Leave Her To Heaven (1945)

screen capture from 20th Century Fox DVD

WHO: John M. Stahl directed this.

WHAT: This is what I wrote about this film the last time I saw it on the big screen seven years ago:

Movie buffs know how Leave Her to Heaven's sunny technicolor exteriors mask truly sinister impulses underneath. It's not for nothing that the film is frequently the sole full-color entry into the film noir canon. With such a reputation preceding, audiences don't have to guess whether Gene Tierney's longing stare at Cornel Wilde on their early New Mexico train ride portends eventual doom. Tierney's affection-starved green-eyed-monster is no simple rich bitch or cut-and-dried psychotic. Even in her most despicable moments, the audience is asked to empathize with the motivations, if not the twisted logic, behind her devastating acts. As a result, Leave Her to Heaven becomes as cutting an indictment of repression as anything by Ingmar Bergman.

WHERE?WHEN: Screens 7:30 PM tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: I suspect I compared Leave Her To Heaven to Bergman in the above-quoted paragraph because I saw it within a year after the latter died, a period in which I viewed or re-viewed quite a few of the Swedish master's works in cinemas or on home video. During that period I didn't happen to have seen very many films by two other perhaps more sensible comparisons: Douglas Sirk or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose work more directly relates to Stahl's. Sirk, making melodramas at Universal Pictures in the 1950s two decades after Stahl's period there, ended up re-making three Stahl films, each showing in the PFA's Stahl retrospective: Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession and When Tomorrow Comes (which was re-titled as Interlude when Sirk got a hold of it). As I've mentioned here before, Imitation of Life and Interlude were among the Sirk films that are said to have initially influenced Fassbinder in turn in the 1970s, but I wouldn't be shocked to learn one or both of these auteurs hadn't seen Leave Her to Heaven as some point as well- in fact its colors make it feel more proto-Sirkian or Ali-esque than the mid-1930s Stahls are (I've yet to see When Tomorrow Comes and am greatly anticipating it June 26th.) My other favorite Stahl film thus far is the 1933 Only Yesterday, which was later remade by yet another legend, Max Ophuls, as Letter From an Unknown Woman. It's hard to decide which is a better version, as I noted when picking it as one of my top repertory experiences of 2014.

Though no Sirk, Fassbinder or Ophüls films screen at the PFA for the rest of 2015 (I sadly missed Ophüls' From Mayerling to Sarajevo last week and hope the print circles back somehow), Fassbinder is one focus of another big cinema event starting tonight, the 39th annnual Frameline festival. A new documentary made by one of his contemporaries screens at the Castro next Tuesday, just a few weeks late for what would've been the openly bisexual German radical's 70th birthday. The following afternoon the same space will show Fassbinder's final feature Querelle, unfortunately not on 35mm as Frisco Bay audiences were lucky to see it in 2013. Other films about classic queer and queer-allied filmmakers screening at Frameline this year include Peter Greenaway's Eisenstein in Guanajuato, Stephen Winter's Jason and Shirley, about the making of Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason, Jeffrey Schwartz's Tab Hunter Confidential, and Feelings Are Facts: the Life of Yvonne Rainer, about the living-legend dancer and filmmaker who came of age in San Francisco. Though I have not seen any of these (besides Querelle) I can heartily recommend another Frameline film to cinephiles: Jenni Olson's The Royal Road, which I saw at the San Francisco International Film Festival and which I think I loved as much as I did The Joy of Life, one of the first films I reviewed on this blog when I started it ten years ago.

HOW: The entire Stahl series is expected to screen in 35mm prints from Universal, Criterion or the UCLA Film and Television Archive; hopefully this will indeed come to pass as I feel a bit remorseful that last week I steered readers to a Kirsanoff program that was advertised as 35mm but ended up screening digitally after all.

In A Year of Thirteen Moons (1978)

WHO: Written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

WHAT: According to Wallace Steadman Watson this was one of the three films that Fassbinder, when asked about his favorites of his own films shortly before his death in 1982, cited as "important" along with Beware of a Holy Whore and The Third Generation. Ed Gonzalez has insightfully drawn a link between Beware of a Holy Whore and In A Year of Thirteen Moons as films marked by devastating events in Fassbinder's personal and professional life just prior to their production; In A Year of Thirteen Moons was made just after the suicide of Fassbinder's ex-lover Armin Meier following their breakup. Meier had appeared in several of Fassbinder's films, at least twice (in Fear of Fear and Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven playing the husband to a shrewish Irm Herrman housewife. I have not seen In A Year of Thirteen Moons yet myself, however. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today at 5:15 at the Pacific Film Archive and 7:30 next Saturday, December 21st at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

WHY: I've long been warned that although In A Year of Thirteen Moons is one of Fassbinder's most rewarding films, it's also one whose rewards may not be apparent to a viewer who has little experience with and understanding of the writer-director through his other films, so I've held off on seeing it. With a good portion of the multi-venue retrospective held over the past months under my belt, I think it may be time for me to finally seek out this reputed masterpiece (ranked 3rd of Fassbinder's films by the contributors to the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll behind Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Berlin Alexanderplatz, and tied with the latter for 3rd by the directors polled that year, who put Veronika Voss in the #2 slot). It seems fitting, then, that both the PFA and YBCA series, and in fact their entire slate of 2013 film programming, ends with this film.

HOW: 35mm imported print

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

WHO: Preston Sturges wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Can an artist who has only known privilege make art that speaks to the experiences of people without privilege? This is the question at the heart of Sullivan's Travels, a laugh-out-loud comedy made in the early 1940s, when the Great Depression had officially ended but poverty continued. A pompous but good-hearted movie director, tired of making studio fluff, determines to experience the "real" America by going out on the road, and ends up farther from his Hollywood mansion than he'd ever expected. Filled with the romance, adventure, witty dialogue, and wonderful character actors that typify classic-era movie-making at its best, this film is frequently cited as one of the best comedies ever. Has the Hollywood myth machine ever been subject to more hilariously honest satire?

