Henry And June (1990)

WHO: This film was based on a memoir by Anaïs Nin; she is portrayed in the film by Maria de Medeiros (at left in above image).

WHAT: I have not seen this film; Here is a blog by someone who found it quite profound upon release, and revisited it twenty years later. It's best-known as the first, and behind Showgirls, still the highest-grossing, of all films ever rated NC-17 by the MPAA. In fact it was first rated X, but a legal action in the wake of that decision helped spark the creation of the 23-year-old "adults only" movie rating.

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

WHY: This is the second-to-last YBCA screening of 2013, with In A Year of 13 Moons this Saturday providing the climax to an excellent year of screenings and a 35mm-heavy autumn dominated by Fassbinder, Tarkovsky, and a spotlight on the X-Rating.

2014 will also kick off with films dialoguing with the history of censorship in American film: the complete works of Jack Smith, whose Flaming Creatures was deemed "obscene" and banned in New York after its 1963 cinema debut there. This January series, which also includes two documentaries on Smith (who may have known Anaïs Nin in fact; he certainly was connected to her through mutual associates like Jonas Mekas and Kenneth Anger), is a co-presentation of SF Cinematheque, which will also be presenting films by Janis Crystal Lipzin, Luther Price and others at YBCA February 1st, 2014 as part of a tribute to the stalwart Millennium Film Journal.  Further SF Cinematheque/YBCA events have yet to be announced, but the venue has revealed more of its February slate, including the ASKEW Film and Performance Festival, the annual Arrow Awards, and the documentary Design is One: Lella & Massimo Vignelli, which will on February 27th will launch a month of twelve design & architecture films; the other eleven titles yet to be revealed.

HOW: Henry And June screens in 35mm.

This Charming Couple (2012)

WHO: Alex MacKenzie found this highly-distressed film fragment, and repurposes it as his own work of projector performance by running it through his analytic projector in reverse.

WHAT: I have not seen it, so here is MacKenzie's website description,

A water-damaged educational film, repurposed. Its original message of the risks of entering marriage without fully knowing your partner is visually abstracted, rendering a moral lesson into a shifting landscape of emulsion. Played in reverse, the couple in question slowly move apart, becoming less and less visible as the damage worsens at film's edge

WHERE/WHEN: On a program playing tonight only at the Exploratorium at 7:00 PM.

WHY: I wrote my general thoughts on the place of projector performance in cinema culture earlier this year when Vanessa O'Neill's Suspsension screened at the monthly Shapeshifters Cinema event in Oakland. This past Sunday it was MacKenzie's turn to project his piece Intertidal at the venue. If you missed that show (as I did) you get a second chance at seeing it tonight, along with This Charming Couple and Logbook, at the wonderful new Exploratorium screening space. 

Unfortunately, though they seem to me to be naturally connected, the local avant-garde film community and the archival/early/silent-cinema community are frequently split in two by conflicting screenings occurring at the same time. Tonight begins a two-night stand at the Rafael Film Center of archivist Randy Haberkamp and piano accompanist Michael Mortilla showing first rare Hollywood Home Movies and then The Films of 1913 via a hand-cranked 1909-era projector. These events force choices, and this week is a particularly good example of it.  You can't see both MacKenzie AND Haberkamp/Mortilla tonight, just as you can't see both Haberkamp/Mortilla AND (on the avant-garde side) the presentation of Paul Clipson-curated films in Napa tomorrow. Nor can you see both Clipson's Artists' Television Access screening of his own work AND Oddball Films' presentation of (Mostly) Strange Silents Friday. Nor can you see both the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's program including Mae Marsh in the D.W. Griffith-scripted Hoodoo Ann AND the free selection of films by Owen Land, Curt McDowell, Luther Price, etc. at the Canyon Cinema Pop-Up at the Kadist Gallery this Saturday. Well, that last one might be strictly possible if you have access to a fast car to get you from SF to Fremont.

Full disclosure: I'm also heavily involved (as in, performing live music) at a screening event tomorrow evening that I think would interest fans of both avant-garde and of early/silent cinema. Check it out if you can!

HOW: On a full program consisting entirely of live 16mm projector performance.

differently, Molussia (2012)

WHO: Forty-year old French filmmaker Nicolas Rey made this. He is not to be confused with the long-deceased director of They Live By Night and Rebel Without A Cause, Nick Ray.

WHAT: I haven't seen differently, Molussia yet, and in all likelihood neither has anyone else- at least not the precise version that's being screened tonight. There are actually 362, 880 possible versions of this film, an adaptation of a 1931 unpublished novel by Günther Anders, that has never been translated into a language that Rey understands. As Michael Sicinski writes in his Cinemascope piece on it:

The 80-minute feature is comprised of nine individual reels of varying lengths, and Nicolas Rey has designed the film so that their order of presentation should be randomly assigned. (Each reel is designated by a differently coloured title card: a pink reel, a green reel, a canary reel, etc.) That is, Rey has built the film from modules, each thematically linked to the others while retaining semi-autonomy with respect to order, narrative, and spatial orientation. They must all appear once, but can appear in any sequence.

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

WHY: Following Tuesday's Black Hole Cinematheque screening, tonight is another showcase by a filmmaker heavily involved in the artist-run film lab movement. Rey will be on hand tonight and has fascinating, informed perspectives on the state of the film medium in an age of digital convenience. I'll excerpt a pair of remarks from an interview conducted by Darren Hughes:

It’s very important to me to prove that you can still make films on film. There’s something very important about this. What’s at stake is organizing the possibility to continue producing on that medium. And showing films on that medium for people to curate. I’m surprised there’s not more questioning about that. Everyone has thrown up their hands and said, “It’s over. It’s over.”

And:

But even on the curating side it’s getting difficult. I’m amazed that cinematheques are willing to show films on digital formats, presented as “preservation.” They’ve abandoned showing the work in its original format. There was a big conference at the French Cinematheque and I didn’t hear them say, “We’ll show the films on film as long as we can. We’ll fight for that.” Not at all. Only the film museum in Vienna has made a strong stand on the matter.

I think anyone invested in the idea of watching films on film should be interested in hearing what Rey has to say to a San Francisco audience. I'll definitely be there tonight (although I rue the fact that I have to miss an opportunity to see an imported 35mm print of Stanley Kwan's Center Stage at the Pacific Film Archive to make it).

HOW: 16mm projection of what will almost certainly be a unique permutation of the film.

Necrology (1970)

WHO: Standish Lawder made this short film, and makes a brief appearance in it as well. (He's the one smoking in the above screen shot.)

WHAT: It's definitely best not to read about this film at all before seeing it, because almost anything anyone could write about it might give the game away. (Though it's certainly easy to appreciate the film while knowing about its secrets, there's always just one first time...) But in case you've seen it recently and would like to read some good analysis of it, try Ed Howard's write-up.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 7:00 at the Exploratorium's Kanbar Forum.

WHY: It's hard to believe that the Fall SF Cinematheque calendar is down to only a few last shows, but all of them are unique, only-in-cinema events, at least in part because they involve filmmaker-in-person appearances. Tonight's screening of Necrology and eight other Lawder works will be followed by November 29th's YBCA showing of Nicolas Rey's anders, Molussien with its usual randomized reel sequence, and in December the Exploratorium will host Alex MacKenzie for multi-screen projector performances.

