Tom Luddy's Long Happy Life

Image from Nocturama provided by SFFILM

My first week or so at the San Francisco International Film Festival was pretty successful. I saw many solid movies, only one real dud (sorry, Golden Exits, it's you not me) and one absolutely gripping feature, Nocturama, that is really sticking with me and making me eagerly anticipate a chance to see it again (it's supposed to be commercially released theatrically in July, although I'm not sure if that's just in New York or not; no San Francisco dates have been announced yet.) I also really enjoyed the Who Cares, Who Sees: Experimental Shorts program although I feel a bit bad that I skipped out on the last short in the set (Jesse McLean's See a Dog, Hear a Dog) in order to race from the Roxie to the Castro for the transcendent Parallel Spaces: Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Bitchin Bajas With Jerome Hiler program, which I hope to write more about soon as well. Here's hoping that the Crossroads festival coming to SFMOMA May 19-21 includes it in its program when it's announced tomorrow. (In fact, I'd be happy to rewatch any of that program's films, especially Brigid McCaffrey's brilliantly-colored, hand-processed Bad mama, who cares or Christoph Gir​ardet & Matthias Müller's haunting personne in a future festival like Crossroads). None of the above-mentioned films has another SFFILM playdate; of the titles I saw that do, I was most impressed with the Catalan amnesia drama The Next Skin.

One highlight of the weekend was the Sunday afternoon presentation of the Mel Novikoff Award, named for the former owner and/or operator of many historic Frisco cinemas (including the Castro), to former Pacific Film Archive director, Telluride Film Festival co-founder and co-director, and storied producer of films of all sorts, Tom Luddy. One of the great highlights of my blogging "career" was when Luddy responded by e-mail to my obituary of his friend and collaborator Chris Marker, and then allowed me to publish some of his recollections of working with Marker. Although I've never had the gumption to introduce myself to Luddy on the many occasions I've seen him at a local screening, I feel very much like a personal beneficiary of his famed generosity. Of course I also have greatly benefited from viewing films he had a hand in getting produced (like Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man For Himself and Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi), or revived (like Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba and countless others).

Alice Waters onstage at the Castro Theatre to introduce the Mel Novikoff Award presented by SFFILM to Tom Luddy, April 9, 2017.
Tommy Lau, courtesy of SFFILM

I just said that the award presentation was a highlight, but in fact that's not precisely true. The presentation of the spire-shaped award itself was unmemorable in itself. Luddy even left it on the table as he exited the Castro stage, which in the moment seemed to prove Michael Barker of Sony Pictures' Classics right when he said, "People like Tom Luddy do not seek awards. They go out of their way not to receive them," although I later learned that an in-fact grateful Luddy was asked to leave it behind by the festival staff so they could engrave it.  Barker said this shortly after being brought out by the first speaker of the afternoon, SFFILM director Noah Cowan, who stressed that Luddy was in fact a member of the Mel Novikoff Award selection committee himself, and that his comrades in the group had "gone behind his back" to select him for the honor. Barker's encomium (followed by similar but not overlapping ones from Peter Becker of the Criterion Collection and Alice Waters of Chez Panisse) had competition from an attention-diverting slideshow of photographs of Luddy posing with various directors and other folks; I identified Les Blank, Wim Wenders, Philip Kaufman, Eleanor and Francis Ford Coppola (the latter three in attendance at the Castro as well) in one and Alexander Payne in another, while certain other figures were unrecognizable to me. However, his address was unfazed by audience members clapping for favorite pictures projected onto the screen above him, and he related how Andrei Tarkovsky told him Luddy speaks "perfect Russian," how Akira Kurosawa said of him upon disembarking from a long plane flight, "that guy plays a great game of golf," and how he'd personally been steered by Luddy to the works of Ozu, to Fritz Lang's Die Niebelungen, "the greatest war film ever made", and to the amazing 1912 silent The Land Beyond the Sunset. Becker, up next, credited Luddy with helping him appreciate and ultimately commit to restoring and releasing a pair of trilogies, Satyajit Ray's Apu and Marcel Pagnol's Marseille a.k.a. Fanny trilogy. Leah Garchik, reporting on the Castro event in the San Francisco Chronicle, has summarized Becker's tale of a Luddy-organized excursion he took with several aforementioned directors. Finally, Waters, just in from a Bloomington, Indiana screening of The Baker's Wife, talked of being brought by Luddy to Pagnol screenings at Novikoff's long-gone Surf Theatre and read a passage, from her upcoming memoir, about her introduction via Luddy to films by Kenneth Anger, Max Ophüls, Bruce Conner and Alain Resnais.

For better or worse, this long build-up to the award presentation itself felt less like a public presentation and more like an intimate industry event than any Novikoff Award event I've attended (namely, Manny Farber in 2003, Paolo Cherchi Usai in 2004, Jim Hoberman in 2008, Serge Bromberg in 2011, Pierre Rissient in 2012 and Peter Von Bagh in 2013). The real highlight of the afternoon came after the statuette was delivered to its recipient and he expounded on his life as a cinephile-mover-and-shaker in an interview with critic Todd McCarthy. From a chair on the Castro stage (and magnified by video camera feed running above him), Luddy told stories from various stages of his life amidst screens and the artists who fill them. It didn't feel like name-dropping to me while hearing it, so I hope it doesn't seem like it when I try to summarize what he said.

Film critic Todd McCarthy and Mel Novikoff Award recipient Tom Luddy onstage at the Castro Theatre during the 2017 SFFILM Festival, April 9, 2017.
Pamela Gentile, courtesy of SFFILM

Luddy talked about the spark that ignited his movie passion: a high school religion class taught by a friend of Elia Kazan's, who took him on field trips to see The Ballad of a Soldier and films by Visconti, Bergman and the like at places like the Beekman and the Paris Theatre (although he later became delighted to realize he'd seen a Luis Buñuel film, namely Robinson Crusoe, at age 10). When he moved from New York to Berkeley he plugged right into the local cinema scene at a time when Sidney Peterson, James Broughton, Bruce Conner, Christopher MacLaine and Kenneth Anger were in the Bay Area. He attended screenings inspired by SFMOMA's Art in Cinema series which had been founded by Frank Stauffacher in the 1940s, such as Bruce Baillie's Canyon Cinema screenings "in churches in Kensington." He went to Ed Landberg's Cinema Guild just after Pauline Kael had been fired from it, sparking impassioned boycotts; he hadn't met Kael yet and thus had no loyalty to betray. Soon he was putting on shows himself, renting prints from local distributors like Willard Morrison's Audio Films and Bob Greensfelder of Kinesis, Incorporated (Greensfelder would later be instrumental with Luddy in helping Agnès Varda create her wonderful short Uncle Yanco.) Luddy ran Cal's F.W. Murnau Film Society (named for one of his longstanding favorite directors- and mine, too) and later, the Telegraph Repertory Cinema, which for a time brought in more box office revenue for screenings of Andy Warhol films than anywhere else in the country.

