Carl Martin Only Has Two Eyes

It's impossible for any pair of eyes to view all of Frisco Bay's worthwhile film screenings. I'm so pleased that a number of local filmgoers have let me post their repertory/revival screening highlights of 2011. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Carl Martin, the keeper of the Film On Film Foundation's Bay Area Film Calendar.

this year's short list was modest compared to years past. still tough to winnow down to ten:

april 3, pfa: north beach
the fragment of dion vigne's film i'd seen before is brilliant. i'd heard the complete film was even more so--but how could it sustain its frantic energy for 17 minutes? it could!

april 27, kabuki #1: salvador
i've never been an oliver stone fan but this early buddy movie (?) has just the right tone of general nonpartisan political cynicism. james woods is a lunatic. a first-rate print, well projected.

may 13, castro: out of the blue
finally allowed to direct again after the last movie, dennis hopper made a film almost as radical and disruptive, yet, to its benefit, with more confidence and cohesion. linda manz. linda manz!

june 5, red vic: the great muppet caper; june 19, castro: the muppets take manhattan
i hadn't seen these first two muppet sequels since their original releases, and they had me choked up from scene one. masterful puppetry, masterful command of cinema's emotive possibilities. plus great songs and cameos. lovely prints. (the new muppet movie was ok but they shot the dang thing with a video camera!)

july 1, roxie: tex
matt dillon: a dumb mug awash with pathos-inducing, vulnerable bravado. this movie tore my damn heart out. followed by the somewhat cathartic over the edge, an earlier, nearly as good effort (as screenwriter) from tim hunter.

august 1, roda theatre: the juggler
the early part of the day is a dead time for repertory. but that's when i'm most alert, most receptive, before the drowsiness of early evening cycles in. thank you, sfjff, for showing this lovely print of a heartbreaking film at mid-day. i felt every twist of the emotional wrench. kirk douglas gives one of his finest performances as a charismatic man revealed to be quite mad--the only sane response to the madness of his world. too bad the ending's a bit pat.

august 5, pfa: king queen knave
usually i don't like to "read the book" before i "watch the movie" but when i read nabokov's novel five years ago i had no idea who skolimowski was, let alone that he'd adapted it. oddly, some of the clunkier material from the book, such as the robot mannequin sequence, reveals itself to be cinematic gold in this hilarious sex comedy. the print, alas, was faded.

september 9, pfa: payday
no punches are pulled in this dissection of country music's seedy underbelly, back when country music was good. now it's even more cynically commercial, but, worst of all, bland. rip torn--bland he is not.

september 14, pfa: ice
a ballsy super-low-budget agit-prop feature that really seems to embody its own convictions and contradictions. the first part of zabriskie point meets... it happened here, maybe? why the hell is it called ice?

december 2, roxie: hi-riders
i was surprised the same auteur lay behind the ultra-schlocky joysticks and this considerably more interesting work. it's shamelessly exploitative, to be sure, with a breast count to rival its body count, but dean cundey's photography elevates it, and the finale is shockingly effective. this original print had, shall we say, lots of character.

Michael Hawley Only Has Two Eyes

It's impossible for any pair of eyes to view all of Frisco Bay's worthwhile film screenings. I'm so pleased that a number of local filmgoers have let me post their repertory/revival screening highlights of 2011. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from cinephile/critic Michael Hawley, who blogs at film-415. This list is cross-posted there along with his lists of favorite new films of 2011.


10 Favorite Repertory/Revival Screenings
1. Deep End (1970, UK, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, Castro Theatre)
2. Battleship Potemkin (1925, USSR, dir. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Castro Theatre)
3. La Dolce Vita (1960, Italy, dir. Federico Fellini, Castro Theatre, San Francisco International Film Festival)
4. Dance Hall Racket (1953, USA, dir. Phil Tucker, Roxie Theater, "I Wake Up Dreaming" Film Noir series)
5. The Leopard (1963, Italy, dir. Luchino Visconti, Castro Theatre)
6. World on a Wire (1973, West Germany, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pacific Film Archive – San Francisco International Film Festival)
7. L'argent (1928, France, dir. Marcel L'Herbier, Castro Theater, San Francisco Silent Film Festival Winter Event)
8. The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948, USA, dir. John Farrow, Roxie Theater, "I Wake Up Dreaming" Film Noir series)
9. Sunrise (1927, USA, dir. F.W. Murnau, Castro Theatre, San Francisco Silent Film Festival)
10. All eight films I saw in the "Southern Discomfort" series at the Pacific Film Archive and Roxie Theater: God's Little Acre (1958, dir. Anthony Mann), The Intruder (1962, dir. Roger Corman), Moonrise (1948, dir. Frank Borzage), Swamp Water (1941, dir. Jean Renoir), Hurry Sundown (1967, dir. Otto Preminger), Poor White Trash (1957, dir. Harold Daniels), The Beguiled (1971, dir. Don Siegel), Shy People (1987, dir. Andrey Konchalovskiy)

