SFFILM 61: Day 8: I Was Born, But...

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began last week and runs through April 17th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

Image from I Was Born, But... supplied by SFFILM

I Was Born, But... (JAPAN: Yasujiro Ozu, 1932)
playing: 8:00 tonight at the Castro Theatre

What to say about I Was Born, But...? It's one of my very favorite Ozu films, one of my favorite silent films, heck, one of my favorite films of all time. As I wrote in my essay for the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival screening:

Usually described as a comedy, I Was Born, But… has been compared to Hal Roach’s Our Gang series. Yet it is much more, reflecting a tumultuous 1930s Japan being shorn of its traditions. The film focuses on the family of a typical white-collar worker (“salaryman”), his stay-at-home wife, and two school-age sons, who have just moved from Tokyo’s crowded center to an unfinished suburban development. As the boys struggle to find a place in the pecking order among neighborhood kids, they outwit the dandified young Taro and his bullying protector with their wily antics, only to be humiliated when their father plays jester to his boss, who happens to be Taro’s father. Ozu uses schoolboy politics to mock the hypocrisies of adult hierarchies. 

I haven't watched I Was Born, But... since that SFSFF showing, so I'm excited to finally revisit it tonight in 35mm. The musical accompaniment at the Castro is Blonde Redhead, a band I don't think I ever listened to in their 1990s heyday, but whose somewhat Sonic Youth-esque album Fake Can Be Just as Good I've been listening to a bit over the past year or so. I'm not sure how the pairing of a New York band with roots in noise punk, and a boisterous but thoughtful silent comedy are going to gel, but I'm almost always up for giving the San Francisco International Film Festival's annual silent film/indie rocker mash-ups a try in the hopes of another sublime night like Dengue Fever & the Lost World.

Since 2011, I've been pleased to have near-annual chances to see Ozu's silent films at the Castro Theatre, thanks to the SF Silent Film Festival. They showed Tokyo Chorus in 2013, Dragnet Girl in 2014, That Night's Wife in 2016, and it was just the other week announced they'll be showing another one, his final silent An Inn in Tokyo, on the second day of its now-expanded-to-five-day 2018 festival. As an Ozu completist I love having opportunities to see on such a large screen these also-excellent films, but I have to admit the loyalty to two Japanese directors (the other being Teinosuke Kinugasa, who has seen two films show over the years), as much as I like them, gives me second thoughts when I reflect that the festival hasn't shown any films by the likes of Mikio Naruse, Kenji Mizoguchi, etc. So I was thrilled to see that for the first time SFSFF will show two films from Japan in 2018: An Inn in Tokyo and Policeman, which for more than ten years I've regretted missing at the PFA's Tomu Uchida retrospective. This means there will be an unprecedented three films from Asia in this year's SFSFF, the third being A Throw of Dice from India. It looks like a truly wonderful festival for a silent film lover like myself, with only two features selected (opening night film The Man Who Laughs and An Inn in Tokyo) that I've seen before, and the latter only on a French-intertitled VHS tape from Le Video. According to the Film on Film Foundation calendar, ten of the festival's twenty feature-length selections, as well as one full shorts program, will screen in 35mm prints; these include the Ozu & Uchida films as well as some of my most-eagerly anticipated selections like Jean Grémillon's The Lighthouse Keepers, Rex Ingram's Mare Nostrum introduced by Kevin Brownlow, the Tom Mix Western No Man's Gold, and an Italian film called Trappola which will be screening with footage of Market Street footage after the 1906 earthquake, filmed by the same brothers who filmed the famous A Trip Down Market Street just a few days before; this newly-uncovered footage will re-premiere digitally at a long-sold-out Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum screening this coming Saturday.

SFFILM61 Day 8
Other festival options: Tonight's your last chance to see The Shape of a Surface: Experimental Shorts program of 16mm works by some of the great modern practicioners of hand-made, medium-specific analog moving images. I already mentioned how the pair of the late Paul Clipson's films in the program are substitutes for two films that couldn't be finished onto 16mm prints in time for the festival, after his shocking February death. Since then I learned that another two films in the program, Pablo Mazzolo's NN and Jennifer Saparzadeh's Nu Dem, were originally intended to screen in 16mm (like the other seven films showing tonight will be) but that the sole available release prints were damaged in one case and destroyed in transit in another, thus necessitating digital presentation at the Roxie tonight. The same venue hosts the final SFFILM screening of No Date, No Signature, which I profiled yesterday, tonight as well, while BAMPFA hosts the second of three SFFILM screenings of Mila Turajlić's The Other Side of Everything, which she is expected to attend along with her filmmaking subject: her activist mother Srbijanka Turajlić.

Non-SFFILM option: In addition to being an SFFILM venue tonight, BAMPFA is hosting another installment of its Wednesday afternoon lecture and screening series led by UC Berkeley professor Anne Nesbit. The theme of the series this semester has been "Eisenstein and His Contemporaries", complementing the evening/weekend Sergei Eisenstein retrospective at the venue that will wrap up April 21st with a double-shot of Ivan the Terrible Part I & II (with a few minutes of surviving test footage from the never-made Part III). I've been able to catch a few of the screenings and lectures, and got a lot out of both viewing and lectures for Pudovkin's The Battle of St. Petersburg and Eisenstein's The General Line, as well as the lecture-less showing of the Swiss-made rarity Misery and Fortune of Women (shown half digitally, half in 35mm). But nothing compared to finally fillng one of my greatest cinematic gaps Alexander Nevsky in a great 35mm print. This is the film & print that will be discussed and be screened at BAMPFA today at 3:10. If you're free at that time you should definitely go. It's been called a masterpiece enough times to be a cliché by now, but it's true.

The Anita Monga Era at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

As I find myself with less and less of the time and (perhaps more importantly) the ability to direct my focus away from the world's turmoil to write about cinema as much as I'd like to, I become increasingly protective of my old articles and interviews. I'm not proud of this feeling; I know it's the opposite of how most wordsmiths far more talented than I feel about their older pieces; to generalize from discussions I've had with some of them it's clear that many of them can't bear to look at most of their prior work, and that this feeling of near-disgust is one of their motivations for continuing to push themselves to become better writers. 

But for me, even though I of course see turns of phrase and ideas in prior writing that I wouldn't choose to employ today, I still find value in many of my past musings. So it was very disappointing to learn last month that all of the articles I wrote for publication at the Fandor streaming service's Keyframe website between 2011 and 2016 had disappeared from the "live" internet (though a few, though not all, of them still existed in google caches and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, last I checked) as part of Fandor's rebranding. What's worse is that so much of the other, better writing by other cinephiles and critics on that site seems to have disappeared too. I'm so glad that at least David Hudson, who'd been such an essential voice at GreenCine (R.I.P.) and The Auteurs (now Mubi) before his time at Keyframe, has found a home worthy of his Daily dispatches, namely Criterion. 

