Claire Bain's 2018 Eyes

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 2018. An index of participants can be found here. 

Four-time contributor Claire Bain is an artist based in San Francisco.

Calle Chula image from Video Data Bank

“Have You Seen Her? La Misión” ...”20th year anniversary retrospective showcase [of] the varied responses to the transformations experienced in the Mission District during the late 1990s dot.com boom....” Roxie / Cine + Más San Francisco Latino Film Festival

Wicked Woman Castro Theater

When the Beat Drops (not an old movie, but independent). Frameline42 LGBTQ Film Festival

Rififi Castro Theater

Black Orpheus Castro Theater

West Side Story Castro Theater

Zero For Conduct screen capture from Criterion DVD

Zero for Conduct and À Propos de Nice by Jean Vigo, Pacific Film Archive

The Adventures of Robin Hood (with Errol Flynn) Castro Theater

Marie-Octobre Roxie Theater

All of the ATA@SFPL screenings

Monica Nolan's 2018 Eyes

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 2018. An index of participants can be found here. 

Four-time IOHTE contributor Monica Nolan is an author and editor who regularly writes for the Film Noir Foundation and the SF Silent Film Festival.

Quiet Please, Murder

Quiet Please, Murder (John Francis Larkin, 1942, at Noir City): George Sanders tortures library denizens with a harp string while future producer of Perry Mason Gail Patrick looks on!

Destiny (Julien Duvivier and Reginald Le Borg, 1944, at Noir City): a mannered, mangled masterpiece.

Jealousy (Gustav Machaty, 1945, at Noir City): Karen Morley’s super-charged performance as the mild-mannered murderess brought a round of applause from the audience.

Rosita (Ernst Lubitsch, 1923, at SF Silent): Gorgeously restored and long underrated Lubitsch gem.

Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness (Piel Jutzi, 1929, at SF Silent): Slum living ends in infanticide/suicide. Now that’s realism.

The Wind Will Carry Us screen capture from Cohen Media DVD

The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999, at SFMoMA): a mysteriously sublime rightness in every cut and camera angle.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932, CFI San Rafael): More Lubitsch perfection.

Les Rendezvous d’Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978, at the Roxie) Still wondering why no one (I mean you, PFA programmers) has done a massive retrospective of Chantal Akerman’s work.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, 1938, at the Castro) a reminder of the sheer delight of big screen technicolor.

Honorable mention for rarity and glimpse of San Francisco of yore: Whatever Happened to Susan Jane? (Marc Huestis, 1982, at SFPL)

10HTE: Claire Bain

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

Three-time IOHTE contributor Claire Bain is an artist in San Francisco.

At the Castro:

Vertigo screen capture from Universal DVD

Vertigo. Hitchcock's identity kink, featuring great acting by Kim Novak, whose eyebrows were nearly as strange as her doubled character.

Bullitt and Dirty Harry: Rogue cops, chases on foot and by car, spectacular use of San Francisco's geography

Singin' in the Rain

ATA@SFPL: Artists’ Television Access programs library 16mm films and screens them at Noe Valley Branch Library:

Phantomatic Bikes (Andrew Emmons, 1971)
Baggage (Alexander Neel, 1969)
Man and His World (Homer Groening, 1966)
Pas de Deux (Norman McLaren, 1968)
Luminauts (Christian Schiess, 1982)

Banks and the Poor 

Night and Fog screen capture from Criterion DVD

Night And Fog 

USA Poetry: Allen Ginsberg & Lawrence Ferlinghetti 

Other Cinema:

Lise Swenson: a celebration of life and work

ATA (Artists’ Television Access):

Speculation Nation

At the Roxie (French Film Noir series):

Macao, l'Enfer de Jeu

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

20th Century Fox DVD screen capture

WHO: William Fox produced this film and F.W. Murnau directed it.

