My 60th San Francisco International Film Festival Plans

Image from Xiu Xiu: the Sent-Down Girl supplied by SFFILM

Goodbye SFIFF. *sniff* Hello SFFILM!

The San Francisco International Film Festival, while celebrating its 60th iteration, is undergoing a major rebranding. As Michael Hawley points out in his March 24 festival preview piece, we saw "hints of impending change in some of the graphics used during last year's festival and now it's become official. Henceforth, the festival's parent organization, the San Francisco Film Society, will be officially known as SFFILM, and the preferred name for its annual festival is the SFFILM Festival." Hawley's been attending since 1976, 23 years longer than I have, so he's seen more dramatic changes over the years (like when it moved from October to April in the early eighties); what I've seen over the past eighteen has generally felt more like natural evolutions and minor tweaks by comparison.

What's in a name? Maybe not much, on it's own. I'm not quite sure what factors played into the change, though when Hawley quotes The Festival's fourth-year Executive Director Noah Cowan as saying it "provides a new kind of flexibility" and "reflects the reality and breadth of our programming" I wonder what former words were found inflexible or unrealistic. "International"? Though the Cowan-era "Marquee Presentations" section of the program, focusing on some of the more accessible, distribution-bound, talent-accompanied titles is perhaps a bit less global in reach than in prior years, it never really was the place to find films made in languages other than English (or perhaps French), and other sections, from "Masters" and "Vanguard" to "Dark Wave" and "Golden Gate Award Competitions", not to mention, of course, "Global Visions", seem to be about as "International" as ever. Furthermore, The Festival seems perfectly happy to use the I-word as long as it's spelled out, which ultimately may give the International component of the event a bit more visibility, not less. I suspect the real culprit is the word "Society" which sounds rather snooty on it's own and not much less so with the word "Film" in front of it, calling to mind the high-minded, European-originating groups also known as cineclubs that sprang up nearly a hundred years ago and that may seem especially alien in a modern digital-distribution-dominated landscape. Or maybe they just wanted to minimize confusion with other SFIFF organizations like the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival or the Syrian Federation of International Freight Forwarders. Of course now someone has to figure out what the all-caps SFFILM might be an acronym for: San Francisco's Foreign, Indie & Local Movies? Some Fab Films I Like, Man? (or Ma'am?) Striking Further Forward Into Limitless Media? Someone's gonna come up with something better than those...

But there are bigger changes for this 60th annual festival than just the name-change. The festival's timing has been moved up fifteen days from the slot in the calendar it had occupied since I started attending in 1999. On an international scale, this gives SFFILM more breathing room before the beginning of Cannes in mid-May. Nationally, it bumps it up to before Tribeca, which has in some previous years proved a thorn in The Festival's side in terms of booking all the films and guests it might have wanted to bring in a perfect world. Locally, the move has already caused some other festivals to shuffle their dates. (Certainly the Green Film Fest, probably SF Cinematheque's  Crossroads too, and I can't help but wonder if CAAMFest's recent announcement that it's moving its traditionally-March-held event to Asian Pacific American Heritage Month for 2018 is partially spurred on by an expectation that SFFILM would be permanently vacating May.) Starting and ending the festival on Wednesdays feels rather earth-shattering in a town in which almost every film festival begins on a Thursday or Friday and ends on a Sunday or Thursday. If it's successful, will this move also be copied by the myriad of other local fests?

Image from The Green Fog - A San Francisco Fantasia supplied by SFFILM

More regular screening venues have been commandeered than ever (at least in my memory) including, for the first time, my beloved (closest to my home and to my workplace of all festival venues) Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, which will utilize its normal 92-seat Screening Room and outfit its 700+ seat Theatre, normally used for live performances and lectures, with DCP projectors. I'm excited to check out a movie or two in a space I never have before. That goes double for the Dolby Cinema space at 1275 Market, which opened for private demonstrations and press screenings last Fall but as far as I know hasn't been available to the ticket-buying public until now; it'll be used only during SFFILM's first weekend. A good number of screenings there are already at RUSH status so if you want to see the space buy your tickets soon if you'd rather not wait in line for a chance at an emptied seat. With the addition of these new spaces, pretty much all of my favorite San Francisco cinemas are being used, the few exceptions being Artists' Television Access (and Craig Baldwin's Other Cinema-within-a-cinema, which brings two programs during SFFILM), and the sporadically-used New People, which is hosting an all-digital Cherry Blossom Film Festival in the second year in a row of the San Francisco International Film Festival's absence from Japantown). Add in BAMPFA in Berkeley as another major venue for ten days, and there's not many options (mainly just the Stanford, which is running a Val Lewton retrospective this month, and the Niles Film Museum) for Frisco Bay cinephiles wanting to attend non-commercial screenings outside The Festival's purview while it's happening. I'm especially pleased that the Castro Theatre is being utilized daily for 12 of the 15 festival days, not just for certain high-profile events like tonight's opening night selection Landline or the amazing-sounding closing night The Green Fog on April 16th (which in this case celebrates the closing of some venues but not others, as screenings continue at the Mission venues the Roxie, Victoria & Alamo for a few days after that), as it usually has been over the past decade-plus.

Which brings me to the other major change I notice in this year's festival: awards presentations. When I first started attending, the San Francisco International Film Festival presented four major awards to cinematic luminaries in four distinct categories. The Akira Kurosawa Award for directing had at that point gone to world cinema titans such as Kurosawa, Robert Bresson, Satyajit Ray, Ousmane Sembène, Manoel de Oliveira, and Im Kwon-Taek, as well as a few genuine Hollywood legends like Arthur Penn and Stanley Donen. Shortly after I began paying attention the awardees began a sixteen-year streak of being either American or else having each directed major English-language hit films. (During this time the award's name changed to the Irving M. Levin Award, after The Festival's 1957 founder.) The vast majority of these more recent awardees were perfectly solid and sometimes inspired choices, but only a few (like Robert Altman and Werner Herzog) tapped into my cinephile pleasure centers as deeply as I might hope, and as a group, even with a Walter Salles here and a Mira Nair there, they didn't feel like they truly embodied the "International" in the festival's name. At least the selections were more diverse than the recipients of the Peter J. Owens Award for acting over the years. Again it's a very solid list of stars who have proved (and in a few cases, later disproved) their serious commitment to acting, but as a group it's all white, mostly male, and nearly all American with only a couple Brits and one Australian to justify the "International" label. By contrast I could rarely quibble with the choice of recipients for the Persistence of Vision Award to directors of animation, documentary, short-form and/or experimental work or the Mel Novikoff Award presented to individuals or institutions (most commonly critics, programmers, distributors, or archivists) whose work has "enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema," both of which have done an excellent job alternating between honoring already-beloved figures and bringing attention to lesser-known but equally vital contributors to a thriving cinephile culture.

