10HTE: David Robson

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

Five-time IOHTE contributor David Robson is the Film/Video Curatorial Assistant at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He almost never documents his movie-viewing at his own blog the House of Sparrows, and he cohabitates with those adorable simian cinephiles at Monkeys Go To Movies.

Blow Up screen shot from Warner DVD 

I insist, likely to the point of tedium, that Noir City is at its best when it goes "not quite noir" or even "...wait a minute is this even noir?". Fedora'd purists be damned: expanding the scope of the series into other realms brings a noir perspective to familiar movies that, when it clicks, renders them new. Case in point: the series' final screening of Antonioni's Blow-Up, which played to a packed house that included many of the Noir City faithful, and the often rowdy NC crowd was taken into the movie's confidence, watching the climactic tennis match unfold in rapt silence. It felt like I was seeing this famous, much-debated scene for the first time, and I've never felt an Antonioni movie connect so powerfully with an audience.

About four times a year the San Francisco Symphony accompanies a film screening with its score performed live. And though neither the venue nor its audience seem to understand the differences between these events and regular film screenings it proved the ideal way to experience Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, giving Bernard Herrmann's score the primary focus. Hearing and seeing the score performed live proved that the story had the scope and depth of an opera, with Herrmann deploying Wagnerian motifs to dizzying ends. Kim Novak's act 3 confession played like an aria in this context, proving my suspicion that a composer of a film (specifically this composer for this film) could be its most powerful auteur.

The conflict of interest prevents me from listing any of the offerings of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' film program, but I feel I can name a film that screened there prior to my return there: Joel Shepard's entire Gothic Cinema series (link here, please: Gothic Cinema: Darkness and Desire ) was a beautiful cross-section of shadowy horrors, fantasies, and romances, and among its many gems I got to see Jack Clayton's The Innocents for the first time. The gorgeous 35mm allowed it to shine within the context of the series, but even without the support of its fellow Gothics Jack Clayton's tale of a governess protecting her charges from unseen threats was and is clearly a superior picture. Crystalline photography by Freddie Francis, and even the 20th Century Fox logo is tastefully, powerfully deployed at movie's start.

The Matador image provided by contributor 

The 21st century closer of the Castro's Bond and Beyond series paired the lite entertainment of Die Another Day with Richard Shepard's spectacular black comedy The Matador. The latter features a post-Bond Pierce Brosnan in exceptionally sybaritic form as a strung-out hitman, with fine support from Greg Kinnear as a square businessman caught in his orbit and Hope Davis as Kinnear's wise, adoring spouse. It had been a dark horse favorite in 2005, and it was an absolute joy to experience again, its three lead characters returning like cherished friends, David Tattersall's photography capturing an eye-popping palette of colors. Lynn Cursaro pointed out that too rarely does rep cinema venture into the recent past, naming this movie as exactly the kind of hidden gem that are due another shot. Her hilarious posts about the movie in the days following the screening helped extend its spell.

Prince is Dead, Long Live Prince. And much, much gratitude to our friends at the Alamo Drafthouse for scoring the lovely print of Sign O' the Times. The revival of Purple Rain in the wake of Prince's departure was inevitable, but Sign appears to be Prince's greatest cinematic testament, showcasing its star's considerable talent and charisma (and more-than-adequate directing chops, as well) while giving his band plenty of space to stretch out in individual and group moments. The greatest wake of the year.

Speaking of the Drafthouse: Mike Keegan's seized the standard of late-nite grindhouse programming, but my favorite of the films I saw under that aegis was Robert Altman's little-seen and less-regarded OC & Stiggs. It's a bizarrely ramshackle 80s teen comedy that feels like it's going to self-destruct at any second, but the Beast is one of cinema's greatest cars, the King Sunny Ade concert is an incredibly cathartic set-piece, and the obnoxious title heroes are no moreso than any of Altman's other two-against-the-world double-acts. The final freeze-frame seals Altman's affection for them, and our own.

