Night On Earth (1991)

 

WHO: Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed this. Gena Rowlands appears in the first of its five segments.

WHAT: One of the more neglected films from the director of such independent-film classics as Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Dead Man, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai as well as the upcoming Only Lovers Left Alive, it's also one that, through its construction of five vignettes set in five separate cities across the United States and Europe, demonstrates the scope of Jarmusch's insider-cinephilia through its location and casting choices, many of which are meant to pay tribute to favorite directors through his choices of location and cast. Working backwards longitudinally (and chronologically), the Helsinki episode features actors known for working with Jarmusch's friends Aki & Mika Kaurismäki- and the late, great Matti Pellonpää even plays a character named Mika. Rome memorably involves actor/director Roberto Begnini, whom Jarmusch had worked with on Down By Law and the initial Coffee and Cigarettes short film, but also has Paolo Bonacelli playing a priest, a twisted homage to his role in Pasolini's Salò. The Paris segment casts Isaach De Bankolé, who had by this point already filmed performances in the first two features directed by Jarmusch's assistant director on Down By Law, Claire Denis. And the New York segment features Gianacarlo Esposito and Rosie Perez, both actors heavily associated with the work of Jarmusch's former NYU schoolmate Spike Lee. This paragraph is long enough so I'll deal with the fifth vignette in the "WHY" section just below...

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 9:05.

WHY: Jarmusch wrote the Los Angeles taxi passenger part for Gena Rowlands as a tribute to her performances in films made with her husband John Cassavetes, one of Jarmusch's filmmaker idols. On the supplemental materials for the Criterion DVD of Night On Earth Jarmusch says he was honored that Rowlands agreed to make his film mark her return to film work after the death of Cassavetes in 1989. However, this is contradicted by a New York Times article claiming that her performance in Lasse Hallström's Once Around was shot in January of 1990, when compared to the Night on Earth commentary track by cinematographer Frederick Elmes and sound man Drew Kunin, who indicate that the reason her scene begins at the Santa Monica Airport rather than a larger one was because of security issues relating to the First Gulf War.

No matter. Having Rowlands play a casting agent soon after her husband's death was surely a great honor for Jarmusch nonetheless. And it's a rare privilege for Frisco Bay audiences to be able to see Rowlands on the Castro screen on two consecutive Wednesdays; her Oscar-nominated performance in Cassavetes' 1980 film  Gloria screens there in 35mm on July 24th. I can't recall the last time this particular Cassavetes film screened in a local theatre and would be shocked if it was sometime in the past ten years.

HOW: On a double bill with Jarmusch's previous film Mystery Train, both on 35mm prints.

Audition (2012)

WHO: Karen Yasinsky is the artist who made this piece of animation. Her work often contains contains cinephilic content, for instance her series of drawings inspired by the films of Robert Altman, Robert Bresson and Jean Vigo.

WHAT: When Audition screened at last year's Views From The Avant-Garde sidebar of the New York Film Festival, Genevieve Yu wrote about it for Reverse Shot. Let me excerpt:

Yasinsky works over a few frames from John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, animating and repeating, in an intricate pattern that mimics dot-matrix commercial printing, the image of a woman prancing across a strip club stage, her skirt swirling Loie Fuller-like around her. Sit too close to the screen, and the image becomes illegible; it loses coherence the more closely it’s examined. The second half of the film features a book of early Japanese photographs whose pages are flipped before the camera.

The bridge between these two segments becomes the audio track: the music from the Cassavetes scene,  a beautiful piece called "Rainy Fields of Frost and Magic" by Neil Young sound-alike singer-songwriter Bo Harwood, whose demo-esque "scratch track" recordings used in this and other Cassavetes films retain a raw quality that fits the famous director's style as a maker of films that, in the words of Roger Ebert (R.I.P.): "gloriously celebrated the untidiness of life, at a time when everybody else was making neat, slick formula pictures".

