IOHTE: Ryland Walker Knight

"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 Ryland Walker Knight is a writer and filmmaker.His latest short film Inside Voices screens at SF IndieFest this month.

Screen capture from Winner World Korea DVD

My favorite repertory screening in 2014 was seeing Streets of Fire at The Castro on 35mm. Somehow, I’d never seen this Walter Hill classic before, and I can easily say it was the most fun I had at the movies in that last calendar. A couple beers helped, as did the presence of my best friend, but the film is a welcome antecedent to whatever it is Tarantino’s up to with his “Westerns”, except this one is pure fantasy in dramaturgy as well as genre tropes.

The other great experience was re-seeing Robert Altman’s The Company, which I have our host to thank for, and a big thanks it is. The last time I saw the film was on a DVD, before I “came of age” in my cinephilia, and as such it felt like a whole new film for me. I want to say I saw it in theatres, but I cannot say that with confidence, so I’m going to tell myself this was the first time I saw it on film, and I love those early-aughts digital films printed to celluloid for how the process transformed the quite common artifacting into rare textures of emulsion—a blown out light source becomes a flash of burnt celluloid where the white bleeds blue and red in an instant. It’s a mistake in a lot of professional registers, I suppose, but what a lovely index of pure presence, announcing the document and its artificiality equally.

My greatest regret when it comes to my 2014 repertory notebook is how thin it is, as seems the case with me each year this decade. I feel at fault, indebted so much to this art, not doing my part to sustain my ardor, especially when the PFA ran so many Godards on 35. Then again, we see what we want to, and I cannot complain about what I did venture forth to seek on screens.

Gideon's Army (2013)

WHO: Dawn Porter directed this.

WHAT: I haven't seen this documentary about Deep South public defenders 50 years after the Earl Warren Supreme Court's landmark Gideon v. Wainwright decision, so let me quote from a review by Tambay A. Obenson:

The minimalist, verite-style documentary is free of any embellishments - even a soundtrack, except for the occasional muted drone or beats. Director Porter simply documents the action, on camera, sans voiceover narration, or any visual gimmicks. She doesn't lead the audience nor insert herself into the picture, which I appreciated, as it could've lessened the impact audiences would experience of this rather cold, stark, all-consuming, even dangerous and potentially depressing world that the film's subjects exist in - both the public defenders and their primarily impoverished clients.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Little Roxie at 9:00.

WHY: When SF IndieFest's DocFest showcase moved its position on the annual festival calendar from October (as it was in 2012) to June 6-23 this year, it gave the programming team access to a greater number of documentaries that had played at, and even perhaps won awards at, the Sundance Film Festival (still one of the top showcases for brand-new documentaries, especially those made by U.S. filmmakers), but had not yet found a venue for a Frisco Bay theatrical premiere. Gideon's Army fits this profile perfectly; it won the "best editing" award from Sundance, but had DocFest not been around to screen it, it might have skipped local cinemas entirely as few venues seem likely to want to touch a documentary after it has its HBO television premiere, as this will in two weeks.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digital production.

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.

Elena (2012)

WHO: Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa made this.

WHAT: Not to be confused with Andrey Zvyagintsev's 2011 drama with the same title, this first-person documentary was undertaken after Costa had an inspirational viewing of Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès. I haven't seen it, but after several impassioned recommendations from cinephiles who have, I'm very excited to. Let me quote from Jordan M. Smith's recent review:

Elena was a Brazilian dancer turned movie bound New Yorker, dead set on becoming a star. Following in her sister’s footsteps, Petra has taken up the camera, performs before it and let’s her voice lay elegantly aloft the starkly personal collage she’s constructed.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie Theater at 9PM.

WHY: I haven't yet had a chance yet to attend this year's edition of SF IndieFest's annual showcase DocFest, which began last week and runs through June 20th at the Roxie and other Frisco Bay venues, after which it takes up a three-day residency at Santa Cruz's Rio Theatre. Though the festival began last Thursday, there are only a couple of fest selections that audiences won't have at least one more chance to see over the next two weeks. Check David Hudson's handy round-up of press previews to get a full sense of the program. But although none of the linked previewers mention Elena, my sense from the Facebook and Twitter endorsements I've spied is that it will be one of the festival's biggest highlights.

HOW: DocFest is all-digital this year, but that' makes sense as so few documentaries are shot on film anymore. This one mixes footage shot using digital and analog video cameras with that from a Super-8 film camera, which may be confounding to would-be format purists trying to decide whether to attend or not.

Silver Bullets (2011)

WHO: Joe Swanberg wrote, directed and stars in this. He also has credits as cinematographer, editor, co-producer, and is even one of three people credited for sound. Such is the way of making movies on ultra-low budgets sometimes.

WHAT: Although the most widely-seen work Swanberg has made so far has been a segment of last year's "found footage" horror anthology V/H/S, his earlier Silver Bullets is not really, contra imdb, a horror movie. It does feature rather elaborate werewolf make-up by Brian Spears (Stake Land), and it may be frightening on an emotional level to anyone averse to seeing the rawness of an impending break-up portrayed on screen.  Silver Bullets is a seemingly-semi-autobiographical portrait of a crisis point in a relationship between an ultra-low-budget filmmaker (Swanberg) and his girlfriend/leading lady (played to perfection by Kate Lynn Sheil), in which interpersonal tensions erupt when the latter pursues an opportunity to take a role in a "film-within-film" by an independent horror movie maker (played by independent horror movie make Ti West).

It's also the only Swanberg movie I've seen (at the 2011 AFI Fest). I went in with very low expectations because many critics whose opinions I value have nothing good to say about his work, which is often labelled naïve or self-indulgent or worse. But I have to wonder how many of his detractors have seen Silver Bullets (at least one has indicated he felt it represented a growth step for the young auteur.)  Overall I was impressed. Though Swanberg makes some choices with the camera and with his audio mix that I found off-putting, the ultimate impact of the film was that it really captured a complex idea very well: that an artist has very different sorts of relationships with his artworks and his collaborators, and that allowing these to bleed over into each other is perilous. For more detailed analysis I recommend reading Jaime Christley's review at Slant, or what Dan Sallitt has to say on his blog.

WHERE/WHEN: Screening tonight only at 7PM at the Roxie Theater, on a double-bill with Swanberg's Art History.