WHERE/WHEN: Only at the Stanford Theatre tonight through Sunday at 7:30, with additional matinee screenings tomorrow and Sunday at 4:10.

WHY: It's a pretty weak weekend for 35mm film screenings in Frisco Bay, believe it or not. The Castro is given over to the all-digital Good Vibrations Erotic Short Film Competition tonight and digitally-projected Sing-A-Long Sound Of Music the rest of the weekend. The Pacific Film Archive is screening its own 35mm print of the Hong Kong New Wave landmark The Arch Sunday and an imported print of Fassbinder's Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? tonight, but the latter is surely the same moderately scratched, extremely color-faded print I saw at Yerba Buena Center For The Arts last month. Otherwise it's showing Fassbinder's Despair on Blu-Ray and turning over the rest of the weekend to 2K & 4K digital presentations of classic films known for their great photochemical-era cinematography. At least Sony archivist Grover Crisp will be on hand to defend DCP as a format for the Saturday showings of Louis Malle's Alamo Bay and Scorsese's Taxi Driver. I hope he's asked some pointed questions.

But there are bright spots for 35mm-goers besides The Arch: YBCA is showing Querelle on 35mm Sunday (quality of print unknown), the 4-Star is giving the brand-new, shot-on-film 12 Years a Slave what I believe to be it's first local 35mm showings, and there's always the Stanford, which is wonderfully old-fashioned enough not to have the capability of screening anything digitally. Nor does it have the capability of selling advance tickets online or by phone, so if you want to ensure a seat at its annual, always-sold-out Christmas Eve screening of It's A Wonderful Life, you'll have to make your way to the theatre box office sometime shortly after tickets go on sale tomorrow. While you're there, why not catch a great film or two? Preston Sturges's closest-to-canonized classic Sullivan's Travels screening with my personal favorite Marx Brothers picture Horse Feathers? You can't go wrong.

HOW: Both films on the double-bill screen in 35mm as always at this venue.

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970)

WHO: Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

WHAT: This early Fassbinder feature gets a lot of points for its title, perhaps the best of a pretty grand bunch (placing Fassbinder with Chuck Jones as the best filmmaker adopters of one of the few words English and German have borrowed from Bahasa Malay). It was also a favorite of the great critic Manny Farber, who (as previously quoted by Gregg Rickman) wrote with Patricia Patterson of the film that "the essence of Fassbinder is a nagging physical discomfort."

WHERE/WHEN: 7:30 tonight at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and 7PM December 6th at the Pacific Film Archive

WHY: The Fassbinder season is starting to wind down. YBCA only brings four more films to town in its series, and the PFA shows just those and four others (three of which have previously played at the YBCA or Roxie this Fall). But it's never too late to join a series midstream, and see what's been drawing those of us who have been attending as many Fassbinders as we've been able over the past month and a half.

YBCA is also one of the first out of the gate to begin announcing its early 2013 programming, starting with a Jack Smith retrospective including newly restored 16mm prints of Flaming Creatures and other films, January 16-30.

HOW: 35mm.

Breathless (1960)

WHO: Jean-Luc Godard directed this.

WHAT: Godard's first feature film. Only one of the most famous and influential art/independent/foreign films ever made. A masterpiece that I find grows in stature with each viewing (maybe that's the very definition of masterpiece). David Hudson collected a large number of excellent articles about the film when it had its 50th anniversary in 2010.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre at 7:30 PM.

WHY: Though (at least in 2013) we're not getting anything close in size to the giant Godard retrospective that New Yorkers were able to see last month, at least local cinephiles get to see at least five of Godard's best features in local cinemas this month, four of them on the giant-sized Castro screen. The Castro plays a Godard every Wednesday in November: Breathless tonight, Weekend on a 35mm double-bill with David Cronenberg's Crash on the 13th, Contempt as a newly-prepared DCP on the 20th, and Band of Outsiders alongside Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 on November 27th, both in 35mm.

The fifth Godard coming to Frisco Bay is perhaps my favorite of all his films: Vivre Sa Vie, his signature collaboration with his wife Anna Karina, screening as part of the Pacific Film Archive's Fassbinder's Favorites sidebar to its retrospective for that director. That'll be November 22nd, the same evening as the final screening in the PFA's current Agnès Varda series, Cléo From 5 to 7. It's an appropriate pairing because, although Varda last night said she was didn't feel particularly close to the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd (of which Godard must certainly be considered a member), she did recruit him and Karina to perform in the short film-within-film Les Fiancés du pont Mac Donald ou (Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires) appearing in Cléo.

Varda also noted last night that, although she was alone among female filmmakers to gain notice during the 1960s heyday of the French New Wave, she's become heartened that there are so many French women directing, shooting, and taking other once-male-dominated roles in filmmaking nowadays. Of the nine contemporary French films screening in the San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now series opening at the Clay tomorrow and running all weekend, female directors outnumber males five to four (only by counting French-Canadian director of Vic & Flo Saw A Bear Denis Côté does the ratio even up to five-five), and the series includes five films shot or co-shot by women cinematographers, including two by Claire Mathon, two by Jeanne Lapoirie, and of course Bastards, directed by Claire Denis and shot by superstar DP Agnès Godard (no relation to Jean-Luc). For a full preview of the French Cinema Now series I direct you to the excellent article by local Francophile and cinephile Michael Hawley.

HOW: Breathless screens in 35mm, on a double-bill with the local DCP premiere of one of Godard's favorite films, Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse. This was the film that inspired Godard to cast Jean Seberg.

Written On the Wind (1954)

WHO: Douglas Sirk directed this.

WHAT: One of the best-known of Sirk's high-gloss melodramas made for producer Ross Hunter. I've historically preferred Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life myself, but I feel like it's about time I took another look at this one too. Tag Gallagher calls it the director's "fullest expression of [the] “Faust” theme". 

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:50 PM.

WHY: This screens as part of the PFA's Fassbinder's Favorites mini-series; a sampling of the German cinephile-director's most cherished films made before his own career began in the late 1960s. All but one of the four selections screen on the same night as a Fassbinder film at that venue; tonight's screening is preceded by one of Chinese Roulette. The odd one out is Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, which screens November 22nd, the same night that Cleo From 5 To 7 closes a short series of Agnès Varda's films inspired by her trip to the PFA this coming Monday and Tuesday.