Luckily SF Cinematheque is not the only game in town for experimental film viewing. The Exploratorium shows shorts programs every Saturday afternoon in its still-new screening space, Artists' Television Access hosts Craig Baldwin's Other Cinema and the female-filmmaker-centric GAZE series, the Pacific Film Archive still has a couple screenings left in its Alternative Visions series, and even Oddball Films is known to show the occasional avant-garde classic; this Friday night Bruce Conner's Report makes it onto a John F. Kennedy-themed program. Watching experimental film at home is often the equivalent of looking at a zine full of poorly-photocopied versions of 20th-century paintings, so get out there and see what these films were really meant to look like!

HOW: On a 16mm program of nine short films by Lawder, with the director in person.

Dark Enough (2011)

WHO: Jeanne Liotta made this film using text by Lisa Gill.

WHAT: Sarah Smith wrote about Dark Enough and other short films and videos by Liotta for the Austin Chronicle when they screened in Texas a year and a half ago.

WHERE/WHEN: On a program starting 7:30 tonight at Artists' Television Access.

WHY: Tonight's SF Cinematheque program is a part of the annual Litquake festival and thus features experimental filmmakers using words as a key component of the on-screen image. I've seen most of the films being presented, including those by Stan Brakhage, Su Friedrich, Paul Sharits, David Gatten and Stephanie Barber, and in nearly every case consider the selected film among my favorites of each filmmaker. (I have not yet seen rarer works like Jesse Malmed's Supernym or Michael Snow's So Is This.) But Dark Enough may be my favorite of them all.

It's a busy weekend for SF Cinematheque with this event followed by tomorrow's benefit art auction featuring works by Liotta, Bruce Conner, Nathaniel Dorsky, Miranda July, Luther Price, Ben Rivers and (my girlfriend) Kerry Laitala all up for auction. You can bid online if you can't make it to the actual event in-person. Then on Saturday Phil Solomon will present films including his three-screen American Falls at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Finally, October 20th SF Cinematheque presents a screening of Swiss filmmaker Thomas Imbach's Day Is Done on the third and final day of the San Francisco Film Society's Zurich/SF festival.

HOW: The show is a mixture of 16mm and video works, and I believe Dark Enough was made and will be screened as the latter.

Cutaways of Jiang Chun Gen—Forward and Back Again (2013)

WHO: James T. Hong

WHAT: The Taipei Times covered a relatively recent screening of this 10-minute, wordless documentary on the effects of biological warfare.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program starting at 7:30 PM at Artists' Television Access

WHY: Hard launch of SF Cinematheque fall season. Other screenings presented over the next months at various venues; presence of an asterisk (*) means I've seen and can recommend at least one film on the given program:

Ken Paul Rosenthal in person October 8th*.
Phil Solomon in person October 16th & 19th.
An evening of films by Stan Brakhage, Jeannie Liotta, Paul Sharits, Su Friedrich, etc. October 17th*.
Thomas Imbach's Day Is Done October 20th.
Abigail Child in person October 30 & November 1.
Laida Lertxundi presenting her own work along with that of Harun Farocki and others November 10th*.
Standish Lawder in person November 13th.
Nicolas Rey in person, screening his anders, Mollusien November 29th.
Alex MacKenzie in person with performance-based films December 11th.

HOW: Cutaways of Jiang Chun Gen—Forward and Back Again is a video work and will be a video presentation, with James Hong present in person.

Conjuror's Box (2011)

WHO: Kerry Laitala made this short film. She and I have been dating for a couple of years now; she was already a well-established experimental film and video artist before we met at a film festival in 2011. If you find my use of this blog as a promotional platform for my girlfriend's work objectionable or compromised in anyway. you can pretend I wrote instead about Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game, which is screening at the Castro today. (I haven't seen it, and its double-bill-mate The Canyons is one of the worst new films I've seen all year.) Otherwise, read on!

WHAT: Conjuror's Box is a 35mm work of hand-made cinema, the latest in Laitala's series of films entitled the "Muse of Cinema" films, inspired by the silent era and pre-cinematic projection technologies and artifacts. In the artist's own words, it's "in effect a memento mori to the celluloid medium" as 35mm film becomes increasingly expensive for artists to work with and rare for most venues to project. Still, Conjuror's Box has screened in 35mm at several festivals and venues around the world, including at the San Francisco International Film Festival this past April and May. It was on the occasion of its screening there that the Film On Film Foundation's Carl Martin saw and briefly reviewed the film. He wrote that Conjuror's Box

uses an amalgam of techniques in its evocation of the shadowy beginnings of cinema. Sinuous abstractions (and a few recognizable objects) are photogrammed directly onto a filmstrip, then step-printed to introduce variations in tempo and bring emphasis to certain chance formations, as Stan Brakhage did with some of his hand-painted films. The striking colors of these photograms led me briefly to wonder what they would look like through the chroma-depth glasses used to view Laitala's video works, but there was already so much apparent depth to the image that it wouldn't be worth hazarding its filmic texture. Conjuror's Box is soon augmented with fanciful images suggestive of magic lantern slides (that is perhaps what they are) inserted into the masked-off center of the frame, while in the periphery the film roils on as before. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, on a program starting at 7:00.

WHY: Last week I wrote about the PFA's weekly Wednesday Alternative Visions programming, and mentioned some of the animators who are expected to be at tonight's screening showing their new work, but I'll re-iterate: Lawrence Jordan with his Solar Sight II, James Sansing with his haunting Verses, and Stacey Steers with her Night Hunter will be on hand for audience interaction, as well as Laitala.

Since last week's post, I've learned about more experimental film screenings that might be of interest to anyone thinking of attending the PFA tonight. Tomorrow night Artists' Television Access hosts formerly local filmmaker Brian Frye for a screening of a number of his shorts; the next day he'll be at the Roxie to introduce a screening of the found-footage documentary he produced Our Nixon. The SF Cinematheque Fall calendar has also been revealed, and will include appearances by filmmakers like James T. Hong, Laida Lertxundi, Standish Lawder and Nicolas Rey among others, at venues like A.T.A, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Exploratorium and others.

HOW: Conjuror's Box and Verses screen in 35mm, while Solar Sight II and Jodie Mack's Point de Gaze screen in 16mm, and the other works in the program screen digitally.

Verses (2012)

WHO: Local artist James Sansing made this film.

WHAT: I was fortunate to view a version of Verses at an informal artist salon several months ago, and it absolutely stunned me. Though the above still provided by the San Francisco Film Society gives a sense of what a single frame from this work looks like, it can't evoke the eerie morphings that are created by it and its brothers in a frame-by-frame, page-by-page animation.

I encourage you to click on the image to enlarge it, however. You should be able to make out parts of the handwritten ledger entries about  the residents of the long-abandoned juvenile hall where Sansing found this book, which he ultimately used as raw material for his film. Lines like "These boys are to be kept in their rooms until Estes talks to their school and contacts us" and stray discernible words like  "confronted", "depressed", "insulin" and "psychologist" can be read in the spaces between the mildew and ink stains, evoking both the mundane details and the psychic melancholy that must have been in the atmosphere of this place when it was functioning.

If the motion of the film can't be expressed by a still, neither can these scrawls be seen by an audience watching the mold patterns evolve as pages turn from front cover to back. Yet a viewer can get a sense of some of the concerns written about in the ledger even if the origin of the artifact is unknown (as it was to me when I saw it). Not only because the stains resemble Rorschach blots throbbing with an uncanny lifeforce (the magic of animation), but also because of the way Sansing has photographed them, as if a historical document under glass and illuminated by an archival-quality light source. Meaning is imbued into these images by their very presentation, and only amplified if we know their original provenance.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:45, and at New People this Tuesday at 7:00.

