South And North

Since my previous post on the Frisco Bay screening scene, two major pieces of news have caught the eyes of cinephiles like myself. First, the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto quietly began a new multi-calendar series last week. It's an extensive centennial tribute to Universal Pictures, focusing attention on the oldest of the Hollywood studios, which mogul Carl Laemmle formed out of his company IMP (Independent Moving Pictures Company) and several others after emerging victorious in his legal battle with the 'old guard' of American motion picture production: Edison, Bioscope, Vitagraph, etc. a.k.a. "The Trust". The first picture made at his Universal City studio after this formation, At Old Fort Dearborn, was released on September 28, 1912, and was itself a centennial commemoration of a War of 1812 battle taking place where Chicago would eventually be founded. Though this film (if it indeed exists) is not announced for the Stanford schedule, there are three silent film presentations between now and the end of the calendar: two early entries in the famous "Universal Horror" series: the spooky Cat and the Canary this Friday September 21 & Lon Chaney's famous Phantom of the Opera November 2nd, as well as Erich von Stroheim's 1922 drama Foolish Wives on October 12th. All three will feature Dennis James at the Wurlitzer organ, and will hopefully be followed by more Universal silent films in subsequent calendars.

The Good Fairy (William Wyler, 1935) screen capture from Kino DVD

The meat of the Stanford schedule over the next two months is not 1920s silents, however, but a healthy sampling of features from the 1930-1935 period, all on 35mm prints as usual at this venue. Essentially all of the surviving Universal Horror films from this period will screen, from famous titles like Dracula and the Mummy to lesser-knowns Werewolf of London and Secret of the Blue Room, paired on Halloween night. With quite a few films by melodrama master John Stahl (Magnificent Obsession & Imitation of Life make a double-bill of Douglas Sirk pre-makes Oct. 13-14) and a complete retrospective of James Whale's work from 1931's Waterloo Bridge and Frankenstein to his 1935 Bride of Frankenstein and Remember Last Night?, the series is ideal for auteurists. If this Wednesday & Thursday's pairing of Frank Borzage's rarely-shown but highly-regarded Little Man, What Now? with one of my very favorite William Wyler films (from a Preston Sturges screenplay) The Good Fairy doesn't entice you to Palo Alto I'm not sure what I can say. Maybe you have an excuse if you're immersing yourself in one of the two other current studio-focused film series happening in Berkeley right now. I was sad to miss Stahl's 1933 Only Yesterday last week but glad I caught Isao Takahata's 1991 film with coincidentally the same (English) title- it was as equal to the best films of Hayao Miyazaki as it was different from them, and it plays again at the California Theatre this Wednesday only.

The other studio-focused series in Berkeley is the Pacific Film Archive's Nikkatsu centennial, which I'm sad to say I haven't been able to attend any of yet. (How could I let myself miss a rare Mizoguchi film?) There are still quite a few screenings left to go however, including a Daisuke Ito chambara from the silent era and three Seijun Suzuki selections from the 1960s. Like Universal, Nikkatsu is still in action today, releasing films like Rent-A-Cat, which will screen nearby next month. This brings me to screening news #2: Last Wednesday's press conference and announcement of the program for the Mill Valley Film Festival happening in various Marin County venues from October 4-14. 

In Another Country (Hong Sangsoo, 2012) courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival

Though the press conference itself was underwhelming (why rent the Dolby Labs screening room and then show compressed clips with cut-off subtitles and obfuscating pixelation? Well, at least the festival trailer looked great.) the program itself more than made up for that. Quite a few of the festival circuit's hottest titles, by veteran auteurs and up-and-coming makers alike, are part of the MVFF program this year. Whether this is because the festival is celebrating an anniversary itself (its 35th) or because of other factors, I don't know, but there's no doubt I'm finding more to lure me on the trek North this year than I've ever seen on a prior Mill Valley program. I don't feel left out of hyped Eastern festivals, knowing that 7 highly-anticipated films from the New York Film Festival's main slate are set to play here in less than a month: Christian Mungiu's Beyond The Hills, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die, Antonio Méndez Esparza's Here And There, Leos Carax's Holy Motors, Ang Lee's Life of Pi, Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone In Love, and Miguel Gomes's Tabu. These are joined by more new films I have I hopes for, foremost among them the first screen team-up between one of my favorite international directors Hong Sangsoo, and one of my favorite international performers, Isabelle Huppert: In Another Country. 

I'm also curious to see Nor'Easter and Fat Kid Rules The World, both first features from American directors Andrew Brotzman and Matthew Lillard, respectively. I believe these are the first films completed with some assistance from Lucas McNelly and his ambitious A Year Without Rent project (full disclosure: my roommates and I contributed a night on a couch to this project) to have public screenings in the Bay Area. There's also The Wall, which comes to Mill Valley after screening at the Berlin & Beyond festival this month, a fascinating Frisco-focused documentary called The Institute, and the annual offering from the prolific local legend Rob Nilsson, whose films rarely screen in San Francisco proper, even when they're made here. This one is called Maelstrom and is set in Marin, making MVFF an even-more ideal showcase than usual. 

