Adrianne Finelli: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE Contributor Adrianne Finelli is an artist, a Prelinger Library guest host, and co-curator of A.T.A.'s GAZE film series. 

1. Otar Iosseliani's Early Films
Akvareli (1958) Song About a Flower (1959) April (1962) Cast Iron (1964)
Pacific Film Archive
Thursday, January 22, 2015
The early short films of Otar Iosseliani are all poems in their own right, but paired together this quartet evokes a full spectrum of feelings and styles. Cast Iron is one of the most beautiful documentary films I have ever seen. I tried to attend as much of the Discovering Georgian Film series as possible because there was so much amazing work that I had never encountered.  This screening was no different and it stuck with me for weeks.

2. Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966)
The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle, 1969)
Castro Theatre, Noir City 13
Sunday, Jan 25, 2015
This was the craziest double feature I have ever seen in a grand movie palace. Thank you to Noir City for pairing these delightfully strange films together. Seconds is among my favorites, but I had only ever heard of The Honeymoon Killers by way of its influence on John Waters’ garish style. Wow! I was speechless.

3. My Grandmother (Kote Mikaberidze, 1929)
Pacific Film Archive
Saturday, Februrary 7, 2015
Also part of the Discovering Georgian Cinema series at the PFA, My Grandmother was banned for fifty years for its pointed mockery of Soviet bureaucracy. It was by far the most surreal and inventive film that I saw this year, and features a surprising amount of experimental animation techniques.

4. Inevitability of Forgetting: Films of Lewis Klahr––Memory and Collage
False Aging (2008) Engram Sepals (2000) Helen of T (2013) Daylight Moon (2003) The Occidental Hotel (2014)
SFSU August Coppola Theatre
Thursday, February 19, 2015
This was a special screening as Lewis Klahr was there in person to present his work, thanks to SF Cinematheque and the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University. I have been a fan of Klahr’s films ever since seeing Altair (1995) several years ago. His style of collage animation is almost tactile and his characters, although sourced from old comics and magazine advertisements, somehow capture the mysteries of humanity. The strong sound design and musical choices transport you in and out of places from your own past, and there is something very fragile about the materials, like memory, fading and fleeting. This screening resonated with me on a deep emotional level.

5. The Bittersweet Films of Mikhail Kobakhidze
The Musicians (1969) The Wedding (1965) The Umbrella (1967) En Chemin (2001)
Pacific Film Archive
Sunday, March 22, 2015
The Bittersweet Films of Mikhail Kobahidze are exactly that, bittersweet. Each celebrates the pleasures of life while also recognizing the sorrows. Although all four of these films have elements of humor and whimsy, The Musicians pares down the story to just two characters set in an infinite white space, in which a cartoon-like battle ensues between them. The Wedding (1965) reminded me of The Graduate in part and had a more similar feeling to the young-love story of The Umbrella. Kobakhidze’s films all resemble the visual and physical worlds of Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and Norman McLaren. There is so much to love about these films, and I am grateful to the PFA for their wonderful Discovering Georgian Cinema series for this introduction.

6. The Donovan Affair (Frank Capra, 1929)
Castro Theatre San Francisco Silent Film Festival
Saturday, May 30, 2015

Live Theater Event produced by Bruce Goldstein performed by the Gower Gulch Players: Glenn Taranto, Rick Pasqualone, Hannah Davis, Ashley Adler, Steve Sterner (also on piano), Yelena Shmulenson, Allen Lewis Rickman, Bruce Goldstein, and Frank Buxton.
I was a little nervous going into this screening, I just didn’t know what to expect with a live soundtrack performance and was prepared for something like dinner theater and felt ready to dislike it. Much to my pleasant surprise the whole production was brilliant, from the cast to tiniest details in the live sound effects and the musical score. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival and the entire team that was involved in this performed version of The Donovan Affair provided an unforgettable and entertaining experience to all at the Castro that night.

