for a little while now, and will continue to screen both for at least another week. But starting tonight with the much-welcomed second chance to see CXL on the big screen, the venue will be changing programming every day. Tomorrow is a Detroit firefighting doc called Burn. And Friday marks the beginning of the popular, annual I Wake Up Dreaming series of films noir programmed by the brilliant Elliot Lavine. This year's set starts with the noir that some scholars consider the first in the entire cycle of fatalistic crime films that became a major cultural staple in the 1940s and 50s, the 1941 Betty Grable(!) vehicle I Wake Up Screaming. Of course it's also the inspiration for the name of the series, and extremely rare to see on the big screen (I think it's been about ten years since it last played Frisco Bay.) I'll be writing more on the series soon, but would initially point to Shakedown and Autumn Leaves as particularly uncommonly-seen must-sees.

HOW: CXL will be a digital presentation of a digital feature.

Helsinki, Forever (2008)

 

WHO: Peter Von Bagh made this.

WHAT: I have not seen this film, so let me quote from a short piece by Jonathan Rosenbaum:

a lovely city symphony which is also a history of Helsinki (and incidentally, Finland, Finnish cinema, and Finnish pop music) recounted with film clips and paintings

Sounds great, and perhaps not so dissimilar from Thom Andersen's amazing 2003 visual essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, which argues a history of that city through clips from fiction films shot there. And it turns out this comparison has been made before by writers who have seen both works.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screening this afternoon at 3:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: First of all, the subject of the film sounds just up my alley and makes me think I'll be trying to track down a copy of World Film Locations: Helsinki soon after the screening. Which reminds me to mention that the volume in that series of books that I contributed an essay to, World Film Locations: San Francisco, is now available for pre-order.

But the occasion of the screening would make me want to attend even if the film didn't sound as interesting to me as it does. Director Von Bagh will be on hand for the show, as he is receiving the Mel Novikoff Award for work that has "has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema"- an award that has gone to critics like Manny Farber and Roger Ebert, archivists like Kevin Brownlow and Serge Bromberg, and programmers like Bruce Goldstein and Anita Monga. Von Bagh is not only a filmmaker but a historian and the director of the Midnight Sun Film Festival held in Sodankylä, Lapland at the time of summer each year when night never falls above the arctic circle, making the inside of a cinema the darkest place around 24 hours a day.

I don't know when I first heard rumor of this festival, but read more about it in Kenneth Turan's book Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made, which immediately shot it to the top tier of my list of festivals I dream of attending one day. Looking at a partial list of filmmaker guests over the years make it clear that Von Bagh and his programming team have terrific taste, and my understanding is that Von Bagh is something of a film-on-film purist, insisting on film screenings even in the waning days of its viability as a mass-market medium.

The other day, I happened to be at a screening sitting next to another award recipient at this year's SFIFF: Philip Kaufman, who will be at the Castro Theatre tomorrow evening for an on-stage conversation before a screening of his great 1978 shot-in-San Francisco remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We got to talking, and he told me he'll be at the Midnight Sun festival for the first time this summer, and that he's currently trying to track down good prints of films he hopes to show there. Invasion of the Body Snatchers will be shown tomorrow digitally, however. 

But as film purist Carl Martin notes in his latest SFIFF round-up, last night's screening of Marketa Lazarová began with an announcement that another Castro screening of a 1970s film tomorrow will be screened on 35mm instead of previously-expected DCP. The film is The Mattei Affair, a political thriller by Francesco Rosi, a filmmaker who, like Kaufman, received an award from the SFIFF (in 1981) and later went on to attend the Midnight Sun festival (in 1999). Why is it being shown in 35mm even though the Film Foundation has helped prepare a new DCP they're trying to show off? The answer lies in Frako Loden's latest SFIFF round-up article, in which she reports on last weekend's  Pacific Film Archive screening via its new digital projector, in which subtitles froze on screen and essentially ruined the experience for non-Italian speakers in the audience. Rather than risk a repeat of such a snafu at the Castro, the festival has opted to use a trusty 35mm print for the 1:30 PM matinee. 

HOW: Helsinki, Forever screens in 35mm.

Old San Francisco (1927)

WHO: Alan Crosland was the director of this film; in 1961 William K. Everson called him "sadly underrated by historians" and I don't think his stock has been rated much higher in the decades since then.

WHAT: By no means an example of silent-era movie-making at it's highest artistic level, Old San Francisco is nonetheless a fascinating curiosity, especially for anyone interested in how San Francisco's Chinatown and the 1906 earthquake were depicted in the silent era.