When I contacted Fandor about the disappearance of my Keyframe articles, I was told that "all content" from Keyframe would soon be republished on fandor.com soon. While waiting for that to occur, assuming it ever really does, I thought I'd republish some of my older articles here on my otherwise-underused blog. Being that tonight is the opening night of one of my annual cinephiliac highlights, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, I thought I'd start with this 2014 piece in which I discussed the history of the festival and especially the changes that its Artistic Director Anita Monga has made to it since being hired in 2009. Obviously some of the references to years passed have dated during the three years since this piece was originally published at Keyframe/Fandor, and the particular films I'm highlighting in this article aren't screening this weekend. In fact, as Michael Hawley notes in his detailed preview of the 2017 festival, not a single one of the feature-length films showing this year have played at a prior SFSFF (he doesn't say that it's the first time since 2010 that the summer festival includes no repeats of feature films screened at previous summer or winter events; the only repeat I'm expecting is the four-minute-long The Dancing Pig as part of Saturday morning's Magic And Mirth program.) But there are plenty of films I'm extremely excited to see this weekend, foremost among them Ernst Lubitsch's The Doll, which I've been waiting a long time to see on the big screen, the always stirring Battleship Potemkin (pictured at the top of this post), with live music from the Matti Bye Ensemble, and pretty much everything screening on 35mm per the Film On Film Foundation's latest info. (Especially the rarities from Poland, Italy and the Ukraine.) I've also heard great things about some of the movies screening digitally like The Informer and Terje Vigen, and will probably want to revisit longtime favorites like The Freshman and A Page of Madness as well.

Without further ado, here's the republication of my May 29, 2014 article "The Anita Monga Era at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival", relatively unchanged other than the links and images.

Twenty Junes ago, San Francisco moviegoers were first made aware of something called simply the Silent Film Festival, described as "a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the art of silent film and its value as a record of early 20th century life." This tiny upstart, run by two people (co-founders Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons) out of a one-bedroom apartment, had yet to consummate its first actual festival. It was making its debut in symbiosis with an already established festival, the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, then in its 18th edition (and now running 38 years strong as Frameline). This launch was a single Sunday afternoon Castro Theatre screening of Ernst Lubitsch's 1919 gender-bending comedy I Don't Want To Be A Man, with Dennis James providing Wurlitzer organ accompaniment and Leigh Crow (a.k.a. Elvis Herselvis) on hand to recite the English translation of German subtitles. Sandwiched between showings of Dionne Brand's documentary Long Time Comin' and the posthumously-assembled Derek Jarman film Glitterbug, I Don't Want To Be A Man was a hit with the SFLGFF audience, and a tangible foundation had been laid for future success. 

It would be another two years of fundraising and community-building before the first actual San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) was underway in July 1996. Three feature films (Gretchen the Greenhorn, Lucky Star and Ben-Hur) and a program of shorts, fragments and trailers from lost films (including Lubitsch's Oscar-winning The Patriot) packed a Castro Sunday with 1800 attendees. Everything screened as superior 35mm prints played at the proper projection speed, with expert musical accompaniment. This has been the template the SFSFF has followed ever since. Initially slow-growing (the 1998 event actually scaled back to one film - Erich Von Stroheim's S.F.-shot Greed - and was billed as a benefit for the festival, but has retroactively been counted as the 3rd annual festival), SFSFF expanded from one packed Castro day to two in its seventh year, adding a third day to its summer festival and an annual winter screening in year 10. This weekend the nineteenth edition of the festival will screen more than twenty-five films in eighteen programs over four days, plus a free presentation of recent work from archivists Bryony Dixon and Dan Streible, and industry veterans Craig Barron and Ben Burtt at the "Amazing Tales From The Archives" showcase Friday morning. 

In 2009 Anita Monga took the reins of Artistic Director over from Salmons. 'Peaceful Transition of Power' is an understatement here, as he was ready to step away from the organization he'd helped create, just as Chittick had a few years prior, and was overjoyed to be able to pass it to a beloved and veteran film booker (Monga oversaw the Castro's regular programming for sixteen years until 2004) with deep contacts in the distribution world. Since then the organization has been more ambitious and successful than ever, continuing the incremental annual expansion of its summer programs while mounting weekend retrospectives for individual silent-era directors (so far: Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin) and special events like, at Oakland's über-grand Paramount Theatre, Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc with a full orchestra and chorus and the to-date only four North American screenings of Abel Gance's triple-projector epic Napoléon in its full Photoplay restoration by Kevin Brownlow, with Carl Davis conducting his symphonic score. Annual attendance has grown to 18,000 and the festival has become at least as internationally significant as any silent film showcase outside Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Italy. 

Under Chittick and Salmons, SFSFF tended to avoid most of the silent film staples of Film History 101 classes in favor of films made, whether by auteurs or by skilled craftsmen and women, with entertainment rather than self-conscious artistry in mind. Though launched with a German film, the festival proper didn't feature a foreign-made film until its fourth year when Lev Kuleshov's By The Law was shown. Non-American films continued to be programmed but they were more likely to be lesser-known gems from Shanghai or Latin America than "warhorses" from Scandinavia or the Weimar Republic. Monga's arrival coincided with an explosion of European films in the festival line-ups, and this year's edition is the most impressively international yet, with two feature films from Germany and an unprecedented three from British producers, two from Sweden, two from the Soviet Union, and two from East Asia. Language barriers some filmgoers experience with subtitled sound pictures aren't an issue for silent pictures. "With silent film you don't have to be constrained because people aren't speaking in words; they're speaking in intertitles which can be easily translated." Monga reminded me when I interviewed her last week. "In the silent era everybody really sounds how you think they sound." 

Monga's shown a few extremely famous European silents when there's been a special reason to, like premiering Fritz Lang's Metropolis reunited with footage that had been missing from it for over eighty years, introducing San Francisco audiences to Swedish composer Matti Bye and his ensemble with a signature accompaniment for Häxan, or showcasing Pandora's Box in a new photochemical restoration. But for the most part she eschews the "warhorses" as well, in favor of demolishing audience stereotypes. For 2014 she's picked films by Kuleshov, Dreyer and Yasujiro Ozu, but in each case they're films that go against the grain of their auteurs' reputation. Ozu's gangster picture Dragnet Girl has been called a "film noir" by David Bordwell, and may be the only film the Japanese family drama/comedy specialist made in which a gun is fired. Dreyer's The Parson's Widow is an uncharacteristically ironic comedy by the ponderous and austere director of Vampyr and Ordet. And Kuleshov, best known for his theory of using editing to change audience perception of an individual shot, made only one feature-length comedy and it screens Saturday night. The Extraordinary Adventures Of Mr. West In the Land of the Bolsheviks, as scholar Vlada Petrić has noted, does indeed utilize the "Kuleshov effect" when it intercuts its American-in-Moscow protagonist with real archival footage of a Red Square march to make it appear as if the Harold Lloyd-inspired character is integrated into a space the actor never occupied, the scene resonates with comic absurdity. It's a proto-Zelig moment. 

