Philip Fukuda: IOHTE

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 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Philip Fukuda is a volunteer at various local film festivals. 

 Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society

Monte-Cristo (Henri Fescourt, 1929, France). San Francisco International Film Festival, Kabuki Cinema. Lenny Borger, this year's SFIFF Mel Novikoff award winner, elected to screen the 3 plus hour silent Monte-Cristo. Based on the Alexandre Dumas, père novel, the director's meticulous attention to detail made this classic tale of revenge a delight for me. I'm convinced that the French were masters of the epic historical drama.

On the other end of the spectrum, The Swallow and the Titmouse (Andre Antoine, 1920/83, France) is a simple drama. Screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro Theatre. Filmed in a quasi-documentary style, The Swallow and the Titmouse (L'hirondelle et la mésange) shows the countryside pass by at leisurely pace as the barge travels between France and Belgium. Stephen Horne's piano and Diana Rowan's harp were the perfect accompaniment for the film.

100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History. San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro Theatre. This was one of the highlights of 2015's Silent Film Festival for me. This program presented footage discovered in the Museum of Modern Art's collection which consisted of scenes from Lime Kiln Field Day, shot in 1913 but never completed, USA featuring Bert Williams. It was a treat for me to see the pioneering black entertainer Bert Williams and showed why he was considered one of the top comedians of the day. I was also fascinated to see the performances shift over the course of multiple takes.

Screen capture from Miramax DVD of My Voyage to Italy

Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943, Italy). Noir City 13, Castro Theatre. I enjoyed this adaptation of James M Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice for its unglamorous and realistic view of the rural Italian countryside and equally earthy people that inhabit it. Visconti's love of the male body and opera are in full display in the film.

Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950, USA). Castro Theatre. I've seen this film many times, but I'm still knocked out by Gloria Swanson's bravura performance and Billy Wilder's and Charles Brackett's whip-smart dialogue. It's wonderful (and startling too) to see closeups of the still-beautiful 50-year old Swanson.

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955, USA). Castro Theatre. Charles Laughton's sole film directorial effort was a memorable one. It's German Expressionism meets Southern Gothic. I think the sets are wildly artificial yet so beautiful. Robert Mitchum's Rev. Harry Powell was a menacing a villain as I've ever seen. Though I'd seen it several times on DVD, this was the first time I'd seen it in a theater, and what better place than on the Castro's big screen.

The Wild, Wild Rose (Wang Tian-lin, 1960, Hong Kong). A Rare Noir is Good to Find! series, Roxie Theatre. Grace Chang, a pop mega-star in Hong Kong, chews the scenery and belts out Carmen in Chinese in this wildly entertaining film. One of my guilty pleasures of 2015.

Hope and Glory (John Boorman, 1987, UK). Mostly British Film Festival, Vogue Theatre. I thought it was a charming film showing both the childrens' and adults' reactions to the Blitz in World War II.

Screen capture from Wellspring DVD

Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai Ming-liang, 1992, Taiwan). Opera Plaza Cinema. Slacker teens, petty crime, video arcades in early 1990s Taipei. For me, it adds up to a lot more than the average teenage flick.

A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005, USA) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Though I only saw a few films at the David Cronenberg retrospective at YBCA screening room, A History of Violence was a standout. As the title implies, the film was full of thrills, but it was also full of knockout performances.

The Two Eyes Of Ben Armington

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 Ben Armington, Box Cubed chieftain, Roxie pinch hitter, furtive film-goer. 

1. Napoleon (Paramount Theatre, Silent Film Festival) Easily the film event of the year, perhaps of any year. Gance’s storied epic impressed with it’s sustained, crazed inventiveness-- every scene, even every shot of it’s 5 ½ hour runtime felt fired by a red-hot creativity and drive-the-car-over-the-cliff daring. The ending especially reached a hitherto unseen sweaty fugue state of messianic/maniac ecstatical delirium as we were treated to a fusillade of flickering images racing across the fabled triptych screens with the orchestra surging mightily to keep up. Tilt!

2. Grin Without A Cat (PFA, mini-Marker retro) The world is an infinitely poorer place with Chris Marker no longer around, whispering in our mind to look at the image differently, to re-consider the context. This was my second time wading through his awesomely compelling essay-digression on french politics and what the film cleverly calls the “third world war”, and I’m already ready to watch it again. One of my favorite punchlines of the year can be seen in the the sequence about Fidel Castro’s habit for fondling microphones during public speaking engagements. 

 3. Performance (Vogue Theatre, Mostly British Film Festival) Roeg & Cammell’s wigged out doppelganger classic slips a lurid gangster flick a double dip hit of free love utopianism and pretty soon it’s all roads lead to personality Altamont...and something like inner peace. This screening was enhanced by a neighborhood resident’s fireplace, which was close enough to the theatre to fill the auditorium with a thin layer of smoky heat. Or so we were told. 