WHAT: One of those rarities of cinema: a technical marvel with a living, beating heart. As I wrote in my 2009 essay on this film when it screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Valentine's Day event:

Charles Rosher, one of the top cinematographers in Hollywood, had spent time with Murnau in Berlin serving as an unofficial consultant on Faust, the director’s most effects-laden film to date. Rosher worked alongside Murnau as a student as much as an advisor, learning about the innovative German camera methods that amazed American critics and filmmakers. 

Rosher recruited Ben-Hur cinematographer Karl Struss to help him shoot Sunrise on Rochus Gliese’s elaborate sets. Gliese built a vast indoor city set designed to appear even larger through the use of forced perspective. It cost $200,000—nearly the entire budget of a typical program picture of the day. He also created a studio-bound marsh with an uneven floor that could not accommodate a dolly setup. Instead, tracks were attached to the ceiling and Struss filmed upside-down, a maneuver Rosher had observed on the Faust set. It was only one of many radical techniques used in Sunrise. Nearly every shot in the film involves a striking effect, whether from an unusual light source, a superimposition, or a complex camera movement. Yet each is motivated by allegiance to the story and its emotions. Murnau told an interviewer, “I do not take trick scenes from unusual positions just to get startling effects. To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind one is watching the events on screen.”

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Stanford Theatre at 3:50 PM.

WHY: The Stanford is halfway through its most appealing and ambitious program in at least the past 18 months: a tribute to the twenty year reign of the Fox Film Corporation, which began releasing films in 1915 and ceased in 1935, when it merged with the lesser-known upstart Twentieth Century Pictures. So far the series has brought little-screened films featuring stars such as Clara Bow, Will Rogers, Spencer Tracy, and Janet Gaynor, the luminous star of Sunrise who rose from her roots in San Francisco (where she went to Polytechnic High School and was employed by the Castro Theatre) to become the first Best Actress Oscar winner for this film as well as Seventh Heaven and Street Angel. All three of these masterpieces will be screened at the Stanford in 35mm prints as part of its Silent Sunday series, and I can hardly imagine a better introduction to most of these films if you've never seen them before, or to the Stanford if you've never traveled to Palo Alto to visit it before. Gaynor also features in The Johnstown Flood, the rarest of the Stanford's Silent Sunday offerings (on a double bill with Seventh Heaven December 6th) and Lucky Star, which screens with Murnau's lovely final film made in the United States, City Girl, to close the Fox Film Corporation series December 20th as the Stanford moves into its traditional Christmastime screenings: The Shop Around the Corner, It's A Wonderful Life, etc.

Dennis James, Wurlitzer organist extraordinaire, has been performing live music to all the Stanford's Silent Sundays screenings thus far, and will continue to do so for the final three Sundays of the series. Today he gets a week off, as the Stanford has elected to screen Sunrise not with live music but with the pioneering sound-on-film Movietone score that was prepared for the film's original 1927 release in the United States. This score is beloved by many fans of Sunrise but I find it merely adequate and more interesting as a historical curiosity than as an artistic statement. I'm swayed by Janet Bergstrom's research that indicates it was quite possibly not, as is frequently assumed today, prepared by famous composer Hugo Riesenfeld, who definitely composed the musical score for Murnau's swan song Tabu: a Story of the South Seas. To me, it sounds like a mostly-pedestrian compilation score whose tendency to be overwhelmed by non-musical sound effects destroys some of Murnau's poetic treatment of soundless sound in the film (such as in the scene of George O'Brien reacting to an off-screen dog bark, as pictured above). I always found it interesting that Dennis James has so frequently spoken of his insistence on performing originally-composed scores to silent films for which scholars have found them, but often ignores his own rules when it comes to Movietone or Vitaphone soundtracks, having played his own scores to Sunrise and to West of Zanzibar when at the SF Silent Film Festival in 2009. In the case of Sunrise, perhaps he feels (and if so, I agree) that the Movietone score that premiered in New York is less sacrosanct than the live score performed in Los Angeles would be were it not lost to the sands of time.