WHY: Carl Martin has dutifully compiled a schedule of all the SFIFF films that are expected to screen using actual film reels. As we now see only the dying embers of 35mm film stock as a mass distribution medium for motion pictures, it's still unclear what role film festivals will play in preserving exhibition using film formats. Prints are still struck for preservation purposes if nothing else, but it's becoming increasingly rare for audiences to get opportunities to view them. (Spring Breakers for instance, was shot on film but has only, finally, been released on film to a Frisco Bay theatre --the Balboa-- this week after over a month of digital screenings at other local venues.) 

Carl's list includes all five of the new feature films that SFIFF is screening on 35mm, as well as the new-ish Helsinki Forever and the four revival programs of films made between 1922 and 1999 that will be shown on film. He also includes the three shorts programs which involve film-on-film projection. Verses is one of two shorts (the other being Lonnie von Brummelen & Siebren de Haan's View from the Acropolis) in the program entitled Shorts 5: Experimental: Artifacts and Artificial Acts that will be screen on film. I'm very excited for the chance to view Verses on 35mm for the first time, but I'm also excited to see new work by Deborah Stratman, Katherin McInnis, Karen Yasinsky, Scott Stark in a cinema. Video is absolutely a legitimate moving-image-art-making medium, as I suspect anyone else who attended last night's screening of Leviathan will be able to attest. I'm glad that film still figures into SFIFF exhibition, even if in a diminished (less than 10%) portion of the entire program. I expect tonight's program, curated by Kathy Geritz of the PFA and Vanessa O'Neill of SF Cinematheque, will demonstrate how the two media can harmoniously co-exist side-by-side in a festival program.


HOW: As noted above, 35mm film on a program with other short experimental works, most of them screened on video.

The Realist (2013)

WHO: Scott Stark. I wrote about another of his films, Speechless, earlier this week. 

WHAT:  Michael Sicinski has already written an excellent, thought-provoking analysis of Stark's new experimental mannequin melodrama The Realist on the eve of its world premiere. Let me extract an excerpt:

through Stark’s manipulations, the mannequins command our attention. They shimmy, seduce; they seem to march in unison, as if preparing to mobilize in some sort of capitalist-couture guerrilla faction; they gaze as us like kitsch statuary.

A very good description. Sicinski also points out that Stark's juxtapositions "disguise the anteriority between and among shots within a single scene". Indeed. Previewing a not-quite-finalized version of The Realist on DVD the other day, it was remarkable to me how this work retains a sense of created "cinematic time" i.e. an illusory feeling of narrative progression as scenes and sections move forward, against all reasonable odds. Stark employs a method of transforming stereoscopic imagery into two dimensions by jumping back and forth between what each eye would individually see, a method I jokingly referred to as the "Ken Jacobs effect" before I realized other filmmakers such as Stark have employed it as well (then again, perhaps the joke holds, as anyone who has seen the right 1950s National Film Board of Canada documentaries knows Ken Burns didn't invent panning and zooming photographs). Though most films are not edited in-camera or even shot in sequence, most do not bear signs that they at least theoretically couldn't be. The Realist literally makes a cut with every frame. Thanks to its generous use of cross-fading techniques, one could say it makes a minimum of one cut per frame in fact. But the rapid alternation between two or more perspectives somehow assimilates in the brain much like a single shot might.

I would also like to mention that the sense of narrative and "melodrama" in The Realist is greatly aided by Stark's musical selection, a work by composer Daniel Goode, a former student of Henry Cowell's. His propulsive, post-minimalist piece from 1988 Tunnel-Funnel sets a very agreeable rhythm for Stark's editing. I'd love to see a small ensemble (the piece was written for a group of thirteen flutes, trombones, string players plus a pianist and a percussionist) take on a live performance to accompany Stark's images someday.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 5:30 this afternoon at the Victoria Theatre.

WHAT: This screening of The Realist is the centerpiece of a program of Stark's recent work presented by the Crossroads Film Festival which ends today. Because it's a piece with an entirely musical soundtrack, it ought to completely sidestep the sound clarity problems that can trouble screenings of dialogue-dependent films and videos at the Victoria Theatre. I always wish the theatre might channel some of its rentals from film festivals (in addition to Crossroads, the SF Underground Short Film Festival, which happens next weekend, and Frameline are among the more established festivals regularly using the venue) into making improvements to the sound system. Luckily few Crossroads films and performances involve much dialogue at all.

I finally really appreciated why Cinematheque likes to use the space last night during the projector performance piece Tejido Conectivo presented by the Spanish duo Crater. What began as a diverting single-, dual- and triple-projected presentation of birth, backyard & travel home movies running against an electronic musique concrète soundtrack opened out into a glorious display of illusionism, seemingly the entirety of the human condition spilling off the screen and onto the cavernous white walls via no fewer than seven 16mm and super-8 projectors. I expect The Realist to have no less epic an impact in that space.  

HOW: Made and screened via digital video.

Kudzu Vine (2011)

WHO: Josh Gibson, who directed this, has also made documentaries about Chang and Eng Bunker, the original "Siamese Twins", about Lake Victoria's invasive fish species the Nile Perch, and other subjects.

WHAT: I've only sampled a five-minute online clip of this 20-minute documentary on the fast-growing kudzu plant, which was introduced to this continent from Japan 137 years ago, but now covers more than 7 million acres of land in Southern states like North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. Five minutes was enough to know I can't wait to see the whole thing projected on the big screen.

If you've ever driven through kudzu-affected regions,you know how overwhelming its effect on the landscape can be, covering hillsides, houses, trees, and seemingly everything in its path. There's definitely an otherworldliness to a kudzu invasion, so it's appropriate that Gibson has made not a straight-ahead documentary but one that takes on the eerie quality of a 1950s science fiction movie, aided by his use of the cinemascope frame and 35mm hand-processing. For more on the film and its making, check out Eric Ferreri's interview article.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 4:30 this afternoon at the Victoria Theatre.

WHY: According to the Internet Movie Database, Christian Marclay's The Clock is a documentary. At one level this is absurd, and just another indication of the imdb's limitations as a resource for accurate information about anything other than a certain narrow (if generally 'popular') slice of the world's motion picture output. If you've seen any part of The Clock, now on display at SFMOMA, you know it's a 24-hour looped video installation made up entirely of carefully-edited timepiece-centric shots and scenes from thousands of movies (and some television shows for good measure). The only thing it objectively "documents" is what the current time is, as it's shown onscreen and/or mentioned on the soundtrack at least once every minute.

On the other hand (the long hand, perhaps?), perhaps we need to loosen the definition of documentary somewhat. We could go as far as Jean-Luc Godard, who once said "Every film is a documentary of its actors", but that seems to take what was meant as a provocation perhaps too literally, and render the term meaningless. More useful, I think, may be to take a cue from a term from the literary word, that is often used synonymously with "documentary" anyway: "non-fiction". In most libraries, the fiction section is composed entirely of stories set in constructed worlds that may resemble or disresemble the one we live in, but only to the extent that they are controlled and described by their authors. Non-fiction, while often thought of as a term for truthful or factual expression, is as it's name suggests: a catch-all category for "everything else". Where will you find mythology, poetry, musical scores, or books comprised entirely of Salvador Dali paintings? Almost certainly not in the fiction section, despite the often contra-factual elements of these publications. And not usually in separate sections of their own either, but interfiled with the historical and journalistic accounts, the essays, the how-to guides, and other materials we may feel more entirely comfortable calling "non-fiction". 