I have wonderful memories of attending, often at the Castro Theatre, the public conversations with recipients of each of these four awards, as well as with more recent addition Kanbar Award for screenwriting (notably Paul Schrader's 2015 presentation, though he spoke more about his work as a director and they screened his astonishing Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters, which feels to me more like a director's than writer's achievement.) But I've long assumed that the forces guiding these awardee selections, at least for the Levin, Owens & Kanbar Awards, had their eyes less on these for-the-general-public events and more on the annual Film Society Awards Night black-tie gala events that cost to attend, at minimum, as much as some of the cash prizes for Golden Gate Awards Jury Prize winners. I'd never had anyone who didn't work for the festival admit to me they'd attended these tony affairs, and plopping it in the middle of a two-week cinephile event always felt like a weird disconnect. The disconnect grew a bit wider in the past few years with the addition of a new honor, the George Gund III Craft of Cinema Award, given under apparently rather vague criteria to worthy cinema-related luminaries such as Peter Coyote and Ray Dolby, but with no affordable public program attached. Obviously nonprofit fundraising is important, and if celebrity appearances help grease the wheels so that an organization like SFFILM can fulfill its mission to help foster film culture, I'm not going to dismiss its importance. But there are signs that in the most recent chunk of the San Francisco International Film Festival's six-decade lifespan, it's become overly-important, perhaps even to the detriment of The Festival's public programs. (Did you ever notice one mid-fest night in which the films and guests on offer seemed a bit lackluster in comparison to every other? That was probably the Film Society Awards Night; most of the top-level festival staff was preoccupied with that event and so other programs that night sometimes tended to be easier-to-introduce, guest-free ones).

Image from My Name Is Khan supplied by SFFILM

So I'm really quite happy to hear that this year SFFILM will be moving its gala fundraiser to the Fall (no doubt to coincide with "Awards season") and, if I understand it correctly, taking the Levin, Owens and Kanbar Awards with it. It doesn't mean there aren't plenty of awards and tributes planned for the next few weeks; it just means they've all been arranged with an eye exclusively to the public presentation and not in selling multi-thousand-dollar tables to a fancy dinner. The Mel Novikoff Award is going to a long-overdue local recipient, Tom Luddy, a storied figure in Frisco Bay and indeed international cinephilia, whose accomplishments have partially been recorded by Michael Fox in a recent article. I'm excited to see his screening selections A Long Happy Life (a 1966 Soviet drama I'd never heard of before) and the eight-minute-long Une Bonne à Tout Faire, which must be one of the least-commonly seen things ever directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and to hear his conversation with Todd McCarthy at the Castro this Sunday. The P.O.V. Award will go to Lynn Hersman Leeson, another local with a long history in moving-image art going at least as far back as her involvement in the Maysles Brothers' and Charlotte Zwerin's wonderful 1977 documentary Running Fence. And for the first time the George Gund III Craft of Cinema Award will presented at a public event, this time to Eleanor Coppola at an already-RUSH-status screening of her new Paris Can Wait at SFMOMA. Hopefully we'll soon have a clearer picture about just what this award is for. In addition, The Festival has arranged tributes to philanthropist Gordon Gund, writer/producer/director John Ridley, director/writer/producer James Ivory, actor/writer/director Ethan Hawke and actor/producer Shah Rukh Khan. The others are solid choices but I'm thrilled by this last pick: the biggest movie star in the world will be on hand at the Castro, hopefully to launch a series of annual international star tributes, and the film they're showing is a Bollywood-goes-to-Frisco Bay mini-epic (less than three hours is short for an Indian hit) I've been wanting to see for a while: My Name is Khan. The only way it could be better is if they were instead showing his 1993 film that shares my name: Darr. (I learned about it from a festival volunteer over a decade ago.) Surprisingly, there are still tickets available for this.

Of course the soul of the San Francisco International Film Festival is not found so much in the awards and tributes but in the hundred and eighty or so films being screened over the next fifteen days. Be sure to peruse the surfeit of links collected by David Hudson at Keyframe Daily; I'm particularly partial to the advice of trusted friends Max Goldberg and (again, with a more recently published piece) Michael Hawley, who are helping me guide my own viewing selections along with unmentioned-on-Keyframe articles by Kelly Vance and Lincoln Spector. I'd also be remiss not to mention the Bay Area Film Calendar, which notes which of the SFFILM presentations will involve actual reels of film. For the record, it's four programs (one repeated): Joan Chen in person with a 35mm print of her directorial debut (which stunned me on first release; time for a revisit?) Xiu Xiu: the Sent-Down Girl, 16mm presentations of Jerome Hiler films and Guy Maddin's personal selections from the Canyon Cinema catalog, and the only new 35mm film in the program, a 12-minute short by Brigid McCaffrey called Bad mama, who cares, which plays alongside work by Janie Geiser, Matthias Müller and other experimentalists in the Who Cares, Who Sees shorts program. It's a shame this program's only San Francisco showing is nearly at the same time as the Hiler program; those of us who want to see every last scrap of physical film projected at The Festival will either have to give up a prime Saturday night slot to see Bad mama, who cares at BAMPFA, or try our hardest to race from the Roxie to the Castro in hopes of catching both on the same Monday.

