10HTE: Philip Fukuda

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2016. An index of participants can be found here.

Two-time IOHTE contributor Philip Fukuda is a volunteer for various local film festivals.

Elevator to the Gallows screen capture from Criterion DVD

Wicked Woman (Russell Rouse, 1953, USA). I Wake Up Dreaming series, Castro Theatre. As part of Elliot Lavine's last "I Wake Up Dreaming" series in San Francisco, he screened Wicked Woman, one of my favorite noirs. Tall, blond Beverly Michaels has both Richard Egan and Percy Helton wrapped around her finger. Or does she?? It's a pleasure to see the great character actor Percy Helton get so much screen time, too.

Earlier in 2016, Elliot Lavine also presented his last Pre-Code festival at the Castro Theatre. The Cheat (George Abbott, 1931, USA) pits glamorous Tallulah Bankhead against evil Irving Pichel. It's got gambling, partying and adultery in addition to mysterious Oriental customs. This was not a strong vehicle for Bankhead, but I found it fascinating to see her as a young ingénue who finds herself in way over her head.

Behind the Door (Irvin Willat, 1919, USA). San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro Theatre. This film was a revelation and goes far beyond what even the later pre-code films would consider acceptable. With its themes of graphic sex and taxidermy (!), Behind the Door was a stunner and my favorite film in last year's Silent Film festival.

Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925, USSR. A Day of Silents, Castro Theatre. I enjoyed Eisenstein's first feature of strikers in pre-revolutionary Russia. Things don't go well for the proletariat, and not much has changed in 100 years. As relevant today as it was in 1925. The Alloy Orchestra provided superb accompaniment.

A Brighter Summer Day screen capture from Criterion DVD

A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991, Taiwan). Pacific Film Archive. I've managed to miss all the 35 millimeter screenings in the Bay Area over the past several years, so I thought I'd better catch this digital screening, or not see it at all theatrically. Edward Yang's masterpiece portrays life in 1950s Taiwan, concentrating on teenagers and gangs, but also covers the troubles the older generation faced.

The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973, France). Alamo Drafthouse. Although this theater concentrates on first-run Hollywood fare, the Alamo runs several repertory programs in addition to screening neglected classics. And The Mother and the Whore is an absolute treasure of French cinema. Jean-Pierre Léaud, now in his 20s, still plays a disaffected youth with sex and philosophy on his mind.

Crossroads (1976) and Easter Morning (2008) (Bruce Conner, USA). Bruce Conner: It's All True exhibit, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 2 short films shown as part of the exhibit. As a multi-disciplinary artist (paintings, drawings, sculpture and film), Bruce Conner frequently used found objects in his work. In Crossroads, Conner used footage of the atomic testing at Bikini Atoll from 27 different angles. Projected in slow motion, the mushroom cloud first appears beautiful, but as the images progress, I was struck by the sheer horror of it. Easter Morning, Conner's last film is a meditative collage of nature and religious images. Both films featured wonderful musical scores by Terry Riley and Patrick Gleeson in Crossroads and Terry Riley in Easter Morning.

Insiang (Lino Brocka, 1976, Philippines). New Filipino Cinema, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This drama shows the impoverished life of Insiang and what she has to put up with until she can't take it anymore. What a great tale of revenge. It was a major loss that Lino Brocka died so young.

Grave of the Fireflies screen capture from Sentai Filmworks DVD

Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988, Japan). Roxie Theatre. For me, this Studio Ghibli animated film, about the struggles of 2 Japanese children in World War II, packs an emotional wallop even though the story is told in flashback and the viewer knows what happens to the protagonist in the first scene. Also, I think that having children doing the voiceover work in the Japanese version heightens the emotional impact.

Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1958, France). Opera Plaza Cinema. From the wonderful performances of the two lead actors (Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet), the beautiful night shots of Paris filmed by cinematographer Henri Decaë, the assured direction of Louis Malle, and the music by Miles Davis, Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud) is perfection all around. 

10HTE: Adam Hartzell

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2016. An index of participants can be found here.

Eight-time IOHTE contributor Adam Hartzell is a local writer and Roxie board member. He has a piece on Advantageous in the recently released Directory of World Cinema: American Independents 3

This is where I tell you how seriously bummed I was when I found out I missed an opportunity to see First Nations Canadian director Alanis Obomsawin's films at the Pacific Film Archives. (Sad face.)

