10HTE: Sterling Hedgpeth

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 2016. An index of participants can be found here.

First-time IOHTE contributor Sterling Hedgpeth runs a stamps & cinema blog called The Filmatelist, from which he's allowed me to re-post (with different images) from this entry.

Dumbo screen capture from Disney DVD

We’ll start with Dumbo (Sharpsteen, 1941) at the Paramount in Oakland, on absolutely stunning 35mm. Although the emcee called it original (which it couldn’t have been, because that would have meant nitrate stock), it certainly was a crisply struck print that had not seen much circulation. Combine the divine “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence with the most gorgeous Art Deco palace in the Bay Area, and it was a great way to start the year.

Also in January were some memorable titles at Noir City at the Castro, and for me, the highlight was a first viewing of Mickey One (Penn, 1965), a glorious jazz-tinged fever dream of a film, with an assist from legend Stan Getz. Disjointed, bizarre, singularly unique and punctuated by a live dance routine from burlesque goddess Evie Lovelle.

Soon after, the PFA had an excellent Maurice Pialat series, but I suspect that the power of his Under the Sun of Satan (1987) was magnified by it being bookended (quite by coincidence) with two other contemporary films I saw the same week that also explore religious faith, fanaticism and hypocrisy: Pablo Larrain’s The Club and Avishai Sivan’s Tikkun. In Pialat’s fantasy-fueled acid bath Passion Play, he posits the possibility that religion may be the most oppressive to the truly devout. Overall, a provocative accidental trilogy.

The Beguiled screen shot from Universal DVD

Some fun Gothic films ran their course at the Yerba Buena Arts Center that summer, and the highlight was my first time seeing The Beguiled (1971) on the big screen. Still Don Siegel’s best, Clint Eastwood plays a Yankee fox trying to subvert and seduce a Dixie henhouse. The thick hothouse atmosphere and sexual tension played beautifully through Siegel's lighting and the insidious plotting and character power plays. Still a remarkable film (soon to be remade by Sofia Coppola).

Though a relatively recent movie, I have to include the Triplets of Belleville (Chomet, 2003) screening at the Taube Atrium in the SF Opera House because Benoît Charest was there with a jazz combo to perform his exquisite score live, including saws, bikes, and trashcans as percussion instruments. A terrific experience.

2016 was the first year the Alamo Drafthouse in the Mission was open, and the best part of their programming is the late night Mon-Wed screenings. My first dip into that pool was a packed show of Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, 1971), which I’ve seen several times in the theater, but never tire of the gearhead culture, the meditative structure and lack of urgency (for a racing film!) and Warren Oates’s phenomenal turn as GTO. My year was relatively short on roadtrips but this went some way to sating my wanderlust.

The Shining screen capture from Warner DVD

In my backyard at the Parkway, there was an irresistible double bill of the cuckoo-bananas conspiracy theory documentary Room 237 (Ascher, 2012) followed by a screening of the focus of its subject, The Shining (Kubrick, 1980) itself. Rarely does a year go by when I don’t see some Kubrick on screen (I also revisited Paths of Glory and Spartacus at the Smith Rafael Film Center for Kirk Douglas’s 100th birthday), but a bonus this year was an excellent exhibit on Kubrick at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in SF with some amazing artifacts from his career, including the typewriter and hedge maze model from this film.

Also at the Smith Rafael was a Sam Fuller weekend (with his widow and daughter in attendance), where the biggest revelation for me was his Tokyo noir House of Bamboo (1955), a beautifully stylized genre piece whose gangster trappings and compositions appeared to anticipate the marvelous Seijun Suzuki, whose career was starting around the exact same time. As you’d expect, Robert Ryan is in top form and the climax on a rooftop amusement park is a standout.