WHY: Is Silver Bullets a fluke, or an entry point to discovering riches in the remainder of the Swanberg videography? I don't know, but right about now is the perfect time to find out. Tonight's screening of Silver Bullets launches a 12-title retrospective of features directed by the prolific 31-year-old since 2005. Of these twelve I believe nine are making their Frisco Bay theatrical premiere, and of the three that aren't (also including LOL and Hannah Takes the Stairs), All the Light in the Sky premiered only this week at the just-wrapped IndieFest. It's safe to say local cinemagoers have not had much chance to see Swanberg's work, so I'm glad the Roxie decided to take on this series, especially with the director expected to be present for all 12 screenings, ready to personally take credit or blame should it be assigned.

HOW: I believe all of Swanberg's movies were made on video, and will be shown via digital projections this weekend.

Adam Hartzell on Bound By Flesh

With Noir City behind us, more film festivals are populating in Frisco Bay cinemas and on my sidebar. The next one to begin is SF IndieFest, which starts Thursday February 7th and continues for fifteen days. Michael Hawley has written a fine preview, and my friend Adam Hartzell has a review of one of the few documentaries in the program. Here's Adam:

When we build up hopes for a film from which we anticipate big things, we may be setting ourselves up to letting ourselves down.  Will my anxious awaiting for Park Chan-wook's Stoker or Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer, two South Korean ventures into U.S. production territory, live up to my expectations of those two directors?  Will the rest of the U.S. population finally get on the Song Kang-ho greatness bandwagon with his role in Snowpiercer like some in the U.S. finally have with Bae Doo-na in Cloud Atlas?  Or am I just building a poorly constructed infrastructure of hope that will only collapse from the slightest nudge of less-than-greatness?

The examples I gave above are for dramatic films, but I think the danger of high hopes causes the greatest harm for documentaries.  Particularly when those documentaries are done about topics on which we ourselves have engaged in a great deal of outside research.  Case in point for me, Lisa Zemeckis' Bound By Flesh (2012), screening as part of this year's SF Indie Fest running from Feb 7-21 at the Roxie and other San Francisco venues.  If I hadn't read Alice Domurat Dreger's exhaustive medical anthropological study of the lives of conjoined twins, One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal (Harvard University Press, 2004), would I have found Bound By Flesh more compelling?  Instead, I only experience disappointment at a missed opportunity for something greater than the life of Violet and Daisy Hilton told from limited perspectives.

Bound By Flesh details the life of the Hilton sisters, conjoined sisters from  England who eventually found their way to the U.S., via Australia, where they found huge success on the vaudeville circuit.  Most cinephiles know them from their role in Tod Browning's Freaks (1932).  (How Dreger deconstructs Freaks by flipping the script of the dramatic arc in in that film as her own narrative arc for One of Us is part of what makes her rigorous scholarship so accessible and so brilliant.)  Along the way to stardom, they suffered child abuse, both physical and emotional, including being surveilled every hour of their lives by their guardians.  Eventually the Hilton sisters secured emancipation, but since they were now on their own in society for the  first time, they made some less than ideal choices, the consequences of  which they survived temporarily.  But when the vaudeville circuit began to crumble against the enticements provided for audiences by movies and (later) television, the Hilton sisters eventually found themselves impoverished in a new labor market where their skills didn't secure the income and  companionship to which they had previously become accustomed.

The life of the Hilton sisters is compelling and propels the linear narrative in Bound By Flesh.   The talking heads interspersed between the stills, film and TV footage,  and audio recordings of the twins have interesting details to add.  The most engaging of the talking heads is Amy Fulkerson, the curator of collections at The Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas.  To Zemeckis' credit, leaving in The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton's author Dean Jensen's giggles when talking about what he knows of their sexual lives reveals the prurient fascination some male audiences had for the sisters.  But when the former sideshow promoter Ward Hall chooses the word' handicapped' rather than 'freaks'  at one point, stated in a way by him that seems to dismiss liberal calls to re-think our language, it's an unintentional fissure in the text  that illuminates the primary problems with Bound By Flesh.

Why weren't any conjoined twins included amongst the talking heads?  Yes,  there aren't that many to choose from, but country singer conjoined  twins Lori and George Schappell are still boot-scootin' and as conjoined twin performers, they are as appropriate, if not more, than any of the talking heads dominating the film.  (Readers might know the Schappell twins as Lori and Reba, but in 2007, Reba began identifying as male and now goes by George.)   The historical notes on the impact of American entertainment choices is valuable, but so much important  history is still missing.  There's no mention of the lives of other conjoined twins in the circus, of earlier times or contemporary to the Hilton sisters.  For those who don't know, the reason conjoined twins were referred to as 'Siamese twins' was because the first world famous ones were Chang and Eng Bunker who were Chinese-Malay conjoined twins  born in what was then called Siam.  They were successful enough after their circus careers to purchase a plantation with slaves in North Carolina.  They also married two women who were themselves sisters,  although not conjoined, and had 21 children between them. (Darin Strauss wrote a fictional account of their lives called Chang and Eng: A Novel where Strauss decides to whip up some psycho-sexual speculation for some reason.)  Reference to the experience of conjoined twins past (Chang and Eng) and present (Lori and George) along with the seeming paradox that, although objectified, some performers, such as the little person Charles Sherwood Stratton (aka General Tom Thumb) were able to establish fulfilling careers through work in the circus would have expanded the lives of the Hilton sisters beyond an isolated 'freakish' moment in history.

An equally important history to weave in to the story of the Hilton sisters is the history of the Disability Rights movement.  Part of how such context would be helpful is in explaining how the isolation of the Hilton sisters later in life is partly related to issues of accessibility. Bound By Flesh briefly notes how the loss of a U.S. train network impacted the sisters' mobility, but the over-arching commentary of this historical fact is how 'out of touch' the Hilton sisters were with the contemporary Zeitgeist, not how disastrous our national  transportation policies have been for certain segments of the U.S. population.  The Disability Rights movement, like other civil rights movements, spawned a Disability Studies scholarship.  Inclusion of such scholarship in the documentary would have helped deconstruct the 'infinite wisdom' of the able-bodied savior of the Disabled that creeps in to 'save' the Hilton sisters when they are down on their luck along with countering the antics of the former sideshow promoter.

If the Schappell twins were not available, at the very least a film like this demands consideration of Dreger's book if not splicing in interviews of Dreger speaking herself.  As a result of the vast lacunae that unbounds Bound By Flesh, the fact that the life of the Hilton sisters was not conjoined with Disability Studies constructs is the biggest flaw of the film.  If Dreger's One of Us would have been one of the texts used to prepare Bound By Flesh, we would not only have learned that the Hilton Sisters' lack of desire to be separated was not an exception, but the very norm of conjoined twins, we might also have had a documentary that doesn't disappoint the  viewer who has come prepared with background knowledge before the screening, or who chooses to investigate the wider subject afterwards.