Asked by McCarthy about the San Francisco International Film Festival's early days, Luddy said "it was my film school." His first year attending was 1962, "when it was the only film festival in the Western Hemisphere." He fondly recalled Albert Johnson's afternoon tributes to key cinema figures and rattled off the line-up for just one year, 1965: "Walt Disney. Busby Berkeley. Gene Kelly. Hal Roach. John Ford. John Frankenheimer. King Vidor. Leo McCarey. Lewis Milestone. Mervyn LeRoy. William Wellman." A few other names from other festival years were tossed out by Luddy and McCarthy (who was also in the Bay Area by the late 1960s): Raoul Walsh, Jacques Tati, Bette Davis, William Wyler, and Rouben Mamoulian. And of course Howard Hawks, for whom Johnson had prepared such an extensive compilation of clips from throughout his career that the director was able to introduce the screening, head to Kezar Stadium to watch an entire 49ers football game, and be back in time for the post-montage interview.

Tom Luddy, recipient of the Mel Novikoff Award presented by SFFILM. April 9, 2017.
Pamela Gentile, courtesy of SFFILM

Eventually Luddy became director of the Pacific Film Archive, and from that position co-founded Telluride, to where he was particularly proud of bringing an array of guests without perhaps the name recognition of Johnson's cohort, but whose cinematic contributions arguably stand as high: he listed Dusan Makavajev, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Francis Ford Coppola, and legendary art directors Ben Carré and Alexander Trauner. Most especially, Napoléon director Abel Gance, who at nearly ninety remarked, according to Luddy, "I'd rather die on my way to Colorado than vegetate in this cottage" when he offered to bring him there from Nice. Also cinematographer John Alton, a long-standing "holy grail" for the Telluride team to bring, and who was finally tracked down at age 92 after decades living abroad.

Luddy said he left his position at the Pacific Film Archive due to frustrations with the University bureaucracy at the time; he gave one example of being left on the hook for expenses, that ought to have been paid by the school, from Jean-Luc Godard's visit to the institution. By then he'd struck up a friendship with Francis Ford Coppola, who welcomed him into the fold at his American Zoetrope with open arms. Together with George Lucas, they helped secure backing from 20th Century Fox for Akira Kurosawa's 1979 film Kagemusha, after a shared meal at Chez Panisse in which the elder master explained how he couldn't find enough funding in Japan, and the younger three couldn't help but notice the scars from his 1971 suicide attempt on his hands. After Luddy presented Gance's Napoléon at the Avenue Theatre with Bob Vaughn performing an organ accompaniment, Coppola was inspired to try to present it at Radio City Music Hall with "a symphony" by his father Carmine Coppola as accompaniment. Luddy helped make that happen, too, and went on to produce Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters with Paul Schrader, Barfly with Barbet Schroeder and Wind with Carroll Ballard. Those are just a few of the titles he highlighted from the Castro stage!

Tom Luddy, recipient of the Mel Novikoff Award presented by SFFILM onstage at the Castro Theatre, April 9, 2017.
Pamela Gentile, courtesy of SFFILM

Meanwhile, in 1979 Luddy was called in by San Francisco International Film Festival director Claude Jarman to help shepherd the festival when he no longer wanted to remain. At that time in festival history, this meant taking on the responsibility of $150,000 worth of debt. Luddy agreed to volunteer his time to help keep the festival alive through this period, but only if Mel Novikoff would join him in the responsibility. Novikoff agreed and allowed the festivals to use some of his theatre screens without a rental fee for a time, until George Gund stepped in and saved the festival from its debts.

Luddy said that working at the non-profit Telluride Film Festival at the same time as working as a producer in the for-profit movie business is part of the reason why he kept a fairly low-profile through those years, refusing interviews in order to avoid drawing attention to his unique, and perhaps to some, questionable, position. But looking at what he was able to build by straddling both sides of the non-profit/for-profit line, it's hard to begrudge his dual devotions.

The films he chose to screen after the discussion represented these two sides of Luddy pretty well. First, we saw Une Bonne à Tout Faire, a brief piece made by Jean-Luc Godard on the incredible Dean Tavoularis-designed casino set of the American Zoetrope production One From the Heart. Intended as a test for his 1982 film Passion, Godard creates a luminous tableau quite reminiscent of some of the most memorable shots in that film, turning a real film production site into an imaginary one in which Andrei Konchalovsky, portraying a director, and Vittorio Storaro, portraying a cinematographer, communicate with each other in un-subtitled Russian and Italian, respectively, as if locked in a Las Vegas Tower of Babel. Though it was never released at the time, Godard sent Luddy this digital version of the short, transferred from the 1-light dailies for a 2006 screening at the Pompidou. The film's actual cinematographer Ed Lachman (La Soufrière, Carol) is on the hunt for the original negative materials so a preservation (and, I would hope, release) print can be struck, but in the meantime what we saw looked pretty darn good.

Image from A Long, Happy Life provided by SFFILM

The digital presentation of Soviet filmmaker Gennady Shpalikov's A Long and Happy Life, however, didn't fare as well. Though there clearly is a beautiful, equally Jean Vigo- and Michaelangelo Antonioni-influenced film in there somewhere, it was hard to fully appreciate it through the low-contrast, cloudy image quality that appeared to be not much better than the version currently viewable on YouTube. I heard through the grapevine that there was originally a plan to screen a 35mm print from the BAMPFA collection (thus connecting this choice directly to Luddy's non-profit career), but that it was found to be unsubtitled and thus a digital substitute was made. This seems like the perfect opportunity to bring in digital soft-titles over a 35mm print, as has been undertaken at the Noir City festival, for instance. For whatever reason, SFFILM and its partners decided against this option.

Though both films screened as DCP, Luddy himself is clearly for the use of 35mm prints when possible. Before introducing the screening, and after listing a few all-time favorite filmmakers at McCarthy's behest (including Julien Duvivier, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, Mikio Naruse, and Kenji Mizoguchi, as well Murnau, Ray, Bergman, Godard and Coppola) he expressed appreciation for Bay Area audiences and presenters. He singled out the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (which has recently announced its June slate, by the way), for being able to "fill this theater for relatively obscure silent films," as well as Noir City and the completely-non-digital Stanford Theatre. He noted that his friend, critic David Thomson, was helping prepare a summer program tribute to the Warner Brothers studio, stressing that David Packard would be striking new 35mm prints of certain titles currently unavailable to show in that format. Obviously the series will probably include plenty of well-known titles like the Adventures of Robin Hood, The Jazz Singer and Mildred Pierce but my mind is still racing imagining all the possible rarities I might finally be able to see in their intended format this summer. Rarities by Walsh? Hawks? Wellman? Frank Borzage? One Way Passage? Thunder Over the Plains? The Blue Gardenia? Perhaps even the namesake for this blog? I'm trying not to raise my expectations too high.