Beyond some stock photography of city views, the production was made entirely on Hollywood sets.  Old San Francisco was the last of a string of films including Don Juan and When a Man Loves, each made by Crosland as silents and then released with Vitaphone disc musical scores in theatres wired for sound. His next film was his, and Hollywood's, first feature to include sequences with synchronized dialogue: The Jazz Singer. It's notable that this used San Francisco (in particular, the famed speakeasy Coffee Dan's) as the setting for the first appearance of star Al Jolson's voice in the film. According to the Warner DVD commentary recorded by Ron Hutchinson and Vince Giordano, this scene was actually shot in Los Angeles, meaning that again San Francisco is only actually seen on screen thanks to stock photography.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program beginning at 7:30 tonight only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum.

WHY: For those more interested in films shot on Frisco Bay than in those merely set on Frisco Bay, tonight's screening is still noteworthy, as Old San Francisco is accompanied by two brief documentaries made in 1906 (A Trip Down Market Street and The Destruction of San Francisco) which together depict the vast changes to the cityscape in April of that year. Yes, this is the Niles Film Museum's annual earthquake-themed show, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the most cataclysmic minute in the city's history. The actual anniversary is this Thursday, but the Museum doesn't traditionally hold screenings on Thursdays. 

There are likely to be more Frisco Bay films screening at Niles soon, including some surely shot in Niles itself, as the annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival has announced its dates (June 28-30) and even provided a teaser of a few titles. King Vidor's top-drawer Hollywood satire Show People, Lotte Reiniger's beautifully animated The Adventures of Price Achmed and the Gregory La Cava-directed Colleen Moore picture His Nibs are among those being dangled in front of us before the full program is announced. None of these are, to my knowledge, set or shot in the Bay Area, but Broncho Billy always screens a number of films produced by the Niles Essanay studio which the museum is named for and primarily devoted to.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has also announced, if only through a fundraising letter to members and friends of the festival, that a shot-in-San Francisco silent film called The Last Edition is expected to screen at it's annual Castro Theatre event in July. Another film, Allan Dwan's 1916 vehicle for Douglas Fairbanks called The Half-Breed, will also have its world premiere in a new restoration at that festival; according to Geoffrey Bell's The Golden Gate and the Silver Screen it was filmed at least partially near Boulder Creek in Santa Cruz County. A third title mentioned in the mailing, The Joyless Street, was filmed in Germany, of course, by G.W. Pabst in his pre-Pandora's Box days. The full program is expected to be announced May 23.

If you can't make it to Niles tonight, there are quite a few Frisco Bay-shot films screening tonight at the Victoria in the San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival. These are not silent-era films, but some of them are hilarious. I got quite a kick out of the dark comedy in Robb Grimes's two entries, Come To The Bridge and So Long And Thanks For All The Popcorn, both filmed at the sadly-shuttered Bridge Theatre. In fact, I believe the marquee there still has the letters of the latter title emblazoned for everyone traveling down Geary Street to see.

HOW: Old San Francisco and The Destruction of San Francisco will screen from 16mm prints, while A Trip Down Market Street will screen from a 35mm print. All will be accompanied by Greg Pane at the piano.

Speechless (2008)

WHO: Scott Stark made this film. As Brian L Frye writes in Radical Light, "Stark imported the wry wit of seventies performance art to his films, which are best described as works that play games with how movies work." Sounds right to me.

WHAT:  I'm not up to the task of writing a full review or analysis of the thirteen-minute Speechless, especially when eloquent considerations of the film are available at just a click or two away. But I would like to encourage any open-minded reader to see it. Speechless is part of a cycle of Stark films that draws particular attention to the individual frame as the building block of the moving image. Motion in the film is created by juxtaposing still images together, creating graphic matches and mismatches between, in this case, photographs of female genitals from a medical textbook, and images of (mostly) natural landscapes shot by Stark himself. A great many of these landscape images were gathered right here in San Francisco, at the former military installation West of Lake Merced known as Fort Funston. (Others were taken in Oakland or New Hampshire.) A simple, calm electronic drone soundtrack consisting primarily of two alternating notes and overtones provides a suitable sonic backdrop for audience contemplation of the connections between human and earth-borne forms, of how the Bay Area in particular has been a site for expressions of female sexuality (though I suspect few find these particular images of vaginas erotic), and I'm sure many other subjects particular to each viewer's experience. It's a strange and lovely film.

WHERE/WHEN: This free public screening, with Stark present for a post-screening discussion, happens 7:30 PM tonight, only at the lecture hall on the San Francisco Art Institute, Stark's alma mater. But come early for a 7:00 artist reception and to take in some of the best views of Frisco Bay from this beautiful Russian Hill location.

