The Story of Hansel and Gretel (1951)

WHO: Ray Harryhausen directed, produced and animated this short film by hand, and who died at age 92 last week.

WHAT: In Alex Pappademas's lovely obituary, he writes of the feature films that the master worked on:

They were all conceived as showcases for Harryhausen's effects, and he was supposedly heavily involved in every stage of their production, from script to art direction to principal photography, but they tend to fall down a deep well entertainmentwise whenever the puppets yield the screen to people. "I could kick myself when I think of how I didn't insist on more from the director or the studio," Harryhausen once said, admitting that some of his finished pictures made him "heartsick."

It's true that, although Harryhausen's effects have a timeless quality to them, the feature films they appear in work better as entertainments for young children than sophisticated adults. Clunky dialogue and frequently unimaginative camera placement weigh down, say, 20 Million Miles to Earth or The 7th Voyage of Sinbad when Harryhausen's monster creations are not on the screen, and perhaps can only really be appreciated by discerning, aesthetically attuned moviegoers when they are able to summon their inner-child sense of wonder.

The lesser-known short films Harryhausen directed before his feature-film career, however, do not suffer from the same lack of artistic sophistication, perhaps because they were don't involve the blending of live actors with the animated environments. The Story of Hansel and Gretel, for instance, utilizes some creative camera angles and compositions in telling a very familiar story. It's an apparent paradox, because this short film was intended expressly for children while the later science fiction and fantasy films were aimed at wider audiences. But if you can appreciate the enclosed artistry of a Disney Silly Symphony or a Frank Tashlin cartoon, you may find more complete fulfillment from this film than from a Harryhausen vehicle in which his artistry is not evident in every frame.

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

WHY: Many commentators (most recently David Bordwell) have pointed to the increasing importance of film archives to allowing us access to our moving image heritage, in the waning days of 35mm as a mass distribution medium. Movie lovers now have so many convenient (if compromised) methods of seeing films on a whim, and the barriers to providing timely programming to cinema audiences seem to be increasing rather than decreasing as more and more screens go digital-only.

But archives, when they screen their own holdings, as Oddball does every Thursday and Friday evenings, can demonstrate a flexibility few other venues can have. I'm sure that upon Ray Harryhausen's death, programmers at the Castro and Rafael and perhaps other local venues with a history of connecting audiences with his film work, immediately began investigating the possibility of a tribute program. But though none have been announced yet, Oddball has already been able to tribute the stop-motion master twice, first with a film added to last week's Czechoslovakian animation program, and now tonight with The Story of Hansel and Gretel anchoring a program of tasty films that will also include a short featuring Woody Allen and the late Jonathan Winters, an excerpt from an I Love Lucy episode, and a rare showing of Ub Iwerks's 1934 cartoon Reducing Creme. 

Animation fans should also look forward to next week's Oddball screenings: a Devilish set including Betty Boop in Red Hot Mamma, and a Toy-fest that ranges from Gumby to Charles & Ray Eames.

The Bay Area's other big archive, Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, has also just announced its entire summer programming slate. Though there's a lot to peruse and comment upon, the two series most relevant to this particular post are the Sunday-afternoon, 12-film focus on Japan's greatest animation studio Ghibli, and a selection of screenings of Eastern European films from the archive's own collection, donated by George Gund III, and presented as a memorial to his long life, which ended earlier this year.

HOW: Tonight's Oddball program, including The Story of Hansel and Gretel, will screen virtually entirely in 16mm.

All Through The Night (1941)

WHO: Humphrey Bogart.

WHAT: I have not seen All Through the Night. But my friend Miriam Montag (a film programmer herself; she's put together a show at Oddball Films for this Friday) has, and generously contributed her thoughts for Hell On Frisco Bay readers:

Nestled in his filmography between The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart is a politically myopic version of Rick Blaine, “Gloves” Donahue, a Broadway promoter straight from Damon Runyon, in a deceptively light entertainment. The first delirious part of All Through the Night seems to have genre-issues. The tough guy patter is broad, goofy and often veers into a hard-boiled version of Francis the Talking Mule. At the same time, the bodies start piling up. It's a bit like squawking that the strawberries under your Devon cream are the wrong size, but it does put the Noir fan on guard. What gives?   

It seems this hellzapoppin entertainment was aimed at those Americans who might, just like “Gloves”, ignore the front page. Europe isn’t just in flames, folks, there are darker deeds afoot. Bogart is beautifully dumbed down, an isolationist who needs to be reminded there’s a war on, who can barely pronounce the crazy names the Germans have given to the outposts where they are keeping their enemies. A film-goer would have to be a real schmoe to not awaken to the horrors along side our man about town. Such heavy going needs the all the help it can get to make its message palatable, and the entertainment appeal is applied with spades: the wisecracks are sure fire. You want a lilting Johnny Mercer title song? We’ve got one for you. It’s so loaded down with your second banana favorites, it's positively dizzying. 

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie at 8:00.

WHY: Bogie appears on local cinema screens far less frequently than you might expect for a star with such an enduring and regenerating cult. To the best of my knowledge the next scheduled opportunities to see him in a communal screening situation will be when They Drive By Night and High Sierra play as part of the Pacific Film Archive's Raoul Walsh series this summer (precise dates TBA). 

For those who have already been attending the Roxie's I Wake Up Dreaming series this week, the appearance of Peter Lorre in All Through The Night makes for a three-night-run of movies featuring the sleepy-eyed actor. He was excellent in Sunday's Black Angel, practically carried the picture in last night's Island of Doomed Men, and won't be appearing in any more of the series titles over the next week and a half, so catch him while you can.

HOW: On a double-bill with a 35mm print of Nightmare, but projected digitally. Miriam Montag has a few words on that as well:

Roxie programmer Elliot Lavine has been trying to get a 35mm print out of Warners for years, without any luck so All Through the Night will screen digitally. If you want to miss out on Jackie Gleason’s fine performance as “Starchy” because it’s not on 35mm, fine. The rest of us will just move back a few rows.

Words of Mercury (2011)

WHO: Jerome Hiler made this.

