SFFILM Day 14: Asako I & II

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival holds its final screenings today. Each day during the festival I've posted about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A scene from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's film Asako I & II, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Asako I & II (JAPAN/FRANCE: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2018)
playing: 3:00PM today at the Theater at the Victoria Theatre

Since seeing this last Wednesday I've been telling everyone who cares to listen that it's my favorite feature film of this year's festival. A common response is to ask what I thought of director Hamaguchi's prior Happy Hour, a 5-hour drama that played SFFILM (then still SFIFF) three years ago, and I have to sheepishly admit that I missed it at the festival and only got through the first hour or so of that one while trying to watch on a tablet at home (via the SFFILM app); though I was enjoying it I felt I was cheating to watch on such a small screen. So I was thrilled that not only was I able to fit a big-screen viewing of Asako I&II into my schedule, it delivered on everything I hope for in a new narrative movie: the distinct style of an "auteur" voice, a plot that kept surprising me at almost every turn (and the glaring exception of an inevitable development was handled in a way I could never have predicted), and satisfying explorations of contemporary quandaries, both specific (in this case to Japan) and universal.

I know I'm being coy about the plot and even the formal details of Asako I&II. Forgive me; it's the last day of the festival and I'm running out of steam a bit. I do want to say that, though the SFFILM blurb compares it to a certain cinephile touchstone film that I won't name here, I never once thought of that film (one of my favorite, most frequently viewed films) while watching Hamaguchi's two hours fly by. Instead what came to mind were 1930s delights like The Prisoner of Zenda or Thirty Day Princess. That gives a better picture of the kind of energy I saw on screen.

In an ideal world, I'd be able to see today's final screening of Asako I&II. Sadly I've got other commitments during its showtime. The film does have a distributor, Grasshopper Film, but it's a small enough outfit that I wouldn't count on a Frisco Bay theatrical release. So go today if you can!

SFFILM62 Day 14
Other festival options: I can also recommend The Hidden City, a completely non-verbal immersive documentary about tunnels and other spaces beneath the streets of Madrid; it plays 6:00PM at the Roxie. Also at the Roxie at 8:30PM is the latest from Our Nixon and NUTS! director Penny Lane, It's called Hail Satan? and apparently a lot of people like the idea of ending their festival with it, because it's at RUSH status meaning you'll need to wait in line for a ticket. If you don't want to wait, it'll be opening at the Roxie for a commercial run in just over a week.I mean, I guess that's a wait too, but you won't have to do it standing up the whole time.

Non-SFFILM option: Tonight the Castro Theatre hosts a Jackie Chan double-bill: new DCPs of the original Cantonese versions of Police Story and Police Story 2.

Terri Saul's 2018 Eyes

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2018. An index of participants can be found here. 

Nine-time IOHTE contributor Terri Saul is a Berkeley-based artist and writer.

Out of all the films I saw with other people in Bay Area cinemas in 2018, there were only two older films. The others were 2017 films from other countries that premiered in the US in 2018. As interesting as the festival screenings were, if I could only pick two films out of all the movies I saw, these two older films would be at the top of my year-end list.

As Above, So Below screen capture from UCLA DVD "L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema"

1. As Above, So Below (1973, dir. Larry Clark) screened at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley on Wed, 11/14/2018, at 7:00 p.m. preceded by short, Everybody Dies! (2016, dir. Frances Bodomo), followed by an art slideshow and conversation with Larry Clark, and Ra Malika Imhotep and Jamal Batts with The Black Aesthetic.

In the opening short, the grim reaper as a matriarch decides which children live and die as part of a surreal children’s television show. Everybody dies.

Also centered on the precarious, the feature, As Above, So Below, is a surreal and spiritual portrait of Black liberation and rebellion in a Chicago neighborhood, featuring a recovering Marine who finds compassion and community in a neighborhood coffee shop. Another safe haven, the neighborhood church, also provides dramatic cover for something else. Clark says he made the film in his community, by his community, for his community, and after surveying the audience, concluded it was not made for a large portion of the people attending the screening.

As a layer, the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) soundtrack drones on in the background, which at first seems to be included for dramatic emphasis, but is actually an archival tape of US government hysteria and plans for a forthcoming military occupation of Black neighborhoods.

Clark asked us to please try to approach the story through the lens of 1973 and not to project current situations on to it. It was difficult to follow his instructions, and not apply the early 70s setting to today.

Screen capture of Summer in Sanrizuka excerpt from Academy Video VHS of 100 Years Of Japanese Cinema

2. Summer in Sanrizuka (1968, dir. Shinsuke Ogawa) screened at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley on Thursday, 11/29/2018, at 7:00 p.m.

A chaotic documentary created by the filmmaking collective Ogawa Pro, follows radicalized student activists and poor farmers in Sanrizuka, fronted by lines of sturdy women linking arms, as they come together to resist eviction from their land to make way for the Narita International Airport which was built in Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo and resisted for a decade.

Cops and corporations attempt to criminalize people occupying their own land. Residents, in particular the elderly, find ways to shame them for doing so. Young and old come together to resist water cannons, land surveyors, and capitalists, using rocks, shit catapults, sticks, plastic helmets, hand-towels, and other defensive gear made out of materials available on a farm. The day-to-day gains and losses are recorded by a crew constantly tasked with compressing time during the unfolding of a standoff with an unknown trajectory or endpoint.

Partway through production, the cameraperson is arrested. What follows is a break with the shooting style of the previous section. For the rest of the doc, a portrait style emerges as we move closer in and spend moments in stillness, confronting and in some ways disarming the cops via a camera’s gaze.

This exchange of one set of eyes for another offers an additional layer of understanding, pulling the viewer inside the community in a way that only two eyes and one lens never could.

In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

WHO: Nagisa Oshima wrote and directed this.