IOHTE: Brian Darr

First, a hearty thank you to the seventeen other participants in 2014's "I Only Have Two Eyes" survey of Frisco Bay repertory and revival screenings; please check the final update of the hub page for links to each of their exceptionally diverse entries. I don't believe any film was mentioned by more than three participants, but there are certain trends; I feel like film noir was represented more than ever this time around, in keeping with its status as the Bay Area's seeming favorite repertory film genre.

As for my own list. More than in other years, the bulk of it is made up of films I had little or no expectations for when I entered the cinema to see them. A good half of them were made by directors whose other work as director has eluded me so far, and I hold relatively few auteurist preconceptions about some of the other half's directors, either. I don't know why I cherished these surprises more than I did years-in-the-waiting screenings such as Don't Look Now at the Castro, other than to guess that expectations built up over too long a period of time can be impossible to fulfill; I did find Don't Look Now to be devastating and remarkable and if I'd seen it an earlier year I might well have placed it on my list even if the competition from other screenings was fiercer. But this year, I just feel more attached to the following screenings:

Never Open That Door (Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1952), Castro Theatre, January 30th, 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Eddie Muller.

Noir City's 2014 festival was my favorite edition ever of Frisco Bay's highest-profile annual exhibition of cinema heritage. The international theme wasn't just window-dressing but a meticulously-crafted argument against the jingoistic notion that film noir was in essence a Hollywood construction, and I couldn't resist attending, for the first time, every single film shown during those ten days, including the Japanese and British films I'd seen on the Castro screen before or the ones I'd recently watched to prepare my Keyframe Daily preview. Among the festival's high points was a final-day showing of Martin Scorsese's personal 35mm print of Josef Von Sternberg's Orientalist nightmare The Shanghai Gesture, but my very favorite experience of the 10-day chiaroscuro marathon was seeing the first of the three Argentine noirs presented for their first gringo audience in decades- if not ever. Never Open That Door is an elegant fusing of a pair of complimentary (one urban, one rural, etc.) Cornell Woolrich adaptations that simply oozed tenebrific dread and reminded me that John Alton spent several years working in Buenos Aires before making his mark on Hollywood; I don't know if this film's cinematographer Pablo Tabernero ever crossed paths with Alton, but I'm intrigued by his background; he appears to have been a German exile named Paul Weinschenk, who changed his name while making documentaries for the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War before heading to Argentina. I'm thrilled to learn via the Noir City Annual #7 that this film is being restored with English subtitles (this screening was soft-titled) and better yet, reunited with another Christensen/Tabernero Woolrich adaptation called If I Die Before I Wake, and that screening foreign-language films at Noir City is not a one-year oddity but a new tradition.

Rich Kids (Robert A. Young, 1979) Roxie Cinema, March 8th, 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Mike Keegan & Jesse Hawthorne Ficks.

San Francisco's longest-running cinema the Roxie has for various sensible (and regrettable) reasons moved away  from screening much 35mm and 16mm in the past year, putting its energy into creative approaches to running a digital-era cinematheque with programs like this upcoming one. But for five days, in anticipation of the local release of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Mission venue threw a 35mm feast of daily Wes Anderson features. This heartbreakingly hilarious and touching portrait of New York preteens from aristocratic but broken homes, an obvious touchstone for Anderson and/or frequent screenwriting partner Noah Baumbach, was nestled into the program one afternoon, and was a uniquely big-screen experience, as this reputed sole surviving widescreen print contains sequences cut from any panned-and-scanned video copies you might see floating around. Though directed by Young it was produced by Robert Altman when he was at the peak of his clout, and its approach to childhood feels more alien to modern filmmaking than Altman's own approach to environmental catastrophe that year (Quintet), and its showing helped set me on a path of Altman research and rediscovery that continued throughout much of the year and will pick back up again this month at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Passage à l'acte (Martin Arnold, 1993) New Nothing Cinema, March 26th, 2014. 16mm. Introduced by Mark Wilson.

As usual, a sizable portion of my viewing in 2014 was of the experimental film variety; screenings presented by familiar organizations like Oddball Films, the Exploratorium, the Pacific Film Archive and SF Cinematheque each had a distinct impact on my wider appreciation of cinema history. But there's nothing like a new venue, even if it's one that's been around for a while like New Nothing in SOMA. I'd heard about this space for years, but it wasn't until last March that I learned exactly where it was, what it might screen, and how I might find myself there. The occasion was the second in a year-long series of salons presented by Canyon Cinema filmmakers invited to draw from the collection of prints held by this stalwart film institution (which ended 2014 with some wonderful momentum). I attended far too few of these programs, but I'm so glad I made it out for my friend Mark Wilson's presentation of short investigations of human movement on screen. Martin Arnold in particular was a figure I'd long heard of but never seen for myself (like New Nothing) and to experience his optically-printed appropriation of an iconic Hollywood movie amidst great films by Ed Emshwiller and Jeanne Liotta felt like the ideal introduction to a master filmmaker's work. Although I do wonder how I would have reacted if I'd seen it when it was made in 1993, at a time I was immersing myself in industrial and other collage-oriented music but had yet to see my first Robert Mulligan film.

The Good Bad Man (Allan Dwan, 1916) Castro Theatre, May 31, 2014. 35mm with piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin. Introduced by Dr. Tracey Goessel.

As I noted in my preview piece on the 19th San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the SFSFF has been slowly but surely funding and presenting new restorations of the early collaborations between beloved superstar Douglas Fairbanks and still-neglected auteur Allan Dwan (they ultimately completed eleven films together, culminating in the 1929 part-talkie The Iron Mask.) The third of these restorations is the earliest of the collaborations presented so far; The Good Bad Man was only the second Fairbanks/Dwan picture, after The Habit of Happiness, but the restoration looked impeccable for a 98-year-old film screening at only 16 frames per second; it surely didn't hurt that pianist Donald Sosin performed the musical accompaniment as if he were trying to show up all of the weekend's other fine musicians after a year on the bench (I think he succeeded).  It also happens to be the best movie of the three, a perfectly balanced synthesis of Wild West action and romantic comedy. I've barely glimpsed Dwan's non-Fairbanks films, but with this I'm starting to get a sense of his spatial and structural sensibilities. It just so happens that another Dwan silent, this one starring Gloria Swanson rather than the King of Hollywood, screens this Saturday at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. Tempting...

Screen capture from Music Box DVD of The Story of Film

Crucified Lovers: a Story from Chikamatsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) Pacific Film Archive, July 30th, 2014. 35mm.