7. Ivan's Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962)
Pacific Film Archive
Saturday, June 27, 2015
My partner and I managed to see several of the Tarkovsky films at PFA, but neither of us had ever seen Ivan’s Childhood and we were just blown away. While I love both The Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979), there was something about Ivan’s Childhood that shook me to the core. This was the most powerful and haunting film that I have seen all year.

                                              

8. El Sur (Victor Erice, 1983)
Zero For Conduct (Jean Vigo, 1933)
Pacific Film Archive
Friday, July 31, 2015
This screening marked my last night at the old Pacific Film Archive’s theater on Bancroft Way, which made it special in its own right, but sitting directly behind director Victor Erice and his family made it an extraordinary time. Victor Erice gave a beautiful introduction that was as moving as his films, and revealed that watching El Sur pains him, as it is only half of the film that he intended to make. It was fascinating to then occasionally watch him watching his work. Another treat of the night was directly following El Sur there was a screening of the great Zero for Conduct in a program called Cinema According to Victor Erice.

9. For the Eyes: Canyon Salon with Amy Halpern
Assorted Morsels (2012) series – 
Three-Minute Hells
By Halves
Elixir
New Nothing Cinema
Monday, October 5, 2015
I was new to Amy Halpern’s work and left this screening in awe of her stunning cinematography. All three shorts were shot and screened on 16mm film, the photography was some of the most vivid and intimate that I have seen this year. Most of Halpern’s work is silent, allowing you to focus purely on the color and light; yet, Three-Minute Hells had an exceptional sound design. Halpern screened her work along side some of my favorite experimental films: All My Life (1966) by Bruce Baillie, Fever Dream (1979) by Chick Strand, and Fog Line (1970) by Larry Gottheim, and Bad Burns (1982) by Paul Sharits. This was an exceptional program and I am hoping to bring Amy Halpern back to San Francisco for an upcoming GAZE screening sometime this year.

10. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock , 1946)
Paramount Theatre

Friday, November 20, 2015

I remember seeing Notorious for the first time as a kid and feeling more stressed out about the plot than any film I had seen before. I have returned to Hitchcock time and time again for a good dose of suspense, and it always amazes me that you can watch a film half a dozen times and still feel as anxious. I am a big Ingrid Bergman fan and Notorious has been a long time favorite, but I had never seen it on the big screen before this night at the amazing Paramount Theatre in Oakland. The Paramount is one of the most beautiful and lavish movie palaces I have ever stepped foot in, and it always makes any film feel even more magical.

David Robson: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor and cinephile-at large David Robson documents his offline movie-viewing at a number of online film sites, like his own blog the House of Sparrows, and he cohabitates with those adorable simian cinephiles at Monkeys Go To Movies.

I usually limit myself to one movie per filmmaker for these, but Max is great enough to list twice. Ever since David Wong introduced The Exile during the Invasion of the Cinemaniacs! at YBCA I've been "collecting" the films of Max Ophuls, i.e. seeing every damn screening of his movies that I can. I was delighted that the hard-bitten mofos at Noir City basically book-ended the year with Ophuls, showing the exquisite Caught during the Noir City festival in January and The Reckless Moment during their winter preview in December. Watching Ophuls navigate his camera thru the psychological extremis of his characters is one of classic cinema's most savory delights; James Mason is pretty grand in very different roles in both movies, too.

Even after three viewings I continued to struggle with Godard's Goodbye to Language. And yet the ongoing struggle seemed to cleanse the palate for a lovely 35mm print of his mid-80s, Cannon Films-produced King Lear, which played fast and loose with Shakespeare's play but resonated with surprising, often graceful, clarity on all of its subjects. Amid all of Godard's theorizing and deconstruction his cast land their marks with considerable emotion and grace. No surprise that Burgess Meredith should make his Lear-infused gangster resonate across both genre and Shakespearean lines, but Molly Ringwald (who made this movie amid the John Hughes teen flicks that landed her permanently in the 80s firmament) is equally graceful, and, in a bit part as a shady editor,  Woody Allen registers with a conviction and gravitas no one else bothered to ever mine in him. A theatre friend with whom I saw the thing called it a terrific piece of devised theatre, and he's right. Bonus: the quick but graceful callout to Orson Welles in reel 2.