The Two Eyes Of Adam Hartzell

If you didn't attend some wonderful repertory/revival film screenings in 2012, you missed out. As nobody could see them all, I've recruited Frisco Bay filmgoers to recall some of their own favorites of the year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Adam Hartzell, a frequent contributor to Hell on Frisco Bay and other sites, and now available to follow on twitter.

I only have 4-eyes this year, appropriate since I am dependent on glasses in order to see far in front of me.  Here are my favorite rep house events - not necessarily in preferential order

1)  Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, Compensation (Zeinabu irene Davis, 1999, U.S.), part of the L.A. Rebellion Series.  

Of course, Charles Burnett's classic Killer of Sheep (1977) is a masterpiece, but all I was able to catch from the L.A. Rebellion Series was Compensation and what a delight this film was to see.  As Davis noted in her Skype-recorded introduction, she re-configured the structure of the film after she found the best actress for the role, Michelle A. Banks.  Davis incorporated a partial silent film narrative because Banks is Deaf and Davis wanted to make sure Banks' community could enjoy the film as much as hearing folk could.  Such efforts to create a work accessible for a greater number of individuals is just plain awesome!  Again, the PFA is my teacher, introducing me to great cinema from artists I knew nothing about until their programs hit my mailbox.  

2)  Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco - Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (Antoinette Jadaone, 2011), part of New Filipino Cinema Series  

This list is limited to what we saw in theaters, so I will refrain from mentioning the excellent films, like Benito Bautista's Boundary (2011), that I saw as screeners on DVD, but of the two films I saw in the YBCA theatre, the US premiere of Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay was truly the highlight.  An amazing mock-umentary that leaves the willing real-life subject with such an amazing sense of dignity, you forget  for a moment you were watching a mock-umentary and realize again how fiction can often present us with greater truths than non-fiction.  

3)  The Bridge, San Francisco, Studio Ghibli Retrospective 

The perfect way to say goodbye to The Bridge's last year in operation.  How wonderful to see the long line of patrons queuing up for a screening of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hiyao Miyazaki, 1984).  How nice for my wife to now know that when dubbed with care, My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki, 1988) can translate.  (Although she could do without all the extra music imposed upon necessary breaths of silence.)  What a true joy it was watching Kiki's Delivery Service (Miyazaki, 1989) with my goddaughter's friends.  What a surprise it was to see the amazing Only Yesterday (Isao Takahata, 1991) for the first time and learn that Ghibli doesn't need to just be Miyazaki.  And equally important, how nice to know that Studio Ghibli is human and can fail too with crap like The Cat Returns (Hiroyuki Morita, 2002).  

4)  The Roxie, San Francisco - Dance Craze (Joe Massot, 1981, United Kingdom) at San Francisco Documentary Festival,  

Once,  when I was in high school, the British ska band Madness was coming to The Shoppe, our local record shop back when every town had one, along  with a local bookstore and cinema.  In order to impede my brother and I  from playing hooky to meet them, my mother offered to go in our place and get albums signed for me, my brother, and our cousin Nathan.  I ended up with a signed copy of the 'One Step Beyond' 12-inch.  I also ended up with a story of my mother telling the young men of Madness - I really hope it was Suggs - "I don't know anything about you boys, but my sons sure like you."  

That is why I went to see Dance Craze as a double date with my British friend who experienced much of what we were witnessing on screen.  Dance Craze is a wonderful snapshot and breakbeat of the  vibrancy of youth creating (or, in this case, re-creating, since this was a revival of the ska genre) musical movement that would make its way to my little city of Berea, Ohio well across the pond.

Adam Hartzell on Ping Pong

With 2012's protracted election season finally over, it seems a perfect time to get a dose of the real world outside the bubble of punditry, anxiety and spin. What better way to do that than to watch documentaries? For instance, the remarkable 50-year-old celebrity portrait Lonely Boy screens Friday night with other gems at Oddball Films, a rare screening and a timely one since its co-director Roman Kroitor died this past September. SFIndie's DocFest also opens just in time, tonight, and runs through the day before Thanksgiving at the Roxie (which has a worthy kickstarter fundraising going on right now) and other venues, with a host of non-fiction films on subjects such as art, music, food, sports, and yes, a little bit of politics. My friend Adam Hartzell, (who I just realized I haven't yet mentioned here invited me to talk about Studio Ghibli films for a podcast a couple months ago) has previewed one of the films on the program. Here's Adam: 

The film that most drives me to queue up at this year's San Francisco Documentary Film Festival running bi-bay from November 8th-21st, is Grandma Lo-fi: The Basement Tapes of Sigrdur Níelsdóttir, a Danish-Icelandic co-production directed by Kristín Björk, Orri Jonsson, and Ingibjorg Birgisdóttir, themselves participants in the Icelandic music and art scenes.  I had heard (and watching this film will hopefully verify or disprove) that members of that amazing ensemble Sigur Rós helped 'discover' the hidden musical gems that Níelsdóttir was creating merely for her family and friends.  And as has been said by many about this less populated island situated where the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans pour into each other, most everyone in Iceland knows each other, and by extension, become 'family and friends'.  That all said, a family obligation will actually keep me from hearing along with seeing on screen what the 70 year-old began recording on cassette tape in geographical and subculture isolation.   

But what I have had the opportunity to see from this year's SF DocFest is Director Hugh Hartford's equally elder-ed Ping Pong.  (This documentary also contains its own bit of pleasant music in the closing credits where the ping-pong-ing of a ball on table tennis table and raqcuet, what I've learned the British players call a 'bat', provides the beat).  Ping Pong follows eight over 80-years-old players competing in the Senior World Table Tennis Championships.  Two from England, two from Germany, one from Sweden, one avid smoker from China, one Austrian immigrant from the United States, and one 100 year-old sensation from Australia.

I've recently found myself appreciating the sport of table tennis while in Japan during the London 2012 Olympics.  The only Japanese athlete representing my wife's hometown of Yamaguchi City, Kazumi Ishikawa, came in that bitter-tasting fourth place individually but ended with a Silver medal for the woman's team event.  The moment when they secured at least the silver by beating Singapore in the semi-finals was something we got to watch over and over again because Japanese television constantly re-played that match.  I still feel the teary joy sparked via my mirror neurons when looking at images of Kazumi and her teammate's crying after securing their place in the final gold medal match.  The joy was not a chance to win gold.  They were merely happy to finally get a medal for Japan in the event, guaranteed a silver.  Everyone knew Japan wouldn't win the gold medal match because, well, the Chinese always win.