In fact more notable on today's Silent Sunday docket is the presentation of the almost universally beloved Movietone score to John Ford's heartbreaking, Sunrise-esque World War I picture Four Sons, which was to the disappointment of many excluded from the 2007 DVD release of the film. Rarely screened in any form, Four Sons will be for many attendees today the real gem of the program; I've only seen it once myself and never in a cinema, but still I can imagine myself being among them despite my deep, abiding love for Sunrise.

Other upcoming Stanford screenings of particular note include the wonderful Me & My Gal this Wednesday and Thursday, my favorite Janet Gaynor talkie (heck, one of my all-time favorite films as well) State Fair on December 18-19, and most unusually a December 4-5 triple bill of the rumored-excellent Zoo in Budapest along with Seventh Heaven/Street Angel/Lucky Star director Frank Borzage's bizarre 1930 version of Ferenc Molnár's play Liliom as well as Fritz Lang's 1934 version (which I have yet to see). The last of these is a real surprise to see on a Stanford calendar, as it's not a Fox film at all but Lang's sole film made in France on his way out of Germany and into Hollywood. In my fifteen years or so of following the Stanford calendars I'm positive this is the first time I've seen a French film booked for a theatre that in my experience focuses exclusively on classic Hollywood and British productions with the two notable auteurist exceptions of Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. Given that I have to stretch to imagine any other currently-operating Frisco Bay cinemas willing to book a 1934 French film in 35mm, I welcome this development wholeheartedly.

Luckily, although the Liliom/Zoo in Budapest/Liliom bill screens on the same day as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's December 5th "Day of Silents", it also screens the day before, so it won't be necessary to miss a rare 35mm screening of the Anna May Wong vehicle Piccadilly, or the other offerings at the Castro Theatre that day. I'm excited to revisit Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate, this time with Alloy Orchestra accompaniment and introduced by Tracey Goessel, whose new Fairbanks biography The First King of Hollywood I'm in the midst of devouring. Also to see rare documentary footage of China and a Harry Houdini feature The Grim Game. And if you've never seen Marcel L'Herbier's L'inhumaine on a cinema screen it's worth it for the set design alone. Alloy Orchestra takes on musical duties for that one as well; the rest go to the terrific pianist Donald Sosin.

The Day of Silents is just the first cinephile-catnip program on a December full of goodies at the Castro Theatre. Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre with Michael Mann's The Keep, Noir City Xmas pairing The Reckless Moment and Kiss of Death, December 17th Stop Making Sense and Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave and a twisted Christmas booking of Brazil and Eyes Wide Shut are some of the more enticing all-35mm double-bills there this month. The venue also hosts the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco show December 9th and will ring in January with a set of Alfred Hitchcock masterpieces. But even more than all of those, I'm finding myself most excited for a digital presentation of a San Francisco cult classic that deserves to be far better known than it is. I'm speaking of course of Curt McDowell's Thundercrack!, starring (and scripted and lit by) the great underground film icon George Kuchar. It screens twice with director McDowell's sister Melinda and his frequent collaborator Mark Ellinger on hand at (I'm told) both shows, but only the evening show will be hosted by the one and only Peaches Christ. Even if you have no awareness of Thundercrack!, the most entertaining "Old Dark House"-style quasi-pornographic art film ever to get Fox News in a tizzy, this is a rare opportunity to see a Peaches Christ show for less than $20. Mark December 11th on your calendar- in ink!

There's a lot more happening in December at other Frisco Bay venues, but for now I'd better sign off. But in case I don't have time to put up another post before this Tuesday, December 1st, I want to point out that, with the help of other Artists' Television Access volunteers, I'll be helping to present a free 16mm screening of Curtis Choy's untoppably topical 1983 documentary The Fall of the I-Hotel at the Noe Valley Public Library, and I hope you can make it out that evening.

HOW: Sunrise screens on a 35mm double-bill with Four Sons.

Rufino Tamayo: the Sources of His Art (1973)

Image from brief youtube excerpt from the film.

