SFFILM 62 Day 13: The Labyrinth

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival is almost over; last night was the official "closing night" but repeat screenings continue today and Tuesday, April 23rd. Each day during the festival I've been posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A still from Laura Millán's The Labyrinth, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM.

The Labyrinth (COLOMBIA/FRANCE: Laura Huertas Millán, 2018)
playing: 6:00PM today at the Roxie, as part of the Shorts 5: New Visions program.

It could be a quirk of my own personal perception, but to me it feels like in the past few years the nation of Colombia has been undergoing an uptick in motion picture production and/or international distribution, possibly tied to the Foreign Language Oscar nomination of Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent from 2015. Guerra's follow-up (for the first time sharing co-directing credit with editor & producer Cristina Gallego) Birds of Passage became the first Latin American film ever to open the Director's Fortnight at Cannes last year, and showed at the Mill Valley Film Festival before a Frisco Bay commercial release earlier this year.

This year's SFFILM program boasts three Colombian productions or co-productions, as many as from any other majority-Spanish speaking country besides Mexico. Though the three screenings of the Vanguard selection Lapü have all passed, there's still one more festival screening of Monos, from the Dark Wave festival section, and The Labyrinth, one of the longest and most fascinating of the shorts in the New Visions program. It's an experimental documentary from a filmmaker associated with the Sensory Ethnography Lab that gave brought previous San Francisco International Film Festival audiences gems like Leviathan and Manakanama. The Labyrinth doesn't jump out at the viewer as akin to those highly-conceptual features, but rather uses a syncretic approach to materials that allow ideas to bury themselves into the viewer's mind, to be awakened at an unexpected future moment.

It's an oblique portrait of Medellín Cartel drug trafficker Evaristo Porras Ardila, who built a replica of the Carrington Family mansion from "Dynasty" in the Tres Fronteras region of the Amazon where Colombia's Southernmost point touches Peru and Brazil, as told by one of his Porras's former workers named Cristóbal Gómez. Huertas Millán combines a voiceover from Gómez with intercut images of the ruin of the real, recreated mansion and the original, patchworked mansion as filmed by Emmy-nominated cinematographer Michel Hugo (and/or his fellow "Dynasty" DPs). The ruin images feel straight out of a visit to Angkor Wat or another truly ancient fallen city, and when contrasted against televised icons of Reagan-era wealth feel like the rotting interior of an entire economic system. The latter half of The Labyrinth makes more mystical turns into the connections between the jungle and states of altered consciousness. It's a powerful work that was justly praised on its tour of major experimental film festival showcases such as Locarno, Toronto's Wavelengths, the New York Film Festival's Projections, etc.

The Labyrinth is joined by a selection of moving image works by underground artists from around the world in the New Visions program. More than one also contrast mediated televisual images with more personal footage to provocative effect: Akosua Adoma Owusu's Pelourinho, They Don’t Really Care About Us is a Ghanaian maker's look at another South American country, bringing into her 16mm film world both a 1926 letter from W.E.B. DuBois to the Brazilian president and shots from Spike Lee's music video for a Michael Jackson song (the same one also featured prominently in a scene in another SFFILM selection, now a Golden Gate Award winner, Midnight Traveler) shot in the favelas of Rio. The critic Neil Young has written extensively and passionately about this piece. Another similar hybrid is local filmmaker Sandra Davis's That Woman, which intercuts the 1999 ABC broadcast of Barbara Walters interviewing Monica Lewinsky (complete with late-breaking interjections of news about the death of Stanley Kubrick) with scenes of a re-enactment shot in the San Francisco Art Institute's Studio 8, with George Kuchar as Walters interviewing a Lewinsky look-alike. Given that Kuchar died over seven and a half years ago, I understand why Jonathan Marlow followed an impulse to list it in my blog's repertory round-up; he notes that it was "recently completed" by Davis (its local premiere was last summer at 16 Sherman Street) but the presence in the cast of a man who died (too young) over seven and a half years ago makes it feel older than its completion date suggests. Yet now seems like the perfect moment to release a short that would have taken on very different resonances two or three or ten or fifteen years ago. (I don't know if it was shot that long ago; it could've been anywhere from 1999 to 2011 by my initial reckoning).

Add in strong work like Zachary Epcar's Life After Love, Courtney Stephens' Mixed Signals, Sun Kim's Now and Here, Here and Then and Ariana Gerstein's Traces with Elikem, and this is the strongest New Visions program I've seen at SFFILM in several years. Perhaps that's only sensible in the first year in the past quarter-century that the festival has cut its presentation of new experimental shorts from two programs down to one, as I discussed last week, but I wouldn't want to read too much into it. Perhaps it's just a program more aligned with my own personal taste. Which is why I was surprised to see that the Golden Gate Awards shorts jury decided to go outside of the New Visions category to award the festival's $2,000 cash prize for a New Visions work to a short that had been placed in the Animated Short category: Urszula Palusińska's Cold Pudding Settles Love. Definitely one of the stranger entrants in the Animated Shorts competition, it is hard to compare against a crowd-pleasing laugh machine like Claudius Gentinetta's Selfies, which won the Animated Short GGA. While I don't know if the jury's category-confounding selection is unprecedented for the Golden Gate Awards, it's certainly unusual. It makes me glad that The Labyrinth as well as Epcar's Life After Love and Stephens' Mixed Signals will at least get another chance to screen for Frisco Bay audiences during the June 7-9 Crossroads Festival held by SF Cinematheque at SFMOMA and just announced this morning. I'm not sure if that festival still has an audience award prize, and if so I'm certain it's not going to come with $2000, but at the very minimum these films can extend their reach to more viewers.

SFFILM62 Day 13
Other festival options: With just two more days in the festival, everything is now down to it's final screening, so today's your last festival chance to see anything that happens to be playing. I can recommend The Load, which I wrote about yesterday, most highly (it plays the Victoria at 3:30PM), and Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale with some major reservations, not so much regarding its brutal violence (although if you don't want to watch that I certainly don't blame you), but the moments near the end of the film that strain credulity after the believably bleak outlook adopted from the early scenes. That one screens at the Roxie at 8:30PM.