WHAT: In the Realm of the Senses is almost certainly the most-viewed Oshima film internationally, which I feel can be attributed equally to two factors: its high quality (I'd call it one of the two or three best of the dozen or so Oshima films I've managed to view, and I don't get the sense I'm alone in appreciating it narratively and formally) and its notorious reputation. The latter stems, of course, from, attacks on the film by censors over the years; it been banned from screening under obscenity laws around the world, including in parts of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany.

In Japan, where it was filmed, it to this day remains censored (though not banned, certain images including public hair remain obscured from all sanctioned home video and theatrical releases there). Oshima knew his film would be so treated in his country when he made it forty years ago, and correspondingly sent his film to be developed in labs in France to avoid "making his pure film dirty", as he would later decry the blurring and blacking out techniques that treat his film like it's porn. When my friend Adam Hartzell wrote about Oshima and In the Realm of the Senses on this blog on the occasion of an Oshima retrospective seven years ago, he noted that an uncut version of the film finally screened in Japan in 2000, but I've since learned that even that supposedly "uncut" print, while uncensoring female genitalia, still kept male genitalia obscured.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM tonight only at the Roxie.

WHY: Today is the final day of the Roxie's Banned Movie Week, a brilliant idea for a series (that I hope becomes annual) inspired by Banned Books Week, which has been celebrated in libraries and schools during the final week in September since 1982. I highlight this screening on my blog today not only because In the Realm of the Senses is a terrific movie deserving of attention, but because it gives me an excuse to mention that after over ten years working for the San Francisco Public Library in various capacities, I've left that position and am now working for another local library system. My hours and responsibilities have increased somewhat, so I'm not certain I'll be able to keep up the rate of posting on this blog that I've been used to maintaining over the years (sometimes it's been a post per day or more, though there have been frequent periods where'd I'd post no more than once in a month; so far I've never gotten less frequent than that, but I can't guarantee that'll remain true). I still plan to be involved, on a strictly volunteer basis, in the ATA@SFPL group which, for over a year and a half now, has been organizing and hosting screenings of film prints from the SFPL 16mm collection. I wrote a bit about this group on this blog last year, and though I'm not certain what we'll be showing at our next expected screening in December, I'm sure we'll know pretty soon; our group's next event won't actually involve SFPL prints at all, but will be a short presentation at Other Cinema on Saturday November 19, in which we'll discuss the project and show a couple prints owned by local filmmakers whose work we became aware of during our archival explorations: Rick Goldsmith's Anatomy of a Mural and Christian Schiess's Luminauts.

In addition to Banned Movie Week, the Roxie is currently hosting the final few days of the SF Latino Film Festival, a couple digital screenings of anime classics, and the opening week-long runs of new releases like Danny Says and Spa Night to close out September. Highlights of October include a 35mm showing of Point Blank, two MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS showings including a new DCP of Stand By Me paired with a 35mm print of Creepshow and a double-bill of truly neglected sequels, the Walter Murch-directed Return To Oz and my favorite George Miller film Babe: Pig in the City. Both of those are also 35mm, as is the same day's locally-made indie Treasure Island. It's not yet determined whether Takashi Miike's (arguably) sickest film Ichi The Killer will screen as DCP or 35mm print on October 27th, the formats for what may be the month's most exciting series, a horror showcase featuring only films directed by women, have been announced. Expect 35mm prints of Katheryn Bigelow's vampire classic Near Dark and the late Antonia Bird's unbelievable Ravenous, and DCP showings of (I believe) natively-digital features The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears, The Babadook, and Lyle. Only Gloria Katz's Messiah of Evil and Karyn Kusama's Jennifer's Body will be shown on a format other than how they were filmed, and even the latter was, I understand, a hybrid 35mm & digital production.

HOW: In the Realm of the Senses screens as a 35mm print.

Godzilla (1954)

WHO: Eiji Tsuburaya was the mastermind behind the visual effects in this film.

WHAT: The biggest movie ever produced in Japan in 1954 (taking that crown from the just-released Seven Samurai, another film featuring actor Takeshi Shimura and produced at the Toho studio under production chief Iwao Mori), the original Godzilla was like no film made before it. It's also like no Godzilla film made since; for one it's the only film in the 28-entry series in which Godzilla is the lone monster star; all subsequent productions faced him off against another kaiju creation like Mothra or Rodan or King Ghidorah or all of the above at once. It's also the only Godzilla film to feature the beautiful black-and-white compositional creations of cinematographer Masao Tamai, who shot so many masterpieces for the great director Mikio Naruse in the 1950s. 

But the most lasting achievements of the film can be put at the feet of effects wizard Tsuburaya, the subject of one of the most attractive and informative books in my collection, by local author August Ragone. Here's an excerpt of what Ragone says about the first Godzilla movie:

Originally, Tsuburaya wanted to bring the nuclear nightmare to life using stop-motion effects, as King Kong had been made. When asked how long it would take to produce such effects, Tsuburaya told Mori it would take seven years to shoot all of the effects required by the screenplay, based on the current staff and infrastructure of at Toho. Of course this was out of the question--the film had to be in theatres by the end of the year. Tsuburaya decided that his department's considerable expertise in miniature building and visual effects photography could accommodate working with a live actor in a monster costume instead of using stop-motion techniques. 

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at Oakland's Paramount Theatre at 8:00.

WHY: I recently wrote about how my disappointment in Pacific Rim stoked a desire to see the original Japanese giant monster movie again, especially considering it's coming to the kaiju-sized Paramount screen for only five dollars. I won't repeat all of that again here, but I will stress that a full house at the theatre tonight would be a great signal that not only is Godzilla fandom alive and well here on Frisco Bay, but that there's considerable interest in seeing films from other countries enter the rotation of Paramount Movie Classics, which as long as I can remember have always been drawn from a rather narrow slate of Hollywood productions (the August 23rd showing of North By Northwest is at least the third showing of that film in that venue in the past ten years or so, for example.)