Mizoguchi made some of the most emotionally potent political films ever, and this one, which I'd never seen before at all, edged ahead of my first 35mm viewing of his 1939 masterpiece The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum as the summit of my visits to the Pacific Film Archive's hearty director retrospective last summer. The inexorability of unfolding events, each peeling another layer off the rotten onion of patriarchal feudalism, held me transfixed to the screen.

Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl, 1933) Stanford Theatre, August 31st, 2014. 35mm.

It seems incredible that two entirely different films could both share the same title; I saw Isao Takahata's coming-of-age animation from 1991 and put it on my IOHTE list two years ago, and now I've caught up with this pre-code Hollywood employer of the same English-language title, as part of a Stanford Theatre World War I weepie double-bill with Random Harvest. Calling Stahl's Only Yesterday a melodrama in today's age sounds like a dismissal, but in this case the heightened emotions of its characters, particularly the sublime Margaret Sullivan (in her debut screen role!) are transmitted directly to the audience, making for an intense experience akin to that conveyed by its later, more famous remake Letter From An Unknown Woman, (which I also saw at the Stanford in 2014).

¡O No Coronado! (Craig Baldwin, 1992) Artists' Television Access, September 19th, 2014. 16mm. Introduced by Craig Baldwin and Steve Polta.

In 2014 my only "official" filmmaker interview was a mind-melting discussion with underground archivist and iconoclast Craig Baldwin, who summons the Other Cinema screenings most Saturday nights at the increasingly incongruous (and thus culturally valuable) Valencia Street microcinema Artists' Television Access. I also finally caught up with most of his films that I hadn't seen before (I'm still on the hunt for the elusive Stolen Movie). I was able to see a majority of them on the A.T.A. screen, either as part of its 30-hour marathon (of which I survived about fifteen hours of before the dawn showing of Damon Packard's brilliant Reflections of Evil sent me stumbling home for much needed sleep- or was it sanity) or this pair of programs. ¡O No Coronado!, Baldwin's 40-minute sub-feature made to commemorate commiserate the Quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's famed voyage (by presenting the story of a very different conqueror), employs perhaps his most elaborate and "effective" staged footage, shuffled together with ludicrous and expensive Hollywood detritus. His juxtapositions pull the rubber mask off the history-as-mythology industry that seems to dominate our collective understandings of the past.

Screen capture from Kino DVD

Little Fugitive (Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin & Ray Ashley, 1953) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, September 22nd, 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Lynn Cursaro.

Full disclosure: of all the repertory/revival series of 2014, the one that loomed largest for me personally was one that I was honored to be chosen to be involved with myself: Joel Shepard of YBCA's gracious "Invasion of the Cinemaniacs!" series, the film component of the museum's triennial Bay Area Now focus on local artists and art communities. Shepard selected eleven local cinephiles (including six previous IOHTE contributors) to present a carte-blanche choice of a film at the YBCA's technically excellent, intimate screening space. I was humbled to be chosen, and humbled again to find that my buddy Ryland Walker Knight mentioned my selection (Altman's The Company) in his own IOHTE wrap-up this year. A few of the other Cinemaniacs selections have been cited by IOHTE 2014 participants such as Carl Martin and David Robson, but I'd like to single out a few that have been left unmentioned: Adam Hartzell's informed presentation of Korean drama Madame Freedom, Robson's lustrous program-closer The Brides of Dracula, and most importantly Lynn Cursaro's selection Little Fugitive, a wonderfully poetic, American-neorealist exploration of Coney Island through the eyes of a child who fears he might never be able to return home. Though co-directed by three filmmakers I was previously unfamiliar with, it's a film I've been waiting to see on the big screen for many years, ever since learning it was an early entry on the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Watching a 35mm print in a room (half) full of cinema devotees was worth the wait; this is clearly one of the great films of its time (when television was just growing out of being a seductive novelty) and place (on the opposite end of the country from Hollywood).

The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1993) Pacific Film Archive, November 14th , 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Kathy Geritz and Richard Suchenski.

This is the largest exception to the trend I mentioned in my introductory paragraphs: another film I'd been waiting for years to see on the big screen, in this case made by a director I already considered myself a committed fan of. In fact I'd hoped to see much more of the traveling Hou Hsiao-Hsien series brought by Richard Suchenski to the PFA in the last months of 2014 than I did; I'd have liked to attend every screening but scheduling consigned me to seeing only five films in the program. The Puppetmaster was the most revelatory for me of the five (although The Boys From Fengkuei came close) in terms of my understanding of Hou, and indeed (as I noted on twitter), in terms of my understanding of biographical storytelling modes in general. This no-admission screening was nearly full, which was especially gratifying after Suchenski noted that he'd essentially built the Hou series around his desire to see this film in 35mm, that it'd taken two years to negotiate to show it, and that it (and City of Sadness) would certainly become completely unavailable to view on that format after the tour concludes at the end of this year. Which has me giving sidelong glances to airfares after looking at the rest of the schedule...

Screen capture from Cohen Media Group DVD

The Book of Mary (Anne-Marie Miéville, 1985) Pacific Film Archive, November 29th, 2014. 35mm.

My favorite new film seen in 2014 was Jean-Luc Godard's 3D Goodbye To Language, which I saw three times (once for each dimension?) at the Rafael Film Center, the only Frisco Bay cinema it played in time for me to put it on my Top Ten list in time for Fandor's poll. (It screened at Berkeley's Shattuck Cinema in mid-December, and finally has its first showing in San Francisco at the Castro Theatre tonight). But my 2014 Godard experience was not limited to his newest work; the Pacific Film Archive provided many opportunities for me to fill gaps and revisit old favorites throughout the year, and I only wish I'd taken advantage of more of them (on the bright side the series is continuing through April.) Some of the films felt more impenetrable than wonderful, but they all had a touch of both qualities. Most pleasantly surprising, however, was the fact that my very favorite entry in the whole series was directed not by Godard, but by his longtime collaborative companion Anne-Marie Miéville, and screened, as it customarily does, before his 1985 release Hail Mary. It's a perfectly-realized short film, simultaneously naturalistic and expressionistic in its presenting a young girl's perspective on her parents' crumbling marriage (don't ask me why this theme recurs on this list.) Miéville is particularly gifted at framing her subject's body in motion, as in the above-pictured scene where she moves along to a section of Mahler's 9th Symphony. I attribute to The Book of Mary's effectiveness as a prelude the fact that I found Hail Mary to be my own favorite of the Godard films I saw at the PFA last year.

The Cranes Are Flying (1957)

Screen shot from Criterion DVD

WHO: Mikhail Kalatozov directed this.

