A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973)

WHO: Jacques Demy directed this

WHAT: I haven't seen this film before, so let me quote from Dan Callahan's review:

This seems to be a very personal movie for Demy, a gay man who married another talented filmmaker, Agnes Varda. Not much is known about their marriage and what it entailed, but A Slightly Pregnant Man clearly expresses the yearning of an artist who wanted to have family and who also wanted to be with men. Male pregnancy is the most romantic solution to Demy's dilemma (gay adoption is today's prosaic alternative). The concept of the film isn't a commercial gimmick played for easy laughs, as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Junior—it's a metaphor for change, both social and otherwise.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:00.

WHY: We have now arrived at the part of the PFA's Jacques Demy retrospective where the venue is showcasing real rarities among the director's feature films. This film, A Room In Town, The Pied Piper and Three Seats For the 26th have all been absent from Frisco Bay screens in my memory, and represent blank spots in my experience with Demy's films. None of them screened at the 2006 mini-retro of the director's films, and may not re-appear in local cinemas any time in the foreseeable (or even conceivable) future.

The PFA is one of the few venues in the area that can be counted on to provide us the "deep cuts" of a director's filmography like these ones, at least some of the time. The recent Raoul Walsh series included a nice mixture of films that one might expect to see at the Castro or another venue sometime, and those (such as Wild Girl) we might not ever get a chance to see otherwise. The next series beginning at the PFA is a selection of Alfred Hitchcock silent films that did appear at the Castro recently, but might not make their way around again very soon, at least not in a group portrait like the one we're getting a second shot at taking starting tomorrow.

Further on the horizon, I've been given the go-ahead to mention, although at the time you read this the information might not yet be found on the PFA website, are two more retrospectives of European directors who, like Demy, died young and are thought of as great filmmakers at least as frequently as they are as gay or bisexual filmmakers. From September 20th until the end of October the venue will host a comprehensive set of screenings of the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini. In addition to repeat showings of the six 35mm prints screening the weekend before at the Castro and Roxie (that I mentioned yesterday) another thirteen of his features and shorts will play in 35mm, filled out by a few shorts on digital formats. Meanwhile, a large series devoted to West Germany's Rainer Werner Fassbinder begins October 4th with a double-bill of Love is Colder Than Death and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and continues until December 15th.

There's much more in September and October at the Berkeley archive, of course. I've already talked about the Chinese classic films being brought this Fall in conjunction with the Yang Fudong exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum; these titles are on the PFA site so I'll move on. Curator Kathy Geritz's regular Alternative Visions program of experimental film and video resumes Wednesdays after a summer break on September 4th. In-person appearances by filmmakers Nancy Andrews, Lawrence Jordan, Kerry Laitala, James Sansing, Stacey Steers, John Gianvito, Phi Solomon, Abigail Child and Paul Chan, as well as screenings of work by Jodie Mack, Marielle Nitoslawska, Leos Carax (Holy Motors September 18) and more should make for a lively season of exploration.

And that's not all when it comes to in-person filmmaker guests. Six features apiece by little-known Morrocan filmmaker Moumen Smihi and by famous 1970s (and beyond)-era auteur William Friedkin help round out the September-October calendar with more chances to pick director brains than it's probably possible to squeeze into a two-month span. Finally, the horizons of creative programming continue to be pressed with what I wouldn't be surprised to learn is the PFA's first-ever series devoted to a supporting actor. Ten films featuring 1940s & 1950's Hollywood's generally-unheralded Wendell Corey is at the very least a great excuse to show films by Anthony Mann (The Furies September 7th), William Wellman (My Man & I September 13th), Robert Aldrich (The Big Knife September 15th), Budd Boetticher (The Killer Is Loose September 27th) and more, including an early Elvis Presley vehicle, Loving You from 1957 (October 5th).

HOW: A Slightly Pregnant Man screens via DCP. I haven't yet sampled the PFA's 4K digital projection capabilities, and thus remain skeptical of this technological shift. The good news from my pro-35mm perspective is that there's a smaller proportion of DCP on the September-October PFA calendar than there was on the June-July-August one.

Jacquot (1991)

WHO: Agnès Varda wrote and directed this, based on the childhood reminiscences of her husband Jacques Demy.

WHAT: The Pacific Film Archive's current Jacques Demy series is not just the most complete in Frisco Bay history because it's showing fourteen of the French director's films. It's also screening three films about Demy made by his wife, then widow Agnès Varda, all in 35mm. Two of these seem much like the kinds of documentaries often seen on high-end DVD releases, although The Young Girls Turn 25 is not found on the Miramax release of The Young Girls of Rochefort, and The World Of Jacques Demy can only be viewed awkwardly excerpted on DVDs for Lola, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Model Shop, etc. 