5) REBECCA (Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1940) - Balboa Theatre - February 20th, 2016

One of two films on this rep/revival list that I'm glad I held out on to see on screen. I always try to catch a couple films at each year's Mostly British Film Festival. Normally they screen at The Vogue, but this suspenseful classic of Hitchcock's played at The Balboa theatre, a theatre with a special place in my heart that I'm always game to patronize. And it doesn't hurt that such a trip gives me an excuse to eat at Shanghai Dumpling King.

Tokyo-Ga screen capture from Criterion DVD extra for Late Spring

4) TOKYO STORY (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1953) - September 3rd, 2016/TOKYO-GA (Wim Wenders, West Germany, 1986), the latter with an intro by composer/vocalist Ken Ueno - Pacific Film Archives - September 8th, 2016

My cousin, who lives in Berkeley, has a partner who is a cinephile like me. And ones appreciation of Ozu is one of those cinephilic connectors. So it was totally appropriate that my cousin, her man, and I would have Ozu's classic TOKYO STORY as our first viewing experience together as a triple. This was also my first visit to the new BAM/PFA building, so much more convenient from BART than the previous location. Although I've seen TOKYO STORY many times before, the PFA also offered the opportunity to finally see Wim Wenders' documentary about Ozu's Tokyo which includes interviews with regular Ozu collaborators actor Chishu Ryu and cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta. This time I saw it with just my cousin's partner who I'm sure will be a regular PFA companion for me.

3) TAMPOPO (Juzo Itami, Japan, 1985) - Opera Plaza - December 4th, 2016 I hadn't seen TAMPOPO for quite some time. My wife, who is Japanese, had never seen this film. The re-release offered each of us a different experience. My wife laughed at the sight of a young Koji Yakusho and even younger Ken Watanabe. In the end, she was surprised that she found such an 'older' film so delightful, since she tends to find older films boring. I was struck by the scenes I'd forgotten about, such as the French restaurant and the homeless foodies. TAMPOPO clearly transcends its time. Off we went afterward for ramen, but just as we were with our sushi after a screening of JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI (David Gelb, USA, 2011), we were disappointed that the dishes just weren't up to par with what we'd had in Japan.

2) WITHIN OUR GATES (Oscar Micheaux, USA, 1920) - Castro Theatre - May 4th, 2016 Micheaux is the grandfather of Black Cinema in the US. So when the San Francisco Silent Film Festival brought one of his silents this year, I had to attend. In this time of Black Lives Matter, revisiting WITHIN OUR GATES has an even greater impact. The lynching scene is shocking and leads one to reflect on the context of now, what we've witnessed captured on video via smartphone technology. The harrowing intensity of all this was heightened by the accompaniment of the Oakland Symphony and Chorus under the direction of Michael Morgan.

Screen capture from Criterion DVD. 

1) Tanya Tagaq sings as NANOOK OF THE NORTH (Robert J. Flaherty, USA/France, 1926) plays in the background at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts - November 17th, 2016 I have had a couple opportunities to see this proto-documentary but failed to take advantage of them. I'm now glad I waited to see it until Polaris-winning Inuk Canadian throat singer Tanya Tagaq reinterpreted it. Placing the document in its time and place while still confronting its legacy, Tagaq brought new life and agency to the documentary's subjects. Seeing Tagaq has been a bucket-list item for me. Finally checking it off, the experience stays and resonates with me as you hope all bucket-list items will.

Michael Hawley: 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 Michael Hawley runs the film blog film-415.

Favorite Bay Area Repertory/Revival Screenings of 2015

Screen capture from Flicker Alley DVD

Cibo Matto: New Scene (San Francisco International Film Festival, Castro Theatre) 
My top repertory highlight of 2015 was this inspired pairing of fave rock band Cibo Matto with seven avant garde shorts, including Marcel Duchamp's 1928 Anemic Cinema, the 1970 adaptation of Oskar Schlemmer's trippy, geometry-obsessed Bauhaus-era Das Triadische Ballet, and most fabulously, Yoko Ono and John Lennon's Fly.

The Honeymoon Killers (Noir City, Castro Theatre) 
I was gobsmacked by this revisit to one-film-wonder Leonard Kastle's 1969 American true crime shocker, shown at Noir City in a pristine 35mm print. François Truffaut once called this his favorite American movie. I'd always gotten a kick out of it, but hadn't realized what a god-damned masterpiece it was until now.