Similarly, perhaps "documentary" could be a more useful, less constraining (and for some, dismissive) term if it were more frequently applied to all moving image works that aren't stories set in constructed and controlled fictional "film worlds" described through the ineffable "film time" created by shot duration. By this definition, The Clock is a documentary; it doesn't contain its own story, and its "film time" is not constructed or controlled by Marclay but by the filmmakers he and his assistants have selected to appropriate from. It seems worth noting that in the 2 1/2 segment of The Clock I previewed, there appeared to be no images taken from non-fiction films of any sort- or from animation for that matter.

Last night I viewed two programs of Crossroads works while thinking about this possibly expanded view of "documentary". None of the works would qualify as documentaries under the strictest, most conventional definitions, which necessitate genre conventions like voice-over narration, talking-head interviews, etc. Several, such as Paul Clipson's lovely city symphony Absteigend or Jeanne C. Finley & John Muse's seemingly diaristic Manhole 452 or Jodie Mack's delightful feat of animation and musical storytelling Dusty Stacks of Mom, might (like Kudzu Vine) be considered documentaries by most definitions. Others, like Luther Price's unburied Nomadic Flesh or Suzan Pitt's painted Pinball would be easy to call non-fiction but rarely considered as documentaries of anything other than their own creation. But perhaps that's enough.

HOW: Kudzu Vine screens as 35mm print, as part of program 4 in the Crossroads festival, which also includes work screened in 16mm and digital video.

Audition (2012)

WHO: Karen Yasinsky is the artist who made this piece of animation. Her work often contains contains cinephilic content, for instance her series of drawings inspired by the films of Robert Altman, Robert Bresson and Jean Vigo.

WHAT: When Audition screened at last year's Views From The Avant-Garde sidebar of the New York Film Festival, Genevieve Yu wrote about it for Reverse Shot. Let me excerpt:

Yasinsky works over a few frames from John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, animating and repeating, in an intricate pattern that mimics dot-matrix commercial printing, the image of a woman prancing across a strip club stage, her skirt swirling Loie Fuller-like around her. Sit too close to the screen, and the image becomes illegible; it loses coherence the more closely it’s examined. The second half of the film features a book of early Japanese photographs whose pages are flipped before the camera.

The bridge between these two segments becomes the audio track: the music from the Cassavetes scene,  a beautiful piece called "Rainy Fields of Frost and Magic" by Neil Young sound-alike singer-songwriter Bo Harwood, whose demo-esque "scratch track" recordings used in this and other Cassavetes films retain a raw quality that fits the famous director's style as a maker of films that, in the words of Roger Ebert (R.I.P.): "gloriously celebrated the untidiness of life, at a time when everybody else was making neat, slick formula pictures".

Yasinsky has repurposed images from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in which a strip-club owner (played by Ben Gazzara) consoles himself after his gambling losses by auditioning a waitress (played by Trisha Pelham) alone one morning. There's a rather queasy sense of seduction in the original scene, violently interrupted when his girlfriend appears, but Yasinsky confines her animation to earlier moments of motion where the audition seems more innocent. This abstracted ambiguity when contrasted with the clarity of the yakuza-style tattoos on some of the subjects in the photo book provides grist for consideration of the human stories lying behind stereotypical underworld imagery, as Cassavetes' film does within the confines of the gangster narrative.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 9:15 at the Victoria Theatre on the corner of 16th Street and Capp in the Mission District of San Francisco.

WHY: Audition opens the second of eight programs in SF Cinematheque's fourth annual film festival devoted to personal, artist-created film and video, Crossroads. Last year, my favorite program was a selection of cosmically-considered works that all happened to be made by female directors (with one male co-director). Yasinksy's piece kicks of this year's only all-woman-made program, leading beautifully into The Room Called Heaven by Basque filmmaker Laida Lertxundi (who had a full program of her own at last year's Crossroads), and other works before the program finale, the world premiere of a sure crowd-pleaser by Jodie Mack, Dusty Stacks of Mom. The latter is one of the festival works highlighted by Cheryl Eddy in her fine SF Bay Guardian preview.

I was able to sample a few of the weekend's screenings in advance myself, and I selected Audition to highlight today because it's a good reminder of the place of personal, truly-independent filmmaking in larger cinephile culture. Not just as something to be looked at, but as an expression of its makers' own engagement with the moving images that move us to become movie lovers. When we think of the economics of Hollywood production we often forget it, but filmmakers, at least those not chasing after big box-office receipts, are usually cinephiles themselves, expressing their cinephilia in ways no less (and arguably more) valid than writing reviews or making lists or collecting DVDs, or obsessively going to the movies. I have a feeling that many of the filmmakers in attendance for Crossroads will trying to find ways of squeezing in trips to the two other major cinephile events happening in town this weekend: namely, the opening of Christian Marclay's The Clock at SFMOMA and the 35mm Roman Polanski retrospective at the Roxie.

Also note that Yasinsky's Life Is An Opinion, Fire Is A Fact will screen twice at the San Francisco International Film Festival, in its annual program co-presented with SF Cinematheque.

HOW: Audition screens as a digital video projection, but there are 16mm works on this program as well. Other Crossroads programs involve 35mm, 16mm, Super-8 and video projection.

Speechless (2008)

WHO: Scott Stark made this film. As Brian L Frye writes in Radical Light, "Stark imported the wry wit of seventies performance art to his films, which are best described as works that play games with how movies work." Sounds right to me.

WHAT:  I'm not up to the task of writing a full review or analysis of the thirteen-minute Speechless, especially when eloquent considerations of the film are available at just a click or two away. But I would like to encourage any open-minded reader to see it. Speechless is part of a cycle of Stark films that draws particular attention to the individual frame as the building block of the moving image. Motion in the film is created by juxtaposing still images together, creating graphic matches and mismatches between, in this case, photographs of female genitals from a medical textbook, and images of (mostly) natural landscapes shot by Stark himself. A great many of these landscape images were gathered right here in San Francisco, at the former military installation West of Lake Merced known as Fort Funston. (Others were taken in Oakland or New Hampshire.) A simple, calm electronic drone soundtrack consisting primarily of two alternating notes and overtones provides a suitable sonic backdrop for audience contemplation of the connections between human and earth-borne forms, of how the Bay Area in particular has been a site for expressions of female sexuality (though I suspect few find these particular images of vaginas erotic), and I'm sure many other subjects particular to each viewer's experience. It's a strange and lovely film.

WHERE/WHEN: This free public screening, with Stark present for a post-screening discussion, happens 7:30 PM tonight, only at the lecture hall on the San Francisco Art Institute, Stark's alma mater. But come early for a 7:00 artist reception and to take in some of the best views of Frisco Bay from this beautiful Russian Hill location.

WHY: Depending on when you read this post, the program for the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 25-May 9) may or may not be publicly available; the press conference announcing all programs happens this morning. Michael Hawley has done a stellar job running down all of the pre-conference announcements (and making guesses as to what else might screen) but shorts are not usually in his areas of interest. However, word is already out that Stark's eerie 2012 piece Bloom is also expected to screen as part of the SFIFF. Festgoers who see it will never hear the sound of music in quite the same way again.

