The Two Eyes Of Jason Wiener

If you didn't attend some wonderful repertory/revival film screenings in 2012, you missed out. As nobody could see them all, I've recruited Frisco Bay filmgoers to recall some of their own favorites of the year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Jason Wiener of jasonwatchesmovies.blogspot.com.

This is only in approximate order. Most anything on this list could move up or down a few spots. And as always, the hardest part was narrowing it down to ten. You'll notice a few times I've cheated and listed double features as one entry. For each entry I've linked to my review at the time on jasonwatchesmovies.blogspot.com. For the most part, I have not re-read those reviews. Or at most briefly skimmed them. It amuses me after the fact to compare what I remember of the screenings now to what I wrote at the time. I invite you to delve in and see if I say anything really different now than I did right after the screening. Anyway, here we go:

10. Phantom of the Opera (1943) at the Stanford Theatre. As much as I simply love this movie, the only reason it made the elite top ten list against tons of worthy competition is because it was projected on silver nitrate film. The Stanford is one of the very few theaters (I've heard as low as 2, but I won't swear that's true) in the country that is up to code to play this highly flammable film stock. And I had always been told how much brighter, crisper, and more vibrant silver nitrate is over safety film (we won't even speak about digital for the moment.) Simply told, it "pops." And this screening popped my silver nitrate cherry. The reason it's so low on the list is because I didn't see much of a difference. And I'll just leave it at that rather than extending that sexual metaphor more. Although I have been told that with older films (particularly black and white silent films from the teens or '20s) the difference is much more noticeable.

9. Forbidden Zone (1982) at the Terra Gallery as part of Another Hole in the Head. This movie is a real piece of work. There's a few semi-controversial things about this choice. First, the Terra Gallery is not typically a venue for movies. Second, it was shown on DVD (not even Blu-ray or DCP digital projection, but just a DVD.) Neither of those really disqualify it for me. But the third point is most controversial--it was the recently colorized version, so it's kind of questionable to call this an old movie. For the record, Richard Elfman claimed he always wanted it to be colorized--via the hand-tinting process used in old silent films. In any case, it makes the list because it was my second time seeing it and after being totally befuddled (while amused) the first time, it actually started making sense this time. And that scared me more than anything else at San Francisco's premiere horror movie festival. Can't wait for the sequel.

8. A double feature of Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) at the Dark Room for Bad Movie Night. What the hell, I love Bad Movie Night. And these are great movies. And the night was proof that you can have a lot of good, twisted fun getting drunk (which I no longer do at Bad Movie Night, but that's another story) and making fun of movies that you actually like quite a lot.

7. Target Earth (1954) at the Niles Film Museum in their Halloween Creature Features show. I could have filled this entire list with all the stuff I saw at Niles (full disclosure, I volunteer there. Come by some weekend and I might just give you a tour of their original 1913 projection booth. And I feel kind of like a skunk allowing it to be represented by something other than one of their great Saturday night silent film programs. But this was more than just a Halloween presentation of a really cheesy 1950's sci-fi flick. It was a reconstruction of a classic Bob Wilkins episode of Creature Features, complete with Wilkins' humorous comments, interviews, vintage commercials, etc. Since the tapes were nearly always written over in the next week, this is one of only four episodes that survive (and only two that have been reconstructed.) Weird thing is, I didn't even live in the Bay Area at the right time to see it originally. So I'm actually enjoying some faux nostalgia here. I don't care if it's fake, it's still good nostalgia.

6. Double feature: Something Wild (1986) and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) at the Roxie as part of Not Necessarily Noir III. Weird, looking back at my records I learned two things: First, I had said that before last year I had seen Something Wild about 10 years ago. Second, I learned that I had actually seen it just one year prior at the Vortex Room. Anyway, what really put it on my list is for some reason this is the first time I got that Melanie Griffith's character was trying to be Louise Brooks (even calling herself Lulu.) I don't know why I hadn't caught that when I saw it in 2011. But seeing that--and realizing Lulu in fact spent the whole movie worshiping and trying to emulate powerful strong women--really added something for me. I guess I could have just put Something Wild in this entry, but Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was also just a hell of a lot of fun and also featured a strong woman. So it makes a good strong woman double feature.  As an aside, when I pared this list down from about 20 entries on my first pass to 10 entries for the final list, I dropped more screenings from the Roxie than any other theater. In fact, this was the only Roxie screening that made the cut. And that seems...wrong. I love the Roxie and just have way too many great experiences there to capture them all.

5. Another double feature: The Muppet Movie (1979) and Phantom of the Paradise (1974) as a Paul Williams double-feature at the Castro Theater. After careful contemplation, I've decided I don't have to say anything the justify my love of either movie or this pairing. The Muppets might just be my favoritest thing ever. And not only is Phantom of the Paradise a brilliantly kooky movie, but it was released into the world on the greatest day in the history of mankind--October 31, 1974 (the same day I was released on the world!) But I will repeat what I noticed about it that day:

When Beef is attacked by the Phantom in the shower, he has a red squiggly temporary tattoo on his cheek. Minutes later, Philbin finds him trying to escape the theater, and now he has a green clover tattoo on his cheek. So his thinking after the attack was, 'I have to go. I'm going to dress, pack my bags, change the tattoo on my cheek, and get the heck out of here!' And he claims to know the difference between drug real and real real.  

4. Pandora's Box (1929) at the Castro in the SF Silent Film Festival. I could've filled this list just with films from the Silent Film Festival. But this was a clear standout. And I don't think I could say it better than a friend of mine did after the screening (paraphrased): Why didn't they just say after this movie, "Okay, that's a wrap! The art form of moving pictures is perfected, nobody needs to make any movies anymore!"

3. (Sort of) a double feature, The Maltese Falcon (1931 and 1941) at the Castro at Noir City. I also could've filled this list just with the awesome things I saw at Noir City. But here's a weird cinephile confession--I had never seen The Maltese Falcon before! And I broke that cherry with both the famous 1941 Bogart version and the lesser-known 1931 version with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels (who I only knew as Harold Lloyd's leading lady in the silent comedies.) And I love quite a lot about the sleazier pre-code version, especially when Sam Spade challenges Ruth/Brigid to buy his loyalty with something other than just money. Mary Astor needs it spelled out for her, but Bebe Daniels knew what Ricardo Cortez meant right away. Still, the Bogart/Astor version is the classic, and rightly so. It was just such a treat to see them both on the same day (although it wasn't really a double feature because there were a few other movies in between.)