Image from The Death of Louis XIV supplied by SFFILM

Without further ado, my own current program plan for the festival (subject to revision):

Thursday, April 6:
Jem Cohen in person with his World Without End (No Reported Incidents), 6:30, BAMPFA
Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV, 8:30, BAMPFA

Friday, April 7:
Isaki Lacuesta & Isa Campo's Next Skin, 3:00, YBCA Screening Room
Bertrand Bonello's Nocturama, 6:00, Castro
Alex Ross Perry's Golden Exits, 9:15, YBCA Theater

Saturday, April 8:
Joan Chen in person with her Xiu Xiu: the Sent-Down Girl, 1:00, SFMOMA
Hong Sangsoo's Yourself and Yours, 8:00, Dolby
Alexandre O. Philippe in person with his 78/52, 10:00, Roxie

Sunday, April 9:
Matt Schrader in person with his Score: a Film Music Documentary, 1:00, Dolby (John Debney also expected)
Mel Novikoff Award to Tom Luddy, presenting Gennayi Shpalikov's A Long Happy Life, 4:00, Castro
James Gray in person with his The Lost City of Z, 7:00, YBCA Theater

Monday, April 10:
Shorts program Who Cares, Who Sees, 6:30, Roxie (Untitled, 1925 Part Three director Madi Piller expected)
Shorts program Parallel Spaces, 8:00, Castro (with live music by Bonnie Prince Billy & Bitchin Bajas)

Tuesday, April 11:
Delphine Coulin & Muriel Coulin's The Stopover, 8:45, Victoria

Wednesday, April 12:
Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki's El Mar La Mar, 6:30, YBCA Screening Room
Barbara Kopple in person with her This is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous, 8:30, Victoria (Gigi Gorgeous, Ian Roth & Joshua Gamson also expected)

Thursday, April 13:
Anocha Suwichakornpong's By the Time it Gets Dark, 9:15, Alamo

Friday, April 14:
Zhang Hanyi in person presenting his Life After Life, 4:00, BAMPFA
Tribute to Shah Rukh Khan, presenting Karan Johar's My Name is Khan, 8:30, Castro

Saturday, April 15:
Surprise member screening (for the first time I'm a member this year), 10:00, Alamo
Ramahou Keita and Magaajyia Silberfeld in person with their The Wedding Ring, 2:30, Roxie
Shorts program Canyon Cinema 50, 8:30, SFMOMA (Guy Maddin & Antonella Bonfanti in person)

Sunday, April 16:
Zacharias Kunuk's Maliglutit, 1:30, BAMPFA
Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson in person with their The Green Fog, 7:00, Castro (with live music by Kronos Quartet & Jacob Garchik)

Monday, April 17:
Shorts program Shorts 4: New Visions, 8:30, Roxie (It Is What It Is director Cyrus Yoshi Tabar & The Watershow Extravaganza director Sophie Michael expected)

Tuesday, April 18:
Kirill Serebrennikov's The Student, 9:00, Victoria

Wednesday, April 19:
Amat Escalante's The Untamed, 6:00, Victoria
Alejandro Jodorowsky's Endless Poetry, 8:30, Roxie

In The Street (1948)

Screen capture from Flicker Alley DVD

WHO: Photographer Helen Levitt is credited as co-director of this film along with James Agee and Janice Loeb, but she is generally acknowledged to be the primary creative force- the true auteur, if you will- of this film.

WHAT: This intentionally silent (a piano soundtrack was added later for a 1952 release) documentary stitched together glimpses of public life in one New York City neighborhood, many of them taken around Halloween time. This explains the above haunting image of "a black boy in a white pointy hat that eerily resembles a Klansman's hood", as Roy Arden describes it in his 2002 essay on the film. Arden writes:

In the Street is reportage as art. It reports the facts, but for their useless beauty above all. While it could be argued that the film tells us how working class residents of Spanish Harlem lived in the 30's and 40's - how they looked and behaved, the addition of expository narrative could have told us so much more. Statistics and other facts could have helped us put what we see into context and multiplied the use-value of the film. The absence of narration or other texts proves the artist's intent that we are intended to enjoy the film as a collection of beautiful appearances.

Although the word he repeats "useless" usually has very negative connotations, I'm pretty sure Arden is trying to apply it more positively in this piece. His final paragraph links In the Street to a tradition of moving image work by makers like Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol, and proclaims, "A look around at current media art would suggest that it could benefit from a knowledge and understanding of this tradition." Uselessness has its place in life, certainly, but perhaps there's another way to understand the word "useless" when applied to art. It's the opposite of "useful" or "purposeful", and the implication of those words may place limits on what they're describing. Once something useful or purposeful has fulfilled its use or purpose, it becomes completely obsolete. A statistic about life for the residents of Spanish Harlem might become dated and seemingly irrelevant shortly after it's cited, while the images feel far more timeless and important for a modern audience to try and connect with, than they might if accompanied by narration or fact-heavy graphics. This is why we are compelled to come back to it after sixty-eight years.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Victoria Theatre as part of SF Cinematheque's Crossroads festival of experimental/underground/artist-made film & video.

WHY: In The Street is an anomaly of the Crossroads festival in that it is a revived piece of cinema history sitting aside a vast collection of works made by current-day artists in the past few years, most of them receiving their very first Frisco Bay screenings. But, although I haven't seen very much else in the program yet, I think it's fair to say a good portion (perhaps even all) of the filmmakers involved are working in a tradition aligned with that which Arden described as containing Levitt, Brakhage and Warhol but not most of the "current media art" he saw around him. Hard facts are less important than deep truths. Useless beauty is celebrated for its own sake. There are few (if any) attempts to force a work to check the usual boxes of convention that signify "proper" adherence to a genre or form. Nine programs full of such work is a lot to take in, but at least a couple of advance previewers have come onto the scene to help the viewer sort out which programs should be their highest priority. Jesse Hawthorne Ficks has written a generous preview in 48 Hills, and at Fandor, Michael Sicinski has compared the festival against the longest-running American festival of its type, the Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan.

Meanwhile, in case you hadn't heard already, the San Francisco International Film Festival has released its 59th line-up, set to begin later this month. It includes quite a few programs of particular interest to experimental/underground/artist-made film afficionados, including Lewis Klahr's feature-length Sixty Six.

HOW: In The Street screens as a 16mm print as part of a program also including digital works Many Thousands Gone by Ephraim Asili and Field Niggas by Khalik Allah. According to the Film on Film Foundation there will be 16mm (and sometimes also 35mm or Super-8) work in all the Crossroads programs except for Program 5 & Program 6.

Philip Fukuda: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Philip Fukuda is a volunteer at various local film festivals. 

 Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society

Monte-Cristo (Henri Fescourt, 1929, France). San Francisco International Film Festival, Kabuki Cinema. Lenny Borger, this year's SFIFF Mel Novikoff award winner, elected to screen the 3 plus hour silent Monte-Cristo. Based on the Alexandre Dumas, père novel, the director's meticulous attention to detail made this classic tale of revenge a delight for me. I'm convinced that the French were masters of the epic historical drama.

