Before Midnight (2013)

WHO: Richard Linklater directed and co-wrote, with his lead actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, this  feature.

WHAT: What started out as nothing more than a particularly fortuitous mid-nineties Indiewood feature (Before Sunrise) and nine years later became an audacious experiment in sequelization (Before Sunset) is now, with Before Midnight, well on its way to turning into a monumental reinvention of that long-buried, little-regarded cinematic genre: the Saturday matinee serial. Only these films aim at adult audiences, feature more talk than action (or perhaps it's more accurate to say talk as action), and neither compress nor extend time between one episode's cliffhanger and the next's opening moment, but rather allow the audience and the actors as long to wonder what's befallen beloved characters Celine (Delpy) and Jessie (Hawke) in each nine-year interim. So real does this snapshot-moment approach feel, that most critics bypass making comparisons to Pearl White or Buster Crabbe, and head straight to Michael Apted's 49-year, 8-segment (and counting) documentary epic the "Up Series" when making cinematic comparisons in their reviews.

I found Before Midnight to be an incredibly satisfying part three in this (so far) trilogy; it keeps the spirit of the originals (neither of which I've revisited in more than brief clips since 2004) while making some serious structural departures that feel like perfectly logical extensions of the project. But I don't feel I have the words in me to write a review that truly does justice to the achievement here. So instead I'll link to the film's Metacritic page, wherein you'll find plenty of other reviews by some of the country's better critics. I'll note they range from the mostly positive to the wholly positive; I haven't seen any well-argued pans of Before Midnight yet.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at various screens around Frisco Bay this week, including the Embarcadero, Shattuck, Kabuki, Sequoia, Guild, and Camera 7 Theatres.

WHY: You should know, if you haven't already figured it out, that Linklater is not just a filmmaker but a real cinephile. In the 1980s he co-founded the Austin Film Society and befriended one of the real titans of American experimental film, James Benning; this friendship is the subject of a currently-in-production film by one of the smartest young cinephiles around, Gabe Klinger.

Linklater's devotion to the underseen masterpieces of cinema history is well-documented as well; he recently had a piece on Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running published in a book and excerpted in Movie City News (that film screens the Stanford Theatre this Thursday & Friday). Another Minnelli film The Clock came up as an acknowledged influence on the "Before Trilogy" in his on-stage appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival with Julie Delpy and Mike Jones a month ago. (And a lovely clip from it came up in Christian Marclay's The Clock during the early, coffee drinking hours of the installation.)

Delpy was on the verge of revealing another classic film influence on the trilogy, and on Before Midnight in particular, during that SFIFF conversation, but was pulled back by her director, who apparently wanted to keep it a surprise for the audience, most of which had not seen their film yet but would the following night at the fest's designated closing screening. In that spirit I won't reveal the title on this blog other than by linking to the Castro Theatre and Rafael Film Center pages for its upcoming screenings at those venues. So click if you've already seen Before Midnight or don't mind having one of its cinephile references spoiled in advance.

HOW: I believe Before Midnight, the first in Linklater's/Delpy's/Hawke's trilogy to have been shot digitally, is only available to screen as a DCP right now.

The Place Beyond The Pines (2012)

WHO: Mike Patton composed much of the music for this film.

WHAT: The term "neo-noir" gets thrown around an awful lot, often being applied to any modern film that involves criminals and detectives, especially if they're interacting in urban settings providing opportunities to shoot in darkened alleyways and corridors. But the original noir cycle had social and even political signifiers that went beyond the professions or criminal predilections of its characters, or their visual schemes. These films (which were not always set in big cities) were an American manifestation of the existential angst brought upon by the social and moral uncertainties associated with World War II and its horrors.

So to truly earn the term "neo-noir", I think modern films probably need to somehow reflect the specific social and moral uncertainties of our own time, putting their characters into existential crises and exploring the psychological underpinnings of their actions. They can't be simple caper or heist films, or cops & robbers shoot-'em-ups. The Place Beyond The Pines, I think, is one of the few true "neo-noir" films I've seen in recent years, by this definition. I went into it not knowing much about it and I think it's probably best if others do too, so I'm not going to say much about it's plot. 

The film doesn't look (or, thanks to the excellent musical soundtrack, sound) much like what usually gets labeled as "neo-noir". It's decidedly anti-urban, being set in a relatively small upstate New York town, all the better to create a believable microcosm of interconnected human relationships. It's indeed a film all about human relationships, particularly those between fathers and sons, and it mirrors some of the greatest classic noirs in that characters are essentially trapped by their own circumstances and feel fated to make precisely the errors they want so desperately to avoid. It's a lovely, and for me quite moving, film.

WHERE/WHEN: It's screening at more than a dozen Frisco Bay cinemas this week, both arthouse and multiplex, with multiple showtimes each day. I'd like to particularly highlight it's booking at the 4-Star, where it shows 3-4 times daily through this Thursday.

WHY: With the San Francisco International Film Festival receding from view, it might be a good time to catch up with theatrical releases that you weren't able to catch during the festival or the run-up to it. If you waited this long to see The Place Beyond The Pines you're in luck that this shot-on-35mm film only just yesterday became available to view locally via a 35mm print (at the 4-Star only, I believe). It's becoming an increasingly common trend for a film's initial release to local theatres to be a digital one, with a 35mm print appearing only weeks later. Patience can be rewarded for those who like to see their films screened on film. Although we're still waiting to see a print of To The Wonder, for instance.

