Stray Dogs (2013)

A scene from Tsai Ming-liang's STRAY DOGS, playing at the 57th San Franicsco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based auteur Tsai Ming-Liang directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: Tsai's films have long developed recurrent themes of home and rootlessness, but with Stray Dogs he uses these to create his rawest, bitterest attack on Taiwan's inequalities thus far. His first digital feature employs surveillance-style footage of his actor fetiche Lee Kang-sheng and two youngsters tramping through and setting camp in locations "stolen" whether by crew or characters. It culminates in a fourteen-minute take that's simultaneously unforgiving and about forgiveness.

That 75-word capsule is all I'm allowed to write while we await a potential commercial distribution of this film, but there are plenty of more untethered critics who have written very thoughtfully and substantially on Stray Dogs and most (though surprisingly not Martin Tsai's useful reading) are linked on the addictive Critics Round Up website.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 3:15 PM today at New People and 6:30 PM tomorrow at the Pacific Film Archive, both thanks to the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: It's been just over seven years since a new Tsai Ming-Liang feature film has appeared in Frisco Bay cinemas. The last was I Don't Want To Sleep Alone, which debuted here in April 2007 at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. In the meantime, Tsai's 2009 film Face received mixed-at-best reviews at other film festivals around the world, bypassed local cinema screens, and has not even been officially released on DVD (though I've been told it's on Netflix Instant, I've never subscribed and have still yet to catch up with this work; I suppose I still hold out hope it may arrive through another means). And a new featurette called Journey To The West has just started making festival rounds, though it has yet to land here yet.

Watching Stray Dogs made me realize how rusty I've gotten at watching Tsai's films in cinemas, and made me want to have that experience again with one of his prior films. Not a moment too soon, I received an advance look at a program YBCA's Joel Shepard put together for this summer. One of the selections in this screening series is my own (a real honor and my first stab at programming 35mm, I picked a Robert Altman film that means an awful lot to me) but I think I'm equally excited to see the other nine films in the series. Eight of them I've never seen at all and in most cases have longed to for years, and the ninth (or should I say the first), screening July 20th, is a Tsai film I've only seen on home video before: The Hole. It was my introduction to his work way back when, and I'm thrilled to be able to get a chance to watch it in 35mm in just a few short months. Here's the full line-up for the YBCA series:

Invasion of the Cinemaniacs!
July 20 - Sept 25
Sun, Jul 20, 2pm Karen Larsen presents The Hole By Tsai Ming-liang
Thu, Jul 24, 7:30pm Brian Darr presents The Company By Robert Altman
Sun, Jul 27, 2pm Jonathan L. Knapp presents Colorado Territory By Raoul Walsh
Sat, Aug 9, 7:30pm Cheryl Eddy presents Death Wish 3 By Michael Winner
Sun, Aug 10, 2pm Adam Hartzell presents Madame Freedom By Han Hyeong-mo
Sat, Aug 23, 7:30pm Michael Guillén presents Hell Without Limits (El Lugar Sin Límites) By Arturo Ripstein
Sun, Aug 24, 2pm David Wong presents The Exile By Max Ophüls
Thurs, Sept 18, 7:30pm Alby Lim presents Pietà By Kim Ki-duk
Sun, Sept 21, 2pm Lynn Cursaro presents Little Fugitive By Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin & Ray Ashley
Thurs, Sept 25, 7:30pm David Robson presents The Brides Of Dracula By Terence Fisher

HOW: Stray Dogs screens digitally, as it was shot.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 6 allows festgoers a final chance to see Manuscripts Don't Burn, Blind Dates and All About the Feathers, and features the first of two silent film/indie rock pairings of SFIFF57: Thao and the Get Down Stay Down playing new music for Charlie Chaplin's The Pawn Shop, Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich’s The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, and more.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub's Too Soon, Too Late screens digitally at Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland.

Club Sandwich (2013)

A scene from Fernando Eimbcke's CLUB SANDWICH, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society..

WHO: Mexican auteur Fernando Eimbcke wrote and directed this, his third feature film, following Duck Season and Lake Tahoe.

WHAT: One of my favorite scenes from Club Sandwich comes toward the end of the film. (You may want to skip ahead if you're a spoiler-averse hardliner, although I don't think this film or this scene depend on narrative surprise for their success.) Four people are in a car driving on an unpopulated road, and the camera is placed on the hood so we can see all four through the windshield. The driver is Enrique Arreola, who played the pizza deliveryman in Duck Season. Here his role is much smaller; just this scene and another, and no words of dialogue (although his voice is heard on a radio in a third scene, presumably not playing the same character). In the passenger seat is Danae Reynaud, who's playing Paloma, a thirty-something mother of a teenage boy named Hector, played by  Lucio Giménez Cacho (son of Spanish film star Daniel Giménez Cacho, making his film debut). Hector and 16-year-old Jazimn (played by María Renée Prudencio, another screen newcomer) are making out in the back seat while Paloma hunches asleep in her seat. Eventually she wakes up, starts looking around at her surroundings, and finally glances in the rear-view mirror the smooching the audience has been able to watch all along. Though visibly perturbed she plays it cool, yelping as she pretends to swat a mosquito as a way to alert the ineptly-furtive youngsters that their romance just might be discovered.