Suture image provided by contributor 

A pair of digital restorations seemed to be dancing across rep venues in tandem, and they both wound up at the Roxie the same week: Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace was presented with loving care, its digital makeover preserving Bava's gorgeously lurid color schemes and giving Carlo Rustichelli's score a nice boost. Its starkly duo-chrome dance partner, McGehee and Spiegel's Suture, showed none of its age, its Shinoda and Teshigahara-inspired staging rendered with stark clarity.

It's funny how ubiquitous a rarely-seen movie can get, but one doesn't complain. The Vienna series that began in Berkeley at Pacific Film Archive, then went south-west to the Stanford, gave us multiple looks at Powell & Pressburger's Oh Rosalinda!! (And PFA's Powell & Pressburger retro in December gave it yet another curtain call.) Not knowing I'd get another chance I took in the first screening, after which I doubted I'd see a more visually splendid movie in 2016. (I was right.) Anton Walbrook, an actor always well-deployed by the Archer, dove into the Die Fledermaus role with zeal, capped with a polite but weary summation that shook even now, far from Vienna, but resonating with our current wars.

The Vienna series continued into the days after the election. Badly wanting to get away from the ongoing flood of terrible news, I hopped on Caltrain and headed to the Stanford Theatre. Herbert Ross' The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was a movie I'd been longing to see again, and the meeting between Nicol Williamson's Sherlock Holmes and Alan Arkin's Sigmund Freud was a connoisseur's delight. But the scene in which Freud levelled up to destroy an anti-Semite on the tennis court, was what I needed to see that day.

With love and gratitude to all of the programmers whose diligent work makes picking ten difficult, and a particular shout-out to Elliot Lavine, who's about to make Portland, Oregon a better place.

The Lodger (1927)

WHO: Alfred Hitchcock directed this (and was so credited), but also worked, uncredited, on the screenplay, and appeared in the first of his famous cameos.

WHAT: Of the nine surviving Hitchcock silent films which circulated as a group around the country earlier this year, The Lodger is probably the best choice to see on Halloween: its atmospheric depiction of night, of fog, and of a mysterious stranger stepping out of it while an entire section of London is terrorized by a "Jack the Ripper" style killer, makes it the earliest of Hitchcock's films generally thought of as possessing the identifiable signature of the future "Master of Suspense" in just about every scene.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at Davies Symphony Hall at 7:30 PM.

WHY: Every Halloween night for the past several years the San Francisco Symphony has taken the evening off and brought in a concert organist to perform a live score to a classic film from the silent era. Past titles have included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Phantom of the Opera, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This year the Symphony decided to expand the tradition by building four days of Hitchcock music & film programming into its Halloween season, but tonight's annual organ performance is for many the centerpiece of the week, as unlike last night's Psycho screening, tomorrow's Vertigo showing, or Saturday's Hitchcock grab-bag, it doesn't involve the reconfiguring of a sound mix originally approved by Hitchcock.

More silent films, most of them with live musical accompaniment, screening in Frisco Bay venues in the next months:

As I mentioned recently, the Rafael Film Center is showing the 1922 Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror tonight, and will hold another silent film program December 12th; only the latter will have live musical accompaniment.

The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont has just revealed its November-December schedule (as a pdf) including its traditional Saturday night screenings for November.

The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley is showing the last purely silent film starring the so-called "Chinese Garbo" Ruan Lingyu, The Goddess, on November 8th, as well as her first (sort-of) talkie New Women November 9th and Stanley Kwan's acclaimed film about Ruan starring Maggie Cheung, Center Stage, on November 29th. 

The Castro Theatre will host the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's next event: a January 11th day-long tribute to Charlie Chaplin on the 100th anniversary of his filmmaking career. Titles were just announced earlier this week, and include The Gold Rush, The Kid and a program of Mutual two-reelers..

Finally, the SF Symphony continues the 2014 Chaplin celebration April 12th by performing live the actor/director/writer/composer's own score for a screening of City Lights.

HOW: Since 2010 the Symphony's Halloween screenings have all been digital presentations. Tonight's features Todd Wilson on the organ.

Psycho (1960)

WHO: Bernard Herrmann wrote the music for this.