Tales of the Night (Michel Ocelot, 2011)  courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival

Thanks to the festival's timing on the "awards calendar" there's always a certain amount of "Oscarbaition" at Mill Valley, and this year Ben Affleck is expected to be on hand to excite people about his upcoming Argo and David O. Russell will be here with Silver Linings Playbook. But I'm much more interested in an Oscar-ineligible animated feature, silhouettist Michel Ocelot's first 3-D venture Tales of the Night, which screened in Frisco once last year, in French with English subtitles. I missed it with some regret but won't miss the subtitles when I catch it dubbed into English at Mill Valley this year. A recent viewing of the otherwise-excellent Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (which comes to the Castro next month) made me realize I haven't yet trained myself to read words on one focal plane while taking in stereoscopic action at the same time. Thoughtful dubbing is usually less damaging to animation than live-action work anyway. Note that Robert Bloomberg's 3-D short How To Draw A Cat, which screens along with Ocelot's feature, is, contra the festival catalog, not made by young Croatian artists. There is an animation workshop as part of the MVFF Children's Filmfest, and the other features in this sidebar will be preceded by shorts, but labeling How To Draw a Cat as such was a publishing error.

With all the treats in store, it may be a bit disappointing to learn that all the above-mentioned films will be screening digitally rather than in 35mm prints. This is the reality of film festival exhibition for the present and foreseeable future, however, and although the main MVFF venue, the Rafael Film Center, still retains its 35mm projection capability, they understandably also want to show off their recently-upgraded digital projection systems. To festival director Mark Fishkin's press conference promise that the festival screenings will look much better than the clips shown did, I can only say: they'd better! I feel it's worth noting the handful of titles that I'm told will be sourced from actual film reels and not DCP or other digital formats: the painter/film director biopic Renoir, Brazil's Xinga (also a biopic), Polish thriller To Kill A Beaver, and two of the selections in the shorts program entitled Crosseyed And Painless. And two of the retrospective presentations as well: the screening of 

La Jetée that will accompany the October 6th (but not the October 8th) showing of Emiko Omori's tribute to its departed director, To Chris Marker, an Unsent Letter, and the October 7th 35mm screening of Yoyo, a 1965 comedy co-written by Jean Claude-Carrière, and directed by and starring the all-but-forgotten French clown Pierre

Étaix- a pair mentored and introduced by the great Jacques Tati. If 

Étaix's name doesn't ring a bell his face may if you've seen Fellini's The Clowns, Oshima's Max Mon Amour, Iosseliani's Chantrapas, Kaurismäi's Le Havre, or (not bloody likely) Lewis's The Day The Clown Cried.

Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012) courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival

With the studios' all-or-nothing digital push, 35mm prints are disappearing from festivals all over- not just Mill Valley but household-name festivals like Cannes and Toronto as well. This is purely speculation, but it may be that the main reason why this year's MVFF line-up seems stronger than usual is that distributors are more willing to let digital versions of their films play at a regional festival like this than they were willing to send one of their few 35mm prints to Marin in the days when celluloid was king. Small distributors are giving in to pressure to "go digital" just as commercial cinemas are, and the whole film ecosystem as we know it may be unrecognizable in a year or sooner. I'm told a touring 35mm print of Holy Motors will grace at least one local Landmark Theatres screen about a month after it plays digitally at MVFF, but this may already be the exception to the rule.

All I know is, I'm determined to see e.g. Like Someone In Love in Marin County next month, even if it is going to be shown from a Digital Cinema Package (DCP). And if IFC distributes a print of it to a local arthouse sometime this winter or spring or later, I imagine I'll happily pay to see it again there as well. I mean, it's an Abbas Kiarostami feature set in Japan. Of course I'm going to want to see it at least twice! Now, off to buy my ticket befpre it goes to "rush" status...

Adam Hartzell: I Wish

Summer moviegoing in a city like San Francisco doesn't have to mean check-your-brain trips to the mall. Alternative screening venues abound in this town- their schedules linked on my sidebar a click away. I'll make special mention of the particularly strong programming at the Roxie, the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, and the SF Film Society Screen over the next month or two, before mentioning a pair of special events featuring local musicians picking favorite locally-made films (Foul Play and The Conversation) at the Vogue this weekend. Also opening this weekend? A return-to-form from one of Japan's most internationally-esteemed directors right now, Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Adam Hartzell reviews the new film. All photos courtesy Magnolia Pictures:

It speaks to the power of cinema, and Hirokazu Kore-Eda's story-telling in particular, that the director's latest film had my wife and I changing our minds so quickly with such strong re-commitment.  The morning before we sat down to watch I Wish at the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival, we had made the difficult decision that traveling to see our family in Japan this summer probably wasn't the best for us financial-wise.  But once the credits closed the film, my wife was first to exclaim, and I was quick to second, "I really want to go to Japan now!"