True diehards can make this a real kaiju weekend in Oakland, as the New Parkway is screening King Kong Vs. Godzilla Sunday August 11th, with an introduction by the aforementioned Japanese cinema expert Ragone.

Finally, it seems worth mentioning that the Pacific Film Archive's ongoing tribute to the Japanese animation world's most respected company, Studio Ghibli, includes a few films with giant monsters in them as well. The series has been popular enough that the venue has decided to add an extra screening of My Neighbor Totoro August 25th, I've never heard Totoro referred to as a kaiju, but he's got to be the only giant Japanese creature that might rival the Big G in international popularity.

HOW: Godzilla screens in its original Japanese-language version, via 35mm print from Rialto Pictures, and will be preceded by at least one cartoon, newsreel, and trailer, all also in 35mm.

Lesson Of The Evil (2012)

WHO: Takashi Miike wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Another one I haven't been able to to see yet. A number of observers have called Lesson of the Evil  a "return to form" for Miike, and/or compared and contrasted it against other items in his filmography such as Audition and 13 Assassins. Rob Hunter invokes a perhaps even more unlikely comparison point, Miike's first and best-known musical:

While a tonal 180 it’s easily his best film since 2001′s Happiness of the Katakuris and serves to remind us that the guy knows how to make visually impressive and affecting cinema. There’s a sharp and fluidly arresting style throughout accompanied by a blackly comic sense of humor, but when the final bloodletting begins we’re slammed into a wall of non-stop brutality.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at 7:00 at New People, as part of the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco.

WHY: With less than a week left in the inaugural JFFSF, there are still second and third chances to see most of the selections in the program, such as Wolf Children and Rurouni Kenshin, or those you may have missed at other festivals held earlier this year, like Rent-A-Family Inc. or Himizu. 

But Lesson Of The Evil is the title in the festival with the biggest director-name recognition. Miike is prolific enough that many fans have given up hope of seeing every feature and television work he's released (close to a hundred in less than a quarter-century!) but unless they've given up on him completely they should be eager to investigate a work that has been singled out as exceptional.

Especially when it's playing in a space like New People, criminally under-used since the end of its stint as a year-round venue for the San Francisco Film Society nearly a year ago. Chances to see any movie in this comfortable and modern single-screen cinema aren't that frequent- the JFFSF ends a nearly two-month dry spell at the space, although there won't be as long of one after the festival ends August 4th, as a Turkish Film Festival utilizes the space on the 13th through 15th of the month.

HOW: Digital projection.

Pacific Rim (2013)

WHO: Guillermo Del Toro co-wrote and directed this.

WHAT: I've seen a few more stereotypical "summer movies" this year than I usually do. Perhaps it's because, with the (temporary) closure of the Embarcadero and the (sadly permanent) closure of the Bridge and the Lumiere, there are fewer arthouse options calling me to the cinema this summer than in prior years. So far my favorite of the gargantuan-budgeted studio releases, my favorite has been the widely reviled The Lone Ranger, which I hope to make time to write about before it disappears from local screens- but that day is not today. So instead, Pacific Rim. I can't say I liked it very much, other than a few touches revolving around the fairly well-handled Mako Mori character.

If you want to read a generally favorable take on Pacific Rim that is nonetheless rational about some of its shortcomings, there's probably no-one better than Vern to provide it for you. But my friend Dennis Cozzalio (from whom I have brazenly borrowed he above still, hoping he doesn't mind) sums up my impression quite nicely:

Del Toro's monster mash makes a hell of a racket, but it goes nowhere, and not particularly fast at that. The sinking feeling I got from watching the trailers, which was dissipated somewhat by some of the decent reviews, came back very quickly as I waited for the endless battle sequences to amount to something-- anything-- but the conclusion of Pacific Rim ends up as routine as everything that came before it, and just as exhausting as well.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at the Balboa through Thursday, and at many other theatres throughout the area through Thursday and beyond, although its screen count will drop Friday to make way for the next would-be blockbusters.

WHY: Why feature a movie I didn't particularly care for on a day when there are interesting films (albeit unseen by me) playing at (for example) the Stanford or the Roxie?

Because it seems like a perfect opportunity to remind readers of an upcoming screening of the film that more than any other Pacific Rim owes its existence to. Of course I speak of Ishiro Honda's 1954 Godzilla, which has its own remake on the way, but more importantly screens at the the most palatial movie venue on Frisco Bay in just over two weeks.

The Paramount Theatre in Oakland was designed by Timothy Pflueger's firm and erected in 1931, making his company's Castro Theatre design from ten years prior seem like a mere warm-up. It's quite a bit larger and more elaborate, not to mention better preserved than the Castro (where the ceiling paint is noticeably peeling, as a friend pointed out to me as we sat in the balcony this past weekend). But it's not an ideal venue for movies in which making out lots of dialogue is, er, paramount to appreciation of the film (I still have bad memories of a showing of His Girl Friday there), as, last I checked, the audio track can be muddy with certain prints. Thus it's used more frequently as a concert venue (its sound problems don't seem to extend to live performances for some reason), and is ideal for silent film screenings with live accompaniment, as anyone who attended Napoléon there last year will attest.

I've never known the Paramount to screen a foreign-dialogue film with English subtitles before, however. Godzilla will screen, I understand, in its original Japanese-language version, with subtitles translated and prepared by Michie Yamakawa and Bruce Goldstein in 2004. This might work. This might be awesome. With the energy of a big enough audience there, it WILL be awesome.

