Cine Wandering Into the White Mountains of New Hampshire (1942)

WHO: An anonymous, presumably amateur, filmmaker. No names are mentioned in the credits or title cards.

WHAT: This film is a silent, 16mm "home movie" presentation of views of the White Mountains region of New Hampshire. Wintry landscapes, mostly unpeopled, though including both natural and human-made elements to the scene. The geology of the region is featured heavily, including in the segment containing the above image of a "split rock" created by constant weathering and temperature change to the (over time) fragile granite substance.

WHERE/WHEN: On a program screening at 8PM tonight only at Oddball Films. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117.

WHY: I'm tooting my own horn here, as I'll be performing live musical accompaniment for this and for another short reel on tonight's program, a digest print of the 1924 Epic Of Everest, telling the tale of a failed trip to the roof of the world. Both films screen along with films and works-in-progress by my filmmaker girlfriend Kerry Laitala, who is presenting some of what she did in her residency in the Granite State this summer, which I wrote a bit about here.

HOW: On a program of 16mm films with a power-point presentation.

Inequality For All (2013)

WHO: Robert Reich is the focus of this documentary.

WHAT: This breezy documentary addresses a weighty topic, the causes and ill effects of the enormous gap between the wealth and income of a few very rich Americans, and that of the rest of us. Some have lamented that the film doesn't go far enough in arguing for effective solutions to the economic mess we find ourselves in, and it's a fair point to be sure. But clearly the filmmaker (Jacob Kornbluth, a local) felt his film would be more powerful as a tool to raise awareness about the magnitude of the issue, and perhaps even convert some skeptics. To that end, he doesn't go overboard on hammering political points but rather centers his film on one eloquent and tireless advocate of the importance of this issue, UC Berkeley professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, whose biography, it turns our, mirrors his chosen cause in poignant ways. Kalvin Henley has written a more complete review I can recommend reading.

WHERE: Screens at 9:00 tonight and at 6:30 tomorrow and Thursday at the Camera 3 in San Jose, and multiple times daily at the California Theatre in Berkeley at least through this Thursday. UPDATE 11/12/2013: The Balboa is also screening the film multiple times daily through Thursday.

WHY: Whether you feel you've heard Reich's arguments enough or feel you could never hear them enough (or more likely, fall somewhere in between those points on the scale), you may be interested in seeing Inequality For All simply for the local angle. A great deal of the documentary was shot in the Bay Area, including the above image of downtown Oakland's majestic Paramount Theatre (which screens The African Queen for $5 this Friday, incidentally).

Reich appears (with much less screen time, I'm led to believe) in another documentary coming to Frisco Bay soon: Frederick Wiseman's latest institutional investigation At Berkeley, which takes a more comprehensive view of the workings of the University of California's flagship campus. Since I last speculated about where it might screen, I've learned it will come to UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive December 3rd that Wiseman will be on hand for, but that will  be open only to the University's students, faculty and staff. A second PFA showing will occur January 18th, 2014 (dare I hope along with a retrospective of Wiseman films? It's been over ten years since the last), but before that both the Elmwood and the Roxie will screen At Berkeley for at least a week starting December 6th, with opening night screenings accompanied by a Skype q&a with the director.

HOW: Inequality For All was made and will screen digitally.

Light Year (2013)

WHO: Paul Clipson made this.

WHAT: This brand new work by one of Frisco Bay's currently most prolific experimental filmmakers was commissioned by the Exploratorium as a visual exploration of their new site at Pier 15. The museum's website hosts a video with more information on Clipson's creative process.

WHERE/WHEN: 8:00 tonight only at the Exploratorium.

WHY: The Exploratorium has a busy week of film screenings, with events on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday as well as tonight.

Clipson also is involved in an upcoming group show at the di Rosa Gallery in Napa, CA, and will be on hand for a live film & sound performance on November 2nd.

HOW: 16mm projection with live score performed by Tashi Wada.

The Revolutionary Optimists (2012)

WHO: Nicole Newnham and Maren Grainger-Monsen co-directed this.

WHAT: Documentary about children living in the extreme poverty of Kolkata (a.k.a. Calcutta), India, who become activists on behalf of their communities. I haven't seen it, but here's Jonathan Kiefer's review.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at 4:10 today at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on the Stanford University campus, and 4:30 tomorrow at Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, both presented by the United Nations Association Film Festival.

WHY: Festivals occurring during the rest of October:
UNAFF through October 27th at various peninsula venues, plus one day (tomorrow) in San Francisco.
The Silicon Valley Jewish Film Fest runs through tomorrow in Palo Alto, Saturday through Wednesday over the next two weeks, with screenings in Campbell on November 10 & 13 and closing-night with Elliot Gould in person in Palo Alto November 17th.
Arab Film Festival resumes in Oakland October 24th, in Berkeley October 24-27, with final Frisco Bay screenings in Palo Alto November 2 & Oakland November 7.
International Black Women's Film Festival occurs in San Francisco October 25 & 27, and Oakland October 26.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digitally-shot doc.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2003)

WHO: Judy Irving directed this documentary.

WHAT: It's hard to believe it's been ten years since this lovely documentary about urban nature, the humanity of animals (or, perhaps more pertinently, vice versa), and the struggle for survival in a city with harsh forces pressing for us to turn our backs on our true selves, first began screenings in festivals. Though I'd enjoyed it on its initial release, I recently rewatched it and found it better than I had recalled, avoiding nearly all of the traps that have turned me away from commercially-released documentaries over the past decade or so. Here's a worthwhile review by a Chicago writer who I finally got to meet in person when she came to visit San Francisco earlier this year, Marilyn Ferdinand.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 1PM today only at New People Cinema in San Francisco's Japantown, as part of the San Francisco Film Society's Zurich/SF film series.

WHY: The Zurich/SF series is an undertaking meant to highlight cinematic connections between San Francisco and the largest city in Switzerland (though still half Frisco's size in terms of population). Other match-ups screening today and tomorrow include Barry Jenkins's Medicine For Melancholy with Andrea Štaka's Fraulein this evening, Mindy Bagdon's furious Frisco punk document Louder, Faster, Shorter and Swiss Punk Cocktail: Zurich Scene 197680 tonight, and a pair of 1970s buddy-cop comedies Freebie and the Bean and The Swissmakers tomorrow. I don't know why Vitus is the odd film out in the weekend set, especially since I haven't seen it. But reading ploy synopses makes me wonder if there just wasn't enough time in the weekend to squeeze in a screening of something like Around The Bay (which has still yet to screen in San Francisco proper).