Club Sandwich, like Eimbcke's prior features, has a title that appears almost random and tossed-off upon first glance. Early in the film, we think we understand its connection to the film when that food is ordered by Paloma and Hector, a single mom and her 15-year-old on a cheap vacation in Oaxaca during the too-hot-for-tourists season. With the hotel pool to themselves, they lounge determinedly, their comments about each others' swimsuits and body shapes revealing a habitual closeness between the pair almost as much as does their frequent nagging of each other about stray fluids in the bathroom (the shower floor; the toilet seat) or the apparent awkwardness Hector exhibits when his hot mom rubs sunscreen over his broad back. He's at the age when he's longing for a less motherly form of female touching, but of course Paloma is the last person on earth he wants to know that.

But there's not really such thing as a sandwich with only two elements to it. Another family arrives at the hotel, and the way lovely Jazmin and Hector at first avoid each other makes quite clear that each has got at least one eye on the only other member of their peer group in sight. Eimbcke is after three films proving himself to be a master of presenting unspoken communication. He guides his three lead actors to tell us just about all we need to know about their characters through their glances, their gestures, and their body language. Inevitably, Jazmin introduces herself to Hector, and soon enough she's the one rubbing lotions on his back as they have deeply laconic conversations about air conditioning, which lead to more lustful interactions. Only when out of their parents' eyesight of course.

So can these three form a club? Once she realizes what's going on with her son (or some of it, anyway; I haven't mentioned his fascination with her bikini top or his late-night masturbation sessions), Paloma makes an effort to draw Jazmin into the kind of conversation Hector had no need to stoop to: what's her family like, what are her interests, etc. By now knows she won't get anywhere talking with Hector about her; there's nothing more mortifying for a teenage boy than admitting to your mother that you're a sexual being. But she finally lets her guard down and reveals just how jealous she is of her son's emergence from family cocooning, in a hilariously and poignantly awkward late night variation on truth-or-dare. It's a perfect climax to a charming, funny little gem of a film.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight at 9:15 at New People Cinema, and 1:30 PM on Sunday, May 4, both screenings presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: If you click on the "guests expected" box for any SFIFF program you can find out if a director, producer, actor or other filmmaker plans to be on hand in support of his or her film. However, this method doesn't reveal whether a filmmaker is actually going to attend a given screening if there are multiple showings. For that information it's best to visit the big calendar board in the Kabuki lobby, where each screening is individually marked (or not) with a star indicating whether a guest plans to be there. In the case of Club Sandwich for example, writer-director Eimbcke gave a delightful q&a session to the audience for an afternoon screening April 26th, and is expected to still be around for tonight's showing, but at this point he's not expected for the May 4th showing.

HOW: Digital.
.
OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 5 of SFIFF includes the final screenings of the acclaimed Romainian film When Evening Falls on Bucharest and of Julie Bertucelli's documentary School of Babel. It also marks the first festival screenings of Tsai Ming-Liang's Stray Dogs and François Ozon's Young & Beautiful.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: If you missed Bruce Baillie's appearance at the festival yesterday, he's still in town for another day, and will be screening recent works including the in-progress Memoirs of an Angel tonight at Oakland's always-free Black Hole Cinematheque.

Manakamana (2013)

A scene from Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's MANAKAMANA, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society

WHO: Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez are the co-directors of this experimental documentary.

WHAT: I have not yet seen Manakamana, but I've been anticipating it since I first heard about it last summer, when I was primed to see more work by directors associated with the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, beyond Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, who teamed up to make my favorite feature film of 2013, Leviathan. This one is frequently described as an aesthetic opposite of that camera-chaotic work. Featuring eleven static long takes by a 16mm camera planted in a moving cable car ascending a mountain toward a Nepalese temple, it sounds like it may formally resemble a cross between James Benning's 13 Lakes and Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuttle. But Spray and Velez also come out of an anthropological tradition of filmmaking influenced by Robert Gardner (as discussed a bit in this interview), so I expect much of the film's interest to come from the human element visually absent from Gehr's and Benning's pieces. Indeed, I was recently fortunate to be able to see an untitled 2010 single-take short made in Nepal by Spray, and it begged the viewer to seriously con.sider the complexity of his or her relationship to the people being depicted on screen, and to the filmmaking apparatus itself, as well as the dynamics between Spray and her subjects.

Manakamana was released in New York City last week and has been reviewed extensively. A relatively new website called Critics Round Up has links to many of the most significant voices on the film. Don't expect San Francisco International Film Festival-credentialed critics to be added to the list however, as until Spray's & Velez's film secures commercial distribution here, it will remain in the strange limbo of the "hold review", in which local writers aren't allowed to review the film in more than 75 words.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at New People Cinema tonight at 6PM and this Sunday afternoon at 1PM, and at the Kabuki on Monday, May 5th at 2PM.