. . . Except on the senior circuit, as we learn from Ping Pong.  Ping Pong is not a typical sports documentary designed to have you revel in exquisite athleticism. No one has 'impressive' kinesthetic skills here.  You are merely happy some of these athletes can keep up with the demanding pace, let alone simple keep themselves standing up in the first place.  As a result of not being able to show dynamic play, Hartford includes some nice diversions from the typical sports doc set-ups.  For example, not much is shown of the final matches.  More attention is paid towards the lives of the athletes and the demographic stage of life in which each athlete is an age cohort.  Englishman Terry, the youngest of the bunch, is battling through life-threatening illnesses.  German Inge is able to play through her dementia while her compatriot Ursuhla hopes to die on the table tennis table.  Then there's Les, the Charles Atlas of senior table tennis, who looks like he'll go on for another 80 years at this rate.

Ping Pong treats its subjects with respect, letting them tell their own stories, allowing the humor and sympathy to come from them rather than imposing either upon them through editing.  A core message is what such an activity can allow for us in our elder years.  A senior circuit like that shown in this documentary provides regular exercise for the elderly, plus such competition provides the mental benefits of a focused challenge that offers the side benefit of enabling one to focus away from the pains and limited abilities of old age.  And most important, it provides a community of folks who refuse to bowl alone, to adjust a Robert D. Putnam phrase, since it takes two to table tennis.

Cinema of Bodies/Cinema of Space

One of my New Year's resolutions was to keep my introductions for guest bloggers straight and to the point. I'm going to backslide just a tiny bit to mention that the new March-April calendar was released on the Pacific Film Archive website since my previous post. Now I'll turn over the floor to my friend Adam Hartzell:

The second weekend of this year's IndieFest has at least two treats in store. As I've talked about here on HoFB a couple of times, Judy Lieff's Deaf Jam was my favorite film from last year. And catching Deaf Jam once at the Mill Valley Film Festival was not enough for me. I plan to catch it again at one of the two screenings this weekend - Saturday 2/18 @ 12:30pm & Sunday 2/19 @ 5pm. (As a sort of thematic meal and a movie, I plan to finally try out Mozzeria, the Deaf-owned restaurant on Guerrero only a few block from the Roxie Theatre.) For those who didn't click through those hyperlinks to read my past posts here about Deaf Jam, it's a documentary that takes a wide focus on the importance of American Sign Language Poetry in Deaf culture while zooming in on one particular young Deaf poet, Aneta Brodski, an absolutely captivating subject. Besides matters specific to Deaf culture, the film also touches on immigration issues since Brodski came to the U.S. from Israel as a child and her parents only obtained their citizenship after she turned 18. As a result, she is left in legal limbo, something the DREAM Act, if finally enacted by Congress, would rectify. Add to this that Aneta's Hearing poet partner is a Palestinian-American, and you have yet another layer of politics packed into this engaging documentary.
　
Part of why Deaf Jam works so well on screen is because sign languages are visual languages. Sign languages are so perfect for cinema it's surprising how little we see it used in moving pictures. (Thankfully, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is providing us another opportunity to see a moving language in a moving picture with Mina T Son's short Making Noise In Silence, part of the Roots and Reality short film series. Here's a link to an interview I did with Director Son, my last contribution to sf360.org before it folded.) Along with the naturally cinematic language of the Deaf, Deaf Jam Director Lieff also credits her dance background as helping her frame scenes in particular ways because she saw choreography in ASL Poetry performances. Perhaps this is what led Lieff to be comfortable leaving one moment of ASL Poetry un-translated, trusting the body to tell the tale.
　
And multiple bodies tell the tale in the full-on dance extravaganza that closes out IndieFest this year, Jacob Krupnick's Girl Walk // All Day, basically a long-form video for the album All Day by Girl Talk. Although certain dance segments in the wider narrative might drag at points, Girl Walk never fails to eventually turn a corner to re-engage you in the conga line happening on screen. For example, I started to lose interest when one character is bouncing around Chinatown, but eventually she jumps on the scooter of the fan dancer and I'm back in the groove again. Creating a mash-up film to narrate a mash-up album is an idea as ingenious as it is dangerous. Girl Talk, aka Greg Gillis, is a mash-up artist straight out of Pittsburgh, PA who takes a ridiculous number of samples and juxtaposes hip hop with rock n' roll, pop, and punk to make collage albums that are greater than the sums of their parts. But what Girl Talk does is argued by some to be illegal, (Girl Talk's record label is in fact called 'Illegal Art'), since no clearance was sought for the samples from the original album and ergo the movie. If Krupnick tried to release Girl Walk in for-profit theatres, it would likely be prohibitively expensive to get clearance for the songs sampled and the songs the songs sampled are sampling. Girl Walk expands the possible illegality of art through the acts of guerrilla filmmaking portrayed in the film. Besides the moment one dancer is escorted out of Yankee Stadium, there are other instances where it looks like some security cops are on their way. From the credits, it appears that permission was asked at places like the Staten Island Ferry, but not every set was accessed with forewarning. Still others, like myself, would argue that Girl Talk, and now Girl Walk, falls under the Fair Use exemption for creative and scholarly works. And asking for permission to be creative or to engage in scholarship is not Fair Use. You don't need permission for Fair Use. You just do use it or risk losing it. (However, I'm not a lawyer, so don't take my word as bond. A great book that tries to sort out sampling practices and how copyright could change to facilitate creativity such as what we find in Girl Talk/Girl Walk along with providing reasonable remuneration for the creators of works other works are built upon, check out Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola's Creative Licence: the Law and Culture of Digital Sampling.)
　
Girl Walk's somewhat limited attempt at a story involves The Girl (Anne Marsen) who appears to want to get everyone to dance with her, The Creep (John Doyle) who wants to get with the girl, and The Gentlemen (Daisuke Omiya) who's the busker of the bunch and to whom The Girl seems to take a liking. Besides that skeleton of a story, this is just a dance performance that treats New York City like a playground, from the twirls on the High Line to tap-dancing on the bull outside of Wall Street. By dancing in these public, semi-public, and private spaces, and adding a new layer to these places through choreography, ownership of these spaces is brought into question. Just as Girl Talk's digital remixing challenges what is an original artwork and who owns what, Girl Walk creates something out of the accoutrements of these spaces. When Girl Talk meshes General Public's 'Tenderness' with hip hop lyrics that ain't so tender, both songs are deconstructed to be re-constructed into something new, something Girl Talk's own. And now the work of others works that make up Girl Talk's work is even further re-contextualized and newly owned, or re-possessed, in Girl Walk. They take on a new meaning through the bodies interacting with Girl Talk's songs in these spaces. Furthermore, because these dancers occasionally highlight areas like High Line and Madison Square, areas of New York City that have been re-appropriated from their prior uses (a train way and car lanes respectively) in order to expand the availability of public space available to NYC's citizens and visitors, these public spaces are yet further being re-designed by the bodies moving within them. There's even a scene in Girl Walk with a traceur. A traceur is a practitioner of the urban sport of Parkour where cities are used as makeshift obstacle courses. Since the first time a skateboarder afforded a new use for a stair handrail, nothing has re-thought how our bodies interact with our cities more than Parkour.
　
My enthusiasm for Girl Walk exhibited in the words I've typed here is more regarding its potential than it's execution. It's a totally fun film, but not a great film. Those who find that Girl Talk's albums lag at times will probably find the same flaw in the film. (Perhaps we here in San Francisco can make that better film by choreographing a Girl Walk sequel of sequential dances taking place throughout all the Parklets in San Francisco? May I suggest the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra do the soundtrack for our walk?) But it's still very much a film I want to start seeing more of. A film that celebrates the city and how citizens can re-format cities as places more friendly and supportive of our bodies than how they are presently designed for the exoskeletons of our cars and the free/cheap parking we demand to publicly store our private automobiles. To appropriate the recent words of Ellen when reacting to her haters, we need cities that value dance.