Destiny screen capture from Kino DVD

And finally, two silent films, both firsts for me. At the Silent Film Festival at the Castro, Destiny (1921), the earliest film I’ve seen by Fritz Lang and a glorious anthology of stories where Love must face down Death. It was wonderful seeing Lang’s visual imagination in bloom, anticipating the superb special FX and supernatural wonders of his next few years in Germany. Months later, over at the Niles Essanay Film Museum, the buoyant energy of underrated actress Bebe Daniels was on full display in the fizzy comedy Feel My Pulse (La Cava, 1928), about a hypochondriac heiress looking for rest at a health sanitarium which is actually acting as a front for bootleggers (led by a very young William Powell). A hilarious comedy and secret gem.

So that’s 10 features, but since I saw over 60 archival shorts in the theater last year, I’ll give an honorable mention to two with Buster Keaton, still silent in the autumn of his career. I saw The Railrodder (Potterton, 1965) at an Oddball Film Archive screening, featuring Buster traveling across Canada on an open-air mini-railcar, a playful reminder of his other great train film The General, but in sumptuous color. And around the same time, the Smith Rafael Film Center played Film (Schneider, 1965), one of Samuel Beckett’s few forays into film and a wonderful existential metaphor with Buster showing that age had not changed the expressiveness of his body in motion. A sublime pairing. Here’s looking forward to another year of familiar films and new discoveries.

Popeye (1980)

Screen shot from Paramount DVD.

WHO: Robert Altman directed Robin Williams in his first major motion picture role.

WHAT: Robert Altman directed thirty-six feature films and dozens upon dozens of plays and television episodes, but only one of these was an adaptation of a beloved comic strip character (who had been translated to screen by the Fleischer Brothers as animation nearly fifty years prior). It followed a post-Nashville hitless streak that included some of his strangest (and, some of them, among his best) movies, most notably the so-called "Fox Five": the Bergman-esque Three Women, the caustic comedy A Wedding, the enigmatic Quintet (which could be a good double-bill-mate with Bong Joon-ho's current Snowpiercer), the rock-and-roll romance A Perfect Couple, and the proto-Pret-A-Porter of the naturopathy movement HealtH. Longtime Altman collaborator David Levy is quoted in Mitchell Zuckoff's indispensable book Robert Altman: The Oral Biography: "if the five-picture Fox deal left his career in a place where it was on the precipice, this project would be the one that would either put him back on top or he'd be falling over into the abyss."

As it turned out, it became the latter, as Altman spent the following decade-plus persona non grata at Hollywood studios, forced to shut down his own company Lion's Gate (not to be confused with the current outfit), and scrape together television and below-the-radar independent projects (some of them excellent in their own right) until re-emerging with The Player in 1992. This was because of the critical and commercial failure of Popeye upon its opening. However, in a situation that seems impossible to replicate today, Popeye ultimately caught on with audiences starved for big-screen family entertainment, especially at weekend matinees across the country, and ended up, according to screenwriter Jules Feiffer, one of the top ten moneymakers of the year. Today its reputation is in ascendency among Altman fans, although the director always defended it, as at his last San Francisco public appearance at the Castro Theatre in 2003, when he called it his favorite of all his films in response to an audience question that denigrated it. It may be that, as a recent Dissolve article says, producer Robert Evans "bitterly regretted" the film, but in Zuckoff's book he calls it "a work of genius" and "Bob's best work", suggesting that it should be rereleased today.

As for Robin Williams, the star whose suicide this month would sadly be the most likely reason for such a rerelease, here are some of his comments in Robert Altman: the Oral Biography: 

It's a beautiful film, man. It's done with the same love he made every other film with. He told me later on, "Don't always go with a critical response. Go with, 'What did you do there?'" Yeah, we did do some really great stuff. I think it was just because it was my first movie, it was like the illusion--"I want the studio to make money." [. . .] I think for the first one of of the gate, that's a pretty amazing experience. It's kind of like Apocalypse Now without the death. . . . For your first movie to get the shit kicked out of it, it toughened me up. It's kind of, in a weird way, a gift. It was like, "Hey, now you go off and you work. You're no longer a virgin. You've been in your first battle. it wasn't a total victory but we didn't get slaughtered. So keep going."

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:20 tonight at the Castro Theatre, and 4:00 today and 3:00 Monday at the New Parkway in Oakland.