Miriam Goldwyn Montag Still Wakes Up Dreaming

Has it really been over a week since the San Francisco International Film Festival ended? It still reverberates in my cinephiliac bones, and I'm still reading the articles being posted about it. A handful: Adam Nayman, Ryland Walker Knight, Kimbery Lindbergs, Alejandro Adams, and Fernando F. Croce all wrote excellent, often provocative wrap-ups of their festival experiences. Will I have time to write one of my own? Who knows; I'm already getting caught up in post-festival activities. On that note I'll unbury this pre-festival piece, which is growing quickly outdated but still provides a sense of the current screening scene. On the other hand, I've got a bit of the "burden" relieved by my friend Miriam Goldwyn Montag, who has been catching films playing the Roxie's current series of noir delights. Here's the first of her previews, covering films playing this weekend:

The Spiritualist has an alternate title, The Amazing Mr. X. A third title would be even more apt: Mr. Alton Goes to Town. Cinematographer John Alton was said to have been given free rein here and the results range from beyond sublime to just this side of ridiculous. The moonlight beach scene which opens the film is stunning enough to linger in the memory longer than some of the plot's hairpin twists. None of the performers in this film have ever been so luscious before or since; Turhan Bey's turbaned smoothie is almost alluring. When the reliable Cathy O'Donnell finds herself newly and intoxicatingly in love, Alton puts an actual twinkle in her eye and bathes her in a silvery glow. Try not to swoon, that's a dare! The Spiritualist is the perfect meeting of artist and material. The strange worlds of the spiritual con artist and the cinematographer both rely on tricks of shadow and light in a darkened room full of dreamers.

Sunday`s co-feature is The Night has a Thousand Eyes, a spooky tale of strange powers and dark motives. You can prime your pump for the supernatural with Saturday`s Ministry of Fear, Fritz Lang`s tense gem based on the Graham Greene novel. Ray Milland, freshly sprung from the laughing academy, enters a web of treachery over a crystal ball at a garden fete. These fortune telling phonies aren't fleecing widows, they're playing the longest con of them all. Personally, I never trust anyone who picks at dessert.

SFIFF54 Day 15: Sync

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival ends today. Each day during the festival I've been posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

Sync (UK: Max Hattler, 2010)

playing: at 5:00 PM at the Viz/New People as part of the Get With The Program animated shorts collection, which has no further screenings during the festival.
distribution: No commercial distribution is currently anticipated for this 10-minute long film.

The Golden Gate Awards for SFIFF documentaries and shorts were announced yesterday evening. As usual, I've seen only a few of the winners (listed at Indiewire). The only category in which I've watched all the contenders is the Animated Short category. I have trouble arguing against the shorts jury's choice in this case: The External World by Irish-born, Berlin-based animator David O'Reilly is conceptually the most expansive and ambitious of the six nominated shorts. It plays something like an entire program of Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation condensed into fifteen minutes, and amped up with a hypodermic full of cinematic self-reflexivity and paranoia about our increasingly digital-mediated society. Though two of the Golden Gate Award winners, Into the Middle of Nowhere and Young Dracula, can be viewed today on the festival's website, and the Fipresci prize-winner The Salesman plays today at 2PM, The External World is the only GGA winner that screens at a festival venue today.

The other animated short nominees all have their own merits, but perhaps a few shortcomings as well. Pixels takes on some of the same thematic concerns as The External World in a more directly entertaining way, but there are limits to the depth of exploration that can be achieved in an essentially one-joke film such as this. It also seems less necessarily suited to a theatre; its pleasures can be pretty much just as easily obtained as an shared video on the internet (and in fact it made a big splash in this manner over a year ago.) Dromosphere by Thorstein Fleisch, and Once It Started It Could Not Be Otherwise by Kelly Sears, are strong works, but probably not as strong as other pieces by their respective filmmakers (I'm partial to Energy and The Voice on the Line myself). In A Purpleman, a clay animation from South Korea, images provide illustration for a documentary audio interview of a North Korean refugee recounting his experiences as an in-between outsider in his new home. Surely the most obviously sincere of the nominees, some may find it the most sincerely obvious as well.

All of these (except for the Sears piece) play on today's program Get With The Program, but the short in this set I feel most powerfully demands being seen on the big screen is Max Hattler's Sync, which was not in competition for an award at all. Hattler's had a piece in each of the past five SFIFF editions now, starting with Collision in 2007. Sync is much less overtly political than that piece, and in fact might be argued to be an example of animation completely free of representational attributes. But it's even more beautiful, and in fact hypnotizing in its constantly spiraling, expanding complexity.

SFIFF54 Day 15
Another option: On Tour (FRANCE: Matthieu Amalric, 2010) Actor Amalric is known to some as the actor fetiche of Arnaud Desplechin, to others as the star of the Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and to still others as the Bond Villain™ in Quantum of Solace. Lesser-known is the fact that he's directed a few films as well. His latest directorial feature in fact won him the Best Director prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival for this film about American burlesque performers touring in France. I can't wait to see it tonight, especially since it may be the last theatrical screening the film has locally; rumor has it that there are music rights complications to a theatrical release in the United States, limiting it to festival showings only. Good thing there are a lot of seats in the Castro Theatre for all the people who might want to see this possibly-once-in-a-lifetime screening.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: The Strange Case of Angelica at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. Like many SFIFF films, this has traveled the festival circuit, from Cannes to Toronto to New York and elsewhere. Instead of landing at SFIFF, the Yerba Buena Center has decided to book it for two nights and an afternoon in their intimate screening room. In my view it's better than any of the SFIFF films I've seen that are playing this evening, but then again I haven't seen them all, and mileage for a Manoel de Oliveira film may vary. If you feel like sticking with the festival tonight then it plays again Saturday evening and as a Sunday matinee.