WHAT: The Palme d'Or-winning film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958, and the only film from the Soviet Union to ever have won that festival's top prize, unless you count the festival's unusual 2nd year (1946) when eleven films (including Fridrikh Ermler's The Turning Point) shared what was then called the "Grand Prize". The Cranes Are Flying is a technical tour-de-force, especially the bravura cinematography from Sergey Urusevsky, but it's also an emotional powerhouse, its story of young lovers separated by World War II given great resonance through the performances of Aleksey Batalov (who later starred in Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears) and Tatiana Samoilova (who later played Aleksandr Zarkhi's Anna Karenina, and who passed away earlier this year) as the couple asunder.  

WHERE/WHEN: 5:30 today only at the Pacific Film Archive

WHY: Mikhail Kalatozov is one of my favorite filmmakers that I know almost nothing about. I've only seen four of his films, each of them masterpieces, and I know very little of his biography other than that he was born in Tbilisi, Georgia and got his start making silent films in that then-Soviet republic (such as Salt For Svanetia). His follow-up The Nail in the Boot got him in trouble with Moscow authorities, and his career was severely hindered for the next nineteen years (in which he made only three films) but that he made a resurgence in the 1950s, and that The Cranes Are Flying and its follow-up The Letter Never Sent (which I've never seen although it is available on a Criterion DVD) are considered quintessential films of the Khrushchev "thaw" era.  In 1964 he made the phenomenal I Am Cuba, which was denounced in both Cuba and the U.S.S.R. and unseen by the international general public until 1992 when it was presented by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola to agog audiences. By then Kalatozov had been dead nearly twenty years, his final film being a 1969 international co-production starring Sean Connery, Claudia Cardinale and Peter Finch called The Red Tent (another I have not seen).

The four Kalatozov films I'd seen before all screen in an 8-day period at the Pacific Film Archive this week as part of its extended focus on Georgian filmmaking. I unfortunately missed Salt For Svanetia and The Nail In The Boot last Saturday, triply unfortunate because the latter screened with a new-ish documentary on its director called Hurricane Kalatozov. This evening The Cranes Are Flying screens and tomorrow it's I Am Cuba. I was hoping The Letter Never Sent or others of his films might turn up in the next installment of this Georgian focus when it was announced online this week, but I'll have to wait to see if they turn up in the March-April conclusion to the series. Instead, the January and February installments of the series will spotlight the most famous living filmmaking son of Georgia, Otar Iosseliani, one of its most prominent female directors Lana Gogoberidze (who will be at the PFA in person with her films), and a few other odds and ends including reprises of films that particularly impressed PFA-diehards this fall, The White Caravan and Repentance.

The PFA's January-February 2015 schedule also includes the next (last?) installment of the archive's extensive Jean-Luc Godard series, featuring films from the 1990s up until 2010's Film Socialisme. I confirmed with curator Kathy Geritz that the PFA, like most local not-for-profit venues, does not have the technical capability to show Godard's 2 most recent films, which utilize (and indeed push the boundaries of) modern 3D technology. So unless someone brings it to the Castro, the Kabuki, or a link in the Landmark or Camera chains (all of which seem less-than-probable to me), Frisco Bay Godard fans will have to hope they can make it to one of the Rafael Film Center's dwindling screenings if they want to see his latest game-changer Goodbye To Language. Meanwhile there are still five more 35mm prints of Godard films (and a digitally-presented short film called Origins of the 21st Century) to play at the PFA in 2014, including Keep Your Right Up tonight after Cranes Are Flying and Hail Mary tomorrow after I Am Cuba.

Other PFA programs coming in the first months of 2015 include a Billy Wilder series featuring rare 35mm prints of Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend and four of his lesser-seen films, as well as digital presentations of a half-dozen of his most famous directorial efforts plus Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, which he wrote the screenplay for. The African Film Festival returns with a special focus on female filmmakers, including two programs devoted to rarities by Sarah Moldoror, the pioneering classmate of Ousmane Sembène who also worked on The Battle of Algiers before starting her own career as a director. In a separate but related mini-series Mati Diop, the niece of another Senegalese master director Djibril Diop Mambéty, will be on hand to present screenings of Claire Denis's 35 Shots of Rum, which she gave an indelible acting performance in, as well as several of the films she's recently directed. Eric Baudelaire will appear in person to discuss and screen his films.

The first part of the Spring semester's Documentary Voices program will include films by Robert Flaherty, Frederick Wiseman, and the late Harun Farocki. As usual in odd-numbered years, the PFA will host screenings as part of the third International Berkeley Conference on Film and Media, this time collecting silent film scholars to discuss the serial form in silent cinema and as it has captured our attention in the modern era. I can't wait for the screenings of Hollis Frampton's entire Hapax Legomena cycle and of Hazards Of Helen helmer J. P. McGowan's last silent serial The Chinatown Mystery, starring and co-written by John Ford's brother Francis. Finally, Emily Carpenter's Film 50 class, which as usual has a few spaces available to members of the public, involves enough intriguing and rare 35mm screenings that any cinephile with Wednesday afternoons free will want to secure their spots as soon as tickets become available next month.

HOW:  The Cranes Are Flying screens from a 35mm print.

A Movie (1958)

Screen shot from digital transfer of Facets VHS release.

WHO: Bruce Conner made this.

WHAT: Conner didn't bother with warning shots. His first film was a torpedo fired directly at moving image culture as it was in the late 1950s, and honestly as it still is today. Though it wasn't the first film to have been constructed completely out of pre-existing film material (Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart beat it by 32 years, and Soviet filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub had preceded Cornell) it was probably the first to do so with such exuberantly rapid editing and biting humor, in tribute to a memorable moment from the final reel of Leo McCarey's Duck Soup. Today Conner's aesthetic feels familiar and perhaps even stale on a single viewing, at least to those of us raised on music videos and popular compilations that "normalize" Conner's then-radical strategies. But multiple viewings reveal more about the film. Kevin Hatch has written:

With each encounter, the rhythm of the editing appears more natural and the shot selection less arbitrary, until the film's logic becomes intuitively evident. With each viewing of the film, we become accustomed to the abrupt breaks between shots and more comfortable allowing them to reveal unexpected formal relationships and trigger involuntary mnemonic associations. What at first appears chaotic comes to seem, with repeated viewing, compulsively ordered.

Hatch spends quite a bit of time going into more detail on A Movie in his book Looking For Bruce Conner, but one thing he neglects to mention are the dissolves that appear in the last few minutes of the film; previously all edits were of the simple cut-and-splice variety that reconcile with Conner's recollections of having used only the most rudimentary tools of "a little splicer and a rewind and a viewer" to make his earliest films. But in 1958 it was possible to instruct a film lab to insert a dissolve into a print when processing it, for a small fee, so it seems likely that Conner exploited this option to create images like the above crossfade from a smoldering volcano to a ecclesiastical coronation.