Yerba Buena Center's Cracked Actor series offered a fine retrospective of the film performances of the late David Bowie. The Prestige turned out to be the eye-opener in the series, showcasing not just Bowie's fantastic supporting performance (suggesting his particular charisma is best served by such roles) but a surprisingly emotional mid-career opus by its maker, Christopher Nolan. Nolan's work had always left me more impressed than touched or moved, but between this and Interstellar (seen in glorious 70mm at the Castro early last year) I'm reconsidering my bias.

It was pretty genius, the pairing of Hitchcock's The Birds with Larry Cohen's Q. Very much a yin/yang pairing: whereas the lives of carefully delineated characters in a realistic setting are disrupted by an unexplained bird attack in the Hitchcock, Cohen offers a carefully explained series of attacks by a winged serpent on New Yorkers and fills the rest of the movie with a bewildering rogues gallery of engaging weirdos and apparently improvised moments - Michael Moriarty's singing of his own song "Evil Dream" is just the beginning of a performance more like a jazz solo than any other piece of film acting I can recall, but David Carradine finds his own space to add accents around Moriarty, even as he can't quite believe what the hell is going on in front of him. And the undercover mime should have become a franchise. Hitchcock's ambiguities let his movie linger in the mind, but Cohen's never-ending and increasingly lunatic pre-Giuliani NYC smorgasbord is just as fulfilling.

Sure, the Silent Film Festival offered more monumental, moving and graceful works, but when, during the Charlie Bowers comedies, the stop-motion squirrel fished all of the shit out of her purse in search of a nutcracker, I absolutely lost it. And that's just one little throwaway incident amid four works bristling with avant-garde fearlessness and boundless imagination; Bowers is exactly the kind of unique but under-known talent that rep cinema is supposed to introduce to its audiences.

As is Robert Montgomery, perhaps, whose Ride the Pink Horse attained true cult status last year. I'm grateful to Elliot Lavine for booking a lovely print of the movie during his Castro noir series, allowing this sweaty and nuanced yarn to breathe new life.

A startlingly well-built Wim Wenders retrospective began making the rounds of the US late last year, and the Castro gave up all of its November Mondays to many of the movies. As nice as it was to see them all (including many a cinephile's holy grail: the five hour cut of Until The End of the World), The State of Things resonated most strongly with me. Seen in the context of Wenders' other largely-improvised movies, The State of Things (inspired strongly by delays on another movie) reflects beautifully on the ongoing conflict between art and commerce, and the everyday lives of those caught between. Even the car chase, beautifully executed within a single longshot taking in several city blocks, seems to have picked up on the movie's quiet, laid-back resonance. Lovely performance by Samuel Fuller as the practical but all-knowing cinematographer.

I suspect many found it dated or had other reasons for not engaging with it (the buzz one feels after a movie grabs an entire audience, then gently releases them, seemed utterly gone), but goddammit, I'd grown up watching Laurie Anderson's concert movie Home of the Brave on video, and finally seeing it projected, on 35mm, and HEARING it, was that rare experience of seeing a movie one knows by heart for the very first time. Obviously there's a bias on my part that lands this movie, a crucial influence and touchstone on my youth, on this list. But even if its gorgeous and awe-inspiring reveals - the yonic chasm that Anderson's sampler/violin tears thru the climax of "Smoke Rings"; the detonation of the full vocal sample at the end of "Late Show"; the siren that I found, THIS WHOLE TIME, had been baying unobtrusively but insistently behind Adrian Belew and David van Tieghem's otherwise spare and quiet duet - meant nothing to to one in the theatre but me, I felt reconnected, inspired, restored, alive.