WHO: Los Angeles filmmaker Gary Conklin directed this 28-minute documentary.

WHAT: I wrote this brief blurb on this film for the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) website:

An investigation of one of Mexico's most intriguing painters, known especially for his use of color (thankfully SFPL's print has retained all of its lovely hues.) Born in Oaxaca and proud of his Zapotec Indian heritage, Tamayo was one of the twentieth century's most prominent artists influenced both by pre-Columbian art and by European modernists such as Picasso. These inspirations, as well as the visual characteristics of Mexico itself, are presented in conjunction with interviews with Tamayo. In addition, Hollywood director John Huston (the Treasure of Sierra Madre, Night of the Iguana) speaks a narration written by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; director Gary Conklin would later return the favor by documenting the filming of Huston's final Mexico-set feature, Under the Volcano. Conklin has also made film portraits of Gore Vidal, Paul Bowles, and Ed Ruscha.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 6:30 PM tonight only at the SFPL Noe Valley branch's meeting room.

WHY: I sense that Frisco Bay is feeling a smaller presence of 35mm this September than in any month since the nineteenth century. With the PFA closed as it prepares its move down the hill into downtown Berkeley, with the Stanford shuttered until October for remodeling, and with the Alamo Drafthouse's New Mission location still without a publicly-announced grand opening date, it feels like a moment of uncertainty and waiting. Meanwhile Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is presenting a Neil Young screening series (to be followed by an Architecture & Design doc series) with only one 35mm print (his blown-up-from Super-8 Greendale), and the format is running a distant third (with 13 shows) even at the Castro behind digital shows (well over 20) and 70mm screenings (10 Labor Day weekend Vertigo shows plus 5 of Lawrence of Arabia this weekend = 15). The 4-Star Theatre, the last San Francisco cinema still regularly showing new releases in 35mm, has the digitally-shot Straight Outta Compton, and though the South Bay's BlueLight Cinema is showing 35mm prints of 50% of its current offerings (including four shot-on-video action films and one shot-on-35mm drama by a guy whose films I currently refuse to see), I imagine that percentage will drop in the near future, at least if its kickstarter to raise funds for better digital projectors is successful. Finally, the Paramount in Oakland will be showing a 35mm print of the original Mad Max on Friday, although I've been told to expect the American-dubbed version.

When I can rattle off a month's worth of 35mm showings in the region in a single paragraph, it's pretty clear I'm talking about a waning format, perhaps an "inevitable" transition as a panel at the newly-announced Mill Valley Film Festival seems set to prove. But even if 35mm were to die tomorrow, it wouldn't mean the end of projected reels as long as there were 16mm-centric venues like Oddball Films and the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum and the Exploratorium (which is showcasing a set of brand new 16mm preservations this Thursday) around and thriving. Artists' Television Access (A.T.A.) is another venue which values 16mm projection and which is busier than usual this September; Craig Baldwin traditionally involves 16mm in every one of his weekly Other Cinema programs, and my girlfriend Kerry Laitala will be presenting 3 different multi-projector performances this Friday at her show with Voicehandler at the Valencia Street venue. I highly recommend attending, especially if you missed one or both of their shows at Oddball and Shapeshifters Cinema this past July.

in 2015 I've become involved with a group of A.T.A. volunteers who are spending evenings going through the San Francisco Public Library's collection of 16mm prints, most of them untouched in 20 years or more. The library has a collection of hundreds of films intended for teenage and adult viewers, most of which appear to have been acquired for the collection in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. We're looking at some of the more intriguing-sounding films and putting screening programs together of the best (both in physical and aesthetic quality) prints we're coming across. Our first program screened this past June at the Noe Valley library, and showcased five diverse documentaries, most of them unavailable on any home video format or (as far as we've been able to find) the internet. Our second program, screening tonight, is a little more focused, bringing together two nearly-half-hour films about North American artists. Rufino Tamayo: the Sources of His Art, a color film about a painter, is paired with My Childhood, Part 2: James Baldwin's Harlem, a black-and-white film about a writer of poetry, plays, essays, etc. that was broadcast on television in 1964. In addition to helping to select the films, I wrote short blurbs about both, but as I reprinted the Rufino Tamayo one above, I'll make you follow a link to read what I wrote on My Childhood. I hope you can make it tonight's showing of the two films. Admission is free and there will be an opportunity for discussion afterward.