On the other end of the spectrum, The Swallow and the Titmouse (Andre Antoine, 1920/83, France) is a simple drama. Screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro Theatre. Filmed in a quasi-documentary style, The Swallow and the Titmouse (L'hirondelle et la mésange) shows the countryside pass by at leisurely pace as the barge travels between France and Belgium. Stephen Horne's piano and Diana Rowan's harp were the perfect accompaniment for the film.

100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History. San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro Theatre. This was one of the highlights of 2015's Silent Film Festival for me. This program presented footage discovered in the Museum of Modern Art's collection which consisted of scenes from Lime Kiln Field Day, shot in 1913 but never completed, USA featuring Bert Williams. It was a treat for me to see the pioneering black entertainer Bert Williams and showed why he was considered one of the top comedians of the day. I was also fascinated to see the performances shift over the course of multiple takes.

Screen capture from Miramax DVD of My Voyage to Italy

Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943, Italy). Noir City 13, Castro Theatre. I enjoyed this adaptation of James M Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice for its unglamorous and realistic view of the rural Italian countryside and equally earthy people that inhabit it. Visconti's love of the male body and opera are in full display in the film.

Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950, USA). Castro Theatre. I've seen this film many times, but I'm still knocked out by Gloria Swanson's bravura performance and Billy Wilder's and Charles Brackett's whip-smart dialogue. It's wonderful (and startling too) to see closeups of the still-beautiful 50-year old Swanson.

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955, USA). Castro Theatre. Charles Laughton's sole film directorial effort was a memorable one. It's German Expressionism meets Southern Gothic. I think the sets are wildly artificial yet so beautiful. Robert Mitchum's Rev. Harry Powell was a menacing a villain as I've ever seen. Though I'd seen it several times on DVD, this was the first time I'd seen it in a theater, and what better place than on the Castro's big screen.

The Wild, Wild Rose (Wang Tian-lin, 1960, Hong Kong). A Rare Noir is Good to Find! series, Roxie Theatre. Grace Chang, a pop mega-star in Hong Kong, chews the scenery and belts out Carmen in Chinese in this wildly entertaining film. One of my guilty pleasures of 2015.

Hope and Glory (John Boorman, 1987, UK). Mostly British Film Festival, Vogue Theatre. I thought it was a charming film showing both the childrens' and adults' reactions to the Blitz in World War II.

Screen capture from Wellspring DVD

Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai Ming-liang, 1992, Taiwan). Opera Plaza Cinema. Slacker teens, petty crime, video arcades in early 1990s Taipei. For me, it adds up to a lot more than the average teenage flick.

A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005, USA) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Though I only saw a few films at the David Cronenberg retrospective at YBCA screening room, A History of Violence was a standout. As the title implies, the film was full of thrills, but it was also full of knockout performances.

IOHTE: Michael Hawley

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

Contributor Michael Hawley blogs at his own site film-415.

Ten Favorite 2014 Bay Area Revival Screenings

Screen capture from Kino DVD

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Germany, 1920, director Robert Wiene), Castro Theatre, San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Silent Autumn, U.S. premiere of a mind-blowing 4K digital restoration)

Noir City oriental-ist triple bill of Singapore (1947, director John Brahm), Macao (1952, director Josef von Sternberg) and The Shanghai Gesture (1941, director Josef von Sternberg), Castro Theatre, Noir City

Queen Margot: The Director's Cut (France, director Patrice Chéreau), Kabuki Sundance Cinema, San Francisco International Film Festival

Curt McDowell double bill of Taboo: The Single and the LP (1980) and Sparkle's Tavern (1985), Roxie Theatre, with Melinda McDowell in person)

Son of the Sheik (1926, director George Fitzmaurice), Castro Theatre, San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Silent Autumn, world premiere of new score by The Alloy Orchestra

Julien Duvivier double bill of Highway Pickup (France, 1963) and Deadlier Than the Male (France, 1963) at the Roxie Theatre, "The French Had a Name For It" French film noir series 

Pastorale (1976)

WHO: The most prominent filmmaker from the Caucasus state of Georgia, Otar Iosseliani, directed this.

WHAT: This is the film that spurred Iosseliani's emigration to France. It was suppressed by Soviet officials upon completion, and only began appearing in foreign cinematheques and festivals in the early eighties; its success at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982, where it won a critics prize, was followed by the director's move to Paris. I haven't seen it, so here's an excerpt from a review by Dennis Grunes:

As is his delightful wont, Iosseliani has fashioned a mostly silent film. (It is also in black and white, and beautifully cinematographed by Abessalom Maisuradze.) There is minimal dialogue. The sounds we hear in the film are mainly those of musical instruments and voices in song, and the squawking, mooing, oinking, barking and chattering of all kinds of animals—farm, domestic and wild.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at 7PM only at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: One of the highlights for me of the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival was seeing Iosseliani's most recent film Chantrapas, an autobiographically-rooted story of Georgian filmmakers struggling to make films under the eyes of bureaucrats, contrasted with life as an expatriate Parisian artist. It was a lovely film, and a screening made even lovelier by the in-person question-and-answer session offered by its then-77-year-old director. But as much as I swooned over this film, I heard benign grumblings of mild disappointment from a few long-time fans of Iosseliani's work who felt it paled in comparison to earlier films like Pastorale. I'd only seen one of his prior films, the relatively recent (2002) Monday Morning. To this day I've seen only these two.

There aren't too many people who have the luxury of comparing the entries in Iosseliani's filmography. His name is respected but his work is generally obscure; most North American film festivals, including major ones like Toronto's and New York's, refrained from showing Chantrapas. And retrospectives are rare. If the Pacific Film Archive has shown more of his films than other venues over the decades, it's in large part because of the passion for his work held by George Gund III, the former board president of the SFIFF, and for whom the 2011 Chantrapas screening was a tribute.

As Gund died at age 75 earlier this year, the SFIFF had another tribute screening, this time of the Czechoslovakian masterpiece Marketa Lazarová, the print of which Gund had personally secured for the PFA.  Now the PFA is halfway through a more extensive tribute to Gund expressed by screenings of prints in their collection. All eight films in the series were made in the late 1960s and 1970s by filmmakers working in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the USSR; not the most famous names like Miklós Jancsó, Jiří Menzel or Andrei Tarkovsky, but other figures equally worthy of attention. In addition to Iosseliani's film tonight, Russian Nikita Mikhalkov's Five Evenings screens this Saturday, while the following weekend there's And Give My Love To The Swallows by Jaromil Jires (director of Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders) and The Maple of Juliana by Štefan Uher. The Hungarian films in the series have already screened, but it's worth nothing that the Georges Simenon series that begins tomorrow night concludes August 29th with a showing of Hungarian Béla Tarr's (by his own vow) penultimate film The Man From London.