WHY: Depending on when you read this post, the program for the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 25-May 9) may or may not be publicly available; the press conference announcing all programs happens this morning. Michael Hawley has done a stellar job running down all of the pre-conference announcements (and making guesses as to what else might screen) but shorts are not usually in his areas of interest. However, word is already out that Stark's eerie 2012 piece Bloom is also expected to screen as part of the SFIFF. Festgoers who see it will never hear the sound of music in quite the same way again.

But before that, two full programs of Stark's work show in local venues. Speechless screens tonight as part of a set of film and video works investigating the human body, each made between 1996 and 2008. (I listed the other films in the program here).  Then, this Sunday, three of his more recent video works screen as part of the Crossroads festival hosted by SF Cinematheque at the historic Victoria Theatre on 16th Street between Misson and Capp. On the program are a dual-projector screening of Compressive/Percussive, Stark's study of light and shadow upon an Austin, TX freeway, and Longhorn Tremolo, another Texas work that made my 2011 list of favorite films in the "yet to screen in a Bay Area cinema" subcategory. This screening marks its local debut, and also the world premiere of Stark's elegant, monstrous The Realist, which was shot partially in San Francisco and is sure to go down as one of 2013's most important releases into the experimental film & video world. Seeing tonight's program, and Speechless in particular, will be good preparation for appreciation of this brilliant new work.

HOW: Speechless will screen as a 16mm projection.

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

WHO: Did you know Chuck Jones was responsible for the animation that runs during the opening credits of this film?

WHAT: My first thought when approaching this post was to write about how Mrs. Doubtfire is one of the forgotten masterpieces of the 1990s, that best demonstrates how director Chris Columbus's mise-en-scène stands with that of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Theo Angelopoulos and Abbas Kiarostami as some of the most sophisticated and powerful in the world's cinema of that decade. It is April Fools Day after all. But honestly, I have not rewatched more than a few clips of Mrs. Doubtfire in nearly twenty years, long before I'd heard of any of those guys. It wasn't a particular favorite when I last saw it in my early twenties, but why mock a movie that I barely remember?

Thus the Chuck Jones angle. Though his work heading up the creation and animation of a half-cartoon featuring a parrot named Pudgy and a cat named Grunge (this was the early nineties remember) is perhaps not at the same level of creativity as his best work, it nonetheless bears some of the signature characteristics of the director behind most of the Wile E. Coyote and Pepe Le Pew cartoons. The Mrs. Doubtfire "Behind-The-Seams" DVD includes three versions of the full, uncut version of Jones's animation, including animated pencil tests, the final full-color version, and an unused version with alternate backgrounds.

When this sequence appears on screen in the movie, we only get a few unobstructed views; the purpose of this opening is not animation for its own sake, but to establish Robin Williams's character as a struggling voice actor who puts principles above professional gain. He's recording the voices for the parrot and cat we see on screen like a foley artist might do sound effects. This is not the way animation has traditionally been voiced in this country in fact. From Mel Blanc in the Looney Tunes that gave Chuck Jones his start, to Williams in 1992's Aladdin or the more recent Happy Feet films, voice actors generally record their character dialogue before the animators have their turn, if for no other reason then to make lip-synchronization appear smoother (and I'm sure animators could rattle off many other reasons). Incidentally, most Japanese animation does work the way Williams is shown to in Mrs. Doubtfire, with the animation coming before voice recording in the production chronology.

Since Jones was in effect parodying the famous canary-cat duo of Tweety and Sylvester with Pudgy and Grunge, it's worth mentioning that Tweety was one Warner character that Jones almost never worked with during the "Termite Terrace" era. Tweety was a creation of Jones's arch-rival Bob Clampett, that was taken over by another Warner cartoon director Friz Freleng when Clampett left the studio in the mid-1940s. Freleng pitted a modified Tweety against Sylvester, who had debuted in his 1945 cartoons Life With Feathers and Peck Up Your Troubles, matched against a lovebird and a woodpecker, respectively. By the time of Jones's work on Mrs. Doubtfire Clampett was dead of a heart attack, and Freleng was long-retired. One gets a sense from watching Jones interviewed for a segment viewable on the "Behind-The-Seams" DVD that he had some mixed feelings about taking on a cat-and-bird duo for his contribution to the film.

As for the rest of Mrs. Doubtfire, it's clearly beloved by many movie watchers of a certain generation, and may be especially fondly regarded by certain residents of San Francisco, where it was filmed.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie Theater at 7:15 PM.