2. Faust (1926) at the California Theatre, San Jose during Cinequest. A masterpiece by Murnau. Dennis James rocking the Mighty Wurlitzer (pre-show he claimed the California has the most powerful Wurlitzer in the country, and he would play it at full blast.) Mark Goldstein on the Buchla Lightning Wands. Absolutely stunning and thrilling, even near the end of an absolutely exhausting film festival. This was the most amazing silent film--heck any film--experience I had ever had.  And it held that title for just a couple of weeks, because...

1. Napoleon (1927) at the Paramount Theater, Oakland. Simply the best 5+ hours I've spent watching a movie. In fact, the fastest 5 1/2 hours of my life (which is impressive because with intermissions and a dinner break it was more like 8 to 9 hours. There just isn't anything that could possibly occupy the number 1 spot on this list.

Look, I love the fun of sharing and comparing top ten lists (or any top N list.) And for the most part the fun is that there are no right answers. Disagreeing is as much fun as agreeing. I know I've put some things on this list that are fun to put on a list more than they are great movies (The Forbidden Zone, really?) But this is one where I won't tolerate disagreement. Napoleon at the Paramount Theater was the greatest movie event of the year (of my life, really) and if you disagree you simply don't get to pretend to be a cinephile with me (until I forgive and forget...which will take about five minutes.) And if you didn't see it...well that's even worse than seeing it and not putting it number 1 on your list.

One Is Business, The Other Crime (1912)

WHO: Directed by D.W. Griffith.

WHAT: It's a bit of a misnomer to call this one-reeler a "short film" as it was standard for most films 101 years ago to fit on just one projector reel; perhaps the comparatively few multi-reelers of 1912 should be labeled "long films" instead! But it's much easier for a writer to go with the current convention of distinguishing "shorts" from "features" when writing about an approximately fifteen minute film, no matter how anachronistic it is to apply to a film from this era. One Is Business, the Other Crime is a fairly straightforward moral lesson about the hypocrisies of social stratification. Made when the Gilded Age was still fresh in memory, its message is sadly no less relevant today than ever. And it allows Blanche Sweet to brandish a pistol! For more on Sweet, Griffith, and this film, do check out this excellent blog.

WHERE/WHEN: At the unique Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, California, which screens films from the first three dozen years of cinema history on fifty-one Saturday nights every year. 7:30 PM.

WHY: Every two months the Museum releases a new screening calendar, available as a mailing or a pdf download from its website. Local silent film researcher Thomas Gladysz has a habit of writing up a fine preview of the Niles offerings every month, but he can't cover every detail of every program- most Saturday nights include a feature-length silent film as well as two short films, though the popular monthly "Comedy Short Subject Night" ditches the feature to pack in more shorts. Tonight's feature is Behind The Front, a 1926 comedy that was part of a mid-1920s wave of World War I films launched by the massive popularity of King Vidor's smash hit war drama The Big Parade. It's always nice to see a Griffith film in a cinema, but it will be especially nice to see just a month before more Griffith films play at Niles to kick off its February schedule; though titles are not announced as yet, a number of the February 2nd Mary Pickford tribute selections are certain to be his.

HOW: Almost all of the films shown at the Niles Film Museum on Saturday nights are shown via 16mm prints, and always with live musical accompaniment. Tonight it will be Bruce Loeb at the piano.

Local Interest

Gramophone Video on Polk Street is set to close up shop; today is it's last day of selling its rental DVDs for $2.99 apiece. I don't usually get as sad over the loss of a video rental store as I do for the loss of a movie theatre, but Gramphone is different, for me. Its small size deceptively hid a collection that was as robust and diverse as any brick-and-mortar video store I've seen in this town with the exception of Le Video and possibly Lost Weekend, and it included some titles (some on VHS) that neither of the other two legs in this 'Frisco trifecta' of rental shops happened to carry. The coziness perhaps was what facilitated more friendships with staff and fellow regular customers there than I've made at other stores. At least I expect these friendships to last, even if the site of their formation doesn't.

As they began selling off their collection, I couldn't resist purchasing the long Out-Of Print World Artists DVD of Caveh Zahedi's In The Bathtub Of The World. I like to think I would've made the purchase even if I didn't have Zahedi on the brain, as I was working on an article on the former local filmmaker's latest video work The Sheik And I.  This was my favorite feature seen courtesy of the San Francisco International Film Festival this past spring (my second-favorite, The Exchange, has just been announced as part of the upcoming SF Jewish Film Festival, incidentally), and it's been echoing in my brain for weeks. My article was just published the other day at the Keyframe blog arm of streaming-video company Fandor, which includes two approximately half-hour Zahedi videos I Was Possessed By God and Tripping With Caveh, as part of it's online-viewing offerings. Yes I am aware of the ironies.

Do read the article and let me know what you think, if you have the time and inclination. I found it an endlessly fascinating and discussable film, although not everyone agrees. Notably, Frako Loden's recent round-up of SFIFF capsules (which also serves as reminders of summer arthouse releases like Alps, Farewell My Queen, and Found Memories) reveals she was no fan. Other worthwhile reading on The Sheik And I comes from Sean Gillane, Adam Schartoff, David Hudson (with links, naturally) and, with an interview with Zahedi, the Documentary Channel Blog. I swear I had not read the latter when I completed my own article, so when both pieces touch on some of the same metaphors and topics it's purely coincidence. Or perhaps a sign from God- another title I'm not sure if I'd been able to track down without Gramophone Video.

More than six years ago, when I wrote a blog post about a favorite film from each of the last ten decades of Frisco Bay filmmaking, I named In The Bathtub Of The World as representative of the 2000s. Today I'd write that post a little differently, and might be more likely to include an experimental short such as one of the beautiful Nathaniel Dorsky films screening this evening at Pacific Film Archive on such a list. But a recent re-watch of my new (previously-viewed) DVD re-confirms it as a staggeringly ambitious and prescient feature. 

I've been thinking a lot about Frisco-based filmmaking recently, actually. I went to the Stanford Theatre last night, on the penultimate night of its Howard Hawks restrospective, to see, for the first time, Howard Hawks's 1964 comedy Man's Favorite Sport. I had never before heard that it was partially set in town, including several street shots and a scene at a revolving sky room bar, which seems to be modeled on the Fairmont Hotel's Crown Room. Perhaps it was even shot there?  I'm almost certain that stars Paula Prentiss and Maria Perschy (and perhaps, to a more eagle-eyed viewer, Rock Hudson as well) can be spotted in the just-prior scene ascending that hotel's famous Skylift external elevator. If so, Man's Favorite Sport joins Ernie Gehr's brilliant structural piece Side/Walk/Shuttle as a film that ought to be included on lists of films shot at the Fairmont. 