Traveling back several decades, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will show a couple of films from the beginning of the second decade of the Soviet Union's existence, by all accounts and evidence a vastly different era for filmmaking than the 1970s. First, on Saturday July 20th, the festival will screen the PFA's print of the 1928 Boris Barnet comedy The House On Trubnaya Square, one of my most-anticipated screenings of that weekend at the Castro. And the festival has just announced that it will present the North American premiere of a just-rediscovered trailer for Dziga Vertov's The Eleventh Year (which I also saw in 2011- the film not the trailer that is). Apparently this trailer was prepared by Vertov's friend Alexander Rodchenko, who worked on posters, graphics and intertitles for the master documentarian, but who I believe does not have any films widely known to be able to be credited to him- this trailer may be unique in that regard. It will screen in 35mm with live accompaniment from Ken Winokur and Beth Custer, as a warm-up to a DCP showing of a brand-new restoration of the German film The Weavers.

HOW: 35mm print from the PFA's own collection.

Home (2008)

WHO: Agnès Godard was cinematographer for this film directed by Ursula Meier.

WHAT: I haven't seen Home since 2009, when it was one of my very favorite films of the San Francisco International Film Festival that year. It would surely have appeared in the upper half of my Top Ten List that year's-end as well, except that I was restricting that list to films that found week-long commercial releases in the Bay Area; I don't believe Home has ever had another local public screening. Not until tonight.

Here's an excerpt from my own review written a little more than four years ago:

A family has fled urban living to establish a free-spirited life in a house mere feet off the shoulder of the highway. We're introduced to them first in a manic night hockey game shot (by cinematographer Agnes Godard) very tightly on the actors. It's the consistency of their character arcs that holds the film together throughout drastic changes in their setting and in tone; sometimes it feels like a comedy, other times drama, action thriller, or even horror.  

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight at the Pacific Film Archive at approximately 8:30 PM, after a presentation by Agnès Godard that begins at 7.

WHY: The PFA begins not only its Dancing with Light: The Cinematography of Agnès Godard series, but its entire summer schedule with tonight's screening. Godard we be on hand tonight and at four more screenings this weekend, showing and discussing four more films directed by Meier, by Erick Zonca, and by her most consistent collaborator Claire Denis. Two more Denis/Godard films round out the program after the cinematographer departs town.

Of the PFA series arriving later this summer, the one with the most relevance to this Godard selection is the extensive Jacques Demy retrospective being held in July and August. Three films made about Demy by the director's widow Agnès Varda will screen as part of this series, and for the best-known one of those, Jacquot, Godard was one of three cinematographers.

HOW: 35mm print following Agnès Godard's "behind the scenes of the art of cinematography in a talk followed by a Q&A with the audience."

Double Suicide (1969)

WHO: A film by Masahiro Shinoda

WHAT: The best Japanese film of 1969 according to the annual survey of that country's top film magazine Kinema Jumpo. Directed by one of the last living legends of Japanese cinema, with music by one of my favorite composers of all time (for film or otherwise), Toru Takemitsu. The only reason I haven't seen this already is because I've been waiting to see it in a cinema since foolishly missing such a chance at the San Francisco International Film Festival nearly twelve years ago. Yes I can be a patient man sometimes.

WHERE/WHEN: Double Suicide screens at 7:00 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, tonight only.

WHY: I've been writing about Japanese film a fair amount lately. And why not, when there are screening series energizing my passion for it this month? At any moment a drought may come. And in fact, although I'm excited about the recently-announced line-up for the CAAM Fest (formerly known as the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival- and I'm so glad I'll never have to type out that mouthful again) which runs March 14-24 at the PFA and other Frisco Bay venues, I notice there are fewer Japanese films than usual at this year's edition of the festival: just one new film screening, Sion Sono's Fukishima-themed drama The Land Of Hope, and a gallery presentation of Astro Boy television episodes. I'll have more to say on the CAAM Fest line-up soon.

HOW: 35mm print from Janus.

The Two Eyes Of Michael Hawley

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

The following list comes from Michael Hawley, who allowed me to republish these selections from his annual round-up at his site film-415.

2012 Favorite Repertory/Revivals Screenings

Yellow Submarine (1968, UK/USA, dir. George Dunning, Castro Theatre)
As best as I can remember, this new restoration is the only film on the list that was projected digitally. And as much as I hate to admit it, was all the better for it. A trippy, eye-popping joyride.

Napoleon (1927, France, dir. Abel Gance, Paramount Theatre)
Kevin Brownlow's restoration of this silent classic presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival was, of course, the repertory event of the year. While I can't say I was enraptured by all 330 minutes, Part I (Napoleon's childhood) and the grand three-screen finale were more thrilling than anything else I watched all year.

American Graffiti (1973, USA, dir. George Lucas, Pacific Film Archive)
I hadn't seen this in over 30 years and it held up shockingly well. The screening featured a conversation with costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers, for whom this was a first film. Rodgers shared dozens of anecdotes, my favorite being the great lengths taken to keep Richard Dreyfuss' sweat from bleeding his madras shirt, all in the service of continuity.

Quadrophenia (1979, UK, dir. Franc Roddam, Castro Theatre)
The experience of seeing this San Francisco International Film Festival late-show presentation of The Who's second filmed rock opera began while waiting in line, with two dozen motor-scooters with costumed riders pulling up in front of the Castro Theatre. During the screening, drunk and unruly wanna-be Mods and Rockers cheered and hurled insults at each, while others sang along to The Who's anthems. The new, pristine 35mm print was being projected for only the third time, and the highlight, as it was when I first saw the film 33 years ago, was Sting's nearly wordless, uber-cool performance as the king of the Mods.