And if Home of the Brave connected me to myself, David Lynch's The Straight Story (my final 2015 Frisco Bay screening) connected me: to Doris, a fellow Lynchian as psyched to see this never-screened gem as I; to Richard Farnsworth, the elderly and frail but determined star of the movie, given another curtain call; to Lynch, crafting one of his most personal works, a G-rated Disney family movie that no one but David Lynch could have made; to Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, whose intro didn't mention "neo-sincerity", his patented term for his non-ironic approach to older movies, but was instead delicately, movingly, simply, sincere; to my family, the bundle of sticks that don't break; to my fellow cinephiles and other interested parties in the rep theatres of San Francisco; to the coming holidays; to the very universe itself. David Lynch's The Straight Story, it turns out, remains one hell of a movie. Can't wait to see what's next.

Lincoln Spector: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Lincoln Spector is the proprietor of the Bayflicks website. This commentary has been extracted and slightly adapted from a post on that site.

7. An entertainingly gruesome Halloween
Castro
35mm

On Halloween, my wife and i improvised costumes and headed for the Castro–not for the street party, but for the movies: a triple bill of Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Evil Dead. The show started with a hilarious selection of trailers–mostly of deservedly forgotten flicks. We skipped Massacre (I don’t care for it much) and enjoyed a very long intermission. The audience was rowdy and fun, and we ran into friends. Unfortunately, the print of Living Dead was badly battered.

6. Noir triple bill with the Stones (no, not those Stones)
Castro
Noir City
35mm (I think)
The Noir City festival is always fun. But in 2015, the festival’s highlight were three thrillers made by Andrew and Virginia Stone, a filmmaking team whose work I was completely unfamiliar with until this screening. None of them were masterpieces, but they were all well-made and enjoyable. The usual Noir City audience helped with the enjoyment.

5. Apu Trilogy 
Shattuck
DCP
I finally saw the Apu Trilogy this year, on three consecutive nights. It’s clearly one of the great masterpieces of cinema (or, arguably, three of the great masterpieces). And it has been beautifully reborn with one of the most impressive restorations in history. The original negatives were destroyed in a fire, but L’Immagine Ritrovata at the Cineteca di Bologna physically restored much of the melted negatives to the point where they could be scanned.

4. Visages d’enfants
Castro
San Francisco Silent Film Festival
DCP
I had never heard of this film before I read the festival program. It sounded interesting, but I didn’t know until it started that I was watching a masterpiece. Set in a small town high in the Alps, in what appears to be the last 19th century, Visages d’enfants follows the difficulties of what is now called a blended family–and–as is so often the case–it wasn’t blended very well. Beautiful restoration, and Stephen Horne‘s accompaniment–on piano, flute, and I’m not sure what else–just dazzled. Before the film, Serge Bromberg gave an informative and enjoyable introduction.

3. Oklahoma!
Elmwood
DCP
The new digital restoration allows us to enjoy the movie as it was meant to be seen–and that hasn’t been available for decades. Yes, the plot is silly and some of the cowboy accents are terrible, but when you see Oklahoma! on the big screen, with an audience, you discover what a remarkable piece of entertainment it is. The songs are catchy, the jokes are funny, and Agnes DeMille’s choreography is amongst the best ever filmed. And the new digital restoration allows us to experience it in something similar to the original 30 frames-per-second Todd-AO.

2. Piccadilly
Castro
San Francisco Silent Film Festival A Day of Silents
The last silent film I saw theatrically this year was one I’d wanted to see for years. The Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong finally gets the great part she deserved in this British drama about dancing and sex in a London nightclub. Musicians Donald Sosin (on piano and Macintosh) and John Mader (on percussion) put together an often jazzy, occasionally Chinese score that always served the story.

1.Three-Strip Technicolor Projection Experiences
Pacific Film Archive
35mm archival print & 4K DCP
In July, quite by happenstance, I was able to compare the old and new ways to project a film shot in Technicolor’s three-strip process. The first, Jean Renior’s The River, was screened pretty much as the original audiences saw it–in a 35mm dye-transfer print manufactured in 1952. The second, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann, has been digitally restored and was digitally projected. Each was wonderful in its own way.