Yasinsky has repurposed images from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in which a strip-club owner (played by Ben Gazzara) consoles himself after his gambling losses by auditioning a waitress (played by Trisha Pelham) alone one morning. There's a rather queasy sense of seduction in the original scene, violently interrupted when his girlfriend appears, but Yasinsky confines her animation to earlier moments of motion where the audition seems more innocent. This abstracted ambiguity when contrasted with the clarity of the yakuza-style tattoos on some of the subjects in the photo book provides grist for consideration of the human stories lying behind stereotypical underworld imagery, as Cassavetes' film does within the confines of the gangster narrative.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 9:15 at the Victoria Theatre on the corner of 16th Street and Capp in the Mission District of San Francisco.

WHY: Audition opens the second of eight programs in SF Cinematheque's fourth annual film festival devoted to personal, artist-created film and video, Crossroads. Last year, my favorite program was a selection of cosmically-considered works that all happened to be made by female directors (with one male co-director). Yasinksy's piece kicks of this year's only all-woman-made program, leading beautifully into The Room Called Heaven by Basque filmmaker Laida Lertxundi (who had a full program of her own at last year's Crossroads), and other works before the program finale, the world premiere of a sure crowd-pleaser by Jodie Mack, Dusty Stacks of Mom. The latter is one of the festival works highlighted by Cheryl Eddy in her fine SF Bay Guardian preview.

I was able to sample a few of the weekend's screenings in advance myself, and I selected Audition to highlight today because it's a good reminder of the place of personal, truly-independent filmmaking in larger cinephile culture. Not just as something to be looked at, but as an expression of its makers' own engagement with the moving images that move us to become movie lovers. When we think of the economics of Hollywood production we often forget it, but filmmakers, at least those not chasing after big box-office receipts, are usually cinephiles themselves, expressing their cinephilia in ways no less (and arguably more) valid than writing reviews or making lists or collecting DVDs, or obsessively going to the movies. I have a feeling that many of the filmmakers in attendance for Crossroads will trying to find ways of squeezing in trips to the two other major cinephile events happening in town this weekend: namely, the opening of Christian Marclay's The Clock at SFMOMA and the 35mm Roman Polanski retrospective at the Roxie.

Also note that Yasinsky's Life Is An Opinion, Fire Is A Fact will screen twice at the San Francisco International Film Festival, in its annual program co-presented with SF Cinematheque.

HOW: Audition screens as a digital video projection, but there are 16mm works on this program as well. Other Crossroads programs involve 35mm, 16mm, Super-8 and video projection.

Great Directors, Part One

So much I could/should write about in the Frisco Bay film scene right now. Why are there three costume-centric collections of film screenings happening here this weekend? I don't know. How mandatory is the April 14th pair of films at the PFA? pretty mandatory. What do I think of the lineup for the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival? I'll get to that.

But for the moment, all the oxygen in my writing brain is being taken up by Napoléon, which I was extremely lucky to be able to see twice in a period of nine days at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. The first time, I was sitting in the third row (the cheapest seats) and my senses were absolutely overwhelmed. The second time I was in the third-to-last row of the orchestra section and found myself able to enjoy the film on a more analytical level. I realized why this film so easily overcomes my general dislike of biographical films, for instance.

Watching most biopics, I find myself unable to trust the filmmakers' lens onto true historical events. When grinding facts into drama, filmmakers usually want to include the most iconic, seemingly pivotal scenes from an individual's life. Some will approach a well-documented event as careful to maintain historical accuracy as they can be, while others are more interested in re-enacting the way these events are passed down as legends in the popular imagination. How to deal with a less-documented event is more troublesome, especially when the storyteller's instinct to create character arcs, foreshadowing, and other techniques of dramatic license kicks in. An event springing from the screenwriter's imagination can try to pull the same dramatic weight as one documented by the most careful historians, leading to a flattening-out that feels oh-so-fraudulent to me about 95% of the time. In Napoléon, such pitfalls are avoided with the simple usage of the word "historical" in certain intertitles to indicate which scenes are drawn from verified accounts, and perhaps more importantly, by the word's absence, which are not. Rather than creating a cinema of footnotes, this distinction freed me up to appreciate the drama, as well as director Abel Gance's technique and point-of-view on the material.