WHY: Manakamana seems like the kind of moviegoing experience that can't really be replicated on small screens at home, and therefore begs to be seen in a cinema. And it's not one of the several SFIFF selections screening tonight that has already gone to "Rush Status", meaning a wait in line for a chance to get a ticket. If you haven't yet mapped out your whole festival, then there's no better place to start figuring it out than by looking at David Hudson's round-up of capsule previews and other press the festival has received up to this point. As he notes, the SF Bay Guardian has more extensive coverage than the SF Weekly, but that's been the norm for a while now. I imagine SFIFF staff and fans feel some mixed emotions about even the SFBG's coverage though, as for the past couple years now the fact that it gives SFIFF its cover story is blunted by the fact that they wrap this issue (unlike almost any others they publish each year) with an advertisement, thus depriving the city of the sense that the festival is the place to be this week, staring out at them from newsstands and coffee shops across town. Oh well; at least they haven't, like SF Weekly has, given more column inches to that Silicon Valley tv show than to SFIFF.

HOW: Digital

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 2 includes the first local screenings of films by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, Frenchman Serge Bozon and Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof as well as a number of lesser-known directoral quantities.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Mildred Pierce screens in 35mm at Oakland's Paramount Theatre as part of its occasional classic film series that always includes cartoon & newsreel for only $5 admission. The Paramount has announced three more screenings of films with perhaps somewhat more dubious "classic" status (ok, I'm mostly talking about The Goonies) than this Joan Crawford noir between now and mid-July.

The Shining (1980)

WHO: Stanley Kubrick.

WHAT: You don't have to be a Kubrick fan, a horror movie fan, a Jack Nicholson fan, or a Stephen King fan to love and/or be obsessed by The Shining. It incorporates all of those broad categories of fandom but transcends them as well. So much has been said about this film, but I'm sure there's more to say. I'll have to leave that for another day however, and simply link to this amazing site for The Shining devotees.

WHERE/WHEN: 9PM tonight only at the Balboa Theatre, presented as part of Another Hole In The Head.

WHY: Unless you're a big Jaws fan this is clearly the greatest film playing this year's Another Hole In The Head film festival (I'm prejudging a lot of unseen horror films by saying this, but we're talking about what I consider to be an all-time masterpiece here). It's also the last "HoleHead" screening at the Balboa before the festival moves to New People in Japantown (where a digital "backwards and forwards" screening inspired by the movie Room 237 will occur next Thursday night.)

Not only that, it's screening in 35mm, an occurrence I'd expected to disappear now that a digital version of the film has been the go-to theatrical distribution method for Warner Brothers. The Castro and Roxie have both been forced to show The Shining digitally in recent years, and a "last-ever" 35mm screening happened over a year and a half ago (with the last Frisco Bay screening further back in history than that; my last viewing was almost precisely four years ago). I have no idea where and how the SF IndieFest folks who run HoleHead got this print and the permission to show it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's not another long while before there's another chance to see it unspool this way. If ever.

HOW: Billed as a "perfect" 35mm print.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2003)

WHO: Judy Irving directed this documentary.

WHAT: It's hard to believe it's been ten years since this lovely documentary about urban nature, the humanity of animals (or, perhaps more pertinently, vice versa), and the struggle for survival in a city with harsh forces pressing for us to turn our backs on our true selves, first began screenings in festivals. Though I'd enjoyed it on its initial release, I recently rewatched it and found it better than I had recalled, avoiding nearly all of the traps that have turned me away from commercially-released documentaries over the past decade or so. Here's a worthwhile review by a Chicago writer who I finally got to meet in person when she came to visit San Francisco earlier this year, Marilyn Ferdinand.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 1PM today only at New People Cinema in San Francisco's Japantown, as part of the San Francisco Film Society's Zurich/SF film series.

WHY: The Zurich/SF series is an undertaking meant to highlight cinematic connections between San Francisco and the largest city in Switzerland (though still half Frisco's size in terms of population). Other match-ups screening today and tomorrow include Barry Jenkins's Medicine For Melancholy with Andrea Štaka's Fraulein this evening, Mindy Bagdon's furious Frisco punk document Louder, Faster, Shorter and Swiss Punk Cocktail: Zurich Scene 197680 tonight, and a pair of 1970s buddy-cop comedies Freebie and the Bean and The Swissmakers tomorrow. I don't know why Vitus is the odd film out in the weekend set, especially since I haven't seen it. But reading ploy synopses makes me wonder if there just wasn't enough time in the weekend to squeeze in a screening of something like Around The Bay (which has still yet to screen in San Francisco proper).

I'm hoping this series will be a success and lead to more cinematic looks at some of San Francisco's many other Sister Cities. Our city's link to Taipei has surely helped keep the annual Taiwan Film Days festival going, and I'm sure will be seeing some films set in Paris during French Cinema Now. I haven't investigated whether either of our Italian Sister Cities (Assisi and, as of this year, Naples) will be seen on screen during the just-announced New Italian Cinema series, but imagine future festivals devoted to films made in Barcelona, or Shanghai, or Seoul, or Sydney, or Manila? (Not to mention cities with filmmaking scenes I know next to nothing about, like Amman, Jordan or Cork, Ireland or Thessaloniki, Greece.)

In the meantime another recently-announced SFFS mini-fest has also been revealed, that serves as a counterpoint the the SF section of Zurich/SF. This weekend's films are all established classics of one stripe or another (maybe I'm not quite ready to call Freebie and the Bean a classic myself, but you know what I mean). But Cinema By The Bay focuses almost all its attention on brand-new works by local filmmakers. It runs November 22-24.