But before that, two full programs of Stark's work show in local venues. Speechless screens tonight as part of a set of film and video works investigating the human body, each made between 1996 and 2008. (I listed the other films in the program here).  Then, this Sunday, three of his more recent video works screen as part of the Crossroads festival hosted by SF Cinematheque at the historic Victoria Theatre on 16th Street between Misson and Capp. On the program are a dual-projector screening of Compressive/Percussive, Stark's study of light and shadow upon an Austin, TX freeway, and Longhorn Tremolo, another Texas work that made my 2011 list of favorite films in the "yet to screen in a Bay Area cinema" subcategory. This screening marks its local debut, and also the world premiere of Stark's elegant, monstrous The Realist, which was shot partially in San Francisco and is sure to go down as one of 2013's most important releases into the experimental film & video world. Seeing tonight's program, and Speechless in particular, will be good preparation for appreciation of this brilliant new work.

HOW: Speechless will screen as a 16mm projection.

Dyketactics (1974)

WHO: Barbara Hammer

WHAT: Let me step aside and quote Ariella Ben-Dov's piece on the film from the Radical Light book: 

In 1974 Barbara Hammer came out to viewers not only as a dyke but also as a fearless experimental filmmaker who is credited by some as creating the first-ever film by a lesbian about lesbian lovemaking for lesbian viewers. In a mere four minutes, and a poetic and titillating montage of 110 images, Dyketactics, which Hammer calls a "lesbian commercial," reveals the pleasures of looking at the female nude from a female perspective.

Ben-Dov's piece is brief, but I've cut off the above excerpt before she gets into her best analysis, so I urge you to read the entire piece on page 195 of the book. I'd also add, as if it didn't go without saying, really, that one doesn't need to be a lesbian viewer to recognize the formal acuity of Hammer's film. I haven't seen much else of Hammer's work, but this is just great.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at 7PM at SFMOMA's Phyllis Wattis Theater.

WHY: Although SFMOMA's impending closure removes a key screening space from the Frisco Bay fabric of venues that periodically present 16mm films by "underground" makers like Hammer, the local film community can be glad about other institutions that will continue to show such work after tonight's Phyllis Wattis Theater sign-off for the format.

For instance, on April 2nd the San Francisco Art Institute lecture hall will play host to a free screening of 16mm, Super-8 and video work by SFAI alum Scott Stark, who will be present for the event. Titles to be screened include two of my favorites of his, the brilliant Noema and Shape Shift. I haven't yet seen his Under A Blanket of Blue or More Than Meets The Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda or Speechless but my girlfriend who (full disclosure) is organizing this show assures me they're brilliant as well. More information on this event is to be found here.

The following weekend, eyes turn to the Victoria Theatre, where SF Cinematheque's biggest annual screening event, the Crossroads festival takes up residence with eight full programs held over three days (April 5-7).  Scott Stark will once again be featured, this time with more recent work such as Longhorn Tremelo, Traces and the world premiere of his long-anticipated The Realist. The weekend's seven other programs include films by talents such as Luther Price, Paul Clipson, Kelly Sears, Laida Lertxundi, Ben Rivers, and Michael Robinson among many others. 

SF Cinematheque is currently running a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help pay for the Crossroads festival, confidently timing the last day of the fundraising period to be Thursday April 4th, just a day before the screenings begin. As of this writing the campaign is just over halfway to its goal, so if you have interest in supporting this vital organization and making sure the festival is as good as it needs to be, please do see if you can open your wallet to donate. As usual with these things, donations at certain levels are reciprocated not only with good "underground film" karma but with gifts, which range from DVDs and books (such as the aforementioned and indispensable Radical Light as well as Barbara Hammer-signed copies of Hammer: Making Movies out of Sex and Life) to passes to Crossroads and Cinematheque screenings, to tote bags featuring artwork by the late great George Kuchar. A full list of these gift/benefits for donors is found here; click now because some of these items are in limited supply. I've really enjoyed each of the three previous Crossroads festivals, and at the first one I was able to meet several visiting filmmakers including Barbara Hammer, who was one of the featured guests at the festival. At that time I had not yet seen any of her films, but she was most gracious to me anyway. Crossroads is an unpretentious place for both experienced experimental film viewers and relative newcomers to rub elbows and discuss the works on display.

HOW: Dyketactics screens in 16mm, as does the feature (also by Hammer) that it accompanies at this showing, her 1992 feature Nitrate Kisses.

Se7en (1995)

WHO: Kyle Cooper designed the celebrated opening-credit sequence of David Fincher's second feature film.

WHAT: Se7en is an emotionally-draining, police-procedural structured horror movie that upped the ante for the serial killer genre a few years after the Oscar-sweeping Silence of the Lambs. There's no doubt that the unsettling opening-credits sequence did much to set the then-unique, but since often-imitated mood of the film. These titles also marked the first time many viewers (including me) took notice of scratching-on-film and other techniques associated with the world of experimental film, and its practitioners like Norman McLaren, Isadore Isou, and Stan Brakhage. Contrary to popular belief, Brakhage was pleased with the intentional homage to his work, and later praised Fincher as a director, calling Se7en "the most serious morality play I have seen on the screen since Orson Welles' Touch of Evil or The Trial. To learn more about how Cooper and Fincher arrived at these credits, check out this article and this video, but be warned that the latter reveals at least one late-in-the-movie surprise.

WHERE/WHEN: At the Pacific Film Archive. Ticket will say 8:00 PM, but the film will actually begin around 9:00 after an in-person discussion with Cooper.

UPDATE: I JUST LEARNED THAT KYLE COOPER WILL BE UNABLE TO ATTEND TONIGHT'S SCREENING AFTER ALL. FILM WILL STILL RUN, AT 9PM.

WHY: That's right, Kyle Cooper will be on hand at the PFA screening tonight. How often do we get to discuss the art of motion picture title design with one of the most respected people working in the field? I can't recall it happening here recently. I hope that among the topics discussed will be the issue of appropriating imagery that serves a wholly non-narrative purpose to a fictional arena, in which it helps emphasize the fractured state of mind of a deranged character. (Experimental techniques are most frequently imported into mainstream cinema to aid representation of insanity or intoxication.) I don't know if Cooper sees himself as an experimental artist working in a mainstream setting, or a popular artist borrowing from the underground, but this should be a fascinating discussion and a perfect appetizer to seeing a rare 35mm projection of a seminal work of 1990s Hollywood. For those of us waiting for the new SF Cinematheque calendar to get under way later this week, this screening may be a perfect tide-over. And perhaps some Se7en fans who don't know Brakhage, et. al. will be inspired by the event to check out a world of filmmaking well worth exploring.

HOW: 35mm print from Warner Brothers.

The Two Eyes Of Mark Wilson

If you didn't attend some wonderful repertory/revival film screenings in 2012, you missed out. As nobody could see them all, I've recruited Frisco Bay filmgoers to recall some of their own favorites of the year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Mark Wilson, an artist/filmmaker whose work will be included in Gallery Bergen's upcoming exhibition proto-cinematic investigations.

