IOHTE: Claire Bain

"IOHTE" stands for "I Only Have Two Eyes"; it's my annual survey of selected San Francisco Bay Area cinephiles' favorite in-the-cinema screenings of classic films and archival oddities from the past year. An index of participants can be found here.

Contributor Claire Bain is an artist, filmmaker and writer. She is a frequent contributor to the Artists Television Access blog, and most of the links below lead to her writings on the  screenings there.

Screen capture from Frameline DVD

Screaming Queens: the Riot at Comption's Cafeteria (directed by Susan Stryker & Victor Silverman, 2005), A.T.A. January 25, 2014

30 hour marathon, A.T.A. September 5-6, 2014

Marya Krogstad, A.T.A. July 14, 2014

U-Matic Night, A.T.A. July 3, 2014

Fred Alvarado, A.T.A. April 4, 2014

Thick Relations, A.T.A. March 21, 2014

Speaking Directly, Alley Cat Books presentation from SF Cinematheque. February 14, 2014

Reaching For the Moon, A.T.A. August 21, 2014
 

  And one last one, not from a blog:

Screen capture from Warner DVD

One cool Saturday April morning I drove my tired ass to meet a friend at the Balboa Theater's Popcorn Palace, their true Saturday matinee ("matin" means morning in French) where 10 bucks gets you admission and endless popcorn. I met a friend who is a Ray Harryhausen fan, to see The Valley of Gwangi. I expected kids to be running up and down the aisles, but there were only adults, more than a handful of fully mature ones. The movie had a compelling mix of intense characters, including a badass cowgirl boss, a miniature horse, and then some dinosaurs. The epic battle near the end had spellbinding cinematography and nicely blended (not digital, no no no this was long before) effects that occasionally had alluring rhythms that made me think of loops in the optical printer (analog re-photographing apparatus for creating/blending special effects on film). Hilariously creative, it's a movie worth seeing, especially if you can catch it in a theater on some rare occasion. But I do recommend the Balboa Theater's Popcorn Palace!

The Story of Hansel and Gretel (1951)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sean McCourt on Ray Harryhausen

Late August is traditionally one of the few moments of the Frisco Bay filmgoing year during which there are no film festivals- a quiet before the storm of autumn festivals whose flyers are sure to blow onto our doorsteps like fallen leaves soon enough, when the Arab Film Festival, Docfest, the United Nations Association Film Festival and others get into gear, and when the San Francisco Film Society begins its Fall Season in earnest (they've already announced their line-up for a new presentation of something called the NY/SF International Childrens' Film Festival in September, and a few other isolated screenings including Mauritz Stiller's silent Sir Arne's Treasure with music by the Mountain Goats on December 14). In the absence of festivals, several local cinemas have outdone themselves in programming older films worth discovering or revisiting on the big screen in the next few weeks. The Roxie begins a truly amazing and eclectic series entitled Not Necessarily Noir tonight with a double-bill of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Quatermass Experiment; other great selections by programmer Elliot Levine include Andre De Toth's Day of the Outlaw, Brian De Palma's Obsession, Paul Schrader's Blue Collar (image below) and Hardcore, and Abel Ferrara's The Bad Lieutenant.

Also tonight, the VIZ Cinema begins two weeks screening Akira Kurosawa's most broadly-beloved samurai pictures, just as the Pacific Film Archive winds down their summer-long Kurosawa retrospective with the final few films of his career. In addition to the PFA's regular programming (they've just announced their schedule through October as well, by the way) the Berkeley venue has been rented out the afternoon of Sunday, August 22, when Franco Zefferelli's 1981 Endless Love is presented by the Film on Film Foundation, with screenwriter Judith Rascoe expected to be present to talk about her adaptation of the Scott Spencer novel for the screen. FOFF's Brecht Andersch has penned two compelling articles on the "accursed" nature of the film and its place in the great tradition of American melodrama, but the only way to be sure whether or not this never-on-DVD Brooke Shields vehicle deserves its less-than-stellar reputation or not, is to see it on 35mm for ourselves.

The Castro Theatre, too, is an exciting repertory venue in August and September, with films by David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Frank Tashlin, Charlie Chaplin, and other sure-bet directors on the horizon. This weekend the venue turns its screen over to the special effects career of the great Ray Harryhausen. Sometime Hell On Frisco Bay contributor Sean McCourt interviewed Harryhausen in 2006, and I'm pleased that he has offered up his article on the nonagenarian wizard, originally published in a slightly different form in the Marin Independent Journal, for publication here. Here's Sean:

Much like the mad scientists of classic horror films that diligently toiled in remote and mist-filled secret laboratories to bring their mutant creations to life, special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen had to invent unconventional techniques to bring his movie magic to the big screen when he revolutionized the world of fantasy film making in the 1950s and 1960s. His work on Jason and the Argonauts (above image), Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms among many others has influenced several generations of filmmakers that grew up watching his stop-motion creatures—icons that have rampaged their way into the imaginations of children and children at heart for more than fifty years now.

Harryhausen, celebrated his 90th birthday this year, and the Castro Theatre is honoring him this weekend with a six-film tribute including /The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (image below), a film that contains one of his best known scenes—a climatic duel between Sinbad and a sword-wielding skeleton. The effect was created by using a technique called “Dynamation,” where live action footage is combined with stop-motion animation to give the illusion that the intricately detailed models of monsters or people are interacting with the real world.

Seeing 1933’s King Kong as a young boy inspired Harryhausen, and he thinks the stop-motion animation methods that were employed in King Kong and that he later used in his own work did a better job than the computer generated special effects of today. “If you make fantasy too realistic, I think it defeats itself,” says Harryhausen. “It suddenly becomes mundane you know, because half the charm of the early Kong was it was like a nightmare, you knew it wasn’t real, and yet it looks real.”

Bay Area film fans will likely recall It Came From Beneath the Sea, a 1955 sci-fi romp that featured a giant octopus tearing down the clock tower of San Francisco’s Ferry Building and destroying the Golden Gate Bridge. If had been up to city officials, however, the latter scene, another of Harryhausen’s most famous, may never have come to fruition. “We submitted the script to the San Francisco city fathers, and they felt that it would weaken the bridge in the public mind if somebody pulled it down, like a giant octopus,” he laughs. “We had to do everything in a devious way—we put the camera in a bakery truck and went back and forth over the bridge to get our background shots. But the picture was released there and there were no complaints.”

Another hurdle Harryhausen had to overcome on the picture was the lack of sufficient funding. To cut financial corners, and to save some time in the process, the special effects guru made the octopus with only six tentacles, as opposed to the anatomically correct eight, cleverly hiding the fact by making it look like the missing arms were simply under the water. “If they had cut the budget anymore we would have had a tripod,” he laughs.

Limited financial resources were a common bond between most of the films that Harryhausen worked on in those days, as science fiction and fantasy pictures were often regarded as “B movies” by the big studios. “Unfortunately we had to work on very tight budgets, and we always had to compromise—we could never get quite what we wanted because of time and money—but today they’ve outlasted nine tenths of the ‘A pictures’ of that time.”