Jacquot is, by contrast, a re-enactment of Demy's childhood, a catalog of his inspirations, and the last "fiction" feature film made by Varda to this day, although she has made quite a few documentaries and shorts in the meantime. It was speaking to the camera in her superb 2008 autobiographical doc The Beaches of Agnès that she made her first public comment on the fact, known more as rumor beforehand, that her husband had died of AIDS complications. She and other friends held this secret in "affectionate silence, totally respectful of Jacques, who didn't talk about it." As other voices in the documentary relate, "back then, in 1989, AIDS was considered a shameful disease," and "it was taboo."  Jacquot was begun and completed as Demy was dying, and for the cast and crew making the film was a way of accompanying the director in his final months. According to Varda, the film finished shooting on October 17, 1990, just ten days before her husband's death.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, at 7:00.

WHY: Even if you're not planning to be a completist and attend everything in the PFA's Demy series (or, as I'm considering, at least everything unseen previously), there are many reasons to consider making tonight's screening one of your selections. First of all, Agnès Varda, the so-called "grandmother" of the French New Wave (though she was born just a few years before Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol & François Truffaut, and is in fact younger than Alain Resnais & Jacques Rivette) and one of the world's greatest living filmmakers. Of those I've seen, I can't think of a single film of hers that isn't about reflection and mortality, and though I haven't seen Jacquot, its circumstances of production seem right along that line. 

There's also Agnès Godard, who was one of three cinematographers on Jacquot (according to the PFA note, she shot "the longest segment" of the film). Anyone who enjoyed this Godard's appearance in Berkeley last month, and only wished for more examples of work from earlier in her career, this is your chance to get a look at a key work made the same year as her first of fifteen (thus far) credits as cinematographer for Claire Denis.

Finally, the general topic of French cinema. This might be the last good chance I get to mention it beforehand, so I thought I'd point out a refreshing program coming the Castro Theatre August 7th & 8th: a two-day booking of a 35mm double-bill of Jean-Pierre Melville's Un Flic starring Catherine Deneuve, and Claude Sautet's Max Et Les Ferrailleurs starring Michel Piccoli. Deneuve and Piccoli, of course, have both featured in films for Demy and for Varda, including The Young Girls of Rochefort and The Young Girls Turn 25.

HOW: 35mm print

Bay Of Angels (1963)

WHO: Jacques Demy wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Demy's second feature film, and his only one made with the great Jeanne Moreau as Jackie (playing opposite Claude Mann as Jean), was the first of his films I saw, back in 2002 when the Castro Theatre gave it a full week-long run. I recall really liking this gambling-obsession tale but being disappointed with the ending. But it seems high time to revisit the film. Here's an excerpt from Johnny Ray Huston's dual review of Bay of Angels and Demy's debut feature Lola, that helped convince me to go in the first place eleven years ago:

Never one to be associated with the term "fancy-free," the rumpled Moreau brings a nervous undercurrent to Jackie's impetuousness, a quality that Demy further emphasizes in the casino scenes' sound design: stretches of tense silence interrupted by the clatter of chips and the skitter of the ball across niches on a roulette wheel. These noises rarely sync up directly with an image; most often Demy focuses instead on the faces of the gamblers, who – however outlandish their attire – look grimly preoccupied rather than celebratory.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:00.

WHY: In the Spring of 2006 the PFA held a small Jacques Demy retrospective: five of his feature films plus one about him directed by his widow Agnès Varda. More than seven years later and the venue is presenting a far more complete survey of the French New Wave-era pioneer's work. This time there are ten features and four shorts by Demy, taken from all phases of his career, as well as three films by Varda (including two not included in her own 2009 retro at the venue.)

I've been slow to warm to Demy. Though I found a good deal to admire in Lola (which screened last night to open this series), Bay of Angels and Model Shop (Demy's sole experience working in Hollywood, which screens August 2nd), it wasn't until seeing his 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (screening tomorrow & August 31) that I realized the director was as capable of making a great masterpiece as anyone of his generation. I now have a renewed interest in seeing and re-seeing his films, and am glad the PFA offers chances to see well-known titles like Donkey Skin (Aug. 4) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (Aug. 8 & 30), as well as more rarely-seen features like A Room In Town (Aug. 17) and his swan song Three Seats For the 26th (Aug. 24). The shorts and Varda features should bring even more richness to a very appealing series.

Speaking of appealing PFA series, the venue has recently added to its website the five Chinese cinema classics being added to Yang Fudong's An Estranged Paradise to make up the August-October series Yang Fudong's Cinematic Influences, mounted in conjunction with a mid-career survey of Yang's work at the Berkeley Art Musuem. Whether or not you're already familiar with the Chinese artist and filmmaker (perhaps best known in cinephile circles for his his Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest cycle), and whether or not you even care to be, you should know that this series is going to be special. Imported 35mm prints of seminal Chinese classics like the fifth-generation landmark Yellow Earth and the early Shanghai talkie Street Angel don't come around often at all, and as for the canonized "greatest Chinese film of all time", Fei Mu's 1948 Spring in a Small Town is such a rare masterpiece, impossible to see in even a decent home video version, I can almost forgive that it's the one title in the series expected to show via DCP.

HOW: Bay of Angels screens via a 35mm print. Though technically not a double-bill, there is a discounted admission to Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire, screening in 35mm at 8:45 as part of the Simenon and Cinema series, for anyone who also buys a ticket to Bay of Angels.