In 2012, it became positively clear that there are now suddenly far fewer opportunities to see 35mm prints, especially from the catalogs of major studios.  This impending scarcity of projected prints influenced many of my film going decisions this year, as one could no longer be assured that that certain films would come around again, to be presented in the medium they were made to be viewed.  I'm not anti-digital, but I feel that works made as film should be shown as film. Digital shouldn't try to imitate and look like film and to that end, it has a long way to go before growing into its own as a medium. I feel digital translations of films are a useful tool for preservation and study, but not a satisfactory cinema experience. There is another essential quality of cinema that needs to be preserved as well, since it's one we truly cannot afford to lose... the experience of community around cinema, going out to see films with friends, sitting among strangers, and often afterwards discussing the works face to face.  Many of the epiphanies that I've had around a film, how the medium makes its meaning, why a director has made an unusual decision, have often been sparked by an observational fragments spoken by others in conversation, which resonate alongside other fragments I've observed, leading to a fuller understanding of the work.  Many of the programs I've attended last year were presentations by organizations such as the Pacific Film Archives (PFA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco Film Society,  Artists' Television Access (ATA), and San Francisco Cinematheque.  These organizations often not only bring us together as a community to view works, but regularly put us in the same room and in dialogue with the artists who have created the films we view.  Artists' Television Access and San Francisco Cinematheque have been doing this as part of their  mission for decades. If you're unfamiliar with either, they have been around, waiting for you to discover the community they offer.  Both organizations are quite small and in need of the support of open-minded cinema enthusiasts, if they're to continue their mission and to grow in a rapidly-changing San Francisco.

Time:      

Everything you may have read or heard about the greatness of the Silent Film Festival's presentation of Napoleon, is to be believed.  I'm sorry if you missed it, because its way at the top of my list of Bay Area film experiences in 2012, and not exclusively for the film, and the accompanying live orchestral score, but also largely in part for way in which the event fully awakened the Paramount Theater itself... an art deco jewel of a film palace brought to life in the name of Cinema.  Napoleon was a complete experience, a film that took you back in time, to the French Revolution,  presented in a vessel powered by the anticipation, excitement, and energy of those in attendance, transporting us back to an age when Cinema was monumental.

Time, or the questioning of our perception of it anyway, was the theme of several films that make my list for 2012.  Chirs Marker's La Jetee at SFMOMA (as well as his Sans Soleil at PFA), prompted another sitting with Vertigo, when the Castro presented it in 70mm.  There was also a Sunday afternoon at ATA when the Right Window Gallery celebrated the 20th anniversary of Anne McGuire's video Strain Andromeda, The a shot-by-shot, end to beginning, re-sequencing of The Andromeda Strain.  This wasn't exactly a screening of the piece, rather a re-presentation of its themes through Ed Halter reading his new essay about the work, and an exhibition of recent watercolors by McGuire, the Square Spiral Series... applications of small squares of color arranged in patterning reminiscent of the spiral of time seen in Vertigo's opening credits.  The first fifteen minutes of the video was also shown (or the last fifteen minutes of the original, if you prefer...)

Restrospectives:  

In 2012, I had the opportunity to thoroughly immerse in retrospectives of filmmakers whose works I make it a point to see every single time they show (simply because it isn't often enough.) Robert Bresson, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Hayao Miyazaki.  Each of these directors create works one can see many times over and still make new, sometimes startling discoveries within.

The Bresson series ran at the PFA, I'd seen all of the works, even the rare prints, more than once, and most many times...  the surprise film for me this time around was the The Devil Probably, not one of my favorites of his prior, but with Bresson sometimes deeper understanding of the work registers more forcefully after a few viewings (later in the year i saw this film twice again in the final days of the San Francisco Film Society's operation of the New People Cinema in Japantown.)

The Pacific Film Archives also presented Afterimage: Three Nights with Nathaniel Dorsky... as three consecutive Sunday evening programs in June, a time of year when a 7:30 start time in Berkeley feels like the late afternoon, a perfect setting for the contemplation of ten films by Dorsky, all made in the past ten years, (programmed in reverse chronological order I should add.)  Compline is the title I'll single out here, Dorsky's last kodachrome film of several decades of work with the stock, in full command of the color palette, contrasts, density, and everything magical that Kodachrome had to offer.

The Studio Ghibli festival featuring most all of Miyazaki's feature length animation work was a summer event that sort of slipped under the radar, yet provided film goers opportunities to see all the works presented in 35mm.  Those screenings were my last visits to the now closed Bridge Theater in San Francisco.  The series repeated the following week at the California Theater in Berkeley.  Porco Rosso has been the favorite of all these works ever since I first saw it on 35mm.  Seeing this film projected on a big screen is essential to appreciating what Miyazaki is doing in animating the crimson red seaplane, its form rendered from all angles as it twists and turns, gliding to and fro against backgrounds of clouds and blue sky, shown from a vantage point which itself is continuously in motion to the degree to which it all nearly becomes abstraction.

 In-Person:

There were notable in-person visits to the San Francisco Bay Area by experimental filmmakers that were the subject of two- or three-program surveys of work.  David Gatten from Colorado/North Carolina accompanied a touring mid-career retrospective of his films curated by the Wexner Center for the Arts.  In person, Gatten is an excellent storyteller... in particular, a ghost story that he shared, served to illuminate his work, Secret History of the Dividing Line.   PFA and San Francisco Cinematheque at YBCA co-hosted surveys of works by Rose Lowder from France, and by Gunvor Nelson from Sweden.   After her screening at YBCA, Lowder shared images of hand drawn charts, which represented field notes of her intricate film making processes, providing insight to the single frame, multiple pass, in-camera, checkerboard technique used to create film images, such as those of sailboats weaving through a field of red poppies, seen in Voiliers et Coquelicots. Nelson's visit was a return, as she had taught influentially at the San Francisco Art Institute for several decades.  Her work is often built around dense layers of personal language, ensuring there'll always be new things to discover in subsequent viewings.  Nelson's clear, delicate, and mischievous sound work, exemplified in Red Shift, has few peers in the realm of independent filmmaking.  

Material:

Barbara Loden's Wanda, screened at SFMOMA as part of their Cindy Sherman Selects series, was shot on 16mm reversal, intended for 35mm release, giving the film a gritty, yet vibrant look, perfectly befitting the narrative.   The print was recently restored directly from the original 16mm reversal materials.  Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuttle is my favorite film of all time, and I got a good look at it again this past year at the PFA in a new 35mm preservation print (it was originally filmed and presented in 16mm.)  Nineteen-nineties San Francisco has never looked sharper... gravitationally, precariously, clinging to the earth.  Without the technologies of digital, we wouldn't have a hand-colored version of Georges Melies' Trip to the Moon, to look at, so it seems appropriate to cite the Silent Film Festival's digital presentation at the Castro Theatre.  The projection's sharpness of image and richness of coloring seemed perhaps hyper-accentuated, yet properly serving as a reminder of what material we were actually looking at. This translation took little away from Melies' masterpiece (sadly I missed a subsequent presentation of a 35mm print of the restoration at the same theater.)  This year, for the I Only Have Two Eyes project, Brian also invited us to write about one new film wherein some aspect around the presentation worked with the film to create an enhanced cinema experience.  For me it was Jerome Hiler's Words of Mercury, screened in the San Francisco International Film Festival's experimental shorts program Blink of an Eye.  At the PFA, the camera original reversal film was projected, meaning that the very same material that was exposed in the camera was projected to the screen.   From reflected light through camera lens to film crystals, then electric light through film and projector lens to screen...  immediate, and revealing of a stunning spectrum of colors that could be recorded through the layering of exposures on film emulsion.  Inconceivably, that very Ektachrome stock used to make this work, would be discontinued at the year's end.