WHAT: When Alfred Hitchcock first planned out his ideas for Psycho he imagined no music at all accompany the now-famous "shower scene". But at that time Herrmann's stock with Hitchcock was such that he was allowed to persuade the director to let him score that scene with what has now become one of the all-time iconic music moments in movie history. Just hearing one note (maybe two) of Herrmann's dissonant strings is all it takes to evoke the shock and dread of this scene for anyone who has seen the film- and many who haven't. The rest of Herrmann's score, written only for a string ensemble, is brilliant as well. For more on Hitchcock & Herrmann's approach to music and sound in Psycho read this article at FilmSound.org.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at Davies Symphony Hall at 8:00, and at the Vine Cinema & Alehouse in Livermore at 7PM on November 7th.

WHY: Last month I attended a concert at Davies Hall, home of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, in which the Symphony performed famous musical excerpts from Jaws, Star Wars, Schindler's List and other movies made during my lifetime, with their composer John Williams behind the conductor's podium. Steven Spielberg was on hand to discuss his career-long collaboration with Williams and give a cursory introduction to how music makes its mark on motion pictures. 

Most of the pieces were played without any visual accompaniment outside of the spectacle of seeing a celebrity conductor and a world-class orchestra in action, or whatever images from the films or other associations might dance in our minds' eyes. But for a few of the pieces a screen hung above the orchestra, allowing us to look at clips from Close Encounters of the Third Kind while a suite of music from the film played, or clips from a wide variety of swashbuckling adventure films from throughout cinema history while a rousing piece from Spielberg's animated The Adventures of Tintin was performed by the orchestra.

But the most unique surprise of the evening, for me, was a side-by-side comparison of one continuity-intact sequence from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade screened twice in a row. If you know the film, it was a version of the "circus train" sequence that had been specially prepared so that sound effects and dialogue were audible but the originally recorded music score had been digitally "scrubbed" out somehow. For the second viewing of the scene, the orchestra performed the music live, occasionally coming close to drowning out an individual line of dialogue or sound effect, but gloriously conveying a sense of rollicking adventure and excitement. 

If the intent was to show how 'flat' a Spielberg action scene is in the absence of his composer's contribution, it didn't have that impact on me. Williams is a terrific film composer, don't get me wrong. But I found the scene no less gripping, and indeed found more gravitas to its evocation of urgency and physicality, when stripped of its underscore. Whether or not such gravitas is appropriate for an early sequence in an Indiana Jones film is certainly debatable. I've probably seen too many Jean-Pierre Melville films to have a sensible answer, but I did very much enjoy this enhanced peek into the moviemaking process.

I'd seen entire films screened at Davies Hall before, both with the San Francisco Symphony performing (as with The Gold Rush in 2010) and with an outside group using the space (Philip Glass presenting Powaqqatsi in 2006) but these are, music aside, completely silent films. I was aware of the fact that the Symphony had in recent years performed live alongside screenings of sound-era films such as Psycho, Casablanca, and The Matrix, but last month was the first I'd gotten to see the technology in action, and was curious to learn more. Knowing there were four days of Alfred Hitchcock screenings coming up starting with tonight's reprise of Psycho and continuing with Friday night's premiere presentation of the "score-scrubbed" Vertigo with live symphonic accompaniment, I decided to inquire with the symphony about the series. Here's what SF Symphony Director of Artistic Planning John Magnum had to say about the year-long series this week launches at Davies.

We’ve been doing films as part of our Summer and the Symphony concerts for a few years now, and we’ve had a terrific audience response to them. We heard from our audience that there was an appetite for more of these projects throughout the year, and so we thought we’d pilot a four-concert series in 2013-14. To launch the series, we put together a week of performances around the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and the starting point for that was actually the world premiere of Vertigo in concert, which seemed perfect for San Francisco. 

We have a list of films that we know are out there, available for performance with orchestra. We also have some ideas of other films and projects that we’d be interested in producing. We want to have a balance between full-length films, and mixed programs with highlights from various movies – it’s half and half this season, and we’ll probably have about that mix going forward. And of course the basic criteria is that the film is known for having a great score – Bernard Hermann in the case of Vertigo and Psycho, great classical pieces for Fantasia, and so on.

