South And North

Since my previous post on the Frisco Bay screening scene, two major pieces of news have caught the eyes of cinephiles like myself. First, the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto quietly began a new multi-calendar series last week. It's an extensive centennial tribute to Universal Pictures, focusing attention on the oldest of the Hollywood studios, which mogul Carl Laemmle formed out of his company IMP (Independent Moving Pictures Company) and several others after emerging victorious in his legal battle with the 'old guard' of American motion picture production: Edison, Bioscope, Vitagraph, etc. a.k.a. "The Trust". The first picture made at his Universal City studio after this formation, At Old Fort Dearborn, was released on September 28, 1912, and was itself a centennial commemoration of a War of 1812 battle taking place where Chicago would eventually be founded. Though this film (if it indeed exists) is not announced for the Stanford schedule, there are three silent film presentations between now and the end of the calendar: two early entries in the famous "Universal Horror" series: the spooky Cat and the Canary this Friday September 21 & Lon Chaney's famous Phantom of the Opera November 2nd, as well as Erich von Stroheim's 1922 drama Foolish Wives on October 12th. All three will feature Dennis James at the Wurlitzer organ, and will hopefully be followed by more Universal silent films in subsequent calendars.

The Good Fairy (William Wyler, 1935) screen capture from Kino DVD

The meat of the Stanford schedule over the next two months is not 1920s silents, however, but a healthy sampling of features from the 1930-1935 period, all on 35mm prints as usual at this venue. Essentially all of the surviving Universal Horror films from this period will screen, from famous titles like Dracula and the Mummy to lesser-knowns Werewolf of London and Secret of the Blue Room, paired on Halloween night. With quite a few films by melodrama master John Stahl (Magnificent Obsession & Imitation of Life make a double-bill of Douglas Sirk pre-makes Oct. 13-14) and a complete retrospective of James Whale's work from 1931's Waterloo Bridge and Frankenstein to his 1935 Bride of Frankenstein and Remember Last Night?, the series is ideal for auteurists. If this Wednesday & Thursday's pairing of Frank Borzage's rarely-shown but highly-regarded Little Man, What Now? with one of my very favorite William Wyler films (from a Preston Sturges screenplay) The Good Fairy doesn't entice you to Palo Alto I'm not sure what I can say. Maybe you have an excuse if you're immersing yourself in one of the two other current studio-focused film series happening in Berkeley right now. I was sad to miss Stahl's 1933 Only Yesterday last week but glad I caught Isao Takahata's 1991 film with coincidentally the same (English) title- it was as equal to the best films of Hayao Miyazaki as it was different from them, and it plays again at the California Theatre this Wednesday only.

The other studio-focused series in Berkeley is the Pacific Film Archive's Nikkatsu centennial, which I'm sad to say I haven't been able to attend any of yet. (How could I let myself miss a rare Mizoguchi film?) There are still quite a few screenings left to go however, including a Daisuke Ito chambara from the silent era and three Seijun Suzuki selections from the 1960s. Like Universal, Nikkatsu is still in action today, releasing films like Rent-A-Cat, which will screen nearby next month. This brings me to screening news #2: Last Wednesday's press conference and announcement of the program for the Mill Valley Film Festival happening in various Marin County venues from October 4-14. 

In Another Country (Hong Sangsoo, 2012) courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival

Though the press conference itself was underwhelming (why rent the Dolby Labs screening room and then show compressed clips with cut-off subtitles and obfuscating pixelation? Well, at least the festival trailer looked great.) the program itself more than made up for that. Quite a few of the festival circuit's hottest titles, by veteran auteurs and up-and-coming makers alike, are part of the MVFF program this year. Whether this is because the festival is celebrating an anniversary itself (its 35th) or because of other factors, I don't know, but there's no doubt I'm finding more to lure me on the trek North this year than I've ever seen on a prior Mill Valley program. I don't feel left out of hyped Eastern festivals, knowing that 7 highly-anticipated films from the New York Film Festival's main slate are set to play here in less than a month: Christian Mungiu's Beyond The Hills, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die, Antonio Méndez Esparza's Here And There, Leos Carax's Holy Motors, Ang Lee's Life of Pi, Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone In Love, and Miguel Gomes's Tabu. These are joined by more new films I have I hopes for, foremost among them the first screen team-up between one of my favorite international directors Hong Sangsoo, and one of my favorite international performers, Isabelle Huppert: In Another Country. 