 4. Rio Lobo/El Dorado (Stanford Theatre, Hawks Retro) Howard Hawks, Leigh Brackett, and the Duke rework their essential western Rio Bravo (itself reportedly a response to High Noon, a movie that Hawks and Wayne were none too fond of) not once but twice! The films were entertaining enough in their own right, but there was a special pleasure to be had tracing the continuities and variations between the films. My first visit to the Stanford, a venue I hope to spend more time at in the future. 

5. Underworld, USA. (Castro Theatre, Noir City X) A tawdry-urban-revenge melodrama, rife with pungent dialogue, ripe characters, and a plot that grips like a noose, from the bare knuckle-tabloid imagination of Sam Fuller. Cliff Robertson plays the hero with a startling heartlessness to his fellow humanity, often evincing disgusted disdain in the form of a mirthless thin-lipped smile to the other characters’ mewling protestations. He makes other no-bullshit seekers in the noir landscape like Lee Marvin in Point Blank or Michael Caine in Get Carter look positively cuddly by comparison. 

6. Wanda (SF MOMA, Cindy Sherman selects series) Terrific film that has been justifiably enjoying word-of-mouth revival love over the past few years and boasts quite a few hip celebrity admirers, like Cindy Sherman and John Waters. Directed, written and starring “actor’s director” Elia Kazan’s ex-showgirl second wife Barbara Loden, the film is that rare bird in that it pulls off a heart-breakingly well-observed character study that feels truly lived in without being signified as autobiographical. Tragically, Loden died before she was able to make another film. 

 7. Crossroads/A Trip To The Moon/2001 (Castro) One of the highlights of the side-winding, illuminating pairings the Castro does so well. I could have done without the really loud Air score laid over A Trip To the Moon, but it was a real treat to see Bruce Conner’s explosions in the sky. 

 8. Xtro (Roxie, Alamo Drafthouse co-presents) Bizarre pod-people movie obliquely dealing with the trauma of deadbeat dad’s return with trippy sci-fi imagery. Playing like E.T. directed by Cronenberg or Zulawski, the movie also finds time to capture London in the swinging 80’s with entertaining fashion photography and saucy au pairs. Also featuring a symbolic panther and full grown man-birth.  

9. On the Silver Globe (YBCA, Zulawski retro) My favorite in the Zulawski retrospective, a lightning bolt of future-medieval imagery and impossibly convoluted plotting that haunts me still. 

10. Year of the Dragon (Castro) Great, filthy 80’s “neo-noir” with Mickey Rourke up to his ears in intrigue in Chinatown. Rourke plays the lead character as a no-nonsense man of action, a strutting peacock, and a needy attention vortex, the type of fellow you may surreptitiously cross the street to avoid running into--- but Rourke manages to make almost magnetic. Director Michael Cimino matches him by piling on the gruesome detail and dramatic cheese.

Brief Encounter (1945)

WHO: David Lean directed it.

WHAT: This is what André Bazin had to say about this 1945 film in his 1949 review of The Bicycle Thief (though a few years later he recanted the paragraph and it is sometimes omitted from translations today): 

A film like Brief Encounter would probably have been impossible without the ten years of preparation by Grierson, Cavalcanti, or Rotha. But the English, instead of breaking with the technique and the history of European and American cinema, have succeeded in combining a highly refined aestheticism with the advances of a certain realism. Nothing could be more tightly structured, more carefully prepared, than Brief Encounter--- nothing less conceivable without the most up-to-date studio resources, without clever and established actors; yet can we imagine a more realistic portrait of English manners and psychology?

WHERE/WHEN: At the Vogue Theatre as part of the Mostly British Film Festival, at 2:30 PM,

WHY: It's very pleasant to see crowds at the 100-year-old single-screen Vogue Theatre at the Mostly British Film Festival, an annual spotlight on foreign films from the UK and certain current (Australia, South Africa) and former (Ireland) members of the Commonwealth of Nations. A good portion of these selections, including all of today's programs, are being shown in 35mm prints (check the Bay Area Film Calendar for details on the others). If you've never seen Brief Encounter with an audience, this is a rather rare opportunity to do so.

HOW: As suggested above, in 35mm. I'm hoping the Vogue will find a better solution for screening Academy-ratio film prints (another Lean film, This Happy Breed, today at noon for instance) than it used for last night's screening of Carol Reed's 1947 Odd Man Out, which was improperly masked as if a widescreen film- though it still retained much of its cinematic power in the wrong aspect ratio.

The Two Eyes Of David Robson

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 David Robson, proprietor of the House Of Sparrows blog:

In order seen:

- Perturbed though I was that all of the offerings I caught at the Vogue Theatre's Mostly British Film Festival were offered on video, the chance to catch up, in a single month, with Michael Apted's entire 7 UP series was just one gift the series offered. But THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE was the most compelling thing I saw there, its imagery of Antarctica (the first film ever shot there) offered new vitality by a smart and emotive score by Simon Fisher Turner. Scott and four of his companions never returned; in some kind of solidarity, I walked home from the Vogue.