This is, of course, exactly what the folks of jeki want to hear. jeki, (I've only seen it officially referenced in lower-case), is the East Japan Marketing & Communications advertising group, which is a subsidiary of the East Japan Railway Company.  And jeki partially funded I Wish.  If an international audience wasn't the intent, at least it can be assumed that they hoped to inspire their fellow Japanese citizens to travel to the most southwesterly island of Japan's archipelago, Kyushu.    Although my wife and I won't be heading that far south this time, (we went to Oita during our past visit), we are definitely heading to other prefectures along other railway lines after witnessing this engaging story of kids rallying around something bigger than themselves.

What was it that so transfixed us?  First, a quick plot summary.  The film follows two brothers who are amicably apart after the separation between their mother and father.   The two brother characters, older Koichi and younger Ryonosuke, are played by two real life brothers, Koki and Oshiro Maeda.   Koichi feels stuck in the ash-y air of Kagoshima where an active volcano (Sakurajima) brews and occasionally spews ash, resulting in daily habits particular to Kagoshima residents such as vigorously brushing off the ash upon arrival at school or wetting ones finger to see if ash collects on the upright phalange.   (My wife was born there and these Kagoshima gestures resonated with her memories of visiting her grandmother.)


It appears the younger Ryonosuke got the better deal in the bargain.  He is having the childhood most can only dream of, running around the more bustling Fukuoka with his posse of mostly girls, all while helping sell the merch at concerts for his dad's rock band.  Ryonosuke is truly the hyper one that walks ever so closely towards that annoying line, but never fully crosses it.  The plot consists of the possibility of the family reuniting and Koichi's attempts to assist in this re-cleave post-cleave by conjuring up a story that if you make a wish when two bullet trains pass each other, your miracle (the literal Japanese title of the film) will come true. 

Simply watching the wonderfully expansive train system of Japan and the freedom it provides is advertising enough for someone like me who is stuck in the backward-thinking highway-bounds of a car-dependent nation. But the director's deft story-telling makes sure I Wish is so much more than an ad for the railroad industry.  Kore-eda shows us the joy of watching kids throughout their day, wandering around their respective cities unchaperoned, creating adventures for themselves, from as complicated as their journey to make a wish to as simple as rushing to a favorite food stall.  To me, this was precious without being sickeningly kawaii. 


In this way, I Wish further solidifies Kore-eda's reputation of being one of the best directors of young actors and actresses.  What particularly transfixed me was just the importance of that less self-conscious time of childhood when if you can dream it, you can do it, at least in your head.  For my wife, it was nostalgia for what her adult self is no longer permitted to enjoy.  She and I can enjoy it vicariously now by watching our nieces engage in these privileges of youth, and by watching I Wish again when it is released this weekend at the Lumiere in San Francisco, Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

I cannot recommend I Wish enough, but it is important to point out something missing from the narrative that comes off chasm-atic if you are aware of it, as Japanese citizens would be.  


The opening celebration for the northern section of Kyushu extension noted in the film takes place on the 12th of March, 2011.  This should have been a momentous event that further solidified Japan's forward-thinking in establishing a railway network envied by many.  But the celebration was canceled by an incident of world-wide proportion that happened one day before the opening - the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.   Neither the earthquake, nor the tsunami, nor the nuclear disaster enters into the plot of I Wish.  This can be argued as a major omission.  Even though kids can go about their days without knowing much of the wider world, this was an incident of such devastation to the country it ought to have been mentioned somewhere.


And, arguably, it is indirectly mentioned.  But to flesh this out, I have to ruin the plot.  So your time here is done if you hold onto the view that 'spoilers' spoil a film.  (Recent evidence suggests otherwise.)

But here's some non-plot spoilers regarding how the new northern Kyushu lines connect the dots of the plot.  Koichi is so bummed about living in Kagoshima, he takes one of the things that bothers him about it, the ash-spewing Sakarujima volcano, and melds a fantasy in his mind where an eruption of Sakarujima will force his family to leave Kagoshima.  The wish he plans to plead for once the bullet trains pass is that Kagoshima be destroyed.  Now, Koichi isn't evil in that he hopes people die.  It's just that he's a kid, living in his often selfish world.  If he really thought his wish through, he'd realize folks might die in the process of living his fantasy. 

And Koichi does seem to realize that his dream is selfish, because he lets go of it and doesn't wish for a disaster when the trains pass.  He resolves to accept his present plight and will make the most of life in Kagoshima.  If we read Koichi's disbanded disaster as the triple disaster that actually shook Japan the day before the launch of the new northern Kyushu line, even though neither the earthquake, the tsunami, nor the nuclear plant disaster are mentioned, perhaps that is partly an unspoken motivation for Koichi to relinquish the disaster in his mind.  (The reasons the film presents are more pedestrian, but still virtuous.) 

Unfortunately, this reason for exclusion is not an argument I find too convincing.  It makes me feel like I’m stretching it.  If you are going to place a fictional world within the borders of a real-life event, it's hard to justify silence on a national tragedy.  (By the way, I am not implying at all that jeki encouraged such silence.  And let’s also keep in mind that the funding and story line were probably well solidified prior to the horrible disaster that inflicted Japan.)  Still, I wish Kore-eda would have found a way to make note of what's excised from the narrative.  Such is the only flaw in an otherwise wonderful film.