Side/Walk/Shuttle, for its part, is fresh in mind because its publicity stills are currently under glass at the Old Mint, along with "ephemeral" material from the Pacific Film Archive's collection of documents from the rich history of Bay Area avant-garde filmmaking and exhibition. Also included: a Tony Labat storyboard, flyers from film screenings by local organizations like SF Cinematheque, Film Arts Foundation, the SF Art Institute, and more. I was particularly interested to see original advertising from the notorious October 23, 1953 "Art In Cinema" series screening at the original SFMOMA, in which Christopher Maclaine's The End was shown to an unruly audience. The End is in fact not listed on the ad as it was a last-minute replacement for another film, but I immediately recognized the document thanks to the intense research Brecht Andersch and I did on The End prior to a screening I helped him put on last year.

Why are these objects at the Old Mint? They're part of an exhibit the San Francisco Historical Society is holding as a fundraiser for their project of turning the Old Mint into a permanent exhibition space. As a fundraiser, it's an exhibit put together on a limited budget, but with a great deal of creativity on the part of curator Miguel Pendás of the San Francisco Film Society, who quietly dazzles festgoers with his knowledge of local film locations at the Noir City festival each January. He's divided the Old Mint space into several themed rooms, including a room of silent-era filmmaking with creative input from David Kiehn of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, a room of nothing but noir posters from the personal collections of Noir City's Eddie Muller and the Telluride Film Festival's Gary Meyer, a photographic look inside local studios like Pixar and Lucasfilm, a room devoted to "Cars, Cops and Cocktails" which has tips for anyone wanting to know how to mix drinks imbibed in After The Thin Man, Days of Wine and Roses, or Zodiac, and more, including an Vistavision camera used to shoot Vertigo and full-size wax figures of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and Charlie Chaplin in A Jitney Elopement (shot in Golden Gate Park). Michael Fox and Frako Loden have written good overviews of the exhibition, which ends today. It's quite possible to take the entire thing in about an hour or so.

The PFA documents I described above were the centerpiece of a room devoted to independent filmmaking in San Francisco- a scratching of the surface, really, but one that also represents documentary filmmaking with a poster from Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, and major studio-distributed projects by independent-minded makers, represented by a poster from the version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers made by Philip Kaufman (who will, it's just been announced, introduce the screening of Wonderful Lie Of Nina Petrovna at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival next month). This room and the silent-era room were the most interesting to me. When I attended a press preview two weeks ago, not all of the displays were in place yet, so I was glad when returning to see the full exhibit this week, that Lon Chaney had been added to this particular room. Not only did he perform on San Francisco stages before his film career, and make films like Outside The Law and The Shock in town, but a dream sequence from his villainous vehicle The Penalty has him directing a crime wave from the steps of the Old Mint itself! Some things about the building have not changed very much since 1920, but I didn't see any obvious criminal masterminding on my excursion. Today is the last day of the exhibit. A perfect thing to do on the way to the Stanford to see Man's Favorite Sport (and its co-feature Rio Bravo) if you haven't yet.

I also recently attended a free program at the San Francisco Public Library hosted by Jim Van Buskirk, author of the useful but frustratingly incomplete book Celluloid San Francisco. An hour+ of clips from narrative and documentary films that make particularly interesting use of the Golden Gate Bridge as plot device or thematic signifier (not mere pictorial backdrop), this program was more completely satisfying than his book, and not only because it was free. He began with the 1936 Frank Borzage film Stranded, which includes plot developments centered around the worksite for the builders of the still-unfinished bridge, and ended with an extended battle film Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and crammed clips from dozens of films including Dark Passage, the Man Who Cheated Himself, The Love Bug, A View To A Kill, The Joy Of Life, and Monsters Vs. Aliens into the presentation, knowing when it best to provide audio commentary for the clip and when to let it play out un-intruded-upon. After the show there was ample time for a spirited conversation to spring up among the attendees. He gives his presentation one last time this month, on Wednesday at the Excelsior SFPL Branch. 

If free library screenings fit your budget perfectly, then you might want to know that more than 20 SFPL branches will be hosting DVD screenings of San Francisco-themed films throughout July. Titles include Flower Drum Song, The Lady From Shanghai, Time After Time, and The Social Network. If image quality is more important to you than price, the Castro Theatre is going to be screening a number of San Francisco films as part of its August celebration of its 90th year in operation. So far, only an August 1-2 booking of The Maltese Falcon (with the New York-set The Asphalt Jungle) has been announced, but rumor has it that there will be more announced soon. 

Best Fests In the West?

It's that time of year again. For The Love Of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon is holding its 3rd annual outpouring of blog-love for the integral activity of film preservation, hosted earlier this week by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy On Films, and now by This Island Rod. For the third year in a row, the Blogathon is raising funds for a San Francisco-based preservation non-profit. In 2010 funds raised from For The Love Of Film went to the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve color-tinted versions of two hundred-year-old Western one-reelers, The Sergeant and The Better Man. Last year's donations went to the Film Noir Foundation to help pay for a new restoration of blacklisted director Cy Endfield's Try And Get Me, which is expected to be finished in time to screen at the January 2014(!!!) edition of Frisco's Noir City festival. Consider that a year-and-a-half early scoop (in the meantime, Endfiled's The Underworld Story screens at the Roxie next week). This year's blogathon is taking donations for, once again, the National Film Preservation Foundation, this time to make what remains of The White Shadow, a very early feature worked on by Alfred Hitchcock and until recently thought completely lost, available at the NFPF's online screening room with a musical score by Michael Mortilla.  Donate today to help further the world's knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock and British silent film!

Many of the blog pieces being written for this week's blogathon have focused on Hitchcock films and related subjects, and I considered writing about his Vertigo star Kim Novak, who will be returning to this city for a gala event June 14th to help kick off a week-long exhibition of Frisco Bay movie-making memorabilia at the Old Mint, put together by the SF Museum & Historical Society. Novak was in the news earlier this year, as you may remember, for objecting to The Artist's re-use of Bernard Herrman's iconic love theme from Hitchcock's love/hate letter to San Francisco. Well, less for objecting to it, than for using a very controversial word choice to express her objection. My own tweets at the time of the controversy expressed my feelings on the subject pretty well, I think.  I chalk the whole incident up to the usual Oscar-season mudslinging, and would never hold an isolated comment against an actress I admire as much as Novak, who is undoubtedly absolutely brilliant in Vertigo although I've barely seen any of her other acting work.