- I'm pretty sure that all of the TWO EYES participants who saw the epic restoration of NAPOLEON at Oakland's Paramount Theatre will include it in their lists. The restoration of Abel Gance's epic (itself only a sixth of the total story he wanted to tell) was certainly one of the major film events of the year, well-served by its orchestral accompaniment in that lovely theatre. A bonus came from seeing it with my girlfriend, who had no idea the three-screen finale was coming and gushed excitedly upon its arrival.

- When I made a vow to never watch the Oscars again if they omitted Raul Ruiz from its In Memorian montage, Mr. Darr gently, firmly (and, of course, correctly) told me that I could be sure it wouldn't happen. And sure enough, the passing of Ruiz, despite his voluminous body of work, to say nothing of the sometimes incredible shit executed within that corpus, warranted nary a blip on Oscar's radar. Pacific Film Archive were more generous, and offered us a series of films unified by their literary origins. And though the series was far from complete, as some observed (though I remain weirdly optimistic that a Ruiz series can never be complete, as I'm positive he created much more work than logged by even his substantial IMDB filmography), it offered this filmgoer a first look at a decent cross-section of his oeuvre. I didn't like everything I saw; THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE STOLEN PAINTING bewitched me with its shadowy labyrinth and quietly witty imagery. And even if Ruiz has finished expanding his work, the end of it is nowhere in sight. It lives.

- A screening of a loose trilogy by Wong Kar-Wai at the Castro gave me a welcome second look at these interconnected romances. Though I remain somewhat distant from DAYS OF BEING WILD and found myself liking 2046 a bit less on seeing it again, I finally, belatedly connected with IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE. It's my new favorite of his films, perhaps, its slo-mo fancies, Maggie Cheung's dresses, intimate rooms, and Umebayashi score resonating in my mind even as I sit here recalling it.

- A number of people (maybe a majority) on their list of all-time favorite movies include films they've seen hundreds of times, and would enjoy again. It's not a bad criterion, but there are a couple of films on my list that I've only ever seen once, and fear I may never see again. My experiences with these films are quite special, a one-time-only glimpse of an incredible, intimate but far-away world. Such was my time viewing Zulawski's ON THE SILVER GLOBE (part of a touring retrospective hosted by Joel Shepard at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts). Some movies function like drugs, and you feel your mind expanding, your brain building upon itself to take in, navigate, and fully process the movie unfolding before your eyes. ON THE SILVER GLOBE remains one of the most powerful trips I've ever had, with cinema my sole intoxicant. It's all you need, really.

- I mean god dammit, if all DCP restorations of older films were undertaken with the care, diligence, and fanpassion as the digital PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE that the Castro screened in September, it'd make digital cinema a hell of a lot easier to bear. It looked lovely. And the movie's terrific, of course.

- I woke up late one August Saturday and my mind went to film. I had a particular craving for old school, 35mm thrills that only an aging print of a possibly schlocky movie could provide. What's at the Castro today? EARTHQUAKE. This can't possibly have been a deliberate piece of highly focused (and extremely well-anticipated) film programming, but Mark Robson (no relation)'s ensemble disaster drama was just what the DR ordered. Fantastic.

- Jesse Hawthorne Ficks' Midnites for Maniacs series, though it continues to struggle with the nonavailability of film prints, continued to offer an always intriguing selection of overlooked, semi-underground films for the Castro's audience. And even though it wound up screening (rather beautifully, as it turns out) on Blu-Ray, PHENOMENON became my favorite Dario Argento film at its M4M showing. A rare (unique?) coming-of-age film from its director, PHENOMENON found a lovely setting for its horrors in a weird area outside Zurich, pitched between Argento's supernatural and giallo modes.

- The Not Necessarily Noir 3 series at the Roxie was one of those events that brings out every cinephile in the Bay Area. There really was something for everyone in that sprawling series, with a robust enough selection spanning from well-known gems in the neo-noir canon to rare films seen for the first time by many in the audience. And yet my most treasured film in the series was TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. - though it's a film I know well, the screening here cemented it as an all-time favorite. It's probably William Friedkin's greatest labyrinth: though it yields a number of well-executed crime movie thrills, its more abstract details (from its tricky homoeroticism to its layers of artifice that suggest a film directed by its villain, counterfeiter Rick masters [Willem DaFoe]) continue to resonate and shift decades after its making. It certainly occasioned the most layered and intense post-screening discussion I had after a movie this year. I'm convinced that Roxie programmer Elliot Lavine had some kind of intimate congress with the print he screened, but I'm too polite and unimaginative to speculate here on the details. In any event, Lavine cannily paired the film with Woo's HARD BOILED, a film with as much to say about 1990s Hong Kong as TL&DILA has about 1980s America.

- I can't believe it took me this long to get down to the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, but after my first trip there in October I went a couple of more times before year's end. Most fun was blowing off work early, grabbing Caltrain down, and settling in for the MUMMY'S HAND/WOLF MAN two-fer. I was giddily excited for weeks before the program, and everything from the murky weather to the tastes of buttered popcorn and chocolate mixing in my mouth the the gonzoid fucking energy of THE MUMMY'S HAND made for a memorable night at the movies, and the perfect capper to the Halloween horror season. Exquisite.