Akira Ifukube's score and Godzilla's signature vocalizations should come through fine, and if the dialogue doesn't it won't be much of a problem for English-language readers. As usual at the Paramount there will be a cartoon, newsreel, and live organ performance beforehand. Best of all, the show will only cost five dollars a ticket. At those prices, your budget may be able to also afford the cocktails available to be enjoyed in style in the glorious Grand Lobby or one of the ornately Art Deco lounges,

So if your friends ask you to go along with them to see Pacific Rim, consider taking them up on it. Maybe you'll like it better than Dennis or I did. But whether you do or not, make sure to tell them to come along with you to Godzilla at the Paramount August 9th so you all can see what a time-tested kaiju eiga (monster movie) can look like on a REALLY. BIG. SCREEN. Wouldn't it be great if 1700 people filled every seat in the house for a showing of a 1954 Japanese movie?

HOW: 35mm print at the Balboa, and digitally in 2D, 3D, and (at least through Thursday) 3D IMAX (at the Metreon) and "LieMax" (at other venues using the IMAX brand) elsewhere. It was shot in digital 2D, so 3D versions are post-converted.

Tokyo Chorus (1931)

 

WHO: Yasujiro Ozu directed this.

WHAT: Made the year that Japan's first talking picture was unveiled, this is the ninth of the fully- or partially-extant films Ozu made in his first four years as a director for the Shochiku studio. He actually directed more than double that number during the period, but so much of Japan's silent film heritage is lost that we can only guess from production artifacts and contemporary accounts what, for instance, Ozu's first film as director Sword of Penitence, or his first (according to David Desser) shomin-geki or "common people's drama" film The Life of an Office Worker might be like. 

At any rate, Tokyo Chorus is almost certainly the best-known of these nine early survivors, thanks in large part to Criterion, which selected it along with slightly later films I Was Born, But... and Passing Fancy to include in its Silent Ozu DVD box set. It was a wise choice of film to include in this set (which is overdue for a sequel I might add) because its particular combination of comedy  and social commentary make it probably the ideal option of these early nine (which includes other truly great films like That Night's Wife and I Flunked, But...) to use as an introduction to Ozu, or just to this stage of his career, for a newcomer to his work.

However, it's also true that the more Ozu films you've seen, and the more frequently you've seen them, the more you are likely to get out a viewing of any of his films, Tokyo Chorus included. Veteran Ozu-philes can recognize this film as particularly rich with actors who recur in other Ozu films. Here's a rundown of the cast:

Tokihiko Okada plays the salaryman father at the center of the story. One of Shochiku's most popular stars, he had leading roles in four other Ozu films: That Night's Wife, Young Miss (now lost), The Lady and the Beard, and Beauty's Sorrow (also lost). Of his non-Ozu roles his turn in Kenji Mizoguchi's 1933 The Water Magician is probably his most famous. He died from tuberculosis at age 30 shortly after completing that film.

Emiko Yagumo plays the wife in the family and was in two other Ozu films; she played the titular character in That Night's Wife, opposite Okada, and had a juicy role as a jealous mistress to Takeshi Sakamoto in A Story of Floating Weeds.

Hideo Sugawara plays the son of the above pair, and is pictured at the top of this post. This and I Was Born, But..., where he plays the older brother and instigator of a short-lived but memorable hunger strike, seem to be his largest roles for Ozu, although he also makes a brief appearance in Passing Fancy and was also in at least two films by Ozu's fellow Shochiku director Mikio Naruse: a substantial role in Flunky, Work Hard and a walk-on in Every Night Dreams. Somewhere in my files I have a still of him grown to gangly teenagehood in a 1936 film called The Pick-Pockets' House. His filmography and biography trail off into the unknown after 1940.

Hideko Takamine plays the daughter, also pictured at the top of this post. One of the biggest child stars, teen stars, and ultimately movie stars in Japan until her screen retirement in the 1970s, Takamine worked with many great directors over the years, but was particularly associated with Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita. I wrote about one of her signature roles for the latter director, Carmen Comes Home, for Senses of Cinema earlier this year. Takamine only worked with Ozu one more time in her career, however, alongside Kinuyo Tanaka in Ozu's uncharacteristic 1950 film The Munekata Sisters.

Tatsuo Saito plays Okada's mustachioed teacher in Tokyo Chorus. It was his 16th(!) role in an Ozu film, and there would be seven to follow, including, perhaps most memorably, the (clean-shaven) put-upon father of Hideo Sugawara and Tokkan Kozo in I Was Born, But.... Though associated strongly with Ozu, especially in his early silent period, Saito had a long career playing memorable roles for many directors such as Naruse, Kinoshita, Hiroshi Shimizu, and even Jack Cardiff and Richard Brooks.

Choko Iida, who plays the teacher's wife, is another very familiar Ozu face. She's in more than a dozen Ozu films (as well as some Naruses and Kurosawas), often playing a landlady or washerwoman. Her signature roles are probably as the mother in Ozu's first talkie The Only Son, and as the lead in his first post-World War II film The Record of a Tenement Gentleman. In real life Iida was married to Ozu's cinematographer Hideo Mohara.

Reiko Tani plays the president of the company Tokihiko Okada's character works for. He can also be seen in Ozu's Dragnet Girl, Passing Fancy (as a barber) and A Story of the Floating Weeds, among others.