HOW: 35mm print.

Effi Briest (1974)

WHO: Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote & directed.

WHAT: Of all of Fassbinder's films, Effi Briest is the only one set in the nineteenth century and based on a classic of German literature along the lines of Madame Bovary. I haven't seen the film yet, so let me link to a review by E. Barry.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:30 tonight only at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

WHY: One of the great pleasures of seeing, researching and posting about Fassbinder's films over the past month has been discovering writers drawn to making intensive studies of the filmmaker. Certainly he's not a director who inspires half-hearted fandom; once you've seen a film or two that has worked its magic on you, it's not unusual for his films to become an obsession. This may be why his films lend themselves so well to large-scale retrospectives, and why some of the occasions in which I've seen one of his films in isolation (Beware Of A Holy Whore six years ago at the Pacific Film Archive, and Lola three years ago at the Castro) have been far less satisfying than the screenings at this year's retrospective or the one that first exposed me to his work ten years ago, or the weekly viewings of Berlin Alexanderplatz episodes I was able to take in at SFMOMA in 2008.

A very exciting find in my online research has been the blog In A Year of 44 Films, in which a Bay Area Fassbinder fan named E. Barry has been moving through all of the director's films in chronological order, writing analysis of each one. So far she has gotten through 1979 The Marriage of Maria Braun, which means she's about three quarters done -- or would be, if she wasn't planning on writing a full review of each episode of the fourteen-part Berlin Alexanderplatz. 

Anyway, I strongly encourage exploration of her site. One page is particularly useful and relevant this month: her most highly-recommended selections from the current PFA/YBCA retrospective. Of the six films she marks as "The Best of the Classics", Effi Briest is the only one I haven't seen, and also the only one that doesn't align with my own list of top five or six favorites from among his films- in other words, our tastes seem to match up almost precisely, so I'm expecting to really savor this film tonight. Other Fassbinder-fan friends assure me that I'm not setting myself up for disappointment.

HOW: 35mm.

The Merchant Of Four Seasons (1971)

WHO: Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote, directed, and appeared in a small, uncredited acting role here.

WHAT: The story goes like this: after making almost a dozen feature-length films for cinema and television in 1969 and 1970, Fassbinder attended the Munich Filmmuseum's six-film retrospective dedicated to Hollywood director Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Interlude, The Tarnished Angels, A Time To Love And A Time To Die and Imitation of Life). A new style began to be injected into his work due to Sirk's influence, starting in The Merchant of Four Seasons, which Wim Wenders claims was in fact the only film Fassbinder made in 1971 (although several films he'd shot the previous year, presumably prior to his Sirk exposure, were released before it that year.) As E. Berry writes: "More certain now of his abilities, he deploys a wider range of cinematic tools to his own ends. No more hiding behind avant-garde minimalism. This is the Fassbinder we talk about when we talk about Fassbinder."

Since one of the most commonly-cited pieces of evidence of the Sirk influence in Fassbinder's work is the similarity in story between the latter's Ali: Fear Eats The Soul and the former's All That Heaven Allows, it's interesting to contemplate that the basic story of Fassbinder's film was recited by a character in The American Soldier, which was released in the last months of 1970. Since the Munich Filmmuseum's Sirk retro is usually cited as having occurred either in late 1970 or early 1971, and since it's frequently said to be Fassbinder's first exposure to Sirk's films, it seems that he had Ali: Fear Eats The Soul well in mind before he ever saw All That Heaven Allows. Unless one of the pieces of this chronological puzzle has been misreported, it may be that upon seeing that Sirk film Fassbinder recognized similarities between it and a story he already had in mind. In which case, he may have been drawn to Sirk because he saw the director as kindred to his established approach as much or more than because he saw him as an alien influence that could be assimilated into his own style.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 2PM this afternoon at Yerba Buena Center For The Arts and Friday, October 25th at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: Last Thursday the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts began its 10-title Fassbinder series with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Merchant Of Four Seasons is the first title in the set that YBCA will screen before it comes to Berkeley's PFA, though in this case the East Bay won't have to wait very long as the film screens Friday along with Fear Of Fear at the latter venue. The PFA is also showing Written on the Wind as part of a concurrent series of films at one time or another considered personal favorites by Fassbinder.

HOW: 35mm print.

The American Soldier (1970)

WHO: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

WHAT: Fassbinder is famed for being prolific- by most counts he made 44 films (including made-for-television works) in his short lifespan. But his most prolific period of all were the first few years of his feature filmmaking outgrowth of his involvement in the Antiteater collective, before he began making films under the influence of German-American melodramatist Douglas Sirk. Of the films made beginning with 1969's Love Is Colder Than Death and before his Sirkian Merchant of Four Seasons in 1971, five of them have been recently re-released on Region 1 DVD by Criterion's Eclipse sublabel, including The American Soldier, which happens to be my own favorite of his work from this period I've seen thus far.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley at 7:00.

WHY: Seeing Fassbinder films in isolation is great, but seeing them in dialogue with each other as part of a retrospective is even better, as I notice ways in which they speak to each other across years of the filmmaker's career. If I hadn't seen Love Is Colder Than Death and Fear Of Fear in short succession would I have noticed that opera music coming from Ulrich Faulhaber's television in a key scene from the latter is the very same duet from Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier that composer Peer Raben augmented with electronic sounds for the memorable supermarket scene of the former? And if I hadn't seen Ali: Fear Eats the Soul at the PFA just a couple days before seeing The American Soldier at the Roxie, would the scene (depicted in the screen capture above) in which a character recounts the plot of Ali, four years before it was filmed, have hit so hard?  If you attended Ali: Fear Eats the Soul at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last night you have an extra incentive to make it to The American Soldier tonight. 