Most of the other international selections are truly obscure, at least here in the land of Mr. West Coast. I'd be pretty surprised to learn that China's first international prize-winning film The Song Of The Fisherman (by Cai Chusheng, slightly better known for The Spring River Flows East) or late-1920s German dramas Harbor Drift and Under the Lantern, had screened in a Bay Area cinema since the silent era, or ever. Monga singled out Swedish actress/director Karin Swanstrom's The Girl In Tails as particularly (though of course not literally) "made for San Francisco". She told me "it interweaves all of these disparate stories and there's a retreat with a group of wild women: intellectuals and lesbians and women living apart from society, embracing their goofy nephew who comes with the transgressing girl in tails. It was a surprise to me and I think people will really love it." 

One signature of Monga's programming is the annual inclusion of some kind of documentary in the summer program. I use the term loosely to include an exhilarating formalist study like Man With A Movie Camera or an ethnographic slice-of-life like Legong: Dance of the Virgins, but there's no mistaking The Epic Of Everest for anything other than history in the making. Filmed by Captain J. B. L. Noel, formerly of a British Army regiment in North India and an explorer in his own right, this chronicling of a G. Leigh Mallory's climbing team attempt to summit the planet's highest peak is rich in slices of Tibetan life, mountaineering drama, and Himalayan views that would make even Leni Riefenstahl gasp for breath. It's also a triumph of filmmaking technology's ability to withstand extremely harsh natural conditions, much like Herbert Ponting's footage of Captain Scott's doomed mission to the South Pole, which greatly inspired Noel even before it was edited into the form shown at the 2011 SFSFF: The Great White Silence. 

There are, of course, plenty of American films in the 2014 festival program, including six features and a generous helping of short films of various kinds. The opening night film is one of the landmark Hollywood films of the early 1920s and the one that made Rudolph Valentino a screen giant: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Cited by no less an authority than Kevin Brownlow as "the greatest World War I picture" it's an ideal choice for the festival to commemorate the 100th anniversary of The Great War. Monga promised they'll be showing "Brownlow's own restored print. So Patrick Stanbury, Kevin's partner at Photoplay, will be in the projection booth, changing the speeds as the film goes. It's 132 minutes but it is not all the same speed." The musical accompaniment to this Argentine-centric film will be provided by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, who are celebrating an anniversary as well, as they banded together as the Mont Alto Tango and Ragtime Orchestra 25 years ago. 

For the fourth straight summer, the SFSFF will screen a film starring acrobat extraordinaire Douglas Fairbanks. Like Mr. Fix-It and The Half-Breed before it, this year's selection The Good Bad Man is one of the lesser-known of the eleven films he made under the directorial guidance of Allan Dwan (the better-known ones include A Modern Musketeer and Robin Hood). All three films were restored with direct support from the festival, in fact. Mr. Fix-It was aided by the SFSFF preservation fund, and both The Half-Breed and The Good Bad Man are in fact SFSFF restorations (aided by archival partners of course) outputted to 35mm presentation prints that require special projection equipment. "The Castro projectors have variable speeds, but they don't go down as slow as The Good Bad Man needs. That creates a lot of flicker on screen, so we have to replace the blades. It's a three-blade shutter instead of a two-blade shutter," Monga explained to me. "We control it at the Castro, so we know that the print is not going to be ruined with one turn through the projector. That's the fate of 35mm. You can wreck a really expensive print really fast." 

This fragility, and its effect on the policies of archives and distributors that supply films to a festival like this, is why the SFSFF is increasingly employing digital projection. About two-thirds of the 2013 summer festival program was screened on 35mm prints, while this year it's expected to be about half-and-half. All the slapstick comedy screenings, for example, are planned to be shown via DCP, for instance, including both of the Buster Keaton showings. A newly-discovered alternate version of his short The Blacksmith debuts as part of a program presented by Paris archivist Serge Bromberg (also including work by Roscoe Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin), and the festival closes with one of Keaton's biggest commercial successes The Navigator, preceded by an animated short from the Soviet Union called Pochta. Monga sounds particularly excited about this East-West program pairing. "There's something that is going to be perfect about putting it before the Keaton. In The Navigator particularly there's a kind of Rube Goldberg-ian aspect to the actions, and Pochta's forward momentum is all the letters being sent around the world in search of a guy who's one step ahead of the letter. You get to see this amazing progression." 

In fact every one of the SFSFF programs is a testament to the international cross-connections that informed cinema history as it was being made, and to those that continue to inform its rediscovery and restoration. The exportable nature of film has always defined it, especially in the years before recorded dialogue created obstacles to immediate comprehension of images across language-segregating boundaries. Every foreign filmmaker on display this weekend was directly influenced by American films, and it's fair to say all the Americans were influenced by international filmmakers as well. And it's through international archival cooperation that many of these films are being presented today. Midnight Madness, a DeMille Pictures production, was thought lost until it was repatriated from its hiding place in a New Zealand archive in 2010. A similar story involving the Czech Film Archive is responsible for the availability of the 1928 version of Ramona, starring Mexican import to Hollywood Dolores Del Rio and made by the most thoroughly American of the weekend's directors: Chickasaw actor-turned-director Edwin Carewe. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival's motto has long been "True art transcends time." It may be time to add a corollary. It transcends distance as well.

10HTE: Brian Darr

If you've read the seventeen other contributions to by tenth annual I Only Have Two Eyes project attempting to chronicle a hefty portion of the San Francisco Bay Area's best repertory and revival venues and screenings then you know the scene is still robust even as it constantly shifts, opening up new venues as others shutter or pull back. Now it's time for me to (finally) unveil my own top choices from my 2016 filmgoing as experienced from my seat in the audience among friends and strangers.

As usual, I'm essentially limiting my choices to films I'd never seen before at all, as I particularly value the ability I have in the Bay Area to let my first viewings of great films come in the kinds of environments they were intended for in the first place. It was nearly a half-century ago that Jean-Luc Godard said to Gene Youngblood, "I would never see a good movie for the first time on television." I don't strictly hold to this doctrine but I find my home viewings increasingly compromised and theatrical viewings increasingly precious in this distraction-driven era. I could create a shadow list of viewings of films I'd previously seen on television or in an otherwise-unideal circumstance, which came more alive through a 2016 cinema viewing. (Here's a try: Dumbo at the Paramount, In a Lonely Place at Noir City, I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang at the Castro, In the Street at the Crossroads festival, When A Woman Ascends the Stairs at BAMPFA, How To Survive A Plague at YBCA, The Grand Budapest Hotel at the Roxie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me at BAMPFA, Early Spring at BAMPFA, and Halloween at the New Mission.) But without further ado, here are the ten I'm "officially" picking as my 2016 I Only Have Two Eyes selections. Thanks to all my other contributors, to all you readers, and of course to the venues and the filmmakers, dead or alive, whose work made 2016 another grand one for my continuing cinematic self-education and enjoyment.