Additionally, if you liked or even loathed the festival's presentation of the silent Waxworks with a newly-commissioned score by four musicians including Patton, your interest in seeing a film to which he contributed musical accompaniment, with the blessing of its director, may be stoked for comparison purposes. 

Finally, with the Roxie having just embarked on a two-week exploration of classic noir back streets and underpassages (check out Pam Grady's article on the Roxie series if you haven't yet), it may be just the right week to try and fit in a viewing of The Place Beyond The Pines, as a comparison point with the wartime and post-war films being shown there, and so you can let me know what you think of my own reaction to it as an authentic neo-noir piece.

HOW: 35mm print at the 4-Star, but I believe all other theatres are screening via DCP.

Present Tense (2012)

WHO: Belmin Söylemez directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: This film, about a Turkish fortune-teller named Mina, with dreams of emigration, just won the San Francisco International Film Festival New Directors Prize, an award previously given to promising auteurs like Jia Zhang-Ke (for Xiao Wu in 1999), Miranda July (for Me and You and Everyone We Know in 2005), and Pedro González-Rubio (for Alamar in 2010). 

I have not seen Present Tense yet so let me excerpt from an absolutely fascinating article that uses this digital feature as an example of the kind of film being crowded off even Turkey's screens thanks to homogenization pressures created by wholesale DCP conversion of cinemas, written by Emine Yildirim:

Mina could be the epitome of many women living in this country -- aching for a better and more independent life in the midst of uncertainty and economic destitution. The fortune telling sequences in which Mina's predictions are juxtaposed with the faces of many different women promises to become a classic in Turkish cinema; for those of us who live in this culture always want to hear the same future: a way out of our brooding existence into a refreshing place with certain happiness and good fortune.

WHERE/WHEN: Final San Francisco International Film Festival screening this afternoon at 2:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: It's the final day of SFIFF, and there are still plenty of movies left to watch; it would be absurd to imagine someone having been able to see them all. I can certainly recommend The Search For Emak Bakia (which also screens post-festival at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco a week from tomorrow) and Leviathan if you haven't seen them yet. Or, if you want to end the festival on an enormously satisfying cliffhanger, the official closing night offering Before Midnight.  I don't think that's a spoiler; anyone who has seen the previous entries in this continuing Richard Linklater/Julie Delpy/Ethan Hawke serial, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, should know what to expect in the way of narrative structure even if they're sure to be surprised by the details.

But with most of the festival's awards now announced (audience awards are usually revealed during the closing night film presentation), there are a few more recommendations of films on today's festival slate, made by the festival's various juries of filmmakers, curators and critics. In addition to Present Tense, one of the two New Directors Prize runners-up, the Peruvian The Cleaner also has a final showtime today. The other runner-up La Sirga and the FIPRESCI Jury pick Nights With Theodore have no further festival screenings.

Then there are the Golden Gate Awards, the longest-standing of the SFIFF awards given as they go back to the 1957 inaugural festival's prizes for Pather Panchali, Uncle Vanya and The Captain from Köpenick. It was fifty-one years ago that The People Vs. Paul Crump, a documentary about a death row inmate, won a Golden Gate Award for its young director William Friedkin, just starting out on his filmmaking career. Friedkin returned to SFIFF this year to give a master class and screen his terrific 1985 film To Live & Die In L.A. If you missed it at the festival, I've recently learned it will circle back to Frisco Bay this September when it's included in a six-film Pacific Film Archive retrospective for the director, also to include The French Connection, Cruising and (in my opinion) his greatest film Sorcerer, the latter along with an in-person conversation between Freidkin and my friend Michael Guillén.

But back to this year's GGAs and their winners (any of whom might be a future Freidkin?): The Documentary Feature GGA went to Kalyanee Mam's introduction to social and environmental issues in Cambodia entitled A River Changes Course. It has no more SFIFF showings but will screen at the just-announced SF Green Film Festival on June 1st. The Bay Area Documentary Feature GGA went to Dan Krauss's The Kill Team, which you may have heard about via On the Media; it screens one last time at SFIFF tonight at 6:00.

Twelve different shorts were also winners or honorable mentions for GGAs in various subcategories: narrative, documentary, animation, youth works, family films, etc. If you missed out on seeing these on this year's shorts programs, there's still one chance to see three GGA winners (and four other shorts) on the Shorts 4: New Visions program this evening. The New Visions category winner was Alfredo Covelli's single-take documentary of the aftermath of a violent event, Salmon, and both the first-prize and second-prize winners in the Bay Area short category also came from the New Visions section: 3020 Laguna St. In Exitum, Ashley Rodholm & Joe Picard's enigmatic documentation of an unusual Cow Hollow art exhibition won first prize, while Jonn Herschend's hilariously uncomfortable spoof of the in-house industrial video, More Real, took second. All three of these screen at 8:30 at New People.

HOW: Present Tense was shot on video, and will be screened on video, as will all the other screening titles I mention in this post. Except for, I'm hoping, the Freidkin films coming to the PFA in September.

CXL (2012)

WHO: Sean Gillane directed this, and is also credited as cinematographer, editor & co-writer. Full disclosure: I've known Sean personally for a few years now, mostly through his twitter persona and his annual coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHAT: CXL is an unusual movie with an equally unusual title- it's a bookselling industry term indicating indicating a cancelled order, which somehow seems quite appropriate for a work that forces the audience to scrap all its expectations about where the plot is going. Fine performances, a strong music soundtrack, exquisite digital photography of familiar (and unfamiliar) Frisco Bay locations, and some impressively seamless low-budget visual effects work make this worthwhile viewing for anyone willing to follow a narrative down unusual paths.