Scarlet Street (1945)

WHO: Fritz Lang directed this, and Edward G. Robinson starred in it.

WHAT: A remake of Jean Renoir's 1931 masterpiece La Chienne, about an amateur artist who finds himself taken advantage of by a conspiracy of small-time criminals, Scarlet Street has a darker ending than Renoir's original, and is frequently cited as an important piece of the mid-1940s film noir cycle.  As "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller wrote in the conclusion of his two-part Keyframe article on the film, it marked a key moment in Lang's career. Quoting from Muller's article:

Starting with Scarlet Street, Lang claimed that all his films “wanted to show that the average citizen is not very much better than a criminal.” We must always be on guard from ourselves, and our deepest desires. Lang’s early films displayed a dark fascination with the vagaries of fate. After Scarlet Street that changed.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at the Castro Theatre today only at 4:15 PM.

WHY: I didn't have time to ask Muller about Scarlet Street when I interviewed him recently, so I won't be publishing more outtakes from our conversation here, but I did want to highlight this film as a true film noir masterpiece that completely fits this year's Noir City "Art of Darkness" theme. In fact when I first heard the theme announced this was the first film that came to mind as an obvious program choice (even though it has screened at a prior Noir City festival, back in 2007). Since I've not seen Specter of the Rose yet, I can also say that it may be your last chance to see a true film noir masterpiece at this year's festival, as while tonight's other presentation, The Red Shoes is an incredible, very dark film, and a perfect fit in this year's artist-centric program, it's still a far cry from film noir. Meanwhile tomorrow's Peeping Tom/Blow Up pairing, while also arguable masterpieces, treads into the territory of the noir-influenced sixties art film, out of film noir itself. That's okay. They're a great way to close the program by shepherding the audience out of the chiaroscuro world we've inhabited for the past week or so.

Last year's Noir City wrapped up with a sixties double-bill as well, a The Honeymoon Killers and Seconds pairing that seemed to blow every mind in the theatre. Seconds makes its way back to Frisco a year later as the closer for the Roxie's February 5-7 "Mad Men Weekend" featuring film and television critic Matt Zoller Seitz introducing four excellent movies that influenced that recent TV hit's aesthetic. The program includes another previous Noir City closing film, The Sweet Smell of Success, as well as Billy Wilder's The partment and Frank Perry's bizarre, amazing The Swimmer. Though the Roxie indicates these all as digital presentations, the Film On Film Foundation seems to have other information about Seconds being shown on 35mm, though as I recall that site originally listed its Noir City screening last year as being in that format, which was not borne out at the actual showing. Other upcoming 35mm Roxie showings include two pre-Valentine's showings of John Waters's Polyester (in Odorama!), and, on February 25, Too Late, the experimental 2015 neo-noir closing Indiefest this year.

Meanwhile, I picked up a paper copy of the new Castro schedule and was able to see the back page, which lists the formats of each film screening (along with succinct and usually-enticing program descriptions) before the information appears on the theatre's website. My previous posting that rounded-up the upcoming programs there would have been more effusive had I seen it in time. lmost everything I'd hoped to be screened on 35mm will be, including every single one of the films shot by departed cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. Obviously I will be skipping the live Oscar broadcast in order to watch a 35mm print of Heaven's Gate February 28- I've been waiting many years for such a screening (I've never seen this film before at all). Might as well make it a marathon that day, too, with its double-bill-mate America America being shown on 35mm as well. (I feel a bit stupid for not having immediately recognized that the Zsigmond films all partner with a film shot by another recently-deceased master DP,  Haskell Wexler- all his films show on 35mm as well. Maybe because I've seen fewer of them; Bound For Glory will also be a first for me). I also got word on the pre-code Wednesday formats: all the screenings will be 35mm except for Safe in Hell and The Bitter Tea of General Yen, which makes me very excited indeed. Especially for the back half of the opening program: Two Seconds, starring Scarlet Street protagonist Edward G. Robinson.