Community:  

This year I get to write about one of the highlights of my Bay Area film-going experiences of 2011, Mission Eye & Ear.  A series that was organized by Lisa Mezzacappa with Fara Akrami and presented at Artists Television Access, three programs of newly commissioned works, pairing Bay Area composer/musicians with their experimental filmmaker counterparts.  The programs in 2011 were spread throughout the year and because the works were new then, I couldn't list them in last year's contribution to Two Eyes, however, for 2012 I can list this past November's all-day reprisal of the series at YBCA, part of Chamber Music Day events.  All the efforts were amazing, but I felt the highlights were Konrad Stiener's The Evening Red with music by Matt Ingalls, and Kathleen Quillian's Fin de Siècle scored by Ava Mendoza (who also deserves mention for her 2012 colloaboration with Merrill Garbus and tUnE-yArDs, in scoring a program of Buster Keaton shorts for SFIFF.)  I mentioned community at the beginning of this post, and for me this series exactly represents the best of what that means here in the Bay Area.  I've attended and followed performances and work by most of these composers and musicians of the local experimental improv scene for over a decade, and for more than two decades have attended experimental film programs in the Bay Area.  It was incredibly satisfying to experience these new works arising from a collaborative meeting of these two communities of artists.

Best Fests In the West?

It's that time of year again. For The Love Of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon is holding its 3rd annual outpouring of blog-love for the integral activity of film preservation, hosted earlier this week by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy On Films, and now by This Island Rod. For the third year in a row, the Blogathon is raising funds for a San Francisco-based preservation non-profit. In 2010 funds raised from For The Love Of Film went to the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve color-tinted versions of two hundred-year-old Western one-reelers, The Sergeant and The Better Man. Last year's donations went to the Film Noir Foundation to help pay for a new restoration of blacklisted director Cy Endfield's Try And Get Me, which is expected to be finished in time to screen at the January 2014(!!!) edition of Frisco's Noir City festival. Consider that a year-and-a-half early scoop (in the meantime, Endfiled's The Underworld Story screens at the Roxie next week). This year's blogathon is taking donations for, once again, the National Film Preservation Foundation, this time to make what remains of The White Shadow, a very early feature worked on by Alfred Hitchcock and until recently thought completely lost, available at the NFPF's online screening room with a musical score by Michael Mortilla.  Donate today to help further the world's knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock and British silent film!

Many of the blog pieces being written for this week's blogathon have focused on Hitchcock films and related subjects, and I considered writing about his Vertigo star Kim Novak, who will be returning to this city for a gala event June 14th to help kick off a week-long exhibition of Frisco Bay movie-making memorabilia at the Old Mint, put together by the SF Museum & Historical Society. Novak was in the news earlier this year, as you may remember, for objecting to The Artist's re-use of Bernard Herrman's iconic love theme from Hitchcock's love/hate letter to San Francisco. Well, less for objecting to it, than for using a very controversial word choice to express her objection. My own tweets at the time of the controversy expressed my feelings on the subject pretty well, I think.  I chalk the whole incident up to the usual Oscar-season mudslinging, and would never hold an isolated comment against an actress I admire as much as Novak, who is undoubtedly absolutely brilliant in Vertigo although I've barely seen any of her other acting work.

A more detailed appreciation of Novak in Vertigo will have to wait for another day, because I cannot resist using the blogathon as an excuse to talk about a few upcoming film festivals that feature preserved and restored films in their program. The NFPF screening room and the DVD sets it releases are wonderful boons to home viewing, but the importance of getting our film heritage in front of audiences in cinemas should not be understated. Sometimes the essential qualities of films made to be screened theatrically cannot be fully decoded in other settings. With the world of film exhibition under increasing pressure to conform to Hollywood studios' desires to turn cinema into a digital wonderland that threatens to be a digital blunderland and, as David Bordwell warns, a "freezing of the canon," film festivals may become one of the last remaining models for getting actual film prints on cinema screens. While certain local festivals have scaled back their retrospective screening components, it's heartening that others remain committed to giving past cinematic glories as much or more attention than the newest motion picture trends.


The National Film Preservation Foundation's aforementioned DVD sets cover a wide range of American filmmaking strands, from narratives of practically every genre and length to documentaries, animation, newsreels, home movies and even advertisements. But the bulk of these collections is given over to two general categories that tend to fall through the cracks for most commercial DVD-releasing enterprises: silent films and avant-garde films. Though their first set is perhaps their most eclectic in both themes and time periods, sets two, three, and five are almost exclusively devoted to silent-era filmmaking. The fourth set was given over entirely to this country's rich avant-garde filmmaking tradition, and the announced sixth set will be a sequel released next year. Correspondingly, there are three film festivals coming to Frisco Bay in the next couple months that celebrate silent films and avant-garde films: The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, and Crossroads.

Since it begins first- this evening, as a matter of fact- I'll take on Crossroads for a few paragraphs first. The third annual initiative on the part of venerable experimental film exhibition organization SF Cinematheque to program a full-fledged festival of artist-made film and video, Crossroads will screen more than fifty works from around the globe between now and Sunday. Many of today's most interesting truly independent moving image artists have work in the festival, from established masters like Scott Stark, Ken Jacobs, and Saul Levine, to rising talents such as Linda Scobie and Sylvia Schedelbauer -- I've seen Scobie's Craig's Cutting Room Floor and Schedelbauer's Sounding Glass and am certain both with make a strong impression on Crossroads attendees. Max Goldberg has written a fine preview focusing mostly on new works getting their Frisco Bay premieres at the festival.

Of great interest to the preservation-minded, however, is tomorrow afternoon's program of films made by Chick Strand, the co-founder of Canyon Cinema, the 1960s exhibition predecessor to SF Cinematheque that still operates as a distribution company today. Strand's film Fake Fruit Factory was included on the fourth NFPF DVD set and is available for online viewing in their virtual screening room. Last December, two years after Strand's death in 2009, the film was included on the list of new entrants to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry along with far more famous titles like Bambi  and Faces. I think it's great that she now has a film on the registry list, but am still a bit baffled as to why that particular one was chosen, fine as it is. The Crossroads festival will be screening two of Strand's (in my book) far greater masterpieces, her joyous 1966 film Angel Blue Sweet Wings and her 1979 tribute to Anne Frank, Kristallnacht. Also screening is her rarely-shown 54-minute 1979 film Soft Fiction, which I have yet to see. The program is titled Woman With Flowers after the name of a film that was originally also slated to screen; that title has been replaced with her 1979 found footage film Cartoon Le Mousse. I don't know the reason for the switch, but it's interesting that Woman With Flowers was completed by the filmmaker in 1995, yet she never created a distribution print. According to the website of the Pacific Film Archive, which screened the film last October, the Academy Film Archive completed post-production on the film posthumously, but that "no creative interpretation or intervention was necessary."