Heaven's Gate screen capture from Criterion DVD

Heaven's Gate, February 28, 2016

Though I'll definitely be watching the Oscar telecast this year (with reservations) in the hopes that I get to see my old blog-buddy Barry Jenkins accept (or at the minimum, see some of his Moonlight collaborators accept) an award or two, even with the temptation of seeing a newly-more-relevant cinematic titan, and one of the films that inspired it, on the Castro screen, last year I skipped the show without the tiniest shred of compunction in order to catch an extremely epic double-feature in the aforementioned cinema. San Francisco's grandest screen was the ideal place to finally view Michael Cimino's notorious film maudit, which I'm not so surprised to report is now my favorite of his films made up to that point: his 1980 Heaven's Gate. (I haven't delved into Year of the Dragon through Sunchaser but was less-than-thrilled by his swan-song segment of To Each His Own Cinema). It's a sprawling, misshapen masterpiece full of wisdom and folly and a wagon-load of scenes I will absolutely never forget even if I never watch it again- which I certainly will, especially if a 35mm print of this 219-minute cut shows up somewhere again, as it surprisingly did for this Vilmos Zsigmond-tribute showing paired with the also exceptional America America which provided the Haskell Wexler half of the pairing in honor of two great, now-deceased cinematographers. That Cimino joined those two in the pantheon of departed masters only a few months later and that a President was elected who would certainly hate the pro-immigrant themes of these two films soon after that, makes the showing feel all the more special nearly a year later.

Foreign Correspondent, March 20, 2016

I made it back home from a weekend trip to Alfred Hitchcock's Sonoma County stomping grounds just in time to race to Palo Alto's Stanford Theatre for the final screening of his second Hollywood film, which is my second-to-last of his Hollywood films to view (I still haven't seen Topaz). Perhaps a decade or so ago I made a vow never again to watch a Hitchcock film for the first time on home video, and I've broken it only once since (for his silent Champagne, which I missed at the Castro in 2013 to catch a Stanford showing of The Ten Commandments). I'm glad I didn't and waited for this formative, pure entertainment whose 1940 thrills still feel so visceral on a big screen. I only wish I had been able to make it to the same venue in the fall when it showed the ever-rarer Waltzes From Vienna, which marks the end of the string of his British films (beginning with Juno and the Paycock) which, along with the much-later Jamaica Inn, I haven't been able to catch in a cinema yet and thus remain gaps in my Hitchcography. At least I saw several other excellent films from the Stanford's Vienna-themed series (including Spring Parade and Liebelei) and other great 2016 screenings (Hold Back the Dawn, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, A Midsummer Night's Dream) at my hands-down favorite south-of-San Francisco screening venue.

Black Sunday screen capture from Anchor Bay DVD

Black Sunday, April 7, 2016

A 2002 Yerba Buena Center For the Arts retrospective is where I first became acquainted with the visionary, technically audacious cinema of Italian master Mario Bava, whose films like Kill Baby Kill, Five Dolls For an August Moon and Twitch of the Death Nerve make him my personal favorite international horror director from the period between Jacques Tourneur's and David Cronenberg's peaks in that genre. But I couldn't see everything in that 15-year-old retro, so I'd never before seen his very first feature film as an uncredited writer and a credited director. It's appropriate that I return to the scene of the crime (YBCA) to finally view this eerie and intense 1960 film, which not only made a star out of Barbara Steele but also allowed Bava to emerge with a fully-formed style (honed by years as a cinematographer). YBCA's all-35mm Gothic Cinema series was an overall 2016 highlight, also allowing me a chance to finally see wonderfully spooky films like James Whale's The Old Dark House and Jack Clayton's The Innocents for the first time.

Quixote, May 22, 2016

Bruce Baillie is well-known as the founder of Canyon Cinema. He's also one of my very favorite living filmmakers and I'm so glad I had a chance to finally see two of his major works on 16mm for the first time in 2016. Though it was wonderful to see him down from Washington State introducing a screening of his first film On Sundays at New Nothing Cinema in September, an Artists' Television Access showing of his 1965 Quixote was even more precious. It was introduced by a more recent (though not current) Canyon executive director, Denah Johnston, who also showed a lovely film of her own called Sunflowers as well as the great Study of a River by then-gravely-ill master Peter Hutton, as examples of work inspired by Baillie's unique way of seeing. Quixote turns out to be truly monumental work of the proto-hippie counterculture, on the order of Baillie's post-hippie Quick Billy if not ever greater. Shot all over the American West and edited with the aplomb of the most skillful of the Soviet masters, it's Baillie's grand, righteous, sorrowfully patriotic/anti-patriotic statement all in one. Other 2016 repertory highlights in an experimental vein included 16mm showings of Thad Povey's Scratch Film Junkies' Saint Louise and Gunvor Nelson's Take Off at SOMArts (the latter also introduced by Johnston, the former by Craig Baldwin) and of Scott Stark's Angel Beach, Paul Clipson's Another Void and Rosario Sotelo's Flor Serpiente among other works at A.T.A.; both of these evenings were organized in conjunction with an undersung SOMArts exhibit called Timeless Motion that I had a very small hand in assisting in the installation of. I also loved seeing Ron Rice's The Flower Thief and Pat O'Neill introducing his Water & Power at BAMPFA, Caryn Cline showing Lucy's Terrace and her other films at the Exploratorium, Toney Merritt showing EF and many of his other films and Lynn Marie Kirby showing Stephanie Beroes's Recital at New Nothing, and Ishu Patel's Perspectrum and James Whitney's Lapis among others presented by Ben Ridgeway at Oddball (whose weekly screenings have sadly been put on hiatus). It was another good year in this regard.

Gate of Flesh screen capture from Criterion DVD

Gate of Flesh, May 28, 2016

I like the latest iteration of the Pacific Film Archive, now rebranded as BAMPFA, in its newly-built structure just a block or so from the Downtown Berkeley BART station. I don't love it yet, though, because it can't compete with fifteen years of memories made at the old corrugated-metal building further up the hill. It doesn't help that my approach to cinema-going doesn't seem to mesh quite as well with some of the patterns being established at the new venue; earlier showtimes, a reintroduction of the canon, more DCPs (the latter two may be related), etc. And I'm not quite used to the fact that though there are more seats, there also seem to be more sold-out shows; more than once I've arrived at the venue only to be turned away for lack of space, something that hadn't happened to me, no matter how spontaneous my arrival had been, in about a decade before 2016. But BAMPFA still allowed me to see some wonderful 35mm prints of films I'd never watched before, including several Maurice Pialat films, John Ford's The Long Voyage Home, Nick Ray's The Lusty Men, and a decent sampling of the Anna Magnani series that played in the fall. But my year's happiest personal discovery there was certainly that of Seijun Suzuki's 1964 Gate of Flesh, first released when he was a mere 41 (he's now 93 and counting!) It's a maximalist melodrama set in the world of makeshift brothels of post-war Tokyo at it's bombedest-out, filled with tremendous color and energy and some of the most inventive double-exposures made since the silent era.