HOW: Scarlet Street screens today as part of an all-35mm triple-bill also including John Brahm's excellent Hitchcock remake The Lodger and Edgar G. Ulmer's Bluebeard. 

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

Screen capture from Warner DVD

WHO: Oscar Wilde, the "Irish dramatist, poet, novelist and essayist known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, glittering conversation and enduring artistic achievements" wrote the novel on which this film is based. The quote comes from Wilde's plaque on the Rainbow Honor Walk on the sidewalk just a few dozen feet down the hill from the Castro Theatre. Thankfully the original plaque, with its embarrassing typo ("bitting wit") has been rectified.

WHAT: I read Wilde's novel years ago and loved it, but have yet to see this adaptation. Dave Kehr calls is "a good movie" and it takes a pretty stratospheric place on Jaime Christley's 1945 top ten list. On the other hand Fernando Croce calls it "an instance in which an outright debacle would have made a much more interesting film," taking director Albert Lewin to task while praising its performers Hurd Hatfield, Angela Lansbury and George Sanders, if not quite their performances. This is still probably the most well-known version of the novel, despite a 2009 British production that has some fans.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:15 tonight only at the Castro Theatre as part of Noir City

WHY: What better place to see an Oscar Wilde movie than at the Castro Theatre? A 1400-seat Timothy Pfleuger gem built in an era much closer to Wilde's than our own, but in a neighborhood that still feels like it owes a debt to prominent pioneers like him. The Castro has been San Francisco's home to Noir City for twelve of its fourteen years and is an example of an event and a venue being a perfect match for each other. Castro regulars know that for ten days they'll have to plan their bathroom visits carefully in order to avoid long lines, and in exchange they're allowed to sit in the usually-closed-off balcony, where the most comfortable seats in the house are located.

The Castro just announced its February calendar on its website and it's pretty outstanding (it has to be, I suppose, to stay relevant now that the new Alamo Drafthouse is deep in its "signature" programming, and the Pacific Film Archive is set to grab a lot of attention as it re-opens in a new location close to the Berkeley BART station next week). Some potential highlights include: underrated neo-noir Copland screening Wednesday February 3rd in a Stallone double-bill with Creed; a February 13 pairing of Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans with Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon; a Valentine's Day marathon of Casablanca with Notorious (also screening together at the Stanford this coming weekend) as well as the new documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut (a love story of a more cinephilic sort); Truffaut's Jules & Jim on February 18 (a day after his counterpart Jean-Luc Godard's rarely-shown Sympathy For the Devil); A February 15 pairing of George Lucas's American Graffiti (his best film, IMHO) with Steven Spielberg's (and perhaps more importantly the late great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond's) Close Encounters of the Third Kind; more great Zsigmond showings including McCabe & Mrs. Miller February 21, Deliverance February 23, and Heaven's Gate February 28 (a very good Oscar night alternative). There's also a hint of March offerings including a Jean Cocteau double-bill on the 3rd and a David Bowie tribute screening of The Man Who Fell To Earth with co-star Candy Clark in person, on March 12th.

A February 24th showing of Howard Hawks's Scarface marks the beginning of a six-Wednesday stand of 1931-1933 "pre-code" gems programmed by Elliot Lavine. I've seen eleven of these fourteen sex- and crime-oriented entertainments, and there's not a one I wouldn't recommend to someone who hasn't seen it before. The ones I'm eager to see for myself for the first time are Two Seconds (also on the 24th), Torch Singer on March 2nd, and (not listed on the Castro site) Downstairs on March 23rd (paired with The Bitter Tea of General Yen). I'm also always up for a big-screen rewatch of films like Shanghai Express and Safe in Hell (March 9th), I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Wild Boys of the Road (March 16th) and Island of the Lost Souls, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and Freaks (March 30th). Every one of these films should appeal strongly to almost any Noir City regular; this period of the early 1930s and the mid 1940s have some interesting affinities in Hollywood.