There are a few producers working with the studios to create the projects, which we then license from the producer for live concert performance. In a couple of cases, we have worked directly with the studios or a creator’s estate, which basically accomplishes the same thing. This is an area that other orchestras are interested in as well – Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, for example, as well as some of the European orchestras and presenters – so there are new projects in the pipeline for future seasons, too.  

The Symphony's Hitchcock week has been recently profiled by Thomas Gladysz, The Saturday "Hitchcock! Greatest Hits" program focuses especially on Dimitri Tiomkin's music for Strangers on a Train and Dial 'M' For Murder, as well as Herrmann's for North By Northwest (including the main title, the drunk driving scene, and the Mount Rushmore finale.) It's filled out by two scenes piece from Vertigo and To Catch a Thief (music by Lyn Murray), and of course Charles-Francois Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, which became synonymous with the Master of Suspense from its use in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series.

Unlike the Symphony's silent film presentations (such as that of Hitchcock's The Lodger tomorrow night), these programs are not ideal for purists or for newbies, but for fans of a film interested in experiencing it in part or in full again on a large screen in a unique way: with live musical accompaniment from a terrific ensemble, If you can't make it to the Hitchcock series, the Symphony will screen Singin' in the Rain with live music December 6th and 7th.


HOW: Tonight's digital presentation of Psycho at Davies Hall. will be a version with the original music recording "scrubbed" off the soundtrack while sound effects and dialogue remain. Herrmann's score will instead be performed by the San Francisco Symphony with Joshua Gersen conducting. The Vine Cinema screening will be the original 1960 version, sourced from a Blu-Ray.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

WHO: Humphrey Bogart stars in this.

WHAT: If you go to the corner of Bush Street and Burritt Alley, you'll find a plaque that reads: "On approximately this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O'Shaunghnessy". It must be the only plaque in San Francisco that memorializes not a historical event, but a key moment in fiction, namely the Dashiell Hammett detective novel template known as The Maltese Falcon. At least, the only one that bears no indication of its fictionhood, or that it constitutes a "spoiler" for anyone who might not have read the book or watched one of the movie versions made from it. Such as the 1941 version written and directed by John Huston.

Other versions (the 1931 one sometimes called Dangerous Female, or the 1936 Satan Met a Lady) have their points of interest, but the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is the one that became a cultural sensation and launched (with High Sierra) Humphrey Bogart's career as a leading man, Huston's as a director, and film noir as a powerful cinematic thread through the 1940s, 50s and beyond. San Francisco movie lovers are proud that their city plays such a key role in such a key film in such a key genre of Hollywood filmmaking, even if they know that apart from a few library-footage shots of the Bay Bridge and the city skyline, Huston's film does not feature actual footage of their city. As Nicola Balkind wrote in the recently-published book World Film Locations: San Francisco:

The camera descends and we are introduced to an office announcing 'SPADE AND ARCHER' where Sam Spade is working as the Bay Bridge gleams through a large window. The office interior was shot in LA but the location is estimated to be 111 Sutter Street at the corner of Montgomery in the heart of the Financial District - not far from neo-noir's favorite location: Chinatown. Although The Maltese Falcon was made in Hollywood, we're never allowed to forget it is set in San Francisco.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens daily at the Stanford Theatre at 5:40 and 9:25.

WHY: World Film Locations: San Francisco is starting to get a few reviews, such as this one in the Bay Area Reporter. It's available online and at stores such as City Lights, Moe's and even the DeYoung Museum gift shop. I'm proud to have contributed an essay on film noir in the city for the book, in which I quickly trace film noir history from Hammett and Huston to Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, to the post-war vogue for on-location shooting and into the ways noir was transformed in the mid-to-late fifties and ultimately found expression in the still-vibrant neo-noir genre.

That's just two pages of the book's 1928, however, most of which are devoted to individual films from the silent era to relatively recent history (Steven Soderbergh's 2011 Contagion being the most current entry). Forty-six films are matched with forty-six of their most iconic San Francisco locations and presented fully-illustrated and even mapped. The pages for Greed show us the Cliff House in 1924 and today, while The Conversation is represented by One Maritime Plaza and Raiders of the Lost Ark is an excuse to show us City Hall, for example. 