What CXL ultimately amounts to is harder to say, at least after only a single viewing. On the occasion of its single local screening last November, Michael Fox put it well:

CXL [...] is a puzzle movie that I haven't cracked. A second viewing would certainly help, and that's anything but a dig: I happily left Antonioni and Bergman films with swarms of unanswered questions. I'll advance the proposition that CXL is a kind of urban coming-of-age story about a protagonist who isn't as certain in his identity as he'd like others -- or himself -- to think. He's a good guy, and he's trying to do his best, but life is more of a conundrum than he can perhaps handle.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie at 7:15.

WHY: Yes, the San Francisco International Film Festival is still running for another two days, and there are certainly some worthwhile screenings happening at SFIFF venues today (I can particularly recommend The Strange Little Cat, which I wrote about here.) But it's time to start thinking about other local cinemas we may have been ignoring during the festival, perhaps foremost among them the Roxie, to my knowledge the longest-running cinema in the area- perhaps the entire country (an abbreviated history going back to 1909 can be read here).


The Roxie has been running the excellent feature Upstream Color and the intriguing documentary The Source Family for a little while now, and will continue to screen both for at least another week. But starting tonight with the much-welcomed second chance to see CXL on the big screen, the venue will be changing programming every day. Tomorrow is a Detroit firefighting doc called Burn. And Friday marks the beginning of the popular, annual I Wake Up Dreaming series of films noir programmed by the brilliant Elliot Lavine. This year's set starts with the noir that some scholars consider the first in the entire cycle of fatalistic crime films that became a major cultural staple in the 1940s and 50s, the 1941 Betty Grable(!) vehicle I Wake Up Screaming. Of course it's also the inspiration for the name of the series, and extremely rare to see on the big screen (I think it's been about ten years since it last played Frisco Bay.) I'll be writing more on the series soon, but would initially point to Shakedown and Autumn Leaves as particularly uncommonly-seen must-sees.

HOW: CXL will be a digital presentation of a digital feature.

Waxworks (1924)

WHO: Paul Leni was both director and art director on this film.

WHAT: Waxworks was the last feature made by German director Leni before he emigrated to Hollywood to make films like The Cat and the Canary and The Man Who Laughs, before an early death befell him at age 44, in 1929.

Waxworks has never been a particular favorite of mine from among the canonized classics of German expressionistic horror, but I suspect this may be because I've never seen it on the big screen. As a film, much like Murnau's masterpiece Faust, where visual design overwhelms narrative and character (even with a cast full of heavyweights: Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss and William Dieterle in main roles), it seems certain that to get the same kind of impact out of the imagery that the critics and filmmakers who canonized it did, one needs to see it on as big a screen as possible.

The film mirrors Fritz Lang's Destiny in presenting a frame story and three stories-within-stories. Jannings plays Harun al-Rashid, Veidt takes the role of Ivan the Terrible (in a sequence that Lotte Eisner claimed influenced Sergei Eisenstein), and Krauss is Spring-heeled Jack, while Dieterle portrays a writer hired by a wax museum to write narratives about these figures in his collection.

Eisner features the film prominently in a chapter called "Decorative Expressionism" in her essential book The Haunted Screen. Here's an excerpt, focusing on Leni's set design:

The low ceilings and vaults oblige the characters to stoop, and force them into those jerky movements and broken gestures which produce the extravagant curves and diagonals required by Expressionist precept. If the Expressionism in the caliph episode is confined to the settings, in the Russian episode it completely withdraws into the attitudes of the characters, as when the bloodthirsty Tsar and his counsellor move in front of a wall in carefully stylized parallel attitudes, with their trunks jack-knifed forward.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screening tonight only at 8:30 PM at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: I'm extremely excited to see Waxworks on the Castro screen, but I'm not sure I'd recommend the experience to everyone. The screening marks the SFIFF's annual experiment in presenting a silent film with a newly-commissioned score by musicians known for working in a musical idiom, and promises to be one of the most experimental entries in this tradition. Waxworks will be accompanied by vocalist Mike Patton (of Faith No More, Fantômas, and many other musical projects) and three percussionists (Matthias Bossi, Scott Amendola and William Winant), each known for pushing the envelope of musical expression. I've followed Patton's work for years and seen him perform live several times, so "I plan to go as a Patton fan and leave my German Expressionist hat in the closet."

That quote comes from a Paste Magazine article on tonight's screening, for which I was interviewed to provide perspective on the SFIFF's long tradition of presenting silent film screenings, and some of the hazards of making film-musician pairings when the latter are novices as playing for silent film. The author, Jeremy Mathews, also interviews Sean Uyehara, the SFIFF programmer who has been the caretaker of this series in recent years, as well as Bossi, whose comments make me optimistic that tonight's score will go down as one of the better SFIFF presentations. Although I have to say that even when these pairings fail to produce a stellar film-music combination, I sometimes enjoy the event quite a bit anyway; hearing Mountain Goats perform a lovely set on the Castro Theatre stage, and seeing a terrific print of Sir Arne's Treasure flicker on its screen, at a December 2010 Film Society event was very much worth my while, even if it was as if the two activities were happening in the same space and time without one having much to do with the other.