I'm hoping this series will be a success and lead to more cinematic looks at some of San Francisco's many other Sister Cities. Our city's link to Taipei has surely helped keep the annual Taiwan Film Days festival going, and I'm sure will be seeing some films set in Paris during French Cinema Now. I haven't investigated whether either of our Italian Sister Cities (Assisi and, as of this year, Naples) will be seen on screen during the just-announced New Italian Cinema series, but imagine future festivals devoted to films made in Barcelona, or Shanghai, or Seoul, or Sydney, or Manila? (Not to mention cities with filmmaking scenes I know next to nothing about, like Amman, Jordan or Cork, Ireland or Thessaloniki, Greece.)

In the meantime another recently-announced SFFS mini-fest has also been revealed, that serves as a counterpoint the the SF section of Zurich/SF. This weekend's films are all established classics of one stripe or another (maybe I'm not quite ready to call Freebie and the Bean a classic myself, but you know what I mean). But Cinema By The Bay focuses almost all its attention on brand-new works by local filmmakers. It runs November 22-24.

HOW: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill screens on a 35mm double-feature with another urban documentary made about ten years ago, called Downtown Switzerland

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

WHO: Humphrey Bogart stars in this.

WHAT: If you go to the corner of Bush Street and Burritt Alley, you'll find a plaque that reads: "On approximately this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O'Shaunghnessy". It must be the only plaque in San Francisco that memorializes not a historical event, but a key moment in fiction, namely the Dashiell Hammett detective novel template known as The Maltese Falcon. At least, the only one that bears no indication of its fictionhood, or that it constitutes a "spoiler" for anyone who might not have read the book or watched one of the movie versions made from it. Such as the 1941 version written and directed by John Huston.

Other versions (the 1931 one sometimes called Dangerous Female, or the 1936 Satan Met a Lady) have their points of interest, but the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is the one that became a cultural sensation and launched (with High Sierra) Humphrey Bogart's career as a leading man, Huston's as a director, and film noir as a powerful cinematic thread through the 1940s, 50s and beyond. San Francisco movie lovers are proud that their city plays such a key role in such a key film in such a key genre of Hollywood filmmaking, even if they know that apart from a few library-footage shots of the Bay Bridge and the city skyline, Huston's film does not feature actual footage of their city. As Nicola Balkind wrote in the recently-published book World Film Locations: San Francisco:

The camera descends and we are introduced to an office announcing 'SPADE AND ARCHER' where Sam Spade is working as the Bay Bridge gleams through a large window. The office interior was shot in LA but the location is estimated to be 111 Sutter Street at the corner of Montgomery in the heart of the Financial District - not far from neo-noir's favorite location: Chinatown. Although The Maltese Falcon was made in Hollywood, we're never allowed to forget it is set in San Francisco.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens daily at the Stanford Theatre at 5:40 and 9:25.

WHY: World Film Locations: San Francisco is starting to get a few reviews, such as this one in the Bay Area Reporter. It's available online and at stores such as City Lights, Moe's and even the DeYoung Museum gift shop. I'm proud to have contributed an essay on film noir in the city for the book, in which I quickly trace film noir history from Hammett and Huston to Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, to the post-war vogue for on-location shooting and into the ways noir was transformed in the mid-to-late fifties and ultimately found expression in the still-vibrant neo-noir genre.

That's just two pages of the book's 1928, however, most of which are devoted to individual films from the silent era to relatively recent history (Steven Soderbergh's 2011 Contagion being the most current entry). Forty-six films are matched with forty-six of their most iconic San Francisco locations and presented fully-illustrated and even mapped. The pages for Greed show us the Cliff House in 1924 and today, while The Conversation is represented by One Maritime Plaza and Raiders of the Lost Ark is an excuse to show us City Hall, for example. 

San Francisco moviegoers can hardly get enough of seeing our own city on cinema screens, and there are many opportunities to do so in the coming months. The Stanford's current "Best of Bogart and Film Noir Classics" series gives us one almost every weekend in late September and October. After The Maltese Falcon this week, the venue brings Out of the Past (with the Caribbean-set To Have and Have Not) September 26-29, and Dark Passage (Oct. 10-13 with The Blue Dahlia), The Lady From Shanghai (Oct. 24-27 with Key Largo) and The Caine Mutiny (Oct. 31-Nov. 3 with Touch of Evil) each have their own entries in World Film Locations: San Francisco as well.

Two of the three features playing at Oakland's Paramount Theatre as part of its fall movie classics series are also featured in the book: Bullitt, which screens this Friday, and All About Eve, which was set in New York and Connecticut but had a key scene shot at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, screens there October 15th. (The third Paramount movie classic this fall is Huston and Bogart's Uganda-shot adventure film The African Queen on November 18th). Both of the films screening at the Pacific Film Archive's free outdoor movie series in the coming weeks also get WFL:SF entries: Harold and Maude and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And Vertigo (of course also in the book) screens November 1st at Davies Symphony Hall, with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra performing Bernard Herrmann's incredible musical score live.

Perhaps the most unexpected upcoming showcase of Frisco Bay films comes courtesy the San Francisco Film Society, which is hosting at New People Cinema October 18-20 an event called Zurich/SF, which is a cinematic celebration of the ten-year anniversary of San Francisco's sister-city partnership with Switzerland's largest city. This mini-festival collaborates with the Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective coming to the PFA, YBCA and Roxie this fall to plug the Autumn's German-language cinematic gap caused by the Berlin & Beyond festival's move back to a January timeslot after a few years having a go in the Fall, by showing films such as Kurt Früh's rarely-seen The Fall and Andrea Štaka's Fraulein (both in 35mm) as well as five other films by Swiss filmmakers. But it also brings four showings of films in which San Francisco is more than mere backdrop to action but a major element of character and theme. Of these, The Conversation and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (the latter of which will screen on 35mm) merit entries in WFL:SF, while Medicine For Melancholy is discussed in one of the other contextualizing essays in the book. As for 1970s buddy-cop oddity Freebie and the Bean, it will have to wait and see if sales on the book merit a sequel.

HOW: The Maltese Falcon screens on a 35mm double bill with Casablanca.