HOW: The Picture of Dorian Gray screens on a double-bill with the UK rarity Corridor of Mirrors. The latter will be screened as a DCP, while the Picture of Dorian Gray will screen as a..., well, I'd rather let Eddie Muller break it to you. This is what he said when I interviewed him for Keyframe Daily recently:

I had my heart set on finding an original print of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Have you ever seen that? It has Technicolor inserts in the film. I was always like, "why hasn't there been a restoration of this?" Harvard Film archive has a 35mm print. But they admitted, under slight pressure, that the color sections had faded. Warner brothers, which owns the rights to the film, restored it digitally to put it out as a Blu-Ray. But there's no film. So I said, "you know what, I'm just gonna show the Blu-Ray". Because I felt like I wanted the experience for the audience to be as close to what it was like when that film came out as possible, and that meant that those color sections had to be shocking. Like, "oh wow, this gorgeous black and white is now vivid Technicolor". And that's not gonna happen with a faded print. You're left trying to imagine what they intended. I'd rather show you, as close as possible, what they intended.

Humoresque (1946)

Screen capture from Warner DVD.

WHO: Joan Crawford and John Garfield star in this.

WHAT: Another film I've yet to see and am excited to. Here's what Noir City festival honcho Eddie Muller had to say about this film when I interviewed him last week (but couldn't fit into my Keyframe article):

I could argue that Humoresque is Joan Crawford's best performance. What interests me about it is it's not Joan being Joan. She plays a very different character, very vulnerable, and trying to be a big woman and kind of failing and breaking down. It's really dramatic. She's just great in it and I think I said in my notes something along the lines of that it's one of those Hollywood movies where you can see every calculated thing in it, just how archly melodramatic the whole thing is, and it doesn't matter. It's almost like its incredible theatricality is what makes it so emotionally affecting. It really is a powerful film. And to see Hollywood go all out in a film about classical music in both of those movies, it's like Hollywood treating classical music like there's no higher art form in the world. And to see the special effects, and how they make John Garfield a musician with very complicated effects that aren't in the camera. These are physical effects that are just extraordinary. Garfield is a multi-armed character when he's playing, you know: one arm belongs to somebody and another arm belongs to somebody else. Unbelievable. You honestly can't tell.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre, with showtimes scheduled at 3:50 and 8:45.

WHY: There's a tendency, when viewing films in pairs, as the hardcore denizens of Noir City do this week thanks to its double-feature format, to compare one film against the other as if they're in competition. I do the same thing myself sometimes, as when I say things like "Rear Window is a better movie than The Public Eye, but I preferred seeing the latter Friday night because its 35mm print looked a lot better than the Rear Window DCP did." It's more fruitful to consider the ways a pair of films can build upon each other, deepening both viewing experiences, as the colliding of two films about ethically questionable Manhattan photographers did for the opening of the Noir City festival.

Last night's pairing of pitch-black noirs from Argentina and Sweden, Fernando Ayala's The Bitter Stems and Hasse Ekman's Girl With Hyacinths, is another example. These films were clearly not just chosen to be together because they're both extremely pessimistic, because they both tangentially fit into this year's "Art of Darkness" Noir City theme, or because they're both featured in recent or upcoming (New York City) MoMA retrospectives. All of the above is true, but is overshadowed by the films' fundamental connection despite being made six years and over eight thousand miles apart from each other: both films are obsessed with their nation's neutrality during World War II. This is something I'd enjoy writing about in much greater depth (after a second viewing of each film, too, ideally). But for now I'm just going to avoid talking about which of the two films is "better" than the other, as I overheard many do as I left the Castro last night, and focus on the ways each film strengthens the other in my memory as I think about them a day later.