A more detailed appreciation of Novak in Vertigo will have to wait for another day, because I cannot resist using the blogathon as an excuse to talk about a few upcoming film festivals that feature preserved and restored films in their program. The NFPF screening room and the DVD sets it releases are wonderful boons to home viewing, but the importance of getting our film heritage in front of audiences in cinemas should not be understated. Sometimes the essential qualities of films made to be screened theatrically cannot be fully decoded in other settings. With the world of film exhibition under increasing pressure to conform to Hollywood studios' desires to turn cinema into a digital wonderland that threatens to be a digital blunderland and, as David Bordwell warns, a "freezing of the canon," film festivals may become one of the last remaining models for getting actual film prints on cinema screens. While certain local festivals have scaled back their retrospective screening components, it's heartening that others remain committed to giving past cinematic glories as much or more attention than the newest motion picture trends.


The National Film Preservation Foundation's aforementioned DVD sets cover a wide range of American filmmaking strands, from narratives of practically every genre and length to documentaries, animation, newsreels, home movies and even advertisements. But the bulk of these collections is given over to two general categories that tend to fall through the cracks for most commercial DVD-releasing enterprises: silent films and avant-garde films. Though their first set is perhaps their most eclectic in both themes and time periods, sets two, three, and five are almost exclusively devoted to silent-era filmmaking. The fourth set was given over entirely to this country's rich avant-garde filmmaking tradition, and the announced sixth set will be a sequel released next year. Correspondingly, there are three film festivals coming to Frisco Bay in the next couple months that celebrate silent films and avant-garde films: The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, and Crossroads.

Since it begins first- this evening, as a matter of fact- I'll take on Crossroads for a few paragraphs first. The third annual initiative on the part of venerable experimental film exhibition organization SF Cinematheque to program a full-fledged festival of artist-made film and video, Crossroads will screen more than fifty works from around the globe between now and Sunday. Many of today's most interesting truly independent moving image artists have work in the festival, from established masters like Scott Stark, Ken Jacobs, and Saul Levine, to rising talents such as Linda Scobie and Sylvia Schedelbauer -- I've seen Scobie's Craig's Cutting Room Floor and Schedelbauer's Sounding Glass and am certain both with make a strong impression on Crossroads attendees. Max Goldberg has written a fine preview focusing mostly on new works getting their Frisco Bay premieres at the festival.

Of great interest to the preservation-minded, however, is tomorrow afternoon's program of films made by Chick Strand, the co-founder of Canyon Cinema, the 1960s exhibition predecessor to SF Cinematheque that still operates as a distribution company today. Strand's film Fake Fruit Factory was included on the fourth NFPF DVD set and is available for online viewing in their virtual screening room. Last December, two years after Strand's death in 2009, the film was included on the list of new entrants to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry along with far more famous titles like Bambi  and Faces. I think it's great that she now has a film on the registry list, but am still a bit baffled as to why that particular one was chosen, fine as it is. The Crossroads festival will be screening two of Strand's (in my book) far greater masterpieces, her joyous 1966 film Angel Blue Sweet Wings and her 1979 tribute to Anne Frank, Kristallnacht. Also screening is her rarely-shown 54-minute 1979 film Soft Fiction, which I have yet to see. The program is titled Woman With Flowers after the name of a film that was originally also slated to screen; that title has been replaced with her 1979 found footage film Cartoon Le Mousse. I don't know the reason for the switch, but it's interesting that Woman With Flowers was completed by the filmmaker in 1995, yet she never created a distribution print. According to the website of the Pacific Film Archive, which screened the film last October, the Academy Film Archive completed post-production on the film posthumously, but that "no creative interpretation or intervention was necessary."

Contrast that statement against what preservationist Bill Brand has to say in the liner notes to the recent Criterion Collection DVD release of Hollis Frampton's films, which have been scarcely seen on Frisco Bay screens in recent years. Brand insists that preservation of avant-garde films invariably involves creative work, as film companies discontinue the stocks filmmakers originally used, and digital transfers demand compromises and aesthetic judgments. A 16mm print of the late Frampton's 1969 film Lemon plays the Crossroads festival on Sunday evening along with two other experimental film "classics": Bruce Baillie's simple yet breathtakingly rich 1966 film All My Life, and Morgan Fisher's Picture and Sound Rushes. All three have been programmed to compliment a five-film set of films by Basque filmmaker Laida Lertxundi, who comes fresh from the Whitney Biennial and counts these works among her influences. I haven't seen ant of Lertxundi's films yet, but I marvel at the programming of Lemon at a time slot coinciding with a rare annular solar eclipse. Lemon is often remarked on as an erotic interpretation of a citrus fruit, but the way its lighting scheme gradually shifts over the course of seven minutes recalls the (apparent) movement of a familiar solar orb around our own globe. Assuming the program runs continuously without extended breaks for introductions, the (partial in San Francisco) eclipse ought to peak right about the time when the films finish. But you probably won't want to race out of the Victoria Theatre to peek at it, for two reasons: looking directly at the sun, even during an eclipse, is far more dangerous to the eyes than looking at an on-screen lemon, and Lertxundi has been flown into town to speak about her work following the screening.


On the subject of flying in to film festivals, although it's undoubtedly too late to book a cheap flight to attend Crossroads, there's plenty of time for out-of-towners to plan to visit the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which announced its full program last week but doesn't commence until mid-July.  You'll hardly be alone, as scores of visitors from around the country descend upon the Castro Theatre every summer to join the thousands of locals in love with what has become the largest silent film festival in the country (and probably the largest one anywhere in the world that has yet to screen an Alfred Hitchcock silent film. Operative word, I hope: Yet.)  Continuing the aviation thread, the festival opens July 12th with the new restoration of William Wellman's World War I dogfight saga Wings, which will be accompanied by a live score from Colorado's Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and by Foley effects from renowned sound designer Ben Burtt (Star Wars). Though Wings, which stars Richard Arlen, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Clara Bow and Gary Cooper, is well-known as the winner of the Best Production award at the first Academy Awards ceremony - and often retroactively designated as the first Best Picture winner - few know that the other award the film won that year, for Best Engineering Effects, was designated equally for the film's ground-breaking visual effects and for the live sound effects that accompanied its gala premiere screening in Los Angeles. Silent films are by no means equivalent to silent screenings; though the prints include no sonic information, they have almost always been screened with musical accompaniments, sound effects, narration, etc. The SFSFF brings some of the best international accompanists to provide music for all screenings, and will experiment with narration for its July 14 screening of the 1919 British documentary South, for which actor Paul McGann will read from the diaries of the film's hero, Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, while Stephen Horne provides piano accompaniment. 