Premonition (1995)

WHO: Dominic Angerame made this short film.

WHAT: The completion of the new Eastern span of the Bay Bridge finally finishes the major roadway reconstruction of damage incurred during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, nearly a quarter-century after the event. With an empty span sitting there awaiting demolition, my mind turns back to Angerame's Premonition, which documented another quake-damaged structure, the Embarcadero Freeway, before its destruction. Eerie images of empty lanes of highway accompanied by an industrial soundscape makes for an almost post-apocalyptic feeling to this ten minute film made on the same stretch of pavement that has been used in Frisco films starting with The Lineup and continuing with the likes of Bullitt, The Killer Elite and Time After Time.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only on a program starting at 7:00 at the Emerald Tablet, a North Beach venue I've never attended (or, frankly, heard of) before.

WHY: This is the second of two nights of screenings of Angerame's films. I regret finding out about last week's screening too late to share with readers, or to make time to attend myself. But tonight's includes more films I've seen and can recommend. In addition to Premonition there's Deconstruction Sight, Angerame's 1990 predecessor in the "City Symphony" series, and 1997's follow-up In The Course Of Human Events, which documents the tearing down of the Embarcadero Freeway. I haven't seen the first or fifth pieces in the series, Continuum or Line of Fire, but I understand they make for a coherent cycle when shown together. And though I also haven't seen the 2013 video revision being shown tonight, his 2010 film The Soul of Things fits with the others in the series, and is a cinematographic marvel worth making Angerame an honorary modern-day member of Dziga Vertov's troupe of "Kino-Eye" photographers.

HOW: Premonition screens in 16mm along with four other 16mm shorts and two video works.

Conjuror's Box (2011)

WHO: Kerry Laitala made this short film. She and I have been dating for a couple of years now; she was already a well-established experimental film and video artist before we met at a film festival in 2011. If you find my use of this blog as a promotional platform for my girlfriend's work objectionable or compromised in anyway. you can pretend I wrote instead about Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game, which is screening at the Castro today. (I haven't seen it, and its double-bill-mate The Canyons is one of the worst new films I've seen all year.) Otherwise, read on!

WHAT: Conjuror's Box is a 35mm work of hand-made cinema, the latest in Laitala's series of films entitled the "Muse of Cinema" films, inspired by the silent era and pre-cinematic projection technologies and artifacts. In the artist's own words, it's "in effect a memento mori to the celluloid medium" as 35mm film becomes increasingly expensive for artists to work with and rare for most venues to project. Still, Conjuror's Box has screened in 35mm at several festivals and venues around the world, including at the San Francisco International Film Festival this past April and May. It was on the occasion of its screening there that the Film On Film Foundation's Carl Martin saw and briefly reviewed the film. He wrote that Conjuror's Box

uses an amalgam of techniques in its evocation of the shadowy beginnings of cinema. Sinuous abstractions (and a few recognizable objects) are photogrammed directly onto a filmstrip, then step-printed to introduce variations in tempo and bring emphasis to certain chance formations, as Stan Brakhage did with some of his hand-painted films. The striking colors of these photograms led me briefly to wonder what they would look like through the chroma-depth glasses used to view Laitala's video works, but there was already so much apparent depth to the image that it wouldn't be worth hazarding its filmic texture. Conjuror's Box is soon augmented with fanciful images suggestive of magic lantern slides (that is perhaps what they are) inserted into the masked-off center of the frame, while in the periphery the film roils on as before. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, on a program starting at 7:00.

WHY: Last week I wrote about the PFA's weekly Wednesday Alternative Visions programming, and mentioned some of the animators who are expected to be at tonight's screening showing their new work, but I'll re-iterate: Lawrence Jordan with his Solar Sight II, James Sansing with his haunting Verses, and Stacey Steers with her Night Hunter will be on hand for audience interaction, as well as Laitala.

Since last week's post, I've learned about more experimental film screenings that might be of interest to anyone thinking of attending the PFA tonight. Tomorrow night Artists' Television Access hosts formerly local filmmaker Brian Frye for a screening of a number of his shorts; the next day he'll be at the Roxie to introduce a screening of the found-footage documentary he produced Our Nixon. The SF Cinematheque Fall calendar has also been revealed, and will include appearances by filmmakers like James T. Hong, Laida Lertxundi, Standish Lawder and Nicolas Rey among others, at venues like A.T.A, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Exploratorium and others.

HOW: Conjuror's Box and Verses screen in 35mm, while Solar Sight II and Jodie Mack's Point de Gaze screen in 16mm, and the other works in the program screen digitally.

The Last Edition (1925)

WHO: Emory Johnson, a key figure in Frisco Bay filmmaking of the silent era, directed this.

WHAT: I haven't seen The Last Edition yet. Almost nobody has in the past eighty-something years. But it's a newspaper-themed drama set and shot (for the most part) in San Francisco, and thus of extremely high interest to anyone who wants a look at how this city appeared on film in the days before the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges were more than glints in its residents' eye. It also is of great interest to journalists, simply for its look inside the San Francisco Chronicle building. As historian David Kiehn writes in his exclusive essay on Johnson in the San Francisco Silent Film Festival program book (available at no cost to every attendee of the festival this weekend),

Most newspaper-themed films before and since The Last Edition have concentrated on crusading or investigative reporters pursuing the big story, but few have shown the physical process of getting out a newspaper in such detail. The film was especially popular with news reporters who knew fact from fiction.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre at 3:30, presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

WHY: The Last Edition has just been restored by a team led by SF Silent Film Festival Board President Rob Byrne, and is making its world "re-premiere" today. It's almost certainly going to be the hottest ticket of the last day of the festival today, so it may be a good idea to arrive early if you don't have tickets bought in advance. If you're still not convinced you want to see it, perusing the information and images on the restoration website, from which the above image shot at 5th and Mission Streets by the Old Mint was borrowed.

Though traditionally Sunday has been the strongest day of each annual Silent Film Festival, today's set has its work cut out for it to match Fridays and yesterday's lineups. With a comedy shorts program, a new restoration of a Swedish classic never before shown here in as complete a version, a German film about a labor uprising, and one of the most thrilling comedy finales ever filmed, all screening today along with The Last Edition, Sunday's going to put up a heckuva fight anyway.

HOW: The Last Edition screens in a newly-struck 35mm print, with piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne.

Fruitvale Station (2013)

WHO: Ryan Coogler wrote and directed this.