Non-SFFILM option: The Castro Theatre (which incidentally has a good portion of its May offerings on its website, including a day-long screening of a new DCP of Sergei Bondarchuk's 7-hour War & Peace May 25) tonight launches a pretty cinephile-friendly final week and change before the San Francisco Silent Film Festival opens May 1st. Tonight's World War I-themed double-bill pairs a 35mm print of Peter Weir's rarely-revived 1981 classic Gallipoli with a 3D presentation of Peter Jackson's recent documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. Other 35mm prints playing there this week include Joseph Losey's Boom!, David Lynch's Mulholland Dr., and a day stuffed with films starring Italian actor Ugo Tognazzi, including films by auteurs Elio Petri, Bernardo Bertolucci, Dino Risi and Marco Ferreri, all presented in prints brought in by the Italian Cultural Institute.

SFFILM 61 Day 12: Drop By Drop

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

Image from Drop By Drop provided by SFFILM

Drop By Drop (PORTUGAL: Alexandra "Xá" Ramires & Laura Gonçalves, 2017)
playing: 3:00 today at the Roxie, as part of Shorts 3: Animation.

Drop By Drop is in my opinion the most visually impressive of the animated short films found in either the Shorts 5: Family Films program (in which Louise Bagnall's Late Afternoon and Erick Oh's “Pig: The Dam Keeper Poems” Chapter 4 are the standouts) or the Shorts 3: Animation program intended for mature audiences (not that they're particularly racy this year; in fact they're far less juvenile than the typical "Sick & Twisted" fare you might find on some animation programs).

A great example of documentary/animation hybridization, Drop By Drop takes audio interviews of Portuguese villagers reacting to the social and environmental impacts of climate change and desertification on the Iberian peninsula and imagines a fantastic visual landscape based on the metaphors in its interviewees' descriptions. Not only is the imagery striking and strong, the animation itself is a wonderful example of the under-utilized concept of "camera movement" in animation. Where so many independent animations have a very closed-off, shoebox feel (which can be beneficial to certain, but not all, subjects), Drop By Drop moves in all directions, creating a sense of vastness that befits its theme of long-rooted traditions becoming upended as families scatter to the four winds.

Other noteworthy selections in the Shorts 3 program include Oscar-nominated Negative Space by Max Porter & Ru Kuwahata, which is probably the best example of character animation in the set (I sorely wish it had won the Oscar over the self-important celebrity promo Dear Basketball), Leah Nichols' sweet, locally-focused rotoscope doc 73 Questions, and the humorous Icebergs by Elrini Vianelli.

The one that got to me emotionally was Oh Hi Anne, from local artist Anne McGuire, perhaps best known for her reverse-ungineered 1970s blockbusters like Snatchers Body The Of Invasion and Strain Andromeda The, or her performances as half of The Freddy McGuire Show. Here she also takes documentary audio, in this case voicemail messages left by underground film & video legends & longstanding Mission District residents George Kuchar (1942-2011) and his brother Mike, and applies a simple set of drawn images to them to create a little narrative about her friendships with her former teacher George, and later Mike. Combined with audio of a lovely song written and performed by McGuire, that I've gladly had running in my head for over a week now, and my own memories of meeting George, and showing him an article I'd written about one of his films Wild Night in El Reno, shortly before he died, I was in tears by the end of the short.

However, judging by the dismissive reaction of audience members around me during and after last weekend's Roxie screening, Oh Hi Anne was done a disservice by being placed into a program that, while perhaps pushing the boundaries of narrative and documentary animation, never really pushed past those boundaries. There used to consistently be a few examples of experimental animation in this program in the festival. With no selections like 2016 San Francisco International Film Festival picks All Rot by Max Hattler or Kazue Monno & Takeshi Nagata's Track to warm the audience up to expanding their ideas of what animation can do and be, it was easy for some viewers to pick on Oh Hi Anne as overly earnest or seemingly crude (I don't suppose any of the grumblers I heard are aware of McGuire's exquisite watercolor "Dark Universe", currently on display (along with Mike Kuchar's 1980 drawing "Faery Tale" and a slew of other great work by local artists from throughout history), at BAMPFA's must-see Way Bay exhibit). Admittedly, by most definitions of animation I'm aware of, Oh Hi Anne doesn't really qualify. But to me it feels like an essential piece of this year's SFFILM, challenging aesthetic boundaries and linking back to a gentle giant of Frisco Bay filmmaking who is still sorely missed by many members of the local community. I suspect if the experimental animation ハネムーンHanemun Honeymoon had been plucked out of the Shorts 4: New Visions program and put into the Shorts 3 set, perhaps in place of the slick, cute, but ultimately go-nowhere selection Hybrids, McGuire's film wouldn't have been the first in the show to totally upend audience expectations, and had a better chance of hitting with some of the cynics in the crowd.

SFFILM61 Day 12
Other festival options: Today's menu options include the presentation of the George Gund Craft of Cinema Award to collaborative filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman before a screening of their short doc End Game and the so-called "Closing Night" showing of Gus Van Sant's Don't Worry He Won't Get Far On Foot with Van Sant and composer Danny Elfman expected in person (I can't help but wonder if, with Elfman's former girlfriend Kim Gordon in the film, and speaking at the Nourse tomorrow night, she might make a surprise appearance as well. Pure speculation on my part), both at the Castro Theatre. BAMPFA's last day as a festival venue looks strong, with Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, Wajib, a set of 16mm Nathaniel Dorsky shorts including Avraham, and Michael Hazanavicius introducing his Godard, Mon Amour. Meanwhile YBCA closes out its time as a 2018 SFFILM venue with Angels Wear White, Shirkers and Carcasse, and The Children's Creativity Theater says goodbye to its first festival year with Bisbee '17 and A Prayer Before Dawn. None of the titles mentioned in this paragraph will play during the final two days of the festival when it contracts to fill only the Roxie and the Victoria.