WHY: Popeye is a perfect MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS selection, as it snugly fits head MANiAC Jesse Hawthorne Ficks's neo-sincere philosophy of appreciation of "misunderstood and maligned" movies. Though tonight's Castro screening is surely going to be affected by the spike of interest in Williams following his suicide, it was actually planned (unlike the New Parkway shows) before the star made that tragic decision. So although it's not one of the first Williams tribute screenings here in San Francisco, it will end up being the first at the Castro Theatre, to be followed by eight shows on that venue's newly-announced September calendar. If you click that link you can also see the first programs for October at the Castro, beginning with an October 1st tribute to the late Lauren Bacall, who was tributed beautifully by in this week's issue of Eat Drink Films by Eddie Muller, by way of the vivid description of the circumstances of his 2007 interview with the Hollywood icon (who incidentally starred in Altman's HealtH along with the recently-deceased James Garner; it's been a bad summer for stars of 1980 Altman films.) The back page of the September Castro calendar gives us a bit more information than what's available on-line. More Bacall tribute screenings there will include Key Largo and Harper on October 12th and How to Marry a Millionaire and Written on the Wind on October 19th. Although the Castro now has a new 4K projector for its digital screenings, which will be used to show this weekend's booking of Lawrence of Arabia (I hope this doesn't spell the end of 70mm screenings at one of the few local venues which can theoretically hold them, although I fear it might), I hope that, like most of the Robin Williams tribute showings (all but Popeye and The Fisher King), most of the Bacall screenings will be able to be shown in 35mm prints. No word on that yet, though. UPDATE: Shortly after publication I learned that all the Bacall films will be shown in their native 35mm, other than How to Marry a Millionaire.

As Cheryl Eddy notes in her excellent SF Bay Guardian Fall preview of Frisco Bay cinema options (from which I have finally updated my sidebar of upcoming film festivals, if you scroll up and to the right), the next MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS screening is (a week before previously announced) a September 19th showing of Inside Llewyn Davis (shot on film but sadly unavailable to screen that way, it seems) and a 35mm print of Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter. What she doesn't mention (presumably because it was unavailable at press time) are some of the other terrific Castro September options, such as the rarely seen Bob Fosse film Sweet Charity screening in 35mm with the new DCP of All That Jazz September 6th, or a 35mm double-bill of Red Desert and Mickey One Sept. 24, or two prints of Sam Fuller films Park Row and Pickup on South Street, playing with a new documentary by his daughter Samantha called A Fuller Life, on Sept. 28. 

HOW: Tonight's screening is a double-feature with a 35mm print of Sidney Lumet's The Wiz, but Popeye itself will be screened as DCP. The New Parkway's showing will also be digital, as always at that venue.

Rush (2013)

WHO: Anthony Dod Mantle is the director of photography on this, and Ron Howard directed it.

WHAT: It wasn't a box office hit in this country but Rush has been satisfying most people who see it, other than highbrow critics and cinephiles who tend to wince at the sight of Ron Howard's director credit. Some of them, anyway; I consider myself in that latter group but I actually found this a pretty good flick; certainly Howard's best at least since my sentimental favorite Parenthood. I don't really attribute this film's success to Howard as much as to DP Anthony Dod Mantle, however. It's an unlikely combination. Who would have thought in, say, 1999, that the director of EDTV might end up hiring the digital-video wizard behind the images in anti-mainstream pictures like The Celebration and Julien Donkey-Boy? But his images here, which don't try to ape the look of photochemical film as much as they try to suggest an alternative, are what give what would otherwise be a very conventional true-life sports melodrama its distinction. Even negative reviews tend to single out Dod Mantle's camerawork for praise. Such as Robert Ham's:

The canniest choice that Howard made in this film was bringing former Dogme 95 acolyte Anthony Dod Mantle on board as cinematographer. Shooting digitally, the Brit helps bring to life the desaturated colors of the era with real flair. It often feels like flipping through a box of Kodak prints from 1976.