Underworld USA (1961, USA, dir Sam Fuller, Castro Theatre)
I was lucky enough to catch all but one of the 26 flicks on offer at 2012's Noir City. Most were pretty darn fabulous, but this gritty revenge tale starring Cliff Robertson managed to stand out. Other highlights included the inane slapstick of Frank Tashlin-scripted The Good Humor Man, the slatternly haughtiness of Beverly Michaels in Pickup and the Angie Dickinson double bill of The Killers and Point Blank (with Dickinson herself on-stage in conversation with Eddie Muller).

Animal Crackers (1930, USA, dir. Victor Heerman, Castro Theatre)
Monkey Business (1931, USA, dir. Norman Z. McLeod, Castro Theatre)
Horse Feathers (1932, USA, dir. Norman Z. McLeod, Castro Theatre)
There were plenty of terrific revivals going on at the Castro outside the realm of 2012's film festivals, including this revelatory triple bill of the Marx Brothers' second, third and fourth features – and all for the price of one movie. Another memorable 3-way for the budget conscious was a Saturday marathon of Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love and 2046.

Possession (1981, France/West Germany, dir. Andrzej Zulawski, Castro Theatre)
The Tenant (1976, France, dir. Roman Polanski, Castro Theatre)
More love for the Castro Theatre, this time for their inspired double bills, and in particular this Isabelle Adjani creep-fest with gorgeous 35mm prints which looked like they'd been struck yesterday. I was also thrilled to partake in 2012 double bills of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and 2, and Boogie Nights with Pulp Fiction.

The Cheat (1931, USA, dir. George Abbott, Roxie Theater)
As a Tallulah Bankhead obsessive, this was of course my favorite of the eight films I caught during programmer Elliot Lavine's springtime pre-code series, "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World." Another highlight was finally getting to see the "Sweet Marijuana" production number from Mitchell Leisen's très risqué 1934 flick, Murder at the Vanities, complete with bare-breasted chorines posing as singing cactus flowers.

Come Back Africa (1959, USA, dir. Lionel Rogosin, Roxie Theater)
Seeing and hearing Miriam Makeba sing two songs in an intimate living-room setting was the high point of this film about one black man's struggles in apartheid-era South Africa. The screening I attended was followed by a live performance by the Vukani Mawethu Choir, who sang a selection of South African freedom songs. Talk about your value-added in-cinema experience! Other memorable 2012 revivals at the Roxie include Shirley Clarke's The Connection and 60's live-concert movie, The Big T.N.T. Show.

The Docks of New York (1928, USA, dir. Josef Von Sternberg, Castro Theatre)
Last, but certainly not least was this utterly exquisite love story set in a shabby waterfront saloon, my favorite of the 15 programs I saw at this year's better-than-ever San Francisco Silent Film Festival. There wasn't a single dud in this year's line-up, although I regret having to miss the Alloy Orchestra accompany The Overcoat, due to the REALLY late start time of the festival's Centerpiece Film, Pandora's Box. Other standouts included my first exposure to Pola Negri in The Spanish Dancer, the beautiful heartbreak of The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna, the dashing antics of Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro and of course, Buster Keaton in the closing night film, The Cameraman.

Local Interest

Gramophone Video on Polk Street is set to close up shop; today is it's last day of selling its rental DVDs for $2.99 apiece. I don't usually get as sad over the loss of a video rental store as I do for the loss of a movie theatre, but Gramphone is different, for me. Its small size deceptively hid a collection that was as robust and diverse as any brick-and-mortar video store I've seen in this town with the exception of Le Video and possibly Lost Weekend, and it included some titles (some on VHS) that neither of the other two legs in this 'Frisco trifecta' of rental shops happened to carry. The coziness perhaps was what facilitated more friendships with staff and fellow regular customers there than I've made at other stores. At least I expect these friendships to last, even if the site of their formation doesn't.

As they began selling off their collection, I couldn't resist purchasing the long Out-Of Print World Artists DVD of Caveh Zahedi's In The Bathtub Of The World. I like to think I would've made the purchase even if I didn't have Zahedi on the brain, as I was working on an article on the former local filmmaker's latest video work The Sheik And I.  This was my favorite feature seen courtesy of the San Francisco International Film Festival this past spring (my second-favorite, The Exchange, has just been announced as part of the upcoming SF Jewish Film Festival, incidentally), and it's been echoing in my brain for weeks. My article was just published the other day at the Keyframe blog arm of streaming-video company Fandor, which includes two approximately half-hour Zahedi videos I Was Possessed By God and Tripping With Caveh, as part of it's online-viewing offerings. Yes I am aware of the ironies.

Do read the article and let me know what you think, if you have the time and inclination. I found it an endlessly fascinating and discussable film, although not everyone agrees. Notably, Frako Loden's recent round-up of SFIFF capsules (which also serves as reminders of summer arthouse releases like Alps, Farewell My Queen, and Found Memories) reveals she was no fan. Other worthwhile reading on The Sheik And I comes from Sean Gillane, Adam Schartoff, David Hudson (with links, naturally) and, with an interview with Zahedi, the Documentary Channel Blog. I swear I had not read the latter when I completed my own article, so when both pieces touch on some of the same metaphors and topics it's purely coincidence. Or perhaps a sign from God- another title I'm not sure if I'd been able to track down without Gramophone Video.

More than six years ago, when I wrote a blog post about a favorite film from each of the last ten decades of Frisco Bay filmmaking, I named In The Bathtub Of The World as representative of the 2000s. Today I'd write that post a little differently, and might be more likely to include an experimental short such as one of the beautiful Nathaniel Dorsky films screening this evening at Pacific Film Archive on such a list. But a recent re-watch of my new (previously-viewed) DVD re-confirms it as a staggeringly ambitious and prescient feature. 

I've been thinking a lot about Frisco-based filmmaking recently, actually. I went to the Stanford Theatre last night, on the penultimate night of its Howard Hawks restrospective, to see, for the first time, Howard Hawks's 1964 comedy Man's Favorite Sport. I had never before heard that it was partially set in town, including several street shots and a scene at a revolving sky room bar, which seems to be modeled on the Fairmont Hotel's Crown Room. Perhaps it was even shot there?  I'm almost certain that stars Paula Prentiss and Maria Perschy (and perhaps, to a more eagle-eyed viewer, Rock Hudson as well) can be spotted in the just-prior scene ascending that hotel's famous Skylift external elevator. If so, Man's Favorite Sport joins Ernie Gehr's brilliant structural piece Side/Walk/Shuttle as a film that ought to be included on lists of films shot at the Fairmont. 