HOW: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill screens on a 35mm double-feature with another urban documentary made about ten years ago, called Downtown Switzerland

The American Soldier (1970)

WHO: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

WHAT: Fassbinder is famed for being prolific- by most counts he made 44 films (including made-for-television works) in his short lifespan. But his most prolific period of all were the first few years of his feature filmmaking outgrowth of his involvement in the Antiteater collective, before he began making films under the influence of German-American melodramatist Douglas Sirk. Of the films made beginning with 1969's Love Is Colder Than Death and before his Sirkian Merchant of Four Seasons in 1971, five of them have been recently re-released on Region 1 DVD by Criterion's Eclipse sublabel, including The American Soldier, which happens to be my own favorite of his work from this period I've seen thus far.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley at 7:00.

WHY: Seeing Fassbinder films in isolation is great, but seeing them in dialogue with each other as part of a retrospective is even better, as I notice ways in which they speak to each other across years of the filmmaker's career. If I hadn't seen Love Is Colder Than Death and Fear Of Fear in short succession would I have noticed that opera music coming from Ulrich Faulhaber's television in a key scene from the latter is the very same duet from Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier that composer Peer Raben augmented with electronic sounds for the memorable supermarket scene of the former? And if I hadn't seen Ali: Fear Eats the Soul at the PFA just a couple days before seeing The American Soldier at the Roxie, would the scene (depicted in the screen capture above) in which a character recounts the plot of Ali, four years before it was filmed, have hit so hard?  If you attended Ali: Fear Eats the Soul at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last night you have an extra incentive to make it to The American Soldier tonight. 

But with the BART Union forced to strike by management of the transit system, you may have to pick your film options this weekend based on where you live and can most easily travel to and from. If you're in Berkeley, you're in great shape to see Fassbinder tonight (Beware of a Holy Whore screens as well as The American Soldier), Pasolini tomorrow and/or Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi (in person) on Sunday. If you're in San Francisco, you'll have to wait until Sunday for your Fassbinder fix, as YBCA screens The Merchant of Four Seasons. Tonight you might want to see a rare 35mm print of a film by another German-language filmmaker working in the 1970s, as postwar Swiss master Kurt Früh's final film Der Fall opens the Zurich/SF weekend festival at New People Cinema.

HOW: 35mm print.

Cairo 678 (2010)

WHO: Mohamed Diab wrote and directed this.

WHAT: The all-time most successful Egyptian film in terms of international film sales, according to Jonathan Curiel's interview with Diab.

WHERE/WHEN: 7PM tonight only at New People Cinema, presented by the San Francisco Film Society.

WHY: The big news is that Ted Hope's resignation as executive director of the SF Film Society was made public yesterday, so the SFFS is once again on the hunt to fill the shoes left empty by the deaths of EDs Graham Leggat and (just a few months later) Bingham Ray. According to Variety, Hope told the board his decision last Friday, the very same day the SFFS Fall Season opened with a Hong Kong Cinema series at the Vogue. Next up in the season is Zurich/SF, also at New People, followed by Taiwan Film Days at the Vogue, French Cinema Now at the Clay, and Italian and local-filmmaker-focused series with as-yet-unannounced selections at the Clay and Roxie, respectively. I understand these programs are all set and will not be affected by Hope's departure from the organization. I wonder what his involvement in them might have been in the first place; he seemed far more interested in the SFFS filmmaker granting programs than the local film programming.

But the festival moves forward with tonight's screening, part of Diab's Artist-in-Residency in which he's visiting with local students and presenting a free Artist Talk Monday.

Tonight's screening is co-presented by the Arab Film Festival, which begins at the Castro tomorrow night and moves to other venues in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley (and even faraway Los Angeles and San Diego) over the next few weeks. Many filmmakers will be in attendance.

Another Arab filmmaker coming to Frisco Bay is Morocco's Moumen Smihi, who arrives at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive October 20-27 to introduce screenings of four of his films. As a kind of preamble to his visit, the PFA screens his 1975 feature The East Wind and his 1999 Moroccan Chronicles tonight and next Thursday in 35mm prints.

HOW: Cario 678, though shot on 35mm, will be projected digitally tonight.

Lesson Of The Evil (2012)

WHO: Takashi Miike wrote and directed this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW: Digital projection.

Kuroneko (1968)

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW: Kuroneko screens in a 35mm print.

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.

A River Changes Course (2013)

WHO: Kalyanee Mam directed this

WHAT: The winner of the San Francisco International Film Festival's Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature (I reported on all the festival's awards last month), this is a polished and interesting documentary about the ecological and economic pressures facing average families in Cambodia. When placed in comparison to the more probing and poetic (and frequently more harrowing) documentaries of the great filmmaker Rithy Panh (who just won a Cannes prize for his latest film The Missing Picture), it comes across as a somewhat lesser work, at least for someone like me who has visited the country and is generally familiar with its many problems and wonders. But Mam's take functions as an ideal "Cambodia 101" for people who haven't heard much about the small country beyond the famous horrors caused by American intervention in the region forty years ago.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 7:00 at the Goldman Theater in the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley, as part of the San Francisco Green Film Festival.