Rebels of the Neon God (Landmark's Opera Plaza Cinemas) 
Perhaps the most unlikely commercial re-release of 2015 was slow-cinema, Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang's 1992 debut feature, which I missed seeing at the 1993 San Francisco International Film Festival. It was worth waiting 22 years for a second opportunity.

The Happiest Girl in the World (Romanian Film Festival, Coppola Theatre, SF State University) 
I had read many terrific things about Romanian New Wave director Radu Jude, but none of his features ever came to town (nor had any reasonably priced, small screen options presented themselves). I was therefore thrilled when this previously unknown-to-me festival, now in its fifth year, finally brought Jude's droll 2009 social satire to town last fall.

Screen capture from Miramax DVD of My Voyage To Italy

Two Women & The Gold of Naples (Castro Theatre) 
Cinema Italia San Francisco brought a one-day, five-film Vittorio De Sica retrospective to the Castro in late September. The program featured two spanking new 35mm restorations, including Sophia Loren's Oscar®-winning performance in 1960's Two Women followed by 1954's The Gold of Naples. The latter was comprised of six self-contained short stories set in Napoli, the best of which starred De Sica himself as a pathetic gambling aristocrat.
  

54: The Director's Cut (San Francisco International FilmFestival, Castro Theatre)

While hardly the "minor masterpiece" some critics wanted us to believe, this reconstruction of Mark Christopher's 1998 ode to NYC's famed discotheque, featuring 44 previously unseen minutes, was the most fun I had at the movies last year. In addition to director Christopher, stars Ryan Philippe and Brecklin Meyer were on-hand for the revival's U.S. premiere. They were ogled both on-screen and on-stage by a whooping, exuberant Castro audience. 

It's a Gift (Sunday Funnies: Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields, Pacific Film Archive)
W.C. Fields is a hen-pecked hubby trying to get some sleep on the back porch in this raucous, 1934 featurette from director Norman Z. McLeod. It's my favorite comedy of all time and I'd never seen it on a big screen (let alone in 35mm) until last summer at the PFA.

Screen capture from Warner Archive DVD

Noir City, Castro Theatre
In addition to The Honeymoon Killers, there were other perverse delights at last year's Noir City. I was particularly taken by the Saturday afternoon triple bill of nail-biting suspense dramas The Steel Trap (1952), Julie (1956) and Cry Terror! (1958), all from Hollywood husband-and-wife filmmaking team Andrew and Virginia Stone (he wrote and directed, she produced and edited). Who knew that Doris Day singlehandedly landed a jet plane 19 years before Karen Black? Other Noir City 2015 flicks I'm still thinking about one year later include Ossessione (Luchino Visconti's 1943 homoerotic adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice), Robert Siodmak's The Suspect (1944) and Douglas Sirk's Shockproof (1949).

San Francisco Silent Film Festival (Castro Theatre)
The world's second most prestigious silent film showcase celebrated its 20th edition back in May with a tremendous 21-program line-up. What I remember most fondly are three comedies. In the UK/German co-production Ghost Train (1927), hijinks ensue when passengers take refuge in a haunted railway station overnight. Harold Lloyd's final silent film Speedy (1928) featured Babe Ruth in a supporting role (as himself) and an unforgettable 20-minute sequence set in Coney Island's famed Luna amusement park. Then in Amazing Charley Bowers, preservationist/showman Serge Bromberg introduced us to the surrealistic genius of American comic Bowers and his insane combinations of live action and stop-motion animation. At that same festival I was also blown away by the intense eroticism of John Gilbert and Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1926) and the immense spectacle of Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925).

Backstreet (Melodrama Master: John M. Stahl, Pacific Film Archive)
While I didn't get to the PFA as often as I would've liked in 2015, I'm sure glad to have caught this low-key but intensely moving 1932 adaptation of Fanny Hurst's novel, starring Irene Dunne as a career woman who spends 25 years as a married man's mistress.

Philip Fukuda: 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 Philip Fukuda is a volunteer at various local film festivals. 

 Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society

Monte-Cristo (Henri Fescourt, 1929, France). San Francisco International Film Festival, Kabuki Cinema. Lenny Borger, this year's SFIFF Mel Novikoff award winner, elected to screen the 3 plus hour silent Monte-Cristo. Based on the Alexandre Dumas, père novel, the director's meticulous attention to detail made this classic tale of revenge a delight for me. I'm convinced that the French were masters of the epic historical drama.

On the other end of the spectrum, The Swallow and the Titmouse (Andre Antoine, 1920/83, France) is a simple drama. Screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro Theatre. Filmed in a quasi-documentary style, The Swallow and the Titmouse (L'hirondelle et la mésange) shows the countryside pass by at leisurely pace as the barge travels between France and Belgium. Stephen Horne's piano and Diana Rowan's harp were the perfect accompaniment for the film.

100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History. San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro Theatre. This was one of the highlights of 2015's Silent Film Festival for me. This program presented footage discovered in the Museum of Modern Art's collection which consisted of scenes from Lime Kiln Field Day, shot in 1913 but never completed, USA featuring Bert Williams. It was a treat for me to see the pioneering black entertainer Bert Williams and showed why he was considered one of the top comedians of the day. I was also fascinated to see the performances shift over the course of multiple takes.

Screen capture from Miramax DVD of My Voyage to Italy

Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943, Italy). Noir City 13, Castro Theatre. I enjoyed this adaptation of James M Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice for its unglamorous and realistic view of the rural Italian countryside and equally earthy people that inhabit it. Visconti's love of the male body and opera are in full display in the film.

Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950, USA). Castro Theatre. I've seen this film many times, but I'm still knocked out by Gloria Swanson's bravura performance and Billy Wilder's and Charles Brackett's whip-smart dialogue. It's wonderful (and startling too) to see closeups of the still-beautiful 50-year old Swanson.

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955, USA). Castro Theatre. Charles Laughton's sole film directorial effort was a memorable one. It's German Expressionism meets Southern Gothic. I think the sets are wildly artificial yet so beautiful. Robert Mitchum's Rev. Harry Powell was a menacing a villain as I've ever seen. Though I'd seen it several times on DVD, this was the first time I'd seen it in a theater, and what better place than on the Castro's big screen.

The Wild, Wild Rose (Wang Tian-lin, 1960, Hong Kong). A Rare Noir is Good to Find! series, Roxie Theatre. Grace Chang, a pop mega-star in Hong Kong, chews the scenery and belts out Carmen in Chinese in this wildly entertaining film. One of my guilty pleasures of 2015.

Hope and Glory (John Boorman, 1987, UK). Mostly British Film Festival, Vogue Theatre. I thought it was a charming film showing both the childrens' and adults' reactions to the Blitz in World War II.

Screen capture from Wellspring DVD

Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai Ming-liang, 1992, Taiwan). Opera Plaza Cinema. Slacker teens, petty crime, video arcades in early 1990s Taipei. For me, it adds up to a lot more than the average teenage flick.

A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005, USA) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Though I only saw a few films at the David Cronenberg retrospective at YBCA screening room, A History of Violence was a standout. As the title implies, the film was full of thrills, but it was also full of knockout performances.

Frako Loden: 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 Frako Loden is an educator and a writer, who publishes at documentary.org and elsewhere.

Image courtesy San Francisco Silent Film Festival

1. For me the highlight of 2015's repertory screenings was not even a finished film—just a collection of takes for a film that was never to be. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival in June presented Bert Williams: Lime Kiln Field Day, a compilation of rushes for a 1913 film, starring black comic actor Bert Williams and a large number of important black stage entertainers, that the white producers Biograph/Klaw and Erlanger abandoned and never completed. The long preamble at the Castro by MOMA's Ron Magliozzi was rushed and packed with amazing information about the history of black people on Broadway and this particular production. The would-be film's plot isn't unusual--a black social club gears up for a picnic and ball--but the treatment and circumstances of its making certainly were. First, it was a truly interracial production, with white directors and a black assistant director and majority black cast with a few small white parts. Second, the black characters are middle class and their individual personalities, including a rare romantic kiss between Williams and Odessa Warren Grey (who also designed the costumes), preclude the usual stereotyping. A lively ride on a merry-go-round and an elaborate cakewalk sequence were exciting  highlights. The 50 minutes of footage, including repeated takes and glimpses of between-take preparation, gave me a joyous rush of imagining what American filmmaking might have been like if more films like this had been produced. Magliozzi thinks that the release of Birth of a Nation in 1915 was  what put this film on the shelf: it wasn't racist enough. Birth of a Nation unhappily set the standard for racist stereotyping of Hollywood films to come.