But with the BART Union forced to strike by management of the transit system, you may have to pick your film options this weekend based on where you live and can most easily travel to and from. If you're in Berkeley, you're in great shape to see Fassbinder tonight (Beware of a Holy Whore screens as well as The American Soldier), Pasolini tomorrow and/or Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi (in person) on Sunday. If you're in San Francisco, you'll have to wait until Sunday for your Fassbinder fix, as YBCA screens The Merchant of Four Seasons. Tonight you might want to see a rare 35mm print of a film by another German-language filmmaker working in the 1970s, as postwar Swiss master Kurt Früh's final film Der Fall opens the Zurich/SF weekend festival at New People Cinema.

HOW: 35mm print.

Gods of the Plague (1970)

WHO: Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote, produced and directed this, his third feature film, released shortly after he turned 25.

WHAT: Jim Clark, builder of a website with a near-exhaustive section devoted to Fassbinder, notes in his review of Gods of the Plague that it remained one of the director's favorites of his own films. I have not yet seen it myself.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:50.

WHY: If you've missed any (or all) of the Fassbinder films screenings that happened at the Roxie over the past week, you have a second chance to see all the films at the PFA, starting tomorrow with perhaps his most accessible, if devastating, masterpiece The Marriage of Maria Braun. Likewise, you have a second shot at the three films screened at the PFA thus far starting this Thursday when Yerba Buena Center For the Arts launches its own ten-title selection of his films with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

However, if you want to see all twenty-four of the Fassbinder prints coming to Frisco Bay this Fall, you're going to have to be aware of the seven films screening only at the PFA and not in San Francisco. This septet begins tonight with The Katzelmacher and Gods of the Plague, continues Sunday with I Only Want You To Love Me, and is rounded out with Beware of a Holy Whore, Chinese Roulette, the epic World On A Wire and finally Despair starring Dirk Bogarde. I collected a full list of Fassbinder films screening in local venues here, in case you missed it last week.

HOW: All Fassbinder films in this season screen from 35mm prints. (UPDATE 10/12/2013: in fact The Katzelmacher was screened from a DVD last night due to print damage, and I Only Want You To Love Me will screen via Blu-Ray, as has been planned from the series announcement. I regret the error.)

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972)

WHO: Margit Carstensen has the title role; Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed the film, based on his own play.

WHAT: Not Fassbinder's only all-female-cast film (as Marsha McCreadie notes in her excellent piece on the film, there's also his 1977 rarity Women in New York) but his most famous one by far.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at the Roxie at 7PM, and Thursday, October 29th at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: With four posts on Fassbinder since Friday you may wonder if I have blinders on about other local screenings happening this week. No, I just consider a Fassbinder retro a major event and it's been ten years since the last substantial one in the Bay Area.

But I can't help but notice that tonight's Roxie selection is (surely by coincidence) booked on the same day as a female-centric Castro Theatre double-bill of Thelma & Louise and Switchblade Sisters. If you have a free afternoon you can actually catch that bill as a matinee with just barely enough time to quickly walk from the Castro to the Roxie before The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant begins unspooling. Or if not, you can potentially make the reverse trip to catch the 9:25 Switchblade Sisters, although it might be safer to cab it depending on whether or not the Roxie's Mike Keegan gives Petra an introduction (he did on Monday for another Fassbinder/Carstensen Fear Of Fear, but not on Sunday for The American Soldier.

HOW: 35mm

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975)

WHO: Brigitte Mira plays the title role in this film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

WHAT: This irony-drenched fable is one of my very favorite Fassbinder's films. Often called his "most political" film, it tackles serious issues but is perhaps more playful in tone than usual. Joanne Laurier and David Walsh co-authored a fine article on the film from a socialist perspective in 2003; they call it "perhaps the last work of his most valuable and politically radical phase of filmmaking, 1971-1975".

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM tonight at the Roxie and at 8:30 on November 30th at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: The San Francisco and Berkeley venues showing 24 Fassbinder's films over the next months have done a very good job of coordinating screenings to maximize local cinephiles' chances at seeing as many of them as possible. Only last Friday's dual-venue opening of the season and tonight are there  conflicting screenings at both the PFA and the Roxie. While the latter screens Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, the former shows Effi Briest, which will repeat on October 24th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Though Mira appeared in over a dozen of Fassbinder's films and television works, only six of them are part of the PFA/YBCA/Roxie screening series. Luckily, both of her major 'leading lady' roles are represented, this and Ali: Fear Eats The Soul. Either one is eminently re-watchable for Fassbinder fans, and also an ideal introduction for a newcomer to his work.

HOW: 35mm.

Fear Of Fear (1975)

WHO: Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Among the Fassbinder films I have yet to see. Justin Vicari calls is a "forgotten masterpiece".

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM tonight at the Roxie and 8:50PM October 25th at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: It's certainly still possible to see all 24 of the Fassbinder films coming to Frisco Bay over the next few months (which I listed on my blog Friday), even if you missed the five films that screened at the Roxie and PFA over the weekend. Although there are seven films in the series that only screen once (all at the PFA), they don't begin unspooling until this Friday when his 1969 films The Katzelmacher and Gods of the Plague play the PFA. If you miss Fear of Fear at the Roxie tonight, there is still a chance to see it in two and a half weeks.

If you live in San Francisco and want to minimize trips to the East Bay, however, you can do so by seeing Fear of Fear tonight at the Roxie and The Merchant of Four Seasons October 20th at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts instead of seeing the pair at the PFA on the 25th. Seeing another Fassbinder film the same night as his emotionally-draining The Merchant of Four Seasons might not be ideal either, so even if you plan to visit the PFA that night, you might want to attend one or the other film in San Francisco first. Seeing two Fassbinder films in one night is generally unadvised. Luckily it's generally avoidable with this Frisco Bay Fassbinder season.

HOW: 35mm print.

Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (1974)

WHO: Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote, directed, and acted in this.

WHAT: Ed Gonzalez wrote a great review of Fassbinder's international breakthrough as part of a Slant Magazine focus on the director about ten years ago.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:50, and Thursday, October 17th at Yerba Buena Center For The Arts at 7:30.