Side/Walk/Shuttle, for its part, is fresh in mind because its publicity stills are currently under glass at the Old Mint, along with "ephemeral" material from the Pacific Film Archive's collection of documents from the rich history of Bay Area avant-garde filmmaking and exhibition. Also included: a Tony Labat storyboard, flyers from film screenings by local organizations like SF Cinematheque, Film Arts Foundation, the SF Art Institute, and more. I was particularly interested to see original advertising from the notorious October 23, 1953 "Art In Cinema" series screening at the original SFMOMA, in which Christopher Maclaine's The End was shown to an unruly audience. The End is in fact not listed on the ad as it was a last-minute replacement for another film, but I immediately recognized the document thanks to the intense research Brecht Andersch and I did on The End prior to a screening I helped him put on last year.

Why are these objects at the Old Mint? They're part of an exhibit the San Francisco Historical Society is holding as a fundraiser for their project of turning the Old Mint into a permanent exhibition space. As a fundraiser, it's an exhibit put together on a limited budget, but with a great deal of creativity on the part of curator Miguel Pendás of the San Francisco Film Society, who quietly dazzles festgoers with his knowledge of local film locations at the Noir City festival each January. He's divided the Old Mint space into several themed rooms, including a room of silent-era filmmaking with creative input from David Kiehn of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, a room of nothing but noir posters from the personal collections of Noir City's Eddie Muller and the Telluride Film Festival's Gary Meyer, a photographic look inside local studios like Pixar and Lucasfilm, a room devoted to "Cars, Cops and Cocktails" which has tips for anyone wanting to know how to mix drinks imbibed in After The Thin Man, Days of Wine and Roses, or Zodiac, and more, including an Vistavision camera used to shoot Vertigo and full-size wax figures of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and Charlie Chaplin in A Jitney Elopement (shot in Golden Gate Park). Michael Fox and Frako Loden have written good overviews of the exhibition, which ends today. It's quite possible to take the entire thing in about an hour or so.

The PFA documents I described above were the centerpiece of a room devoted to independent filmmaking in San Francisco- a scratching of the surface, really, but one that also represents documentary filmmaking with a poster from Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, and major studio-distributed projects by independent-minded makers, represented by a poster from the version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers made by Philip Kaufman (who will, it's just been announced, introduce the screening of Wonderful Lie Of Nina Petrovna at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival next month). This room and the silent-era room were the most interesting to me. When I attended a press preview two weeks ago, not all of the displays were in place yet, so I was glad when returning to see the full exhibit this week, that Lon Chaney had been added to this particular room. Not only did he perform on San Francisco stages before his film career, and make films like Outside The Law and The Shock in town, but a dream sequence from his villainous vehicle The Penalty has him directing a crime wave from the steps of the Old Mint itself! Some things about the building have not changed very much since 1920, but I didn't see any obvious criminal masterminding on my excursion. Today is the last day of the exhibit. A perfect thing to do on the way to the Stanford to see Man's Favorite Sport (and its co-feature Rio Bravo) if you haven't yet.

I also recently attended a free program at the San Francisco Public Library hosted by Jim Van Buskirk, author of the useful but frustratingly incomplete book Celluloid San Francisco. An hour+ of clips from narrative and documentary films that make particularly interesting use of the Golden Gate Bridge as plot device or thematic signifier (not mere pictorial backdrop), this program was more completely satisfying than his book, and not only because it was free. He began with the 1936 Frank Borzage film Stranded, which includes plot developments centered around the worksite for the builders of the still-unfinished bridge, and ended with an extended battle film Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and crammed clips from dozens of films including Dark Passage, the Man Who Cheated Himself, The Love Bug, A View To A Kill, The Joy Of Life, and Monsters Vs. Aliens into the presentation, knowing when it best to provide audio commentary for the clip and when to let it play out un-intruded-upon. After the show there was ample time for a spirited conversation to spring up among the attendees. He gives his presentation one last time this month, on Wednesday at the Excelsior SFPL Branch. 

If free library screenings fit your budget perfectly, then you might want to know that more than 20 SFPL branches will be hosting DVD screenings of San Francisco-themed films throughout July. Titles include Flower Drum Song, The Lady From Shanghai, Time After Time, and The Social Network. If image quality is more important to you than price, the Castro Theatre is going to be screening a number of San Francisco films as part of its August celebration of its 90th year in operation. So far, only an August 1-2 booking of The Maltese Falcon (with the New York-set The Asphalt Jungle) has been announced, but rumor has it that there will be more announced soon. 

Maureen Russell 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 Maureen Russell, San Francisco film festival volunteer and cinephile

2011 was an embarrassment of riches for me, film-wise. I finally saw several classic films I'd never seen before (that it seemed everyone else had), waiting for my big screen opportunity. Good thing I got to a lot of films last year, as the 35mm screenings will be harder to find in the future. And my favorite festivals were as strong as ever- I limited myself to one film from each of them.

1. World On A Wire
I hadn’t heard of this film for television before. I ended up seeing it twice: first at SFIFF, the digital screening at the Kabuki. There was so much to take in visually (plus subtitles) and story-wise, that I had to go again when the Roxie screened it a few months later, on 35mm. The 200 minute film sounded like a challenge to do in one screening (with intermission), but I got lost in the intrigue and loved the color, humor, drama, dashing lead, West German early 70’s fashion, sets, mind-bending story, and figuring out the characters.

2. Toby Dammit, Castro Theatre
SFIFF’s last minute acting award and screening was worth the wait. A fun onstage interview with the still charming Terence Stamp was followed by a seldom-screened masterpiece Fellini film. It was 40 minutes of bliss for me: Edgar Allen Poe, late 60’s Italy, surrealism, horror, Italian sports cars, and Terence Stamp as an alcoholic actor.

3. He Who Gets Slapped, Castro Theatre
The entire SF Silent Film Festival was top notch and it was hard to pick a favorite. While I’m usually wary of films about clowns, this one stars Lon Chaney along with John Gilbert and Norma Shearer. The Swedish Matti Bye Ensemble returned to SF to accompany this Swedish director Sjöström’s MGM film, and the music soared.

4. Angel Face, Castro Theatre
Noir City 9 was another great 10 days of noir. Hard for me to pick a favorite here too, but this one definitely delivered. Director: Otto Preminger.

5. Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, Castro Theatre
Los Angeles neo-noir double feature with two period pieces.
Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski: I’m one of the people who had never seen Chinatown before (only clips)! I was saving myself for a big screen, and it was worth the wait! Wow.
L.A Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson: Fantastic character and action driven story from James Ellroy’s novel; Great cast includes Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. I’d seen this on TV before, but so much better on the big screen and in this double feature.

6. The Devil’s Cleavage
Good thing I chose to go a screening during the PFA's Cult of the Kuchars series. George Kuchar was there to introduce The Devil’s Cleavage, and the actor playing the plumber was in the audience. A beautiful and outrageous film. And George died just months later...

7. David Holzman's Diary, Victoria Theatre
Another film I'd never heard of before. I found out about it as a Fandor free screening with the director (Jim McBride) in person. The film was beautifully shot and so direct that it stays with you, a mockumentary as well as a personal film. And looking at my list, it ties in with #9.

8. The Hunger/Nadja, the Roxie.
I'm not one to pass up a double feature of arty vampire films before Halloween. I remember loving both of these films when they came out, but hadn't seen either in years. They were great together and I appreciated them as much as ever. I was especially pleased to see Nadja screened on 35mm: a beautiful Pixelvision 90’s flick I wish more people could see. And SFMoMA brought Ann Magnuson (who had a memorable minor role in The Hunger to the Roxie for a revealing onstage interview. I even answered one of her trivia questions and got a prize and a hug from Ms. Magnuson!

9. SFMoMA’s Exposed On Film series
The series accompanied SFMOMA’s fascinating Exposed photography exhibit.
Films I caught at the Castro Theatre included Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler, introduced by Haskell Wexler!
and Kids on the Boundaries day triple feature with the haunting Deep End, Jerzy Skomilowski, Streetwise, Martin Bell, (director's restored version) and Pretty Baby, Louis Malle.
AND my first time seeing Lost Highway, David Lynch! I was waiting for a big screen for that one. It did not disappoint.

10. In Search of Christopher Maclaine: Man, Artist, Legend:
Wilder Bentley II, actor, and Lawrence Jordan, filmmaker in person. Curated by Brecht Andersch, presented by Andersch with Brian Darr, SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater:
The End, The Man Who Invented Gold, Beat & Scotch Hop by Christopher Maclaine. Trumpit by Lawrence Jordan. Moods in Motion by Ettilie Wallace.
I was not familiar with Christopher Maclaine before, so this was a great introduction. Seeing these films, especially The End, was a great bit of SF History. The onstage interview with men who were there and the cool slide show presented by Brecht Andersch and Brian Darr of their quest for SF locations in The End was topped off by drinks at Vesuvio’s, one of the film’s locations.

Lincoln Spector 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 Lincoln Spector of Bayflicks. With his permission, I extracted the Frisco Bay repertory events from his previously-published list of Best Movie-Going Experiences of 2011:

Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm, Castro, June 11. Hollywood made a lot of long epic movies in the 50s and 60s. Many of them were shot in large formats, and initially presented in 70mm roadshow presentations—a great way to see a big film. Some of these movies were pretty good. A few were excellent. Too many of them are unwatchable. But only one stands out among the greatest masterpieces of the cinema: David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia—as perfect a blending of medium and story as you can find. Seeing this film this way wasn’t a new experience for me last summer, but an old, beloved one. Had it been my first such experience, it undoubtedly would have made number 1.

Four Noir Features in One Day, Castro/Noir City, January 22. It was dark. It was dangerous. Lust, greed, and fear hung heavily in the air. It was enough to drive you crazy. On one dark and scary winter day, I sat through two double bills of vintage noir, all about people who were out of their minds (a festival-long theme last year). I loved three out of the four movies, but the best was easily Don’t Bother To Knock, which gave Marilyn Monroe one of her first starring roles. She plays a babysitter who really should not be trusted with a child. She shouldn’t be trusted with a grown man like Richard Widmark, either.

Three Charlie Chaplin Mutual Shorts, Castro/Silent Film Festival Winter Event, February 12. Forget, for a moment, the mature Charlie Chaplin of The Gold Rush and City Lights. It was the short subjects he made a decade earlier that won him more populsilarity than anyone could have imagined before he stepped in front of a movie camera. The three shorts presented that day, The Pawnshop, The Rink, and The Adventurer reminded me and hundreds of other people of just how amazing he was in his third year as a filmmaker. The early Chaplin character could be exceptionally selfish and cruel–even sadistic. Yet you root for him. That’s star power. Donald Sosin provided piano accompaniment.

Upstream, Castro/San Francisco Silent Film Festival, July 14. How often do you get to see a newly discovered John Ford movie (actually, this was my second). Thought lost for decades and recently found in New Zealand, Upstream is not the sort of picture you associate with Ford. But this amusing and entertaining trifle about the residents of a theatrical boarding house–a story with a love triangle at the center–showed that he was considerably more versatile than we generally assume. Rather than merely accompanying the film on a piano, Donald Sosin put together a jazz sextet that rocked the house.

Serge Bromberg and the History of 3D, Castro/San Francisco International Film Festival, May 1. In 2011, the Festival gave its Mel Novikoff Award to film restoration expert, distributor, and entertainer Serge Bromberg. After a brief Q&A where he discussed preservation and set some nitrate film on fire, he presented, narrated, and occasionally accompanied some rare, historic 3D shorts. Among the filmmakers whose works were presented were George Mêliés and Chuck Jones. With the exception of the first two-reeler, all of the films were presented digitally.

Kirk Douglas & Spartacus, Castro/San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 25. Last year, the Jewish Festival gave its Freedom of Expression Award to Hollywood star, living legend, executive producer, and stroke survivor Issur Danielovitch—better known to the world as Kirk Douglas. The stroke slurred his speech but not his enthusiasm, and didn’t keep him from talking about the importance of free expression in a democracy, and that how without it we are all slaves. Then they screened Spartacus–one of the great roadshow productions of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like Lawrence of Arabia, this picture requires something like the Castro to make it work its best. My only regret: They screened it in 35mm as no 70mm print is currently available.

runners-up, listed in chronological order by screening date

The Leopard, Castro, February 20
The Battleship Potemkin, Castro, March 18
Screenwriter Frank Pierson and Dog Day Afternoon, Kabuki/San Francisco International Film Festival, April 30.
Days of Heaven, Cerrito, August 11
Elevator to the Gallows, Pacific Film Archive, November 4