2. A lesser revelation at the December Silent Film Festival, also at the Castro, was Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 L'Inhumaine and its crazy Art Deco montage finale, in which a rejected young scientist-suitor brings his inhumanly cruel paramour back to life after a fatal snakebite in a laboratory designed by Fernand Leger. The frenetic sequence, which was a scandal in its day, could have inspired artists like Devo, Klaus Nomi and David Bowie. The film was accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra, which long ago established its reputation as one of the finest silent-film musical ensembles active today.

Image courtesy of Janus Films

3. Two years after the death of the great documentarist Les Blank, we were finally able to see his long-suppressed 1974 documentary on Leon Russell, A Poem is a Naked Person. Thanks to Blank's son Harrod, the film screened at the Opera Plaza followed by a Q&A with Russell himself, rolling to the screen in a mobility scooter and never removing his shades or signature hat. It was a bittersweet occasion to see a vivid, eccentric evocation of Russell's career and discover that Russell is just as laconic and taciturn about the film as Blank would have been.

4. The strangest, most astonishing repertory film experience this year was at the Roxie for the re-release of Roar, a sui-generis 1981 horror film directed by Tippi Hedren's husband Noel Marshall and starring the couple and their children, the most famous of which was a teenage Melanie Griffith. Of course the real stars are a menagerie of big cats allowed to roam free through the family's house. The publicity for the film is a list of casualties involving fractures, ripped scalps, bites and gangrene—some of which are captured on-screen. A roiling swarm of tawny manes, claws and jaws leaves an unforgettable impression.  

Screen capture from Sony DVD

5. Possibly the most joyous rep-film experience I had was at the Roxie shortly before Christmas for Michael Schultz's 1975 black kung fu romance-comedy The Last Dragon, with host/fanboy/racism critic W. Kamau Bell and star Taimak in attendance. The rowdy audience knew the dialogue and Motown song lyrics by heart. Bell christened the audience as an official Black Lives Matter gathering and that a meeting would commence after the screening. Bell's affection for the film and Taimak, whose performance inspired the adolescent Bell to think that a black hero could be both kickass and serenely centered, was a happy way to end 2015.

Iris (2014)

A scene from Albert Maysles' IRIS, playing at the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23 - May 7 2015. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: The late Albert Maysles directed this.

WHAT: I'm allowed to write no more than a seventy-five word review of this film during the festival; because of its "Hold Review" status I'm supposed to wait until its upcoming commercial release to say more. So here goes:

Manhattan's fearlessly original, supremely quoteable, style maven-about-town Iris Apfel and centenarian husband Carl prove ideal subjects for Maysles' perhaps most poptacular documentary, the last released before his March passing. I doubt it's merely the theme of exuberance in the face of mortality that makes it seem like he's filming a mirror; the fly even comes off the wall for a few warmly unguarded moments. Wear your craziest outfit to this one.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 1PM today only in House 1 of the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). It also opens commercially on May 8th for a (minimum) week-long engagement at the Opera Plaza, the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley, and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

WHY: With this going into general release so soon, you may be tempted to schedule another screening in its timeslot and see it in a couple weeks. The main reason why this is not a perfectly good idea is that the day Iris is released commercially, the day after SFIFF ends, is the first day of a seven-day festival of Maysles documentaries at the Vogue Theatre, coinciding precisely with the seven days it's booked at the above venues. I mentioned this Maysles series in a post last month, but now the entire schedule of sixteen features and shorts has been posted online and tickets are already on sale. Although the series is all-digital, it includes many guest appearances by Maysles associates. I don't think any true admirer of Maysles life and work will want to go into this week-long event without having seen Iris first.

HOW: Digital presentations at each venue.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today is the only festival screening of Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent, with director and star Gaspard Uillel both expected to attend the Castro showing. It's also the final showing of Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence, at the Pacific Film Archive, and the first showing of Tsui Hark's The Taking of Tiger Mountain at the Kabuki.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The last double-bill in Yerba Buena Center For the Arts' Noir Westerns series may or not be noir, but it's a powerhouse: John Ford's masterful (yet somehow today undervalued) The Searchers and the first of Anthony Mann's cycle of gritty treatises on American civilization starring Jimmy Stewart, Winchester '73, both in 35mm prints.