For those who desire a more authentic silent film & live music experience, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum continues to provide one weekly, and has just announced its May and June schedules as well as the line-up of its June 28-30 Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, which will include a Saturday matinee screening of a German silent from 1926, The Adventures of Prince Achmed with Judith Rosenberg on piano. And although the July San Francisco Silent Film Festival hasn't announced its program yet, but it's been leaking a few titles through various channels (most recently Safety Last! through Facebook), including a German title starring Werner Krauss, The Joyless Street. In the meantime they of course host nine early films by the German-trained Alfred Hitchcock at the Castro in June.

If you're not a Mike Patton (or Matthias Bossi or Scott Amerndola or William Winant) fan, and you're not sure you want to attend a classic film screening with a musical soundtrack likely to be incongruous to styles used during the jazz age, the SFIFF is screening three other classics of a far more recent vintage today. The 1971 Finnish made-for-television work Eight Deadly Shots screens for five and a half hours this afternoon. Meanwhile, the 1993 Best Picture nominee The Fugitive screens as part of a Harrison Ford in-person tribute. And in the evening, conflicting with the Waxworks screening, director William Freidkin will be at New People to screen his underrated 1985 thriller To Live & Die In L.A. 

HOW: Waxworks will screen via a 35mm print from Cineteca de Bologna.

The Search For Emak Bakia (2012)

WHO: Man Ray is the elusive (though not entirely so) subject of this piece.

WHAT: One of the most surprising discoveries of the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival for me has been this feature-length retracing, re-examining, and even remaking of Man Ray's experimental short Emak-Bakia. I'm pleased that Terri Saul has agreed to premiere an excellent (and essentially spoiler-free) review of the film for Hell On Frisco Bay readers:

Oskar Alegria's The Search For Emak Bakia is not a film that was made in the editing room; it was lived. The rough translation of Emak Bakia is a Basque term meaning, gruffly, "Leave me alone." 

Ekphrastic, the film-slash-poem-slash-collage, is a work of art that is made in reaction to, or to explore, another work of art, a 1926 film by Man Ray. It is art as dialog, a dialog requiring patience. If made in the traditional way the director would be constantly telling his backers, "Leave me alone. I'm not finished and I don't know when I will be."

The SFIFF audience reaction was a highlight of Saturday's experience. Alegria's curiosity made the audience curiouser and curiouser, alive, observant, awakened. He had an historian's sense of wanting to acknowledge truth, the forgotten past, a list of disappearing words, places, place names. 

Stepping into the unknown, not only linguistically (The film is primarily in French and Alegria began the project not speaking French) he took on the role of art historian, cultural anthropologist, and a poet who is also a linguist. 

Journalist and film-maker, Oskar Alegria told himself, "Let's follow a rabbit's path, down the rabbit hole." He knew his idea to chase a mystery by unconventional means, such as following a plastic glove blowing down the middle of a street, would never be fully supported by his occupational, rational journalist self who enjoyed reporting serious facts, counting the number of boats in a harbor for example. Alegria said during the Q&A that he wanted to kill his inner journalist, the editor with a sellable story in mind. 

One of Alegria's interview subjects, a Basque musician, also acknowledged what I call "salvage anthropology," those who attempt to rescue or are "addicted to" their own ancestral-patterned past vs. those who want to remember the past and yet adapt to their current context in a more musical way than via forced salvaging. 

One scene intermittently illuminates a silhouette of a cat watching lightning strike the subject of the film's treasure hunt. The cat has the same approach as the film-maker, to alternate between patience and curiosity to see what develops. Alegria seems to be saying: "Don't just MAKE a film. Don't make ONLY a film." In other words (spoiler alert), sit in the pigsty with the pigs in order to get your shot. 

While shooting a bull, engaging its eyes, Algeria kept rolling while wind blew his camera 360 degrees, violating, as did Man Ray, the horizon. We rolled with the camera then, remembering a soundtrack of whistling oak branches recorded earlier, in situ. 

When Alegria filmed volunteer "eyelid models," he juxtaposed their dreaming gaze with Man Ray's shots of freshly opened actress' eyes, fluttering not so much like butterflies, but more like like sleepy bulls in the aforementioned breezy field, matching the film's unselfconscious dream-state. 

A group of older women leapt from the audience to ask questions after the screening, notably those born prior to the digital age. Happily, Alegria treated the nonagenarian women in his art-story with the respect and attention typically reserved for the young and conventionally beautiful in the world of film, festivals, and media events. He also gave his festival audience the same. 

The film will probably not enjoy a release to DVD because as Alegria himself says, it's not a commercial project. It's not a film. It just happens to use film as its medium.

WHERE/WHEN: Two more SFIFF screenings: one tonight at 8:45 at the Kabuki, and one on Thursday, May 9th, at 3:30 at New People.

WHY: I'm fascinated that Alegria has been able to make a poetic, humorous, informative, and never-dull feature-length documentary about an experiment in film form, by investigating it from just about every conceivable angle except for its formal qualities. Emak-Bakia is explored through its documentary aspects, its linguistic aspects, as psycho-geography and as cultural artifact. But certain aspects of Ray's film are barely touched upon, particularly its cameraless and more abstract segments. Part of me feels that this means there's something important missing from Alegria's film, but another part rejoices that a self-described (in the q&a) non-filmmaker could put together such an elaborate and engaging work without demonstrating much in the way of Ray's technique. I'd love to see a similar approach applied to a film by Stan Brakhage or Paul Sharits or Chick Strand someday.

The SFIFF has one more screening of a short film made using some of the cameraless techniques pioneered by Man Ray: Conjuror's Box is, like Emak-Bakia, a silent film, and it will screen with a live electronic organ accompaniment by the one and only V. Vale as part of a shorts program on Thursday May 9th at 8:30 at New People.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digitally-shot feature.

