Cosmic Voyage (1936)

image courtesy San Francisco Silent Film Festival

WHO: Stars Sergei Komarov, the Soviet-era actor who also performed in previous San Francisco Silent Film Festival selections By the Law, Chess Fever and The House on Trubnaya Square, and directed A Kiss From Mary Pickford. He's also in tomorrow night's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks.

WHAT: In the words of Michael Atkinson, who wrote the essay on this film found in the glossy, 112-page program book provided free to every attendee of this year's Silent Film Festival, Cosmic Voyage is "a genuinely obscure silent-Soviet artifact that appears to not have been mentioned in any film history book known to the English-speaking world. This is hardly just an old silent-- it's a dream retrieved from the long-lost consciousness as well as an important progenitor of many of science fiction film's integral genre tropes."

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at 10PM tonight at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: Cosmic Voyage will be introduced by the one and only Craig Baldwin, who will share a little of his Other Cinema energy with a Castro Theatre audience as the SF Silent Film Festival's annual "filmmaker's pick". This program launched officially in 2008 when Guy Maddin gave a stirring defense of melodrama while introducing a screening of an imported French-intertitled print Tod Browning's The Unknown, for which he recited the English-language title cards. Since then, luminaries like Terry Zwigoff, Alexander Payne and Phillip Kaufman have provided introductions to selections from the festival programs. Last year the "filmmaker's pick" appeared to go on hiatus, although one might consider animator John Canemaker's presentation on pioneer Winsor McCay an unofficial iteration.

It's a wonderful tradition in my opinion, a perfect compliment to the many scholars and archivists who are brought in to introduce films at the festival each year. Though I wasn't able to fit her answer into my Keyframe preview on the festival, I was interested to hear what artistic director Anita Monga said about   Baldwin and the "filmmaker's pick" program when I spoke with her last week:

We don't just ask everyone. We're looking at their work and thinking, "how has early cinema influenced later cinema?" And there's something about Craig's work and that collage sense that has a direct correlation with the Soviet period. People often say "I'm not an expert on the silent film." But that's not why we're asking. We're trying to make the thread from the earliest cinema to today. In all kinds of ways, narrative filmmakers and underground filmmakers and experimental filmmakers had roots in the moving image of the silent era.

I also had the honor of being asked to interview Baldwin for the latest issue of a new Bay Area film site Eat Drink Films, just published earlier today. Please check out the interview and the other articles on the site including another Silent Film Festival-related piece on food in slapstick comedy, by Paul F. Etcheverry.

HOW: DCP with musical accompaniment by the Silent Movie Music Company (a.k.a. Günther Buchwald and Frank Backius). Frank Buxton will be on hand to read aloud an English translation of the Russian intertitles.

As for the digital nature of tonight's screening, I've already noted that there are more digital screenings than ever this year. Though I feel it's also worth noting there are also more film programs being screened on film this year than in any SFSFF year prior to Anita Monga's involvement in the festival. When I asked Monga about digital, she made some very interesting points:

At the beginning of DCP people made mistakes in the quality. They cleaned up too much. They made the image very flat. I am not one of the people who thinks that format is the paramount thing about these films. We're making these titles accessible in the best possible way. If I were going to be doctrinaire I would say I never want to see anything from the silent era on anything other than nitrate because there is a really qualitative difference between that and acetate. I'd like to continue doing other programs that address this."

The Saddest Music In The World (2003)

WHO: Directed by Guy Maddin.

WHAT: An almost indescribable film about a Winnipeg brewery owner (Isabella Rossellini) who stages a contest between international musicians to decide which performs the saddest melody (thus the title), in hopes of promoting beer sales as the Prohibition era comes to an end. Her former lover Matt McKinney arrives with his new girlfriend (Maria de Medeiros, pictured above) to represent the United States in the competition, but things get complicated when his father and brother appear to represent Canada and Serbia, respectively. It's one of Maddin's most accessible features.

WHERE/WHEN: 7PM tonight at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Hard to believe it's been nearly 10 years since Saddest Music In The World was completed and released onto an unsuspecting public. Which means it's been almost 9 years since the PFA became the site of its first Frisco Bay public screening, as part of the 47th San Francisco International Film Festival. Since then the venue has periodically brought it back, but never before with the sort of hullabaloo promised for tonight's screening, which will include beer provided by Pyramid and a live musical performance (presumably not during the film- this is not one of Maddin's neo-silents), all emcee'd by Peter Conheim. Whether you've never seen this on the big screen before, or whether you're due for a revisitation to the Muskeg Brewery, when could there be a better time than now?