WHY: Three Frisco Bay cinemas are running Fassbinder series this autumn, the first major local retrospective of the director's films in ten years. Two of the three begin their screenings tonight. The Roxie begins a week of 7 nightly Fassbinder screenings tonight with one of the director's late works Lola. Meanwhile the PFA in Berkeley screens Ali: Fear Eats the Soul as well as series namesake Love is Colder Than Death tonight to kick off that venue's 24-title series, complimented by a set of four of Fassbinder's favorite films by other directors starting November 1st.

Ali: Fear Eats The Soul will also kick off the YBCA's 10-title series in a couple of weeks. There is no overlap between the Roxie and YBCA titles, but all of them will play the PFA, along with seven others. Following is a list of all the films playing all three venues, in chronological order:

Lola: Roxie October 4 or PFA November 23
Love is Colder Than Death: PFA October 4 or YBCA October 27
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: PFA October 4 or YBCA October 17
Fox And His Friends: Roxie October 5 or PFA November 15 (same day as Robert Bresson's Pickpocket)
The American Soldier: Roxie October 6 or PFA October 18 (same day as Beware a Holy Whore)
Fear of Fear: Roxie October 7 or PFA October 25 (same day as the Merchant of Four Seasons)
Mother Kusters Goes To Heaven: Roxie October 8 or PFA November 30
Effi Briest: PFA October 8 or YBCA October 24   
Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant: Roxie October 9 or PFA October 29
Marriage of Maria Braun: Roxie October 10 or PFA October 12
The Katzelmacher: PFA October 11
Gods of the Plague: PFA October 11
I Only Want You To Love Me: PFA October 13
Beware a Holy Whore PFA October 18 (same day as The American Soldier)
The Merchant of Four Seasons YBCA October 20 or PFA October 25 (same day as Fear of Fear)
Chinese Roulette: PFA November 1 (same day as Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind)
World on a Wire: PFA November 2
Veronika Voss: YBCA November 3 or PFA November 24
Satan's Brew: PFA November 9 or YBCA November 16
Why Does Herr R. Run Amok: YBCA November 21 or PFA December 6
Martha: YBCA December 1 or PFA December 12
Despair: PFA December 6
Querelle: YBCA December 8 or PFA December 14 (same day as Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar)
In A Year of 13 Moons: PFA December 15 or YBCA December 21

HOW: All films in the Fassbinder season screen from 35mm prints. (UPDATE 10/17/2013: in fact The Katzelmacher was screened from a DVD due to print damage, and I Only Want You To Love Me screened via Blu-Ray, as had been planned from the series announcement. I regret the error. UPDATE 11/30/2013: Despair will also screen via Blu-Ray)

A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973)

WHO: Jacques Demy directed this

WHAT: I haven't seen this film before, so let me quote from Dan Callahan's review:

This seems to be a very personal movie for Demy, a gay man who married another talented filmmaker, Agnes Varda. Not much is known about their marriage and what it entailed, but A Slightly Pregnant Man clearly expresses the yearning of an artist who wanted to have family and who also wanted to be with men. Male pregnancy is the most romantic solution to Demy's dilemma (gay adoption is today's prosaic alternative). The concept of the film isn't a commercial gimmick played for easy laughs, as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Junior—it's a metaphor for change, both social and otherwise.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:00.

WHY: We have now arrived at the part of the PFA's Jacques Demy retrospective where the venue is showcasing real rarities among the director's feature films. This film, A Room In Town, The Pied Piper and Three Seats For the 26th have all been absent from Frisco Bay screens in my memory, and represent blank spots in my experience with Demy's films. None of them screened at the 2006 mini-retro of the director's films, and may not re-appear in local cinemas any time in the foreseeable (or even conceivable) future.

The PFA is one of the few venues in the area that can be counted on to provide us the "deep cuts" of a director's filmography like these ones, at least some of the time. The recent Raoul Walsh series included a nice mixture of films that one might expect to see at the Castro or another venue sometime, and those (such as Wild Girl) we might not ever get a chance to see otherwise. The next series beginning at the PFA is a selection of Alfred Hitchcock silent films that did appear at the Castro recently, but might not make their way around again very soon, at least not in a group portrait like the one we're getting a second shot at taking starting tomorrow.

Further on the horizon, I've been given the go-ahead to mention, although at the time you read this the information might not yet be found on the PFA website, are two more retrospectives of European directors who, like Demy, died young and are thought of as great filmmakers at least as frequently as they are as gay or bisexual filmmakers. From September 20th until the end of October the venue will host a comprehensive set of screenings of the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini. In addition to repeat showings of the six 35mm prints screening the weekend before at the Castro and Roxie (that I mentioned yesterday) another thirteen of his features and shorts will play in 35mm, filled out by a few shorts on digital formats. Meanwhile, a large series devoted to West Germany's Rainer Werner Fassbinder begins October 4th with a double-bill of Love is Colder Than Death and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and continues until December 15th.

There's much more in September and October at the Berkeley archive, of course. I've already talked about the Chinese classic films being brought this Fall in conjunction with the Yang Fudong exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum; these titles are on the PFA site so I'll move on. Curator Kathy Geritz's regular Alternative Visions program of experimental film and video resumes Wednesdays after a summer break on September 4th. In-person appearances by filmmakers Nancy Andrews, Lawrence Jordan, Kerry Laitala, James Sansing, Stacey Steers, John Gianvito, Phi Solomon, Abigail Child and Paul Chan, as well as screenings of work by Jodie Mack, Marielle Nitoslawska, Leos Carax (Holy Motors September 18) and more should make for a lively season of exploration.

And that's not all when it comes to in-person filmmaker guests. Six features apiece by little-known Morrocan filmmaker Moumen Smihi and by famous 1970s (and beyond)-era auteur William Friedkin help round out the September-October calendar with more chances to pick director brains than it's probably possible to squeeze into a two-month span. Finally, the horizons of creative programming continue to be pressed with what I wouldn't be surprised to learn is the PFA's first-ever series devoted to a supporting actor. Ten films featuring 1940s & 1950's Hollywood's generally-unheralded Wendell Corey is at the very least a great excuse to show films by Anthony Mann (The Furies September 7th), William Wellman (My Man & I September 13th), Robert Aldrich (The Big Knife September 15th), Budd Boetticher (The Killer Is Loose September 27th) and more, including an early Elvis Presley vehicle, Loving You from 1957 (October 5th).