WHERE/WHEN: Today at 4:30, Wednesday at 6:20, and Thursday at 8:15 at the New Parkway in Oakland.

WHY: Yesterday the still-accurately-named New Parkway celebrated its first birthday. Not even old enough to attend any of its own movies except at its weekly "baby brigade" Monday showings, intended for moms and dads who want to catch a big-screen movie without having to spring for a sitter. (Warning to all: do not attend today's screening of Rush if you have an aversion to the sounds of little ones in a theatre. See another movie or go another day instead.) 

Last month I finally made a second trip to the venue, after the one I reported on last January. This time, I watched a movie that had been shot on film but was being projected on video, and though it perhaps felt more like watching a giant-sized HD television than going to a movie, perhaps this wasn't such an inappropriate way to see a movie that's based on an instant-cult-classic television series. The movie was Serenity, (I'd never seen it or any of the Firefly series before) and though it was enjoyable enough, what I most liked was the convivial atmosphere amidst a devoted group of fans (though I did not notice anyone actually wearing brown coats from my vantage point in the Theatre 1 balcony.) I did feel the theatre set-up was better than in Theatre 2, which I'd sampled almost a year ago, simply because there wasn't a doorway leading to a bright hallway on the same wall as the screen (I forgot to check if they'd installed a curtain or something to prevent light from distracting viewers whenever a server or someone else entered Theatre 2 during a screening). Unfortunately, the slight keystone issue I'd noticed at Holy Motors was evident at this showing as well; at least this time I told the staff about it and they seemed interested in trying to fix it for future showings.

Anyway, congratulations on your first year of operation, New Parkway, and I hope it doesn't take as long for me to make my third visit as it did for me to make my second.

HOW: Rush was shot on an array of digital cameras, and screens digitally as well.

Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

WHO: Maya Deren directed this.

WHAT: Coming as it does after her landmark psychodramas Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land, Ritual in Transfigured Time is still an under-appreciated Deren work. Acquarello describes the film's opening in her review:

an animated, approachable female figure (Maya Deren) alternately framed in high contrast against a pair of interchangeable doorways, beckons a seemingly naïve young dancer (Rita Christiani) into a large adjoining room to assist in an implied Sisyphean domestic ritual before being summoned by a striking, cosmopolitan figure (Anaïs Nin) awaiting in an opposite doorway.

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM tonight only at Oddball Films. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117.

WHY: The cost of striking and renting 35mm prints is reaching ever-escalating heights. If the Pacific Film Archive 's upcoming complete Pasolini retrospective is being charged the same amounts a friend programming in another North American city mentioned he was quoted to screen some of the Marxist filmmaker's key works, there's no way they're making up the cost in ticket sales the old-fashioned capitalist way. It's no wonder that for-profit venues like the Castro are becoming more reliant on cheaper DCP technology to source their screening content (though its excellent September calendar is thankfully relatively light on repertory titles screening digitally).

As bleak as things might get for continued 35mm distribution, however, I'm optimistic that film-on-film exhibition will not die before audience demand for it does. Networks of archives and collectors who recognize the unique qualities of the film medium will continue the tradition of screening reels of films through mechanical projection equipment. The selection of titles may become more limited geographically, consisting more and more of titles that don't have to be shipped in heavy canisters for thousands of miles, but in a place like the Bay Area, with its many collectors and official and unofficial archives, the number of available titles will still be practically inexhaustible, as long as support from audiences encourages collaboration between local collectors and venues. As the organic food crowd has gravitated to the sustainability of the locavore movement so too can cinephiles encourage a community-based alternative movement to massive and costly distribution. It just needs a good name. Perhaps someone can think of something better than "parokinal" (my awkward mash-up of "parochial" and "kino").