SFIFF54 Day 14: Let The Wind Carry Me

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival is in its penultimate day, ending tomorrow, May 5th. Each day during the festival I've been posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

Let The Wind Carry Me (TAIWAN: Chiang Hsiu-chiung & Kwan Pun-leung, 2010)

playing: at 3:45 PM at the Kabuki, with no further screenings during the festival.
distribution: no U.S. distribution is currently planned.

A documentary portrait of the cinematographer behind the lens of nearly all the famous films of great Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien? Sign me up. The film begins with a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of The Electric Princess House, Hou's 3-minute contribution to the 2007 omnibus Chacun Son Cinéma, which has still never played theatrically here on Frisco Bay (though the DVD is available to rent at Le Video). Getting a glimpse of any part of Hou's process is priceless for a fan like me, and we are also treated to peeks at on-set footage from the filming of Hou masterpieces like Flowers of Shanghai and Flight of the Red Balloon.

But I get ahead of myself. this is not a film about Hou, but a tribute to Mark Lee Ping-bin, a slightly bohemian-looking cinematographer who, in addition to working with Hou, has also shot films for dozens of other auteurs from across Asia and Europe. I'd seen a surprisingly high percentage of them, most often at previous SFIFF editions, and got enough pleasure out of realizing, "oh, Lee shot that film as well?" from the clips excerpted in this documentary, that I'll leave a listing out of this review, but link to his imdb page for a full recounting. The image quality of these clips has been taken to task by a few reviewers, inlcuding Michael Hawley. For my part, watching on 35mm, the only clips that seemed particularly degraded were those from Flowers of Shanghai. I appreciated that in the clips, when dialogue is spoken, it's left unsubtitled, alllowing English readers fewer distractions from Lee's compositions. The impression one gets from watching Let The Wind Carry Me is that Lee will accept any job that he feels will allow him to continue to elevate the art of cinematography; we viewers may rarely appreciate that many of the greatest contributions to cinema as an artform come from the kind of devotion to craft and work that involves a good deal of personal sacrifice.

The arc of Lee's relationship to his mother is the film's main illustration of this; though he lives and usually works abroad, while she has remained in Taipei, he makes efforts to visit her whenever he can, and to credit her in his acceptance speeches for awards he receives around the globe. I was surprised to verge on tearing up at one particularly emotional reunion moment between mother and son. Others may find the moments we're taken away from Lee's artistic process to be extraneous, but I found the tension between the subject's crossed desires to be a dutiful son as well as a prolific filmmaker to save the film from becoming a pure hagiography; it veers close enough as it is. It also seems to fumble around for a dramatically satisfying ending. Indeed, Let The Wind Carry Us is not a masterpiece. But it's a film about masterpieces, that helps enrich the relationships we can have with them.

At the screening I attended, one of the film's two co-directors, Kwan Pun-leung, was on hand to answer questions from the audience. During the q-and-a, it was announced that Mark Lee Ping-bin himself is expected to join Kwan for the post-screening q-and-a this afternoon!

SFIFF54 Day 14
Another option: Detroit Wild City (FRANCE/USA: Florent Tillon, 2010) Local archivist Rick Prelinger did an excellent job interviewing Serge Bromberg before last Sunday's Mel Novikoff Award screening, but he also wrote a piece for SFMOMA Open Space blog on Detroit, and has an interesting take on French director Florent Tillon's documentary on the unique city. Tonight's Berkeley screening is the last for this film in the festival.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Strangers On A Train and They Live By Night at the Castro, a double-bill in memory of Farley Granger, who died just over a month ago. These are certainly two of his greatest film roles; no wonder when you work with Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray. The pair screened as part of Noir City five years ago, and I was lucky to be able to attend. Granger appeared in person at the event; a blogger's recap has been preserved here.

SFIFF54 Day 13: Tabloid

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

Tabloid (USA: Errol Morris, 2010)

playing: at 9:30 PM tonight at the Kabuki, with another, final screening on Thursday afternoon.
distribution: IFC Sundance Selects is releasing it this summer, and as of now, the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley is scheduled to open it July 15th, with the Embarcadero following suit July 22nd. It's almost unheard of for a new release to play commercially in Berkeley before San Francisco, which leaves me wondering why this film is getting such treatment.

Stop. Back up. Go ahead and literally press the "←" button on your browser's toolbar, even. If you're already hoping to see Errol Morris's latest documentary, perhaps because you're a loyalist to the director, or perhaps because you've already heard something about the subject matter and are intrigued, you really must not read another word about this film. Don't click the link to the festival program description I placed under the photo above. Don't go to the imdb page or read any reviews (the Bay Guardian has made this extra easy, leaving Dennis Harvey's capsule in last week's paper out of the online edition for some reason- which I will refrain from speculating on in this space).

Whatever you do, DON'T google "Joyce McKinney", the name of the subject of Tabloid. If you've done any of this already, try to forget what you may have learned, because the less you know of McKinney's story, and of the many surprises this film has in store for you, the more likely you are to be able to appreciate it on at least two levels. 1) It's extremely entertaining. 2) The methods Morris uses to investigate the different sides to this story, and to challenge the audience's understanding of objectivity, puts into relief the similar methods Morris uses to retell an extremely (some would say very much overly) well-known story in his documentary about Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure.