HOW: A Slightly Pregnant Man screens via DCP. I haven't yet sampled the PFA's 4K digital projection capabilities, and thus remain skeptical of this technological shift. The good news from my pro-35mm perspective is that there's a smaller proportion of DCP on the September-October PFA calendar than there was on the June-July-August one.

The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)

WHO: David Bowie stars, Buck Henry (pictured), Candy Clark and Rip Torn support, and Nicolas Roeg directs.

WHAT: This non-escapist science fiction film was Bowie's first role as an actor, and may be the most delicate of Roeg's works. Whether you find it an entrancing masterpiece or a pretentious bore may depend largely on your circumstances when seeing it; I thought it was pretty close to the latter category upon my first viewing nearly twenty years ago, but that was a version cut down by twenty minutes. If you think it's paradoxical to think of a longer cut of a film as better-paced than a shorter cut, think of the endless examples where it is (you may not agree with everything on this list but then again you might).

One fan of the film, at least of an aspect of the film central to his own cinematic interests, was activist and film historian Vito Russo, who throughout the 1980s frequently cited it as one the few examples of commercial cinema to depict a gay character in a way that was neither stigmatizing nor patronizing. He wrote in his chapter on the 1970s in The Celluloid Closet: 

Homosexuality was almost never incidental or second nature to a screen character; after all, sexuality was always the reason for using a gay character in the first place. In fact, except for the hitchhiking funny lesbian ecology freaks (Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil) whom Karen Black and Jack Nicholson pick up in Five Easy Pieces (1970), Buck Henry's incidentally gay lawyer to Davdi Bowie's alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) and Robert Altman's unobtrusively integrated, happy lesbian couple (Heather MacRae and Tomi-Lee Bradley) in A Perfect Couple (1979), American cinema was unable to portray gay characters without their being sex-obsessed or sex-defined.

The fact that The Man Who Fell To Earth was actually a British-produced film that happened to be filmed and released in the United States makes his comment all the more damning to Hollywood portrayals of the era.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:00.

WHY: Though the PFA's recurring A Theatre Near You programming was conceived of to bring new restorations and art-cinema releases that bypassed the dwindling East Bay arthouse screens during recent commercial releases, and indeed this Saturday's screening of Buñuel's Tristana (on DCP rather than Blu-Ray as when it played in San Francisco in January) fits this bill, it seems the philosophy behind the "series" (which I've sometimes called a "non-series" due to its eclecticism) seems to have shifted somewhat. Now it seems to be more of a catch basin for any film that hasn't been able to be fit into any other recent PFA series (like the ongoing Studio Ghibli and Agnès Godard sets or the upcoming programs devoted to Eastern European classics and Raoul Walsh) but would likely appeal to PFA audiences. Which is fine. It means films like The Man Who Fell To Earth and the Mill and the Cross, both of which screened down the hill at the Shattuck in the Fall of 2011, have another excuse to unspool in 35mm. 

Though tonight's screening probably indicates that no Nicolas Roeg retrospective is planned for the PFA anytime soon (might I suggest he's a tad overdue for one?), later this year the venue will be hosting at least three more retrospectives devoted to great auteurs of the 1970s. Last month I mentioned that William Friedkin is expected in town for an (at least partially) in-person retrospective in September. Since then I've received a fundraising letter from the institution that tipped off a couple more: one for Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose last PFA retro was almost six years ago and very incomplete) and one for Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which I hear will include his entire filmography, and will be mirrored in San Francisco by complimentary Fassbinder screenings at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Roxie Cinema this Fall (this is confirmed by a note at the bottom of the latter's summer calendar, in case you haven't been eagle-eyed to catch it already.)

Friedkin. Pasolini. Fassbinder. All three factor into Russo's The Celluloid Closet, but only Friedkin gets more of a mention than The Man Who Fell To Earth does. Russo has frequently been criticized for not factoring the work of gay European auteurs into his thesis about the inadequacy of cinema to provide images of gay and lesbian characters that queer and queer-friendly audiences could be proud of. Such criticism seem oblivious to the fact that, as Michael Schiavi points out, The Celluloid Closet was in fact a reaction against a previous text about homosexual portrayals in cinema, Parket Tyler's Screening The Sexes, which looked more closely at examples from the avant-garde and the European "art cinema" tradition than it did the Hollywood Russo as more interested in for multiple reasons.

Friedkin, on the other hand, was discussed extensively by Russo, thanks to two particular films in his ouevre: The Boys In The Band and Cruising, which bookended the 1970s and in a way defined the decade vis-a-vis Hollywood's role in the national conversations about gays in that era, at least according to Russo's persuasive telling of it. For my part I've never seen The Boys In The Band and hope it's among the films the PFA brings as part of its Friedkin retro. I have seen the more controversial Cruising, and while it's probably my least favorite of the director's films, that doesn't make it not worth watching, or revisiting (it will be part of the PFA series in the fall, I'm told).

I'm getting around to the fact that the twin shadows of Russo and Cruising loom over the so-called "Cannes  of gay film festivals" (a title surely no less applicable even after last month's Cannes victory for a lesbian-themed film entitled Blue Is The Warmest Color), which begins tonight: Frameline. Russo because his always does; he was in 1986 the first recipient of the Frameline Award (this year going to Jamie Babbit) was the subject of last year's festival-opening documentary Vito, and because to this day there is probably no greater inspiration to LGBT filmmaking than the groundwork he laid with The Celluloid Closet. Vito's director Jeffrey Schwartz screens his new biographical doc I Am Divine (about the John Waters actor fetiche, naturally) at the Castro this Sunday afternoon.

Later that night the same venue will play host to Interior. Leather Bar., Travis Mathews & James Franco's exploration of the Cruising mythology, which apparently attempts to imagine what Friedkin's cutting-room floor may have gathered during the editing of that film to avoid an 'X' rating. And you thought Cruising was provocative?