WHERE/WHEN: A Movie screens tonight at 7:00 at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: Though it's hard to find many bright spots in yesterday's election results, I did enjoy a reminder, through a glance at the facebook page of the proprietor of the Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland, that Bruce Conner in 1967 ran a losing campaign for Supervisor that garnered more votes than some recent winners of Supervisor races have (though at the time elections were citywide rather than district-by-district, and therefore unfair to compare). As I wrote in a 2006 blog on Conner, his campaign speech was nothing more than a list of sweets.

I can think of no better cinematic post-election hangover cure than to see a Bruce Conner movie and a Craig Baldwin movie on the same bill. Baldwin's Tribulation 99 screens after A Movie tonight at the PFA, making a near-complete piecemeal retrospective of the living legend of San Francisco underground curation and filmmaking in the last few months, after terrific screenings of Mock Up On Mu, Sonic Outlaws and more at Artists' Television Access back in September. Tribulation 99 is probably Baldwin's most quintessential and essential film, and he'll be at the theatre to discuss it with anyone who dares to attend.

Tonight's program is part of the PFA's Alternative Visions series of experimental films, which winds down this month with shows devoted to Polish artist Pawel Wojtasik and to recent experimental films made by filmmakers who I'm guessing would probably acknowledge a debt to Conner in their own work. Many of them would likely acknowledge a debt to Baldwin as well, but probably none as vociferously as Linda Scobie, whose playful collage Craig's Cutting Room Floor is a 16mm film-assemblage of just what it describes: the material found beneath Baldwin's feet as he works in the editing room.

These may be the last three strictly experimental film programs at the PFA for a while, as recent tradition has held that the Alternative Visions series has been a Fall-only program with Spring devoted to cutting-edge documentary. With the PFA closing after July 2015, to re-open in a new, more BART-friendly, location in 2016, if the pattern holds it may be a couple years before we get a shot at seeing this kind of material in Berkeley again. Although there are some who would consider Jean-Luc Godard's films (especially his more recent ones) to be experimental films as well, and the PFA promises to continue with their retrospective of his work next Spring (presumably to culminate in his newest Goodbye To Language 3D, which in the meantime premieres locally next week in San Rafael). The current installment of this Godard retro covers his 1982-1994 work, and starts with his masterpiece Passion this Saturday. I'm pleased that a greater proportion of this segment of the Godard series is screening via 35mm prints than did in the last segment focusing on the 1970s. In fact the lion's share of the PFA's November-December calendar is 35mm, including everything in the Hou Hsiao-Hsien series, nearly everything in the Georgian film series that will also continue into 2015, and more than you might expect in the political documentary series entitled I’m Weiwei: Activism, Free Expression, Human Rights.

Of course the PFA is not the only place to show experimental films in the Bay Area; far from it in fact, when there's an organization like SF Cinematheque entering into a particularly busy month including tomorrow's Castro Theatre(!) screening of Andy Warhol's dual-projection epic Chelsea Girls and Friday's YBCA showing of Warhol's Hedy, both with fascinating and eloquent Factory star Mary Woronov in person, its annual art (and film) auction and benefit November 15th, and much more.

HOW: A Movie and Tribulation 99 both screen from 16mm prints in the PFA's own collection.

Paths Of Glory (1957)

Screen shot from Warner DVD of Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures

WHO: Stanley Kubrick co-wrote and directed this.

WHAT: One of the most generally well-regarded films of all time, it has the distinction of being one of only ten films released prior to 1960 on the utterly populist (if male-film-geek-centric) imdb all-time top sixty. I've long considered it my own least favorite of Kubrick's thirteen feature films, which is praising it with faint damnation, as I like or love all of that iconoclast's pictures. It has astonishing battle sequences and a remarkably affecting ending feature Kubrick's soon-to-be-wife Christiane, the niece of German director Veit Harlan (infamous for making the Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß). But I've always felt its treatment of the meaning of war to be more ponderous and less interestingly nuanced than other Kubrick war pictures like Fear and Desire and Full Metal Jacket, or even Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon. Perhaps it's just my usual allergy to courtroom scenes (most agree this one's is among the greatest ever filmed). I've always meant to see it again at some point. There are two upcoming opportunities to do so on the big screen.

WHERE/WHEN: At the Pacific Film Archive in Berkely, at 7PM tonight and on Saturday, September 6th at 6:30 PM.

WHY:  It's rare, perhaps even unprecedented, for the Pacific Film Archive to screen the same film twice in a period of fifteen days, as part of two separate series. But Paths of Glory is the penultimate program in the centennial-focused World War I on Film (which closes Wednesday with the great All Quiet on the Western Front) and also comes early in that venue's Kubrick retrospective being held just over fifteen years after his death. Last week the PFA announced this series as well as the rest of its September and October schedule (with a number of select November and December screenings revealed as well). A brief rundown:

Perhaps the most exciting reveal is the Fall's first half of a fifty-title survey of cinema originating from the (now former, of course) Soviet republic of Georgia, where an astonishingly large portion of great Soviet-era filmmakers including Otar Iosseliani and Sergei Paradjanov have had roots. Those big-name filmmakers may be saved for the Spring section of the series, but the coming semester features filmmakers like the silent-era's Ivan Perestiani, the later Soviet era's Eldar Shengelaia, and modern-day directors like Levan Koguashvili and Nana Janelidze. The latter three will be on hand for screenings of their films and others'. I'm excited to dig into this all-but-unknown corner of world cinema; the only four films from the Fall program I've seen thus far are the four by Mikhail Kalatozov screening November 22-29. All four are brilliant, most especially Cranes Are Flying, my own pick for 1957's greatest anti-war picture.

A focus on Jean-Luc Godard's career from 1968-1979 would be impossible to say a bad word about, had the Spring 2014 retrospective of his films up to 1967 not set such a high standard by showing every film he made during that period, including rarely-seen shorts. Though most everyone prefers 1960s Godard to 1970s, it's somewhat disappointing that very little of his Dziga Vertov Group filmmaking is being included in this segment of the series, and that, aside from 35mm screenings of Sympathy For The Devil, Tout Va Bien, Every Man For Himself (a.k.a. Slow Motion) and perhaps Letter To Jane, at least half the screenings are to be digital. It feels churlish to complain when several of the digital showings involve use of (analog) video, and/or are introduced by Godard-connected luminaries like PFA founder Tom Luddy (who appears in One P.M.) and Jean-Pierre Gorin (who co-directed Ici Et Ailleurs and others of this era). But this series is called "Expect Everything From Cinema", and although I try not to expect everything from my cinematheque, part one of this multi-part retrospective got my hopes up. Perhaps the next installment in the series, covering the underrated 1980s (and beyond?) will be more comprehensive.