Clara Bow is represented at the festival not only by Wings but by Mantrap, a 1926 Paramount comedy released on DVD last year as part of the NFPF's fifth box set of Treasures From American Film Archives. Stephen Horne, again, will reprise the piano score he performs on that DVD, but the film will be screened on a 35mm print. Indeed, the SFSFF has a reputation of using the best possible 35mm prints for their screenings, and nearly all of the films in the 2012 festival are expected to screen on 35mm- the exceptions being Wings, Ernst Lubitsch's last surviving German film, The Loves Of Pharaoh, and the color restoration of A Trip To The Moon which screens before a 35mm print of Buster Keaton's The Cameraman to close the festival July 15th. Presumably, as in the few (I count three) other instances when the SFSFF has used digital rather than film prints, there are not 35mm versions of these restorations available for them to screen. The festival has screened Wings in 35mm before, way back in 1999. That was the first time I'd ever heard of SFSFF, and I unfortunately couldn't make the screening and have yet to see Wings on anything other than VHS. I hope the new restoration is worth the wait, and the presence of pixels.


G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box is the other repeat selection in this year's festival, and although I saw it last time around (in 2005), I won't want to miss it this time either, as it's an extended version with about 10 more minutes than any other available, it will be shown in a 35mm print of a full restoration funded by Louise Brooks fan Hugh Hefner, and will be musically accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble, the Swedish accompanists who are quickly becoming many fans' favorites of the SFSFF stable of musicians. They will also accompany Mauritz Stiller's 1920 Erotikon (not to be confused with Gustav Machaty's 1929 film with the same name, which screened at the 2009 SFSFF), which I've been wanting to see for years. 

And there's more- much more. Musicians I haven't yet mentioned include Wurlitzer organist extraordinaire Dennis James, who will accompany Douglas Fairbanks (not Jean Dujardin) in The Mark Of Zorro and  The Loves Of Pharaoh. The Alloy Orchestra will premiere a new score for Soviet co-directing team Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg's Nikolai Gogol adaptation The Overcoat- another film I've had on my to-see list for quite some time. Keyframe recently published an interview I did with Alloy co-founder Ken Winokur, if you want to know more about why I'm excited by this pairing. And pianist Donald Sosin will play for no less than four film programs including Chinese auteur Sun Yu's well-regarded Little Toys starring Shanghai's answer to Greta Garbo, Ruan Lingyu. He'll also back Pola Negri in a brand new restoration of The Spanish Dancer, and my favorite Josef Von Sternberg silent film The Docks Of New York (which I wrote about upon its DVD release here), but I'm most excited to hear his collaboration with local ensemble Toychestra for a set of seven Felix The Cat cartoons. Felix is undoubtedly my favorite silent cartoon star, and Sosin's keyboard style seems especially suited to his antics.


Might as well mention the three other films, which I knew little or nothing about before the SFSFF program announcement: The Wonderful Lie Of Nina Petrovna starring Brigitte Helm of Metropolis, with music by Mont Alto, and two more for the versatile Stephen Horne: Stella Dallas (no not the Barbara Stanwyck version) and The Canadian. Not to leave out the program perhaps most pertinent to this blogathon, the annual "Amazing Tales From The Archives" program, free to the public, in which archivists from around the world present some of the latest, most fascinating finds for an audience of peers and newbies. I've met people who decideded to enter the field of film preservation after attending one of these enlightening sessions, and it was at such a presentation nearly two years ago that I was lucky enough to be among the first participants in a For The Love Of Film Blogathon to see the fruits of the project's first stab at fundraising: a brand-new 35mm print of The Better Man, with Horne doing his first improvisational run-through of the piano score he'd eventually record for the NFPF's fifth DVD set.

If I don't see you at Crossroads or at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, perhaps I will at the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, running June 29 through July 1st at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in the otherwise-sleepy town of Niles, California. This festival will also include a 35mm print of a film found on the fifth NFPF DVD set: Mack Sennett's The Tourists, starring Mabel Normand as a visitor whose stay in Albuquerque turns out to be longer and more exciting than she expected. And of a Clara Bow film: Helen's Babies, also starring Edward Everett Horton and Diana Serra Carey a.k.a. Baby Peggy (who, at age 93, will be in town for the festival). I've written about Niles and the unique screening venue for this festival before, and I usually make it out to their regular Saturday night screening series at least once or twice a year, even though it's not exactly simple to get there from San Francisco without a car. But I've never attended their biggest annual event. This year, as the festival celebrates its fifteenth year of existence, and the 100th anniversary of Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson's arrival in Niles to make some of the first cowboy pictures, I'm determined to attend at least one or two festival screenings. This year's line-up puts a particular focus on films made precisely 100 years ago, in Niles or elsewhere, including five films by Anderson, two by D.W. Griffith, and even one of the few feature length films made in this country that year: Charles Gaskill's Cleopatra.


But if you have a few bucks to drop on attending one or more of these festivals for your own enjoyment, why not also donate so that not only you, but anyone with an internet connection can benefit from film preservation. I just donated myself. I can't wait to see The White Shadow, through any legal channel available to me.

Silent Introduction

The silent film resonances in this year's Oscar nominees and winners The Artist and Hugo have been much-commented on by folks more impassioned and eloquent than I. I'm just glad I could get away with dressing as Georges Méliès at a friend's Oscar party this year. It's been a season of Méliès for me, as I finished up an essay on the indispensable French film pioneer, now up at the Fandor Keyframe blog in two parts.

Local film screening venues have been capitalizing on the silent film/Oscar resonances all Winter, and the reverberations continue throughout March and into the coming months as well. The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum includes Méliès films in three of its five Saturday night screening programs this month, including a hand-colored print of his Palace of the Arabian Nights March 31st. The Balboa Theatre also grabs a hold of Hugo this Sunday when it celebrates its 86th birthday. The tradition of showing a silent film during their annual bash continues, this year with a 35mm print of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last, the film from which comes the iconic image of a bespectacled wall-crawler hanging off a giant department store clock. Hugo presents this image prominently as well, when its main characters attend a film screening (although in the original book they attend the Rene Clair film Le Million.) Past Balboa birthday parties (I've attended three over the years) have been some of the best value-for-ticket-dollar experiences I've had on Frisco Bay. Not only is there a feature film with live musical accompaniment, but also other live entertainment, cake, door prizes and the opportunity for trivia prizes as well. Last year I made quite a haul, and would've even if I hadn't known my Charlie Chaplin trivia.

And then there's The Artist, the first French film ever to win the top Oscar. If you don't count its two scenes containing words and/or sound effects, it's also the first silent film to do so since the first Academy Awards in 1929, when Wings won an award called "Production of Most Outstanding Picture", which in most history books has been revised as "Best Picture" for consistency's sake. The Stanford Theatre showed William Wellman's Wings last Friday as part of a nearly-weekly series of silent films featuring Dennis James as organ accompanist; the series continues this week with Ernst Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle (a huge influence on Yasujiro Ozu and other filmmakers) this Friday, then goes on a little hiatus (during which James performs for F.W. Murnau's Faust with Mark Goldstein at the California Theatre for Cinequest) before resuming in late March and April.