Non-SFFILM option: Another festival opened yesterday at a former SFFILM venue I have a lot of fondness for, Japantown's New People Cinema; they're hosting the 2nd Annual Cherry Blossom Film Festival, highlighting features made in Japan. Yesterday they had a 3-title tribute to a filmmaker I first encountered via the San Francisco International Film Festival, Shunji Iwai, but the rest of the festival is devoted to animation, such as The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, by the great Studio Ghibli master Isao Takahata, who passed away this week. Today's offerings include a Japanese-dubbed, English-lauguage version of Takahata's partner Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro (which originally was released in Japan on a head-scratching double-bill with Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies), and the more recent Miss Hokusai.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

20th Century Fox DVD screen capture

WHO: William Fox produced this film and F.W. Murnau directed it.

WHAT: One of those rarities of cinema: a technical marvel with a living, beating heart. As I wrote in my 2009 essay on this film when it screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Valentine's Day event:

Charles Rosher, one of the top cinematographers in Hollywood, had spent time with Murnau in Berlin serving as an unofficial consultant on Faust, the director’s most effects-laden film to date. Rosher worked alongside Murnau as a student as much as an advisor, learning about the innovative German camera methods that amazed American critics and filmmakers. 

Rosher recruited Ben-Hur cinematographer Karl Struss to help him shoot Sunrise on Rochus Gliese’s elaborate sets. Gliese built a vast indoor city set designed to appear even larger through the use of forced perspective. It cost $200,000—nearly the entire budget of a typical program picture of the day. He also created a studio-bound marsh with an uneven floor that could not accommodate a dolly setup. Instead, tracks were attached to the ceiling and Struss filmed upside-down, a maneuver Rosher had observed on the Faust set. It was only one of many radical techniques used in Sunrise. Nearly every shot in the film involves a striking effect, whether from an unusual light source, a superimposition, or a complex camera movement. Yet each is motivated by allegiance to the story and its emotions. Murnau told an interviewer, “I do not take trick scenes from unusual positions just to get startling effects. To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind one is watching the events on screen.”

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Stanford Theatre at 3:50 PM.

WHY: The Stanford is halfway through its most appealing and ambitious program in at least the past 18 months: a tribute to the twenty year reign of the Fox Film Corporation, which began releasing films in 1915 and ceased in 1935, when it merged with the lesser-known upstart Twentieth Century Pictures. So far the series has brought little-screened films featuring stars such as Clara Bow, Will Rogers, Spencer Tracy, and Janet Gaynor, the luminous star of Sunrise who rose from her roots in San Francisco (where she went to Polytechnic High School and was employed by the Castro Theatre) to become the first Best Actress Oscar winner for this film as well as Seventh Heaven and Street Angel. All three of these masterpieces will be screened at the Stanford in 35mm prints as part of its Silent Sunday series, and I can hardly imagine a better introduction to most of these films if you've never seen them before, or to the Stanford if you've never traveled to Palo Alto to visit it before. Gaynor also features in The Johnstown Flood, the rarest of the Stanford's Silent Sunday offerings (on a double bill with Seventh Heaven December 6th) and Lucky Star, which screens with Murnau's lovely final film made in the United States, City Girl, to close the Fox Film Corporation series December 20th as the Stanford moves into its traditional Christmastime screenings: The Shop Around the Corner, It's A Wonderful Life, etc.

Dennis James, Wurlitzer organist extraordinaire, has been performing live music to all the Stanford's Silent Sundays screenings thus far, and will continue to do so for the final three Sundays of the series. Today he gets a week off, as the Stanford has elected to screen Sunrise not with live music but with the pioneering sound-on-film Movietone score that was prepared for the film's original 1927 release in the United States. This score is beloved by many fans of Sunrise but I find it merely adequate and more interesting as a historical curiosity than as an artistic statement. I'm swayed by Janet Bergstrom's research that indicates it was quite possibly not, as is frequently assumed today, prepared by famous composer Hugo Riesenfeld, who definitely composed the musical score for Murnau's swan song Tabu: a Story of the South Seas. To me, it sounds like a mostly-pedestrian compilation score whose tendency to be overwhelmed by non-musical sound effects destroys some of Murnau's poetic treatment of soundless sound in the film (such as in the scene of George O'Brien reacting to an off-screen dog bark, as pictured above). I always found it interesting that Dennis James has so frequently spoken of his insistence on performing originally-composed scores to silent films for which scholars have found them, but often ignores his own rules when it comes to Movietone or Vitaphone soundtracks, having played his own scores to Sunrise and to West of Zanzibar when at the SF Silent Film Festival in 2009. In the case of Sunrise, perhaps he feels (and if so, I agree) that the Movietone score that premiered in New York is less sacrosanct than the live score performed in Los Angeles would be were it not lost to the sands of time.

In fact more notable on today's Silent Sunday docket is the presentation of the almost universally beloved Movietone score to John Ford's heartbreaking, Sunrise-esque World War I picture Four Sons, which was to the disappointment of many excluded from the 2007 DVD release of the film. Rarely screened in any form, Four Sons will be for many attendees today the real gem of the program; I've only seen it once myself and never in a cinema, but still I can imagine myself being among them despite my deep, abiding love for Sunrise.

Other upcoming Stanford screenings of particular note include the wonderful Me & My Gal this Wednesday and Thursday, my favorite Janet Gaynor talkie (heck, one of my all-time favorite films as well) State Fair on December 18-19, and most unusually a December 4-5 triple bill of the rumored-excellent Zoo in Budapest along with Seventh Heaven/Street Angel/Lucky Star director Frank Borzage's bizarre 1930 version of Ferenc Molnár's play Liliom as well as Fritz Lang's 1934 version (which I have yet to see). The last of these is a real surprise to see on a Stanford calendar, as it's not a Fox film at all but Lang's sole film made in France on his way out of Germany and into Hollywood. In my fifteen years or so of following the Stanford calendars I'm positive this is the first time I've seen a French film booked for a theatre that in my experience focuses exclusively on classic Hollywood and British productions with the two notable auteurist exceptions of Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. Given that I have to stretch to imagine any other currently-operating Frisco Bay cinemas willing to book a 1934 French film in 35mm, I welcome this development wholeheartedly.