Takashi Sakamoto, finally, has a small role in Tokyo Chorus as an elderly employee at the same company. His old age make-up should not obscure a familiar face from no fewer than twenty-six Ozu films. He's best known for three films in which he plays a rather similar, happy-go-lucky, lead character (but in different enough circumstances that you know they're not really the same person) named Kihachi: these are Passing Fancy, A Story of the Floating Weeds, and An Inn at Tokyo.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today only at 4:30 at the Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

WHY: This is the third Japanese feature, and the second by Yasujito Ozu, to screen at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival over its 18-year history. But though the total number is small, the frequency is increasing, thankfully. It was only two years ago that the festival screened Ozu's I Was Born But... in a comparable time slot to this afternoon's. Wait, has it been two years already? Time flies. As you know if you attended Prix de Beauté last night, every festival-goer is given a 108-page program book jam-packed with content about the films, some of their lesser-known stars, the musicians who accompany festival programs, and more. In the past I've contributed essays to these guides when they were smaller and printed on matte rather than glossy paper. My last contributed essay to this publication was for I Was Born, But..., and though I'm glad it's archived on the festival site, I'm just as glad to see that the PFA Library's Jason Sanders contributed the lovely and informative essay on Tokyo Story to this year's guide. For now you'll have to attend the festival to get a copy to read for yourself, but I assure you that Sanders' research is impeccable and his prose style matches the elegance of Ozu far better than mine does. And that's just one of the two dozen or so articles in this handsome souvenir keepsake book. If that doesn't make you want to spring for at least one SFSFF ticket this year I don't know what will.

HOW: Thanks to Carl Martin of the Film On Film Foundation, I now know that not only is Tokyo Chorus screening in 35mm, it's screening from a Janus print "struck in 2003 by Shochiko for Ozu's centennial." Martin has similarly -and more- useful data on every feature film (as in non-DCP) presentation at the festival this year, in case you're one to be interested in the historical provenance of restorations and prints. 

Pianist Günter Buchwald will make his SFSFF debut at this screening. I'm curious to hear how he sounds; accompanying Ozu is not the easiest silent film-music task.

Kuroneko (1968)

WHO: Kaneto Shindo, who died in May 2012 at the age of 100, wrote and directed this.

WHAT: I once tweeted that this film is a missing link between Kenji Mizoguchi's classic samurai-era-set ghost story Ugetsu from 1953, and Nobuhiko Obayashi's feline-themed haunted house phantasmagoria Hausu from 1977. It's the kind of statement that probably deserves more qualification than 140 characters of text can provide. In truth there's a rich tradition of ghost stories in Japanese cinema, and these three films happen to be three of the perhaps four or five best-known examples of this tradition internationally (as evidenced- and perpetuated- by their appearance on DVDs by both Criterion in the US and Masters of Cinema in the UK). I'm not well-exposed enough to Japan's kaidan-eiga history to really say whether Ugetsu directly influenced Kuroneko or whether it in turn influenced Hausu, or whether instead any similarities between the films can be better explained within a broader cultural context of Japanese stories involving spirits and transformations. Although it feels worth pointing out that Shindo apprenticed under Mizoguchi before becoming a director himself, and that Hausu and Kuroneko were made at the same studio, Toho. If Obayashi and Shindo were not intentionally referencing or reacting to the prior films in this make-shift "trilogy" they were at least aware of them. Consequently, if you're a fan of Ugetsu or Hausu or, especially, both, you'll definitely want to see Kuroneko as well. The lighting effects alone distinguish it from the average chiller.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:30 PM

WHY: I hope it's not giving too much of the story away to say that Kuroneko involves shape-shifting between human and animal forms, a theme that recurs in a number of other Japanese films screening at the PFA and other venues in the coming months. No, I'm not speaking of Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog, which screens there next Saturday; that film only compares city dwellers to canines and doesn't imagine them as avatars of one another. But the titles in the Studio Ghibli season of anime includes quite a few animals who take human form, or vice versa; for instance tomorrow's raccoon-dog saga Pom Poko, next Sunday's story of a pilot under a spell to make him look like a pig, Porco Rosso, or next month's Howl's Moving Castle, a film filled with transformations, including the title character's avian tendencies.

Did you know that the director of Howl's Moving Castle was at one point not expected to be the revered Hayao Miyazaki at all, but a younger animation director named Mamoru Hosoda, best known for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time? Hosoda's newest film Wolf Children is another film with a shape-shifter theme, and it gets its San Francisco premiere July 28th and August 4th at the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco at New People Cinema. I'm not sure if any of the other films on this brand-new festival's program (which also includes Himizu by Sion Sono and Lesson of the Evil by Takeshi Miike) involves shape-shifting.

And though it doesn't seem into include any shape-shifting-themed films, and in fact falls outside my usual purview here at Hell On Frisco Bay, I might as well mention that the Sacramento Japanese Film Festival occurs from July 12-14 at that city's Crest Theatre. When your festival opens with the latest film by Masahiro Kobayashi, Haru's Journey starring Tatsuya Nakadai, and includes a retrospective screening of Mikio Naruse's masterful silent Every Night Dreams, you get my attention. I'm thinking about a little road trip...

HOW: Kuroneko screens in a 35mm print.

Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

WHO: Hayao Miyazaki directed this.

WHAT: One of the best of the feature film animated at Studio Ghibli (the company name makes a cameo on the side of the bus in the above scene), and the biggest box-office success of all Japanese films released in 1989. Its tale of a young (benevolent) witch in training is one of the most affecting girl-empowerment fables committed to the screen.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Pacific Film Archive at 4:00 PM.

WHY: Starting with last week's screening of Castle In the Sky, the PFA's  Studio Ghibli series brings 35mm prints of the majority of Miyazaki and his cohort's beloved films to Berkeley every Sunday this summer. Most of the screenings will employ Japanese versions of these films, with English subtitles. These versions are widely considered superior by fans, as there's no doubt some of the versions prepared for American release employ distracting dub jobs involving Hollywood celebrities. For me, Princess Mononke is the worst offender of these, and I'm glad the PFA is planning to show the subtitled version instead on July 28; when the film screened at the Bridge last fall the version with Billy Bob Thornton giving his unmistakeable twang to the character Jigo was unfortunately was the one screened.