You Wish To Go To The Festival(s)?

Fall festivals are flying fast and furious, as Frisco Bay film organizations jockey for the attention of eager movie lovers. Two local film festivals are already winding down as I type this (Michael Hawley has details), and undoubtedly at least one or two more will send an announcement into my inbox before I finish writing this post. Tonight marks the beginning of a pair of weekend-long festivals I've never attended, the SF Irish Film Festival at the Roxie, and the Oakland Underground Film Festival at various venues in that city. The former screens new work from the Emerald Isle along with some retrospective entries like Once, In The Name of the Father (both, according to Film On Film, on 35mm prints), and artist-turned-film director Steve McQueen's Hunger. As for the OUFF, if their Friday night selection Marimbas From Hell is any indication of the festival's spirit, expect a weekend of wonderfully weird films unlikely to find commercial distribution. Marimbas From Hell is Guatemalan filmmaker Julio Hernández Cordón's first film since his low-budget scorcher of a debut Gasoline, and it bursts with humanity and eccentricity as it follows an unemployed xylophone player who joins forces with an aging heavy metal god to create a musical fusion that blurs documentary and fiction as much as Julio Cordón's style seems to.

Tonight is also the Sf Film Society's kickoff party for its 2011 Fall Season, a nearly nonstop parade of themed collections of international film selections at its new home New People Cinema (and a few other venues as well). Festivals announced so far include: Hong Kong Cinema (September 23-25) with recent films by directors Ann Hui, Johnnie To and others; read Adam Hartzell's write-up for more. Taiwan Film Days (October 14-16) including the goofy cross-cultural comedy Pinoy Sunday. The NY/SF International Children's Film Festival (October 21-23) features at least one 3-D animation with serious potential to impress, French silhouette master Michel Ocelot's Tales Of The Night, to be screened at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio rather than at New People as most of the rest of the Children's Fest will be. This is a rare opportunity to experience perhaps what's probably the most technically perfect screening venue in town.

Though Cinema By The Bay (Nov. 3-6), the San Francisco International Animation Festival (Nov. 10-13) and New Italian Cinema (Nov. 13-20) have yet to be unveiled on the SFFS website, they'll have to be pretty impressive to displace French Cinema Now (October 27-November 2) as my most anticipated of these Fall Season series. Three of the most talked-about films from this year's international festival circuit (Cannes, Toronto, etc.) get their Frisco Bay debuts during this series, and I can't wait to see all three of them: Goodbye, First Love, young director Mia Hansen-Løve's follow-up to her stunning second feature Father Of My Children, The Dardennes Brothers' The Kid With A Bike, which won the Grand Prix (essentially second prize to Terence Malick's Tree of Life) at Cannes back in May, and Le Havre, the new feature by Finland's most famous director, Aki Kaurismäki, his first in more than five years. The original mission of French Cinema Now is stretched by the inclusion of films from Finland and Belgium along with France, but if we interpret the "French" in the series title as a reference to the language of the dialogue and not the nationality of the crew, all three films are equally at home here. As are the other French-language films in the program, none of which I've heard much about as of yet. Mathieu Amalric's The Screen Illusion is the only one of these directed by a filmmaker I've seen other work by: his On Tour closed the the last SF International Film Festival. That screening was the final public appearance of Graham Leggat, who ran the Film Society brilliantly for more than five years until stepping down shortly before he succumbed to cancer late last month.

Leggat's recent passing was solemnly mentioned, along with local legendary filmmaker George Kuchar's, at a press conference announcing the line-up of the 34th Mill Valley Film Festival last week. Kuchar was subject of a MVFF tribute in its second year of operation, back in 1979. (He'll be subject of a pair of posthumous tributes by SF Cinematheque this December. Jordan Belson, another recently departed Frisco filmmaking giant, will be posthumously honored at the Pacific Film Archive in October). These days MVFF tributees are less likely to be dedicated underground filmmakers like Kuchar and more likely to be individuals in the early stages of an Oscar campaign. This year the festival tributes Glenn Close with a screening of Albert Nobbs, and spotlights Michelle Yeoh, Ezra Miller and Jennifer Olson, all year-end-awards possibilities for their new films, The Lady, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Martha Marcy May Marlene, respectively. One 2011 MVFF tributee is most definitely not stumping in hopes of hearing his name mentioned by Eddie Murphy next February. Gaston Kaboré is one of the top film directors from Burkina Faso, the country that hosts Sub-Saharan Africa's most prestigious film festival, the biannual FESPACO. Though his films are known to some cinephiles, they are rarely revived and, apart from his brief contribution to the international omnibus Lumiere And Company (all I've seen of his work), not easily found on DVD. So it's wonderful that two of his most acclaimed films Wend Kuuni and its sequel Buud Yam are being brought to Marin along with their maker next month. Unfortunately tickets to Buud Yam are already at "Rush Status" so make sure to buy tickets in advance for Wend Kuuni if you don't want to have to wait in line on a Tuesday night for a sample of Burkinabé cinema.