WHY: A River Changes Course is not strictly about environmental issues, but then again environmental issues and their potential solutions are impossible to extract from other human challenges. Thus it's a good choice for the 2nd annual San Francisco Green Film Festival, which opened the other night and runs through June 5th. The underutilized New People Cinema is the main festival venue, but there are screenings at various other Frisco Bay venues, including a free San Francisco Public Library screening of Plastic Paradise, which shows us images from Midway Atoll, a chain of islands affected tremendously by the accumulation of petroleum product waste in the North Pacific Gyre. 

Tonight's screening is one of two at the David Brower Center, a venue I've yet to investigate for myself. The other screening at the space is Tuesday's showing of Breathing Earth - Susumu Singu's Dream, the latest feature by director Thomas Riedelsheimer, who made two wonderful previous documentaries called Rivers and Tides and Touch the Sound, both about unique artists working with  materials in ways that set them apart from some of the ecologically-unsustainable practices used in many sectors of the art world. This portrait of a wind sculptor, and this afternoon's other Riedelsheimer screening Garden in the Sea, about an underwater installation in the Sea of Cortez, seem to fit this pattern as well.

More documentaries of interest to eco-minded cinephiles are to be found at the Rafael Film Center this week and at SF IndieFest's DocFest showcase opening the day after the SF Green Film Festival ends.

HOW: Digital screening of a natively-digital work.

Present Tense (2012)

WHO: Belmin Söylemez directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: This film, about a Turkish fortune-teller named Mina, with dreams of emigration, just won the San Francisco International Film Festival New Directors Prize, an award previously given to promising auteurs like Jia Zhang-Ke (for Xiao Wu in 1999), Miranda July (for Me and You and Everyone We Know in 2005), and Pedro González-Rubio (for Alamar in 2010). 

I have not seen Present Tense yet so let me excerpt from an absolutely fascinating article that uses this digital feature as an example of the kind of film being crowded off even Turkey's screens thanks to homogenization pressures created by wholesale DCP conversion of cinemas, written by Emine Yildirim:

Mina could be the epitome of many women living in this country -- aching for a better and more independent life in the midst of uncertainty and economic destitution. The fortune telling sequences in which Mina's predictions are juxtaposed with the faces of many different women promises to become a classic in Turkish cinema; for those of us who live in this culture always want to hear the same future: a way out of our brooding existence into a refreshing place with certain happiness and good fortune.

WHERE/WHEN: Final San Francisco International Film Festival screening this afternoon at 2:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: It's the final day of SFIFF, and there are still plenty of movies left to watch; it would be absurd to imagine someone having been able to see them all. I can certainly recommend The Search For Emak Bakia (which also screens post-festival at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco a week from tomorrow) and Leviathan if you haven't seen them yet. Or, if you want to end the festival on an enormously satisfying cliffhanger, the official closing night offering Before Midnight.  I don't think that's a spoiler; anyone who has seen the previous entries in this continuing Richard Linklater/Julie Delpy/Ethan Hawke serial, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, should know what to expect in the way of narrative structure even if they're sure to be surprised by the details.

But with most of the festival's awards now announced (audience awards are usually revealed during the closing night film presentation), there are a few more recommendations of films on today's festival slate, made by the festival's various juries of filmmakers, curators and critics. In addition to Present Tense, one of the two New Directors Prize runners-up, the Peruvian The Cleaner also has a final showtime today. The other runner-up La Sirga and the FIPRESCI Jury pick Nights With Theodore have no further festival screenings.

Then there are the Golden Gate Awards, the longest-standing of the SFIFF awards given as they go back to the 1957 inaugural festival's prizes for Pather Panchali, Uncle Vanya and The Captain from Köpenick. It was fifty-one years ago that The People Vs. Paul Crump, a documentary about a death row inmate, won a Golden Gate Award for its young director William Friedkin, just starting out on his filmmaking career. Friedkin returned to SFIFF this year to give a master class and screen his terrific 1985 film To Live & Die In L.A. If you missed it at the festival, I've recently learned it will circle back to Frisco Bay this September when it's included in a six-film Pacific Film Archive retrospective for the director, also to include The French Connection, Cruising and (in my opinion) his greatest film Sorcerer, the latter along with an in-person conversation between Freidkin and my friend Michael Guillén.

But back to this year's GGAs and their winners (any of whom might be a future Freidkin?): The Documentary Feature GGA went to Kalyanee Mam's introduction to social and environmental issues in Cambodia entitled A River Changes Course. It has no more SFIFF showings but will screen at the just-announced SF Green Film Festival on June 1st. The Bay Area Documentary Feature GGA went to Dan Krauss's The Kill Team, which you may have heard about via On the Media; it screens one last time at SFIFF tonight at 6:00.

Twelve different shorts were also winners or honorable mentions for GGAs in various subcategories: narrative, documentary, animation, youth works, family films, etc. If you missed out on seeing these on this year's shorts programs, there's still one chance to see three GGA winners (and four other shorts) on the Shorts 4: New Visions program this evening. The New Visions category winner was Alfredo Covelli's single-take documentary of the aftermath of a violent event, Salmon, and both the first-prize and second-prize winners in the Bay Area short category also came from the New Visions section: 3020 Laguna St. In Exitum, Ashley Rodholm & Joe Picard's enigmatic documentation of an unusual Cow Hollow art exhibition won first prize, while Jonn Herschend's hilariously uncomfortable spoof of the in-house industrial video, More Real, took second. All three of these screen at 8:30 at New People.