The four exceptions to the PFA's plan of showing these films with their original soundtracks are Howl's Moving Castle and (in my opinion the least-distracting of the Americanized Ghibli dubs) My Neighbor Totoro, both showing in August, next week's Ponyo (which I don't believe has ever screened on Frisco Bay in an English-subtitled 35mm print), and Kiki's Delivery Service today. This is not one of the best or the worst of the English-dubbed Ghibli versions out there; it may take a while to get used to hearing Phil Hartman voicing Kiki's cat Jiji, but for the most part he does a good job keeping his performance restrained. This familiar may have a familiar voice, but it ought not bring to mind any particular Hartman character from Saturday Night Live or the Simpsons or the rest of his career. There are some changed musical cues on the Americanized soundtrack.

Even these compromised versions are worth seeing on the big screen however. In fact, I think each of them should be seen at least once by any Ghibli fan not fluent in Japanese. When spending portions of time during a film looking at subtitles, even a fast reader can miss some of the detail and even the kineticism of the beautifully animated images, and for me it's usually a very acceptable trade-off to have an "impure" soundtrack experience if I can watch the whole frame for the whole movie. For me, this rule applies to high-quality animation far more than to live-action films, where I really long to hear the voices of the actor I'm seeing on screen. But those who extend their dislike of "dubbing" in cinema to Japanese animation might keep in mind that virtually all animation released in that country is in fact "dubbed"- in Japanese. I've written a bit about this here and here and don't want to repeat myself, but it seems relevant to this discussion.

HOW: 35mm print of the English-dubbed version of Kiki's Delivery Service.

Revenge of the Pearl Queen (1956)

WHO:  Michiko Maeda stars in this.

WHAT: I haven't seen this before, but it was based on the same true story that inspired Josef Von Sternberg to make what would be his final film, The Saga of Anatahan, in 1953. Revenge of the Pearl Queen was also apparently the first Japanese film to feature female nudity (Maeda's). As Mark Schilling wrote about her in a somewhat longer piece on the film:

Though no actress, Maeda had an upright, ladylike bearing, even when she was fleeing bare-breasted from would-be rapists, that justified the “queen” appellation. And, of course, au naturel, she was a natural.

WHERE/WHEN: 3:30 PM today only at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts

WHY: Sadly, I haven't yet been able to attend any of the YBCA's Girls! Guns! Ghosts! The Sensational Films of Shintoho series devoted to the so-called AIP of Japan, the Shintoho studio where great films by directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse were produced in the early 1950s, but which in the latter half of that decade became known for less "respectable" fare by genre filmmakers like Nobuo Nakagawa and Teruo Ishii. Revenge of the Pearl Queen is the final film in the YBCA series before the venue turns its attention to newer films: Post Tenebras Lux by Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas, its second annual New Filipino Cinema festival, and Austrian Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy. which takes the venue through the end of June.

If your itch to see Shintoho films on the big screen has not been fully scratched by this series, there is another chance to see a great film made at the studio: my personal favorite of all of Akira Kurosawa's films, the police thriller Stray Dog, screens at the Pacific Film Archive July 13th.

HOW: Digital presentation, the second half of a double bill with Ishii's Yellow Line.

Last Life In The Universe (2003)

WHO: Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang directed this.

WHAT: An often dreamlike tale of a shy, fastidious library assistant named Kenji (played by Tadanobu Asano) who has fled Japan for Bangkok in order to escape his yakuza family ties. A random accident leads to an encounter with a slovenly extrovert named Noi leads to an "opposites attract" romance between the pair. But there are bound to be complications...

Last Life In The Universe is probably Pen-ek's most widely admired film, and it forms a pivot point in his career. After making three plot-heavy, purely Thai films that proved his versatility in directing individual scenes with aplomb, he had never really put together a film that was completely structurally satisfying. With his fourth film, the director accepted international financing and both a foreign star (Asano) and cinematographer (Christopher Doyle, best known for his collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai). Though all these complications threw off his confidence during filming, the finished product found him a natural at maintaining a more languid pace and visually depicting his characters' interior emotions. Since this, he's made four more films that represent varied attempts at elaborating on this stylistic success.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts tonight only at 7:30 PM.

WHY: I was pleasantly surprised that YBCA curator Joel Shepard, while interviewing Pen-ek from the stage following last Thursday's opening to the six-film retrospective of his work, mentioned my name and the name of this blog while quoting the passage I borrowed for my recent post on Headshot. Thanks Joel, not just for the plug but for putting together a series like this that allows us to fill in gaps from this undervalued director's career, and revisit old favorites like Last Life in the Universe. After hearing Pen-ek talk about his films both publicly and in an interview I was able to conduct before he flew out of town, I'm more eager than ever to see my own personal favorite films on the big screen once again. I'm still in the midst of transcribing the interview but I'll keep readers posted when it's ready to be unveiled. In the meantime, enjoy the four remaining films in this series; Joel mentioned that the retrospective required the importing of 35mm prints from Europe as his work is no longer distributed in that form in the United States (and some of it, like this coming Sunday's Ploy, probably my second-favorite of his films, was never distributed in this country to begin with.)

Since this particular film is a Japanese co-production, it seems a worthwhile moment to mention that the next YBCA screening series will be an eight-title selection of genre films made at the Shintoho studio between 1956 and 1960. It kicks off May 9th with Ghost Story of Yostuya, directed by supernatural specialist Nobuo Nakagawa the year before he made his most famous film, Jigoku (a.k.a. Hell). None of these will be shown on film, I'm told, because there simply are no projectable and/or English-subtitled prints available anywhere in the world.

HOW: Last Life in the Universe screens from a 35mm print.

Double Suicide (1969)

WHO: A film by Masahiro Shinoda

WHAT: The best Japanese film of 1969 according to the annual survey of that country's top film magazine Kinema Jumpo. Directed by one of the last living legends of Japanese cinema, with music by one of my favorite composers of all time (for film or otherwise), Toru Takemitsu. The only reason I haven't seen this already is because I've been waiting to see it in a cinema since foolishly missing such a chance at the San Francisco International Film Festival nearly twelve years ago. Yes I can be a patient man sometimes.