WHY: When I last mentioned Chuck Jones on this blog, it was in part to point out how rare it is to see his cartoons projected in 35mm, and that despite a current Cartoon Art Museum exhibit coinciding with the animator's centenary year, no such local screenings were on the horizon as far as I knew. Tonight's showing breaks a long drought; although it's surely not the same as seeing a 35mm print of a classic-era cartoon, it is an opportunity to see his animation in 35mm regardless, if momentarily, and interfered with by credits and cutaways to Williams performing. Jones's Mrs. Doubtfire art is even a part of the Cartoon Art Museum exhibit, along with pieces from throughout his career.

For those more interested in the earlier cartoons, Sonoma Film Festival is bringing a program of Chuck Jones films to Sonoma's Sebastiani Theatre on the morning of April 13th. A selection of 35mm prints from Jones's private collection will screen at 9:30 AM. Because this is being marketed as a ticket-less event aimed at bringing representatives of the newest generation of young moviegoers to the well-established festival, it may be wise to arrive even earlier than the scheduled start time in order to obtain first-come, first-serve seats.

HOW: 35mm print.

Urine Man (2000)

WHO: The Urine Man himself is in some sense the auteur of this film, as he demanded control over when the camera could be turned on or off before he'd allow himself to be interviewed- although 'interviewed' may not be the correct verb as he also demanded no questions be asked of him during the filming. But as he proved to be anonymous and untraceable, it makes sense that local filmmaker Greta Snider get the credit as director; she certainly deserves credit for instigating the filming of the Urine Man and presenting him to the world.

WHAT: "You are what you eat. You can't be yourself unless you eat yourself." If one takes the initial aphorism literally, the Urine Man's conclusion bears an impeccable (and in the context of the rest of his rant, hilariously disgusting) logic.  However.

Filmed in 1999, this piece was released after the ringing in of the new millennium, an act that in itself discredits its subject, as he makes Y2K predictions that obviously had not come to pass by the time any wider public heard them. His error ensures that the rest of what he says cannot be taken as a mystical tapping into secret wisdom, but rather a particular, (and perhaps particularly "entertaining") expression of irrationality. Perhaps it could even do some good as a kind of reverse-psychology public service message: don't do what the Urine Man recommends, unless you want to be like him.

A compassionate viewer may resist laughing at or being entertained by the Urine Man's monologue. Pity or anger or more complex feelings may arise instead of, or along with, such reactions. This is how Snider's film works as not just reportage but art. Sara Herbet probably says it best when she identifies it as a film that "straddles voyeurism, taking advantage of a crazy person, and giving voices to the underrepresented." Urine Man's formal simplicity is as deceptive as the structures its subject imagines are cloaking the kind of "wisdom" he has to share with us.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at Artists' Television Access, as part of a full program of films that begins at 8:30.

WHY: Tonight's ATA screening is part of Craig Baldwin's weekly screening series entitled Other Cinema, one of the Bay Area's most convivial and unpretentious showcases of mindblowing experimental film and video work, as well as one of its longest-running. Other goodies on offer this evening include Kathryn Ramsey's West: What I Know About Her, Marcy Saude’s Sangre de Cristo, Vanessa Renwick's Portland Meadows, Brigid McCaffrey's AM/PM, and Bill Daniel's Texas City. Future Other Cinema attractions in the coming weeks include an April 13th magic lantern presentation by Ben Wood channelling Eadweard Muybridge, a 4/20 premiere of Baldwin's own double-projection Nth Dimension, a May 4th space-age slide show from Megan Prelinger, the annual blowout "New Experimental Works" on May 25th, and much much much much much more.

HOW: I believe Urine Man is planned to screen digitally, if only because usually the Other Cinema calendar page explicitly mentions when a 16mm or Super-8 film is expected to be shown. Among tonight's program selections only West: What I Know About Her is called out as a 16mm showing.

Dyketactics (1974)

WHO: Barbara Hammer

WHAT: Let me step aside and quote Ariella Ben-Dov's piece on the film from the Radical Light book: 

In 1974 Barbara Hammer came out to viewers not only as a dyke but also as a fearless experimental filmmaker who is credited by some as creating the first-ever film by a lesbian about lesbian lovemaking for lesbian viewers. In a mere four minutes, and a poetic and titillating montage of 110 images, Dyketactics, which Hammer calls a "lesbian commercial," reveals the pleasures of looking at the female nude from a female perspective.

Ben-Dov's piece is brief, but I've cut off the above excerpt before she gets into her best analysis, so I urge you to read the entire piece on page 195 of the book. I'd also add, as if it didn't go without saying, really, that one doesn't need to be a lesbian viewer to recognize the formal acuity of Hammer's film. I haven't seen much else of Hammer's work, but this is just great.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at 7PM at SFMOMA's Phyllis Wattis Theater.