I Only Have Two Eyes: 2014 Edition

Screen capture from Warner DVD of Macao

We're already well into the 2015 film-going year, but it's not too late to take time to reflect on the cinematic character of 2014 before it recedes into memory too far. One major release bucked trends by bringing 35mm and 70mm projectors back to life in a few cinema spaces. Otherwise, 35mm screenings of new films all but disappeared from the Frisco Bay screening landscape, with only the 4-Star in San Francisco and the Bluelight Cinemas in Cupertino by year's-end still regularly playing whatever new commercially-available films they're able to track down prints for from the studios still striking them. Remaining film projectors at a place like the Opera Plaza were so under-utilized in the past twelve months that learning that the venue just the other day removed them from all but one of its tiny screening rooms (installing DCP-capable equipment into its two comparatively "larger" houses) felt completely unsurprising and barely disappointing at all to me. It's safe to say that film festivals are no longer a home for 35mm either; as far as I'm aware the only new films that screened in that format at any local fests in 2014 were the throwback short Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret at the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival in June, and Yoji Yamada's The Little House at Mill Valley in October.

Most of the major local festivals have only kept the embers of sprocketed film warm in 2014 either by showing 16mm works by "experimental" artists still employing celluloid, or by showing a few revival titles in 35mm. Indeed, revivals and repertory houses are now where almost all of the action is at for those who like to view light passing through 35mm strips onto screens. Frisco Bay still has venues where this is a major component of programming, as well as a growing contingent of cinema spaces finding creative ways to attract audiences out of their home-viewing patterns (which are shifting themselves) by embracing digital-age developments. I'm eager to see what 2015 will bring to the cinephiliac landscape in San Francisco and its surroundings. Changes are afoot; the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley will be closing midyear to prepare for a move to a new, more transit-connected space; meanwhile the biggest DCP advocate among its programming team has just retired. The Alamo Drafthouse is expected to open its first branch in the region in 2015 as well, at a site within walking distance of several cherished repertory haunts. As highlighted in the new Film-Friendly Links section of the Film On Film Foundation website, Alamo CEO Tim League appears committed to involving 35mm in his company's continued expansion. I'm excited to see how that shakes out.

My annual "I Only Have Two Eyes" survey of local cinephiles' favorite screenings of revival and repertory films may have more mentions of digital screenings than ever for 2014, but as you'll see as I unveil the various contributions over the next week or so, there is plenty of diversity of format, venue, and of course the films themselves, in their selections. I'm so pleased to have gotten a strong turnout for this year's poll, including many participants from the past seven years when I've conducted it, as well as new "faces". Enjoy perusing their lists and comments as more are added!

January 26: Veronika Ferdman, who writes for Slant Magazine, In Review Online and elsewhere.
January 26: Lucy Laird, Operations Director for the SF Silent Film Festival.
January 27: Michael Hawley, who blogs at his own site film-415.
January 27: Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, educator at the Academy of Art & MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS
January 28: Margarita Landazuri, who writes for Turner Classic Movies & elsewhere.
January 28: Ben Armington, Box Cubed Box Office guy for many Bay Area Film Festivals.
January 29: Terri Saul, a visual artist who posts capsule reviews on Letterboxd.
January 29: Lincoln Spector, the proprietor of Bayflicks.
January 30: Michael Guillén, schoolmaster of The Evening Class and contributor to other publications.
January 30: David Robson, editorial director of Jaman and caretaker of The House of Sparrows.
January 31: Jonathan Kiefer, critic for SF Weekly and the Village Voice.
January 31: Adrianne Finelli, artist, educator, and co-curator of A.T.A.'s GAZE film series.
February 1: Haroon Adalat, a designer, illustrator and video editor.
February 1: Maureen Russell, cinephile and Noir City film festival volunteer.
February 2: Ryland Walker Knight, a writer and filmmaker with a new short at SF IndieFest.
February 2: Carl Martin, film projectionist and keeper of the FOFF Bay Area Film Calendar.
February 3: Claire Bain, an artist, filmmaker and writer.
February 4: Brian Darr, a.k.a. yours truly.