Also gone to "Rush Status" at MVFF are opening night Sequoia Theatre screening-only tickets to Jeff, Who Lives At Home, the latest from the Duplass Brothers, who made The Puffy Chair, Baghead and Cyrus. This was screened at the festival press conference, and from the moment early in the film when they start to make reference to M. Night Shyamalan's Signs I knew the film was going to be a lot smarter than the average contemporary comedy about unlikable man-children. I'm not supposed to say too much about the film until its general release next Spring, but I found it a very satisfying exercise in enjoyable audience manipulation. It's still possible to buy tickets to the film+party package, though they're quite expensive. The closing night film is another one I'm hotly anticipating: Michel Hazanavicius's neo-silent The Artist. More MVFF titles are commented on in Jackson Scarlett's SF360 article.

Since I mentioned silent cinema, let me step away from film festivals for a moment to note the Niles Silent Film Museum's current calendar. October brings, along with many other films, a pair of classics I've seen and can comment on: A Fool There Was is not a very good film, but it's a very important one as it's among the only features still surviving of superstar sex symbol Theda Bara's prodigious output. The Man Who Laughs, meanwhile, is a really wonderful film to see with an audience; it stars Conrad Veidt as a disfigured nobleman striving against a lifelong conspiracy against him. His make-up famously inspired Batman creator Bob Kane's vision of The Joker. The final Niles show of September 2011 reunites Mary Pickford and Cecil B. DeMille, who had acted together on the New York stage, but who came to Boulder Creek, CA to make Romance of the Redwoods with Pickford in front of the camera and DeMille behind it. Also on this Saturday's program are a Max Linder short and my favorite of all of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's films, the two-reel Fatty and Mabel Adrift. Earlier this month, I wrote an Indiewire article on Arbuckle, informed by my last trip to Niles, to see a film he made just before the scandal that destroyed his career ninety years ago: Leap Year. I hope you take a look at the piece and let me know what you think.

I could go on, but I really ought to wrap this post up. So I'll just mention the other Frisco Bay festivals coming up in the next month or so, and hope that you can tell me whether there are films screening at them that you're interested in, or think I might be. There's the brand-new Palo Alto International Film Festival (which includes what may be your last chances to see Werner Herzog's Cave Of Forgotten Dreams in "Real D" 3-D before the inevitable stereoscopic retrospectives come along), the Arab Film Festival, the 10th SF DocFest, the 14th United Nations Association Film Festival, and the ATA Film & Video Festival.

Adam Hartzell on Three Canadian Indies

Film festival season has started again here in Frisco. Last week I spent the majority of my evenings at Noir City, taking in a personal-best fifteen of the twenty-four films programmed. I've been letting a wrap-up piece slowly broil, but in the meantime I highly recommend the coverage of the festival by Max Goldberg, Michael Guillén, and the indefatigable Odienator, who wrote stimulating reviews of nearly every film in the program for the newly-redesigned House Next Door blog, and is now posting daily Black History Mumf entries at Big Media Vandalism. Makes me feel like a slacker when it comes to writing...

Luckily I have a compatriot here at Hell On Frisco Bay who helps me pick up the slack. As my life gets busier in February, I'm not likely to be able to see (much less write about) the films programmed at the festivals currently underway: the Ocean Film Festival, the African Film Festival, or the Mostly British Film Festival and IndieFest, both of which begin tonight. Reliably, Adam Hartzell has stepped into the breach, previewing three Canadian films programmed at the latter event this week and next. Here's Adam:

This year's SF IndieFest provides the opportunity to watch three films from a country's cinema often kept from us in the States, Canada. And whether planned or not, they've spread the Canadiana out across three different provinces - Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec.

Manitoba's contribution is Zooey & Adam (Dir. Sean Garrity). The film begins pleasantly enough, but quickly takes a horrifying turn, well-executed in its direction to disturb. In order to avoid giving this major plot point and its impact away, let me say that the scene takes place in the dark, reminding me of a comment made by Iranian director Jafir Panahi. He said he did not feel confident choreographing violence, choosing in The Circle to have the violence take place behind a closed door, making the scene all the more frightening because of its visible absence. Garrity does the same thing here by not showing us exactly what's happening as the characters scream in horror at a scene taking place in only our own minds. An interesting story follows about how a couple tries to stay together after the trauma.
　
The film's impact is limited by the jaunty Indie editing style of scenes spliced together from different cuts. I don't know if there is a term for this particular editing style, but here's an example of what I'm talking about. We have the characters in a heated argument and then we quickly jump to them in silence and notice that their posture and position within the same room is noticeably different from before the cut. At one point, the heated argument jumps to them quickly resolving their differences. This disjointed editing style can sometimes add to a film, but here the scenes occasionally feel as if Garrity is making do with what he has, something low-budget directors have to learn to handle expertly. In spite of this and some other poorly orchestrated scenes, the film still carries one through an anguishing, fairly compelling story.
　
Ontario's offering primarily takes place in a small town well outside of Toronto. (Toronto’s main signification in the film is a bird's eye shot of two of the characters near a Bay Street sign, Bay Street being Canada's Wall Street.) The music throughout Point Traverse (Dir. Albert Shin) and the gorgeous images of landscapes provide nice meditative breaks. As for the story, we follow three childhood friends as they establish ennui in young adulthood. One manages a fast food chicken joint. One sleepwalks from street life to a janitorial job to a relationship with a Russian immigrant escaping a life best left behind as well. And the a third, a character Shin decided not to develop as fully, is hinted to be the man-child of the bunch. When the story drags, the music and landscape images make up for what‘s otherwise not working. When the story works, it’s a nice meditation on young adulthood in a nowhere town, trying to find somewhere to go amidst the nowhere.
　
As usual when we talk about Canadian cinema, the best of the bunch comes from Quebec. West of Pluto is directed by Myriam Verreault and Henry Bernadet and although it includes the clichéd 'loss of virginity as bad experience' trope of the more serious teen films, the rest of this narrative is truly a breath of fresh, francophonic air. It begins with a montage of the teens we will spend the rest of the film with giving class speeches about their passions. (One of the characters gives his passion-speech about, of all things, peanut butter, which foreshadows that this kid lacks direction.) With such a wide cast of characters, the concise development is fairly well accomplished. The title comes from the fact that these kids live in a suburb where several streets are named after planets and the fact that one student’s passion is for Pluto. Interspersed throughout the narrative is footage of NASA preparing for the launch of a rocket to survey Pluto, launched only a few months before Pluto would lose its planet status. (With the dropping of Pluto, if you’re wondering what does My Very Educated Mother Just Serve Us Now, a quick Google search suggests it turns out she‘s no longer serving nine pizzas, but just 'Nachos'.) The story is simple and progresses to a teenage party gone wrong. But outside of the loss-of-virginity cliché mentioned earlier, the many ways in which this party goes wrong don‘t leave me feeling as if I've attended a party (or after-party) like this one before. Along with the French spoken, an animated debate on Quebec sovereignty and a late night munchies satiation at a poutine stand keep this film marked as clearly from Quebec. But the stories of youthful identity-searching, with authentic, mean-spirited actions tempering any overly romantic John Hughesian themes, allows for universals of youth to be taken from a clearly Canadian film.