You've probably already read too much. I've probably already written too much. I hope you haven't gotten this far in this article because, even though I'm trying to say nothing of substance about Tabloid's content, my vagueness might just be making you more tempted to learn the tale through some other means than Morris's cinematic techniques. If so, resist temptation until you can get yourself to a screening. Stand in the rush line wearing earplugs. And if you can't make it into the festival showings, continue wearing them until July, because people are going to be talking about this film, and you really don't want to inadvertently overhear any of its twists and turns.

SFIFF54 Day 13
Another option: My Joy (UKRAINE/GERMANY/NETHERLANDS: Sergei Loznitsa, 2011) I'm sure that Kevin Lee (no fan of Tabloid, according to his twitter feed) would recommend you see this reportedly bleaker-than-bleak film by a first-time filmmaker instead of the Morris doc. As Lee notes in a recent article speculating on the SFIFF New Directors prize (and Golden Gate Award) contenders, My Joy played on the main competition slate at last year's Cannes Film Festival. This is a rare occurrence for a first feature, which makes Loznitsa automatically a name to watch, I plan to do so tonight.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer at SFMOMA. Thom Andersen's hour-long documentary on the proto-cinema pioneer is screening (on video) daily at 3PM, every day SFMOMA is open. Today, however, is the monthly "free day" at the museum, which makes today's showing of special interest to movie lovers on a limited budget. It's the last "free day" to see the Andersen piece before his latest film, Get Out Of The Car, plays with work by Paul Clipson, Gary Beydler, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and others on a program at the SF Cinematheque's Crossroads festival May 14th.

SFIFF54 Day 12: Claire Denis Film Scores

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

Tindersticks: Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009

playing: at 8:30 PM at the Castro, with no further screenings during the festival.
distribution: not applicable; this is a live event.

For each of my other daily festival previews this year, I've been singling out a single film to focus my writing, even if it's part of a shorts program. Yesterday, the film I wrote on didn't actually show- though its 1935 remake did (what an evening it was!). Today, instead of focusing on a single film, I'm going to talk about a program as a whole. That's because tonight's Tindersticks event won't involve the screening of any film in its entirety; instead, clips from ix films for which the British ensemble has provided musical scores, will be shown at the Castro in versions with music stripped out but dialogue remaining, but accompanied musically by the composers live on the stage.

Dennis Lim has aptly investigated the working relationship between the great French auteur Claire Denis, and Tindersticks, who have provided the score for all of her feature films since 1996's Nenette And Boni (pictured above), save for two: Vers Mathilde, her only documentary in this period, and 1999's Beau Travail which understandably took a different approach to music than Tindersticks might have been able to provide, at least not so early in the collaboration. I'm interested in tonight's event for a number of reasons. Foremostly, because I love most every Denis film I've seen (and thanks to the recent PFA retro that's nearly all of them), have always thought the aural contributions from Tindersticks played a large role in this affection, and want to hear them perform the music live. I'm also curious about the technical side of the event: how is this going to work to have dialogue and image at a music event, or should I say a louder-than-usual musical score at a film event? Will there be improvisation, or will the music be just as heard in the films? Finally, I'm hoping that foregrounding the musical aspect of some of Denis's films for an evening, might help me understand a bit better just what is working in the Tindersticks scores, that makes them seem so unique, and what is their precise contribution to making her films so unique. I'm expecting an evening that will be much-discussed by local cinephiles for many months to come.

SFIFF54 Day 12
Another option: The Journals of Musan (SOUTH KOREA: Park Jung-bum, 2010) I haven't seen this first feature by an assistant director to Lee Chang-dong on the recent Poetry, but Adam Hartzell has called it "poignantly pessimistic", and other reports from festgoers who attended prior screenings have me intrigued.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Moulin Rouge at the Red Vic. I don't even like this movie, but the fact that it's playing on 35mm at the Red Vic makes it of interest. What else was I going to pick on a Monday? The digital screening of Top Gun playing in every single AMC Theatre across America tonight? (Which might be more popular than expected, after last night's news.) I could mention the double-bill at the Stanford but I already mentioned it on Friday.

SFIFF54 Day 11: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SFIFF54 Day 10: World On A Wire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SFIFF54 Day 9: Toby Dammit

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

Toby Dammit (ITALY: Frederico Fellini, 1968)

playing: Following the 7:30 PM Evening With Terence Stamp at the Castro Theatre, with no further screenings during the festival.
distribution: American International Pictures distributed Toby Dammit in this country in 1969, as part of the omnibus film Spirits of the Dead. Home Vision Entertainment released a DVD of the omnibus nearly ten years ago, and it's out of print. What's more, the print they transferred to disc was a French-dubbed one, lacking Stamp's voice on the soundtrack. Last year British company Arrow Films finally released Spirits of the Dead with the option to hear Stamp speaking his original dialogue in English. However this is a Blu-Ray only release. The opportunity to see a 35mm print of Toby Dammit, with the soundtrack Stamp prefers you hear, at a venue like the Castro, comes around approximately every 1.2 lifetimes.