HOW: 35mm print from IFC Films.

Travel Logs

I'm back from a very pleasant and rejuvenating trip to Costa Rica- my first time in Central America. Since it had been quite a while since I had a vacation that involved neither family nor a film festival (or both), I felt like I was getting some much-needed perspective while there. But though most of my time was spent in rural areas and wildernesses where it was easier to view monkeys, sloths, and tropical birds than movies, my thoughts did turn to cinema from time to time. I tried to be on the lookout for traces of homegrown Costa Rican filmmaking but came up empty. I did catch a broadcast of Ernst Lubitsch's charming Bluebeard's Eighth Wife the one time I stayed in a hotel room equipped with television. And I at one point made a foray to a mini-multiplex in the country's second-largest city Alajuela, where I caught a dreadful Hollywood product (X-Files: I Want to Believe), picked from the four available options -- all big-budget films from major North American studios -- because it was the only one not dubbed in Spanish and that seemed less likely to feature more explosions and adolescent power fantasy than my travel companion and I were in the mood to suffer. Too bad it was still such a bad movie- succeeding at simulating the veneer of intelligence but nothing more. Anyway, for the most part this trip was a real break from cinephilia.

Back in Frisco, where the options for moviegoing are more varied (more on that soon), I was pleased to see that the interview I conducted with Guy Maddin last May was published at GreenCine during my absence from the blogosphere. I hope the conversation is as enjoyable to read as it was to have. The occasion of the interview was the San Francisco International Film Festival's screenings of Maddin's tongue-in-cheek travelogue of his hometown, My Winnipeg. If you missed this film at the festival or during its brief run in town, it's still playing through Thursday, August 14th in San Jose, at the Camera 12 cineplex. Definitely a film worth a little travel time to get to see on a big screen.

Mark Your Calendar: Silent Film Festival and More

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I've left link hints in my previous two posts, but I'm not sure how many of my readers follow all the purple-font clickables in some of my more densely-packed entries (what say you, readers?). So I'd like to take a bit of time to point out some of what's going to be playing at the 13th Annual Silent Film Festival, to be held at the Castro Theatre this July 11th, 12th and 13th. As I did last year, I will be contributing an approximately 1200-word essay on one of the films to the festival program guide and developing a slide show presentation to be seen before the film begins. I've been attending biweekly meetings of the festival's Writers Group, where the essayists for each of the films compare research notes and drafts. So you could say I've been biased by hearing all sorts of fascinating things about each of the films in the program. But I was excited by all eleven feature films playing this year's edition from the moment they were revealed to the writers group a few weeks ago, and I honestly would have enjoyed researching and writing on any one of them.

But I'm thrilled that I'm getting to research what was my first choice from among the selections (picked by festival programmers Stephen Salmons and Stacey Wisnia.) The first Japanese feature ever to play at the festival, it's called Jujiro, or Crossways in English. It was directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa, perhaps best-known for his remarkable a Page of Madness made two years before Jujiro. I haven't seen the film I'm writing on myself yet, but I've been delving as deeply as I can into English-language sources on it, on Kinugasa, and on the context of silent-era filmmaking in Japan. Every day I feel more certain that I'm going to love seeing Jujiro projected in a reportedly astonishing 35mm print provided by the BFI at the Castro in a few months.

The weekend-long program will open Friday, July 11th with what happens to be my personal favorite Harold Lloyd film, the Kid Brother. Having seen it with organ accompaniment at the Stanford Theatre several years ago, I can attest that Lloyd's rural exploits in this film slay an audience in the mood to laugh. Another comedy showing during the weekend is one of the original flapper Colleen Moore's few surviving films, Her Wild Oat. I've only seen Moore in the talkie the Power and the Glory and interviewed in Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's "Hollywood" series of documentaries, but that's more than enough to make me eager to see her in a silent film.

I'm also eager to fill a few gaps in my knowledge of a pair of European auteurs, Carl Theodore Dreyer and Rene Clair. The Dreyer film being shown by the festival is his early gay-themed drama Michael, and the Clair film is his last silent Les Deux Timides, a comedy. Between Dreyer, Clair and Kinugasa, there's some very prestigious directing muscle behind this year's foreign film selections; there are actually other well-known directors on the program schedule besides those three, but if I'm going to finish this post before passing out tonight I'd better leave it at that for now.