There Haven't Been Any Quiet Moments

Welcome to 2012 and a New Year of Frisco Bay cinephilia! Rumors of the Castro Theatre's demise were greatly exaggerated, and it's running repertory and festival screenings, now with newly-hired general manager Keith Arnold at the helm. After largely avoiding Japanese films in the first months of programming their year-round venue New People, the SF Film Society, its identity as an exhibitor of varied, cutting-edge from around the globe now established at the venue, brings samurai classics back to that screen in January. Yerba Buena Center For the Arts begins a promising Spring season this week with the local premiere of a new restoration of Nick Ray's We Can't Go Home Again; check Max Goldberg for an excellent recent article (complete with comment by one of Ray's former student-filmmakers!) The Rafael Film Center hosts its annual For Your Consideration series of Oscar-contending foreign films for a week starting Friday; first looks at new films by Béla Tarr, Ann Hui & Nuri Bilge Ceylan are among the most tantalizing of those considered.

Perhaps most excitingly of all, on Thursday Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive opens up again for a new semester featuring, among other offerings, retrospectives for Henri-Georges Clouzot, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Bresson and Howard Hawks. The latter, though not complete, is a hearty mixture of the consummate classic-era Hollywood director's best-known and least-known films, including four rarely-seen silents, and the pair of important pre-code action dramas that open the series: The Crowd Roars and Monterey Bay-shot Tiger Shark (pictured above). It's on the occasion of this Hawks series that I introduce a new guest contributor to Hell On Frisco Bay, one of my longest-standing cinephile friends, moving image archivist and philatelic blogger Sterling Hedgpeth. He previews the series through the prism of the film aptly chosen to play the PFA on February 14th.

Here's his article.

Adam Hartzell on Three Upcoming Documentaries

I'm slowly recovering from the busiest time of my year, Halloween. I haven't blogged in weeks, haven't tweeted in days, and am just about to get back into my cinephile swing. Today's the right timing, as tonight the new November-December Pacific Film Archive calendar launches with The Unstable Object, the first of four Alternative Visions screenings Wednesdays this month. The Castro Theatre screens four masterpieces in a Nick Ray centennial mini-fest today and tomorrow, and the Roxie chimes in with a fifth Ray (Johnny Guitar) Sunday as part of its Not Necessarily Noir 2 series. And the SF Film Society closes French Cinema Now tonight and opens Cinema By The Bay tomorrow; I'm intrigued by the screening of the 1926 silent The Bat and the films by Lawrence Jordan, Carolee Schneeman, etc. playing the Canyon Cinema spotlight. But my friend Adam Hartzell has just added three more upcoming films to my to-see list, each sampled at the Mill Valley Film Festival last month. Here, Adam writes on the discoveries made in his cinemagoing travels:

In order avoid adding to both our financial and carbon footprint debt, my wife and I have been limiting our plane-dependent vacations to one a year. And we never travel by car anymore. But we still long to 'get-away'. So we've been venturing around the Bay Area, to places that can be reached by ferry, train, or bus. And many of these advanced 'stay-cations' have been for film festivals. We've taken Amtrak to Sacramento for the French Film Festival where we got to see Alex Deliporte's Angèle & Tony and the Audrey Tatou vehicle Beautiful Lies before San Francisco French Cinema Now attendees did this past week. It was also in Sacramento that we got to see the wonderful scene where Je t'aime . . . moi non plus is first heard by Serge Gainsbourg's record company in Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life that opened at the Embarcadero this past weekend. We've also made the Tiburon International Film Festival an annual trip since it's such a green convenience to walk off the ferry right smack dab into the festival.
　
The Mill Valley Film Festival makes it a bit more difficult to travel to on a green stream. They do provide a shuttle from the San Rafael and Mill Valley venues, but we chose films showing in Mill Valley and there wasn't a direct bus from the Larkspur Ferry as far as we could tell, so we grabbed a cab to get to Mill Valley for our overnight stay. (We did take the shuttle to San Rafael in order to take Golden Gate Bus back, however.)
　
Although we didn't plan it this way, all three of the films we caught at MVFF will be released in San Francisco before the year is out. Coming to the Balboa December 2nd will be Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey's Eames: The Architect and The Painter. I had heard about the Charles and Ray Eames's marriage and professional partnership in a past podcast (the name of which escapes me), so I was ready for the most revealing aspect of Cohn and Jersey's documentary; that is, how important Ray Eames's work was to the success of their designs. They were a couple speeding past the Zeitgeist of the 50's, having to negotiate the respect Ray wanted and Charles wanted for Ray within the patriarchal narratives demanded of the times. The television clip where the hostess can't seem to integrate the female half of this couple is a very valuable moment of archival retrieval. Eames: The Architect and The Painter is an example of the value and necessity of what is often called 'revisionist history', a term sadly intended negatively by too many mindless talking heads. Much history is 'revisionist history' in that it is the applying of recently excavated information to create a new narrative that is hopefully more representative of what actually happened and why. In this way, Eames: The Architect and The Painter brings a lathe to refine the record of the impact of the Eames studio. It's no longer just Charles who gets a seat at the table since he wasn't alone in the creation of those seats and tables.