Anguish, August 9, 2016

When I first heard in April 2012 that the Alamo Drafthouse was going to be renovating the long-shuttered New Mission Theatre I was living just a few blocks away, and was excited but skeptical that I'd still be living there by the time it arrived. Sure enough, I was evicted and moved across town within two years and the venue didn't open for nearly another two. But I've still found the allure of another repertory venue filling some of the long-standing genre gaps in the Frisco Bay screening ecosystem too strong to resist. Alamo's New Mission has something of a reputation for catering to the gentrifying crowd epitomized by the condos next door whose construction were part of the deal to revive the old "Miracle Mile" movie house, and if you look at the prices of their normal tickets and food-and-drink menu items, it's hard to shake that perception. But the theatre's regular late-weeknight, usually-35mm screenings of our grindhouse cinematic heritage for only $6 a seat makes it a godsend for budget-minded cinephiles. The most successful series seems to be Terror Tuesdays, and though it tends to focus pretty strictly on films from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, I can't deny that's a pretty good time period to focus on when it comes to horror movies. Catalan filmmaker Bigas Luna's jaw-dropping 1987 Anguish fits right into that frame, and I'm SO glad I saw it for the first time in a theatre full of other movie lovers who, like me, didn't seem to know what was hitting them. I don't want to spoil a moment of this unique film experience, but I will say that Alamo programmer Mike Keegan (formerly of the Roxie) gave a pitch-perfect introduction that gave us a sense of the intensity of experience we were in for without tipping Bigas's hand in any way. If I could only pick one viewing experience to highlight on this list instead of ten, Anguish would be very much in the running. I've also enjoyed the Alamo's Weird Wednesday programming (especially Walter Hill's Southern Comfort) and, before the admission price more than doubled from $6 to $14, the Music Monday events (especially Donald Cammell's & Nicolas Roeg's Performance).

Manhunter screen capture from MGM DVD

Manhunter, September 3, 2016

I must admit that of all the active filmmakers I see many of my cinephile friends and admireds discussing with passion, Michael Mann is the one that I have traditionally had the most resistance to joining the cult of. Perhaps I've just seen the wrong films (The Keep must be for the advanced Mann-ophile). His 1986 Manhunter, on the other hand, is most definitely the right film. It revels in an eighties-era dread very different from (and to me, more appealing than) the 1990s guignol of Silence of the Lambs, which it technically precurses even if its shared characters are played by different actors, and does a better job at interrogating the wobbly line between society's desecrators and its guardians than any serial-killer movie I can think of. This was screened as part of Jesse Hawthorne Ficks's MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS series, which by the end of 2016 appeared to have departed from the Castro as its primary home for over ten years (after a healthy early-2000s stretch at the 4-Star) and taking up residency at the Roxie (where Manhunter screened) while occasionally venturing into the Exploratorium or the New Mission. The houses are more reliably packed and the films chosen more frequently diverge from my own personal perception of "dismissed, underrated and forgotten films" (this weekend is a tribute to Hayao Miyazaki, whom I love but whom I have a hard time imagining with those labels), but as Ficks has direct contact with a new generation of moving-image-obsessives in his position as a film history teacher at a local school, I'm willing to defer to his definitions. Especially when it means 35mm prints of great films get shown in nearby cinemas.

Viridana, October 14, 2016

What cinema fan doesn't love Luis Buñuel? Finally getting a chance to see his 1961 excoriating re-entry into filming in his homeland after 29 years, in a beautiful 35mm print, would be a highlight of any year. It's a tremendous, unforgettable film, perhaps Buñuel's most Buñuelian, tackling all his usual themes of hypocrisy, sexual obsession, class conflict, etc. with maximum fervor. As much as I love his Mexican and French filmmaking periods, there is something about his few Spanish films that sets them apart. The screening was held at SFMOMA on the second weekend of its first Modern Cinema series devoted to the Criterion Collection and to Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (its current series is Werner Herzog and Ecstatic Truth and its next series, in June, celebrates 100 years of Jean-Pierre Melville by grouping his films with those of one of his most ardent director acolytes Johnny To). After sampling the venue with Viridiana I was able to re-watch great films by Victor Erice, Hiroshi Teshigahara, and Apichatpong, who was on hand wearing a Canyon Cinema T-Shirt for certain showings. This series marked the relaunching of SFMOMA's film programming after over three years of expansion and refurbishment; the Wattis Theatre got a mild make-over in comparison to much of the rest of the building, a missed opportunity to provide more legroom between rows compounded by a new problem of noise from stairwalking museumgoers infiltrating the theatre space during museum-hours screenings of quiet films. Luckily Viridiana screened after hours, a new capability of the space now that it has a separate public entrance from the expensive-to-insure galleries, and I found one of the better seats in the house to view it from.  Despite its minor problems, I'm glad to have a key piece of Frisco Bay repertory reinstated after such a long absence.

So This Is Paris screen capture from youtube

So This Is Paris, December 3, 2016

Since instating an annual one-day Winter Event (or sometimes Fall Event) at the Castro Theatre as a supplement to its Summer (now moved to late Spring) multi-day festival more than ten years ago, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has gradually moved more and more to showing most of the latest restorations and rarely-seen archival gems in the summer while using the opposite end of the calendar to bring out well-known warhorses like The Thief of Bagdad or The General or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It's like a little favor to the many out-of-towners who attend the multi-day festival that they tend to shy away from showing too many films at the one-day event that they'll really regret missing. In 2016, however, their December Day of Silents may have been even more enticing to certain silent film fans than the June festival; it was to me. Although the latter let me see terrific unknown films like Behind the Door and a program of (minimum) 110-year-old hand-colored European films as well as re-viewing great work by Ozu, Wellman, Clair, Flaherty, etc, the Day of Silents seemed to be programmed right to my fondest viewing desires: a rare chance to see longtime favorites like Eisenstein's Strike and Von Sternberg's The Last Command on the big screen for the first time, a chance to see Raoul Walsh's wonderful (if sadly incomplete) Sadie Thompson for the first time ever, and more, nearly all of it (excepting an early-matinee Chaplin shorts set) in 35mm prints. The highest highlight, however, was seeing the last and probably the best of Ernst Lubitsch's Warner Brothers silents, So This Is Paris from 1926, with a tremendous piano accompaniment from Donald Sosin. Everyone talks about this film's bravura Charleston dance sequence, justifiably, but the rest of the film is also a supreme delight, spoofing the then-in-vogue romantic sheik figure, engineering a perfectly-interlocking love quadrangle based on the same material as the famous Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus, and suffusing the proceedings with a biting gallows humor. It immediately shoots to the top tier of American silent films most shamefully lacking an official DVD release, alongside Lubitsch's next great film The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (which I'm not sure how to explain the absence of on my very first I Only Have Two Eyes list from when I saw it at SFSFF in 2007).