WHAT: About midway through Fruitvale Station, the docudrama account of Oscar Grant III's last day or so on earth before being fatally shot on the platform of  the BART stop between Lake Merritt and the Oakland Coliseum, it becomes clear that we're witnessing a series of Grant's goodbyes to his loved ones. We know it. The filmmakers know it. Only the characters don't as their real-life counterparts didn't back on the eve of 2009 when the incident took place, although Grant's daughter Tatiana, as played by Ariana Neal, seems to have a sense of it as she voices her fears for her father as he heads out into the night.

Knowing a tragedy is soon to unfold for the characters in a movie can imbue a movie with the ability to make us pay a different kind of attention than one in which fate is undetermined as narrative progresses. If we like the characters (and thanks to excellent performances by Michael B. Jordan as Grant and Melonie Diaz as his baby mama Sophina, we probably do unless we're the sort of folks who are predisposed not to be able to relate to imperfect people), we want them to experience every moment to their fullest before the inevitable curtain close. This translates to our wanting the filmmakers, led by Coogler, to make the most of every scene and every shot. And frequently Coogler does, helped by the familiarity with location and regional slang that comes with being an Oakland native. The scenes on the BART train heading into Frisco (as the characters call it) walk a lovely line between expressing the exuberance of living in the moment and making the best of a mildly disappointing situation (being stuck in a train car during the strike of the New Year), and performing a celebratory send-off for Grant and for his relationships with friends and family.

But not every scene feels so natural in its expression of a life being wound down, completely unawares. I think the different register of attention a preordained finale invites has invited certain critics to become particularly judgmental of scenes that for one reason or another don't seem to "fit". A scene in which Grant holds a pit bull in its last moments after a hit-and-run has been criticized in particular, for being an incident taken not out of Grant's own life, but Coogler's brother's, and speculatively placed into a blank spot on Grant's known itinerary that day. The scene has been condemned as a manipulation intended to get audiences to sympathize with a drug dealing philanderer as an animal lover, but ignored in the critiques I've read is the visible stain of dried dog blood on Jordan's white shirt, visible for the next several scenes but (as I recall, though perhaps my memory fails me) uncommented on by other characters. One would think he'd change shirts first chance he gets, but instead he puts on another shirt over it, as if wanting to hide the mark from the outside world but keep the life-force of another being close. I'd like to see the film again sometime, if for no other reason than to try to further tease out the significance of this stain.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, the California in Berkeley, the Metreon in San Francisco, with more Frisco Bay theatres expected to be added over the coming weeks.

WHY: Fruitvale Station has, of course, a built-in reason to be worth seeing by Bay Area audiences who are interested in the way that their home (primarily the East Bay, but Frisco gets its moment as well) comes off in a feature film likely to be seen and taken seriously by large audiences around the country and beyond. A film based on a real event, using real locations, and funded in part by the San Francisco Film Society is practically required viewing for anyone interested in the local film community. Thankfully it's worth seeing. 

And then, I can't escape mentioning, is the timing of the film's release with the weekend's announcement of the Trayvon Martin verdict in Florida. There are some undeniable similarities, as well as some stark differences, between the two slayings. Perhaps the biggest similarity between the two tragedies is the desperation for polarized commentators to portray the people at either end of the guns in each case as either a violent thug or a boy scout (albeit one who hadn't rightfully earned his Emergency Preparedness badge). By instinct, I'd rather avoid weighing in on the Martin case myself because I really haven't followed it as closely as everyone else I know seems to have, but this is a situation where a few brief, unoriginal statements (in lieu of the fully-reasoned-out essay the subject deserves) seems less cowardly to me than a false front of neutrality. 

So here goes: I think institutional racism is alive, well, and one of the most horribly pernicious aspects of our society today. I think that the extent of the legality of gun use in this country is absurd from every point of view other than the munitions industry and its (perhaps unwitting) supporters, and that "Stand Your Ground" laws in particular are horribly ill-conceived considering the solid tradition of self-defense in our legal system. Finally, I'm simply appalled by the instinct to turn George Zimmerman into a hero.

HOW: A 35mm print screens at the Grand Lake, while other venues screen digitally. Fruitvale Station was shot on 16mm film. UPDATE 7/18/2013: I've been informed by two separate sources that despite the Film on Film Foundation's listing of Fruitvale Station as a 35mm screening at the Grand Lake, it's in fact showing on DCP.

The Blue Umbrella (2013)

WHO: Saschka Unseld directed this.

WHAT: Toy Story 3. Cars 2. Monsters University. Of the last four feature films made by Emeryville's Pixar Animation Studio, three have been sequels to previously-produced properties, populated by familiar characters, and the fourth represents the studio in its most Disney-esque of milieus- never mind that last summer's Brave was aimed at correcting the princess-passivity of the studio's parent company. There have been lots of technological advancements in the field of computer-generated animation in the meantime, and Pixar has been at the forefront of employing them. But in terms of the look of its films, the studio still embraces a very "cartoony" look- especially in its character designs. That Woody and Buzz, and Mike and Sully, look and move about the same in the 2010s as they did in 1995 and 2001 is probably a very good thing. Nobody really wants more "realistic" versions of these toys and monsters. But the arguable over-reliance on proven characters (next up: Finding Dory in 2015) may indicate a kind of water-treading in Pixar features that seems uncharacteristic of a company that not so long ago had an impressive 3-year run introducing (essentially) original characters in more-or-less exquisitely crafted stories: Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up.

Meanwhile, animation has become ever more a major part of Hollywood's so-called "live action" extravaganzas (Pacific Rim reportedly has 1594 animated effects shots), pretty much all of which try to avoid utilizing "cartoony" looks in favor of photorealistic approaches. Might Pixar want to prove its mettle in producing movies that match- or outdo- the work being done on "bake-off" contenders like Life of Pi and The Avengers? If so, their latest short The Blue Umbrella may give us a taste of directions to come. This sweet tale of an attraction between two colorful umbrellas in a sea of black ones sidesteps the uncanny valley by preventing us from seeing any human faces, but is set in a cityscape so believable that it has frequently been mistaken for a live-action/animation hybrid. In fact it was created entirely through animation, although photographs of San Francisco and New York were used as reference for the ultimate composite. Director Unseld has spoken of a character (named "Lisa") based on an object he saw on the sidewalk while walking in his San Francisco neighborhood. Going by a clue on his tumblr I believe I was able to track it down; if I'm right the object is still there in front of Paragon Cleaners on Bush Street, right at the foot of Dashiell Hammet Alley.