WHY: Although SFMOMA's impending closure removes a key screening space from the Frisco Bay fabric of venues that periodically present 16mm films by "underground" makers like Hammer, the local film community can be glad about other institutions that will continue to show such work after tonight's Phyllis Wattis Theater sign-off for the format.

For instance, on April 2nd the San Francisco Art Institute lecture hall will play host to a free screening of 16mm, Super-8 and video work by SFAI alum Scott Stark, who will be present for the event. Titles to be screened include two of my favorites of his, the brilliant Noema and Shape Shift. I haven't yet seen his Under A Blanket of Blue or More Than Meets The Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda or Speechless but my girlfriend who (full disclosure) is organizing this show assures me they're brilliant as well. More information on this event is to be found here.

The following weekend, eyes turn to the Victoria Theatre, where SF Cinematheque's biggest annual screening event, the Crossroads festival takes up residence with eight full programs held over three days (April 5-7).  Scott Stark will once again be featured, this time with more recent work such as Longhorn Tremelo, Traces and the world premiere of his long-anticipated The Realist. The weekend's seven other programs include films by talents such as Luther Price, Paul Clipson, Kelly Sears, Laida Lertxundi, Ben Rivers, and Michael Robinson among many others. 

SF Cinematheque is currently running a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help pay for the Crossroads festival, confidently timing the last day of the fundraising period to be Thursday April 4th, just a day before the screenings begin. As of this writing the campaign is just over halfway to its goal, so if you have interest in supporting this vital organization and making sure the festival is as good as it needs to be, please do see if you can open your wallet to donate. As usual with these things, donations at certain levels are reciprocated not only with good "underground film" karma but with gifts, which range from DVDs and books (such as the aforementioned and indispensable Radical Light as well as Barbara Hammer-signed copies of Hammer: Making Movies out of Sex and Life) to passes to Crossroads and Cinematheque screenings, to tote bags featuring artwork by the late great George Kuchar. A full list of these gift/benefits for donors is found here; click now because some of these items are in limited supply. I've really enjoyed each of the three previous Crossroads festivals, and at the first one I was able to meet several visiting filmmakers including Barbara Hammer, who was one of the featured guests at the festival. At that time I had not yet seen any of her films, but she was most gracious to me anyway. Crossroads is an unpretentious place for both experienced experimental film viewers and relative newcomers to rub elbows and discuss the works on display.

HOW: Dyketactics screens in 16mm, as does the feature (also by Hammer) that it accompanies at this showing, her 1992 feature Nitrate Kisses.

Dorothy Vernon Of Haddon Hall (1924)

WHO: Mary Pickford, one of the first and greatest stars Hollywood has ever known, but one that has become a rather unfashionable figure until very recently. She is currently enjoying a renaissance of attention from Frisco Bay cinema programmers, thanks to a new book by Christel Schmidt, who is brining rare film prints on a national tour.

WHAT: In 1922, Pickford's husband Douglas Fairbanks had successfully retooled his screen image from performances mostly in modern-day comedies and Westerns, to swashbuckling period adventures such as The Mark of Zorro and Robin Hood. "America's Sweetheart" was probably even more popular than her husband at the time, but she saw good reasons to expand her repertoire from the "little girl" roles she continued to play at age thirty, to more adult roles in films with more European flavor. She brought Ernst Lubitsch from Germany to direct her next film; at one point this was to have been Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, based on a 1902 novel set in Elizabethan England. Although Lubitsch balked and ultimately directed Pickford in Rosita instead, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall became her follow-up, with Lubitsch out of the picture and frequent collaborator Marshall Neilan in the director's chair for most of the shoot, until his alcoholism became too much to bear. Pickford herself ended up directing at least one of the film's Golden Gate Park scenes. 

WHERE/WHEN: 7:15 PM tonight only at the Roxie Theater.

WHY: You may have noticed that there are a lot of silent film screenings here on Frisco Bay this month. G. Allen Johnson wrote about a number (to be specific, 40) of them for sfgate this week, although he's incorrect in saying they'll all be projected in 35mm as the Silent Film Festival's Silent Winter includes one DCP presentation (Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad) among its otherwise all-35mm lineup, and quite a few films in the Niles Film Museum February schedule will show in 16mm prints. If you want to look ahead to March, Cinequest will present 35mm screenings of Safety Last! and Cops at San Jose's California Theater during that festival. I'm not sure how the Balboa's March 3 screening of the silent Peter Pan will be sourced.