Adam Hartzell: DocFest 2009

Adam Hartzell reports on three features in the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, a.k.a. DocFest, opening tonight at the Roxie. More coverage of the 14-day event is available at sf360, at the Evening Class, and at the SF Bay Guardian website and arts & culture blog. Adam:

I have ambivalent feelings about the use of ridicule in documentaries, such as those of Sascha Baren Cohen, Bill Maher or Michael Moore. As much as I might agree with the political views of these filmmakers, we know that the tactic of ridicule can impede efforts to bring people over to other views. Rather than convince people, ridicule can end up causing the other party to be defensive. And in the form of ridicule, any efforts to educate are received instead as condescension. Yet there are individuals and organizations that are not interested in actually furthering debate or illuminating discussion. They seek to obfuscate, to inject disinformation for the sole purpose of confusing people from knowing the factual information. (I’m looking at you FOX/GOP network!) When facing disinformation campaigns, I find ridicule useful to reduce the power that figure or the organization they speak for might illegitimately have. As much as I might feel Bill Maher often goes overboard, when he mocks Glenn Beck with a fake Beck book release entitled Painting with Poop, Maher is homing in perfectly on the insanity of Beck’s idiotic ideas.

Of the three DVDs I screened for the 8th edition of the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, none were out to ridicule their subjects. They treated each subject with dignity. But if there is any topic that deserves ridicule, it’s the nonsense of the Young Earth Creationists and their efforts to muddy up progress with false claims that the earth is only roughly 6,000 years old.

In this way, I find Todd Gitlin’s The Earth Is Young problematic since it is vulnerable to lending an unwarranted legitimacy to Young Earth Creationism’s fraudulent claims. Real world scientific evidence is stacked against the claims made by Young Earth Creationists in this reel world. They disregard science in order to advocate their pre-ordained beliefs. My concern is that without placing the proselytizing of Young Earth Creationists into context, we risk their views receiving unwarranted respectability. Call me a worrywart, but I’m concerned that by having such scientifically unfounded claims sit there in the democratic vat, the result would lead us towards dormancy on necessary public policy issues, such as our need to address climate change and our need to implement infrastructure changes to address the post-petroleum, post-car future that is soon upon us.

Yet, Gitlin’s documentary is intentionally off-putting, so the approach is not completely problematic since this creeping creepiness throughout the film is the indirect critique that I would rather be more direct. The drone we hear throughout the film, the voice-of-god-like blob cleverly placed amongst the microscopic world of microorganisms, the focus on the mute faces and gesticulating hands, these all add to the overall eerie feel of the documentary underscored by the bizarre claims made by the practitioners. It is this discomforting imprint that stays with me, leaving me not just unimpressed with the proselytizing trying to pass for scientific research, but a bit frightened as well.

For those who like their film-festival experience to overlap thematically, the Young Earth Creationists make an appearance in Joe Winston and Laura Cohen’s film adaptation of Thomas Frank's non-fiction book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? As much as I might disagree with the political views of the Christian Conservatives, I appreciate how the directors refuse to ridicule them here. This allows for a more accurate portrayal rather than the caricatures drawn in some liberal circles. For those who haven’t yet, I suggest reading the book rather than relying on this documentary to inform you. The arguments laid out by Frank regarding how working class conservatives vote against their own economic interests are made more compellingly in the book than the film. But then again, maybe I just have a book-bias when it comes to nonfiction, because there is some action at the end (which I can’t reveal here without spoiling) that underscores Frank’s thesis. What this documentary does do in some ways better than the book is humanize the citizens of an oft-ridiculed state of the union. Plus, since this documentary takes place during the federal midterm election after the publication of Frank’s book, it provides a snapshot of a political shift in Kansas. I don’t think we’re in What’s the Matter with Kansas?’s Kansas anymore, Toto. Kansan Politics have begun to matter a little differently.

The best of the films I caught for this year’s SF DocFest was Patrick Shen’s The Philosopher Kings. Shen focuses his camera on the lives and philosophies of those in what is considered by many as the lowliest of professions, the custodian. Several janitors at several academic institutions are interviewed on their thoughts about their jobs, their futures, life, death, and everything in between. Personal epistemologies are espoused by each of these custodians based on life experience. Shen demonstrates each unique perspective while also drawing life parallels, such as accidents and family histories, along with similar situations specific to janitorial work.

In this way, Shen demonstrates the interplay between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ put forth by Anthony Giddens. As Andrew Hickey notes of Giddens’ work in Hickey’s contribution to iPod and Philosophy: iCon of an ePoch, this is “An interplay that operates as a negotiation between the structural conditions of existence you find yourself in and the desires you have to express a certain identity” (p 124). The agency found within the structures of their profession is quite evident in The Philosopher Kings, from Melinda Augustus of the University of Florida who engages in self study of the butterflies in the building she cleans, to Corby Baker who finds inspiration for his own artwork in the student projects he dusts at Cornish College of Arts in Seattle.

Locals might recognize the UC Berkeley representative, Michael Seals. But many in the film argue that it is likely locals won’t recognize him, since we often make our janitors invisible. As someone who regularly greets and talks with the janitorial staff at my work, I am often disappointed at the levels others engage in to ignore the presence of those who assure our facilities are presentable and work smoothly. Others seem to walk around them as if they are a poorly placed pillar in the middle of the room by some absent-minded architect, looking away from them as if they are not worthy of everyday salutations. The Philosopher Kings gently addresses the injustices of such invisibility. It is an absolute gift of a film that will hopefully leave audiences with a change in perspective, which is the aim of every good philosopher, and of every good documentary.

Time to Unclog the Backlog

Indiefest is up and running, and as usual Jason Watches Movies is the go-to site to get the latest screening reports. I haven't been this year yet myself. Because I didn't want to miss the scarcely-screened an American Tragedy and Dishonored in the Pacific Film Archive's Josef von Sternberg series, I had to skip the other night's screenings from Indiefest's I Am Curious (Pink) selection of Japanese "pinku" films, and I'll be missing next Saturday's follow-up in favor of the Cat and the Canary at the Silent Film Festival. But I do hope to sample Indiefest selections Woodpecker, Great Speeches From a Dying World and Idiots and Angels if I can. We'll see. February is shaping up to be a very busy month for attractive filmgoing experiences. Following are a list of festivals and screening venues which have (relatively) recently announced new programs over the next several weeks, with a few particular highlights from my perspective.