HOW: Present Tense was shot on video, and will be screened on video, as will all the other screening titles I mention in this post. Except for, I'm hoping, the Freidkin films coming to the PFA in September.

The Search For Emak Bakia (2012)

WHO: Man Ray is the elusive (though not entirely so) subject of this piece.

WHAT: One of the most surprising discoveries of the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival for me has been this feature-length retracing, re-examining, and even remaking of Man Ray's experimental short Emak-Bakia. I'm pleased that Terri Saul has agreed to premiere an excellent (and essentially spoiler-free) review of the film for Hell On Frisco Bay readers:

Oskar Alegria's The Search For Emak Bakia is not a film that was made in the editing room; it was lived. The rough translation of Emak Bakia is a Basque term meaning, gruffly, "Leave me alone." 

Ekphrastic, the film-slash-poem-slash-collage, is a work of art that is made in reaction to, or to explore, another work of art, a 1926 film by Man Ray. It is art as dialog, a dialog requiring patience. If made in the traditional way the director would be constantly telling his backers, "Leave me alone. I'm not finished and I don't know when I will be."

The SFIFF audience reaction was a highlight of Saturday's experience. Alegria's curiosity made the audience curiouser and curiouser, alive, observant, awakened. He had an historian's sense of wanting to acknowledge truth, the forgotten past, a list of disappearing words, places, place names. 

Stepping into the unknown, not only linguistically (The film is primarily in French and Alegria began the project not speaking French) he took on the role of art historian, cultural anthropologist, and a poet who is also a linguist. 

Journalist and film-maker, Oskar Alegria told himself, "Let's follow a rabbit's path, down the rabbit hole." He knew his idea to chase a mystery by unconventional means, such as following a plastic glove blowing down the middle of a street, would never be fully supported by his occupational, rational journalist self who enjoyed reporting serious facts, counting the number of boats in a harbor for example. Alegria said during the Q&A that he wanted to kill his inner journalist, the editor with a sellable story in mind. 

One of Alegria's interview subjects, a Basque musician, also acknowledged what I call "salvage anthropology," those who attempt to rescue or are "addicted to" their own ancestral-patterned past vs. those who want to remember the past and yet adapt to their current context in a more musical way than via forced salvaging. 

One scene intermittently illuminates a silhouette of a cat watching lightning strike the subject of the film's treasure hunt. The cat has the same approach as the film-maker, to alternate between patience and curiosity to see what develops. Alegria seems to be saying: "Don't just MAKE a film. Don't make ONLY a film." In other words (spoiler alert), sit in the pigsty with the pigs in order to get your shot. 

While shooting a bull, engaging its eyes, Algeria kept rolling while wind blew his camera 360 degrees, violating, as did Man Ray, the horizon. We rolled with the camera then, remembering a soundtrack of whistling oak branches recorded earlier, in situ. 

When Alegria filmed volunteer "eyelid models," he juxtaposed their dreaming gaze with Man Ray's shots of freshly opened actress' eyes, fluttering not so much like butterflies, but more like like sleepy bulls in the aforementioned breezy field, matching the film's unselfconscious dream-state. 

A group of older women leapt from the audience to ask questions after the screening, notably those born prior to the digital age. Happily, Alegria treated the nonagenarian women in his art-story with the respect and attention typically reserved for the young and conventionally beautiful in the world of film, festivals, and media events. He also gave his festival audience the same. 

The film will probably not enjoy a release to DVD because as Alegria himself says, it's not a commercial project. It's not a film. It just happens to use film as its medium.

WHERE/WHEN: Two more SFIFF screenings: one tonight at 8:45 at the Kabuki, and one on Thursday, May 9th, at 3:30 at New People.

WHY: I'm fascinated that Alegria has been able to make a poetic, humorous, informative, and never-dull feature-length documentary about an experiment in film form, by investigating it from just about every conceivable angle except for its formal qualities. Emak-Bakia is explored through its documentary aspects, its linguistic aspects, as psycho-geography and as cultural artifact. But certain aspects of Ray's film are barely touched upon, particularly its cameraless and more abstract segments. Part of me feels that this means there's something important missing from Alegria's film, but another part rejoices that a self-described (in the q&a) non-filmmaker could put together such an elaborate and engaging work without demonstrating much in the way of Ray's technique. I'd love to see a similar approach applied to a film by Stan Brakhage or Paul Sharits or Chick Strand someday.

The SFIFF has one more screening of a short film made using some of the cameraless techniques pioneered by Man Ray: Conjuror's Box is, like Emak-Bakia, a silent film, and it will screen with a live electronic organ accompaniment by the one and only V. Vale as part of a shorts program on Thursday May 9th at 8:30 at New People.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digitally-shot feature.

Marketa Lazarová (1967)

WHO: Czech director František Vláčil made this.

WHAT: The second and final full week of the San Francisco International Film Festival starts today. I was recruited to provide seven week 2 picks for the 7x7 website and the piece was just published. Since one of my picks is Marketa Lazarová, let me quote from myself:

If you thought Soviet master Andrei Tarkovsky was the only Eastern Bloc filmmaker to meticulously recreate the Middle Ages in a stunning, black-and-white widescreen epic, you need to see František Vlácil's 1967 film, Marketa Lazarová, perennially named the "greatest Czech film of all time." Its unblinking approach to medieval violence between pagans and Christians easily puts it in a class with Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev,

WHERE/WHEN: Final SFIFF screening tonight at 8:45 at New People Cinema.