WHAT: I haven't seen Words of Mercury in over a year, and even when I did I was forced to see it in a compromised quality (on video rather than 16mm film) so let me excerpt a brief quote from a 2012 review of the film (which, if intrigued, you should read in its entirety) by P. Adams Sitney:

The opening superimposition of Words of Mercury ... layers a dance of jittering lights over a crepuscular landscape, as if the pencil-thin white and colored lines of light were swarming midair before a barely discernible background of trees, as night falls.

WHERE/WHEN: Words of Mercury screens on a SFMOMA program starting at 7:00 tonight only. 

WHY: Today marks the midpoint of the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival, and there are certainly screenings of interest happening tonight; the first festival showings of Salma, Computer Chess and Frances Ha (all at the Kabuki) and the final festival showings of Something In The Air and The Act Of Killing (both at the Pacific Film Archive), for example. 

But the festival is not the only interesting screening entity in town over these two weeks, as I noted by cataloging most of the alternative film screening opportunities during SFIFF in a post last week. Tonight in particular there are some very tempting alternate options to see rarely-screened films. The Stanford shows the 1953 War of the Worlds and the early Ray Harryhausen effects showcase 20 Million Miles To Earth today and tomorrow. Oddball Films has a 16mm set of Jewish comedy shorts. And the Castro hosts a very enticing Nicolas Roeg bill. Note that since my post last week, the Castro has released its entire May calendar, including a double-feature of Badlands (on DCP) and Electra Glide In Blue (in 35mm) happening the night before the SFIFF closing night presentation of Richard Linklater's terrific Before Midnight at that venue.

All of this is enticing but screenings of Jerome Hiler films projected properly may be rarer than all of the above combined. Although, as Carl Martin has noted, Words of Mercury was in fact a 2012 SFIFF selection, it screened on film only at it's PFA screening. It was shown on video at New People because the latter venue then lacked a variable-speed 16mm projector that could show the film at its maker's desired frame-rate. So tonight's screening feels like the completion of some unfinished business from last year's festival for some of us.

HOW: Words of Mercury screens in 16mm, along with a new work by Hiler and two of the films most newly made by his partner Nathaniel Dorsky.

The Pink Panther (1963)

WHO: Robert Wagner was one of several actors in this ensemble cast who found themselves upstaged and overshadowed by Peter Sellers' performance as Inspector Jacques Clouseau.

WHAT: The Pink Panther, of course, was named for the pink diamond at the center of the plot of this jewel-thief comedy, but it became more identified with the cartoon character created by animation director Friz Freleng for the film's opening credits sequence (which Freleng once speculated as being the longest animated credits sequence in a feature film release up to that point), and with the Inspector Clouseau character, who appeared in more sequels (six) than the jewel (three) ever did. Not to mention the reboot and its own sequel starring Steve Martin in the Clouseau role.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 7:30 PM. Tickets are FREE with an RSVP (which, last I checked, it was not too late to répondez to), but you may have luck as a walk-up as well, if you don't mind waiting in a line or two.

WHY: Robert Wagner will be on hand for tonight's screening, interviewed by Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies in a run-up to their film festival in Hollywood later this month. He may not be the best-remembered element of The Pink Panther but he's sure to have some tales to tell about working with departed participants such as Sellers, David Niven, and director Blake Edwards.

Wagner will be seen again on-screen (though surely not in-person) at the Stanford Theatre May 9 & 10 when that venue shows A Kiss Before Dying, which he starred in. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any other Peter Sellers or Blake Edwards (or even David Niven or Claudia Cardinale) films expected to screen in nearby cinemas any time soon.

However, Friz Freleng fans (and I'm certainly one of them!) should note that one of the first films he animated for the Warner Brothers studio, 1931's Smile, Darn Ya, Smile, screens as part of an Oddball Films 16mm tribute to the jazz age. That program includes several other jazz-inflected short films from the twenties and early thirties, as well as two 1970s revisitations of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Joan Micklin Silver's fine adaptation of his story Bernice Bobs Her Hair with Shelley Duvall in the lead role, and an eight-minute excerpt from the mostly-reviled 1974 version of The Great Gatsby.

HOW: Despite the printed version of the calendar mistakenly starting otherwise, tonight's screening of The Pink Panther is planned to be a 35mm showing.

The Egg Cracker Suite (1943)

WHO: Ben Hardaway, whose nickname "Bugs" became immortalized while he was directing cartoons for Warner Brothers, and drawings by Robert Clampett of a Wascally character in Hardaway's Porky's Hare Hunt cartoon became labelled "Bugs's Bunny".  

WHAT: This cartoon about a mechanized egg production factory (made a year before the famous Swooner Crooner) is the only one Hardaway directed after leaving the Warner Studio (after being demoted from director upon Friz Freleng's 1939 return from a period at MGM) and working for Walter Lantz, for whom he helped created the character Woody Woodpecker. It seems only fitting that it features a rabbit as lead character. In fact it's the final cartoon ever produced featuring the Oswald The Lucky Rabbit character once created by Walt Disney and star of several silent films. It was Disney's loss of the exclusive rights to make Oswald cartoons that inspired him to jealousy guard the control over his next character creation, Mickey Mouse.

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

WHY: This week David Bordwell wrote a lovely tribute to the 16mm film format and its history over the years. It read much like a euology. And perhaps it is, in a way. But although 16mm appears to be in its final, waning years as a format for working with as a medium of creation, there are still enormous quantities of 16mm film reels in archives and personal collections around the world. Leaving aside the many works natively created in this format, reduction prints are also the only method of reasonably accessing vast categories of films originally made in 35mm in a physical (as opposed to digital, or just as frequently, non-existent) form. So while I may have sounded dismissive when mentioning a 16mm print of Blood Money earlier this week, I was in fact thrilled to get any kind of chance to see that singular film, despite its less-than-perfect presentation.