But Pickford is definitely the queen for the month of February. Tonight's screening is joined by a focus on her early work tomorrow in Niles and a showing of My Best Girl at the Castro February 16th. If you consider Pickford's filmography as something of a personal blind spot (it is for me, certainly) there's no reason to delay trying to get up to speed on this star whose celebrity status was truly made by, and not forced upon, audiences. Just to make the deal more of a "sweetheart": tonight's film is extremely rarely screened, not on DVD, and shot partially in San Francisco.

HOW: A 35mm print imported from Belgium for the occasion. There will be live musical accompaniment as well; Daniel Redfeld will be performing his own piano score for the film.

The White Rose (1967)

WHO: Jay DeFeo, subject of a current SFMOMA exhibition which will be taken down in just a few days, is also the subject of this brief film, one of the greatest artist portraits I've ever seen.

WHAT: DeFeo's painting The Rose is among the most monumental art works created in San Francisco. She worked on it obsessively for nearly a decade, layering paint upon paint until it bulged off the canvas like a beautiful inflated gland on the wall. By the time a fivefold rent increase forced eviction from her second-story Fillmore Street apartment (a block up from the Clay Theatre) she had applied so many thousands of pounds of paint that removing the piece, which by now was as much sculpture as painting, required cutting away parts of the wall and bringing it down to street level by forklift. Her friend, assemblage artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner, documented her apartment, this surgical extraction of its most vital organ, and its visible effect on DeFeo, editing it into a seven-minute film with a soundtrack of Miles Davis's performance of the "Concierto de Aranjuez" from Sketches of Spain. The result is a masterpiece, both a perfect introduction for a newcomer to Conner's work and a piece that grows richer each time one views it.

WHERE/WHEN: The White Rose screens at SFMOMA's Phyllis Wattis Theater tonight as part of a 7PM program of Beat Era filmmaking that also serves as the opening of the 2013 SF Cinematheque season. It also screens, on its own, at the museum's Koret Visitor Education Center twice today, tomorrow and Saturday afternoons.

WHY: Whether you've already spent time with The Rose during SFMOMA's retrospective, or are planning to do so before it departs from view this Sunday (skipping this rare opportunity altogether is not an option), you will definitely want to watch Conner's film to enrich your perspective. Seeing it tonight as part of the Cinematheque program is for many reasons the optimal way to take it in. In addition to The White Rose, several key works made by other San Francisco Beat-associated artists during the year DeFeo began this painting (1958) will screen. Lawrence Jordan's Triptych in Four Parts, Christopher Maclaine's Beat, and Wallace Berman's sole film, begun in 1956 but like The Rose extended for about a decade after, and entitled Aleph after his 1976 death, are crucial works well-known to students of this era of truly independent filmmaking.

Poet ruth weiss's film The Brink came a bit later in 1961, and according to Kari Adelaide Razdow was shot on Super-8 around the San Francisco Bay Area that year. Local viewers ought to be able to recognize sites such as Baker Beach and Sutro Heights Park, the latter of which was also one of the locations which Brecht Andersch & I identified as used in Maclaine's 1953 The End. Like that film The Brink is anchored by a strong narration, in this case a recitation of a version of a poem of the same title that weiss had published in 1960. Whereas Maclaine is known for his filmmaking while his poetry languishes these days, weiss is fairly well-represented in discussions of Beat-era poetry, and has several books available at City Lights and at the San Francisco Public Library, but is relatively unknown as a filmmaker. Tonight represents a rare chance for a Frisco Bay audience to begin rectifying this, as weiss, now in her eighties, will appear along with her film at tonight's screening. She will also appear at a community tribute to Jay DeFeo this Saturday afternoon, also at SFMOMA.

HOW: I've been told that tonight's screening will be mostly from 16mm prints, including The White Rose. The afternoon screenings are digital video presentations however.

The Sniper (1952)

WHO: Marie Windsor, MGM's one-time "New Joan Crawford", who ended up getting called "Queen of the Bs" because she featured in so many cheaply-made pictures after the studio dropped her. She's been immortalized in films noir such as Force of Evil, The Narrow Margin and The Killing, and is one of six women lovingly profiled in Noir City mayor Eddie Muller's 2001 book Dark City Dames. In The Sniper she has a supporting role.

WHAT: The Sniper is one of the first films I ever saw at a Noir City festival, the first one held in San Francisco in 2003, which was devoted entirely to (excuse the double entendre) shot-in-San Francisco movies. Imagine my surprise when the last name of Windsor's character was first revealed, and it was my own rather rare surname Darr, which I've never heard of a fictional character possessing, before or since. It feels like an honor to imagine such a lovely and talented chanteuse in my family tree (though my parents moved to Frisco after this half-noir, half social problem picture was released, so Jean must be from another branch of Darrs).