Contrast that statement against what preservationist Bill Brand has to say in the liner notes to the recent Criterion Collection DVD release of Hollis Frampton's films, which have been scarcely seen on Frisco Bay screens in recent years. Brand insists that preservation of avant-garde films invariably involves creative work, as film companies discontinue the stocks filmmakers originally used, and digital transfers demand compromises and aesthetic judgments. A 16mm print of the late Frampton's 1969 film Lemon plays the Crossroads festival on Sunday evening along with two other experimental film "classics": Bruce Baillie's simple yet breathtakingly rich 1966 film All My Life, and Morgan Fisher's Picture and Sound Rushes. All three have been programmed to compliment a five-film set of films by Basque filmmaker Laida Lertxundi, who comes fresh from the Whitney Biennial and counts these works among her influences. I haven't seen ant of Lertxundi's films yet, but I marvel at the programming of Lemon at a time slot coinciding with a rare annular solar eclipse. Lemon is often remarked on as an erotic interpretation of a citrus fruit, but the way its lighting scheme gradually shifts over the course of seven minutes recalls the (apparent) movement of a familiar solar orb around our own globe. Assuming the program runs continuously without extended breaks for introductions, the (partial in San Francisco) eclipse ought to peak right about the time when the films finish. But you probably won't want to race out of the Victoria Theatre to peek at it, for two reasons: looking directly at the sun, even during an eclipse, is far more dangerous to the eyes than looking at an on-screen lemon, and Lertxundi has been flown into town to speak about her work following the screening.


On the subject of flying in to film festivals, although it's undoubtedly too late to book a cheap flight to attend Crossroads, there's plenty of time for out-of-towners to plan to visit the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which announced its full program last week but doesn't commence until mid-July.  You'll hardly be alone, as scores of visitors from around the country descend upon the Castro Theatre every summer to join the thousands of locals in love with what has become the largest silent film festival in the country (and probably the largest one anywhere in the world that has yet to screen an Alfred Hitchcock silent film. Operative word, I hope: Yet.)  Continuing the aviation thread, the festival opens July 12th with the new restoration of William Wellman's World War I dogfight saga Wings, which will be accompanied by a live score from Colorado's Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and by Foley effects from renowned sound designer Ben Burtt (Star Wars). Though Wings, which stars Richard Arlen, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Clara Bow and Gary Cooper, is well-known as the winner of the Best Production award at the first Academy Awards ceremony - and often retroactively designated as the first Best Picture winner - few know that the other award the film won that year, for Best Engineering Effects, was designated equally for the film's ground-breaking visual effects and for the live sound effects that accompanied its gala premiere screening in Los Angeles. Silent films are by no means equivalent to silent screenings; though the prints include no sonic information, they have almost always been screened with musical accompaniments, sound effects, narration, etc. The SFSFF brings some of the best international accompanists to provide music for all screenings, and will experiment with narration for its July 14 screening of the 1919 British documentary South, for which actor Paul McGann will read from the diaries of the film's hero, Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, while Stephen Horne provides piano accompaniment. 

Clara Bow is represented at the festival not only by Wings but by Mantrap, a 1926 Paramount comedy released on DVD last year as part of the NFPF's fifth box set of Treasures From American Film Archives. Stephen Horne, again, will reprise the piano score he performs on that DVD, but the film will be screened on a 35mm print. Indeed, the SFSFF has a reputation of using the best possible 35mm prints for their screenings, and nearly all of the films in the 2012 festival are expected to screen on 35mm- the exceptions being Wings, Ernst Lubitsch's last surviving German film, The Loves Of Pharaoh, and the color restoration of A Trip To The Moon which screens before a 35mm print of Buster Keaton's The Cameraman to close the festival July 15th. Presumably, as in the few (I count three) other instances when the SFSFF has used digital rather than film prints, there are not 35mm versions of these restorations available for them to screen. The festival has screened Wings in 35mm before, way back in 1999. That was the first time I'd ever heard of SFSFF, and I unfortunately couldn't make the screening and have yet to see Wings on anything other than VHS. I hope the new restoration is worth the wait, and the presence of pixels.


G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box is the other repeat selection in this year's festival, and although I saw it last time around (in 2005), I won't want to miss it this time either, as it's an extended version with about 10 more minutes than any other available, it will be shown in a 35mm print of a full restoration funded by Louise Brooks fan Hugh Hefner, and will be musically accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble, the Swedish accompanists who are quickly becoming many fans' favorites of the SFSFF stable of musicians. They will also accompany Mauritz Stiller's 1920 Erotikon (not to be confused with Gustav Machaty's 1929 film with the same name, which screened at the 2009 SFSFF), which I've been wanting to see for years. 

And there's more- much more. Musicians I haven't yet mentioned include Wurlitzer organist extraordinaire Dennis James, who will accompany Douglas Fairbanks (not Jean Dujardin) in The Mark Of Zorro and  The Loves Of Pharaoh. The Alloy Orchestra will premiere a new score for Soviet co-directing team Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg's Nikolai Gogol adaptation The Overcoat- another film I've had on my to-see list for quite some time. Keyframe recently published an interview I did with Alloy co-founder Ken Winokur, if you want to know more about why I'm excited by this pairing. And pianist Donald Sosin will play for no less than four film programs including Chinese auteur Sun Yu's well-regarded Little Toys starring Shanghai's answer to Greta Garbo, Ruan Lingyu. He'll also back Pola Negri in a brand new restoration of The Spanish Dancer, and my favorite Josef Von Sternberg silent film The Docks Of New York (which I wrote about upon its DVD release here), but I'm most excited to hear his collaboration with local ensemble Toychestra for a set of seven Felix The Cat cartoons. Felix is undoubtedly my favorite silent cartoon star, and Sosin's keyboard style seems especially suited to his antics.


Might as well mention the three other films, which I knew little or nothing about before the SFSFF program announcement: The Wonderful Lie Of Nina Petrovna starring Brigitte Helm of Metropolis, with music by Mont Alto, and two more for the versatile Stephen Horne: Stella Dallas (no not the Barbara Stanwyck version) and The Canadian. Not to leave out the program perhaps most pertinent to this blogathon, the annual "Amazing Tales From The Archives" program, free to the public, in which archivists from around the world present some of the latest, most fascinating finds for an audience of peers and newbies. I've met people who decideded to enter the field of film preservation after attending one of these enlightening sessions, and it was at such a presentation nearly two years ago that I was lucky enough to be among the first participants in a For The Love Of Film Blogathon to see the fruits of the project's first stab at fundraising: a brand-new 35mm print of The Better Man, with Horne doing his first improvisational run-through of the piano score he'd eventually record for the NFPF's fifth DVD set.

If I don't see you at Crossroads or at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, perhaps I will at the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, running June 29 through July 1st at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in the otherwise-sleepy town of Niles, California. This festival will also include a 35mm print of a film found on the fifth NFPF DVD set: Mack Sennett's The Tourists, starring Mabel Normand as a visitor whose stay in Albuquerque turns out to be longer and more exciting than she expected. And of a Clara Bow film: Helen's Babies, also starring Edward Everett Horton and Diana Serra Carey a.k.a. Baby Peggy (who, at age 93, will be in town for the festival). I've written about Niles and the unique screening venue for this festival before, and I usually make it out to their regular Saturday night screening series at least once or twice a year, even though it's not exactly simple to get there from San Francisco without a car. But I've never attended their biggest annual event. This year, as the festival celebrates its fifteenth year of existence, and the 100th anniversary of Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson's arrival in Niles to make some of the first cowboy pictures, I'm determined to attend at least one or two festival screenings. This year's line-up puts a particular focus on films made precisely 100 years ago, in Niles or elsewhere, including five films by Anderson, two by D.W. Griffith, and even one of the few feature length films made in this country that year: Charles Gaskill's Cleopatra.


But if you have a few bucks to drop on attending one or more of these festivals for your own enjoyment, why not also donate so that not only you, but anyone with an internet connection can benefit from film preservation. I just donated myself. I can't wait to see The White Shadow, through any legal channel available to me.