16mm prints from the Oddball collection are also often less-than-perfect as well, but I've seen quite a few that were simply lustrous. And I always treasure a mediocre print viewing than a mediocre digital viewing; I doubt much of the Oddball collection is available on Blu-Ray or even good DVDs (the DVD versions of the Eames films screening there tomorrow night are adequate, but in my view still far inferior to watching 16mm prints). The Egg Cracker Suite was produced in 35mm but the odds of seeing it projected that way in your or my lifetime seems slim at best. I hope it's a good print, but I'll be glad just to see it one way or another.

HOW: The Egg Cracker Suite screens as part of a full 16mm program of delectables, also including industrial training films like Rush Hour Service and breakfast-themed excerpts from The Ipcress File, a feature film made by Sidney J. Furie, whose The Entity blew minds at the Castro Theatre last Friday.

For Scent-imental Reasons (1949)

WHO: Directed by Chuck Jones, this is one of two Academy-Award-winning films he made in 1949. Although both awards went to his producer Edward Selzer, Jones remains the only director to have made films that have won Oscars in both the animated short category and the documentary short category during the same year.

WHAT: This is the first cartoon of the long-running series of Pepé Le Pew shorts produced at the Warner Brothers studio in which Pepé's character is fully-developed. In his first two appearances (Odor-Able Kitty and Scent-imental Over You) the passionate polecat's name is not Pepé but "Stinky", and in the former cartoon is in fact revealed at the end to be an American-accented philanderer named Henry only trying on a Charles Boyer impression. (This is probably the most zoologically logical explanation for a skunk to have a French accent; the Mephitidae family has no representatives native to Europe, although it occurs to me that he could in fact be a Québécois). An unnamed, nonverbal skunk with a Pepé-esque appearance also makes a cameo in the 1946 Fair And Worm-er, and is the focus of the 1948 Art Davis-directed cartoon Odor Of The Day, in which he acts totally uncharacteristically (read: unlasciviously). For Scent-imental Reasons begins a string of thirteen cartoons made over an equal number of years, all but one (Really Scent) directed by Jones, in which the skunk is definitely French, definitely attracted to female cats with white stripes painted down their backs, and definitely full of himself. In other words, definitely Pepé.

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

WHY: Oddball is the only screening local venue I can think of, other than perhaps the Paramount, which plays Warner Brothers cartoons on a semi-regular basis. Although I hope some Frisco Bay programmer decides to organize a 35mm screening of Chuck Jones films to coincide with the Cartoon Art Museum's current exhibition of static art produced by the most famous member of the Termite Terrace team of directors, I'll take what I can get, and for now, this appears to be the only opportunity to see a Jones film projected on film in the near future.

HOW: Oddball usually screens only 16mm prints from its own collection. For Scent-imental Reasons screens on a program of Oscar-nominated films and clips from past Oscar ceremonies, also including Saul Bass's Why Man Creates, Mel Brooks's The Critic, Isaac Hayes performing the "Theme From Shaft" at the 1972 ceremony, and an excerpt from one of that year's strangest winners, The Hellstrom Chronicle, which I saw in full at Oddball last December and called an "Eco-malthusian approach to arthropods as scientifically suspect as creationism but WAY more fun". I can't believe it actually won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. 

A Chairy Tale (1957)

WHO: Sitarist Ravi Shankar, along with tabla (Indian percussion) master Chatur Lai, composed and performed the music for this short film.

WHAT: By the time Shankar came to Canada to record the score for this film, co-directed by the National Film Board's head animator Norman McLaren and by Montreal filmmaker Claude Jutra, he'd begun to tour in Europe and North America and his scores for Satjajit Ray's films were already beginning to be heard by international film festival audiences, but his name was still nearly a decade away from becoming a household one outside India. His collaboration with McLaren and Jutra was one of his earliest collaborations with artists in the West. It's a delightful piece, and although Jutra's performance as a man having a disfunctional relationship with a piece of furniture is quite memorable, I don't think the film could work without Shankar's expressive score. The film is a must-see for anyone interested in cross-cultural collaborations of the 1950s, and of course for fans of Shankar, Jutra or McLaren.

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

WHY: With 2012 receding in the rear-view mirror, it's an ideal time to remember some of the luminaries who left this world during the calendar year. Frequent Oddball curator Lynn Cursaro has put together a program to tribute some of the personalities we're just going to have to learn to do without in 2013. The afterworld roll call includes (but is not limited to) Shankar, who died just over a month ago, Chris Marker, who died in July and is represented with his groundbreaking sci-fi short La Jetee, Davy Jones, whose February passing inspires an opportunity to bring out rare outtakes from his band the Monkees' television show, and author Maurice Sendak, whose work inspired Gene Dietch's 1975 animation In The Night Kitchen, and who since May has been exploring That Great Night Kitchen In The Sky.

HOW: All of the above will be screened on 16mm prints from Oddball's extensive archive. It says a lot about the depth of the collection that Cursaro was able to locate relevant works to honor each of the above-mentioned individuals. I understand she has more up her celluloid sleeve that aren't mentioned in the program announcement.

The Two Eyes of Rob Byrne

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 Rob Byrne, board president of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and blogger at Starts Thursday. The photograph below is his own, taken during the set-up of the first five events on his list...

1. Napoleon (1927) @ Oakland Paramount, 3/24/12. Opening night!  The realization of a dream.

2. Napoleon (1927) @ Oakland Paramount, 4/1/12. Closing night.  Tears.

3. Napoleon (1927) @ Oakland Paramount, 3/31/12.

4. Napoleon (1927) @ Oakland Paramount, 3/25/12.

5. Napoleon (1927) @ Oakland Paramount, 3/23/12. Dress rehearsal. We're actually going to pull this off!

6. Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna [The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna] (1929) @ Castro (SFSFF), 7/13/12. A revelation. Brigitte Helm performance in the title role may be one of the best of the silent era.  

7. Grand Illusion (1937) @ Castro, 6/12/12.  There's nothing new that anyone can say about this film.  Crystalline new restoration, I just sat back and let soak it in.  So gorgeous I watched it twice.

8. Trailer Trash: A Mini-Movie Extravaganza (1950s-70s) @ PFA, 6/8/12.  A wild and varied potpourri of movie trailers from the PFA collection, many of which originated from Gary Meyer.  Too often ignored, trailers truly deserve recognition as genre apart.