Luckily, although the Liliom/Zoo in Budapest/Liliom bill screens on the same day as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's December 5th "Day of Silents", it also screens the day before, so it won't be necessary to miss a rare 35mm screening of the Anna May Wong vehicle Piccadilly, or the other offerings at the Castro Theatre that day. I'm excited to revisit Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate, this time with Alloy Orchestra accompaniment and introduced by Tracey Goessel, whose new Fairbanks biography The First King of Hollywood I'm in the midst of devouring. Also to see rare documentary footage of China and a Harry Houdini feature The Grim Game. And if you've never seen Marcel L'Herbier's L'inhumaine on a cinema screen it's worth it for the set design alone. Alloy Orchestra takes on musical duties for that one as well; the rest go to the terrific pianist Donald Sosin.

The Day of Silents is just the first cinephile-catnip program on a December full of goodies at the Castro Theatre. Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre with Michael Mann's The Keep, Noir City Xmas pairing The Reckless Moment and Kiss of Death, December 17th Stop Making Sense and Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave and a twisted Christmas booking of Brazil and Eyes Wide Shut are some of the more enticing all-35mm double-bills there this month. The venue also hosts the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco show December 9th and will ring in January with a set of Alfred Hitchcock masterpieces. But even more than all of those, I'm finding myself most excited for a digital presentation of a San Francisco cult classic that deserves to be far better known than it is. I'm speaking of course of Curt McDowell's Thundercrack!, starring (and scripted and lit by) the great underground film icon George Kuchar. It screens twice with director McDowell's sister Melinda and his frequent collaborator Mark Ellinger on hand at (I'm told) both shows, but only the evening show will be hosted by the one and only Peaches Christ. Even if you have no awareness of Thundercrack!, the most entertaining "Old Dark House"-style quasi-pornographic art film ever to get Fox News in a tizzy, this is a rare opportunity to see a Peaches Christ show for less than $20. Mark December 11th on your calendar- in ink!

There's a lot more happening in December at other Frisco Bay venues, but for now I'd better sign off. But in case I don't have time to put up another post before this Tuesday, December 1st, I want to point out that, with the help of other Artists' Television Access volunteers, I'll be helping to present a free 16mm screening of Curtis Choy's untoppably topical 1983 documentary The Fall of the I-Hotel at the Noe Valley Public Library, and I hope you can make it out that evening.

HOW: Sunrise screens on a 35mm double-bill with Four Sons.

IOHTE: Adrianne Finelli

"IOHTE" stands for "I Only Have Two Eyes"; it's my annual survey of selected San Francisco Bay Area cinephiles' favorite in-the-cinema screenings of classic films and archival oddities from the past year. An index of participants can be found here.

Contributor Adrianne Finelli is an artist, curator, educator & film lover. She co-curates the GAZE film series at Artist Television Access; its next screening is February 13.

After a couple years of extended visits to the Bay Area, this past June I relocated here for love. Fortunately for me, my love of film is flourishing here as well. In the summer sun, my partner and I drove 2600 miles across the country straight to the Pacific Film Archive. Having only been here for six months of this year, I feel like I’ve missed a lot of treasures, but I’m grateful that I was able to see what I did. I’m looking forward to seeing much more in 2015. As requested by Brian Darr, whose film blog has become one of my bookmarks, here’s my list of my 10 favorite repertory film screenings of last year. Thanks to Brian and Hell on Frisco Bay for the invitation.

Favorites are fun, but they’re always so hard to whittle down:

Screen capture from Eclipse DVD

1) Sisters of Gion 

Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan, 1936) 

Pacific Film Archive  

This was my first opportunity to see a Mizoguchi film on the big screen; this screening also marked my first week in the area as an official resident. Apart from that, the film, Sisters of Gion, may be my favorite of his works and is a quintessential feminist film. Rebellious and decades ahead of its time, a critique of traditions and the clash of eras—the film looks deep into the lives and issues that the women of the Geisha tradition faced. Mizoguchi’s empathy is with the lives sold and not the salesman that are buying. Oh, that ending.  

2) A Woman of Rumor 

Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan, 1954) 

Pacific Film Archive  

Another poignant Mizoguchi feature about the personal lives of sex workers in Tokyo, that pays special attention to issues of what it means for these businesswomen to age. A fascinating portrait of two generations of women, somewhat Mildred Pierce, tragic drama of a mother and daughter in love with the same man. However, Mizoguchi does not let the man get off so easy, as the daughter’s love and empathy for her mother as a fellow woman grows and strengthens their bond. Such a beautiful film on so many levels, stunning and more mature camera, art direction and editing.

Screen capture from Ruscico DVD

3) Magdana’s Donkey 

Tengiz Abuladze, Rezo Chkeidze (USSR, 1955) 

Pacific Film Archive  

Simple and beautiful—a story about a working class widow and her day to day struggles to provide for her children. The family’s luck changes when they nurse an abandoned and abused donkey back to health, allowing Magdana to transport and sell more yogurt, but then she is brought to trial for stealing the donkey. There is definite documentary influence in this neorealistic drama, yet the rich black & white cinematography has its own style. I would love to see this film screened along side Bresson’s 1966 Au hazard Balthazar—donkeys might be the most honest animals in cinema.  

4) Sikkim 

Satyajit Ray (India, 1971) 

Pacific Film Archive  

I am so glad that I caught this, I had no idea how much I would learn and love about this film. A documentary about the sovereignty of Sikkim, a kingdom in the Himalayas situated between China and Indian, commissioned by the King of Sikkim and later banned until 2010. All copies were thought to be destroyed until one was uncovered at the British Film Institute. Very lyrical camera and sound—it’s more like a personal essay than a typical anthropological documentary of a foreign culture. Satyajit Ray’s refreshing and candid portrait has real heart and respect for the people and their traditions.