On the heels of that, it seems funny to comment on today's double-bill of musician-themed melodramas featured on the cover of the gorgeous program book available only to Castro attendees this week (and a reason alone for noir-loving shut-ins to buy at least one ticket to the festival). I believe it's the first time Noir City has paired a Joan Crawford film (Humoresque) with a Bette Davis one (Deception) on the same double-bill. Going way back to the second Noir City festival in 2004, there were three "Crawford vs. Stanwyck" double-bills that year (this year Barbara Stanwyck appears separately, in tomorrow night's The Two Mrs. Carrolls), but the famous history of the Davis/Crawford rivalry really invites the audience to make today's pairing into a competition (perhaps especially so on a day when spandex-clad gladiators compete for a trip to Frisco Bay next week). Just a reminder that this might not always such a productive way to view movies, as one can be appreciated without having to be "better" than the other one...

HOW: Today's films are both screening in 35mm; according to the aforementioned program book, all upcoming Noir City screenings are expected to employ 35mm prints except for The Picture of Dorian Gray, which screens from a Blu-Ray, and Corridor of Mirrors, The Red Shoes, and Blow Up, which screen from DCP.

The Public Eye (1992)

WHO: This film was shot by cinematographer Peter Suschitsky. who was the Director of Photography on The Empire Strikes Back as well as on films for Peter Watkins, Tim Burton and M. Night Shyamalan, but who is probably best-known as David Cronenberg's regular cinematographer since Dead Ringers in 1988.

WHAT: I haven't seen this film, beyond a few short clips and enough of the uncharacteristically monochromatic opening credits, which feature photographs by Arthur Fellig a.k.a. WeeGee, the renowned New York photographer of the 1930s-1960s.  Joe Pesci plays a character based heavily on Fellig/WeeGee. I recently spoke to Eddie Muller, who programmed this film as part of tonight's Noir City festival opening. and had this to say about it:

I'm not gonna say that it's a modern classic or anything like that but there are parts of it that are absolutely spectacular. Mostly the stuff that captures WeeGee at work. That's what is just fabulous. Where he's driving around New York to Mark Isham's score, and he's finding things to photograph. It also fits the theme of this festival perfectly because it's about a newspaper photographer who believes he's creating art. There's a gimmicky crime plot and all this nonsense with Barbara Hershey being threatened by these gangsters, but that's just defined to follow this other thread which is about the difficulties he has having people take his work seriously as art.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 9:30 PM.

WHY: The "theme of this festival" Mr. Muller speaks of above is "The Art of Darkness", this year's organizing principle for Noir City, providing excuses to show two dozen films about morally questionable painters, writers, curators, dancers, musicians and filmmakers as well as photographers. Although Muller makes a strong case for photography as a particularly cinematic artistic medium in an excellent, brand-new podcast interview on the Cinephiliacs which touches on several of the same topics as my own just-published Keyframe Daily interview article with him: film restoration, his days as a student in George Kuchar's San Francisco Art Institute class, etc. Muller gives a great interview, and since quite a bit of what we discussed didn't fit into my Keyframe article, I plan to publish more excerpts from our talk over the next several days as Noir City unfolds. Stay tuned.

I'm excited to see The Public Eye tonight, although I wouldn't be surprised if a number of Noir City diehards are feeling more skeptical about the festival's first-ever full-color opening night double-bill (and closing day, come to think of it) and might be tempted to skip tonight in order to catch the Stanford Theatre's weekend presentations of Casablanca and Gilda in 35mm, or the Rafael's 35mm showings of (non-noir, but a big-screen must see) Foreign Film Oscar frontrunner Son Of Saul, which after Sunday is expected to screen digitally, as it's showing in every other Frisco Bay cinema despite its director's preference for 35mm presentation (which I agree with, especially for the format's tendency to exacerbate the disorientation of the opening moments). Because you don't want to miss anything screening Noir City on Saturday or Sunday, right? Especially not Saturday night's international noir showcase. But I'm lucky to have seen Casablanca, Gilda and Son of Saul in 35mm, twice apiece, so I'm ready, willing and able to start following Muller's art theme at the beginning and, hopefully, do my best to follow it to the end next weekend when it closes with 1960s photographic subversions Peeping Tom and Blow Up.

HOW: The Public Eye screens on a double-bill with Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Rear Window. The Public Eye will screen from a 35mm print. I'm not certain about Rear Window's format.