9. Koruto wa ore no pasupooto [A Colt is My Passport] (1967) @ PFA, 9/1/12.  Jô Shishido is a tough guy's tough guy.  In a fight he'd kick Clint Eastwood's ass any day of the week.

10. Crime Watch!  (1922-1973) @ Oddball Film Archive, 9/14/12.  No Top 10 list would be complete without an entry from Oddball, the Bay Area mecca for orphan film.  This program of seven crime/police related films, included Parole (1956) shot on location in San Quentin; Don't Shoot II (a sequel!) (1973), a training film for law officers about when to use their weapons, and Flesh and Leather (1951) starring Hugh Beaumont (aka Ward Cleaver) as a hard boiled private detective trying to unravel a murder.

The Electric Eel (1954)

WHO: Irwin Moon, an evangelical clergyman who found scientific demonstrations to be an attention-getting vehicle for spreading the Christian gospel. Before he began turning his attention to movie-making in the 1940s, he was perhaps best known for a stunt in which he claimed to feed a million-volt electrical charge into his body.

WHAT: This is the only one of Moon's Moody Institute films I've seen, and it was only a month ago that I saw it. But although I'm not sure if I knew more about electric eels before or after watching this gimmicky on-film demonstration, I definitely recommend viewing it if you want a jolt of unusual mid-century Americana. The segment where he shocks a set of his staffers is especially entertaining.

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM tonight at Oddball Films, the largest 16mm film archive in Northern California. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117. 

WHY: Have you got something better to do on a Thursday night?

HOW: Most Oddball programs are sourced from 16mm films found in the archive. Tonight's program includes a half-dozen other Irwin Moon films in addition to The Electric Eel.

Adam Hartzell on Ping Pong

With 2012's protracted election season finally over, it seems a perfect time to get a dose of the real world outside the bubble of punditry, anxiety and spin. What better way to do that than to watch documentaries? For instance, the remarkable 50-year-old celebrity portrait Lonely Boy screens Friday night with other gems at Oddball Films, a rare screening and a timely one since its co-director Roman Kroitor died this past September. SFIndie's DocFest also opens just in time, tonight, and runs through the day before Thanksgiving at the Roxie (which has a worthy kickstarter fundraising going on right now) and other venues, with a host of non-fiction films on subjects such as art, music, food, sports, and yes, a little bit of politics. My friend Adam Hartzell, (who I just realized I haven't yet mentioned here invited me to talk about Studio Ghibli films for a podcast a couple months ago) has previewed one of the films on the program. Here's Adam: 

The film that most drives me to queue up at this year's San Francisco Documentary Film Festival running bi-bay from November 8th-21st, is Grandma Lo-fi: The Basement Tapes of Sigrdur Níelsdóttir, a Danish-Icelandic co-production directed by Kristín Björk, Orri Jonsson, and Ingibjorg Birgisdóttir, themselves participants in the Icelandic music and art scenes.  I had heard (and watching this film will hopefully verify or disprove) that members of that amazing ensemble Sigur Rós helped 'discover' the hidden musical gems that Níelsdóttir was creating merely for her family and friends.  And as has been said by many about this less populated island situated where the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans pour into each other, most everyone in Iceland knows each other, and by extension, become 'family and friends'.  That all said, a family obligation will actually keep me from hearing along with seeing on screen what the 70 year-old began recording on cassette tape in geographical and subculture isolation.   

But what I have had the opportunity to see from this year's SF DocFest is Director Hugh Hartford's equally elder-ed Ping Pong.  (This documentary also contains its own bit of pleasant music in the closing credits where the ping-pong-ing of a ball on table tennis table and raqcuet, what I've learned the British players call a 'bat', provides the beat).  Ping Pong follows eight over 80-years-old players competing in the Senior World Table Tennis Championships.  Two from England, two from Germany, one from Sweden, one avid smoker from China, one Austrian immigrant from the United States, and one 100 year-old sensation from Australia.

I've recently found myself appreciating the sport of table tennis while in Japan during the London 2012 Olympics.  The only Japanese athlete representing my wife's hometown of Yamaguchi City, Kazumi Ishikawa, came in that bitter-tasting fourth place individually but ended with a Silver medal for the woman's team event.  The moment when they secured at least the silver by beating Singapore in the semi-finals was something we got to watch over and over again because Japanese television constantly re-played that match.  I still feel the teary joy sparked via my mirror neurons when looking at images of Kazumi and her teammate's crying after securing their place in the final gold medal match.  The joy was not a chance to win gold.  They were merely happy to finally get a medal for Japan in the event, guaranteed a silver.  Everyone knew Japan wouldn't win the gold medal match because, well, the Chinese always win.

. . . Except on the senior circuit, as we learn from Ping Pong.  Ping Pong is not a typical sports documentary designed to have you revel in exquisite athleticism. No one has 'impressive' kinesthetic skills here.  You are merely happy some of these athletes can keep up with the demanding pace, let alone simple keep themselves standing up in the first place.  As a result of not being able to show dynamic play, Hartford includes some nice diversions from the typical sports doc set-ups.  For example, not much is shown of the final matches.  More attention is paid towards the lives of the athletes and the demographic stage of life in which each athlete is an age cohort.  Englishman Terry, the youngest of the bunch, is battling through life-threatening illnesses.  German Inge is able to play through her dementia while her compatriot Ursuhla hopes to die on the table tennis table.  Then there's Les, the Charles Atlas of senior table tennis, who looks like he'll go on for another 80 years at this rate.

Ping Pong treats its subjects with respect, letting them tell their own stories, allowing the humor and sympathy to come from them rather than imposing either upon them through editing.  A core message is what such an activity can allow for us in our elder years.  A senior circuit like that shown in this documentary provides regular exercise for the elderly, plus such competition provides the mental benefits of a focused challenge that offers the side benefit of enabling one to focus away from the pains and limited abilities of old age.  And most important, it provides a community of folks who refuse to bowl alone, to adjust a Robert D. Putnam phrase, since it takes two to table tennis.