You might ask why an animation company might want to move away from "cartoony" looks when they ply a craft in a long tradition of masters from Winsor McCay to the Termite Terrace crew to Hayao Miyazaki, none of whom have ever needed to convince audiences they were looking at anything other than a cartoon. And perhaps they won't, and The Blue Umbrella will remain a one-off experiment in the Pixar filmography. But though countless styles of hand-drawn animation have been proven acceptable to mass audiences over the years, it's hard to deny that mainstream animated features these days have a tendency to look quite a bit like each other, as if their characters all could exist in the same universe (no matter whether it's Pixar or Dreamworks or another rival producing). It's hard to picture Betty Boop naturally co-existing with Tom & Jerry in the Yellow Submarine universe, but it wouldn't be such an aesthetic stretch to see The Incredibles battling Megamind or Despicable Me if their corporate masters allowed it. At this point I'd be excited for any new direction in the way mainstream feature animation looks, and I'd bet on Pixar being the most likely candidate to lead that way.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple showtimes daily at theatres around Frisco Bay. Today is the last day to see it at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, however. Read on.

WHY: I feature this short today because I believe it's the last chance we'll have to see it screened on 35mm, which is how it's playing at the Grand Lake today. You might wonder why it's important to see a digitally-created short on film, but it appears to be (along with Digital 3D) one of the preferred methods of viewing by Unseld, who says

If you see it in 2D I’d recommend looking out for a cinema that shows it on film because the film grain and the celluloid really adds a whole other dimension into it as well.

HOW: Screens before Monsters University, both digitally everywhere except for at the Grand Lake.

Fog Over Frisco (1934)

WHO: Bette Davis stars in this, looking astonishingly young to anyone who has her performance in All About Eve, made sixteen years later (or even in Now Voyager, made eight years later) burned into their brains.

WHAT: Film historian William K. Everson called it the "fastest film ever made" and compared it favorably to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin as a screen textbook for film editing. But for viewers interested the history of San Francisco's depiction in Hollywood films, Fog Over Frisco takes on special significance. It's one of the very few big-studio productions of the 1930s that actually brought some of its cast (although not Davis, as far as I can tell) and crew to the City By The Bay in order to film sequences on location here.

There's a dynamic sequence in which a gaggle of reporters await Margaret Lindsay (who plays Davis's sister) outside her family's mansion in order to ambush her with their cameras. This is shot in Pacific Heights, right at the corner of Octavia and Washington, and you can clearly see Lafayette Park, Spreckels Mansion (pictured above, and currently resided in by novelist Danielle Steel) and other still-standing structures in the scene. The cable-car line on Washington Street, however, is no more.

Another scene in the film calls for a bridge- but since the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges had only just begun construction in 1933, the filmmakers utilized the Third Street Bridge (now known as the Lefty O'Doul Bridge) in China Basin- a neighborhood that has evidently changed its appearance far more than Pacific Heights has since 1934.

These sequences make Fog Over Frisco one of the most extensive on-location Hollywood film to use 1930s-era San Francisco that I've ever come across. Films like Ladies They Talk About (1933), Barbary Coast (1935), San Francisco (1936) and Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) for instance,  use stock photography of the city or none at all, evoking San Francisco entirely through the construction of Hollywood sets. It's a very different story from that of the 1920s, when films like Moran of the Lady Letty (1922) and Greed (1924) were just a few of the productions able to shoot extensively in town (without sound crews, of course), or of the 1940s (particularly the post-World War II era) when developments in cameras and film stocks helped usher in a vogue for location photography in this city that has essentially never looked back. But any student of history wants to fill gaps in the record however possible, so a chance to see what 1930s Frisco was like, through the lens of a First National production, is all the more precious.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight and tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre at 6:10 and 9:05, and the West Portal Branch of the San Francisco Public Library at 6:30 PM on July 23rd.

WHY: I'm thinking a lot about San Francisco-shot films this week because I just received an advance copy of World Film Locations: San Francisco, a book tracing the history of San Francisco moviemaking in a fun and informative way. I'm proud to have been able to contribute to this handsome volume packed with maps, images, and short write-ups on forty-six of the most notable films made in my hometown, each represented by a different scene and location. There are also six essays contextualizing certain recurring trends (the Golden Gate Bridge, car chases) and filmmakers (Hitchcock, Eastwood) involved in shooting here, and a seventh that discusses the current reigning local favorite filmmaker (at least according to a plurality of SF Bay Guardian readers), Peaches Christ.

I've mentioned here before (perhaps too frequently) that my contribution was one of these contextualizing essays, in my case on the topic of film noir in the 1940s and 50s. Though I had free reign to approach this topic how I liked, for which I graciously thank editor Scott Jordan Harris. I had no input in the rest of the book, including the selection of the 46 featured and mapped titles. Of course there are some omissions I'd have stumped for if it had I been involved in that part of the process, but that's a natural reaction any movie fan would feel. Perhaps there can be a sequel if this edition is a success- I think it will be. Overall the book does a great job in bringing together the famous films everyone around the world associates with this city, with a healthy dose of unexpected surprises.

So no, Fog Over Frisco is not featured in the book, but that doesn't mean Spreckels Mansion isn't. It gets its own two-page spread as the chosen location from George Sidney's 1957 musical Pal Joey, starring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak. I don't want to give away too much about the contents of an unpublished book yet, but I will note that nine of the book's forty-six featured films are planned to screen for free this month at San Francisco Public Library branch locations as part of a twenty-title SF Library Film Festival. (To further narrow a few guesses, I'll hint that two of the three of these titles screening Thursdays at the Main Library are in the book).

HOW: At the West Portal Library, Fog Over Frisco will screen via projected DVD. At the Stanford, it screens on a 35mm double-bill with the Of Human Bondage, the career-defining Davis role that was filmed just before, and released just after, the filming of Fog Over Frisco.

Absteigend (2012)

WHO: Paul Clipson is one of Frisco Bay's leading experimental filmmakers over the past decade or so. Even if you haven't heard of him you may have seen his handiwork as projectionist for SFMOMA until it closed earlier this month. This video shows him at work, and gives a glimpse of the remarkable storyboards he's created to assist reel changes.