WHY: Tonight's screening is a special event. Marketa Lazarová screens in honor of George Gund III, who chaired the board of the San Francisco Film Society until his death this past January. Gund was a tireless advocate of Eastern European and Czechoslovakian cinema in particular, and the print of Vlácil's masterpiece I first viewed at the Pacific Film Archive more than ten years ago came to the PFA directly due to Gund.

I was always too shy to approach the SFFS board president when I saw him at festival events. Part of this must have been due to a sense of regret planted in me from childhood. Growing up in a middle-class household less than a block from Alamo Elementary School in the Richmond District, I attended that school and befriended Gund's son Gregory, who was exactly one day older than me and was a member my first-grade class. When we became friends I had no idea how wealthy Greg's family was; all I knew is that hockey was a big deal in his household, but that he was also the only boy in my grade who was willing to forego playing team sports during recess and lunch in order to hang out with an unathletic kid like me and play word games and pore over Safari cards. Once I was invited over to the family home- I'd never knew about mansions with elevators before. My friendship with Greg ended when he moved to Idaho the summer after first grade (presumably a move related to the Gund connection to the Sun Valley Suns). I lost touch with him as most kids tend to do when friends move, and by the time I seriously thought of trying to contact him again, it was too late, as he'd recently been killed in a plane crash.

So I'll be attending tonight's screening not just to see a great work of cinematic art, but to pay some small tribute to the man whose parenting produced a little boy who made early elementary school far more bearable for an introverted kid like me.

HOW: 35mm print.

Spend It All (1971)

WHO: The late, great Les Blank directed this.

WHAT: Some critics, curators, and historians try to group Les Blank's documentaries into three categories: the music films typified by The Blues Accordin' To Lightnin' Hopkins and Chulas Fronteras, the food films such as Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers and All In This Tea, and the "everything else" films like Burden of Dreams and Gap-Toothed Women. In truth, all of his films that I've seen (not the entire catalog, but a good-sized selection) are rich in scenes depicting the preparation and/or consumption of food. They all prominently feature music, usually by accomplished 'folk' or 'roots' musicians. And they all contain a great deal of "everything else". 

Spend It All, one of Blank's (in Max Goldberg's words) "city symphonies set to the languid pace of Cajun country" is exemplary of this. If I had to classify it in one of the three categories I wouldn't know how to choose. There's plenty of  music, performed by fiddlers and accordionists like The Balfa Brothers, Nathan Abshire and Marc Savoy, a familiar face in later Blank documentaries J'ai Été au Bal, Yum, Yum, Yum!: A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking and Marc and Ann. There's plenty of food, too, with copious scenes of shellfish, crustaceans, and even coffee being prepared Louisiana-style. But there's a lot of "everything else" as well: shots of young (and younger) jockeys at a country horse racing track, for example. And most poignantly for a film screening so soon after its maker's death, we get a tour of a brushy cemetery, including a shot of a tombstone engraved with a common Cajun name very similar to his own: "LeBlanc".

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at 7:00 at New People and 8:45 Friday at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Spend It All is part of a three-film tribute to Les Blank, who was known to be dying of cancer when the SFIFF announced these screenings last month, and who indeed succumbed a week later. The set of three rarely-seen shorts includes two not featured in last summer's PFA retrospective: the 1967 Christopher Tree, which Blank photographed and edited but is not credited with directing, and Chicken Real, Blank's own favorite of the sometimes-subversive industrial films he made for hire, early in his career, for various American companies including Shakey's Pizza, Smucker's Jam, and in this case factory farming pioneer Holly Farms. 

Blank's son and fellow filmmaker Harrold is expected to attend the screenings.


HOW: All three films will screen in brand new 16mm prints of recent restorations by the Academy Film Archive.

Morning of St. Anthony's Day (2012)

WHO: João Pedro Rodrigues directed this.

WHAT: Have you ever felt like you were in a George Romero movie on the morning after a full-fledged Bacchanal? The stars of Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day sure have. It may be useful contextual information to know that St. Anthony's Day is a municipal holiday in Lisbon, Portugal (where this was shot), marking the June 13, 1231 death of the Franciscan monk, who was canonized only a year later. His statue in that city's Alvalade Square, and lines from a poem by Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (although not the lines that mention St. Anthony) also figure into this piece.

To get a written feel for the work, I can't really improve on Jorge Mourinha's description:

Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day is a deadpan, dialogue-free look at the aftermath of a night spent partying, precisely choreographed as a sort of hungover, slow-motion zombie flash mob and shot as if an alien Big Brother was watching humankind and asking what the hell is going on. Even if slightly overlong, it’s by far the loosest, cheeriest work of a director usually not known for his sense of humour, though this is more the Roy Andersson variety of dry, poignant wit.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at 9:30 and Thursday May 9th at 8:30, both at New People Cinema.