On strange coincidence I discovered after the pairing of these two films was made. As I noted above, Rufino Tamayo's director Gary Conklin later made an hour-long documentary about the filming of John Huston's final film shot in Mexico, Under the Volcano. The documentary is available through the Criterion Collection edition of the 1984 feature. Well, it turns out that one of the key filmmakers involved in making My Childhood, cinematographer Ross Lowell, also traveled to Mexico to document the making of a John Huston film, namely the 1964 Night of the Iguana. Lowell's 15-minute final product is available on the Warner DVD of the Huston film. Just to add another layer to the coincidence, it was well after we selected these two films to play together tonight that I learned the Castro Theatre would be screening a 35mm print of Huston's first Mexico-set feature (and my favorite of the three), Treasure of the Sierra Madre, on September 27th.

HOW: Rufino Tamayo: the Sources of His Art and My Childhood, Part 2: James Baldwin's Harlem will screen together in 16mm prints from the SF Public Library collection.

Fog Over Frisco (1934)

WHO: Bette Davis stars in this, looking astonishingly young to anyone who has her performance in All About Eve, made sixteen years later (or even in Now Voyager, made eight years later) burned into their brains.

WHAT: Film historian William K. Everson called it the "fastest film ever made" and compared it favorably to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin as a screen textbook for film editing. But for viewers interested the history of San Francisco's depiction in Hollywood films, Fog Over Frisco takes on special significance. It's one of the very few big-studio productions of the 1930s that actually brought some of its cast (although not Davis, as far as I can tell) and crew to the City By The Bay in order to film sequences on location here.

There's a dynamic sequence in which a gaggle of reporters await Margaret Lindsay (who plays Davis's sister) outside her family's mansion in order to ambush her with their cameras. This is shot in Pacific Heights, right at the corner of Octavia and Washington, and you can clearly see Lafayette Park, Spreckels Mansion (pictured above, and currently resided in by novelist Danielle Steel) and other still-standing structures in the scene. The cable-car line on Washington Street, however, is no more.

Another scene in the film calls for a bridge- but since the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges had only just begun construction in 1933, the filmmakers utilized the Third Street Bridge (now known as the Lefty O'Doul Bridge) in China Basin- a neighborhood that has evidently changed its appearance far more than Pacific Heights has since 1934.

These sequences make Fog Over Frisco one of the most extensive on-location Hollywood film to use 1930s-era San Francisco that I've ever come across. Films like Ladies They Talk About (1933), Barbary Coast (1935), San Francisco (1936) and Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) for instance,  use stock photography of the city or none at all, evoking San Francisco entirely through the construction of Hollywood sets. It's a very different story from that of the 1920s, when films like Moran of the Lady Letty (1922) and Greed (1924) were just a few of the productions able to shoot extensively in town (without sound crews, of course), or of the 1940s (particularly the post-World War II era) when developments in cameras and film stocks helped usher in a vogue for location photography in this city that has essentially never looked back. But any student of history wants to fill gaps in the record however possible, so a chance to see what 1930s Frisco was like, through the lens of a First National production, is all the more precious.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight and tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre at 6:10 and 9:05, and the West Portal Branch of the San Francisco Public Library at 6:30 PM on July 23rd.