WHAT: Clipson's Absteigend might be called a music video for a song on Evan Caminiti's Thrill Jockey album Dreamless Sleep, except that there's nothing "video" about it in its original form. Shot and processed using Super-8 film, this brief New York "city symphony" was one of the highlights of this Spring's Crossroads Festival put on by SF Cinematheque. Sophie Pinchetti puts it succinctly when she says the filmmaker "explores the melancholic beauty and solitude of the industrial cityscape". You can follow that last link and watch it online, but there's no substitute for seeing it in its "reel" form.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 8:00 PM at Artists' Television Access.

WHY: Tonight Absteigend screens as part of a full program of Clipson's recent film work, which will include a performance by Clipson and sound artist Marielle Jakobsons. The unique Artists' Television Access is an improbable survivor of multiple real-estate booms on the Valencia Street corridor, and one of the last neighborhood storefronts essentially retaining the same character it had twenty years ago. ATA is a perfect place to see small-gauge film and video that you'd be hard-pressed to see play at any other venue. Its July calendar includes documentaries Directing Dissent (about a political activist) and The Space Invaders: In Search of Lost Time (about arcade games) as well as a showcase for Oakland collective Elements of Image Making, an open screening and more.

HOW: Tonight's films screen as Super-8mm projections.

Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton (2013)

WHO: As you might guess from the film's title, San Francisco filmmaker and poet James Broughton is the subject of this documentary.

WHAT: I've yet to see Big Joy but it's getting rave reviews everywhere this week: Jackson Scarlet, MIchael Guillén, Dennis Harvey and even Peter Wong of the Chronicle all have made it one of their top picks of the Frameline Film Festival. And that's on top of the terrific reviews and interviews linked on the film's website. I don't feel I can add much to the conversation, certainly not before seeing it.

But having seen most of Broughton's films either in 16mm prints presented at local screening venues or on the Facets DVD, and hearing that Big Joy includes generous clips from his work, I'll talk a but about three of my favorites of his films, each from a different phase of his career.

Four In The Afternoon was made in 1951, just after the publication of his third book of poetry Musical Chairs. Each of its four parts places dancers in a different San Francisco location ("Game Little Gladys" is Telegraph Hill and "The Gardener's Son" is Sutro Heights) for a fine frolic reminiscent of the more balletic aspects of silent film comedy, accompanied by a soundtrack of lovely music and the voice of Broughton reciting one of his poems. Of particular note is the third section "Princess Printemps" in which dance legends Anna Halprin and 
Welland Lathrop enact a flirtation amidst the Palace of Fine Arts structures left behind by the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

High Kukus was made in in 1973, five years after Broughton's return to filmmaking (with the groundbreaking The Bed) after a fifteen-year hiatus. It's a very brief (3 minute) iris shot of a shimmering blue pond in Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden, casting reflections of the trees above and rippling with the rhythms of nature (we hear birds and frogs chirping) as Broughton recites what he called "cuckoo haikus" in homage to Zen poet Basho. Though the image brings to my mind the work of Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand and Nathaniel Dorsky, I've found that both experimental film diehards and people completely unschooled in the (here's a misnomer but handy one) "avant-garde tradition" get a great amount of joy from this one.

The Gardener of Eden is from 1981, during the "Joel Singer period" in which Broughton collaborated as a filmmaker with one of his San Francisco Art Institute students. Between 1976 and 1988 Broughton and Singer made eight films; this one was filmed when the couple were living on a Sri Lankan rubber plantation, and is so aesthetically dense and thematically multilayered as to deserve a full explication- perhaps book-length. But for now I'll just mention a few facts and formal generalizations: here Broughton's recited poetry is found only at the beginning and ending, bookending (after an opening thundercrack) a conch-shell musical performance credited to Antarjyami Muni. Between its pulsating tones and the rapid cutting and zooming of Singer's camera, upon palms and aloe vera leaves, upon dozens of young Sinhalese men and boys, but most especially on the piercing gaze of the elderly Bevis Bawa, the island nation's most famous horticulturist.

I don't know if these films will be excerpted in Big Joy or if more attention will be paid to famous films like The Potted Psalm, Mother's Day and The Bed. But I can't wait to find out!

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre at 4:00, as part of Frameline 37.

WHY: If Big Joy is as good as I'm hoping, it will be a great pump-primer for audiences to get excited about other experimental work at this year's Frameline festival. Though in an ideal world the festival would have included a full program of retrospective works by Broughton in the festival, or at least scheduled a screening of one of his shorts to play before this afternoon's Castro screening (though it may be that none are distributed on 35mm or DCP, the Castro's favored formats now that they no longer have a 16mm projector installed), I'm hoping this only means Frameline will co-present a retrospective to coincide with Broughton's centennial this November, perhaps with Canyon Cinema, which is co-presenting today's screening. 

If you click the "experimental" tag on the Frameline website you get 37 titles listed, most shorts. Of these, the most promising to me seem to be the works by experimental video artists Kadet Kuhne and Texas Tomboy screening under the banner Sexperimental this Wednesday, and the Rats In Glitter compilation of new experimental shorts by Vika Kirchenbauer, Jonesy, and other modern makers. Both of these screenings happen at the Roxie.

Other experimental film screenings I'm aware of this summer (usually a comparatively dry period with school out and both Other Cinema and SF Cinematheque on seasonal hiatus) include a June 29th Artists' Television Access screening of films by Paul Clipson, and performances by Vanessa O'Neill and Kent Long (a.k.a. Beige), and by the aforementioned Kuhne at the relatively newly-formed Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland.

HOW: Digital screening.

My Way To Olympia (2013)

WHO: This documentary is from Niko Von Glasow, who began his film career as a "production assistant" (that is, coffee maker) on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola and Theater In Trance, then worked his way up the ladder in films by the likes of Alexander Kluge and Jean-Jacques Annaud. Since 1990 he's written/directed, produced, or done both for about a dozen films thus far, and with My Way To Olympia he does all three, plus appears on camera.

WHAT: I haven't seen this documentary, made by Von Glasow at last year's ParaOlympics in London, but it sounds quite compelling, and I'm rather relieved to read reviews assuring what the film is not, such as the one by Cirina Catania I'm about to quote:

Von Glasow’s matter-of-fact approach to his subjects gets our attention right from the beginning of the film when he declares he is not sure he wants to make the movie, he hates sports and he thinks the ParaOlympics are basically a dumb idea. My Way to Olympia is not a gushy story about a group of charismatic, disabled humans overcoming adversity against all odds…

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at the Little Roxie at 9PM and Saturday, June 15th, at the New Parkway at 5PM.