I'll have more to say about Frameline over the next few days (here's my previous post from when the line-up was announced), but for now, I'm off to the PFA to see The Man Who Feel To Earth.

HOW: 35mm print of the full 140-minute version.

My Way To Olympia (2013)

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BANG BANG: Eric Freeman

BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.

Things I Found Interesting in Things I Saw This Year by Eric Freeman

A Brighter Summer Day (dir. Edward Yang): I saw this in January at a mostly empty screening with no intermission in Berkeley, and it’s still probably the best thing I’ve seen all year, old or new. Read Rosenbaum's longer piece if you want more comprehensive breakdown. I’ll just note that what strikes me about ABSD (and Yi Yi, as well) is that the epic scope follows not from stunning natural vistas or loud pronouncements of import, as we’ve come to expect from the medium, but finding an interesting situation and treating the context and its characters with complete respect and as much depth as necessary. It’s an epic because it’s so true to the way people relate to one another.

World on a Wire (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder): If ABSD is the best movie I saw this year, then this one has proven to have fascinated me the most. It was my first Fassbinder, and since then I’ve steadily run through a good chunk of his career. One thing I love about this one, apart from the “what if we shot through four panes of glass?” aesthetic, is how RWF sets up shots where a pan finishes in a hilariously overdetermined setup. It’s the movie in microcosm: things may appear free-flowing, but everything has been decided already.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (dir. Sean Durkin): A disappointment even as I enjoyed it, if only because it’s so easy to see how it could be better. While the structure is indeed very clever, many of the match cuts fall flat because it’s immediately when and where the scenes take place. As the last shot proves, Durkin wants the audience to identify with Martha’s displacement, yet continually keeps her at remove. Which is all a way of saying that the film needs more moments of actual ambiguity, like the several shots of Martha walking through a dark hall, when it’s unclear where she is until she ends up in a room she herself might not have expected to enter.

Certified Copy (dir. Abbas Kiarostami): Ryland thinks this film is fundamentally a work of criticism, and I mostly agree with that statement. But I also think it comes across as more dismissive than it should, because in this case the criticism gets at important points about how relationships change over time, the value of authenticity in everything from art to interactions, and all sorts of other deep philosophical questions that we tend not to consider on a daily basis. So, yes, it’s criticism, but also proof that criticism isn’t really about the thing it directly addresses, but deeper conceptions and feelings about how people relate to the world around them.

Mildred Pierce (dir. Todd Haynes): It’s no surprise that a director who regularly gets great performances from actresses does so well with Kate Winslet, who plays this role as a mix of her usual technical strength and the rare looseness usually lacking in her most awarded work. What’s less expected is that Evan Rachel Wood acquits herself so well. Veda can easily come off as a monster, but Wood instills her with enough relatable pride to seem human. Her best moment (and also the one that will make me seem particularly pervy for noting) comes when, directly after Mildred finds out about the affair with Monty, Veda gets out of bed fully naked, struts over to her vanity, and regards herself in the mirror, all as a sort of victory celebration after embarrassing her mother. It’s a triumphant moment for the character, the point at which she believes to have finally proven herself as a dominant woman. For different reasons, the scene makes the same case for the actress.

Drive (dir. Nicholas Winding Refn): I’m of the camp that takes this movie as a massive spastic fuckup, mostly because NWR has no idea what he was trying to do and not for some difficulty in melding tones and styles. But there are some delightful moments of clarity, especially the opening set-piece and the various music videos (not like music videos) that distill the latent emotions of the piece into perfect pairings of image and sound. For all the talk of Drive as an arthouse action movie, the best parts are almost always the most overtly commercial.

Rango (dir. Gore Verbinski): It’s become standard in some circles to say that the home-viewing experience is almost as good as the theater these days, but Rango is the first movie that ever made me think it could be true. I loved the movie in March, mostly for its gag-a-minute pace, but I don’t think I fully appreciate the visual dazzle until I saw it on the very excellent Blu-Ray transfer on a reasonably-sized TV. Multiplex projection standards are so poor that, for a detail-driven, wide-audience movie like this one, it’s almost preferable to watch it on a couch.

Bridesmaids (dir. Paul Feig): As the thinkpieces all said, an important step forward for the status of women in Hollywood comedies. Unfortunately, the movie itself is a sad commentary on exactly what those Hollywood comedies entail. Almost all the best parts are moments of emotional discord between Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph or throwaway lines from the amazing Melissa McCarthy -- the worst are the zany, insert-setpiece-here laugh-generators that could have been ported in from any Apatowville (or, worse yet, Farrelly Bros) creation. Turn this into a movie about adult friendship with regular laughs, and it might have felt a little more true to its characters. Instead, it’s all too familiar.

Enlightened (created by Mike White and Laura Dern): This HBO series isn’t especially cinematic, but it deserves mention on this list for Laura Dern’s performance as Amy Jellicoe, in my opinion the best acting work of the year. It’s easy to caricature Amy—the pilot arguably does it too often—as a hypocritical woman who believes herself to have found inner peace when she falls victim to the same sort of jealousies and grudges she did before getting a few weeks of new-age counseling. In Dern’s hands, however, Amy is fascinatingly complicated, oblivious enough to peacock a new friend in front of past confidants but introspective enough to acknowledge that pettiness a few hours later. In a TV landscape heavy on melodrama, Enlightened stands out as a series about the everyday difficulties of trying to be a better person in a world that tends to incentivize the opposite behavior. It’s about self-awareness and emotional processes, and those battles register on Dern’s face as often as they manifest in an external conflict.


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Eric Freeman writes regularly about sports at The Classical and Ball Don’t Lie, and intermittently elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @freemaneric.

SFIFF54 Day 10: World On A Wire

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.

World On A Wire (WEST GERMANY: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)

playing: at 2:00 PM this afternoon at the Pacific Film Archive, with no further screenings during the festival.
distribution: Janus Films is touring a revival of this film in advance of an eventual (as yet unannounced) Criterion DVD release. The Roxie Cinema has booked the 35mm print to screen during the week of July 29-August 4th.