The Great Beauty (2013)

WHO: Paolo Sorrentino directed and co-wrote this film.

WHAT: I haven't yet seen this reportedly Fellini-esque film from the director of Il Divo and This Must be The Place. Here's a link to a review from a critic who loved it: Bilge Ebiri.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at least through the end of 2013 at the Rafael in San Rafael, the Shattuck in Berkeley, and the Opera Plaza in San Francisco, and through this Thursday at the Aquarius.

WHY: With Hollywood flooding the market with supposed "Oscar contenders" and local film festivals on hiatus for the holidays, it's the time of year when characters speaking languages other than English tend to get squeezed off of Frisco Bay screens. Right now there are just a handful including the French-language Blue Is the Warmest Color, the Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Telugu-language movies playing at the Towne 3 in San Jose and the Big Cinemas Fremont 7, and Dhoom 3, the Hindi car-racing picture which has crossed over out of those venues into multiplexes. And The Great Beauty, which was just announced as one of the nine finalists for the Foreign Film Academy Award along with Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture, Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster, Felix van Groeningen's The Broken Circle Breakdown, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt and (I believe) four titles that have yet to screen in Frisco Bay cinemas. One of these, the German submission Two Lives will open the Berlin and Beyond festival on January 15th at the Castro, the night before the official announcement of this year's Oscar nominees is made.

As fundamentally flawed as the Academy Awards are as a methodical process for the determination of quality films, the flaws in the system are hardly more evident than in the Foreign-Language Film category, as is always noted at this time of year. Still, its convoluted elimination procedure sheds attention on films that might otherwise be ignored, and nominated films generally are able to see distribution in this country that might elude a merely shortlisted or submitted title. But sometimes the submitted titles that fail to be nominated are just as interesting or more interesting than those that aren't. Yet for every example like The Past, the Iranian submission that has officially failed to make the cut for a Foreign-Language Film Oscar, but has secure distribution (it open at the Clay and the Aquarius, where it replaces The Great Beauty, this Friday, and will arrive at the Rafael January 10th) there are a handful or two of films that, because they failed to achieve a coveted nomination slot, will soon become difficult to see, especially in cinemas, in this country.

This makes the Rafael Film Center's annual For Your Consideration series, which runs from January 10 through 17 at the restored Art Deco theatre in downtown San Rafael, a very welcome one for foreign film fans. Of the fourteen films screening in the series, only one has a shot at being Oscar-nominated: the aforementioned Two Lives, which screens at the Rafael the evening after its Berlin & Beyond premiere. Berlin & Beyond fans should note that German-language submissions The Wall from Austria and More Than Honey from Switzerland play at the Rafael, but not at the San Francisco festival. Other FYC films come from the Czech Republic (Jiri Menzel's The Don Juans), New Zealand (Dana Rotberg's Maori-focused White Lies), Australia (Kim Mordaunt's The Rocket, set in Laos), Argentina (Lucia Puenzo's The German Doctor), Georgia (Nana Ekvtimishvili's In Bloom), Japan, Poland, Romania, Afghanistan, Sweden and Canada.

The Rafael is of course committed to showing foreign language films that don't make a big impact on the Academy Award nomination process as well, and sometimes these can be the most interesting films of them all. I don't know if that's an accurate description of the Brazilian film Reaching For the Moon, which opens there Friday (and at the Opera Plaza that day as well), but from my point of view it definitely does describe A Touch of Sin, the latest from Jia Jaing-Ke and one that was never eligible to even be considered in the Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination process because it has never been screened in its country of origin, China. It opens for a week at the Rafael January 3rd, the same week it screens at the Roxie.

In fact, I feel as though I didn't really start seriously appreciating foreign films until I started paying more attention to films that had nothing to do with the Oscar nomination process. I don't think it's a coincidence that, when it comes to films screening at Berlin & Beyond, I'm far more intrigued by Thomas Arslan's Gold, Pola Beck's Breaking Horizons and Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's The Shine of Day than the Oscar contender. We'll see what I'll be able to make it to in January.

HOW: The Great Beauty screens on DCP at the Shattuck and Rafael, and on Blu-Ray at the Opera Plaza. It's a bit of a shame that these are the only options for local moviegoers as the film was shot on 35mm, and is being made available for screening on 35mm by its U.S. distributor at at least one venue.