WHY: If you haven't yet seen one of the year's best films, The Place Beyond the Pines, it's playing in 35mm at the Castro today and I urge you to catch it. But if you already have, you may want to turn your attention to DocFest, which is responsible for bringing this screening tonight. At 7PM there's a showcase of shorts by local doc-makers, and an hour-long psittacine feature by another local (Emily Wick) called Life With Alex, which SF IndieFest near-completist Jason Wiener has called "the most amazing thing I've seen in the festival (so far.)"  Then at 9 there's yet another by a local: Public Sex, Private Lives, by Kink.com filmmaker Simone Jude; this one was featured in last week's Bay Guardian. 

But I'm personally most interested in the most far-flung of tonight's selections, My Way To Olympia, in part because I'm always interested in seeing films made about the Olympics, and why shouldn't that include the ParaOlympics as well? The fact that Von Glasow is himself a paraplegic adds to the allure, I admit; if one-eyed auteurs like Raoul Walsh and André De Toth could show-up most of their fully-sighted directorial brethren when making 3-D films during the 1953 stereoscopy craze, then how good of a picture might a Thalidomide survivor be able to come up with? I aim to find out.

HOW: Digital production and presentation.

Burn On (1973)

WHO: Shirley Muldowney is one of the drag racers briefly interviewed in this documentary.

WHAT: I've already mentioned "interviewed" and "documentary" in the same sentence (twice now!) and it may have made your eyes roll. But this film is a flurry of images and sounds from the Epping, New Hampshire drag racing track where it was filmed, and the interviews comprise a very small component of its sixteen-minute running time. I've found very little reference to it outside of racing enthusiast circles, but it ought to be known by cinema enthusiasts as well. It hearkens back to an era when formal experimentation and non-fiction storytelling were less mutually-exclusive categories.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 9:05 PM

WHY: When I found out Burn On was screening tonight, I just had to feature it today.

Last night I got back from a week-long trip to New Hampshire, the state where it was filmed. I steered clear of racetracks and high speeds but ticked off quite a few rental car miles while driving around the state with my wonderful girlfriend, award-winning filmmaker Kerry Laitala, who is spending part of the summer there thanks the generosity of the MacDowell Artist Colony. I helped her gather footage, photographs, materials, and even a few interviews that she'll be using as raw material in her next film project about the New Hampshire icon the Old Man of the Mountain (which you may or may not be aware was the indirect origin of Buster Keaton's nickname "The Great Stone Face".)

While her residency at the MacDowell Colony is a boon, her film requires additional expenses that she's hoping will be able to be funded by a Kickstarter project currently in-progress. I'm obviously close to the project, but I think it's going to ultimately produce a fascinating and beautiful investigation of the human relationship to landscape, the nature of impermanence, and the relevance of the past to our own faced-paced age.

This all may seem like a huge digression from Burn On, but I feel the New Hampshire connection and the fact that the racing documentary exhibits certain experimental film techniques in a lineage of visual vocabulary that Laitala's work is not so far from, gives me an excuse to pitch this project to my blog readers. I don't often use this blog to promote my friends' crowd-funding projects, but this one is particularly close to my heart. I've never placed ads on my site or asked for donations before either, so if you appreciate my efforts in covering the Frisco Bay film scene, please click the link to her project, and consider pledging to her project or (just importantly) sharing it with people you think might also be interested in supporting her, or receiving some of her unique art object rewards. And do it soon, as there's only a week left to go in her campaign!

HOW: Burn On plays prior to a screening of Monte Hellman's great road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, and after a 7:00 showing of Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. All three in 35mm prints.

Angels (2013)

WHO: Jim Granato directed this short.

WHAT: Thanks to the Sequester, Fleet Weeks all over the country are being cancelled, including New York's, which normally would be occurring today, with an air show by the Blue Angels in honor of Memorial Day today. San Francisco's Fleet Week is usually in October, but will be cancelled for 2013 as well.

I mention all this because Granato's brand-new short comedy is set during Fleet Week, although it's not expressly mentioned in the film; in fact the film's entire comedic premise is the knowledge gap between those of us who've been Frisco Bay residents long enough to understand the rhythms and traditions of our fine city, and those newcomers who can become confused when thrown into a situation they never experienced before coming here.

It's also a celebration of San Francisco traditions, particularly those of the cinematic variety. Settings include some of the Mission District's most vital purveyors of alternative culture, Artists' Television Access, Other Cinema curator Craig Baldwin, and the Roxie (pictured above). Both of these venues need to be supported, especially in these times of massive immigration (and its accompanying displacement) into the neighborhood, by people who may be so used to whatever mall multiplexes and streaming services they used to see movies in their former residences, that they would never even think to look for a cinema that might be screening films and videos they'd be hard pressed to find using any other distribution channels.

But Angels is a comedic tribute, not a harangue. It'll be through the gentle catalyst of humor, if it gets Mission residents (whether long-timers or newcomers) excited about the storied traditions of San Francisco moviegoing - and moviemaking. Indeed, Granato takes a mid-film shift from semi-naturalistic urban comedy (not so far removed from the tradition of American slapstick that grew up mostly on the streets of Los Angeles in the silent era with the outdoor-shot pictures of Mack Sennett and his competitors) to a more fantastic, meta-cinematic mode when he starts making explicit reference to some of the great films shot here in the past. 

What films? I don't want to spoil the surprises and perhaps the biggest laughs in the picture, but with the 2013 Cannes Awards just announced, I'll give a few hints: one of them is the only San Francisco-located film to have won a previous Palme d'Or at Cannes, and another's star handed out one of the awards at the French festival yesterday.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie at 7:30 PM.

WHY: There's no better place to see Angels than in the Roxie, one of its most prominent locations, so this is the perfect place for its world premiere. I previewed it on my home computer and, though I enjoyed it, I felt a bit rueful that I'll never be able to watch it for the first time with an audience to laugh along with, and to see the 104-year-old cinema's cameos on the screen being depicted.