San Francisco moviegoers can hardly get enough of seeing our own city on cinema screens, and there are many opportunities to do so in the coming months. The Stanford's current "Best of Bogart and Film Noir Classics" series gives us one almost every weekend in late September and October. After The Maltese Falcon this week, the venue brings Out of the Past (with the Caribbean-set To Have and Have Not) September 26-29, and Dark Passage (Oct. 10-13 with The Blue Dahlia), The Lady From Shanghai (Oct. 24-27 with Key Largo) and The Caine Mutiny (Oct. 31-Nov. 3 with Touch of Evil) each have their own entries in World Film Locations: San Francisco as well.

Two of the three features playing at Oakland's Paramount Theatre as part of its fall movie classics series are also featured in the book: Bullitt, which screens this Friday, and All About Eve, which was set in New York and Connecticut but had a key scene shot at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, screens there October 15th. (The third Paramount movie classic this fall is Huston and Bogart's Uganda-shot adventure film The African Queen on November 18th). Both of the films screening at the Pacific Film Archive's free outdoor movie series in the coming weeks also get WFL:SF entries: Harold and Maude and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And Vertigo (of course also in the book) screens November 1st at Davies Symphony Hall, with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra performing Bernard Herrmann's incredible musical score live.

Perhaps the most unexpected upcoming showcase of Frisco Bay films comes courtesy the San Francisco Film Society, which is hosting at New People Cinema October 18-20 an event called Zurich/SF, which is a cinematic celebration of the ten-year anniversary of San Francisco's sister-city partnership with Switzerland's largest city. This mini-festival collaborates with the Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective coming to the PFA, YBCA and Roxie this fall to plug the Autumn's German-language cinematic gap caused by the Berlin & Beyond festival's move back to a January timeslot after a few years having a go in the Fall, by showing films such as Kurt Früh's rarely-seen The Fall and Andrea Štaka's Fraulein (both in 35mm) as well as five other films by Swiss filmmakers. But it also brings four showings of films in which San Francisco is more than mere backdrop to action but a major element of character and theme. Of these, The Conversation and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (the latter of which will screen on 35mm) merit entries in WFL:SF, while Medicine For Melancholy is discussed in one of the other contextualizing essays in the book. As for 1970s buddy-cop oddity Freebie and the Bean, it will have to wait and see if sales on the book merit a sequel.

HOW: The Maltese Falcon screens on a 35mm double bill with Casablanca.

The Iron Horse (1924)

WHO: John Ford directed this.

WHAT: It's not my personal favorite of Ford's silent films (that'd be, of those I've seen so far, Four Sons) but The Iron Horse is still a lovely example of one of the great American filmmakers' early access to the poetry of landscape. I think of it as something of a spiritual precursor to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo: a fictionalized version of a true story of 19th-Century "New World" economic expansion, that nonetheless was filmed in certain ways almost as if a documentary: Herzog's crew actually sent that ship over that mountain, and Ford's actually laid at least a mile and a half of railroad track while filming the story of the construction of the transcontinental railroad. In lieu of a Burden of Dreams-style documentary on The Iron Horse, do read David Kiehn's terrific article, written for the 2010 San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation of the film.

Another similarity between the Ford and Herzog films highlights what's probably their most fundamental difference: both have complicated- one might also say problematic- relationships to the Indian tribes that made up a good portion of each film's cast and crew.  Fitzcarraldo ends, intentionally, like an art movie, all tangled up in conflicted feelings about the relative success and failure of the white capitalist/art lover and the Campa-Ashaninka Indians to achieve their goals. 

The Iron Horse has a relatively traditional, happy, "Hollywood ending" for its characters, for American history, and certainly for its producers, as the film outgrossed every other US release in 1924. But a modern or so-called "enlightened" audience can also have conflicted feelings about this ending- these endings- especially from the perspective of the Paiutes who performed in the film. Ford films a simple scene of laborers reunifying with their fellows after being separated onto different work crews with such warmth and emotion, while the ceremonial conclusion of the film, with the driving of the Golden Spike, feels more like a tacked-on addendum, even with its wrapping up of the romantic plot. One wonders if this contrast reveals something of Ford's own feelings about the human stories caught up in the sweep of history. 