I Gopher You, December 10, 2016

The Roxie Theater has really improved its repertory-screening game in my eyes over the past year or so, at least in my eyes. Perhaps it's a competitive response to the appearance of the Alamo Drafthouse a few blocks away. Perhaps it's a function of getting the right personnel in place on its staff and its non-profit board. Perhaps it's connected to the November 2015 passage of the Legacy Business Preservation Fund creation, which the Roxie was able to benefit from starting in August 2016. Perhaps all these factors and more contribute. But though the oldest (first opened in 1909) essentially-continuously-operating movie house in San Francisco, if not a much wider geographic area (it's contested), still has challenges to face, it's facing them not only by using creative tools like their current silent auction and upcoming off-site fundraiser, but also by reasserting itself as an essential piece of the Frisco Bay exhibition quilt through its screenings, more of which involved celluloid in 2016 than had been the case in quite a few years. I personally partook in great events like a September Sam Fuller series, a lovely Les Blank program in March, some of the previously-mentioned MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS showings like Manhunter, and more. None were more purely fun than the two all-35mm programs of Warner Brothers animation brought through the Roxie's monthly Popcorn For Breakfast Saturday morning cartoon showcase enthusiastically and knowledgeably hosted by Amanda Peterson. June's set of selections leaned heavily on the great Chuck Jones, and let me view 35mm prints of classics I'd only seen on TV before like Robin Hood Daffy and There They Go-Go-Go; that it was held twenty-four hours before a Castro Jones tribute made for a deeply-immersive weekend for fans of Termite Terrace's most celebrated director. But the Roxie's December dozen, while not ignoring Jones, gave greater attention to his 1950s studio-mates, particularly Robert McKimson. And the program began with a cartoon by my personal favorite of Jones's under-appreciated co-workers, Friz Freleng, which I'm 99% sure I never saw as a kid and 100% sure I hadn't seen as an adult, much less in a great 35mm print. Freleng's 1954 I Gopher You is the fifth cartoon featuring the hilariously over-polite Goofy Gophers voiced by Mel Blanc and Stan Freburg, and the first in which their nemesis is not an antagonistic pooch but the industrial agricultural system itself. "Mac" and "Tosh" find their farmland food supply raided by the mechanisms of post-World War II production, tracing a truck full of freshly-picked vegetables back to the Ajax processing plant. The mazes of conveyor belts and relentless canning contraptions makes for the ideal playground for Freleng's signature "anticipation gags" in which hearty humor derives from the expectation of the fulfillment of a pattern of violence and/or humiliation against a character. Much like the gophers themselves, this well-oiled machine of a film is seemingly small (at only 7 minutes), but packs a formidable wallop. It's available as a bonus on the Warner DVD of His Majesty O'Keefe, which you can rent at Lost Weekend Video.

10HTE: Michael Hawley

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.

Ten-time IOHTE contributor Michael Hawley runs the blog film-415.

2016 Favorite Bay Area Revival/Repertory Screenings

Blow Job screen shot from Music Box DVD of The Story of Film: An Odyssey

Blow Job (1963 USA dir. Andy Warhol)
Andy Warhol's Silver Screen: Rarities & Restorations, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

I expected to be bored, but instead found myself strangely captivated by this infamous Warhol silent in which the camera coolly observes the face – and only the face – of a young man (DeVeren Bookwalter) angelically lit from above, as he receives a titular off-screen BJ. Shot in high contrast B&W, the exquisite new 16mm print made it easy to savor the way light plays over the planes of his expressive and continually moving face. Eventually one notices how the eyes only become visible when the head tilts back and how his pouty upper lip remains perpetually hidden in shadow. After 25 minutes a pair of arms finally rises in sweet surrender, followed by five minutes of cigarette smoking. The End. On the same double-bill was My Hustler, a 1965 two-reeler gab-fest that benefitted greatly from its astoundingly clear audio. In the first section, a gay man and his fag hag neighbor dish the Dial-a-Hustler (Paul America) lounging on the beach below. Mr. America returns in reel two as he and another hustler (Joseph Campbell) shower, shave and preen whilst discussing the finer points of their trade. I was also lucky enough to catch Warhol's The Life of Juanita Castro (1965) and The Velvet Underground Tarot Cards (1966) as part of this YBCA series.

Hospital (1970 USA dir. Frederick Wiseman)
Frederick Wiseman Restorations: Three Confrontational Classics, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Although I found plenty to admire in Titicut Follies (1967) and High School (1969), both part of this 35mm restorations trio, it was Wiseman's riveting portrait of NYC's Metropolitan Hospital that really shocked my senses. I was particularly taken by the hospital staff's compassion and advocacy for their mostly low-income and indigent clientele – and I'm fully convinced it wasn't just an act for the camera. Inone memorably intense sequence, a staff psychiatrist valiantly pleads by phone with the city's Department of Welfare to obtain help for an underage African-American transgender prostitute.

Until the End of the World screen shot from Magnolia DVD of Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine

Until The End of the World (1991 Germany dir. Wim Wenders)
Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road, Pacific Film Archive

While I really dug this dystopian road movie 25 years ago in its 158-minute iteration, there's even more tolove now in this gorgeous 4K restoration of Wenders' five-hour director's cut, shown at the PFA with a 30-minute intermission. The film's prescience is staggering, with automobile GPS, facial ID software and inter-personal video communication all part of its near-futuristic milieu.

Loulou (1980 France dir. Maurice Pialat)
Love Exists: The Films of Maurice Pialat, Pacific Film Archive

After seeing a reunited Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu in 2015's In the Valley of Love, it was grand going back 35 years to watch them in the prime of youthful magnificence. In Pialat's slice-of-life examination of class conflict, Huppert plays a young woman who leaves her priggish husband (Guy Marchand) for Depardieu's loutish ex-con. Favorite line: "I'd prefer a loafer who fucks to a rich guy who bugs me!"

Under Age (1941 USA dir. Edward Dmytryk)
I Wake Up Screaming (1941 USA dir. Bruce Humberstone)
The Girl and the Monster (1941 USA dir. Stuart Heisler
I Wake Up Dreaming, Castro Theatre

This line-up of trashy 1941 Film Noir – courtesy of esteemed, soon-to-be ex-San Francisco programmer Elliot Lavine – was THE triple-bill of 2016. In Under Age, two down-on-their-luck sisters fall into a scheme by which hitchhiking women coax businessmen to a chain of rest stops where they're swindled by waiting gangsters. Then in I Wake Up Screaming, a publicity agent is accused of murdering the waitress he's transformed into an A-list celebrity, with a fantastically menacing Laird Cregar as the police inspector out to frame him. I was surprised by a scene in which Betty Grable and Victor Mature hide out in a 24-hour "Adults Only" movie theater. I guess that was already a thing back in 1941? Then in the ultimate cake-taker The Girl and the Monster, a man about to be wrongly executed asks a scientist to transplant his brain into a gorilla so he can seek revenge against the mobsters who prostituted his sister. Yes, you read that correctly.