On point-of-view, I must contest those who summarily insist that Gance's view of his subject is wholly uncritical and therefore counter-revolutionary or even fascistic. Remember that Napoléon is only the first installment of his planned hexalogy of films on Bonaparte; that it was only one of two he was able to film deprives us of knowing just how certain threads (such as the apparitions of Robespierre, Marat, etc. urging the general to carry their reforms outside the French borders, which Gance may well have intended to be a self-justification) would have resolved in later episodes. I hope a local venue can facilitate a chance to see Gance's 1960 reworking of his Part 3, Austerlitz, and/or Lupu Pick's silent-era filming of Gance's scenario for Part 6, Napoléon At St. Helena, sometime.

A word on the technique. It's just as astonishing as everyone says. I don't feel the need to go into the detail of how his shots were achieved, or even which moments were particularly dazzling to me. I was of course impressed by Gance's use of quick-cutting, of irises and filters, of overlapping images, of splitting the screen (all in-camera, as optical printing had not yet come onto the scene), of animation, of removing the camera from its tripod and shooting hand-held or using an imaginative array of makeshift dollies, and of shooting scenes with three cameras for the magnificent three-projector, three-screen panoramic finale, Many of these are often considered "avant-garde techniques" even today. Seeing them applied to a thoroughly accessible, crowd-pleasing film like Napoléon makes me want to retire that term though. Perhaps there are no "avant-garde techniques" but only "avant-garde" applications.

Though I understand the temptation to use the shorthand. Kevin Brownlow makes a convincing case that Gance's 3-screen Polyvision inspired major Hollywood studios to attempt widescreen processes (particularly Cinerama), arguably the purest application of his triple-projection vision today is a strand of multi-projector performance practiced by underground/experimental filmmakers through the tradition of "expanded cinema". Kenneth Anger once told Scott MacDonald that he was inspired by Gance's film to create his three-screen version of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which has not screened since the 1950s. Since then, Andy Warhol, Roger Beebe, Bruce McClure, and a host of others have made multi-projector work, and there will be opportunities to see modern-day examples by the likes of Greg Pope and Kerry Laitala at SF Cinematheques' upcoming Crossroads festival in May. More details on that forthcoming.

After these two screenings, I'm convinced that Abel Gance was a great director. I long to see Brownlow's documentary on him entitled The Charm of Dynamite. I'm sure it would be a wonderful addition to the currently-running screening series at Yerba Buena Center For The Arts. I've been able to preview a number of the selections in this series, entitled Great Directors Speak!, and I think it's a brilliant programming idea that hopefully will be successful enough to become a regular series at the venue. Of those I've been able to see so far, Marcel Ophüls, Jean Luc-Godard, John Cassavetes, Chantal Akerman, and Robert Bresson are each profiled in fascinatingly diverse ways in these documentaries, and I'm sure one's own experience and relationship with each director will make viewing the films a different experience for every single viewer.

Tonight's pairiing is of two hour-long pieces. Marcel Ophüls and Jean-Luc Godard: the Meeting in St-Gervais is simply documentation of an onstage discussion between the two directors (with very minimal contribution from moderators) after a screening of Ophüls' film about French Resistance and Nazi collaboration during World War II, The Sorrow And The Pity, in Godard's hometown of Geneva, Switzerland a couple years ago. The discussion is fascinating to me, even though I've never seen the Ophüls film (or any film made by the son of Max Ophüls, I must shamefully admit). Godard's eyes open up wide like the aperture of a camera trying to collect the maximum available light as he describes his own wartime boyhood, his admiration for Ophüls, and the shelving of the two directors' plans to make a film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict- or was it more generally about "Jewishness"- together in recent years. Ophüls for his part maintains a polite smile even when the discussion becomes contentious; "I don't want to be your Jewish whipping boy," he at one point exclaims. For one who has followed some of the controversies regarding Godard's alleged anti-Semitism since the release of Richard Brody's biography Everything Is Cinema, it's particularly illuminating to have Godard speak about some of the issues that caused contentiousness in his own voice.