WHERE/WHEN: 4:00 PM today only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Musuem.

WHY: This afternoon's screening is part of LaborFest and its FilmWorks United selection of screenings happening at various venues around Frisco Bay throughout July. I believe this is the first year of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's involvement as a venue. Most of the FilmWorks United screening selections are documentaries (last Friday saw the local premiere of Ken Loach's latest, for instance) but there are three silent features as well, all of them involving the railroad, which seems apropos after last week's BART strike. Last night it was William S. Hart in The Whistle, also at Niles. Today it's The Iron Horse. And on Thursday July 18th (unfortunately the opening night of the SF Silent Film Festival) LaborFest will host a screening of Sergei Eisenstein's depiction of a 1903 locomotive factory Strike at 518 Valencia.

Also worth mentioning although not officially connected to LaborFest: The Weavers, about the Silesian Weaver Revolt of 1844, has been called the "German Potemkin" and screens at the Castro July 21st. And Potemkin screens this month too, on July 28th at Davies Symphony Hall with live accompaniment by organist Cameron Carpenter. Tickets start at $15 for nosebleed seats, but it's a pretty big screen.

HOW: The Iron Horse is a 16mm screening with live piano accompaniment by Bruce Loeb.

Notorious (1946)

WHO: Alfred Hitchcock

WHAT: This is probably the most highly-regarded of Hitchcock's 1940s films. Though the decade may not match the 1950s or (arguably) even the 1930s or the 1960s in sheer number of masterpieces,, Notorious stands with just about anything he ever made as a fully-assured, controlled, work of entertainment and art. Here's part of what the director said about the film to Peter Bogdanovich in 1963, the year the latter helped MOMA put together the first (essentially) complete retrospective of Hitchcock films in the United States:

This is the old love-and-duty theme. Grant's job is to get Bergman in bed with Rains, the other man. It's ironic, really, and Grant is a bitter man all the way through. Rains was sympathetic because he's the victim of a confidence trick and we always have sympathy for the victim, no matter how foolish he is. Also I would think Rains' love for Bergman was very much stronger than Grant's.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto at 5:35 & 10:00 PM, and at 7:00 PM on Monday, April 8th at the Sebastiani Theatre in Sonoma, California.

WHY: As the Stanford's Alfred Hitchcock series winds down (after tonight, there's only next weekend's double-bill of Psycho and The Birds left at that venue) it's time to get ready for the next phase in 2013's celebration of the Master of Suspense.

First of all, the Castro includes a Hitchcock film on it's April calendar: The Birds, which as of this week has been giving avian nightmares for fifty years now, and which will screen there on April 14th.

The excitement is building for the US premiere of new restorations of nine of Hitchcock's silent films, also happening at the Castro thanks to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The festival website has been updated to include all the showtimes and musicians expected to perform for this mid-June event. Only the identity of the organist expected to accompany Easy Virtue on Sunday afternoon on June 16th has yet to be revealed, perhaps because the fate of the Castro's Wurlitzer is currently up in the air. Or that may be a coincidence.

After the Castro screenings, these silent features will tour cinemas around the country, and among the stops will be Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, which still has seven talkies to go in its own retrospective.

The Lodger will return to San Francisco on October 31st, where it will screen at Davies Symphony Hall accompanied by organist Todd Wilson. This is part of a musical-minded Hitchcock week at the venue that also includes an October 30th screening of Psycho with the San Francisco Symphony (albeit presumably just the string section) performing Bernard Herrman's score live on stage to a version of the film with only sound effects and dialogue audible, a similar treatment of Vertigo (this time presumably not just the string section- gotta have those flutes and horns) November 1st, and a November 2nd set of "short films", by which I presume the Symphony staff means excerpts from other Hitchcock features from the period of his collaboration with Herrmann (from 1955-1964).

HOW: Notorious screens tonight on a 35mm Stanford double-bill with North By Northwest. The screening at the Sebastiani is a solo screening, and I've been unable to learn whether it will be a 35mm one, though I know the theatre still has the capability to run such prints.

UPDATE 4/4/2013: I have just received confirmation that the Sebastiani Theatre screening will indeed be in 35mm!