My Two Eyes

I've been so pleased with the participation in this year's "I Only Have Two Eyes" project, collecting lists of favorite repertory/revival film watching experiences had in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010 from 21 other Frisco Bay film-watchers. The entire set of contributions is collected here. But I haven't yet published my own list of ten. Here it finally is, in the order in which I saw them:

Pitfall
Outfitted with a series pass, I was able to catch more of Noir City 8 than any of its previous Castro Theatre editions. The best of the set, to my determination, was the this series opener, a still-underrated marital thriller directed by Andre De Toth. This searing critique of post-war America's stifling suburban ideal stars Dick Powell at his most embittered, with Lisabeth Scott and Jane Greer terrific in supporting roles. However, it's Raymond Burr who nearly steals the show as the extremely menacing villain of the picture, a role that prefigures his own future as one of filmdom's most effective heavies, as well as the terrorizing Burl Ives role that drives the action in De Toth's later masterpiece, Day of the Outlaw (which later in the year played the Roxie if unfortunately in a severely compromised 16mm print).

Trafic
Only two things could have enhanced this year's complete Jacques Tati retrospective, held on both sides of the Bay at the Pacific Film Archive and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (with other Tati screenings at the Red Vic and Rafael): a supplimental 70mm screening of Playtime at a venue equipped to show the increasingly-uncommon format, and a showing of Tati's first feature Jour de Fete at a time that didn't conflict with my unavoidable non-cinephile activities. The plus side of the latter "defect" in the otherwise tremendous undertaking is that I still have an unseen Tati film to look forward to. Trafic, which I also had never seen until YBCA's screening in early 2010, is something of a spiritual sequel to Playtime, and nearly as great. Where the 1967 film wanders through Paris like a seemingly-directionles tourist, this one takes a more linear road-movie approach to its playful but cutting jibes at modern transportation and leisure.

That Night's Wife
In 2010 I was thankful that the VIZ Cinema provided numerous opportunities to revisit some of the best films by perhaps my most consistent favorite of Japanese directors, Yasujiro Ozu: Late Spring, Tokyo Story, Late Autumn, etc. But this Pacific Film Archive screening of Ozu's 1931 silent That Night's Wife, shown with an accompaniment by the superb pianist Judith Rosenberg, trumped even those screenings in opening a window to a younger filmmaker's creative range; the sequence of a vigil in a cramped apartment space shows just how radical (and dramatically effective) Ozu's approach to cinematic temporality could get.

Dodsworth
More than any other cinema on Frisco Bay, the Stanford (or the St. Anford, as a friend recently re-Christened the venue) functions as a temple to one man's cinematic taste. Lucky for us, David Packard has great taste in 1930s-50s Hollywood (and British) cinema! I shuttled to Palo Alto more often than usual in 2010, and was particularly excited to see a 35mm print of the heartrending Make Way For Tomorrow, which I'd only ever seen on a bootlegged VHS tape before. That its previously-unfamiliar-to-me double-bill mate, William Wyler's Dodworth was nearly able to match Leo McCarey's masterpiece in its emotional pull, and even surpass it in its unpandering sophistication, seemed miraculous and still does months later.

Ran
I usually like to reserve slots on my own personal "I Only Have Two Eyes" lists for films I'd never seen before at all, but I had to make this exception this year, for this film that jumped most dizzingly highly in my estimation when finally viewed in 35mm. When I viewed it on VHS as a college student, it was my first exposure to Kurosawa and, indeed, to non-sci-fi Japanese motion pictures, though in fact at the time its 16th Century feudal mileu felt more alien to me than any animated robot or rubber-suited beastie. I'd never gotten around to revisiting it even after becoming a guarded Kurosawa fan, and still harbored the suspicion that it had been overrated by those who ranked it among his best films. But in 2010, "the Emperor"'s centennial year, when I was able to employ the VIZ & PFA to fill in a number of my Kurosawa-gaps (the Quiet Duel being my favorite new discovery) and revisit a couple favorites (Stray Dog, High & Low), it was the extended engagement of Ran at the Embarcadero which provided me with my most fundamental re-understanding of the master's bold artistry. It cannot hurt to know how closely the re-worked Lear story sometimes parallels Kurosawa's late-career struggles as a cast-off from the industry he did so much to build. It also cannot hurt to see those colors (all that blood-and-fire red!) cast in a glorious new print on a big screen.

Le Bonheur
Speaking of color. It seems fitting that I caught up with what I now think of as Agnès Varda's greatest masterpiece (though I love Cleo From 5 To 7, Vagabond and The Gleaners & I deeply) thanks to a PFA series devoted to preservation. Not just because it seems miraculous that these natural, vivid but never gaudy hues and cries could have been photographed in the mid-sixties, and restored lovingly for us today. But also because, in its way this painfully truthful fable is all about the possibilities and impossibilities of preservation and restoration of love relationships and families. Just drawing the film up in my mind again months after seeing it, I find myself shuddering to the memory of its beauty and its ultimate, still shocking agony.

The Chelsea Girls
I've never held much truck with the frequent assertion that the proper role of music in film is: not to be noticed. Becoming something of an aficionado of live musical scores to silent films has only solidified my position. It's harder to dispute that the performative element the projectionist provides to a film showing should be unnoticed if it's to be appreciated. But there are clear-cut exceptions, and The Chelea Girls is the most prominent one. With two projectors running reels side-by-side on the screen, with a fair amount of latitude available to toggle between soundtracks from the control booth, it's probably fair to say there can (and should) be no frame-definitive version of this Andy Warhol film, making a screening (this one was at SFMOMA) feel something akin to a maddening, exhilarating, frustrating, but somehow also illuminating concert experience. "Everything is more glamorous when you do it in bed," Warhol once wrote. I would hope he'd make an exception for watching The Chelsea Girls.