WHERE/WHEN: At the Castro Theatre twice today: a 1:30 matinee and a 7:00 evening show.

WHY: Though there probably won't be another theatrical showcase of Frisco Bay noir like the one held ten years ago anytime soon, Noir City annually sets aside at least one night at the Castro to showcase locally-filmed pictures. Tonight's that night, with a double bill of The Sniper and Blake Edwards' Experiment In Terror, which I also possess a personal connection to, as crucial scenes were filmed at my alma mater George Washington High School and the surrounding neighborhood. Both films are well worth watching no matter where you live, but are particularly notable for locals, as they utilize some of the best, most authentic location photography ever perpetrated on this city by Hollywood studios, meticulously documented at Reel SF. I feel especially confident saying this after recently spending an intense period of watching and rewatching San Francisco noir while writing an essay on the genre for the San Francisco entry into the World Film Locations series of books, which is expected to be published sometime later this year.

HOW: The Sniper will screen from a 35mm print, while Experiment In Terror will be showcased via a newly-premiering Digital Cinema Package from Sony.

Vertigo, Vertigo-ing, Vertigone.

Last week, San Francisco Chronicle columnists Matier & Ross reported that the owners of a house at the corner of Lombard and Jones Streets had recently completed a major remodel to the exterior of their home. Normally I wouldn't take notice of changes made to a private residence, but here the building in question has historic significance to cinephiles. It's 900 Lombard, the residence of Jimmy Stewart's character Scottie in Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo.

Though the indoor scenes in Scottie's apartment were shot at a Hollywood studio, the view from his window, with the phallic Coit Tower looming over the landscape, remains essentially unchanged from when it was synced, through the magic of 1958 Hollywood technology, to these crucial interior shots. But the facade, which features in two just-as-crucial scenes, now is no longer recognizable as a Vertigo location from the street.

One would think the owners of the house, who apparently own a business dependent on the tourist trade, would want to honor the historic nature of their home. Surely they were aware of the movie connection when they moved in 23 years ago, as by this point it was a well-known fact, documented in Michael Oliver-Goodwin and Lynda Myles's 1982 San Francisco magazine article (reprinted in this book). But, according to Matier & Ross, they made the change precisely because they were getting too much attention from Vertigo location hunters.

It seems rather preposterous to me that there would be many cinephiles ringing the doorbell of a private residence, as if expecting a red-robed Kim Novak to answer the door. But what do I know. Maybe there are a lot more unmannered Hitchcock diehards out there than I realized. I do know that I've personally avoided mentioning the addresses of private residences when writing abut film locations (including Vertigo's) on this blog and elsewhere- until now. And when I've visited 900 Lombard I've been careful to respect the privacy of the owners by keeping my voice down and avoiding getting too close to the property, much less trespass.

Reading through the many reader comments on the Matier & Ross article at sfgate.com is depressing to someone like me. The general gist of most of them is: "it's only a movie", "private property rights trump all other concerns" and "film buffs are a pathetic and slovenly lot", although there are a few welcome counter-examples. I don't know. Maybe I'm sensitive because I recently wrote an essay about 1940s & 50s San Francisco location filmmaking for a book expected to be published next year (as part of this series.) Or maybe I've just seen too many Hitchcock movies and have gone overly suspicious, but I feel like there's something else happening here, and the Vertigo connection is more of an excuse than a reason for the remodeling.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I made an excursion to Jones and Lombard to take a look at the changes up close. I went with local filmmaker Sean Gillane, who earlier this month saw his ambitious narrative feature directing debut CXL get its world premiere screening at the SF Film Society's Cinema By The Bay festival. Another world premiere at this festival was Alejandro Adams's fourth feature Amity, which for me is his best picture since his own feature debut Around The Bay. Take that endorsement as you will, as in the past few years I've become friends with Adams, and he and his girlfriend Sara Vizcarrondo (another friend) once invited me to participate in an on-camera discussion of another of my favorite filmmakers (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) on their show "Look Of The Week". Likewise, Gillane (who re-used more than one Vertigo location for his CXL) suggested he film me discussing Vertigo and its role in the psycho-geography of San Francisco at the site, and so he did. I don't know what the fate of this footage will be once it's been edited, but I trust it's in good hands, and will certainly keep Hell On Frisco Bay readers posted.