An unspeakably arrogant actor named Toby Dammit travels from England to Rome to star in a pretentious-sounding Spaghetti Western based on the life of Jesus Christ. His producers drop names like Godard, Pasolini and Barthes as they pick him up from the airport and take him to vapid publicity events culminating in a garish Oscar-esque ceremony where he is to recieve an award and give a speech. Dammit, played by Terence Stamp, spends this entire film in an alcoholic stupor, barking about a Ferrari he's been promised as payment for his involvement in the picture, and beset by visions of a creepy little girl with a white ball, who signifies the Satan he's surely sold his soul to. It's a tremendous performance by a legendary actor, who will appear on stage before the screening for an extended conversation about this film and some of the many others of a career working with directors like Ken Loach, William Wyler, Steven Soderbergh, Peter Ustinov, Joseph Losey, Michael Cimino, Pier Paolo Pasolini (there's that name again!) and of course Frederico Fellini.

Loosely based on the story Never Bet the Devil Your Head by Edgar Allen Poe, Toby Dammit is Fellini at his most chillingly hostile towards his industry and perhaps towards humanity as a whole. Many of his films contain sequences that raise the goose-pimples, but this is the closest the iconic auteur ever came to filming a bona fide horror movie. Never before have Fellini-esque and Dante-esque seemed so synonymous; I'm reminded that the film that made the deepest imprint on the director as a child was Maciste In Hell when I contemplate the fire & brimstone colors he uses in the airport or the chthonian darknesses found later in the film. Yet Nino Rota's score is at its usual carnivalesque pitch, keeping the film from feeling too grim even if some of the images we're seeing are.

Vincent Canby read Toby Dammit as in fact a post-script to Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which will also be playing the festival this weekend, making up for its last-minute pulling from the festival 51 years after it was scheduled to open the fourth edition of SFIFF in 1960. Stamp's award and this Toby Dammit screening are something of a last-minute occurrence as well, having been announced only on opening day of this year's festival. Let's show that our city can pack the Castro for him on little over a week's notice; it's the least we can do after appreciating him in so many wonderful films over the years.

SFIFF54 Day 9
Another option: The City Below (GERMANY: Christoph Hochhäusler, 2010) When my good friend Ryland Walker Knight drops phrases of praise like "Resnais-like openness" and "tower of depravity" I listen.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Royal Wedding at the Stanford Theatre. The Palo Alto venue opens a spectacular season of musicals today with this Stanley Donen film, paired with Vincente Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante. Yes, I'm sure the pairing was picked to comment on the unavoidable hoopla of this past week. I can't say I've been intentionally following it, but I'm sure nothing that occurred was as elegant to see as Fred Astaire dancing on the walls and ceiling was in 1951, or is today, for that matter.

SFIFF54 Day 8: Nostalgia For The Light

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival is at its halfway mark, as it runs through May 5th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

Nostalgia For The Light (CHILE/FRANCE/GERMANY: Patricio Guzmán, 2010)

playing: 6:15 this evening at the Pacific Film Archive, with no further screenings during the festival.
distribution: Thanks to Icarus Films, it's set to open May 13th at the Landmark Shattuck and Lumiere, and have a special screening May 25th at the Rafael Film Center with author Isabel Allende in attendance.

Ever since an interest in mythology begat a fascination with identifying constellations from the roof of my childhood home in Frisco's Richmond District, I've had a long-standing desire to travel to the Southern Hemisphere, so I can see for myself an unfamiliar set of night skies. Years ago while spending one of several summers as a camp counselor and astronomy instructor, I even considered an opportunity to go to Chile in particular, knowing its Atacama Desert's status as the driest spot in the world made it a particularly perfect place for celestial observation.

So of course I was drawn to watch the astronomy-themed Nostalgia For the Light, the newest documentary by Patricio Guzmán, one of a trio of Chile-born filmmakers (Alejandro Jodorowsky and Raúl Ruiz being the other two) who have become famous internationally; all three are best known for their films completed outside their home country (and in fact Jodorowsky has never made a film there). Nostalgia For the Light may change this for Guzmán, however. It was filmed almost entirely in and around the Atacama, where Guzmán shoots gorgeous footage of landscapes, skyscapes, and observatory interiors, and interviews some of the people working in the region. Primarily, these fall into two categories: astronomers, and individuals involved in uncovering the horrible human histories literally buried in the desert, particularly survivors of victims of the repressive, CIA-supported dictator Augusto Pinochet.

This may seem like an odd juxtaposition on paper, but Guzmán's editing and narration over the course of the picture truly unveils the poetic links between science and justice, between history and gravity, and between memory and the cosmos. Though Nostalgia For the Light comes across as more a richly imagistic philosophical contemplation than an activist doc, it ultimately indicts the present with almost an equal fervor as the past. With luck, the success of this film will help the people of Chile, and the rest of the world, better reckon with the tragedies hidden among the silent stones of this patch of brown on the globe. Guzmán will be in attendance at tonight's screening.

SFIFF54 Day 8
Another option: The Dish and the Spoon (USA: Alison Bagnall, 2011) Right after Nostalgia For the Light, the PFA is screening an American indie still fresh from its world premiere at SXSW in Austin. Sara Vizcarrondo interviewed director Bagnall on an episode of Look Of The Week, and definitely piqued my interest in this title.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: American Graffiti at the Rafael Film Center, as a benefit for Marin Charitable. It took me long enough, but when I finally saw the George Lucas film that least appealed to me as a youngster, I became a reborn George Lucas fan. If you've never seen it on the big screen, you've gotta do it sometime.