Multiple Maniacs (1979 USA dir. John Waters)

I hadn't seen Waters' first synch-sound film in over 30 years so this Janus Films 4-K restoration was a true like-a-virgin experience. So many things I had forgotten – Divine's hilariously fevered interior monolog in the church scene, the climactic chase through the streets of Baltimore, the re-enactment of Jesus' multiplying of loaves and fishes (canned tuna and trashy white bread). It was a special thrill seeing it in Alamo Drafthouse's main auditorium with Waters on hand to do the intro honors.

A Woman of the World screen shot from Janus DVD of The Love Goddesses

A Woman of the World (1925 USA dir. Malcolm St. Clair)
21st San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro Theatre

Of the 14 programs I caught at this year's SF Silent Film Festival, I had the most fun watching Pola Negri as a tattoo-sporting Italian countess scandalizing a small American hamlet. The image of Negri horsewhipping the local district attorney who wants to run her out of town is now lovingly seared upon my brain. Two additional SFSFF highpoints were Shooting Stars, which marked the debut of brilliant British director Anthony Asquith (A Cottage on Dartmoor), and René Clair's farcical The Italian Straw Hat.

The Beatles at Shea Stadium (1966 USA)
Castro Theatre

This miraculous 4K restoration of the Fab Four's legendary 35-minute Shea Stadium concert was a bonus feature at screenings of Ron Howard's new documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years. (The doc was concurrently streaming on HULU, minus the Shea concert). Thanks to its being shot with 14 cameras, the viewer experiences everything from the band's dazed sprint out onto the field, right up through their being whisked away by security post-concert. Most importantly, the songs can now be heard clearly over the stadium's 55,000 screaming fans. My favorite moment saw John and George convulsing with laughter while singing back-up on "I'm Down," the concert's final number.

So This is Paris (1926 USA dir. Ernst Lubitsch)
San Francisco Silent Film Festival's A Day of Silents, Castro Theatre

My fave silent film discovery of the year was this clever and breezy marital infidelity romp featuring four first-rate actors I'd never heard of and an orgiastic Charleston dance sequence that's gotta be seen to be believed. This one-day marathon of silent cinema goodness also featured Sadie Thompson with Gloria Swanson (who kept reminding me of Kristen Stewart!), the Alloy Orchestra accompanying Eisenstein's Strike, and the first-ever Oscar winner for Best Actor (Emil Jannings in 1928's The Last Command.)

Scarlet Street screen shot from Kino DVD

Scarlet Street (1945 USA dir. Fritz Lang)
Noir City 14, Castro Theatre

Edward G. Robinson gives a delicately sympathetic performance as a put-upon hubby and Sunday painter who gets mixed up with a prostitute (Joan Bennett) and her pimp boyfriend (Dan Duryea). It's easy to see why Fritz Lang considered this his favorite of the films he made in Hollywood. The movie wrapped up an impressive Saturday afternoon triple-bill that included 1944's The Lodger starring (once again) the great Laird Cregar as a surrogate Jack the Ripper, and 1944's Bluebeard featuring John Carradine as a women-murdering Parisian puppeteer. Noir City 14 also afforded me worthwhile revisits of Michael Powell's The Red Shoes and Peeping Tom, as well as Antonioni's Blow-Up.

10HTE: Sterling Hedgpeth

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.

First-time IOHTE contributor Sterling Hedgpeth runs a stamps & cinema blog called The Filmatelist, from which he's allowed me to re-post (with different images) from this entry.

Dumbo screen capture from Disney DVD

We’ll start with Dumbo (Sharpsteen, 1941) at the Paramount in Oakland, on absolutely stunning 35mm. Although the emcee called it original (which it couldn’t have been, because that would have meant nitrate stock), it certainly was a crisply struck print that had not seen much circulation. Combine the divine “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence with the most gorgeous Art Deco palace in the Bay Area, and it was a great way to start the year.

Also in January were some memorable titles at Noir City at the Castro, and for me, the highlight was a first viewing of Mickey One (Penn, 1965), a glorious jazz-tinged fever dream of a film, with an assist from legend Stan Getz. Disjointed, bizarre, singularly unique and punctuated by a live dance routine from burlesque goddess Evie Lovelle.

Soon after, the PFA had an excellent Maurice Pialat series, but I suspect that the power of his Under the Sun of Satan (1987) was magnified by it being bookended (quite by coincidence) with two other contemporary films I saw the same week that also explore religious faith, fanaticism and hypocrisy: Pablo Larrain’s The Club and Avishai Sivan’s Tikkun. In Pialat’s fantasy-fueled acid bath Passion Play, he posits the possibility that religion may be the most oppressive to the truly devout. Overall, a provocative accidental trilogy.

The Beguiled screen shot from Universal DVD

Some fun Gothic films ran their course at the Yerba Buena Arts Center that summer, and the highlight was my first time seeing The Beguiled (1971) on the big screen. Still Don Siegel’s best, Clint Eastwood plays a Yankee fox trying to subvert and seduce a Dixie henhouse. The thick hothouse atmosphere and sexual tension played beautifully through Siegel's lighting and the insidious plotting and character power plays. Still a remarkable film (soon to be remade by Sofia Coppola).

Though a relatively recent movie, I have to include the Triplets of Belleville (Chomet, 2003) screening at the Taube Atrium in the SF Opera House because Benoît Charest was there with a jazz combo to perform his exquisite score live, including saws, bikes, and trashcans as percussion instruments. A terrific experience.

2016 was the first year the Alamo Drafthouse in the Mission was open, and the best part of their programming is the late night Mon-Wed screenings. My first dip into that pool was a packed show of Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, 1971), which I’ve seen several times in the theater, but never tire of the gearhead culture, the meditative structure and lack of urgency (for a racing film!) and Warren Oates’s phenomenal turn as GTO. My year was relatively short on roadtrips but this went some way to sating my wanderlust.

The Shining screen capture from Warner DVD

In my backyard at the Parkway, there was an irresistible double bill of the cuckoo-bananas conspiracy theory documentary Room 237 (Ascher, 2012) followed by a screening of the focus of its subject, The Shining (Kubrick, 1980) itself. Rarely does a year go by when I don’t see some Kubrick on screen (I also revisited Paths of Glory and Spartacus at the Smith Rafael Film Center for Kirk Douglas’s 100th birthday), but a bonus this year was an excellent exhibit on Kubrick at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in SF with some amazing artifacts from his career, including the typewriter and hedge maze model from this film.

Also at the Smith Rafael was a Sam Fuller weekend (with his widow and daughter in attendance), where the biggest revelation for me was his Tokyo noir House of Bamboo (1955), a beautifully stylized genre piece whose gangster trappings and compositions appeared to anticipate the marvelous Seijun Suzuki, whose career was starting around the exact same time. As you’d expect, Robert Ryan is in top form and the climax on a rooftop amusement park is a standout.