Pastorale D'ete
I could easily have made a respectible top ten, or twenty, or thirty, culling only from the locally-produced experimental short films I watched and re-watched as part of the still-ongoing Radical Light series in support of the fantastic book published last year. Supplemented by a number of SFMOMA screenings in the Spring (and a couple in the Fall), the Radical Light project made 2010 the year the filmic floodgates really opened for me, and the trickle of knowledge and appreciation I had for Frisco Bay's storied history of avant-garde film scenes became a hearty river. Any year allowing me to finally see Will Hindle's Chinese Firedrill, Kerry Laitala's Retrospectoscope, John Luther Schofill's Filmpiece for Sunshine, Dion Vigne's North Beach, Barbara Hammer's Dyketactics, Sidney Peterson's The Lead Shoes (three times!), Jordan Belson's Allures, Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuttle, Dominic Angerame's Deconstruction Sight and Premonition, Dorothy Wiley's Miss Jesus Fries on the Grill, Allen Willis, David Myers and Philip Greene's Have You Sold Your Dozen Roses?, Chuck Hudina's Icarus, and Frank Stauffacher's Sausalito, and to rewatch Tominaro Nishikawa's Market Street, Bruce Conner's Looking For Mushrooms, Take the 5:10 to Dreamland and a Movie, George Kuchar's Wild Night in El Reno, Curt McDowell's Confessions, Hy Hirsch's Eneri, Chris Marker's Junkopia, Gunvor Nelson's Schmeerguntz, and especially Bruce Baillie's The Gymnasts and All My Life (and meet the man himself), and just as especially Christopher Maclaine's The End (and become involved in an intensive collaborative project attempting to retrace Maclaine's steps and talk to survivors of his cohort, most notably Wilder Bentley II) is simply an astoundingly rich one. But above even all of these, it was a new restoration of Hindle's first film Pastourale D'été whose nine minutes burned most brilliantly into my retinal hippocampus during its PFA screening. Shot in the kind of hillside landscape I'd always incorrectly imagined to be typical of the famous Canyon, California until I finally visited the forested town last September, and edited to an Arthur Honegger composition on equipment built by Hindle himself, this nature study is the clearest justification of the zoom lens I've ever observed. The first film made by a director (scarcely) better known for his more claustrophobic later works, it won an award at the 3rd San Francisco International Film Festival in 1959.

Times Square
One of the most heartening developments on the Frisco Bay film scene last year was the re-emergence of the Roxie as a genuinely adventurous, calendered, repertory theatre that can play excellent host to imaginative events. The only known print of this feisty teenaged melodrama set against the punk and new wave scene in 1980 Manhattan provides a unique semi-documentary look at a very specific historical moment, but the film is also special because of how seriously director Allan Moyle takes the relationship between his two leads. Nicky Marotta & Pamela Pearl may represent the 'bad girl' and the 'daddy's girl' but they bust out of their archetypes thrillingly.

Braverman's Condensed Cream of the Beatles
I'm slightly embarrassed that after hearing about the place for years, it took my April move into a loft space shockingly nearby to Oddball Film & Video for me to actually start visiting this unique film archive and screening venue. I took in four of the locale's regular weekend evening shows, including a Saturday-after-Thanksgiving pair of not-exactly themed shorts programs compiled by Lynn Cursaro and Carl Martin of the Film On Film Foundation. Amidst delightful rarities like Red Ball Express, Doubletalk, and Zoo was Charles Braverman's (and Gary Rocklen's) psychedelic collage of music and graphics tracing the birth, growth and public separation of the Fab Four. Constructed between the Beatles' break-up and the tragic assassination that quashed all hope of a real reunion, this nostalgia head trip seems unlikely to ever be cleared for a commercial release in these intellectually proprietary times. It brought me waves of joy and reminiscence to my boyhood in a house where The Beatles ruled the record player over The Stones, The Beach Boys, and practically everybody else.

Austin Wolf-Sothern's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from projectionist/filmmaker Austin Wolf-Sothern, who blogs at Placenta Ovaries:


Sensitive 70s, Oddball Film+Video
-Francesca, Baby, The Drug Scene, Your Self Image, I'm Feeling Scared, Suicide: It Doesn't Have to Happen
A selection of 16mm shorts dealing with serious issues for kids and teens. The sweetest, most sincere two hours of my life. Flawlessly heartbreaking.

Midnites for Maniacs, Castro
A very productive year for Jesse Ficks' fantastic film series, including two all day five-film fests (the themes being Macho Mania and Robots). The year provided a nice mixture of old favorites (Fright Night, An American Werewolf in London, The Gate, RoboCop) and some incredible new discoveries (Nighthawks, Bloodsport, Too Much). My favorite overall program would be the triple feature of Just One of the Guys, Point Break, and Maniac. Jesse insisted there was a common thread between the three, but I actually prefer to think there isn't, and I adored the randomness of three entirely different movies, which if they're linked by anything, it's that they are all fucking great.

Bad Lieutenant/Blue Collar, Roxie
I missed almost every night of Roxie's intriguing Not Necessarily Noir series, but I'm thankful I made it out for this double feature of Films That Assault You.

Phantom of the Paradise, Bridge
The Bridge started up a new series called Citizen Midnight, showing a rock 'n roll classic, with a live rock pre-show inspired by the night's film, performed by a band made up of Bridge staff. Phantom was unfortunately not a print, but the event was a blast, and holy shit, that fucking movie is amazing.

Gone with the Pope, Bridge
If you were one of the other four people in the theater, you already know that this was a genuine treasure discovered by Grindhouse Releasing.

Man with a Movie Camera, Castro
A great film with the most powerful, overwhelming live score (by Alloy Orchestra) I've ever experienced. I wish I could relive this one.

Castro Double Features
There were three double features at the Castro this year that paired up some of the most perfect movies ever made. The Thing/Videodrome, Blue Velvet/River's Edge, and Gremlins/Black Christmas. Most exciting was Videodrome, which I've yearned to see on 35mm for years. Many of the others I had seen on the big screen before, but they are all movies I could watch forever.

Also These
Castro: Showgirls, The Beguiled, A Star Is Born, Roxie: The Brood, Surf II: The End of the Trilogy/Times Square, Wet Hot American Summer, Paramount: Wait Until Dark, Red Vic: The Room with Tommy Wiseau in Person, Hausu.