Our Saturday morning show, Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, was disappointingly lacking in the young folk hoped for as part of the DocFest just past or the Lumiere in SF or Rafael Film Center in San Rafael come December 16th. Or, as my wife suggested, perhaps the kids didn't want the magic of Elmo ruined by seeing the man behind him. The man that brought a voice and aesthetic to Elmo that no other puppeteers were able to bring, Kevin Clash, definitely makes an effort to move his body away whenever he meets kids in real life, as if his contortions are abracadabra gesticulations maintaining the magic. The film is about a dreamer, a geek picked on at school, who works hard at his craft and eventually makes his way to the big leagues as well as the respect of his peers. His parents support is endearing and tantamount to Clash's success, as is the public funding that contributed to Clash's career trajectory. Besides the public television funding that made Sesame Street successful along with the massive research and talent that was part of the Children's Television Workshop that Clash became a part of, military research has a place to play in a particularly puzzling aspect of professional puppetry for young Clash. (I'm going to be vague about it to allow for the pleasure of that reveal.) The public money behind Elmo provided opportunities for artists and researchers to leverage their interests, skills, talents and dreams, resulting in tremendous benefit for individuals, communities and economies. If you're cynical to the joy Elmo has brought to so many children, Elmo did, after all, do more than tickle the economy in all the ancillary products sold.
　
As much as I enjoyed the Eames and Clash documentaries, the best film I saw at MVFF will possibly be the best film I see all year. Judy Lief's Deaf Jam is a celebration of American Sign Language poetry that doubles as a primer of Deaf Culture, triples as a personal story of Israeli and Palestinian friendship, quadruples as a snapshot of the economic impact of our immigration law, and multiplies as many, many other things. This is truly a beautiful, powerful film, providing a mesmerizing experience that I have not had in a theatre for a long time. Lief's dance background is clearly on display in her framing of the hand, body and facial movements that make up the ASL equivalents of phonemes, words, and sentences. She gives us a precise primer on ASL Poetry and thrusts us into the world of ASL Poetry performance by taking the text of subtitles and swirling them around in the translation with such vibrancy that it truly works, rather than coming off as a gimmick. This effort to struggle with how to demonstrate the vitality of ASL through translation even includes a segment where the piece is left respectfully un-translated.
　
Deaf Jam's main subject Aneta Brodski is that charismatic individual many documentarians hope to capture. When we hear the immigration issues she runs up against, you can't help but see how the obstacles financially imposed upon Deaf folks will hit her even harder. Hopefully she will be able to negotiate the college education and later employment she deserves in spite of these obstacles, but you do worry that such a vibrant spirit might be hardened, if not squelched, considering what she will be forced to maneuver around in the future.
　
Screening in a truncated form as part of the Independent Lens series on PBS networks on Thursday November 3rd, Deaf Jam is an example of the tremendous value film festivals can provide through the different lenses they focus onto the world. (And Deaf Jam is another example of the huge benefits provided by public funding - thank you, ITVS!) Even with the chain of transit options we have to step on to get there, MVFF has consistently been a festival worth the journey.

UPDATE 11/3/11: I've just learned from Adam that Eames: The Architect and the Painter will also be opening at the Elmwood in Berkeley and the Rafael in Marin on December 2nd, the same day it comes to the Balboa. I'm glad this documentary is going to be spreading out to various Frisco Bay venues. Is it too much to dream that one or more of them might track down a print of one of Charles & Ray's own wonderful short films (Powers of Ten, Atlas, Blacktop, etc.) to screen prior to the documentary feature?

Does Netflix Cause Cancer?

Short answer: probably not. Not any more than cellphones, power lines, microwave ovens, and the other accoutrements of the modern world, anyhow. But that heading got your attention, didn't it? Remember when your mother told you that sitting too close the television screen would wreck your eyesight or worse? She was probably wrong too, but her overall point that getting too transfixed by home appliances may be unhealthy for us (intellectually and emotionally, if not physically) still has validity.

Don't get me wrong- it's impossible to deny the utility and convenience of home delivery systems for our entertainment, and though I haven't personally embraced streaming or downloading video, I do watch DVDs with some frequency. However, I hope I never get so habituated to doing so that I no longer feel like going out to see a movie playing on a shared screen.

One argument made by some of the proponents of digital delivery systems in favor of traditional 35mm film distribution has been the environmental benefits of moving away from the chemical processes required to make film prints, and the necessity to ship heavy film cans long distances. These benefits are hard to dispute, but the idea that technology is bringing us to some sort of entertainment eco-topia is even harder to swallow. Can we remove the desire to use new technologies to watch movies from the factors encouraging us to buy endless personal computers, media players, and screens, all subject to the little tyrannies of planned obsolescence? Would the impoverished peasants living and laboring in the so-called "e-waste villages" where they come into constant contact with the toxic components of discarded electronic devices, shipped from overseas, consider the decrease in photochemically-based film delivery an environmental boon? I think not. From a certain point of view, the popularity of Netflix, whose streaming services are often said to make up 30% of this country's internet traffic during peak periods (though that figure's been contested), indeed may contribute to increased cancer rates in other countries.