According to a mailer sent out by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, a screening of Wings will open its annual festival at the Castro Theatre on July 12th with the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra providing music and soundman Ben Burtt proving audio effects live, in the spirit of the sound effects used during gala presentations of Wings in its day; the other Academy Award the film won in 1929 was for these effects as well as for the visual effects used to recreate World War I-era aerial action on screen.

But I would be remiss to look ahead to the SFSFF's July festival without pointing out that there are still tickets available for their once-in-a-generation screenings of Kevin Brownlow's reconstruction of Abel Gance's Napoléon at the palatial Paramount Theatre in Oakland. The festival's website has all the information you might need about this presentation, including an indispensable set of Frequently Asked Questions; the answers are an extremely compelling argument that anyone who loves film should attend at least one of these screenings. Which one? If you're the sort of hedging cinephile who waits to see what's happening at all the local film venues before committing to any one ticket, wait no more; pretty much everything has been announced. Check the Film On Film Foundation calendar for that week and see if there's not a day of the four (Mar, 24, 25, 31 & April 1) that you can make seeing Napoléon your priority. I don't want to hear any of my readers complaining a year or a decade from now that you didn't realize how unique and overpowering these screenings are likely to be, and therefore missed out. Even Hugo director Martin Scorsese is stumping for Napoléon. In a brief article written on the film for the latest issue of Vanity Fair he says the 1927 epic is "unlike anything made before or since. Gance ushered in every technical innovation imaginable."


I don't know if Scorsese will be taking his own article's advice and coming to Oakland for Napoléon. For those who want to see more of the famous preservationist and filmmaker, a Jonas Mekas-made documentary An American Film Director at Work: Martin Scorsese closes an 8-program series of documentaries about great film directors at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts; Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Chantal Akerman, John Cassavetes and Hou Hsiao-Hsien are among the other directors spotlighted. March and April provide a typically diverse and intriguing slate for YBCA, with the great directors joined by SF Cinematheque programs, architecture films and 2012 Human Rights Watch Film Festival screenings. My friend Adam Hartzell, who has frequently written on documentaries on this site and elsewhere, is here to write about Salaam Dunk, which opens the latter festival tonight, and its resonances with other similarly-themed sports documentaries.

Here's his article.

Jason Wiener Only has Two Eyes

It's impossible for any pair of eyes to view all of Frisco Bay's worthwhile film screenings. I'm so pleased that a number of local filmgoers have let me post their repertory/revival screening highlights of 2011. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from cinephile Jason Wiener, who blogs at Jason Watches Movies; most of the following links take you to his reviews on that site.

Okay, here's my list of my favorite repertory/revival (ya know, "old movie") screenings of 2011. I must stress that these are my favorites and mine alone. I'm in fact sure I saw better movies over the year, but for one reason or another these are the movies that entertained me in a special way. These are also approximately in order, although I could probably move any of them up or down a spot or two. With that said, here we go:

10. THE MOONSHINE WAR (1970) at the Vortex Room, which means I was pretty drunk on Manhattans (my New Year's resolution last year was to drink fewer martinis and more Manhattans--first time I've ever kept my resolution all year). So what I remember most is Alan Alda doing a bad hillbilly accent. That, and the whole town showing up just to watch the final showdown, like this was their weekly entertainment.

9. THE TIME MACHINE (1960) and FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) at the Stanford Theatre. Aka, the "dumb blondes in sci-fi double feature." Seriously, Yvette Mimeaux and Anne Francis respectively are given nothing to do in these movies other than look pretty and be really dumb (or charitably, really naive). The moral here is that little girls in the 50's and 60's didn't need role models.

8. SOYLENT GREEN (1973) and SILENT RUNNING (1972) at the Vortex Room. Again, I was full of booze, so I kinda snoozed through a bit of the middle of SILENT RUNNING, but they were still both very cool. And the fact that I put dystopian future sci-fi above dumb blond eye candy sci-fi probably says something about me.

7. GASLIGHT (1944) at the Castro, as part of Noir City. Really, I could list all of Noir City here, but part of the fun is picking my favorite. For all the mental torture of Ingrid Bergman, for me I couldn't take my eyes of saucy little 19 year old Angela Lansbury. Something about finding out I'm attracted to Angela Lansbury makes this movie unforgettable.

6. THE KILLERS (1964) at the Roxie, as part of Not Necessarily Noir II. A cool story and I just love seeing Ronald Reagan playing a gangster. Also, let this serve as a plug for this year's Noir City, where it will play on Saturday Night, January 21st, with Angie Dickinson in person.

5. HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971) at the San Jose Women's Club (as part of the Beanbag Film Festival) and again at the Red Vic (as part of its closing weekend). I feel like I should enter a Bay Area cinephile's confessional and say, "Forgive me Father, for I only made it to the Red Vic a few times, and only after I knew it was in a lot of trouble." In any case, HAROLD AND MAUDE has been one of those weird films that I've seen many times, but always far enough apart that I've managed to forget large parts of it (like Maude is a Holocaust survivor) before I see it again. Until 2011, when I saw it twice in a year. Not only did I finally manage to watch it with the knowledge that Maude is a Holocaust survivor, but...well, you can read my review and see that I managed to read a Maude/Hitler romance into her past.

4. THE MAN WHO LAUGHS (1928) at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. Again, I could put pretty much everything I saw at Niles on this list, but I had to choose one, and this is it.

3. WORLD ON A WIRE (1973) at the Roxie. Rainer Werner Fassbinder did the MATRIX some 26 years before the Wachowski brothers came up with it. And he did it as a 4 1/2 hour epic made for German TV. Awesome.

2. NOSFERATU (1922) at the California Theatre, with Dennis James on the Wurlitzer organ, as part of Cinequest. I'm generally against the concept of favorites--I think it calcifies an element of my character that should remain fluid. My favorite movie varies with my mood, what I've seen recently, etc. But with that said, NOSFERATU is very often my favorite movie ever. And seeing it on the big screen with Dennis James on the organ is a tremendous treat.

1. THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE (1924, using footage from 1911-12) at the Castro Theatre, as part of the Silent Film Festival. Again, I could've listed the whole festival, but this was far and away the one that impressed me the most. Just looking back and seeing documentary footage from 100 years ago is pretty amazing, and the story of Robert Falcon Scott's fateful attempt on the South Pole is likewise amazing. The King allegedly wanted this footage shown to all English schoolboys to instill in them the strong sense of adventure and British spirit. My snarky half wants to make a crack about how inspiring children onto adventures that end in death isn't necessarily the smartest thing for the empire. But having seen the movie, I understand what the King was thinking.

And that's my top ten. And now for a few (dis)honorable mentions. You can decide for yourself whether they're dishonorable or honorable. These are in no particular order

SUNRISE (1927) at the Castro, again part of the Silent Film Festival. Murnau's masterpiece, of course. The reason it doesn't make my regular list is that the soundtrack was done on solo electric guitar...and that just doesn't work right. But it was interesting, and you can read from my review that it led me to a new interpretation wherein it was a supernatural succubus story. In fact, the full title for this love triangle is SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS. Makes you wonder which one of the three is not human.

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) first colorized and in 3-D at the San Jose Rep as part of Cinequest, then in black and white 2-D at the Roxie to end Not Necessarily Noir II. The first time was in fact the world premiere of the 3-D version, and I was there dressed as Vampira (it wasn't pretty, and no I don't have pictures). The second time was with Johnny Legend presenting a whole Ed Wood tribute (including GLEN OR GLENDA, which also could've made this list). I'm pretty sure there wasn't anything all that honorable about either screening, but damn it was fun.

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) at the Dark Room, on Bad Movie Night, a traditional part of their War on Christmas. Call me a Grinch, but drunk and cracking wise is the only way I ever want to see this movie again. If I ever have to move away from the bay area, I'd want to live in Pottersville. At least it's better than Cleveland.

Kurtiss Hare Only Has Two Eyes

It's impossible for any pair of eyes to view all of Frisco Bay's worthwhile film screenings. I'm so pleased that a number of local filmgoers have let me post their repertory/revival screening highlights of 2011. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Kurtiss Hare, cinema enthusiast and blogger at cinefrisco.com, where this article was cross-posted.

As 2011 draws to a close, there are no shortage of best-of lists to be found on the internet. My friend, Brian Darr (aka. HellOnFriscoBay), asked a group of Bay Area cinema-goers to bring their top ten repertory/revival experiences of the year to the table, since we only have two eyes apiece. The films listed here are, of course, fantastic on their own, but the real celebrities are the theaters, organizations and curators that make this list possible – a special possibility indeed. In no particular order:


Good Morning (Ozu 1959) @ VIZ Cinema, seen 07/03/2011.

Here, Ozu makes the kind of observations he makes best, this time protracting out from the family to its surrounding neighborhood. Politesse under duress has never been so silly. I remember being very enticed with the VIZ Cinema’s crisp projection of one of Ozu’s few color films.


Lola (Mendoza 2009) @ YBCA, seen 10/02/2011.

It’s monsoon season in the Philippines and two matriarchs brave the impenetrable downpour to keep their families afloat. Heartfelt, stunning and complicated. It was the kind of screening that makes you want to hug a curator.

Woman in the Dunes (Teshigahara 1964) @ VIZ Cinema, seen 6/21/2011.

Meaningful allegories, for me, work best when they aren’t needed. On a granular level, this film is a compelling piece of horror/suspense with sensual visual details. A larger reading of the protagonist’s existential tightrope-walk manages to enhance without usurping. Again, the VIZ’s projection was acute enough to leave me sandblasted.

Kuroneko (Shindō 1968)
House (Obayashi 1977)
@ The Castro Theater, seen 3/23/2011.

OK, so there are two films here, but they were part of a delightful Japanese feline horror-themed double feature. From Kuroneko’s sexy & vicious apparitions to House’s ultra-campy blood floods, this was one hell of an afternoon altercation.


Days of Heaven (Malick 1978)
Badlands (Malick 1973)
@ The Castro Theater, seen 8/25/2011.

A somewhat less creatively curated duo, but no less appreciated. I sometimes think Malick's quiet internal monologues were positively designed to resound through the Castro's arched ceilings before reaching the ear. This was my first time seeing Days of Heaven, and while sometimes a theatrical screening makes me want to hug a curator, other times the curator beats me to the punch.


The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Herzog 1974) @ Red Vic Movie House, seen 3/30/2011.

Kaspar was not the last film I saw at the Red Vic, but it will be the one by which I choose to remember our departed. Here, Herzog puts the entire genre of science fiction to shame by excavating human gems from a plausible, if controversial, case of man-in-the-wild.


It (Badger 1927) @ Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, seen 5/28/2011.

As in, Clara Bow has got "it." Her charisma and peppiness are monuments unto themselves, having injected a potent substance into the veins of our modern outlook on celebrity and Hollywoodland romance. This evening at the Niles-Essanay gave me a taste of silent film the way its original audiences might have enjoyed it.


The Goose Woman (Brown 1925) @ The Castro Theater, seen 7/16/2011.

Another silent, this time during the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at The Castro. Some alpha-noir stylings and an enthralling characterization of haggard, piercing irrelevance by Louise Dresser left me quite taken. We have our own Stanford Theatre Foundation to thank for its preservation.


Gaslight (Cukor 1944) @ The Castro Theater, seen 1/22/2011.

One of the more psychologically twisted (my favorite kind!) noirs I saw this year. I don't know its technical term, but I just googled "the derivation of pleasure from simulated insanity," so that should tell you something. Oh, according to wikipedia, the word "gaslighting" has been appropriated for just such an occasion.


Streets of Shame (Mizoguchi 1956) @ The PFA, seen 6/25/2011.

For me, this very much more focused film is "streets ahead" of Mizoguchi's sweeping epic, Sansho the Bailiff, which I also saw as part of the Pacific Film Archive's Japanese Divas series. It's structured to examine multiple facets of prostitution that are typically hidden behind the bamboo curtain of everyday sensibilities. This was one film in an excellent series overall.

You Wish To Go To The Festival(s)?

Fall festivals are flying fast and furious, as Frisco Bay film organizations jockey for the attention of eager movie lovers. Two local film festivals are already winding down as I type this (Michael Hawley has details), and undoubtedly at least one or two more will send an announcement into my inbox before I finish writing this post. Tonight marks the beginning of a pair of weekend-long festivals I've never attended, the SF Irish Film Festival at the Roxie, and the Oakland Underground Film Festival at various venues in that city. The former screens new work from the Emerald Isle along with some retrospective entries like Once, In The Name of the Father (both, according to Film On Film, on 35mm prints), and artist-turned-film director Steve McQueen's Hunger. As for the OUFF, if their Friday night selection Marimbas From Hell is any indication of the festival's spirit, expect a weekend of wonderfully weird films unlikely to find commercial distribution. Marimbas From Hell is Guatemalan filmmaker Julio Hernández Cordón's first film since his low-budget scorcher of a debut Gasoline, and it bursts with humanity and eccentricity as it follows an unemployed xylophone player who joins forces with an aging heavy metal god to create a musical fusion that blurs documentary and fiction as much as Julio Cordón's style seems to.