I had seen Hausu previously under shitty circumstances, having driven up to San Rafael only to discover it was being shown via the ugliest digital projection I've ever seen, and as a result, I found the film underwhelming. But this year, I saw it properly at the Red Vic (on 35mm) and I was able to get wrapped up in the delirious, hilarious, adorable, fun absurdity of this completely nuts horror ride. I'm not wholly against digital projection, as I've seen some stunning HD screenings, but if it looks like shit, it defeats the purpose of the big screen and I'd much rather watch it in better quality on my substantially smaller television at home. Alternately, a film print feels special and amazing even in terrible condition. A film like Hausu definitely deserves ideal presentation.

I'm Still Miserable About Having Missed
Mac and Me at the Castro, Night Train to Terror/A Night to Dismember at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Lucy Laird's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from writer and projectionist Lucy Laird, who blogs on and off at Lucible:

January:
M. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953), @Smith Rafael Film Center
Having somehow never seen this particular Tati, I ended up viewing it several times over the course of just a few days: once in the audience at the PFA and about three more times projecting it at the Smith Rafael Film Center. Like the saltwater taffy that oozes but is always rescued before it hits the sand, this film is a perfectly choreographed confection, and to project it with perfectly timed changeovers made me feel like I got to dance with M. Hulot, if only briefly.
*and*
Traffic (Tati, 1971), @YBCA
Nice set-up: getting stuck in a rain-drenched traffic jam on the way to this screening. And everyone in the audience got to sport their raincoats and umbrellas, if not any Hulot-ian pipes.

2/5: The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), @PFA
If only the back alleys of Berkeley could look this magnificently menacing when the panther comes down from the hills to hunt...

2/28: Sid's Cinema: A Tribute to Amateur Filmmaker Sid Laverents (1963-85), @PFA, introduced by Ross Lipman and Melinda Stone
Ross and Melinda's stories about hanging out with Sid enlivened an already mind-blowing afternoon of selections from his wacky oeuvre.
5/28: Follow Thru (Lloyd Corrigan, Laurence Schwab, 1930), @Stanford Theatre
A sublimely silly tale of apple-cheeked young golfers in love, featuring a jaw-dropping devil-girl dance number that really does the 2-strip Technicolor justice: I almost couldn't believe my eyes.

7/30: The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968), @PFA
With widescreen, split-screens, and hysterical montages of desperate cops sifting through all the perverts on file to find their granny strangler, this installment in Steve Seid's Criminal Minds series left me reeling and unexpectedly disturbed by Tony Curtis's sinister side.

8/22: Endless Love (Franco Zeffirelli, 1981), Film on Film Foundation @PFA
Full disclosure: I did not see this at the public screening, but got a chance to view the print when Carl Martin (Film on Film Foundation Executive Director) test-projected it. Its Sirkian power, glowing interior cinematography, and cast of beautiful young things—Brooke, of course, but also James (Spader) and Tom (Cruise)—could only have benefited from one thing: a houseful of fellow audience members to savor it all with.

10/9: The Sensitive '70's: Empathetic Self-Help and Social-Problem films from the Disco Decade, Film on Film Foundation @Oddball,
On a rare escape-from-the-projection-booth Saturday night, I gobbled down FoFF's delicious baked goods and one of their periodic cinematic benders culled from the Oddball archives. What was most startling about these films were the faces of '70s adolescence unfiltered, in all their pimpled, combed-over, underplucked glory (Francesca Baby and The Drug Scene, in particular), before the aesthetically (and otherwise) sanitizing forces of the 1980s and '90s set in.

(Will Oldham in Old Joy)

(River of Grass)
11/11-12, Ode, Old Joy and River of Grass (Kelly Reichardt, 1999, 2006, 1993) with Reichardt in person @PFA
My favorite American director right now, Kelly Reichardt, appeared at the PFA to present her films. I was charmed, though not surprised, to find her modest and funny and smart. I was surprised, charmed, and vindicated to find that she helped fund her good works through bad; she edited a season of America's Next Top Model, my one reality-TV guilty-pleasure. Now I just have to figure out which season so I can comb through it for hints of Reichardt's quiet genius.

12/3: Vampyr (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1931), @PFA
Another one I saw from the projection booth (launching the electronic subtitles this time); I can't say that the somewhat battered print didn't dampen the experience (as well as the fact that I wasn't sitting in the audience and absorbing the communal mood), but this Dreyer dreamscape thoroughly unsettles, one uncanny scene after another. An early sound film with the sound made all the eerier in its echo and minimalism, it also features shadow tricks (upside down and backwards) that are the essence of cinema itself. For the people who attended the Voices of Light/Passion of Joan of Arc extravaganza at the Paramount the night before, Vampyr was probably a nice Dreyer hair-of-the-dog hangover remedy.

12/10: Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991), 20th anniversary screening, Midnites for Maniacs' Push It to the Limit! triple bill, Castro Theatre
Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is fighting the good fight with his Midnites for Maniacs—and one of my new year's resolutions is to attend more of them—because his neo-sincerity-ism extends to print quality: if it isn't the nicest, newest 35mm print available, then the faded and pink last-ones-on-earth he hunts down are sincerely explained and treasured all the more. The print of Point Break wasn't perfect (though far from bad), but I was stunned by the widescreen, sun-baked, heavy-grained hugeness of it on the Castro's screen, elevating Keanu Reeves and (sniff) Patrick Swayze to god-like levels. And I don't know anything about surfing, but those CGI-less scenes were pretty rad. All the more poignant because I saw this on the big screen as a teenager, when it first came out, and probably marveled about some of the same things. Oh, it was also fun to be reminded that Bigelow was always pretty good at depicting the performance of masculinity.

Michael Hawley's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from cinephile/critic Michael Hawley. He blogs at film-415, where this list has been cross-posted:

The Bay Area continues to be an incredible place to experience repertory cinema. There are few places on the planet where it's possible to see a film every day of the year and not watch a single new release. In 2010 I caught 47 revival screenings at various local venues. Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the most memorable.