SFIFF54 Day 7: The Sleeping Beauty

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

The Sleeping Beauty (FRANCE: Catherine Breillat, 2010)

playing: 6:30 PM this evening, with no more festival screenings scheduled.
distribution: Strand Releasing is reportedly putting out a DVD later this year, but a theatrical release seems up in the air, given that Breillat's last fairy-tale feature was restricted to non-commercial screenings here on Frisco Bay.

I was fortunate to be able to see a number of this year's SFIFF selections at the last Toronto International Film Festival; this was one of them. If you've seen director Catherine Breillat's prior Bluebeard you have something of an idea of what to expect from this, also a beautiful, video-made, 21st Century take on a classic fairy tale. Don't hold on too tightly to these expectations however, as Bluebeard is a much more straightforward retelling of Charles Perrault than the Sleeping Beauty of Grimm, as the latter works in elements from Hans Christen Andersen and Lewis Carrol, plays with its natural time-travel theme in fascinating ways (you'll never guess the graffito that appears in one scene), and even refers back to one of Breillat's early films explicitly.

Breillat is not expected to be at today's screening, but she did answer questions in person at The Sleeping Beauty's Toronto screening I attended. Among other things, she revealed that the casting of the all-previously-unknown actors was the most time-consuming aspect of the production, that the water in the bathing scene pictured above was in fact ice-cold, and that the last shot of the film was taken in her own home. If you attend tonight's screening, and you relate these tidbits to the person in the seat next to you, why not tell you where you learned them? I can always use another reader.

SFIFF54 Day 7
Another option: Le Quattro Volte (ITALY/GERMANY/SWITZERLAND: Michaelangelo Frammartino, 2010) I don't know much about this second-time filmmaker or his film, other than that it's been nicknamed "the goat movie" and drawing passionate raves on its festival tour. It's one of several SFIFF54 films on the just-released Landmark Film Calendar (pdf) but why wait until June 10th when you can see it tonight?

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Splice at the Pacific Film Archive. I've been attending many (about half) of the Film 50 lectures to UC Berkeley students and community members over the past semester; this is the last in the series. They're always packed with information and insight. Professor Russell Merritt is an engaging lecturer who encourages questions and comments, and the 35mm prints are screened flawlessly and often rare. In this week's case, it's a rare in-cinema opportunity to go back in time and see a Canadian horror film that played last year's SFIFF.

SFIFF54 Day 6: HaHaHa

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

HaHaHa (SOUTH KOREA: Hong Sang-soo, 2010)

playing: 3:30 this afternoon at the Kabuki, with no more scheduled festival screenings.
distribution: None that I'm aware of. This may be your last chance to see this film on the big screen.

"Stop dwelling on adolescent things." It's a scolding given by one of the men in HaHaHa to the woman he's infatuated with, but it could as easily be applied to just about any male character in any Hong Sang-soo film. Invariably Hong populates his movies with creative, would-be "sensitive" guys trapped in states of arrested development. Unable to live up to their own high ideals, these protagonists verbally inflict on the women around them countless cutting comments, subtextual rejections, insincere flatteries and transparent lies. When the women stand for such treatment it's only because they're no less insecure than their male counterparts, even if they may express it differently.

HaHaHa provides more opportunities for its Peter Pans to be put in their pre-adolescent place than any other Hong film I can remember (and I'm lucky to have seen all twelve of his thus-far finished works). The mother of laid-off Seoul prof. Moon-kyoeng (played by Kim Sang-kyeung, who also played the male lead in Turning Gate) infantilizes him in conversation with her friends: "He's gotten so big; I wonder if he's really mine." Later in the film she gives him a spanking with a coat hanger, and makes him cry (these are separate instances).

Another male character, an angsty poet, gets a piggyback ride from his girlfriend as if to demonstrate his immaturity after she catches him with another woman. The girlfriend is Seung-ok, played by Moon So-ri, who SFIFF regulars will remember from her terrific turns in Peppermint Candy, Oasis and Sa-Kwa. This is her first time working with Hong Sang-soo and she commands attention in every scene, not least her outburst while on-duty as a historical park guide who defensively shouts down a tourist who dares to question the accuracy of the heroic histories she's there to impart.

Hong is always motivated to explore the elusiveness of absolute truth, and as usual he does this by dividing HaHaHa into two complimentary (or perhaps competing) stories: a recounting by Moon-kyoeng of the highlights of his seaside hometown visit, and a parallel recounting by his friend Joong-sik, who coincidentally was visiting the same town with his mistress at the same time. Only the audience gets to see just how close the two men came to bumping into each other, as they frequented the same locations, often with some of the same locals alongside them. Along with the dialogue, these close calls provide much of the humor that helps earn the film its title.

What makes HaHaHa different from any other Hong feature is the typical bifurcation is not a temporal cleave between the first and second halves of the film. Rather, Moon-kyoeng's and Joong-sik's stories are alternated and interwoven throughout the running time. This "normalizes" the film somewhat, which may be why it's the first of Hong's films to have energized a few former detractors I'm spoken to. As a devotee, I find this new approach refreshing and intriguing as well.