Screen capture from Columbia DVD

5) Lost Horizon  

Frank Capra (USA, 1937) 

Smith Rafael Film Center  

One of the few Capra films I had never seen, and maybe the strangest. Lost Horizon is a utopian film about an archetypal crew of five western passengers whose flight is hijacked and crashes somewhere in the Himalayan Mountains. The group is then escorted through the terrifying yet beautiful terrain to a magical palace—a warm and plentiful oasis from the harshness of the surroundings—known as Shangri-La. A dreamlike paradise where time is for passions and beauty, and no one ages. The story is bizarre and has a lot of political and social commentary embedded in it, and the set design and photography are worthy of seeing for their own merits.

6) A Night at the Cinema in 1914 

SF Silent Film Festival, Silent Autumn 2014 

Castro Theater  

A delightful collection of eclectic silent short films that were all produced in 1914 with live musical accompaniment by the brilliant Donald Sosin. A few of my favorite shorts to make note of are: Palace Pandemonium, a newsreel of Emmeline Pankhurst and 50 other suffragettes being arrested at Buckingham Palace; Lieutenant Pimple and the Stolen Submarine, endearing cardboard sets and lots of quirkiness; and The Perils of Pauline directed by Louis J. Gasnier and starring the adventurous Pearl White as a woman who wants to explore life before she gets married.  

However, the short that really stood out, Daisy Doodad’s Dial directed by Florence Turner, who also starred in the film as the main protagonist. A super silly, sassy and creative little tale about a couple that enters a face-pulling contest. The story employs a great use of the close-up and superimposition. The score that Donald Sosin composed for this film was half the joy of watching it, I wouldn’t want to see it any other way. One of my favorite things I’ve seen all year, and it was made in 1914!

7) Molba 

Tengiz Abuladze (USSR, 1967) 

Pacific Film Archive  

Like a poem in black & white, a visual metaphor with absolutely stunning cinematography and editing. Definitely one of the most unique films I have seen this year, and a film that most be seen in a dark theater, on a big screen, and on 35mm.

Screen capture from Indiepix DVD of It Came From Kuchar

8) A Criminal Account of Pleasure: The George Kuchar Reader with Andrew Lampert  

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 

Presented by SF Cinematheque 

Corruption of the Damned (USA, 1965) 

The Exiled Files of Eddie Gray (USA, 1997)  

What can I say? If you are not a Kuchar fan, then this isn’t for you. If you are, you should definitely pickup a copy of the The George Kuchar Reader edited by Andrew Lampert before it’s out of print. It’s an amazingly rich collection of journal entries, drawings, scripts, photos and other findings compiled into an impressive 336-page volume. I was so glad that I made it out to the event; Steve Polta of SF Cinematheque gave a moving account of George and introduced Andrew Lampert to read a few excerpts before the screening. Corruption of the Damned was screened on a 16mm print from Anthology Film Archives. It features a very baby-faced George in all his campy glory, and was a much more scripted and serious production than most of his later works. The pairing of this early film with The Exiled Files of Eddie Gray, a even more campy revisit or remake of sorts with some the original cast from the 1965 film, made the night for me. Shedding light, or rather pouring it, onto issues of aging and sexuality, through crude reenactments of love scenes from 32 years ago. There are no words to describe the fabulous Floraine Connors, I laughed so hard I cried.  

9) Flight of the Sparrows 

Teimur Babluani (USSR, 1980) 

Pacific Film Archive  

The first several minutes I was sure I disliked this film; it felt like a not-so-great student film—clunky, bad acting, horrible lighting. After letting my expectations drop, I was taken by surprise at what turned into a really dynamic camera matched by a fresh, beat driven pace. The story is really simple, but weird and oddly poetic and bittersweet. There are two men traveling on a crowded third-class passenger train among a large cast of characters whose diverse profiles become fixtures in the background of the confined camera. The two men are opposites, one a rough-looking rebel of few words whose only friend is the tiny sparrow he carries next to his heart, and the other a pretentious, bragging traveling salesman that leads people to believe he is a world renown opera singer. The final scene shifts to a barren landscape and a surprising battle ensues.      

Screen capture from vimeo trailer for Desire Pie

10) Radical Sex Educational Films from San Francisco’s Multi-Media Resource Center 

Curated by Herb Shellenberger 

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts  

A curious and alluring collection of extraordinarily artistic and avant-garde Sex Ed films, like a time capsule into a different, more radical era. I imagine we would all be better, more inventive lovers if we had the occasion to see these films in our health classes. Although every film different and compelling in its own right, three films really resonated and charmed me. The program opened with Jerry Abrams’ Eyetoon (1968) very easily the most experimental sex education film I’ve ever seen, a collage that combines a variety of techniques with a mesmerizing score. This film takes intimacy into another dimension. Constance Beeson’s hypnotic and lyrical Unfolding (1969) was a visual verse about the emotional side of lovemaking, a song for the two souls becoming one. Unfolding is a more sensitive portrait from a woman’s perspective, about the closeness of sex. Desire Pie (1976) by Lisa Crafts was a fun, tripped-out cartoon of the wacky and weird journey of sexual desires.  

It was also notable to see Alice Ann Parker’s Near the Big Chakra (1972) for the second time, having been lucky enough to meet her during her retrospective program at the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival. It is such a radical educational film through pure observation.    

A special shout-out to the many generous venues and to the people behind the projectors and programming that make this city and the surrounding area an amazing place for those of us that love cinema. Thank you to those that tirelessly search through the archives, those that make new work from old, those that share and connect the community.  

Craig Baldwin & Other Cinema 

Pacific Film Archive 

Artists’ Television Access 

SF Cinematheque 

The Exploratorium 

Shapeshifters Cinema 

Black Hole Cinematheque 

Oddball Cinema 

Canyon Cinema 

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 

SF Silent Film Festival 

Internet Archive 

Rick & Megan Prelinger 

California Film Institute 

Castro Theater 

Roxie Theater 

Kala Art Institute 

& the many others that made my first six months here unrepeatable.