I don't know where the Vortex Room sourced its print of Car Crash last night, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a local collector. Local collections also form the backbone of programming at both the Niles Essnaay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, CA (which has revealed its September Saturday night schedule, and, via pdf, all its other screenings through the end of October) and the Berkeley Underground Film Society. The Psychotronix Film Festival is giving film purists a rare chance to see 16mm projections at the New Parkway in Oakland this Sunday. Even the Pacific Film Archive sometimes supplements its 35mm programs with 16mm prints of varying provenance; the Wendell Corey series starting there tonight is mostly in 35mm, but includes one DCP presentation (Sorry, Wrong Number) and two 16mm shows (Anthony Mann's The Furies tomorrow night and series closing Elvis vehicle Loving You).

But in San Francisco, Oddball Films is the king of the "parokinal" universe. A vast 16mm archive stored in a Mission loft that also houses its director Stephen Parr, Oddball has been screening selections from its collection weekly for years. Tonight's program curated by Scotty Slade is both typically diverse and notably deep. Entitled "Aligning the Trance Particles", Slade's selection includes experimental films like Ritual In Transfigured Time and Pat O'Neill's 7632 as well as ethnographic documentations like the 1964 Pomo Shaman and even a prize-winning scientific film made by Carol Ballard (of  The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf fame) called Crystalization which captures imagery through an electron microscope. I'm planning to go. See you there?

HOW: If tradition holds, all the films in tonight's program including Ritual in Transfigured Time come from Oddball's collection of 16mm prints.

The Act of Killing (2012)

WHO: Joshua Oppenheimer directed this film, along with Christine Cynn and another, anonymous, co-director.

WHAT: The Act of Killing is not just a movie. It's a starting point for discussion, understanding, and hopefully transformative political change- and not just in the country where it was filmed. It's a very 21st-century documentary, in that it cannot be fully comprehended by an audience unfamiliar with Indonesia's political history. If you don't know this history at all (and perhaps even if you do), you are likely to walk away from a viewing of the film with some serious misapprehensions about it.
But watching is a powerful experience no matter what your level of foreknowledge. Complaints that the film needs more context ignore two things: the fact that in 2013 it's increasingly easy for many if not most viewers to do enough basic research after being moved by a screening that they'll have sufficient ability to understand what they missed, and the fact that a less-informed viewer might be able to better apply the universal themes about the nature of humanity to contexts outside Indonesia, than an informed viewed might.

Part of the paradox is that the film's power to shock us out of complacency comes in part from its strangeness and surprises. Which means it's probably best for a fresh viewer not to do much if any reading about the film before viewing it, especially if they're not well-versed in Indonesian politics. Thus I'm avoiding saying much about the film at all. But if you absolutely must read about the film before watching it, I'll point to Arya Ponto's review as one I really appreciated reading after my own viewing.

WHERE/WHEN: Multiple showtimes daily through Thursday at the Opera Plaza Cinema, the Shattuck in Berkeley, and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. It will remain for another week at the Opera Plaza starting Friday, but disappear from the other two venues. It will return to the East Bay September 13-19 at the New Parkway in Oakland.

WHY: Mid-August is the time of year when film festivals are few and far between and mainstream Hollywood films aren't even expected to be very good by their most ardent fans. So it's a perfect time to catch up with new arthouse releases, of which this is probably the most "important" and unusual currently in local cinemas.

HOW: All three venues currently screening this digitally-produced documentary are doing so digitally and in the 122-minute version. I'm hoping the all-digital New Parkway or another local venue will consider showing the 159-minute extended cut (which I believe has not screened at any Bay Area venue).

The Women Outside: Korean Women and the U.S. Military (1996)

WHO: J.T. Takagi & Hye Jung Park directed this documentary.

WHAT: I haven't seen this, but here's a succinct synopsis from a footnote in Glen Mimura's 2008 book Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video:

This film centers on the stories of several Korean women who were involved in the sex industry, and illuminates the industry's multitiered political economy, including the more than 180 "camp towns" set up and regulated by the U.S. Army.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the New Parkway at 7:00. Though the venue website lists the run-time as "unknown", its distributor Third World Newsreel indicates it as 60 minutes long.