I covered this a bit in my "WHAT" section above, but it's great that the venue is hosting periodic "Neighborhood Nights" to help engage the community with their local big screen. The last one was Sean Gillane's CXL earlier this month, and I'm liking this frequency. Hopefully there will be more on the Roxie's forthcoming summer calendar. In the meantime, there are plenty of other enticing film and video programs at the venue, including Czech That Film, a selection of new films from a European country that Mission Bohemians ought to be able to relate to, and a 6-title Jon Moritsugu series including his brand new Pig Death Machine. Both of these series begin later this week.

HOW: Angels will be screened with Granato's award-winning documentary feature D Tour, about a local musician named Pat Spurgeon, who must contend with a failing kidney while embarking on a tour with his band Rogue Wave. Granato will be on hand at the screening, and so will the band, who will perform a live acoustic set following the digitally-projected short and feature.

Milk (2008)

WHO: Daniel Nicoletta was a historical consultant and still photographer for this film, performed in a cameo playing Harvey Milk's political aide Carl Carlson, and was portrayed as a young man by Lucas Grabeel (pictured above).

WHAT: You can nitpick its minor anachronisms or question some of the characterization and still find this Gus Van Sant-directed, multi-awarded biopic of San Francisco's first openly gay elected official to be a very moving film about a crucial moment in the city's, and ultimately the nation's and the world's,  movement toward freedom and equality. Sean Penn's performance as Harvey Milk is a career high, and one of the few recent Academy Award-winning impersonations of a historical figure that I think probably deserved all its accolades.

The decisions to shoot the film in San Francisco locations dressed to be as authentic as possible, and to fill the set with people who lived through the period depicted, available to help guide a younger generation of their own portrayers to verisimilitude, from the featured players down to the marching extras in mass protest scenes, may be foregone conclusions in retrospect, but they weren't the only approaches available to makers of films like Milk. And there's something very interesting about the kind of authenticity available and not available to filmmakers working this way. There's both a paradox and a beautiful expression of continuity that occurs when the audience sees a 25-year-old actor or extra in the same frame as the person he or she is portraying, who is now 55 years old and portraying an elder who may have inspired him or her at the time.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre, with showtimes at 2:00, 4:30, 7:00 & 9:30.

WHY: Every year since Milk came out, the Castro has shown it on Harvey Milk Day, which commemorates the life of the activist who would have turned 83 today had he not been slain. Today the screening also comes just one day after the announcement of the 37th Frameline Festival, which will come to the Castro and other Frisco Bay venues June 20-30. 

As we see in Milk, Harvey Milk's political career arose out of his experiences running a camera store just a block away from the Castro Theatre. This was one of the sets recreated in its original space for the film, and Jenni Olson's beautiful short 575 Castro St. documents that space in moments when it wasn't being utilized as a location for shooting, in a manner intended to remind us of the importance of this store as a hub not only of political activism but artistic expression. In fact the two activities were (and, I would argue, are) intertwined inseparably. Perhaps there's no better example of this than the historical fact that it was Milk's increasing involvement in politics that necessitated his hiring of Daniel Nicoletta at the store, to take on duties he was becoming too busy to handle himself. Nicoletta's presence at the store (depicted in the screenshot from Milk above), which was devoted to small-gauge motion picture processing as well as still photography, put him in the ideal place to help found the first-ever "Gay Film Festival of Super-8 Films" in 1977, an event that over the next few decades transformed into the Frameline festival we know today. As Olson writes, 

For its first few years the festival showcased the modest Super-8 imaginings of such prolific but obscure gay filmmakers as Jim Baker, Bern Boyle, Stephen Iadereste, Ric Mears, Allen McClain, Billy Miggins, T.K. Perkins, Wayne Smolen, David Waggoner, Ken Ward and Christine Wynne as well as festival founders Marc Huestis and Dan Nicoletta and Names Project founder Cleve Jones. Many of these films explored gay themes, but a good percentage of the work (like many other experimental films of the era) focused on simple light and motion studies.

If you haven't been keeping an eye on the Wikipedia page for the Frameline Film Festival, you might like to know that it has recently exploded with historical information, particularly from the festival's first ten years. The page also points out that Frameline has scanned and made available all of its past program guides in a handy archive. From this archive, I've learned more about Nicoletta's own filmmaking than anywhere else. Some of his films shown at the first few "Gay Film Festivals" include a film, which he described as "an autobiographic film about my destiny, my love of San Francisco and life here", or Theatrical Collage: "a collection of theatrical footage from over the years" and Dancing Is Illegal, which is described as "produced for the stage by the Angels of Light".

Reading about this early festival history is a good reminder of the seemingly-humble beginnings that can lay the groundwork for a cultural movement (and considering Frameline is the longest-running and highest-profile LGBT Film Festival in the country and perhaps anywhere, I don't think it's overreaching to use terms like "cultural movement"). In the late 1970s, Super-8 was the most inexpensive motion picture medium around, and thus ideal material for use by independent-minded artists, especially those whose work would likely be systematically be excluded from traditional structures of creation and exhibition. 

Today the equivalently inexpensive medium is digital. It's something to keep in mind after learning at the Frameline press conference this morning that this year is expected to be the first time the festival doesn't screen a single new film on a non-digital format. There will be two 35mm retrospective programs (a matinee of Jamie Babbit's 1999 But I'm a Cheerleader with her 1998 short Sleeping Beauties, and a Peaches Christ-hosted midnight showing of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddie's Revenge) but, it seems, no prints of new titles.  

This may be an end of an era of a sort, but it's not at all unexpected. The ratio of film-to-digital presentations has been steeply declining at practically every festival I know of in the past few years. Last year I believe Frameline screened no more than a dozen films on film, and a good third of those were retrospectives. The good news is that higher-quality digital presentations are becoming more and more affordable for independent makers, so while those of us who take special pleasure in the illusionary intermittence of film projection may mourn the increasing scarcity of opportunities to watch it, at least we may be able to enjoy digital screenings more than we have in the past. I hope so, as there are quite a few new works at Frameline 37 that seem quite promising, including a ten-program regional focus entitled Queer Asian Cinema, and a new documentary on the great Frisco Bay poet and filmmaker James Broughton, appropriately entitled Big Joy after the kinds of feelings most of his experimental films can instill in an attentive audience. Perhaps another local venue will use this new doc as an excuse to rent 16mm prints of some of his films from Canyon Cinema and showcase them during or shortly after the festival.

HOW: Milk will screen as a DCP.