Well, maybe just one more. Or two, really. Tod Browning is another favorite around these parts, and the festival is bringing him back this year along with his favored star Lon Chaney. The film is the Unknown, and it features Joan Crawford in one of her first film roles, possibly as young as 19 (various sources on Crawford reveal various birth years, the latest being 1908, hence the centennial tributes popping up this year.) It will be shown at a late Saturday night screening and, here's the kicker, introduced by Guy Maddin. Maddin has designated the film as his "Director's Pick," something new for the Silent Film Festival. Presumably, in future festivals other current-day directors will be invited to present a silent-era film they feel particularly fond of.

Of course, this will not be Maddin's first trip to Frisco in 2008. He's also expected at the 51st SF International Film Festival that opens this Thursday, attending the first two of the festival's screenings of his latest curiosity My Winnipeg on May 1 & 3. I've seen My Winnipeg and feel confident in assuring Guy Maddin fans that they will not be disappointed in this new film. Unless they have an unexplainable aversion to Ann Savage, who puts in a terrific performance re-enacting the part of Guy's mother. Or to shots of snow, in which case how could you be a Guy Maddin fan in the first place? My Winnipeg is also narrated by Maddin, and I've heard conflicting guesses from people who saw him narrate the film live in Toronto as to whether they expect him to repeat that performance for his SFIFF appearances.

In case you haven't noticed, I've segued out of talking about the Silent Film Festival and am on to other events. I'll try to be quick, getting down to only the bare essentials so I can go to sleep.

As I mentioned, the SF International Film Festival opens this Thursday and runs for two weeks. The (in part) festival-funded sf360 already has the most voluminous coverage from its crack team of writers. Once again I'd also like to point in the direction of Michael Hawley on the Evening Class, who anticipates attending a very similar selection of festival films to the schedule I hope to use. One film Michael leaves out, however, is Johnny To's Linger, which I'm thrilled to see programmed as I have as much interest in To's non-gangster films as I do in the Triad- and/or hitmen-themed films he's best known for. I'm at least as interested in To's thematic concerns and his mise-en-scene as I am interested in him as a genre interpreter.

Some may have wondered why Linger was picked for the SFIFF instead of the more-acclaimed Mad Detective, which appeared at the Venice Film Festival and others. Well, their chance to see Mad Detective comes with the release of the newest PFA calendar. It's not the most jam-packed calendar of the year, as the Berkeley venue will be closed for three weeks following its stint as a venue for the SFIFF, and will also not be running programs on Mondays or Tuesdays in June. But the calendar does include a 9-title series of To's action films, including Mad Detective, which I've not seen yet. Of the eight I have seen my favorite is the goofy Running on Karma. Throw Down is the one I most feel I should give a second chance to after not liking it as much as I'd hoped the first time around. I do wish a Hero Never Dies had been selected as well, as it's my very favorite To film.

Other newly-announced PFA programs include the entire Berlin Alexanderplatz in four parts May 30-June 7, an all-day marathon of Lynn Hershman Leeson video works June 1, a very welcome Joan Blondell series including the big-screen must-see Footlight Parade and John Cassavetes' Opening Night, and a pair of series devoted to filmmakers I've never heard of (any reader suggestions would be welcome): Austria's Axel Corti and Turkey's Zeki Demirkubuz. In conjunction with the BAM exhibition of Bruce Conner's Mabuhay Gardens photographs, there will be four guest-filled Thursday evenings of punk films culminating in a June 26 pairing of Penelope Spheeris' seminal Decline of Western Civilization (the first, best, original segment in the eventual trilogy) with Conner's influential Devo promo Mongoloid.

And before I finally sign off, I just want to pick out the very best of the latest calendars from Red Vic on Haight Street and the Rafael in Marin county. The Red Vic calendar, amidst its usual excellent mix of premieres and second-run "last chance before DVD" screenings, has a few repertory gems in its lineup this time around, most notably a June 10th screening of Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, which I've never seen before, and a June 22-23 short stand of Max Ophuls's the Earrings of Madame de..., which I've only seen on VHS but love dearly. While the Rafael will be hosting a Jimmy Stewart retrospective Sunday and Wednesday evenings from May 18 through June 18. Having never seen the Shop Around the Corner on the big screen and the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance at all you can bet I've already started scheming ways to secure transportation to and from San Rafael on June 1 and June 18, respectively.