The Mattei Affair (1972)

WHO: Francesco Rosi directed this.

WHAT: Not only have I never seen The Mattei Affair, I've never (to my shame) seen any film directed by Rosi. Please don't tell him. Anyway, since I want to highlight this screening today, but am supremely unqualfied to say anything about it, let me quote from a Senses Of Cinema Rosi profile by Gino Moliterno:

Rosi employs a non-linear investigative mode which allows him to bring together, often paratactically or in juxtaposition, a range of disparate materials, both real and fictionally recreated, in an attempt to get closer to the truth.

WHERE/WHEN: Final San Francisco International Film Festival screening today at 1:30 PM at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: It's at that point in the festival when I'm too overextended to write much. But I just wanted to highlight this screening, which as I noted yesterday has been changed from a DCP to a 35mm film presentation at the last moment, and which starts a full day of unique and highly interesting programs. Following The Mattei Affair is No More Road Trips?, Rick Prelinger's interactive amateur-movie compliation that contemplates our history automotive travel at a time when it's becoming less and less affordable for the majority of Americans. (I wrote on it the other day.) The evening ends with the festival's annual Directing Award, this time going to Philip Kaufman, who made The Right Stuff, Henry & June, and perhaps most beloved among Frisco Bay movie fans, Invasion of the Body Snatchers- the latter will screen after an onstage conversation.

HOW: 35mm print.

Helsinki, Forever (2008)

 

WHO: Peter Von Bagh made this.

WHAT: I have not seen this film, so let me quote from a short piece by Jonathan Rosenbaum:

a lovely city symphony which is also a history of Helsinki (and incidentally, Finland, Finnish cinema, and Finnish pop music) recounted with film clips and paintings

Sounds great, and perhaps not so dissimilar from Thom Andersen's amazing 2003 visual essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, which argues a history of that city through clips from fiction films shot there. And it turns out this comparison has been made before by writers who have seen both works.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screening this afternoon at 3:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: First of all, the subject of the film sounds just up my alley and makes me think I'll be trying to track down a copy of World Film Locations: Helsinki soon after the screening. Which reminds me to mention that the volume in that series of books that I contributed an essay to, World Film Locations: San Francisco, is now available for pre-order.

But the occasion of the screening would make me want to attend even if the film didn't sound as interesting to me as it does. Director Von Bagh will be on hand for the show, as he is receiving the Mel Novikoff Award for work that has "has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema"- an award that has gone to critics like Manny Farber and Roger Ebert, archivists like Kevin Brownlow and Serge Bromberg, and programmers like Bruce Goldstein and Anita Monga. Von Bagh is not only a filmmaker but a historian and the director of the Midnight Sun Film Festival held in Sodankylä, Lapland at the time of summer each year when night never falls above the arctic circle, making the inside of a cinema the darkest place around 24 hours a day.

I don't know when I first heard rumor of this festival, but read more about it in Kenneth Turan's book Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made, which immediately shot it to the top tier of my list of festivals I dream of attending one day. Looking at a partial list of filmmaker guests over the years make it clear that Von Bagh and his programming team have terrific taste, and my understanding is that Von Bagh is something of a film-on-film purist, insisting on film screenings even in the waning days of its viability as a mass-market medium.

The other day, I happened to be at a screening sitting next to another award recipient at this year's SFIFF: Philip Kaufman, who will be at the Castro Theatre tomorrow evening for an on-stage conversation before a screening of his great 1978 shot-in-San Francisco remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We got to talking, and he told me he'll be at the Midnight Sun festival for the first time this summer, and that he's currently trying to track down good prints of films he hopes to show there. Invasion of the Body Snatchers will be shown tomorrow digitally, however. 

But as film purist Carl Martin notes in his latest SFIFF round-up, last night's screening of Marketa Lazarová began with an announcement that another Castro screening of a 1970s film tomorrow will be screened on 35mm instead of previously-expected DCP. The film is The Mattei Affair, a political thriller by Francesco Rosi, a filmmaker who, like Kaufman, received an award from the SFIFF (in 1981) and later went on to attend the Midnight Sun festival (in 1999). Why is it being shown in 35mm even though the Film Foundation has helped prepare a new DCP they're trying to show off? The answer lies in Frako Loden's latest SFIFF round-up article, in which she reports on last weekend's  Pacific Film Archive screening via its new digital projector, in which subtitles froze on screen and essentially ruined the experience for non-Italian speakers in the audience. Rather than risk a repeat of such a snafu at the Castro, the festival has opted to use a trusty 35mm print for the 1:30 PM matinee. 

HOW: Helsinki, Forever screens in 35mm.

Marketa Lazarová (1967)

WHO: Czech director František Vláčil made this.

WHAT: The second and final full week of the San Francisco International Film Festival starts today. I was recruited to provide seven week 2 picks for the 7x7 website and the piece was just published. Since one of my picks is Marketa Lazarová, let me quote from myself:

If you thought Soviet master Andrei Tarkovsky was the only Eastern Bloc filmmaker to meticulously recreate the Middle Ages in a stunning, black-and-white widescreen epic, you need to see František Vlácil's 1967 film, Marketa Lazarová, perennially named the "greatest Czech film of all time." Its unblinking approach to medieval violence between pagans and Christians easily puts it in a class with Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev,

WHERE/WHEN: Final SFIFF screening tonight at 8:45 at New People Cinema.