When writing about Hong's other 2010 release Oki's Movie (which comes to YBCA June 23 & 26, incidentally), Marc Raymond suggested that "perhaps no other director is less repetitive than Hong," which on the face sounds like an even more perverse provocation than Hasumi Shigehiko's (via Max Tessier) that Yasujiro Ozu is the "least Japanese of all directors." But there's truth in both claims. Perhaps HaHaHa and Oki's Movie (also an obvious structural departure from Hong's usual template) will help observers (including fans such as myself) better see how to distinguish all of Hong's films from each other, despite their surface similarities.

SFIFF54 Day 6
Another option: Chantrapas (GEORGIA/FRANCE: Otar Iosseliani, 2010) In contrast to Hong, I've only seen one of Septuagenarian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani's films, the delightfully Tati-esque Monday Morning, but it's not the fault of the SFIFF that I haven't seen more. They've shown ten of his films over the past thirty years, and this year's US Premiere screening of Chantrapas serves as a tribute to SF Film Society board chair George Gund III, who is a particular fan of the Georgian director, who is expected to be in attendance for tonight's 6PM screening.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Valley Girl at the Red Vic in a 35mm print. I've never seen this flashback from 1983, which was a breakthrough for both director Martha Coolidge and star Nicolas Cage, and begins a two-night stand at a theatre that got its start in the 1980s.

SFIFF54 Day 5: The Troll Hunter

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

The Troll Hunter (NORWAY: André Øvredal, 2010)

playing: 6:15 PM this evening at VIZ/New People, with no more screenings during the festival.
distribution: Set for a June 17th release at the Lumiere and the Shattuck, through Magnolia Pictures.

Norseman André Øvredal's debut feature presents itself as a found-footage object: a documentary recovered from the hands of a trio of student filmmakers traveling around the Norwegian back-country on the trail of the country's remaining specimens of these dangerous creatures. What fundamentally sets it apart from its most obvious precursor, the Blair Witch Project, is the presence of an intermediary expert, the titular character played by Otto Jespersen. Like the students, we can remain skeptical of the film's fantastic conceits, yet engaged, as long as we're interested in this grizzled oddball. Clever formal note: the film's cinematography style changes subtly but perceptibly when different members of the team are behind the camera.

SFIFF54 Day 5
Another option: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (GERMANY/FRANCE/UK/USA/CANADA: Werner Herzog, 2010) One of the hottest tickets of the festival is the beloved Werner Herzog's latest documentary about the 30,000-year old Chauvet Pont d'Arc cave paintings in Southern France, filmed in 3-D no less. Not one of the Bavaria-born filmmaker's masterpieces, but probably my favorite of his films since 2004's The White Diamond.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Baraka at the Red Vic. For many years this Haight Street cinema showed Ron Fricke's spiritual travelogue around Christmastime, but in 2010 they didn't. Perhaps they were saving it for Easter Sunday and Easter Monday 2011. Either slot seems an appropriate calendaring for the many Frisco Bay seekers of alternatives to traditional religious practices.

SFIFF54 Day 4: A Useful Life

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

A Useful Life (URUGUAY: Federico Veiroj, 2010)

playing: 12:00 Noon at VIZ/New People, with two more SFIFF screenings later in the week.
distribution: The Global Film Institute has picked this up for distribution in the United States, but historically very few of the films in its roster have been gotten a true (week-long) commercial theatrical release in San Francisco. So while a DVD may eventually be forthcoming, these three SFIFF screenings could be the most significant in-cinema exposure this film will have for Frisco Bay audiences.

In The Woman Chaser Richard Hudson (played by Patrick Warburton in the 1999 film version of Charles Willeford's novel) can't believe the studio that hired him won't allow him to release his newly-minted action-thriller about the human condition, The Man Who Got Away, simply because of its length: 63 minutes, too short for to sell to drive-in owners and too long to sell to television. Both Hudson and everyone he shows the workprint to agree it's a kind of masterpiece in its current form, and can't imagine what cutting or padding could be done without destroying its potential impact.

Whatever has this to do with A Useful Life, a film very different from the Woman Chaser (although both are monochromatic films made in a multicolored age) or the fictional film within it? A Useful Life is sixty-seven minutes long, and I wouldn't have wanted it to be a minute longer or shorter. Though its story of a Montevideo cinematheque facing a funding crisis that might force it to close, and of the stalwart projectionist/programmer/archivist who must suddenly contemplate an existence outside of the cinema, may seem small, it's a start-to-finish parade of moments of veracity. As well as humor, depth, and even a tingle of romance. The subject of a threatened movie screen should attract cinephiliac viewers, and if they're like me they won't be in the least disappointed.

SFIFF54 Day 4
Another option: Tokyo - Ebisu (JAPAN: Tominari Nishikawa, 2010) Some may remember Nishikawa from the film he made while studying here at the S.F. Art Institute, Market Street. Interestingly, Callum Cooper's Victoria, George, Edward and Thatcher shares a few cursory similarities to Market Street. Both of these works play on the experimental shorts program The Deep End co-presented by SF Cinematheque, which has just announced its own film festival for mid-May.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Hairspray and Serial Mom make up the final double-bill of the Castro Theatre's John Waters Birthday weekend. Neither screens very frequently in 35mm prints.