Brian Darr Only Has Two Eyes

When I decided to roll out my annual round-up of reflections on the year in local repertory and revival screenings over the past week or so, I hadn't the faintest idea that it would sync up with a new flurry of Twitter conversation and media coverage of Time Warner shutting the doors to its vaults of 35mm exhibition prints in its holdings (which includes all First National and most classic MGM & RKO titles, as well as those produced with the Warner Brothers imprint.) It seems repertory theatre requests to screen The Shining (for instance) on film rather than on DVD are being denied. Although the Pacific Film Archive's current Howard Hawks retrospective and the quickly-upcoming Noir City both promise to screen numerous Warner-owned titles in 35mm prints, it may be that the prints all will be sourced from independent archives and not the studio itself. Such a trend may soon leave repertory as we know it in the exclusive hands of independent collections and not-for-profit organizations.

As bad as that sounds, as I hint at in my introduction to this year's "I Only Have Two Eyes" blog series, the eternal optimist in me feels convinced that both the demand for and supply of Frisco Bay repertory screenings will continue into the future, even if the process of connecting supply and demand shakes out into a new form. It's sad if a for-profit theatre like the Castro can no longer offer 35mm screenings of wonderful Warner-owned titles 2001: A Space Odyssey, Footlight Parade, Badlands, He Who Gets Slapped, Meet Me In St. Louis, etc. (all of which I re-visited in that space in 2011, some for the first time on the big screen) at everyday prices, without the muscle of a film festival's involvement in securing prints from a non-standard source. I look forward to seeing how it all plays out in the coming months, but for now, let me share with you my own top ten cinema screenings of films I'd never seen prior to 2011:

the Wrong Man
2011 began with a series that filled gaps in my cinematic experience I'd been quietly embarrassed about for years. Alfred Hitchcock films are a mainstay of the Castro Theatre programming; I love that the venue offers near-annual opportunities to see classics like Vertigo (which I savored once again during the venue's 70mm series in June.) But in January they showcased a dozen films that tend to be screened more infrequently. I was able to see nine of them which I'd never seen before on the big screen, in some cases never at all. All were various shades of great, and 1956's The Wrong Man proved to be the greatest. It centers on an ordinary man (Henry Fonda) thrust into extraordinary circumstances thanks to a mistake in identity. But the mistake leads not to the thrills and adventure of The Thirty-Nine Steps or North By Northwest, but to devastation. Based on a true story, and treated with utmost seriousness and even a Hitchcockian sort of realism, the film may be (perhaps barring the more personal Vertigo) the director's saddest, and most socially important work.

Beau Travail
I haven't done a full accounting, but my sense is that the Pacific Film Archive's Claire Denis retrospective last Spring, and Beau Travail in particular, received more mentions in this year's "I Only Have Two Eyes" wrap-up than any other selection. And no wonder. This poetic resetting of Herman Melville's story Billy Budd to the Horn of Africa is every bit the masterpiece I'd heard, and more. At the time it came out (at festivals in 1999, commercially the next year) I was living and working abroad, in a relatively remote (from cinephile culture, at any rate) region of the world, so I missed it even if I didn't miss all of the critical praise which (rightly) insisted that the big screen was the way to see it. So although I found a cheap copy of the DVD when a nearby rental store went out of business, I refrained from watching it until I could view it projected somewhere. It took a while. Sometimes waiting to see a film in a proper setting can set up disappointment, but not this time. My years of anticipation, and my decade of distance from my own time living in a foreign land, could only have made the film's strange beauty more profoundly and personally felt inside of me.


Ruthless
This, on the other hand, was something completely off my radar until the Roxie screened it in May as part of its third annual I Wake Up Dreaming series of Golden Age noir. Though I only attended a few, largely unmemorable films in this year's series, and picked Ruthless simply because it fit my schedule that week, it absolutely floored me with its technical virtuosity, its relative lavishness (for a 1948 Edgar G. Ulmer picture) and its sophisticated, lacerating assault on the "rags to riches" myth underlying our economic system. Critics have justly compared Ruthless to no less than Citizen Kane and I was equally reminded of, The Magnificent Ambersons, not just for shared thematics and aesthetics, but because, like that Orson Wells film, Ruthless manages to be a kind of masterpiece despite some very evident flaws that would sink most lesser pictures.

Carmen Comes Home
I spent many many hours during the first half of 2011 reading about, watching, and re-watching movies made by Mikio Naruse, Hiroshi Shimizu and particularly Yasujiro Ozu, to help me prepare an essay for the program guide of the Silent Film Festival, which screened Ozu's best-known silent film I Was Born, But... in mid-July. By the time the PFA's Japanese Divas series rolled around I'd completed my research, but I appreciated it nonetheless. Particularly this 1951 film by former Ozu apprentice Keisuke Kinoshita, starring the brilliant Hideko Takemine as a high-minded stripteaser who returns to her family's village, now notorious from her big city escapades. Japan's first full-color film and eye-poppingly so, Carmen Comes Home is a wonderful window into national values during the final year or so of the Allied occupation, and an opportunity to see some of Ozu's favorite actors (Chishu Ryu, Takeshi Sakamoto, Shuji Sano, etc.) hamming it up in a somewhat broader -and bawdier- comedy than Ozu's own comedies tended to be.

Three Ages
By reputation, the first feature film Buster Keaton directed (with his frequent early co-director Edward F. Cline) is not among his best. It's often repeated that its makers lacked confidence in its success, which is why it consists of three distinct stories intercutting between each other; if the film flopped as a six-reel feature, at least it could be reconstituted into three two-reelers, the form which Keaton was a surefire draw in. Assuming this risk-averse strategy was true, what's not often mentioned is that few slapstick comedians had successfully crossed over from shorts to features in 1923. Nor that the film Three Ages is famously spoofing, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, had been created with the very same sort of strategy; intercutting four feature films worth of material into an epic, and Griffith re-edited two of its four segments (the Babylonian and modern-day episodes) into stand-alone features released three years after the full film failed to ignite box office records in 1916. Three Ages, on the other hand, stood on its own financially, both in its day, and on a late Summer evening last year when a huge crowd packed the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto to see Dennis James beautifully accompany a 35mm print on the Wurlitzer organ. Watching it in such an ideal setting, and laughing along with almost every gag, makes the gap in quality between this and Keaton's top-tier features (The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and what have you) seem extremely small; perhaps non-existent.