WHY: Tonight's screening is a special event. Marketa Lazarová screens in honor of George Gund III, who chaired the board of the San Francisco Film Society until his death this past January. Gund was a tireless advocate of Eastern European and Czechoslovakian cinema in particular, and the print of Vlácil's masterpiece I first viewed at the Pacific Film Archive more than ten years ago came to the PFA directly due to Gund.

I was always too shy to approach the SFFS board president when I saw him at festival events. Part of this must have been due to a sense of regret planted in me from childhood. Growing up in a middle-class household less than a block from Alamo Elementary School in the Richmond District, I attended that school and befriended Gund's son Gregory, who was exactly one day older than me and was a member my first-grade class. When we became friends I had no idea how wealthy Greg's family was; all I knew is that hockey was a big deal in his household, but that he was also the only boy in my grade who was willing to forego playing team sports during recess and lunch in order to hang out with an unathletic kid like me and play word games and pore over Safari cards. Once I was invited over to the family home- I'd never knew about mansions with elevators before. My friendship with Greg ended when he moved to Idaho the summer after first grade (presumably a move related to the Gund connection to the Sun Valley Suns). I lost touch with him as most kids tend to do when friends move, and by the time I seriously thought of trying to contact him again, it was too late, as he'd recently been killed in a plane crash.

So I'll be attending tonight's screening not just to see a great work of cinematic art, but to pay some small tribute to the man whose parenting produced a little boy who made early elementary school far more bearable for an introverted kid like me.

HOW: 35mm print.

Words of Mercury (2011)

WHO: Jerome Hiler made this.

WHAT: I haven't seen Words of Mercury in over a year, and even when I did I was forced to see it in a compromised quality (on video rather than 16mm film) so let me excerpt a brief quote from a 2012 review of the film (which, if intrigued, you should read in its entirety) by P. Adams Sitney:

The opening superimposition of Words of Mercury ... layers a dance of jittering lights over a crepuscular landscape, as if the pencil-thin white and colored lines of light were swarming midair before a barely discernible background of trees, as night falls.

WHERE/WHEN: Words of Mercury screens on a SFMOMA program starting at 7:00 tonight only. 

WHY: Today marks the midpoint of the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival, and there are certainly screenings of interest happening tonight; the first festival showings of Salma, Computer Chess and Frances Ha (all at the Kabuki) and the final festival showings of Something In The Air and The Act Of Killing (both at the Pacific Film Archive), for example. 

But the festival is not the only interesting screening entity in town over these two weeks, as I noted by cataloging most of the alternative film screening opportunities during SFIFF in a post last week. Tonight in particular there are some very tempting alternate options to see rarely-screened films. The Stanford shows the 1953 War of the Worlds and the early Ray Harryhausen effects showcase 20 Million Miles To Earth today and tomorrow. Oddball Films has a 16mm set of Jewish comedy shorts. And the Castro hosts a very enticing Nicolas Roeg bill. Note that since my post last week, the Castro has released its entire May calendar, including a double-feature of Badlands (on DCP) and Electra Glide In Blue (in 35mm) happening the night before the SFIFF closing night presentation of Richard Linklater's terrific Before Midnight at that venue.

All of this is enticing but screenings of Jerome Hiler films projected properly may be rarer than all of the above combined. Although, as Carl Martin has noted, Words of Mercury was in fact a 2012 SFIFF selection, it screened on film only at it's PFA screening. It was shown on video at New People because the latter venue then lacked a variable-speed 16mm projector that could show the film at its maker's desired frame-rate. So tonight's screening feels like the completion of some unfinished business from last year's festival for some of us.

HOW: Words of Mercury screens in 16mm, along with a new work by Hiler and two of the films most newly made by his partner Nathaniel Dorsky.

Spend It All (1971)

WHO: The late, great Les Blank directed this.

WHAT: Some critics, curators, and historians try to group Les Blank's documentaries into three categories: the music films typified by The Blues Accordin' To Lightnin' Hopkins and Chulas Fronteras, the food films such as Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers and All In This Tea, and the "everything else" films like Burden of Dreams and Gap-Toothed Women. In truth, all of his films that I've seen (not the entire catalog, but a good-sized selection) are rich in scenes depicting the preparation and/or consumption of food. They all prominently feature music, usually by accomplished 'folk' or 'roots' musicians. And they all contain a great deal of "everything else". 

Spend It All, one of Blank's (in Max Goldberg's words) "city symphonies set to the languid pace of Cajun country" is exemplary of this. If I had to classify it in one of the three categories I wouldn't know how to choose. There's plenty of  music, performed by fiddlers and accordionists like The Balfa Brothers, Nathan Abshire and Marc Savoy, a familiar face in later Blank documentaries J'ai Été au Bal, Yum, Yum, Yum!: A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking and Marc and Ann. There's plenty of food, too, with copious scenes of shellfish, crustaceans, and even coffee being prepared Louisiana-style. But there's a lot of "everything else" as well: shots of young (and younger) jockeys at a country horse racing track, for example. And most poignantly for a film screening so soon after its maker's death, we get a tour of a brushy cemetery, including a shot of a tombstone engraved with a common Cajun name very similar to his own: "LeBlanc".

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at 7:00 at New People and 8:45 Friday at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Spend It All is part of a three-film tribute to Les Blank, who was known to be dying of cancer when the SFIFF announced these screenings last month, and who indeed succumbed a week later. The set of three rarely-seen shorts includes two not featured in last summer's PFA retrospective: the 1967 Christopher Tree, which Blank photographed and edited but is not credited with directing, and Chicken Real, Blank's own favorite of the sometimes-subversive industrial films he made for hire, early in his career, for various American companies including Shakey's Pizza, Smucker's Jam, and in this case factory farming pioneer Holly Farms. 