Tonight is also the Sf Film Society's kickoff party for its 2011 Fall Season, a nearly nonstop parade of themed collections of international film selections at its new home New People Cinema (and a few other venues as well). Festivals announced so far include: Hong Kong Cinema (September 23-25) with recent films by directors Ann Hui, Johnnie To and others; read Adam Hartzell's write-up for more. Taiwan Film Days (October 14-16) including the goofy cross-cultural comedy Pinoy Sunday. The NY/SF International Children's Film Festival (October 21-23) features at least one 3-D animation with serious potential to impress, French silhouette master Michel Ocelot's Tales Of The Night, to be screened at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio rather than at New People as most of the rest of the Children's Fest will be. This is a rare opportunity to experience perhaps what's probably the most technically perfect screening venue in town.

Though Cinema By The Bay (Nov. 3-6), the San Francisco International Animation Festival (Nov. 10-13) and New Italian Cinema (Nov. 13-20) have yet to be unveiled on the SFFS website, they'll have to be pretty impressive to displace French Cinema Now (October 27-November 2) as my most anticipated of these Fall Season series. Three of the most talked-about films from this year's international festival circuit (Cannes, Toronto, etc.) get their Frisco Bay debuts during this series, and I can't wait to see all three of them: Goodbye, First Love, young director Mia Hansen-Løve's follow-up to her stunning second feature Father Of My Children, The Dardennes Brothers' The Kid With A Bike, which won the Grand Prix (essentially second prize to Terence Malick's Tree of Life) at Cannes back in May, and Le Havre, the new feature by Finland's most famous director, Aki Kaurismäki, his first in more than five years. The original mission of French Cinema Now is stretched by the inclusion of films from Finland and Belgium along with France, but if we interpret the "French" in the series title as a reference to the language of the dialogue and not the nationality of the crew, all three films are equally at home here. As are the other French-language films in the program, none of which I've heard much about as of yet. Mathieu Amalric's The Screen Illusion is the only one of these directed by a filmmaker I've seen other work by: his On Tour closed the the last SF International Film Festival. That screening was the final public appearance of Graham Leggat, who ran the Film Society brilliantly for more than five years until stepping down shortly before he succumbed to cancer late last month.

Leggat's recent passing was solemnly mentioned, along with local legendary filmmaker George Kuchar's, at a press conference announcing the line-up of the 34th Mill Valley Film Festival last week. Kuchar was subject of a MVFF tribute in its second year of operation, back in 1979. (He'll be subject of a pair of posthumous tributes by SF Cinematheque this December. Jordan Belson, another recently departed Frisco filmmaking giant, will be posthumously honored at the Pacific Film Archive in October). These days MVFF tributees are less likely to be dedicated underground filmmakers like Kuchar and more likely to be individuals in the early stages of an Oscar campaign. This year the festival tributes Glenn Close with a screening of Albert Nobbs, and spotlights Michelle Yeoh, Ezra Miller and Jennifer Olson, all year-end-awards possibilities for their new films, The Lady, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Martha Marcy May Marlene, respectively. One 2011 MVFF tributee is most definitely not stumping in hopes of hearing his name mentioned by Eddie Murphy next February. Gaston Kaboré is one of the top film directors from Burkina Faso, the country that hosts Sub-Saharan Africa's most prestigious film festival, the biannual FESPACO. Though his films are known to some cinephiles, they are rarely revived and, apart from his brief contribution to the international omnibus Lumiere And Company (all I've seen of his work), not easily found on DVD. So it's wonderful that two of his most acclaimed films Wend Kuuni and its sequel Buud Yam are being brought to Marin along with their maker next month. Unfortunately tickets to Buud Yam are already at "Rush Status" so make sure to buy tickets in advance for Wend Kuuni if you don't want to have to wait in line on a Tuesday night for a sample of Burkinabé cinema.

Also gone to "Rush Status" at MVFF are opening night Sequoia Theatre screening-only tickets to Jeff, Who Lives At Home, the latest from the Duplass Brothers, who made The Puffy Chair, Baghead and Cyrus. This was screened at the festival press conference, and from the moment early in the film when they start to make reference to M. Night Shyamalan's Signs I knew the film was going to be a lot smarter than the average contemporary comedy about unlikable man-children. I'm not supposed to say too much about the film until its general release next Spring, but I found it a very satisfying exercise in enjoyable audience manipulation. It's still possible to buy tickets to the film+party package, though they're quite expensive. The closing night film is another one I'm hotly anticipating: Michel Hazanavicius's neo-silent The Artist. More MVFF titles are commented on in Jackson Scarlett's SF360 article.

Since I mentioned silent cinema, let me step away from film festivals for a moment to note the Niles Silent Film Museum's current calendar. October brings, along with many other films, a pair of classics I've seen and can comment on: A Fool There Was is not a very good film, but it's a very important one as it's among the only features still surviving of superstar sex symbol Theda Bara's prodigious output. The Man Who Laughs, meanwhile, is a really wonderful film to see with an audience; it stars Conrad Veidt as a disfigured nobleman striving against a lifelong conspiracy against him. His make-up famously inspired Batman creator Bob Kane's vision of The Joker. The final Niles show of September 2011 reunites Mary Pickford and Cecil B. DeMille, who had acted together on the New York stage, but who came to Boulder Creek, CA to make Romance of the Redwoods with Pickford in front of the camera and DeMille behind it. Also on this Saturday's program are a Max Linder short and my favorite of all of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's films, the two-reel Fatty and Mabel Adrift. Earlier this month, I wrote an Indiewire article on Arbuckle, informed by my last trip to Niles, to see a film he made just before the scandal that destroyed his career ninety years ago: Leap Year. I hope you take a look at the piece and let me know what you think.

I could go on, but I really ought to wrap this post up. So I'll just mention the other Frisco Bay festivals coming up in the next month or so, and hope that you can tell me whether there are films screening at them that you're interested in, or think I might be. There's the brand-new Palo Alto International Film Festival (which includes what may be your last chances to see Werner Herzog's Cave Of Forgotten Dreams in "Real D" 3-D before the inevitable stereoscopic retrospectives come along), the Arab Film Festival, the 10th SF DocFest, the 14th United Nations Association Film Festival, and the ATA Film & Video Festival.