Curse of the Demon
I didn't see any familiar Frisco Bay cinephile faces in the healthy-sized crowd when I went to see this last September; perhaps there are few regulars of the usual haunts (the other venues represented on this list) who also check to see what's playing at the UA Berkeley on Shattuck Avenue. The regular Thursday night screening series there generally screens prints of more recent cult "classics" like The Professional and Labyrinth, so I initially wondered if a listing for this rarely-shown horror film was in error. But a confirmation phone call led to a BART trip led to one of the scariest and most thoughtful explorations of the supernatural I've seen. And no, the above image (which has haunted me since seeing it in a book my elementary school library) does not represent the overall tone of the film, which is one of the few examples I've seen of 1950s cinéma fantastique to truly earn its earnest gravitas. I'm only sad that, after seeing his three films made for Val Lewton and this, I no longer have any "straight" Jacques Tourneur-directed horror films to look forward to. Although I suppose there's Comedy of Terrors...

Migration of the Blubberoids
2011 was shaping up to be a great year for local screenings of George Kuchar pictures (In my head I can hear him say the word: "pict-shas"), with a beautiful presentation of Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, restored, at Crossroads and an extensive dual-retrospective with his twin brother Mike at the PFA, just the latest of many tributes the man received from Frisco Bay film institutions over the forty years he spent living here (the MVFF, SFIFF, and, with Mike, Frameline, for instance). Then, so very tragically for everyone who had befriended him, or even met him or been touched by his generous artistic spirit, he died shortly after his 69th birthday. Several venues hosted posthumous screening events; the SF Cinematheque-presented set at SFMOMA was a particularly well-curated selection of lesser-known videos and better-known film work, and the Canyon Cinema screening at the 9th Street Film Center was an amazing set of some of his most rarely-seen 16mm films. But it was at Artists' Television Access where in October I saw the piece that shattered my preconceptions about career arcs: a city symphony from his late-eighties in-camera-edited video period with the unusual but not uncharacteristic title Migration of the Blubberoids. This alternatively lovely and anxious portrait of the Kuchars' native Bronx at Thanksgiving-time, set to music from (according to a 1991 interview) "some kind of a King Kong movie" deserves to be more widely known and shown, especially to anyone unsure of whether George Kuchar could make "pict-shas" as vital, innovative, and formally satisfying in the second half of his career as he could in the first.

In Spring
Hmmm. Two city symphonies in a row on this list. Except that this one, like its cinematographic predecessor Man With A Movie Camera, might equally be called a "country symphony", or better, a "nation symphony". Ever since researching Man With A Movie Camera (also for the Silent Film Festival) I'd been dying to see the film that Mikhael Kaufman, the eponymous "Man" in that film, both as actor and as cinematographer, had directed himself after disagreements with his brother Dziga Vertov caused a rift between the two. When a touring Vertov retrospective arrived at the PFA this fall, I was very pleased to discover that, hidden away as if an Easter Egg, In Spring was to screen as a second feature to a Vertov I'd never been able to track down, Stride, Soviet! Watching them together the Vertov felt overly deterministic and repetitious, but the Kaufman soared with visual lyricism. Pianist Judith Rosenberg improvised first-class musical accompaniments to them both (and to the other Vertov silents I saw in the series) but when the evening was through I began to wonder if the wizardry of Man With A Movie Camera might have been cast under its cinematographer's influence more than its nominal director's. Although the retro proved that Vertov's own talent shone through in some the sound films made after the dissolution of the brotherly collaboration: particularly Enthusiasm (which I'd only before seen on a terrible VHS transfer) and For You, Front!

Through The Olive Trees
It's getting late and this post has gotten long. So I won't say much about this 1994 masterpiece by Iran's foremost director Abbas Kiarostami, working at the peak of his powers. I will say I'm so thankful that the PFA provided an opportunity for me to finally catch up with it, as such opportunities are few and far between in this country without resorting to quasi-legal methods. Why? It has something to do with Muriel's Wedding of all movies, at least according to Jonathan Rosenbaum's book Movie Wars.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Just as I was sending out e-mail invitations for this year's "I Only Have Two Eyes" project, and putting the finishing touches on my own list, I went with moderate-to-low expectations to the Castro to see this 1964 musical on the third-from-last day of 2011. I knew it was the best-known film of Jacques Demy, a director I'd had mixed results exploring, and that its recitative musical style had been aped in at least one much more recent French film I'd seen, liked, and largely forgotten (Jeanne And The Perfect Guy). I was prepared for a pleasant time out at the movies: pretty music, pretty actors (Catherine Deneuve), pretty colors, a small French town, all there. I was fully unprepared to get so involved in the characters, for the waves of complex emotions the film would elicit, and for the brilliant ending, perhaps as heartbreaking as the finale to Demy's wife Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur, released a year later (and featured on my "I Only Have Two Eyes list from last year). One might say the French New Wave was about being inspired by the best Hollywood films to make something completely new and different and even subversive, rather than blandly aping Hollywood's worst traits on French sets, as the Cahiers Du Cinema crew frequently accused their forebears of doing. This, then, is a perfectly New Wave film. And, perhaps, a perfectly perfect one.

Lonely Boy

Most of the specialized cinemas in town have announced their programming for the rest of the year, and some of them (like YBCA) into early 2012. December themes at the Roxie, PFA, Castro & New People include Southen (Dis)Comfort, classic musicals, and François Truffaut.

The screening space at SF Museum of Modern Art has been relatively quiet in the past few months, but December it becomes more active. A three-film series in conjunction with the ongoing exhibit devoted to designer Dieter Rams includes Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a documentary featuring Rams, Objectified. This Thursday's George Kuchar tribute offers a chance to see restored prints of many of that dearly departed teacher & maker's most influential, beautiful films, including Hold Me When I'm Naked and Wild Night In El Reno.