SFIFF54 Day 3: Coming Attractions

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

Coming Attractions (AUSTRIA: Peter Tscherkassky, 2010)
playing: 4:45 PM this afternoon at the Kabuki, as part of the Mind The Gap shorts program, which also plays Sunday, May 1 at 9:45.
distribution: none that I'm aware of; as an experimental short, extremely unlikely to receive any sort of commercial release in this country

As usual, Carl Martin of the Film On Film Foundation is playing watchdog for those cinephiles who are concerned with whether SFIFF films are screening on film or on video; in addition to an overall preview of the festival from this angle, he's created a very handy calendar listing all the festival screenings expected to be presented on film rather than digitally. Not only does he list the features, but even certain individual short films to be shown on film amidst a program of otherwise-video work.

Coming Attractions is one such example, the lone 35mm entry in the Mind The Gap shorts program. It's the latest by Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, whose Outer Space won a Golden Gate Award from SFIFF eleven years ago, and whose excellent follow-ups Dream Work and Instructions For a Light and Sound Machine have played subsequent festivals.

Like these prior collage films, Coming Attractions is an optical printing tour-de-force constructed out of footage repurposed from other sources, in this case largely images from the first few decades of cinema history, from Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul's 1895 Rough Sea at Dover to Jean Cocteau's 1930 Blood of a Poet. These are re-edited, repeated, solarized or otherwise reprocessed, and organized into chapters along with more recent images from the world of advertising or art cinema- the film even ends with a humorous tip of the hat to Pier Paolo Pasolini. Whether or not the cumulative effect of these eleven segments succeeds in illuminating parallels between avant-garde film traditions and Tom Gunning's "cinema of attractions" is up for debate. What isn't is the epic, near-numbing effect of all the stroboscopic and multiple-exposed images set to a soundtrack of assaultive sound effects and playful samba beats. It's hard to image another 25 minutes of film in the festival providing as much pleasurable sensory overload as this film does.

SFIFF54 Day 3
Another option: Mysteries of Lisbon (PORTUGAL/FRANCE: Raúl Ruiz, 2010) Imagine an episode of Masterpiece Theatre, but directed by one of the world's great auteurs, free to buck all conventions of the "great books on television" genre. Instead of watching it couchside in installments, you see all 4 1/2 hours in a digital projection. Now imagine it being one of the top 2 or 3 highlights of the entire festival. I'd be skeptical myself, but that's just what happened to me and this work in Toronto last fall. Maybe it'll happen to you too at SFIFF? If so, it'll have to be today- it's only festival screening.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Desperate Living/Polyester double-bill at the Castro as part of a John Waters birthday weekend tribute (his 65th was actually yesterday). These are almost certainly my two favorite of his films I've seen. Eric Henderson has called Desperate Living his "most divalicious work ever" despite the absence of Divine, who is at her own career-best in Polyester. Both films play multiple times during the day, so it may be possible to attend both the birthday celebration and a particularly anticipated SFIFF title or two.

SFIFF54 Day 2: Meek's Cutoff

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

Meek's Cutoff (USA: Kelly Reichardt, 2010)
playing: 9:00 PM tonight at the Kabuki, with another screening at 4:30 on Monday.
distribution: Oscilloscope opens it theatrically at the Embarcadero May 6th, just after the festival ends.

When Meek's Cutoff director Kelly Reichardt presented all of her previous films at the PFA last October, it suddenly struck me why it makes so much sense that her latest film is a period piece set among settlers on the formative Oregon Trail. As beautiful and heartbreaking as Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy are, Reichardt in moments seems to be straining to portray how modern Americans communicate (and how we don't) when unplugged from computers and cellphones. Telecommunications "advances" move so swiftly, and penetrate society so deeply, that Old Joy already plays like a period piece and Michelle Williams' phone-less character in Wendy and Lucy seems an improbable anachronism.

All of Reichardt's films explore how individual Americans negotiate with each other, moment-to-moment, face-to-face, without the overbearing baggage of a "social network" as codified by our digitized address books. Meek's Cutoff, which has frequently been read as a commentary on 21st century politics, certainly provides insight into the historical underpinnings of American values and communication styles. There's no soft-pedaling on our forebears' unquestioned racism and sexism, but neither is this beautiful film a simplistic harangue. The proportions assigned to action and words for Meek's band of travelers might make the film's most powerful statements- both regarding the perspiration that came before our current largely sedentary lifestyle, and regarding the nature of images of the West that we've grown up with and used to. I don't know if Reichardt plans to continue to avoid portraying the most superficially-"connected" aspects of contemporary culture, but if so I'd be happy to see her continue plumbing the 1800's for a long time.

SFIFF54 Day 2
Another option: The Good Life (DENMARK: Eva Mulvad, 2010) is a documentary by the same woman who made the excellent Enemies Of Happiness. Kelly Vance calls this new one "good, clean, morbid fun."

Non-SFIFF-option for today: His Girl Friday at the Paramount. Though Oakland's (and Frisco Bay's) most opulent movie palace is not the best place to see a Howard Hawks film unless you've got the dialogue memorized (the sound system being the venue's weak link in its presentations of talking pictures), His Girl Friday doesn't come around so often, and the price ($5) and ambiance make an afternoon cram session with Charles Lederer's script seem like a worthwhile idea.