WHY: This month is "Karma Cinema Month" at the New Parkway, which means that every admission ticket purchased has 30% of it donated to local non-profits. Not only that, all ticket prices this month are "pay-what-you-wish"; I wonder if this might result in a higher-than-usual overall box office take, even with that 30% going to charity?

Other movies screening at the venue right now include Before Midnight (currently showing on 35mm at the Opera Plaza, but shot digitally so perhaps the New Parkway's projection is preferable for some), Man of Steel, Kings of Summer and Much Ado About Nothing. The upcoming schedule also includes quite a few interesting options during the month, including a showcase of African and Haitian films called the Matatu Film Festival August 15-17. But tonight's screening of The Women Outside is not just a boon to the non-profits on the New Parkway's "Karma Cinema Month" list; it's also a co-presentation of the Alipato Project and the usual licensing fee to screen the doc has been waived by distributor Third World Newsreel in order to help audiences support the East Bay domestic violence-combating organization.

HOW: Digital presentation. I have been unable to determine whether this was shot on 16mm, or on analog video, or on another format.

Godzilla (1954)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (2012)

WHO: If you watched Sesame Street in the 1970s, you may remember Shola Lynch as one of the kids who interacted with Muppets like Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie during segments of that show. Now Lynch is a grown woman and a director of documentaries like this one.

WHAT: I haven't seen this, but Sam Adams has a favorable review I'll quote from:

Lynch, who profiled black presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm in 2004’s Unbought And Unbossed, has slicked up her game considerably in the intervening years, deftly interweaving archival footage and new interviews. (Having Jay-Z and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith on board as executive producers doubtless bought her plenty of time in the edit room.) There’s less vintage footage of Davis addressing crowds than one might like, but in the present day, Davis remains a beguiling and charismatic speaker, even if the temperature of her rhetoric has cooled significantly.

WHERE/WHEN:  Tonight at 6:30 PM and Wednesday at 7:00 PM at the New Parkway in downtown Oakland.

WHY: There are five fewer arthouse screens in San Francisco this month than last month thanks to the current renovation of the Embarcadero Cinema. A total of ten SF screens have now gone essentially dark in the past year, after the permanent closure of the Lumiere and Bridge and the relegation of New People's screen to occasional festival rentals (like the upcoming Japan Film Festival). Under such conditions it's almost inevitable that certain documentaries and other commercially risky movies will start to get runs in Alameda County but not in San Francisco more frequently than before. Free Angela and All Political Prisoners is an example, and though its East Bay-centric subject matter makes this perhaps understandable, it's a reminder that movie lovers on this side of the Bay Bridge may need to keep closer eye on what's playing at cinemas on the other side if they want a full array of moviegoing options.

HOW: Video projection.

My Way To Olympia (2013)

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The Source Family (2012)

WHO: Co-directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos.

WHAT: Want to spend time in a vegetarian, psychedelic, mystical personality cult? No? How about just 98 minutes? This documentary about a Los Angeles religious community active in the early 1970s is well worth your time if you have any interest in California counterculture of that era. The Source Family, sometimes known as the Aquarians, was a commune of followers of a World War II vet named Jim Baker, who opened several popular health food restaurants, the last of which, The Source, was frequented by the likes of Goldie Hawn and Steve McQueen, and even made cinematic appearances in Hollywood films like Alex in Wonderland and Annie Hall (the doc provides relevant clips).

Inspired by the Kundalini Yoga teachings of Yogi Bhajan, Baker changed his name to "Father Yod" and selected a 19-year old named Robin to become "Mother Ah-Om" to help him set a new religion based on "the best" of all existing ones. 140 youngsters were drawn to his charismatic presence and came to live on his compound, donate their savings, work in his restaurant, and travel with him down a spiritual path involving the usual sex, drugs and rock and roll, but that ultimately took some bizarre turns. Though nothing as massively tragic as what's depicted in Oakland filmmaker Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: the Life and Death of Peoples Temple; the Source Family may have some superficial connections to Peoples Temple in that both attracted seekers trained by the 1960s political climate to distrust traditional father figures even if they still craved a kind of paternal authority, but it's clear that they were not very similar in some fundamental ways.