WHERE/WHEN: Double Suicide screens at 7:00 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, tonight only.

WHY: I've been writing about Japanese film a fair amount lately. And why not, when there are screening series energizing my passion for it this month? At any moment a drought may come. And in fact, although I'm excited about the recently-announced line-up for the CAAM Fest (formerly known as the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival- and I'm so glad I'll never have to type out that mouthful again) which runs March 14-24 at the PFA and other Frisco Bay venues, I notice there are fewer Japanese films than usual at this year's edition of the festival: just one new film screening, Sion Sono's Fukishima-themed drama The Land Of Hope, and a gallery presentation of Astro Boy television episodes. I'll have more to say on the CAAM Fest line-up soon.

HOW: 35mm print from Janus.

Gewaltopia Trailer (1968)

WHO: Motoharu Jonouchi is the credited director.

WHAT: This is a collage film that adroitly splices together (often using overlap techniques, presumably via an optical printer) footage from black-and-white movies -- I recognized Lon Chaney from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Paul Wegener from The Golem, and various Willis O'Brien creations from The Lost World and other films -- with images shot by the filmmaker himself, and apparently used in films he'd previously completed. We see an extreme close-up of a tattooed eyelid opening and shutting, chaotic handheld footage of a group of children laughing and playing, and a varied collage of student protest imagery, some of it shot through a fish-eye lens. Clearly this is a work about seeing, or perhaps re-seeing, if the footage (and not just the 1920s-era clips) is truly all recycled from existing works. Yet entitling the film a "trailer," which from the way I read this description might better be re-translated as a "coming attraction" makes the 1968 film seem like a prophecy of a future in which no new images are made and we spend our lives watching images from the past. Or is that already the present and not the future for some of us? At any rate I feel justified in linking this film to Peter Tscherkassky's 2010 film Coming Atrractions.

WHERE/WHEN: This short film screens as part of a 7:30 program of works (mostly) by Jonouchi at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

WHY: Valentine's Day is bringing a little heartbreak to a lot of local fans of avant-garde Japanese film. Tonight there are two conflicting rare screenings of such work happening on opposite sides of the Bay. Shuji Terayama's Pastoral: Hide and Seek screens tonight at the the Pacific Film Archive as part of the Art Theatre Guild series I wrote about last week and that Dennis Harvey published a piece about yesterday.   But as rare as that film is, it can't be less likely to make a repeat appearance at a local theatre or on DVD than the Jonouchi films showing tonight, can it? Similarly, this Saturday's YBCA screening of work by the great structuralist filmmaker, Takahiko Iimura, by Nobuhiko Obayashi (who later brought his experimental sensibility to the horror film Hausu) and by Yoichi Takebayashi features work far more difficult to see than Nagisa Oshima's The Ceremony, which plays the PFA that night. 

I'm glad the  final two YBCA screenings and the other remaining PFA shows in this series don't conflict, but it's a shame nobody can see everything in both series, as the resonances between programs are pretty clear. Terayama films screen at both venues, so though I plan to miss Pastoral: Hide and Seek I'll at least be able to catch his notorious Emperor Tomato Ketchup next Thursday at YBCA. After seeing the amazing Ecstasy of the Angels at the PFA last Friday I'm fascinated to see anything its director Koji Wakamatsu was involved in making, especially collectively (you understand if you were at the screening). And according to the book Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against The Sky, Wakamatsu was, along with Jonouchi, Kanbara Hirano, and Ecstasy of Angels screenwriter Masao Adachi, the founders of the Nichidai Group of artist/filmmakers that is collectively credited for one of tonight's YBCA films, PuPu from 1960.

HOW: Some of tonight's shorts will be shown on 16mm prints, and others via digital copies. I don't know which will be which.

Silence Has No Wings (1966)

WHO: Directed by Kazuo Kuroki.

WHAT: In the mid-1960s, the studio system in Japan was facing serious structural problems and began exploring new strategies to holding the attention of audiences. When Toho Studio distributed Hiroshi Teshigahara's independently-produced Woman in the Dunes it became a hit in Japan and abroad. Toho asked the film's producer Yasuo Matsukawa to provide a follow-up for them to distribute. Matsukawa enlisted Kuroki, a director of documentaries who had always been interested in breaking into features, to make the film, which ended up being Silence Has No Wings. With all the publicity already set for its distribution through  the studio, once Toho executives viewed the completed film they cancelled its intended release, calling it a "lunatic film". It was instead distributed by the Art Theatre Guild, a company that specialized in releasing films by European auteurs to Japanese cinemas, a much more natural home for a film by a director profoundly influenced by Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. A year and a half later, the ATG released the first in a string of dozens of films produced under its own auspices: Shohei Imamura's remarkable A Man Vanishes.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:00 PM tonight at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Silence Has No Wings opens a spectacular series at the Pacific Film Archive, Chronicles of Inferno: Japan's Art Theater Guild. It's three weeks of rarely-shown works made by filmmakers associated with the ATG, all of them legendary in the history of the Japanese New Wave. Although this weekend's in-person appearance by another documentarian-turned feature filmmaker Susumu Hani unfortunately has been cancelled, his ATG-distributed She And He will still screen Saturday night, while two of his early classroom-set shorts and his best-known film, The Inferno of First Love (produced by the ATG) screen in his absence Sunday. 