WHY: I'm thinking a lot about San Francisco-shot films this week because I just received an advance copy of World Film Locations: San Francisco, a book tracing the history of San Francisco moviemaking in a fun and informative way. I'm proud to have been able to contribute to this handsome volume packed with maps, images, and short write-ups on forty-six of the most notable films made in my hometown, each represented by a different scene and location. There are also six essays contextualizing certain recurring trends (the Golden Gate Bridge, car chases) and filmmakers (Hitchcock, Eastwood) involved in shooting here, and a seventh that discusses the current reigning local favorite filmmaker (at least according to a plurality of SF Bay Guardian readers), Peaches Christ.

I've mentioned here before (perhaps too frequently) that my contribution was one of these contextualizing essays, in my case on the topic of film noir in the 1940s and 50s. Though I had free reign to approach this topic how I liked, for which I graciously thank editor Scott Jordan Harris. I had no input in the rest of the book, including the selection of the 46 featured and mapped titles. Of course there are some omissions I'd have stumped for if it had I been involved in that part of the process, but that's a natural reaction any movie fan would feel. Perhaps there can be a sequel if this edition is a success- I think it will be. Overall the book does a great job in bringing together the famous films everyone around the world associates with this city, with a healthy dose of unexpected surprises.

So no, Fog Over Frisco is not featured in the book, but that doesn't mean Spreckels Mansion isn't. It gets its own two-page spread as the chosen location from George Sidney's 1957 musical Pal Joey, starring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak. I don't want to give away too much about the contents of an unpublished book yet, but I will note that nine of the book's forty-six featured films are planned to screen for free this month at San Francisco Public Library branch locations as part of a twenty-title SF Library Film Festival. (To further narrow a few guesses, I'll hint that two of the three of these titles screening Thursdays at the Main Library are in the book).

HOW: At the West Portal Library, Fog Over Frisco will screen via projected DVD. At the Stanford, it screens on a 35mm double-bill with the Of Human Bondage, the career-defining Davis role that was filmed just before, and released just after, the filming of Fog Over Frisco.

A River Changes Course (2013)

WHO: Kalyanee Mam directed this

WHAT: The winner of the San Francisco International Film Festival's Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature (I reported on all the festival's awards last month), this is a polished and interesting documentary about the ecological and economic pressures facing average families in Cambodia. When placed in comparison to the more probing and poetic (and frequently more harrowing) documentaries of the great filmmaker Rithy Panh (who just won a Cannes prize for his latest film The Missing Picture), it comes across as a somewhat lesser work, at least for someone like me who has visited the country and is generally familiar with its many problems and wonders. But Mam's take functions as an ideal "Cambodia 101" for people who haven't heard much about the small country beyond the famous horrors caused by American intervention in the region forty years ago.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 7:00 at the Goldman Theater in the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley, as part of the San Francisco Green Film Festival.

WHY: A River Changes Course is not strictly about environmental issues, but then again environmental issues and their potential solutions are impossible to extract from other human challenges. Thus it's a good choice for the 2nd annual San Francisco Green Film Festival, which opened the other night and runs through June 5th. The underutilized New People Cinema is the main festival venue, but there are screenings at various other Frisco Bay venues, including a free San Francisco Public Library screening of Plastic Paradise, which shows us images from Midway Atoll, a chain of islands affected tremendously by the accumulation of petroleum product waste in the North Pacific Gyre. 

Tonight's screening is one of two at the David Brower Center, a venue I've yet to investigate for myself. The other screening at the space is Tuesday's showing of Breathing Earth - Susumu Singu's Dream, the latest feature by director Thomas Riedelsheimer, who made two wonderful previous documentaries called Rivers and Tides and Touch the Sound, both about unique artists working with  materials in ways that set them apart from some of the ecologically-unsustainable practices used in many sectors of the art world. This portrait of a wind sculptor, and this afternoon's other Riedelsheimer screening Garden in the Sea, about an underwater installation in the Sea of Cortez, seem to fit this pattern as well.

More documentaries of interest to eco-minded cinephiles are to be found at the Rafael Film Center this week and at SF IndieFest's DocFest showcase opening the day after the SF Green Film Festival ends.

HOW: Digital screening of a natively-digital work.

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.