Blank's son and fellow filmmaker Harrold is expected to attend the screenings.


HOW: All three films will screen in brand new 16mm prints of recent restorations by the Academy Film Archive.

Sofia's Last Ambulance (2012)

WHO: Dr. Krasimir Yordanov, nurse Mila Mihaylova and ambulance driver Plamen Slavkov are the subjects of this documentary, with one of their faces shown in nearly every shot.

WHAT: The close-up, as one of the elements of cinema that most clearly distinguishes the medium from storytelling forms like the novel or the play, has received quite a bit of scholarly inquiry. I wonder if much attention has been paid to close-ups in documentary work. In this portrait of three members of an ambulance unit in Bulgaria's capital city, close-ups captured both by dashboard-mounted cameras and by director Ilian Metev in scenes in which the team deals directly with patients, seem less an aesthetic strategy than an ethical strategy, allowing patient faces to remain anonymous for privacy's sake. But an ethical strategy becomes an aesthetic one by fiat, allowing these three medical professionals to become the true centers of identification in what becomes a story about their compassion and heroism in the face of a cash-strapped municipal health system.

Watching Plamen Slavkov's face as he maneuvers his vehicle through dangerous city traffic, or Mila Mihaylova's as she tries to console a gurney-bound child who had a wardrobe topple onto her fragile body, or Dr. Yordanov's as he dispenses critical advice to 28-year-old heroin addict and his invisible but obviously distraught mother, illustrates their dedication to providing crucial services to a desperate populace, despite the incredibly low wages that have other members of their profession to seek work in other fields or other countries. These real people may not be human saints along the lines of Joan of Arc, but close-ups become a portal to emotion in a way that recalls Maria Falconetti's portrayal of her in that most famously compassion-eliciting of films, Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings at the Pacific Film Archive tonight at 8:50, and at the Kabuki May 3rd at 3:30.

WHY: The SFIFF press department provides lists of "Special Interest Categories" for festival-accredited journalists who might be daunted by the task of combing through the entire program guide to find the comedies, or the films about seniors, or the films made by women directors (for the record, there are 19, not counting shorts, according to the list provided).

One list is of "Health / Medicine"-related films, and includes, of course, Sofia's Last Ambulance as well as another documentary highlighting medical professionals called After Tiller. There are also four fiction features on this list, each with at least one more festival screening, whose characters must contend with disease: Big Blue Lake, Rosie, Unfinished Song and Youth. At least two more festival films might be sensible additions as well, both of them added screenings announced after the original lists were compiled. Both are also 1990s-era Hollywood thrillers that involve the shadowy, conspiratorially corporatist influence on health and health care. Michael Mann's The Insider is based on the true story of a whistle-blower within the American tobacco industry, and screens in 35mm as part of a May 8th on-stage tribute to its screenwriter Eric Roth. The film to accompany Harrison Ford's May 7th tribute has just been revealed as well: it's the now-twenty-year-old The Fugitive, in which Ford plays a doctor framed for the murder of his own wife, and who must use his physician skills to survive and find the real killer while on the run from Tommy Lee Jones, after fate spectacularly derails his punishment for this crime he did not commit. 

HOW: Sofia's Last Ambulance is a digitally-shot documentary and will screen on DCP.

Leviathan (2012)

WHO: Lucien Castaing-Taylor (of Sweetgrass) and Verena Paravel (of Foreign Parts) co-directed this documentary.

WHAT: If documentaries shine clarifying light into mysterious corners, Leviathan illuminates just how literally tenebrous a subject can be. Bookendend in blackness, brushstrokes of light captured by ultra-portable videocameras paint, detail-by-detail, what ultimately becomes a canvas illustrating the workings of a Northeastern seafood trawler. First harshly machine-like, this floating factory's human operation comes into focus before fade-out. If Herman Melville'd had access to GoPro technology, would we still read Moby Dick?

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at 8:45 at the Pacific Film Archive, with an added screening at the Kabuki, at 5:30 on May 9th. 

WHY: The capsule review in the above "WHAT" section of this post is exactly seventy-five words long. I counted because this is the maximum credentialled press are allowed to use when writing on certain SFIFF films each year. Called the "hold review" policy, it's meant to encourage writers to save detailed reviews and articles until the theatrical releases of features with distribution. Sometimes it makes perfect sense; when Olivier Assayas's Something In The Air is set to open locally on May 17th, or even when Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing has a farther-in-the-future release date of August 9th, it makes sense for the festival and its distributor partners to put pressure on critics to wait to have their full say at a time when it will most benefit theatres who've booked a commercial run, the distributors themselves, and arguably the audiences, who will have more options for viewing than just a few festival screenings at very select theatres and times.

In the case of Leviathan, whose distributor is the admirable but small Cinema Guild, a local commercial release in a Frisco Bay cinema is a more open question. A week-long run in New York City occurred over a month ago, and the accompanying reviews have already been published. Considering the popularity of this particular doc at SFIFF, it's not out of the question that the Roxie might chance a booking (in which case I'll be trumpeting it as loudly as I can to anyone who'll listen), but I wouldn't count on it. So hopefully my seventy-five words are enough to help you decide whether or not to get a festival ticket, because this may be your only chance to see it on a local cinema screen.