Accepting that we live in an age of ever-expanding personal screens (and typing this on my computer, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to pretend I don't accept it, albeit with reservations) doesn't necessarily mean that we should celebrate when traditional film distribution methods disappear. I'm a little heartsick that the greenest cinema in town is almost certainly going to close before the end of the month. Barring some kind of deus ex machina intervention by a well-funded angel, the Red Vic Movie House, which has solar panels on its roof and sells its popcorn and drinks in reusable bowls and cups rather then industry-standard disposable containers, is set to close after its 31st anniversary and annual screenings of Harold And Maude July 22-25. The theatre's July calendar is filled with the kinds of wonderful films that a group of passionate programmers might want to bring to audiences one last time before finally shutting the theatre doors: Vertigo July 5 & 6, Babe on July 10 & 11, What's Up, Doc July 12 & 13, Stop Making Sense July 15 & 16, Touch of Evil July 17 & 18, and (sadly fittingly) The Last Waltz Jul 19 & 20. They're also holding one last poster sale, and having cinephile-musician Jonathan Richman perform and present a screening of Romani filmmaker Tony Gatlif's Vengo.

Six months ago I wrote a blog post focusing on the impending fate of the Red Vic, as well as on the VIZ a.k.a. New People Cinema. Last week, the San Francisco Film Society announced a plan to bring year-round film programming to New People starting this fall. It's very welcome news, as the state-of-the-art venue has been underused in the half-year since my post. There is a current set of weekend matinee screenings of Japanese classics by Yasujiro Ozu (the Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice and, as seen in the top image on this post, Good Morning, neither of which have shown theatrically on Frisco Bay since 2003), Akira Kurosawa (a 35mm print of Red Beard and a digital showing of Scandal) and Shohei Imamura (a 35mm print of Vengeance Is Mine and a digital showing of The Pornographers) and upcoming showings of Das Boot and of K-20: the Fiend with Twenty Faces, the latter as a Japanese earthquake and tsunami benefit. But, with a few exceptions, these screenings peppered throughout the month represent more cinematic activity than New People has seen of late. Michael Hawley has written a characteristically thorough post on the deal that I suggest reading for more context.

One question that Hawley brings up is how this deal impacts upon the Film Society's historical use of Landmark Theatres for many of its Fall screening activities (French Cinema Now, New Italian Cinema, et cetera. September 2011 brings a Hong Kong series into the Film Society fold.) Another that he hints at is what this may mean for the future of Frisco's most venerable art house, the Clay, which has been regularly playing foreign films since the 1930s (when films by Marcel Pagnol, Sascha Guitry and Fei Mu, for instance, had runs) and midnight movies since the 1970s, and which was expected to close nearly a year ago. The SF Film Society's expressed interest in using the Clay for year-round-programming seemed to delay its closure. But now that this New People deal has made clear that Film Society negotiations with the Clay property owner went nowhere, I once again must wonder how long the latter venue will remain open. For now, Landmark has Michael Winterbottom's The Trip playing there, and it's expected to open French comedy The Names of Love Friday, July 29 and host a screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show the next Saturday at midnight. Then, Sam Sharkey is to bring his popular monthly midnight screenings of the bizarrely, brazenly bad cult movie The Room from its former Red Vic home to the Clay on the second Saturday of August, September and October. We'll see.

Landmark is certainly the theatre chain that brings the most film titles of interest to a Frisco moviegoer weary of Hollywood sequelitis and remake fever. Recent Landmark hits include Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Terence Malick's the Tree of Life, and I expect upcoming bookings of Errol Morris's Tabloid (opening July 15) and of the Rialto Pictures revival of Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth (opening September 9) to do well also. The chain also screens a lot of titles that you have to closely follow the independent film and film festival world to recognize. (What will we do without David Hudson?) That's why I was actually rather excited to learn that local Landmark Theatres (along with most local AMC Theatres, a San Jose theatre devoted to South Asian cinema called Big Cinemas Towne 3, and the South Bay's Camera Cinemas mini-chain) were on the list of theatres participating in the pilot program called MoviePass, announced as launching this month as a kind of Frisco Bay beta-test. For $50 a month, moviegoers were to be admitted to any film playing at any of the participating theatres, as long as they didn't go to more than one movie per day, or (presumably as a precaution against fraud) go to any movie more than once. The thing is, these "participating theatres" weren't really participating-- the deals had been arranged through their online ticketing partner movietickets.com without input of the chain owners. Soon it was announced that the program would be canceled before it began, with theatre staff instructed not to honor tickets purchased through the MoviePass program. Still, it seems like a similar plan along such lines, if it ever were to be enacted, would hold great appeal to a segment of Frisco Bay cinephiles (though perhaps not the same segment that owns smartphones) and might even be effective in luring bargain-hunters not normally attracted to documentaries and foreign films into expanding their cinematic horizons. Lets hope future endeavors on the part of MoviePass are more thought-through.