One of the hot discussion topics amongst certain cinephiles at this year's SFIFF is, why did the festival decide to show Fassbinder's World On A Wire at the Kabuki last Saturday in a digital projection, when the Pacific Film Archive screening of it this afternoon is coming from a new 35mm print? It's true that the Kabuki is not equipped to do changeover 35mm projection (its platter system is considered acceptable for most festival prints of new films, but not for archival or certain other flim prints.) But I understand that the New People/VIZ Cinema house could have been another San Francisco venue option, as it's equipped for changeover, and has approximately as many seats as the Kabuki's House 3, where World on a Wire screened. When introducing the screening there, SFIFF director of Programming Rachel Rosen touted the clarity of the digital "print", and reminded that though Fassbinder shot on film, this particular work was originally seen most frequently on television anyway. The image did look fine, for a digital projection, but I still missed the certain warmth of light that only a projected film image can provide, at least according to my video viewing experience up to now.

Regardless, the PFA is expected to show a 35mm print this afternoon; it's in fact the only festival title touted as such in the Berkeley venue's printed calendar. Though the PFA typically tries to show films in as close as possible to the format they were originally made (flim on film, video on video) during SFIFF it's at the mercy of the ever-shifting vagaries of print traffic, which is why last Monday a Useful Life was screened there on a video format, much to the articulately-expressed chagrin of Carl Martin. I've been assured by the festival's hard-working print traffic manager Jesse Dubus that A Useful Life will screen at the Kabuki today in 35mm, unlike its two screenings earlier in the festival. For a real education in the quality of film vs. video image, a viewer of a Useful Life or World On A Wire on video last weekend could take a second look, on film, today.

World On A Wire is a good enough film to deserve a second look, regardless of format. A science-fiction take on the computer revolution that, made in 1973, prefigured the Matrix and Inception by decades, it's a typically imagistic Fassbinder work and truly a forgotten (if not by everyone, thankfully) classic in the prolific auteur's oeuvre. Dennis Harvey has recently written an insightful review, but let me chime in with a couple observations. The music is superb; Gottfried Hüngsberg's original compositions make industrial noise artists of the late seventies like Throbbing Gristle seem just a bit less ahead of the curve (I say this as a big fan of TG), and the employment of a Strauss waltz in a futuristic film made only 5 years after the release of Kubrick's 2001 takes a certain kind of daring- and it fits here equally well, if differently. Without spoiling anything, I'd also point out that the final scene of the film, though interpreted many ways in the places I've looked or listened, seems to me to hold a clue to understanding the rest of the film in the way its look and even the performance styles contained within it, contrast so sharply against the other 3+ hours. Needless to say, this is a work that grows more and more fascinating with every successive reel.

SFIFF54 Day 10
Another option: Dog Day Afternoon (USA: Sidney Lumet, 1975) Easily my favorite of Sidney Lumet's films, Dog Day Afternoon was what I first thought of when regretting the passing of the director earlier this month. But today's screening is not a memorial tribute, but a celebration of the life and work of its screenwriter Frank Pierson, who also wrote the scripts for Cat Ballou, Cool Hand Luke and many other successful Hollywood pictures. Though Dog Day Afternoon will be shown on a video format rather than its native 35mm, it's a strong enough picture to survive the conversion, and with the writer on hand this promises to be an insightful afternoon.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS comes to the Red Vic as a benefit to keep it open. At 7:30 PM Head MANiAC Jesse Hawthorne Ficks unspools a full program of 35mm trailers, then at 9:00 he auctions off rare film memorabilia items from his personal collection, and at 9:45 he screens a secret title from the 1970s, never before released on any home video format I can think of. And in the afternoon, the theatre hosts a poster sale. All for the extremely good cause of saving the only co-operatively owned and run repertory cinema on the West Coast.

Third Street Summer Screenings

Two museum screening rooms on opposite sides of Third Street between Mission and Howard have posted more information about their summer film schedules.

On the East side of the street at SFMOMA, on Thursdays and Saturdays:

Throughout June, all fourteen episodes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz play. It may have been "made for television" but this 15-hour magnum opus first revealed itself at the 1980 Venice Film Festival, and played in U.S. movie theatres in 1983. I'm heading off to see the first three episodes as soon as I finish this post. SFMOMA now has a blog, and discussion of the film has begun there in earnest.

In July, Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy. Your opportunity to see Blood of a Poet, which inspired film artists from Jean Genet to David Lynch, on the big screen.

In August, in conjunction with the Frida Kahlo exhibition opening on Saturday and running through September, a series of Mexican film classics. Starting with Luis Buñuel's masterpiece Nazarín on Thursday July 31st, the series also includes great films I've only seen on video like Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Que Viva México!, Emilio Fernández's Enamorada (pictured above) and Paul Leduc's superb biopic (normally a paradoxical pair of words in my book) Frida, naturaleza viva. And of the films I've never seen before, I've heard great things about Alberto Gout's Aventurera, and I'm vastly intrigued by the rare silent film El Puño de hierro (The Iron Fist).

On the West side of Third Street, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, there are the videos by Jia Zhang-Ke, Michael Haneke and Apichatpong Weerasethakul this month. Thursday's screening of Jia's Useless was sans English subtitles, so it might be worth your while to call ahead before tomorrow's screening if such a thing matters to you. On the other hand, Dong (pictured) was subtitled and terrific.

In July, there's the Cinekink festival, the US premiere of Rotterdam Film Festival discovery a Listener's Tale, shot in Sikkim, India, and the Frisco premiere of a film seen nearby only in Berkeley, Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon on July 31st.

And, as I learned from Michael Guillén's interview with YBCA programmer Joel Shephard, the venue's Bay Area Now triennial celebration of Frisco Bay artists and curators will include films guest-programmed by some of the most creative film and video bookers on the local scene, including Oddball, kino21, the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (whose annual festival runs this June 13-15), Peaches Christ (whose Midnight Mass summer series at the Bridge has been revealed,) and more.