WHY: As much excitement there may be in the selections of films the programming team brings to SFIFF every year, every cinephile who pays attention to the international festival scene probably can think of at least one or two that haven't been brought but they wish were. For me, new films by two directors, whose prior films (Wild Grass and To Die Like A Man) were among my favorite SFIFF films in 2010, stand out: Alain Resnais's You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet and João Pedro Rodrigues's The Last Time I Saw Macao. While I hope both play Frisco Bay cinemas at some point in the next several months, I'm glad to be tided over in the latter instance by this Rodrigues short that has gotten less international exposure.

Morning of St. Anthony's Day screens as part of an eclectic program going by the title Shorts 4: New Visions, but it's actually quite a substantial work. At 25 minutes in length, it's more than twice as long as any of this program's other shorts, which range from five to twelve minutes in duration. With all the feature-length (and, in the case of Penance and Eight Deadly Shots, much longer) possibilities to cram into a festival schedule, many attendees systematically avoid scheduling shorts programs. But people who came to be fans of a filmmaker like Rodrigues (or of Joan Chen or of Grégoire Colin, both of whom have directed shorts playing in other festival shorts programs) through features may want to rethink this strategy, and they may be exposed to some great work by filmmakers who regularly eschew feature-length running times as well.

HOW: Digital video screening of a digital video work, as part of a program of five other video works along with one 35mm silent film with live musical accompaniment.

Casablanca (1942)

WHO: Michael Curtiz directed it. Conrad Veidt, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Dooley Wilson star in it. Oh yeah, and there's the love triangle too: Paul Heinreid, Ingrid Bergman and a guy called Humphrey Bogart.

WHAT: One of the most famous movies of all time. It's almost impossible to pay attention to film without hearing someone make mention of it. Just the other day I heard a podcast interview with Cissy Wellman, who relates Howard Hawks's commonly-told and well-refuted story of a swap Hawks and Curtiz (who according to the story was the originally assigned director to Sergeant York) made between their directing projects. I think it says a lot that Hawks would tell this story in the mid-1960s after he'd begun being celebrated by critics as an auteur, a status denied him during the first few decades of his career. It's as if to say that by walking away from making Casablanca he denied himself the chance at a competitive Oscar and the kind of immortality that came from having made one of the most beloved classics ever, but that perhaps the kind of immortality Hawks was starting to enjoy as a developer of a career worth poring over might be preferable to being thought of as a relatively anonymous if highly competent workman like Curtiz.

WHERE/WHEN: Today at 1:30 & 7:00 at the Kabuki, or at 2:00 & 7:00 at Cinemark Theatres around the nation, including the Bay Area. Also screens at 2:30 & 7:00 on April 28th at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: Both the Kabuki and the Castro will be venues for the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival April 25-May 9th. Tickets, now on sale to members, become available to the general public this Friday. I'm not going to draft a typical festival announcement piece when there are others to read. I'll undoubtedly be devoting a good deal of attention to this event over the coming weeks, though not to the exclusion of others. Michael Fox opens his article on April's screenings with an interesting perspective about the usual role of a big international film festival in the film culture of a city. With presentation of new works by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kim Longinotto, Bernardo Bertolucci, Andrew Bujalski, Sophie Fiennes, Olivier Assayas and scores of other established and up-and-coming international filmmakers, there's no question but that this year's SFIFF is a crucial event for those of us who try to keep reasonably current with trends in world narrative and documentary cinema-making.

But what does the festival provide for those of us interested in keeping current with trends in restoration and re-evaluation of cinema from the past? The festival's repertory selections must provide quite a bang if they're going to be worth a ticket-buyer's bucks, especially with this year's price increases. For a San Francisco resident, a trip to a typical repertory film at the Pacific Film Archive or the Stanford Theatre (which has just released its next calendar) is about the same cost as a non-member SFIFF ticket- but only if you factor in the cost of public transportation.

There's potential here. I'm thrilled that the SFIFF is offering rare chances to see great films from the sixties, seventies and eighties, like Marketa Lazarová, To Live and Die in L.A. and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and reputedly-great films like The Mattei Affair, Eight Deadly Shots, and Downpour. What I don't know is whether any of the above will be presented in the film formats that they were originally made for, rather than via a digital delivery system. So far the festival has only made available the screening format information on one retrospective program: a 16mm showing of three rarely-seen early documentaries by Les Blank. This will be one of the first tickets I purchase. The others, I may hold off on until I hear whether they'll be shown on 35mm or not. I know this almost certainly mean I won't be able to get a ticket to To Live and Die in L.A., as that screening will include a live appearance by its legendary director, William Friedkin, and is being held in cinema (New People) with less than 200 seats. But that's okay; I saw a 35mm print of it last fall at the Roxie, and am  in no way going to allow myself to miss the other revival that it takes place on the same night as: the Castro showing of Waxworks. Again, I don't know if this will be a digital or film screening, but I do know I want to be there to find out what Mike Patton and his cohort of three percussionists plan to pull off as a musical accompaniment for the Paul Leni film starring Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt.

Conrad Veidt! Oh yeah, I knew there was a reason I wanted to talk about this stuff under a post about Casablanca. Why see Casablanca tonight? To get in the mood for another Veidt film coming your way.

HOW: I know that the Castro showing of Casablanca will be sourced from DCP, and I believe the Kabuki & Cinemark showings will be sourced that way as well.