Destiny screen capture from Kino DVD

And finally, two silent films, both firsts for me. At the Silent Film Festival at the Castro, Destiny (1921), the earliest film I’ve seen by Fritz Lang and a glorious anthology of stories where Love must face down Death. It was wonderful seeing Lang’s visual imagination in bloom, anticipating the superb special FX and supernatural wonders of his next few years in Germany. Months later, over at the Niles Essanay Film Museum, the buoyant energy of underrated actress Bebe Daniels was on full display in the fizzy comedy Feel My Pulse (La Cava, 1928), about a hypochondriac heiress looking for rest at a health sanitarium which is actually acting as a front for bootleggers (led by a very young William Powell). A hilarious comedy and secret gem.

So that’s 10 features, but since I saw over 60 archival shorts in the theater last year, I’ll give an honorable mention to two with Buster Keaton, still silent in the autumn of his career. I saw The Railrodder (Potterton, 1965) at an Oddball Film Archive screening, featuring Buster traveling across Canada on an open-air mini-railcar, a playful reminder of his other great train film The General, but in sumptuous color. And around the same time, the Smith Rafael Film Center played Film (Schneider, 1965), one of Samuel Beckett’s few forays into film and a wonderful existential metaphor with Buster showing that age had not changed the expressiveness of his body in motion. A sublime pairing. Here’s looking forward to another year of familiar films and new discoveries.

10HTE: Adrianne Finelli

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 Adrianne Finelli is a filmmaker & GAZE co-curator.

This chronological list is not presented in any type of rated order as I could not begin to weigh these works in relation to one another.

The Fall of the I-Hotel screen shot from online trainer

1
The Fall of the I-Hotel (1983)
dir. Curtis Choy
Artists'Television Access
Thursday, February 11, 2016

This screening was of the most politically resonant and poetically inspiring films that I have seen in recent years. The Fall of the I-Hotel should be required viewing for everyone living in the Bay Area, as was the preceding short film Anatomy of a Mural (1982) by Rick Goldsmith. The screening was programmed by a team of filmmakers, writers and curators who are rediscovering a local library's film print collection and sharing the best of their findings through free public screenings.

2
L'enfance nue (1968)
dir. Maurice Pialat
Pacific Film Archive
Saturday, February 20, 2016

Naked Childhood (L'enfance nue) was the most emotionally charged narrative film that I saw this year, and its true impact is how it restrains emotion into very palpable realism. The story is complex and simple, the performances are jarringly brilliant, the cinematography is beautifully sincere. I tried to see as much of the Pialat series as possible, he is a master of portraying the human depth of feelings.

3
NFPF PreservationHighlights
presented by Jeff Lambert
Pacific Film Archive
Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Jeff Lambert presented this program of recently preserved films. The screening was full of surprising variety and unexpected gems from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Children Who Labor (1912) by Ethel Browning, Interior New York Subway (1905) and Lyman Howe's Famous Ride on a Runaway Train (1921)—all new to me—were fascinating documents. Plus, it was a real treat to see Sid Laverents's Multiple Sidosis (1970) on 35mm.

That Night's Wife screen capture from Eclipse DVD

4
That Night's Wife (Sono yo no tsuma) (1930)
dir. Yasujiro Ozu
Castro Theatre—San Francisco Silent Film Festival
Friday, June 3, 2016

Perhaps the most beautiful silent film I have ever seen—this particular print was stunning, the texture of the film almost became another character. Ozu cleverly hooks us with a suspenseful, noir-like crime plot and slowly shifts the story's core to an intimate family drama. I never remember crying during a silent film, but Emiko Yagumo's brilliant performance as the mother moved me to tears. I'm sure that the nuanced live musical accompaniment by Maud Nelissen also had something to do with my weepy reaction.

5
Within Our Gates (1920)
dir. Oscar Micheaux
Castro Theatre—San Francisco Silent Film Festival
Saturday, June 4, 2016

I left the Castro feeling like I needed to write a thank you letter to each member of the Oakland Symphony and Chorus for their unforgettable performance. This was my first time seeing Micheaux's Within Our Gates, and getting an African-American perspective from that historical era makes me wish I had seen it during my film studies instead of being shown The Birth of a Nation (1915) repeatedly. In addition, the writing and performances are powerful, and the whole is tremendously haunting considering our current political climate.

6
Water and Power (1989)
dir. Pat O'Neill
Pacific Film Archive
Thursday, September 29, 2016

Filmmaker Pat O'Neill was in attendance for this screening of Water and Power plus several short works. It was a joy to see all of the films in the new PFA theater and to hear the discussion that followed the screening. I was blown away by the whole evening. O'Neill is a master that remains curious and prolific. It was wonderful to also see the exhibition of his artwork in the gallery beforehand. The range of work—painting, drawing, sculpture and installation was remarkable.

Jeanne Dielman screen capture from Criterion DVD

7
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
dir. Chantal Akerman
SFMOMA
Sunday, October 9, 2016

This screening was perhaps the most meaningful film screening of 2016 to me. I had seen Jeanne Dielman before, but this particular time marked my first public screening as a projectionist. I had the honor of sharing the booth and studying under the talented Brecht Andersch. We bonded over having seen the film for the first time in our late teens and the impact it had on us. We collectively mourned the loss of the great Chantal Akerman. It was a very emotional and surreal experience. 

8
La Région Decentrale (2016): A Prepared Projection Performance for Michael Snow's La Région Centrale (1971) by Gibson + Recoder
Exploratorium co-presented with Canyon Cinema
Tuesday, November 7, 2016

This screening happened on Election Day 2016 after spending the day hiking in the Marin Headlands with dear company. I entered the Kanbar Forum with a sinking feeling in my stomach as we were still uncertain of the country's fate, but my fears and anxiety fell away as I became entranced in a visual and aural meditation with a room full of fellow travelers. Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder presented a live four projector performance that reimaged Michael Snow's three hour La Région Centrale (1971) simultaneously into a quadrant of images that layered the sound from each reel. At the moment that the third projection was introduced the sound transformed into an otherworldly force.

9
Conical Solid (1974)
dir. Anthony McCall
Sutro Baths Cave—Lightfield Film Festival
Sunday, November 13, 2016

Lightfield Film Festival organized one of the most magical film events that I have ever attended. Imagine this—abstract light flickers from a 16mm projector fill a cave of fog and creates forms that touch the bodies flanking its brilliant beam with the sound of the salty waves crashing against the rocks alongside the ruins of the famed Sutro Baths under the biggest supermoon of our lifetime.

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 11 screen capture from longnow.org stream of the show.

10
Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 11
edited by Rick Prelinger
Castro Theatre
Wednesday, December 7, 2016

This was my fifth year attending Rick Prelinger's annual screening of found footage of the San Francisco Bay Area. My husband and I always look forward to the event and love hearing the voices of the community shout out locations, jokes and information, but this year was especially wonderful as we had the rare opportunity to join Rick and Megan Prelinger on stage with our fellow Prelinger Library volunteers. Rick's remarks about the importance of the commons struck a chord with many and the energy of the crowd could be felt throughout the entire theater. It was also a great pleasure to scan some of the featured 8mm and 16mm film footage for Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 11.