Made up mostly of interviews with former Source Family members, as well as the personal archive of Isis Aquarian, the now-septugenarien "family historian and temple keeper", The Source Family is no formal ground-breaker. It has a "generally favorable" rating on Metacritic, which seems fair enough. But I notice that the two most unfavorable reviews (neither outright pans) fault the film for not including more of an attempt to place The Source Family into the social and religious context of its time. It's true that directors Wille and Demopoulos largely avoid panning out to a view of the forest, preferring to examine the story at tree-level, almost as if the audience is experiencing the history of the movement from the perspective of someone who was a part of it at the time. Writer Erik Davis and a few other outsiders do provide a bit of analysis and context, mostly their commentary revolves around the musical recordings Father Yod and his followers published, which we also hear samples of throughout the soundtrack, and which now fetch pretty prices in psychedelic record collecting circles.

But though this approach meant that the film took a little bit of time to truly blossom into a compelling story, it also feels respectful of the audience, which is nonetheless given plenty of information and allowed to make up its own mind about went on in Father Yod's group (I know I'm being vague, but I don't want to give away any of the most unexpected revelations. If you want to know more than even the film tells you about Father Yod and his legacy, this article and the currently-active comment thread below might do the trick. But it may make a viewing of The Source Family less enjoyable.)

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the New Parkway at 7:00.

WHY: Lots of documentaries at The New Parkway this week. This plays this as part of its weekly Doc Night held each Tuesday. The venue will also host a documentary tomorrow night: After Innocence, sponsored by the ACLU and screening for free. Friday through Sunday, it joins the Roxie in hosting SF Indie's Doc Fest. And Monday it shows Crossing The Line, about a US Army defector now living in North Korea.

HOW: Digital projection, as always at the New Parkway.

Eternity And A Day (1998)

WHO: Directed by Theo Angelopoulos, the master Greek filmmaker who was killed in a car accident at the age of 76 over a year ago.

WHAT: I haven't seen Eternity and a Day but it's certainly one of Angelopoulos's most lauded works. In fact it was awarded the top prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival (the Palme d'Or) a unanimous decision by a jury headed up by Martin Scorsese.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today only at the Castro Theatre, at 4:20 and 9:20 PM.

WHY: The 2013 Cannes competition line-up isn't announced until next week, but already there are are people trying to guess at contenders for the top award. Of course, not every Palme d'Or winner truly stands the test of time as a great film (anyone want to make the case for Pelle the Conqueror or Fahrenheit 9/11 right now?) and in fact an upcoming screening series in New York called Booed At Cannes is a reminder of how a poor reception at Cannes screenings doesn't exactly doom a film to more obscurity than a good one does. (Although it's interesting to note that two Palme winners appear in that series: Taxi Driver and Wild At Heart.) I hope this series travels here, as there's hardly a film in it I wouldn't like to see (or re-see) on the big screen.

Upon sampling Angelopoulos's The Travelling Players on VHS years ago I realized that the big screen was the only place for me to really take in the Greek master's motion pictures, so I determined to wait for screenings to appear at local cinemas. It's been a long wait; as far as I know today's showings are the first 35mm screenings of one of his films here since The Weeping Meadow got a short run at the Balboa seven and a half years ago.

Other films that have won the top Cannes prize (not always called the Palme d'Or but that's a long and complicated story) that are set to screen in Frisco Bay theatres soon include Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up next Wednesday at the Castro, Francesco Rosi's The Mattei Affair at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Wild At Heart and Pulp Fiction, which both screen in upcoming slots in the New Parkway's Thursday night "Parkway Classics" series, and Amour, the most recent winner and Eternity and a Day's double-bill-mate at the Castro today.

HOW: Eternity and a Day screens from a 35mm print, and its co-feature Amour is a digital production screened on DCP.

Sita Sings The Blues (2008)

WHO: Nina Paley wrote and directed this partially-autobiographical animation.