The Stanford Theatre has a new calendar running through April 27th. This is the premiere Frisco Bay venue devoted almost exclusively to classic Hollywood and British films 4-5 days a week (closed Tuesdays, Wednesdays and occasionally Thursdays this season). Silent films with top organ accompaniment play on select Fridays; in each case well-known titles programmed with a rare and somehow related talkie as second feature, e.g. both versions of Seventh Heaven on March 13th, and King Vidor's silent masterpiece the Crowd with his 1934 Our Daily Bread on March 27th. The venue steps out of the English-language comfort zone with day-long screenings of Satjajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, perfect counter-programming for Oscar weekend for anyone tired of hearing about Slumdog Millionaire. Other noteworthy picks include but are not limited to Edgar G. Ulmer's the Black Cat with Mitchell Leisen's Death Takes a Holiday March 19-20, and Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's a Matter of Life and Death and a Canterbury Tale April 18-20. Powell & Pressburger's the Life and Death of Colonel Blimp plays April 23-24 with the original British version of Gaslight.

These are not the only chances on the horizon to see Powell & Pressburger's tremendously enjoyable films on large cinema screens in the coming months. Their (to my mind) greatest masterswork I Know Where I'm Going! comes to the Vogue in Laurel Heights on March 1st, and Powell's sans-Pressburger film Age of Consent screens in what's billed as "a pristine archival print" at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael March 3rd. This is in connection with the Mostly British Film Series held at those theatres February 26th through March 5th. The majority of offerings will be recent films from the U.K. (and/or Australia and Ireland, thus the "mostly" in the series title), such as opening night's Genova by Michael Winterbottom and the much-laureled closer Hunger from artist Steve McQueen. But another retrospective at the Vogue is the Friday February 27th showing of Christopher Nolan's first feature, from 1998, Following. Though its time-jumping narrative is arguably less graceful than that of his first American breakthrough Memento, it's still an intriguing and relatively assured debut that may be even more interesting to view in the light of a subsequent highly successful Hollywood career.

The Balboa Theatre celebrates its 82nd year of operation February 22 at 1PM with a screening of Mary Pickford's final silent film My Best Girl, released in late 1927. At about that time halfway around the world Pickford appeared on screen, without her knowledge, in a film called a Kiss From Mary Pickford. A newsreel camera had captured brief footage of her planting a kiss on actor Igor Ilyinsky while she and her husband Douglas Fairbanks were traveling in the pre-Stalinist Soviet Union. A screenplay fictionalizing this incident was written for Ilyinsky, last seen on Frisco Bay screens in the PFA-programmed Carnival Night, where he plays the crusty-old-dean role in a school pageant film. Here he's 30 years younger and apparently hilarious. I'm excited for this chance to see a Kiss From Mary Pickford at the Castro Theatre, and then a "real Mary Pickford film" from the same year at the Balboa the following weekend.

The Red Vic's current calendar is no longer new anymore, but's it's starting to get really interesting. This week Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre remake plays February 11th and 12th, all the better to get us in the mood for original Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau's Sunrise at the Castro on February 14th. At the Red Vic that day, and the day before, is the theatre's annual Valentine's Day booking of Annie Hall. February 22 & 23 is the Muppet Movie (the first, best, and Orson Welles-iest of the Henson movies) and more Henson magic comes April 1 & 2 with Labyrinth. Frisco filmmaker Kevin Epps has a new documentary the Black Rock premiering February 27-March 5, and it will be directly preceded by a one-night stand of his first feature Straight Outta Hunters Point. Arthouse revivals take over the venue for much of March, starting with Brazil on the 6th & 7th, and continuing with Belle de Jour on the 10th & 11th, Stranger Than Paradise on the 17th and Down By Law the following two days, Two-Lane Blacktop on the 25th & 26th, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her on the 29th & 30th, and finally the Jerk on April Fools Eve. Okay, so perhaps "arthouse" is a stretch for that last item. But on the subject of comedy, I think the Red Vic screening I'm most looking forward to is tonight's midnight showing of one of the most misunderestimated films released during the previous Presidential administration, Pootie Tang. It's part of a Full Moon Midnight series that will next stop at The Room March 11th. Like most people I've never seen Pootie Tang on the big screen, but unlike most I've enjoyed it countless times - under the influence of no illicit substances, mind you - on video. It's almost impossible to make it sound like something worth watching but still its cult following grows for some reason. Sepatown.

SFMOMA's Chantal Akerman series rolls along to its conclusion February 28th, a screening of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles with Akerman herself in attendance for a post-screening q-and-a. In March and April the museum's screening room gives itself over to a science-fiction series entitled the Future of the Past: Utopia/Dystopia, 1965-1984. It ranges from Godard's Alphaville and Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 to Michael Radford's 1984 with stops at a Clockwork Orange, Fantastic Planet, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker and more.

Finally, more film festivals have announced schedules in the past week or two. There's the Ocean Film Festival Feb. 19-22, with its subject focus on science, ecology and recreation on the world's waters. The Noise Pop Film Festival (Feb. 25- Mar. 1) is another subject-specific festival, gathering music documentaries of interest to the loyal attendees of the live performances that have made Frisco a late-February destination for touring bands and music obsessives for years now. I've never attended these so I can't exactly vouch for them, though they've lasted long enough to be considered successful, and to have attracted loyal supporters.

Almost a year ago I trekked to San Jose to attend a few screenings at the most prominent film festival in the most-populated (at night, anyway) city on Frisco Bay, Cinequest. What felt like a novelty last year may have to turn into a tradition, as there are several films in their program I've been anticipating, and I'm not at all confident all of them will find their way into a more Northerly cinema. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's new Tokyo Sonata, plays Cinequest twice, both times at the beautifully restored California Theatre in downtown San Jose. But I know it's going to be distributed theatrically later this year, and it's expected to be among the films programmed for the San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival when their own schedule is unveiled tomorrow. So I probably won't endeavor to catch it at Cinequest. On the other hand, El Camino from Costa Rica, intriguingly synopsized by David Bordwell, and Alejandro Adams' Canary, his genre film follow-up to Around the Bay, seem like they might be just the sorts of films that play Cinequest but otherwise slip through Frisco Bay cinephiles' fingers this year, no matter how good they are. I hope not, but one can't be too sure and I'm seriously contemplating a road trip on March 1st, when they both play at venues across the street from each other.