Showgirls (Castro Theater)
What better way to celebrate the 15th anniversary of my fave film of the 1990s. Peaches Christ brought an expanded version of her infamous Showgirls Midnight Mass preshow to a sold-out Castro, complete with exploding on-stage volcano and free lapdances with every large popcorn. It inspired me to inaugurate my iphone's movie camera feature and create a YouTube channel to post the results. Apart from Peaches' Castro world premiere of All About Evil, this was the most fun I had at the movies in 2010.

Armored Car Robbery (Castro Theater, Noir City)
I was blown away by this taut and tidy 67-minute slice of obscure 1950 B-Noir about the aftermath of yes, an armored car robbery outside L.A.'s Wrigley Field. It would be brought back to mind months later with the Fenway Park heist of Ben Affleck's The Town. Other 2010 Noir City highlights included the double bill of Suspense (1946) and The Gangster (1948), both starring British ice-skating queen Belita, and 1945's San Francisco-set Escape in the Fog, which begins with a woman dreaming about an attempted murder on the Golden Gate Bridge.


Pornography in Denmark (Oddball Cinema)
There's something weird and wonderful going on each weekend at Oddball Cinema, a funky alternative film venue tucked inside the Mission District warehouse digs Oddball Film + Video. In the spring they screened a 16mm print of this landmark 1970 documentary by local porn-meister Alex de Renzy, which became the first hardcore to show in legit U.S. theaters and be reviewed in the NY Times. Introducing the film was writer/film scholar Jack Stevenson, who was on tour promoting his book, Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s.

Freddie Mercury, the Untold Story (VIZ Cinema, 3rd i's Queer Eye Mini-Film Festival)
3rd i is best known for the SF International South Asian Film Festival it puts on each November. Back in June they packed SF's snazzy subterranean VIZ Cinema with this revival of Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher's 2000 documentary – seen in a new director's cut with 43 extra minutes. The audience went nutso at the climax of "Barcelona," Mercury's soaring duet with Montserrat Caballé from the 1986 summer Olympics. Further repertory kudos to 3rd i for bringing an exquisite 35mm print of 1958 Bollywood classic, Madhumati, to the Castro.

Mädchen in Uniform (Castro Theater, Frameline)
A whole lot of LGBT folk must've played hooky from work to catch this mid-day, mid-week revival from 1958 – itself a remake of a 1931 queer cinema classic. Romy Schneider and Lili Palmer are respectively radiant as a student obsessively in love with her boarding school teacher – to the extreme consternation of battleaxe headmistress Therese Giehse. Shown in a gorgeous and rare 35mm print, with the inimitable Jenni Olson delivering a dishy intro. Frameline34's other revelatory revival was Warhol's 1965 Vinyl, in which Factory beauties Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick dance a furious frug to Martha and the Vandellas "Nowhere to Hide." Twice.


The Aztec Mummy vs. The Human Robot (Pacific Film Archive, El Futuro Está Aquí: Sci-Fi Classics from Mexico)
If anything's capable of luring me out of the city on a Saturday night during Frameline, it's bunch of Mexican monster movies from the 50's and 60's. This was double-billed with Santo vs. The Martian Invasion, which had a little too much rasslin' for my tastes. But it boasted a hilarious opening scene in which the Martians explain why they happen to be speaking Spanish. It killed me to miss Planet of the Female Invaders and The Ship of Monsters, also part of this series.

Metropolis (Castro Theater, SF Silent Film Festival)
"When you've waited 83 years, what's another 40 minutes?" Eddie Muller quipped to the antsy, capacity crowd awaiting the Bay Area premiere of Fritz Lang's finally-complete expressionist dystopian masterpiece. In spite of the late start time and disappointing digital format, this was still the repertory event of the year. The Alloy Orchestra performed its celebrated score live and Muller conducted an on-stage conversation with Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña, the Argentine film archivists who discovered the 16mm print of Metropolis with 25 additional minutes. The Alloy Orchestra would return to the fest two days later to perform their heart-stopping score to Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.

The Cook/Pass the Gravy/Big Business (Castro Theater, SF Silent Film Festival)
Each year this festival invites a filmmaker to program a Director's Pick – and past pickers have included the likes of Guy Maddin and Terry Zwigoff. This year Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc., Up) assembled a program of three comic shorts titled The Big Business of Short Funny Films, each of them screamingly funny. First, Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton had a go at each other in The Cook, followed by some hysterical nonsense involving feuding families and a prized rooster in Pass the Gravy. Finally in Big Business, door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen Laurel and Hardy declared war on a disgruntled customer, taking tit-for-tat to absurd heights.

The Boston Strangler (Pacific Film Archive, Criminal Minds)
This ranks as my personal discovery of the year. Director Richard Fleischer employs a wry tone and magnificent use of wide and split screen to tell the story of 60's serial killer Albert DeSalvo. A restrained Tony Curtis, whose title character doesn't appear until the midway point, gives what must surely be the best dramatic performance of his career. Oscar ® didn't care. With Henry Fonda, George Kennedy and an early appearance by Sally Kellerman as the one girl who got away. Double-billed with 1944's The Lodger, a compelling Jack the Ripper yarn starring Merle Oberon, George Sanders and Laird Cregar.

Johanna (Roxie Theater)
I was woefully resigned to never seeing Kornél Mundruczó's 2005 filmic opera about a junkie performing sex miracles in a subterranean Budapest hospital, which had never screened in the Bay Area or been released on Region 1 DVD. Then the Roxie answered my prayers by showing a gorgeous 35mm print for two nights in November, double-billed with the director's follow-up, 2008's Delta. Earlier in the month, the Roxie revived 36 Quai des Orfèvres, a gritty and stylish 2004 policier that had also inexplicably gone unseen the Bay Area, despite starring Gérard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil.

Honorable Mentions
Traffic (1971, dir. Jacques Tati, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts)
Insiang (1976, dir. Lino Brocka, Sundance Kabuki, SF International Asian American Film Festival)
Black Narcissus (1947, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, Pacific Film Archive, "Life, Death and Technicolor: A Tribute to Jack Cardiff")
Hausu (1977, dir. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, Castro Theater)
A Night to Dismember (1983, dir. Doris Wishman, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Go to Hell for the Holidays: Horror in December")