And today at noon, SFMOMA hosts a free screening of six films selected by Goldie-awarded filmmaker Paul Clipson. Three by Peter Kubelka, one by Nagisa Oshima, one collaboration of Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, and one by the comparatively lesser-known Canadian documentarians Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor. Yesterday Brecht Andersch ably previewed the full program on the SFMOMA blog, reminding that I was sitting on an unpublished piece of my own on one of the selections: Koenig & Kroitor's Lonely Boy. Here it is:

The 1962 film Lonely Boy, directed by National Film Board of Canada filmmakers Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroiter, may seem at first glance like a piece of fluff, unworthy of a place in the annals of great documentary history. It's a portrait of pop singer Paul Anka on tour in New Jersey and New York, told through fans-eye views of his concerts, a certain amount of backstage access, and largely self-aggrandizing interviews from Anka and his manager Irvin Field. But it's a testament to the importance and influence of the new technologies becoming available to non-fiction filmmakers in the early 1960s that Lonely Boy looks as familiar and modern as it does to us today. The music and hairstyles may date the film as a fifty-year-old artifact, but the technological (and philosophical)-driven techniques are recognizable as some of the same ones dominant in documentaries of 2011.

When Lonely Boy was made, cameras and sound equipment were becoming available in easily-portable versions. Technologies developed for usage by war photographers and others during World War II became crucial in the development of "civilian" filmmaking. Perhaps none was more crucial than the increased infrastructure for the production and distribution of 16mm film stock, which is only about a quarter the width, resolution and weight of the 35mm standard in use in industrialized film production around the world. Most feature films and studio-produced shorts still used this standard (and indeed, the most lavish productions were now beginning to regularly utilize the even-more cumbersome 70mm film format) but avant-garde and independent work, as well as documentaries, found 16mm cheap and convenient enough that it proliferated. Film stocks were becoming more light-sensitive as well, freeing filmmakers from the necessity of bringing bulky electric lighting equipment everywhere they wanted to shoot.

16mm cameras themselves were more light-weight and portable than ever. I'm not sure there's a single shot in Lonely Boy which uses a tripod or dolly. Zoom lens technology improved significantly, giving filmmakers access to images far beyond the range of previous cameras -- a valuable asset when shooting "in the field." Audio recording equipment had become far lighter and more easily transportable as well, and improvements in synchronization technology meant that for the first time, a modestly-budgeted documentary could capture picture and image simultaneously on location, unshackling filmmakers from the tyranny of the voice-over narration. Interviews could be gathered on the street, or wherever the action was, and not just in a specially-prepared studio.

Though Lonely Boy makes use of all these technologies, providing an easygoing, behind-the-scenes look at a popular star that would have been simply impossible (especially on a NFB budget) only a few years before, perhaps it's most fascinating because it doesn't stick purely to new, often considered "realer" techniques, unlike the Direct Cinema films being made at around the same time with the same kinds of equipment. A key moment of the film is at a concert in New York, filled with female Paul Anka fans. For a time we experience the scene as if we are amidst the crowd, hearing Anka's music only when it cuts through the din of the near-constant youthful screaming. But when Anka brings a young woman up onto the stage with him, the soundtrack smoothly switches from the synchronous sound recording of the event, to the hit record version of the song he's singing, "Put Your Head on My Shoulder." Skillful matching of the camera-captured lip movements to the studio-recorded lyrics reminds us of the role of technology in selling pop music to mass markets, and the pop singer's mandate to sonically recreate a specific performance every night. But the transition also may be read as an entry into the young fan's head, where the sounds of the other concert-goers can be blocked out and only the emotion and the music (its ingrained memory as much or more than its physical sound) exists.

Linking Feller, August 2011

I haven't posted here in nearly six weeks (you don't need to hear the excuses), but I don't want to let the month of August go by without a single post- it'd be my first completely blogless month since first starting Hell On Frisco Bay in 2005.

So, without further ado, five links that seem relevant to Frisco Bay cinephiles on this final day of August 2011:

1. The San Francisco Cinematheque has announced its full program on its website. I don't have time right this moment to break down all the deliciousness in the programming, but since today is the 69th birthday of George Kuchar (and his oft-collaborating twin Mike Kuchar), I should definitely highlight the December 8 & 16 screenings of his films, from works as well-known as Hold Me While I'm Naked to those as rare as Aqueerius.

2. "Dan" of Dan's Movie Blog has been far more diligent at writing about the local cinema scene than I have lately. His latest post deals with the sad passing of San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggatt, as well as the cloudy futures of the Balboa and the New Parkway, as well as discussing some recent screenings at the Castro,

3. Cheryl Eddy's fall repertory film preview from last week's SF Bay Guardian summarizes nearly all of the local screening venues' and organizations' fall highlights. Yes, Fall starts this week at many of our beloved venues.

4. One Frisco Bay venue Eddy's piece does not cover is the UA Shattuck in Berkeley, which runs a Thursday night repertory series for five dollars a ticket. Here's an article listing all the titles being brought through November. Though a few are digital screenings, most are 35mm prints, some of them of films that rarely get projected these days. Note the September 15th showing of Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon, or the October 27th show of John Carpenter's The Thing. Though other websites indicate to the contrary, tomorrow night's 35mm screening of Metropolis is not a version of the 1927 Fritz Lang silent film, but of the 2002 Japanese animation (and, to my memory, Fifth Element ripoff) by Rintaro.

5. However, according to Kino International, Lang's Metropolis will come to the Castro for one screening only on October 27th. No, not the near-complete cut that's been popping up on Castro calendars for over a year now, but the Giorgio Moroder cut from the 1980s, complete with music from the likes of Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar and Adam Ant. It's all in preparation for this version's release on DVD & Blu-Ray the following month. It seems strange that Kino is able to put out this version, when they were prevented by German rightsholders from providing Alloy Orchestra as an alternate score for the DVD/Blu release of the "Complete Metropolis" last year. But what do I know about these kinds of wheelings and dealings. Anyway, this seems the apropos moment to provide an extra, fifth-and-a-half link to the site where you can buy a compact disc with the Alloys' complete score, which it's possible to play while watching the DVD at home. I wonder, since the Alloys' first Metropolis score was synced to the Moroder cut, could they make available a version we could play on headphones during the upcoming Castro screening?