2012 has been quite a roller-coaster year for lovers of Hitchcock in general and Vertigo in particular. For every previously-lost film he assistant-directed made available for free on-line, there's a dreadful-looking, currently-in-theatres Hitchcock docudrama (which focuses its attention on Psycho and not Vertigo; I haven't seen it yet and am not sure I want to). I've mentioned here before that Vertigo unseated Citizen Kane in the most highly-regarded critical poll of the "Greatest Films Of All-Time" this August. It was an ascent 50 years in the making, as when Kane first took that honor in 1962, the four-year-old film Vertigo was selected by only three voters, all Frenchmen: Eric Rohmer, Jean Douchet & Jacques Siclier. From there Vertigo placed #12 in 1972's Sight & Sound Poll, #7 in 1982's, #4 in 1992's and #2 in 2002's poll before achieving top spot this year, being named among the ten best of all time by 191 critics and curators (including Flicker Alley founder and president Jeff Masino, who I interviewed for Keyframe recently.)

But it was hard for many Vertigo fans to properly celebrate this changing of the guard, knowing that one of the film's leading champions had died just days before. I wrote a bit about Chris Marker's Vertigo connection in my obituary for the cinephile and filmmaker, and linked to a pdf of his 1994 essay on Vertigo, but without comment. Though Marker's 1983 essay film Sans Soleil avoided using the 900 Lombard location, this essay references it, without mentioning the house number:

San Francisco, of course, is nothing but another character in the film. [screenwriter] Samuel Taylor wrote to me agreeing that Hitchcock liked the town but only knew ‘what he saw from hotels or restaurants or out of the limo window’. He was ‘what you might call a seden­tary person’. But he still decided to use the Dolores Mission and, strangely, to make the house on Lombard Street Scottie’s home ‘because of the red door’.

If Marker and the red door no longer exist, Vertigo and Sans Soleil still do. The former film will appear in 35mm at the Pacific Film Archive March 13th as part of the Spring semester's Film 50 afternoon screening and lecture series devoted to "The Cinematic City". The latter film recently played the same venue as part of a compact Chris Marker tribute which concludes tonight.

Shortly after publishing my Marker blog piece last July, I was honored to receive an e-mail from one of Marker's local allies: Tom Luddy. Though I never visited the Pacific Film Archive during Luddy's time as programmer there, in recent years I've seen him at local film events rather frequently, whether in the audience, on stage (as when he received an award on behalf of the Telluride Film Festival, which he co-directs, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival last summer), or even on-screen (as a key participant in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which after years of watching on VHS and DVD, I finally saw in a cinema this year thanks to SFMOMA). Luddy cleared up some of the information I'd written about Marker's film Junkopia. The print of this film which I'd seen twice at the PFA was in fact his print, on deposit at that institution. He has graciously allowed me to quote from his e-mail for readers:

Chris came to the Bay Area fairly often in the '70s and '80s, when I was at PFA ('72-'79) and Zoetrope ('80 to the present), sometimes on stopovers to Japan, and sometimes for the two major films that had sequences he shot in Northern California -- Sans Soleil and The Owl's Legacy. I helped him on both. He also did a little second-unit work on Rumble Fish for Zoetrope for a brief moment.

He always stayed in Berkeley, sometimes at my place and sometimes at the Hotel Shattuck. I drove him to SF many times in the '70s.  He was fascinated by the Emeryville Mudflats and one day asked me if anyone had made a film on the ever-changing gallery of objects on display there. I said I did not think there was a film, and he said "let's make one".

So I recruited John and Frank from Zoetrope, and some equipment, and in no time we were shooting there. He was very generous in putting in the credits "Filmed by Chris Marker, John Chapman, and Frank Simeone." But in fact this is a film by Chris Marker in the authorial sense. He gave me a Credit for SPECIAL EFFECTS.... don't ask to explain what for?

He called his producer for many films --Anatole Dauman-- in Paris. Anatole agreed to cover all the costs of the film. Anatole wanted to pay me for my work on the film. I refused to take any money but I said it would be great if I could get a 35mm print as a kind of compensation.  He said fine as he did on Sans Soleil as well. I have a 35mm print of Sans Soleil on deposit at PFA too.

I worked on films with great film-makers (Godard, Agnes Varda, Francis Coppola, etc) and with many more thru my work at PFA, Telluride, San Francisco Film Festival and so on.... Chris is/was the most impressive of them all -- a genius as a writer, photographer, film-maker, collage artist, sound designer, historian, poet...and a great human being.

Tom Luddy's print of Junkopia will screen at the PFA again tonight on a program with a chapter from Marker's 13-part The Owl's Legacy, and with two Marker works made well before his association with Luddy: Les Astronautes (pictured above) and La Jetée. Also screening is Emiko Omori's new documentary To Chris Marker, an Unsent Letter, which Luddy appears in along with other Frisco Bay-connected film personalities like David Thomson, Peter Scarlet, Erika Marcus and David and Janet Peoples. Be there!