Thanks for indulging on this rambling ride through a number of issues that have been on my mind lately. I managed to work in references to some of the notable screenings on Frisco Bay's horizon, but continue on with me and I'll share a few others I'm excited about.

The Pacific Film Archive's new calendar for July & August begins tonight withthe first of a set of American films noir set at least partly in Mexico, from rarities like Anthony Mann's The Great Flamarion to classics like Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (which also features on the Castro Theatre's July calendar on a double-bill with another amazing Robert Mitchum starrer Night of the Hunter). Check what Dennis Harvey and Max Goldberg say on the series. The calendar continues with a great, if incomplete, series of Bernardo Bertolucci films, all in new prints, and a very welcome Jerzy Sklomowski series including what I believe to be Frisco Bay premieres of at least two films, his latest Essential Killing, starring Vincent Gallo, and Four Nights With Anna. I saw Essential Killing in Toronto last September and was both mightily impressed with it and embarrassed I'd never seen any of Skolimowski's films, other than a few he wrote for other directors (Roman Polanski & Andrej Wajda) early in his career. The Berkeley venue also presents a set of films written (and sometimes directed) by the previously mentioned Marcel Pagnol, programs presented by animator John Musker and animation scholar Karl Cohen, Kon Ichikawa's The Makioka Sisters, and a free outdoor screening of It Conquered The World. And the Japanese Divas program continues on from June. Jason Sanders has been putting together beautiful collections of images of the featured actresses from classic Japanese fan magazines on the BAM/PFA's own blog. Looking ahead to September and October, it's been learned that the PFA will play host to a series of films directed (some of them from inside prison walls) by persecuted Turkish filmmaker Yilmaz Güney.

The Roxie is playing host to a number of smaller film festivals this summer, and has announced a number of interesting screenings. Most interesting to me are the July 29-August 4 run of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's World on a Wire, which I saw at the last SF International Film Festival, a two-night stand of Surrogate Valentine, my favorite film of the last SF International Asian American Film Festival, and perhaps most exciting of all, a small Monte Hellman retrospective including the only one of his films I've seen thus far, Two Lane Blacktop, his well-regarded Cockfighter, and two films singled out as "Acid Westerns" by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting. Hellman will even be on hand July 22 to introduce his new film Road To Nowhere; he'll be at the Rafael Film Center in Marin County the next evening introducing the latter two films. Ride in the Whirlwind and Two-Lane Blacktop (though not Cockfighter) will play the Rafael that week as well.

The Rafael is also one of five screening venues for the 31st edition of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. This year, I'm particularly intrigued by the archival selections playing the festival, all at the Castro Theatre. Most impressively, Kirk Douglas has agreed to come to a Sunday afternoon, July 24th screening of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus. How many legends of his stature still have the ability to make personal appearances? Suffice to say this is an incredible coup for the festival. If you're wondering what the overt Jewish content in Spartacus might be, let me just divert your attention over to the festival's other Kirk Douglas film The Juggler, directed by blacklist victim Edward Dmytryk in 1953. A third archival selection is a newly-subtitled 1939 Yiddish-language film Tevye, based on the same set of stories that inspired Fiddler On The Roof years later. I first heard of the film when I learned it had been inducted into the National Film Registry, and I'm excited to finally have a shot at seeing it, especially at the Castro.

The Castro is well worth frequenting in July as well. In addition to already-mentioned events, there's a 9-film tribute to the year 1984 hosted by Jesse Hawthorne Ficks as part of his MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS programming. July 20 brings a Todd Haynes double-bill: Poison and Safe. And the month bleeds into August with the first in a while of the Castro's now-trademark series devoted to great film composers, this time Max Steiner, which gives an excuse to show an astonishing array of beloved Hollywood classics: the original Mildred Pierce, Gone With The Wind, White Heat, King Kong and The Searchers are just some of these.

Of course July 14-17 are my own favorite days in the Castro's upcoming programming; it's the weekend of the Silent Film Festival, with which (I feel compelled to frequently mention, in the interest of full disclosure) I've been tangentially associated with, as a researcher and writer, for five years now. I'm very impressed with their program this year, and plan on discussing it in more detail at a future date. In the meantime, I notice that the Stanford Theatre is planning to bring back a summer silent screening series for the first time in several years. Buster Keaton films yet to be determined will be screened, and I'd bet that the July 15 date will feature organist Dennis James, who'll be in San Francisco July 16-17 to perform for the rediscovered Douglas Fairbanks comedy Mr. Fix-It and the Lois Weber-directed drama Shoes, and to share his perspectives on performing for silent films at the SFSFF's July 16 Variations on a Theme panel hosted by experienced silent film accompanist Jill Tracy. Silent film enthusiasts should also note that the Niles Film Museum also has its July-August calendar available as a pdf on its website. I'm most excited by the chance to see Leap Year, the final feature starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle made before his famous scandal.