HOW: DCP presentation of an all-digital work.

Morning of St. Anthony's Day (2012)

WHO: João Pedro Rodrigues directed this.

WHAT: Have you ever felt like you were in a George Romero movie on the morning after a full-fledged Bacchanal? The stars of Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day sure have. It may be useful contextual information to know that St. Anthony's Day is a municipal holiday in Lisbon, Portugal (where this was shot), marking the June 13, 1231 death of the Franciscan monk, who was canonized only a year later. His statue in that city's Alvalade Square, and lines from a poem by Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (although not the lines that mention St. Anthony) also figure into this piece.

To get a written feel for the work, I can't really improve on Jorge Mourinha's description:

Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day is a deadpan, dialogue-free look at the aftermath of a night spent partying, precisely choreographed as a sort of hungover, slow-motion zombie flash mob and shot as if an alien Big Brother was watching humankind and asking what the hell is going on. Even if slightly overlong, it’s by far the loosest, cheeriest work of a director usually not known for his sense of humour, though this is more the Roy Andersson variety of dry, poignant wit.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at 9:30 and Thursday May 9th at 8:30, both at New People Cinema.

WHY: As much excitement there may be in the selections of films the programming team brings to SFIFF every year, every cinephile who pays attention to the international festival scene probably can think of at least one or two that haven't been brought but they wish were. For me, new films by two directors, whose prior films (Wild Grass and To Die Like A Man) were among my favorite SFIFF films in 2010, stand out: Alain Resnais's You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet and João Pedro Rodrigues's The Last Time I Saw Macao. While I hope both play Frisco Bay cinemas at some point in the next several months, I'm glad to be tided over in the latter instance by this Rodrigues short that has gotten less international exposure.

Morning of St. Anthony's Day screens as part of an eclectic program going by the title Shorts 4: New Visions, but it's actually quite a substantial work. At 25 minutes in length, it's more than twice as long as any of this program's other shorts, which range from five to twelve minutes in duration. With all the feature-length (and, in the case of Penance and Eight Deadly Shots, much longer) possibilities to cram into a festival schedule, many attendees systematically avoid scheduling shorts programs. But people who came to be fans of a filmmaker like Rodrigues (or of Joan Chen or of Grégoire Colin, both of whom have directed shorts playing in other festival shorts programs) through features may want to rethink this strategy, and they may be exposed to some great work by filmmakers who regularly eschew feature-length running times as well.

HOW: Digital video screening of a digital video work, as part of a program of five other video works along with one 35mm silent film with live musical accompaniment.

Verses (2012)

WHO: Local artist James Sansing made this film.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

The Pervert's Guide To Ideology (2012)

WHO: Sophie Fiennes directed this.

WHAT: If you saw Slavoj Žižek holding court on screen in Fiennes's 2006 feature The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, you know what to expect here: an often light-hearted lecture by one of the world's most colorful philosophers, illustrated by clips and wry recreations of set designs from twenty-four films, among them They Live, Jaws, Triumph of the Will, The Fireman's Ball, and one of Žižek's all-time favorites, The Sound of Music. I have not seen this "sequel" yet, but I understand that instead of investigating the cinema itself from the often contrarian (thus perverted- in the non-sexual sense of the term) point of view of its host, as the 2006 film did, The Pervert's Guide To Ideology utilizes cinema as a lens through which to re-examine our preconceived beliefs about society, history and ideology itself. How successful it is at this has been debated since its world premiere last fall. For a sense of the debate, try this Keyframe Daily post from last November.

The comparison may seem specious once I see it, but I can't help but think of parallels to Christian Marclay's The Clock, which also excerpts from cinema history in order to make the viewer ruminate not so much on movies and their formal qualities, but on their social uses and issues rippling far beyond the screen or the walls surrounding it.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screening tonight and on May 5th at 9:15 PM each night at the Kabuki, and at 3:30 on May 1 at New People

WHY: Since I haven't seen The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, I can't exactly recommend it, but it does appear to be one of the titles cinephiles might want to consider seeing today, the first full day of the festival. Others include Raúl Ruiz's swan song Night Across The Street, the critically-lauded fishing documentary Leviathan, and the latest from Takeshi Kitano, Outrage Beyond. 

These are just educated guesses; tomorrow I'll start posting about SFIFF films I've actually seen. But not having seen a film hasn't stopped me from mentioning it on this blog before (though I try to be careful to make sure it's clear whether I have or haven't) and the festival itself is promoting sight-unseen SFIFF picks by six local celebrities and a sports team. For truly informed suggestions for what to see over the next two weeks it's best to consult critics who have actually seen the films they write about. Again, try Keyframe Daily for links to reviews and capsules by just such critics.

Connections between The Pervert's Guide To Ideology and other films in the SFIFF program are probably legion. But I have seen one film that shares with it an engagement with The Sound of Music: Scott Stark's Bloom, which is part of the Shorts 5 program of experimental works screening tomorrow and this Tuesday. Two films Žižek is reported to excerpt are screening at the Castro over the next few days, though not at the festival: A Clockwork Orange and Brazil. I looked in vain on the list of 24 for a title starring the just-announced recipient of the Peter J. Owens Award: Harrison Ford, but he's nowhere to be found. Nor did he appear in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema; the clip of The Conversation used in that piece was not one of his relatively few scenes.

HOW: Perverts Guide To Ideology screens digitally, as it was made digitally (although the clips it excerpts from were shot on film, thus perhaps representing too much of a compromise for the most hard-core film-as-film purists).