Hani's sudden cancellation is disappointing because chances to meet key figures of 1960s Japanese filmmaking are all-too-rare here in the Bay Area. Takahiko Iimura is the only director from that era that I can recall making a public appearance here in the past 10 years or so that I've been faithfully paying attention to such matters. (Two of Iimura's films are part of a complimentary/competing series of films even more underground than the Art Theatre Guild, happening at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, incidentally.) And opportunities for this to occur are disappearing rapidly. Ten years ago, eight of the nine directors with films in this PFA series were still alive (all but Shuji Terayama, who made Pastoral: Hide And Seek but died in 1983 after making his, and the ATG's, final film, Farewell to the Ark.) With the mid-2000s passings of Imamura, Kuroki, and Kihachi Okamoto (Human Bullet), and more recently of Koji Wakamatsu (Ecstasy of the Angels), who died last October, and of Nagisa Oshima (The Ceremony) who died less than a month ago, there are only three filmmakers in this series still among us: Hani, Masahiro Shinoda (Double Suicide) and Toshio Matsumoto (Shura).

HOW: 16mm print. The entire series screens on either 35mm or 16mm.

The Two Eyes Of Frako Loden

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 Frako Loden, college instructor in ethnic and film studies and contributing editor to Documentary magazine.

Life is Short: Nikkatsu Studios at 100, Pacific Film Archive
This retrospective vies with French Film Classics (also at PFA, below) as the best and most extensive repertory series I attended in 2012. Both showed me films I’ve waited years to experience. Kawashima Yuzo’s 1956 Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District was a gratifyingly unpredictable melodrama on the miseries of post-World War II Japan. Makino Masahiro’s 1939 Singing Lovebirds was an astonishing, delightful integrated musical featuring samurai-film stalwart Kataoka Chiezo as a young ronin pursued by several girls. I got roped into sitting up in the projection booth providing real-time subtitle advancing for Suzuki Seijun’s outrageous 1964 Gate of Flesh, which gave me an intense appreciation for the exact time that an English title should appear in a shot. And now I’m completely in love with that film because of what we’ve been through together.

French Cinema Classics 1928-1960, PFA
I’ve long dreaded seeing Georges Franju’s 1949 Blood of the Beasts, but I’m glad this series forced me to. It’s a lyrical meditation on animal slaughter—something that seems cruelly impossible. I was viscerally unprepared for the horror and beauty of watching a white horse fall dead to its knees. It was also my chance to experience for the first time two unforgettable films: Jacques Becker’s 1952 Casque d’or, named for Simone Signoret’s golden gangster moll’s helmet hairdo; and Max Ophuls' 1955 Lola Montes, which left me speechless. It was during this series that I experienced a rare mixup on PFA’s part: they showed Marcel Carné’s 1946 Les portes de la nuit instead of the advertised 1938 Port of Shadows. I couldn’t be happier trading Jean Gabin for Yves Montand.

Always for Pleasure: The Films of Les Blank, Pacific Film Archive
In addition to serving the opening-night audience a pre-film helping of beans and rice—a Blank special effect since back when he wafted the smell of garlic through the UC Theatre lobby during his 1980s films—this series gave the much older me a chance to revisit most of Les Blank’s work. Not only do the films all hold up, but I like them even more for their freeform curiosity and willingness to let the subject control the rhythms of a scene.

At Jetty’s End: A Tribute to Chris Marker, 1921-2012, PFA
I finally got to see Marker’s 1977 essay film on revolutionary movements around the world, A Grin Without a Cat, and see how Fidel Castro really did like to readjust the mikes during his speeches.

A Century Ago: The Films of 1912, Rafael Film Center
This year’s films in this annual series, shown on a hand-cranked 1909 projector, emphasized the growing scope, speed and length of the movies. My favorite was a fake newsreel called Titanic, which instead of showing the actual passenger ship that hit the iceberg that year, displayed its more successful sister liner Olympic with her name sloppily rubbed out in every frame. A subplot featuring Teddy Roosevelt takes over, but the final shot (predating Life of Pi by a hundred years) urges us to shout three cheers for “a tiger!”

In a separate program at the Rafael, the 1914 Salomy Jane, shot in Marin County on a huge budget for its time, promised great success for the San Rafael-based California Motion Picture Corporation with a performance by long-forgotten Latina actress Beatriz Michelena, who later ran her own production company. Sadly, the works of both companies were destroyed by the explosion and fire caused by a boy’s tossed firecracker in 1931. Luckily, a print of Salomy Jane was found in Australia in 1996 and is her only surviving film.

Pretty much everything shown every year at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is terrific, but this year’s screening of William Wellman’s 1927 dogfight blockbuster (and first Oscar Best Picture recipient) Wings with Foley sound effects led by Ben Burtt was probably the most thrilling film event for me next to the festival’s historic presentation of Napoleon (magnificent and undeniably the repertory film event of the year, but I’ll let others rhapsodize about it). Brigitte Helm in Hanns Schwarz’s 1929 The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna took me by surprise. I didn’t think she could top her performance in Metropolis, but here her sophistication and subtle pathos overwhelmed me.

Castle In The Sky (1986)

WHO: Hayao Miyazaki, the greatest animator in Japan (and many argue, the world).

WHAT: In my unstudied opinion this was Miyazaki's first film in which he had all the resources (financial, autonomous, and creative) available to make a truly mature and cinematic animated film. When I say mature I don't mean 'for adults' of course; kids in every age group, from grammar school to retirement are able to connect with Castle in the Sky. But compared to Castle of Cagliostro, where he doesn't seem 110% interested in somebody else's material, and to Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which is a tremendous achievement and undoubtedly his (as it was based on a manga he created), but occasionally feels constrained by the animation medium, here he feels absolutely comfortable and in control with every sequence. Want more? I tweeted and podcasted (with Studio Ghibli-philes Adam Hartzell and Seiko Takada) after seeing it last fall.

WHERE/WHEN: At the Camera 3 in San Jose, only at 6:30 PM today and 8:50 PM tomorrow.

WHY: When there are prints of Studio Ghibli films in your town, you go. If you live in the South Bay you have no excuse not to attend this film and as much of the rest of this Miyazaki series as you can. Other titles with remaining screenings include Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away. Yes these are the English-dubbed versions but don't let that hold you back from a visual experience you won't regret.

HOW: 35mm print.