SFIFF54 Day 11: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival is in its final week. It runs through May 5th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (FRANCE: August & Louis Lumière, 1896)

playing: at 5:00 PM at the Castro as part of the Retour De Flamme: Rare And Restored Films in 3-D program, which has only this single screening during the festival.
distribution: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat has been released on several different DVDs, including this one by Image Entertainment. But not in 3-D. In fact, though many of the works showing tonight have been released on video by different companies, 3-D systems for home viewing are still notoriously subpar, not to mention expensive. It seems fair to guess that this particular collection of films might never be screened together in a San Francisco theatre again.

It's one of the most-often repeated founding myths of the cinema. When a Paris audience at one of the first public exhibitions of films by the pioneering Lumière Brothers saw on the screen an indistinct object near the vanishing point become a locomotive charging towards them, the crowd mistook the illusion of the image for a real train and panicked, screamed, and even fled their seats to get out of the vehicle's path. It's hard to imagine people being so naive about the cinema, even in its earliest days, to react so drastically. It's been a while since I last read Martin Loiperdinger and Bernd Elzer's article on the film from a 2004 edition of the journal The Moving Image, but I recall it being a convincing, if not quite conclusive, debunking of this tale. As I recall, the next issue of the journal included a reader letter theorizing that the October 1895 Montparnasse Station accident might have made the January 1896 Lumière screening audience more jittery about the possibility of an indoor locomotive crash. Myths always contain elements of truth within their falseness, and if we sense that this early audience didn't react quite as dramatically as we often hear to seeing Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat for the first time, some of the assembled members might have had a much more spirited response than we'd expect from our seat-neighbors nowadays.

Can a cinematic effect come closer to replicating the kind of physical response we imagine for this nineteenth-century Paris audience than 3-D? I'd sometimes turn my head away from the screen to watch my fellow audience members bob and sway in reaction to certain "comin' right at ya" 3-D effects, when the Castro Theatre used to regularly host classic-era 3-D film series. The last one was spontaneously turned into a classic-era 2-D film series due to a projector breakdown, and I've heard no rumor of another stereoscopic series on the horizon. This evening's screening will be in digital 3-D, just as the program was presented in Telluride and elsewhere.

Curated and presented (and, in the case of silent-films, accompanied on piano) by French archivist, filmmaker and impresario Serge Bromberg, this set includes films made in 3-D from all eras, and each person who attends will receive two different pairs of 3-D glasses to keep up with the different kinds of processes used over the decades. The best-known era of classic 3-D is the 1950s, which provides several program titles including the only 3-D Chuck Jones cartoon Lumber-Jack Rabbit. But the evening reaches back to the early silent era to filmmakers like Georges Méliès (who only inadvertently worked in 3-D, as I'm sure Mr. Bromberg will explain) and forward to more modern 3-D animations from institutions like Pixar and the National Film Board of Canada. In addition to the screenings, Bromberg will be interviewed on stage in conjunction with his receipt of the Mel Novikoff Award for "work which has enhanced the filmgoing public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema." Previous recipients include critics like Donald Richie, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert, and archivists like Paolo Cherchi Usai, Kevin Brownlow and David Shepard, who has written an excellent article on Bromberg for the program guide.

But what does this program have to do with Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat? More than just the fact that the Lumière film might be the genesis of that "comin' right at ya" philosophy of 3-D filmmaking that I'm sure some, but not all, of this evening's films will exhibit. Apparently a 3-D version of some Lumière Brothers films, including this one, was prepared and presented in the mid-1930s. I haven't be able to determine whether this 1930s 3-D version was a remake/reshooting of the 1896 film, or if it was some kind of primordial back-conversion akin to that of The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D. I can't wait to see it and find out tonight.

SFIFF54 Day 11
Another option: The Autobiohgraphy of Nicoale Ceausescu (ROMANIA: Andrei Ujica, 2010) Over the past six or seven years or so, Romania as been put on the international cinematic map in a very high-profile way, with filmmakers like Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu emerging with award-winning films liike the Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Frequently this "new wave" has been characterized as a signal of a new drive for self-expression, a delayed flowering after the decades of artistic repression under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaucescu, who was overthrown (and executed) by his people twenty years ago. So what was Romanian cinema like under Ceaucescu? Few outside that country know very much, but this three-hour compilation of footage shot by the cameramen officially assigned to cover the man's addresses, official state visits with foreign leaders, and even his vacations, is providing festival audiences with a hard look at one particular strain of filmmaking sanctioned under the regime. There is no commentary (besides a few select musical cues overlaid upon some of the images) to contextualize what we are seeing, yet a narrative of history emerges through curation and editing, even if the viewer has only the slimmest knowledge of Cold War-era Romania. The final hour of the piece is wall-to-wall packed with astonishing documentary footage, and built upon the previous two hours it makes a ferocious impact.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: ...But Film Is My Mistress and Images From the Playground at the Rafael Film Center in Marin County. These are a pair of documentaries on Ingmar Bergman, made since the Swedish director's death a few years ago. that are screening only on this day. Director Stig Björkman, a film critic who has also written books and/or made documentaries on Lars Von Trier and Woody Allen, will be in attendance for the screenings.