By contrast, the PFA's October-December Hou Hsiao-Hsien retrospective, the first in Frisco Bay since before Millenium Mambo premiered, includes all eighteen of the Taiwanese master's feature films, all shown on 35mm prints except for The Green, Green Grass of Home, for which a 16mm print will substitute. I've never seen any of Hou's films prior to Goodbye South, Goodbye, other than the astonishing City of Sadness, so I'm thrilled with this essentially complete retrospective.

More PFA offerings in September and October will include a fascinating-sounding commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's Free Speech movement, with documentaries of the era and beyond, one-night-stand screenings of new films about Ai Weiwei and Mike Seeger, and a complete, all-DCP presentation of James Dean's brief filmography. Finally, weekly experimental moving image screenings under the Alternative Visions header include in-person appearances from animator Laura Heit, local Jerome Hiler, and, for two nights in a row, Leslie Thornton, as well as two evenings devoted to multi-projector screenings and another two devoted the legendary James Broughton as his centennial year winds down.

HOW: Unfortunately, Paths of Glory is the only film in the World War I on Film series screening on DCP (something of a paradox given the series title). More unfortunately, it's among the strong majority of the Kubrick series selections to screen that way, the exceptions being the 35mm prints of Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss, of Spartacus, and of the ideal Halloween-at-PFA movie, Eyes Wide Shut.

The Palm Beach Story (1942)

WHO: Robert Dudley has a very memorable supporting role in this.

WHAT: John Pym writes quite a bit about Dudley's character The Wienie King, a processed-meat tycoon who encounters a low-on-cash Gerry (played by Claudette Colbert) early in the film. A sample:

Why does the Wienie King give Gerry the rent money? Partly to best his wife, to be sure, but partly because he simply has a mind to. He likes the look of Gerry in her pink wrap. He likes birds, and there just happens to be a bird embroidered on the wrap. He knows what it is like to be poor. He just does it. It's in his nature.

WHERE/WHEN: 4:10 and 7:30 today at the Stanford Theatre, and 7:00 on January 29, 2014 at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: I knew I had to post about Robert Dudley this weekend after seeing him for a split second on the Castro Theatre screen last Wednesday during the 4th annual Noir City Xmas screening that has become the traditional way to announce the next ten-day Noir City festival in January (2014's is taking a bold new approach, making it my most-anticipated program yet! But more on that in a future post.) He plays a small role in the 1947 film Christmas Eve a.k.a. Sinner's Holiday which gave a belly-of-Hollywood finish to a double-bill that began with the bleak, New York underground cinema standout Blast of Silence, which somehow feels like the midway point between an Anthony Mann and a John Cassavetes movie.

Christmas Eve, a story of an eccentric spinster trying to reunite with her long-lost wards (George Brent, George Raft and Randolph Scott) is one of those Hollywood oddities that doesn't quite conform to any genre conventions, but rather combines and stirs together elements from several seemingly disparate genres: screball comedy, political thriller, Western. I can't help but think that Robert Altman's involvement, very early in his film career, is in part responsible for this stew. It's an unexpectedly effective mix, especially as the middle segment of the film involving Raft and a Nazi-in-hiding unfolds coldly and powerfully. This is perhaps the only truly noir-ish element of Christmas Eve, and justification enough for it to be programmed at Noir City Xmas, especially one that announces a Noir City line-up that will be kicked off January 25th with a double-bill of Journey Into Fear and the Third Man. 

 The Stanford shows The Palm Beach Story as the penultimate of its selection of Preston Sturges-directed films to wind down its 2013 programming. Already the venue has begun announcing its 2014 line-up, starting with a quickly-organized four-film tribute to Joan Fontaine, the 96-year-old star who died a week ago. All three of Fontaine's Oscar-nominated performances will be highlighted: Rebecca and Suspicion (for which she won) on a Hitchcock/Fontaine double-bill January 2-5, and The Constant Nymph, paired with her turn for the great Max Ophüls Letter From An Unknown Woman January 9-12.

Then, the PFA will show The Palm Beach Story as part of a series called Funny Ha-Ha: American Comedy, 1930–1959 that kicks off with My Man Godfrey the night that venue reopens after the Winter break, January 16th, and speeds through some of the humorous highlights of Hollywood from Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Frank Tashlin, and more. It's called "part one of a three-part series" in the now-online program but it's a little unclear what parts two and three will be: more comedies from the same period? (Either more American ones, or else focuses on other countries' comedies?) More comedies from later periods? Perhaps a set apiece devoted to American Drama and American Romance? Or American Tragedy and American Histories? Stay tuned.

Whatever this large-scale series precisely is, it's not alone. 2014 will evidently see at least two other retrospectives that last more than just a couple of months at the PFA. A Satyajit Ray series begins with the Bengali master's first film Pather Panchali January 17, and will continue through August, expecting to include nearly all of his films. From what we've seen of the PFA's schedule for its year-long Jean-Luc Godard retrospective, it appears that it may be even more complete. Every feature film the master made up through 1967's Weekend will screen in chronological order this Spring, starting with 35mm prints of Breathless and Le Petit Soldat January 31st (unfortunately in the midst of Noir City). Programs of early short films and anthology contributions threaten to make this a complete accounting of Godard's pre-1968 work. A Fall series is promised to cover his post-1968 career.

These three big PFA presentations will still be accompanied by smaller series in 2014; the January-February calendar brings us Anthony Mann crime films, the annual African Film Festival, an in-person appearance by Pennsylvania documentarian Tony Buba, and more.

HOW: The Palm Beach Story screens via a 35mm print at both venues; on a double-bill with A Night At the Opera only at the Stanford.

Buffalo '66 (1998)

WHO: Vincent Gallo wrote, directed, composed and performed underscore, and stars in this.

WHAT: I haven't seen Gallo's debut feature as a director since it came out fifteen years ago, so I don't remember many details other than that it involves an attempt at redemption, a family meal, football bets gone wrong, and vintage progressive rock from the 1970s. But it made enough of a general impression on me that I went to see his next feature The Brown Bunny despite its mixed-to-awful reviews, and sustained my interest in seeing Gallo's future work through that despite a vague sense of agreement with the negative one. I was shocked when his most recent feature Promises Written in Water became one of my favorite films seen on my sole trip to the Toronto Film Festival in 2010, an experience I cherish all the more since the film has never screened publicly anywhere in the world since then. I'd prefer to get a second chance at seeing that, but to see this one on 35mm is not all that much rarer of a treat.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 9:20.

WHY: Though I don't believe Buffalo '66 is strictly a Thanksgiving film (I may be wrong, but I don't see any turkey on the table in the screen capture above), its wintry setting and football and family connections make it a perfect offbeat choice for a screening the night before. Happy holidays!

HOW: 35mm print, on a double-bill with Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders; I don't know what the connection between the two films is other than that Godard is said to be a fan of Gallo's feature.