WHAT: It's unfortunate that, because Sita Sings The Blues became a cause célèbre in the ongoing copyright vs. copyleft battles over corporate control of cultural heritage, discussions of the film often overlook how great an example of virtuoso animation it is. There's more expressiveness of character through movement, more diversity in motion styles, and generally more eye-popping visual material than anything I've seen using Flash. All this is crucial to making a movie that sustains visual as well as narrative interest throughout its 82-minute runtime.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at the New Parkway Theatre at 4:00 PM this afternoon, and at 12:30 PM tomorrow afternoon.

WHY: I haven't yet made a return visit to the New Parkway since my first trip (which I wrote a bit about here) but have noticed that the venue has really expanded its array of special programs in the past few months.  In addition to Thrillville and the Spectrum Queer Media events every Sunday, there's a Tuesday night doc night (upcoming screenings include The Game Changers Project and A Fierce Green Fire), a monthly Grindhouse series that has presented digital screenings of titles like Fulci's Zombie and Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (tonight it plays the original Evil Dead movie), and a music-themed screening series co-hosted by the Spinning Platters blog (coming Saturday April 13th: a Trapped In The Closet sing-along). Sita Sings the Blues screens as part of a Family Classics series, though the feature has appeal to animation fans of all ages. If you haven't seen it yet, the New Parkway is a perfect place to do it, with comfortable couches to sit upon, a variety of food and drink at your beck and call, etc. And if you haven't visited the New Parkway yet, this seems like a perfect screening to sample; it's a natively-digital work so it's a natural fit for an all-digital cinema like this one.

Meanwhile, Nina Paley is working on making her (possibly?) feature-length follow-up to Sita Sings The Blues, and it's called Seder-Masochism. Late last year she posted a segment of it entitled This Land Is Mine online. On April 27th this mini-movie will screen as part of a not-for-the-kiddies Other Cinema program called Animation in Action, which also features works by frame-by-frame experimenters like Dave Fleischer, Lewis Klahr, Martha Colburn, and Janie Geiser.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digital production.

Blue Hawaii (1961)

WHO: Happy 78th birthday to Elvis Presley (in two days, to be precise). He'll surely be celebrating somewhere...

WHAT: Blue Hawaii was the biggest box office success of his motion picture career. I've never seen any of his movies though- probably should remedy that someday.

WHERE/WHEN: 6PM at the New Parkway, just a short walk from the 19th Street BART station in Oakland. 

WHY: Wait, back up. The New Parkway: what's that?  For those of you who remember the original Parkway which closed nearly four years ago, it still stands vacant near Lake Merritt, which is a shame. But a new group of community-minded Oaklanders have been able to borrow that cinema's name and some of the essentials of its 1997-2009 business model (couches, pizza, beer, and second-run movies) and recreate it in a former auto shop in the Uptown neighborhood, while adding some new flavors to the literal and figurative menu. The doors opened to the public a couple weeks ago after a few delays, and the opening weekend was made rockier by a picket by the local projectionists union and its supporters, which appears to have been resolved fairly quickly. I decided to check the place out myself Thursday night for my second viewing of Holy Motors, and was for the most part pretty impressed with the operation, although I did not order food or drink on this visit so I can't really comment on that aspect of the experience. Anyway, Blue Hawaii (a replacement for a previously-scheduled Elvis picture Viva Las Vegas) kicks off the 2013 Thrillville schedule of cult movies programmed by one holdover from the previous Parkway staff: Will "The Thrill" Viharo. Other special programs the venue is exploring include a documentary night, a grindhouse night, and Queer Sunday Matinee that today includes It Gets Messy In Here. 

HOW: The one disappointment (though in no way a surprise) about the New Parkway is that its screenings are digital-only. Holy Motors was shot digitally and looked pretty good digitally-projected, although I did detect a very slight keystoning issue (that my companion, a filmmaker, did not notice until I pointed it out). Blue Hawaii was shot on film of course, so it's more of a disappointment that it'll be projected via DVD. If you know of a place showing Elvis movies on 35mm, much less one where you can order sangria and quesadillas to consume during the show, let me know.