The second screening tonight is of a 1968 episode of the French television program Filmmakers of Our Time, focusing on another legend often compared to Godard: John Cassavetes. (For instance, both Godard's Breathless and Cassavetes' Shadows were remarkable in their day in part for their unabashed employment of jump cuts, albeit in different ways.) Here Cassavetes is energized as he shows his French visitors around his Los Angeles studio in the midst of editing his second independent feature Faces, and less so in an interview conducted after the film's completion and uncertain release. Cassavetes diehard fans are likely to have seen this documentary before, as it is included as a special feature on the Criterion DVD set. For someone like me, who is a Cassavetes admirer but not obsessive, it's a very rewarding viewing. The famous director even comments briefly on the first version of Shadows which was rediscovered by Ray Carney some years ago and suppressed. Hearing what he has to say to the camera in the presence of his wife Gena Rowlands puts a new perspective on that controversy as well.

The Robert Bresson and Chantal Akerman episodes of Filmmakers of Our Time, which screen together at YBCA next Thursday were apparently released on VHS at one time, and an excerpt of the latter is found on the Criterion DVD of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. But to see them in full is rare today. François Weyergan approaches his interview with Bresson rather aggressively, stitching together a barrage of comments from the formidable auteur. Bresson distinguishes "cinema" from the higher form of "cinematography" that is not mired in roots of literature and theatre. When Weyergan asks when "cinematography" began to emerge, his subject answers, "It still hasn't happened. There have been attempts." Speaking this between The Trial Of Joan Of Arc (which, along with Pickpocket and the non-Bresson films Goldfinger and The Testement of Orpheus, the episode excerpts) and Au Hasard Balthazar, frequently considered his greatest masterpiece, made me wonder if he ever changed his mind about this- and if so, how soon afterward.

I have more to say on this series, and much more to say on the Frisco Bay screening scene, but I'd like to get this particular post published before tonight's screenings. So let me pause for now and continue in the near future. In the meantime, I highly recommend, either as a compliment to the YBCA screening series, or on its own, the new work by imprisoned Iranian director Jafar Panahi, This Is Not A Film; it opens for a week-long engagement tomorrow at the San Francisco Film Society Cinema a.k.a. New People. One of the major commercial releases of the year, I particularly recommend Noy Thrupkaew's review in The American Prospect for background on it. Might as well also link to Michael Sicinski's discussion of French director Bertrand Bonello, director of the also-excellent, but unfortunately-named House of Pleasures, which leaves town after tonight to make way for the Panahi film.

SFIFF52 Day 4: a Woman Under the Influence

The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival has begun and runs through May 7th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about one film I've seen or am hotly anticipating.

A Woman Under the Influence (USA: John Cassavetes, 1974)

playing: 5:45 PM tonight at the Castro, with no more showtimes later in the festival.
festival premiere: New York Film Festival, 1974
distributor: Criterion has a DVD out of course, but Cassavetes films should be seen in theatres when the opportunity arises. Brecht Andersch expects the newly-restored print to receive "something of a commercial run" but I wonder if he's being overly optimistic.

I have a confession to make: I have never seen John Cassavetes' a Woman Under the Influence. Shadows, Faces, Opening Night, Love Streams, yes, and all in cinemas. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie on home video only (probably the main reason why I like it the least of these). But not the film that put him the closest to mainstream respectability thanks to its two major Oscar nominations. Gena Rowlands was nominated for Best Actress for her performance; she's expected to attend the Castro screening. And Cassavetes was nominated for Best Director, losing to Francis Ford Coppola, who the festival is honoring May 1st also at the Castro alongside a screening of his 1969 film the Rain People.

It should be noted that initially many critics were hostile to a Woman Under the Influence, and even the positive Variety review had little more to say than that the film was "technically superior to any of John Cassavetes' previous works." Whatever that means in the context of Cassavetes; I suppose I'll find out this evening. All I know for sure is that each Cassavetes film I've seen is wholly different from every other, yet so distinctively part of a larger (love) stream of work that it's impossible not to recognize the author's presence behind the camera (even when he's also in front of it). It's also impossible not to recognize his influence over imitators, for good or ill. I'm eager for tonight, what I expect to be a real highlight of the festival.

SFIFF52 Day 4
Another option: Le Amiche (ITALY: Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1955), which Carl Martin in his round up of SFIFF revival screenings laments was subject to digital restoration, but that won't deter me from partaking.
Non-SFIFF-option for today: Gone With the Wind (USA: Victor Fleming, 1939) at the Stanford, if only to see that crane shot Val Lewton conceived of as a story editor for Selznick, on a big, beautiful screen.