Contempt (1963)

WHO: Jean-Luc Godard wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Godard's biggest-budgeted film, and his only one featuring superstar Brigitte Bardot. Godard fans almost always count it among his greatest films, and even Godard non-fans tend to like it better than the rest of his filmography, too. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard recorded some great comments about shooting the film for the Criterion Collection.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at 4:45, 7:00 and 9:15 at the Castro.

WHY: I don't get quite the same excitement from getting an advance peek at the Castro calendar as I used to. As more and more of their bookings seem to be of digital presentations rather than 35mm prints, the anticipation is delayed until the the back page of the theatre's calendar is put to press, as that's what reveals the formats of each show. I can predict that among December's bookings Dial 'M' For Murder will be a digital 3D presentation and not a dual-system 35mm showing, and that Jesse Ficks's MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS presentations of Home For the Holidays, Love Actually, Valley Girl and Raising Arizona will probably be film-on-film. But anything else is merely guessing, so I'm not sure yet if I should cancel all my plans to catch Phantom of the Paradise in a uber-rare 35mm print December 14th, or if I'll be easily able to nonchalantly pass by another digital presentation that evening.

But with a film like Contempt I'm torn. It's been years since I've had a chance to see it on 35mm, and have been wanting to revisit it ever since finally seeing one of the films it most famously references, Some Came Running, earlier this year. But Contempt is not all that much easier to see via any of my other habitual methods right now. The Criterion DVD is out of print and all San Francisco Public Library copies have departed from the shelves. Not even every surviving local video rental store still has a copy, last I checked. So today's showing holds some appeal, if not quite as much as this Friday's 35mm screening of Vivre Sa Vie at the Pacific Film Archive, or next Wednesday's Band of Outsiders at the Castro.

HOW: DCP

Breathless (1960)

WHO: Jean-Luc Godard directed this.

WHAT: Godard's first feature film. Only one of the most famous and influential art/independent/foreign films ever made. A masterpiece that I find grows in stature with each viewing (maybe that's the very definition of masterpiece). David Hudson collected a large number of excellent articles about the film when it had its 50th anniversary in 2010.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre at 7:30 PM.

WHY: Though (at least in 2013) we're not getting anything close in size to the giant Godard retrospective that New Yorkers were able to see last month, at least local cinephiles get to see at least five of Godard's best features in local cinemas this month, four of them on the giant-sized Castro screen. The Castro plays a Godard every Wednesday in November: Breathless tonight, Weekend on a 35mm double-bill with David Cronenberg's Crash on the 13th, Contempt as a newly-prepared DCP on the 20th, and Band of Outsiders alongside Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 on November 27th, both in 35mm.

The fifth Godard coming to Frisco Bay is perhaps my favorite of all his films: Vivre Sa Vie, his signature collaboration with his wife Anna Karina, screening as part of the Pacific Film Archive's Fassbinder's Favorites sidebar to its retrospective for that director. That'll be November 22nd, the same evening as the final screening in the PFA's current Agnès Varda series, Cléo From 5 to 7. It's an appropriate pairing because, although Varda last night said she was didn't feel particularly close to the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd (of which Godard must certainly be considered a member), she did recruit him and Karina to perform in the short film-within-film Les Fiancés du pont Mac Donald ou (Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires) appearing in Cléo.

Varda also noted last night that, although she was alone among female filmmakers to gain notice during the 1960s heyday of the French New Wave, she's become heartened that there are so many French women directing, shooting, and taking other once-male-dominated roles in filmmaking nowadays. Of the nine contemporary French films screening in the San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now series opening at the Clay tomorrow and running all weekend, female directors outnumber males five to four (only by counting French-Canadian director of Vic & Flo Saw A Bear Denis Côté does the ratio even up to five-five), and the series includes five films shot or co-shot by women cinematographers, including two by Claire Mathon, two by Jeanne Lapoirie, and of course Bastards, directed by Claire Denis and shot by superstar DP Agnès Godard (no relation to Jean-Luc). For a full preview of the French Cinema Now series I direct you to the excellent article by local Francophile and cinephile Michael Hawley.

HOW: Breathless screens in 35mm, on a double-bill with the local DCP premiere of one of Godard's favorite films, Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse. This was the film that inspired Godard to cast Jean Seberg.

...And God Created Woman (1956)

WHO: This is an early role for Jean-Louis Trintignant, in this case playing opposite Brigitte Bardot.

WHAT: I think it would be difficult to find a serious critic willing to go to bat for this as a truly great film; Kevin B. Lee concisely outlined most of the film's limitations as well as strengths in one of his early Shooting Down Pictures videos; if you'd rather read than hear his illustrated essay, the transcript is here. I wouldn't know how to make a case for it as a successful film in any meaningful way, although it was successful financially in its day and successful in helping get the gears turning on the beginning of the French New Wave. Unlike Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette & Chabrol, director Roger Vadim never wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, but because he was able to make such a splash with his first feature before age thirty he became an inspiration to these cineastes (Godard and Truffaut both singled out ...And God Created Woman for praise), and to French financiers looking to tap into market desires for films by youthful directors.

There is something interesting about the film's mise en scène nonetheless. Richard Neupert in his A History of the French New Wave quotes Vadim as saying, "Our generation does not want to retell stories with the same vocabulary that has been used for so long and that not even the neorealists could escape: long shot, medium shot, close up, shot/reverse shot. It has become a nightmare. All films look the same." In ...And God Created Woman the director almost completely eschews close-ups and the shot/reverse shot schematic, building his visual style almost completely out of medium shots and especially long shots, reminiscent perhaps of a Jacques Tati film of the 1950s. Of course this style of filmmaking is no longer very unusual at all especially on the international festival circuit, and directors like Tsai Ming-Liang and Lisandro Alonso have pushed it even further, and to more apparent aesthetic purpose than Vadim's (which seems largely engineered to show off his Saint-Tropez locations, and perhaps to emphasize his stars' bodies over their faces. At any rate it makes what seems to most viewers today to be a rather routine family drama with some uncomfortable social and political undercurrents more than just that for those carefully attuned to how the camera is being used to capture the cast.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. 6:30 PM.

WHY: ...And God Created Woman marks the beginning of the PFA's eleven-film retrospective for the actor currently on minds and screens thanks to his turn in Amour, that lasts this month and next. The series has its share of great films, such as Rohmer's My Night At Maud's, Bertolucci's The Conformist and Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ Express. But any good retrospective should include work that shows a range of quality so as not to give the impression that its subject was only involved in masterpieces. So although I appreciate the the opportunities to rewatch favorite films with Trintignant's performances particularly held in mind, I'm just as curious to see how react to films I haven't cared for before (perhaps because I've seen them only on video) like ...And God Created Woman and Z, and to see relatively lesser-known works like The Outside Man, which also plays the Castro March 8th, on a double-bill with The Terminator for some reason.

HOW: 35mm print imported from Institut Français.