I'm also curious to see Nor'Easter and Fat Kid Rules The World, both first features from American directors Andrew Brotzman and Matthew Lillard, respectively. I believe these are the first films completed with some assistance from Lucas McNelly and his ambitious A Year Without Rent project (full disclosure: my roommates and I contributed a night on a couch to this project) to have public screenings in the Bay Area. There's also The Wall, which comes to Mill Valley after screening at the Berlin & Beyond festival this month, a fascinating Frisco-focused documentary called The Institute, and the annual offering from the prolific local legend Rob Nilsson, whose films rarely screen in San Francisco proper, even when they're made here. This one is called Maelstrom and is set in Marin, making MVFF an even-more ideal showcase than usual. 

Tales of the Night (Michel Ocelot, 2011)  courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival

Thanks to the festival's timing on the "awards calendar" there's always a certain amount of "Oscarbaition" at Mill Valley, and this year Ben Affleck is expected to be on hand to excite people about his upcoming Argo and David O. Russell will be here with Silver Linings Playbook. But I'm much more interested in an Oscar-ineligible animated feature, silhouettist Michel Ocelot's first 3-D venture Tales of the Night, which screened in Frisco once last year, in French with English subtitles. I missed it with some regret but won't miss the subtitles when I catch it dubbed into English at Mill Valley this year. A recent viewing of the otherwise-excellent Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (which comes to the Castro next month) made me realize I haven't yet trained myself to read words on one focal plane while taking in stereoscopic action at the same time. Thoughtful dubbing is usually less damaging to animation than live-action work anyway. Note that Robert Bloomberg's 3-D short How To Draw A Cat, which screens along with Ocelot's feature, is, contra the festival catalog, not made by young Croatian artists. There is an animation workshop as part of the MVFF Children's Filmfest, and the other features in this sidebar will be preceded by shorts, but labeling How To Draw a Cat as such was a publishing error.

With all the treats in store, it may be a bit disappointing to learn that all the above-mentioned films will be screening digitally rather than in 35mm prints. This is the reality of film festival exhibition for the present and foreseeable future, however, and although the main MVFF venue, the Rafael Film Center, still retains its 35mm projection capability, they understandably also want to show off their recently-upgraded digital projection systems. To festival director Mark Fishkin's press conference promise that the festival screenings will look much better than the clips shown did, I can only say: they'd better! I feel it's worth noting the handful of titles that I'm told will be sourced from actual film reels and not DCP or other digital formats: the painter/film director biopic Renoir, Brazil's Xinga (also a biopic), Polish thriller To Kill A Beaver, and two of the selections in the shorts program entitled Crosseyed And Painless. And two of the retrospective presentations as well: the screening of 

La Jetée that will accompany the October 6th (but not the October 8th) showing of Emiko Omori's tribute to its departed director, To Chris Marker, an Unsent Letter, and the October 7th 35mm screening of Yoyo, a 1965 comedy co-written by Jean Claude-Carrière, and directed by and starring the all-but-forgotten French clown Pierre

Étaix- a pair mentored and introduced by the great Jacques Tati. If 

Étaix's name doesn't ring a bell his face may if you've seen Fellini's The Clowns, Oshima's Max Mon Amour, Iosseliani's Chantrapas, Kaurismäi's Le Havre, or (not bloody likely) Lewis's The Day The Clown Cried.

Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012) courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival

With the studios' all-or-nothing digital push, 35mm prints are disappearing from festivals all over- not just Mill Valley but household-name festivals like Cannes and Toronto as well. This is purely speculation, but it may be that the main reason why this year's MVFF line-up seems stronger than usual is that distributors are more willing to let digital versions of their films play at a regional festival like this than they were willing to send one of their few 35mm prints to Marin in the days when celluloid was king. Small distributors are giving in to pressure to "go digital" just as commercial cinemas are, and the whole film ecosystem as we know it may be unrecognizable in a year or sooner. I'm told a touring 35mm print of Holy Motors will grace at least one local Landmark Theatres screen about a month after it plays digitally at MVFF, but this may already be the exception to the rule.

All I know is, I'm determined to see e.g. Like Someone In Love in Marin County next month, even if it is going to be shown from a Digital Cinema Package (DCP). And if IFC distributes a print of it to a local arthouse sometime this winter or spring or later, I imagine I'll happily pay to see it again there as well. I mean, it's an Abbas Kiarostami feature set in Japan. Of course I'm going to want to see it at least twice! Now, off to buy my ticket befpre it goes to "rush" status...

Best Fests In the West?

It's that time of year again. For The Love Of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon is holding its 3rd annual outpouring of blog-love for the integral activity of film preservation, hosted earlier this week by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy On Films, and now by This Island Rod. For the third year in a row, the Blogathon is raising funds for a San Francisco-based preservation non-profit. In 2010 funds raised from For The Love Of Film went to the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve color-tinted versions of two hundred-year-old Western one-reelers, The Sergeant and The Better Man. Last year's donations went to the Film Noir Foundation to help pay for a new restoration of blacklisted director Cy Endfield's Try And Get Me, which is expected to be finished in time to screen at the January 2014(!!!) edition of Frisco's Noir City festival. Consider that a year-and-a-half early scoop (in the meantime, Endfiled's The Underworld Story screens at the Roxie next week). This year's blogathon is taking donations for, once again, the National Film Preservation Foundation, this time to make what remains of The White Shadow, a very early feature worked on by Alfred Hitchcock and until recently thought completely lost, available at the NFPF's online screening room with a musical score by Michael Mortilla.  Donate today to help further the world's knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock and British silent film!

Many of the blog pieces being written for this week's blogathon have focused on Hitchcock films and related subjects, and I considered writing about his Vertigo star Kim Novak, who will be returning to this city for a gala event June 14th to help kick off a week-long exhibition of Frisco Bay movie-making memorabilia at the Old Mint, put together by the SF Museum & Historical Society. Novak was in the news earlier this year, as you may remember, for objecting to The Artist's re-use of Bernard Herrman's iconic love theme from Hitchcock's love/hate letter to San Francisco. Well, less for objecting to it, than for using a very controversial word choice to express her objection. My own tweets at the time of the controversy expressed my feelings on the subject pretty well, I think.  I chalk the whole incident up to the usual Oscar-season mudslinging, and would never hold an isolated comment against an actress I admire as much as Novak, who is undoubtedly absolutely brilliant in Vertigo although I've barely seen any of her other acting work.

A more detailed appreciation of Novak in Vertigo will have to wait for another day, because I cannot resist using the blogathon as an excuse to talk about a few upcoming film festivals that feature preserved and restored films in their program. The NFPF screening room and the DVD sets it releases are wonderful boons to home viewing, but the importance of getting our film heritage in front of audiences in cinemas should not be understated. Sometimes the essential qualities of films made to be screened theatrically cannot be fully decoded in other settings. With the world of film exhibition under increasing pressure to conform to Hollywood studios' desires to turn cinema into a digital wonderland that threatens to be a digital blunderland and, as David Bordwell warns, a "freezing of the canon," film festivals may become one of the last remaining models for getting actual film prints on cinema screens. While certain local festivals have scaled back their retrospective screening components, it's heartening that others remain committed to giving past cinematic glories as much or more attention than the newest motion picture trends.


The National Film Preservation Foundation's aforementioned DVD sets cover a wide range of American filmmaking strands, from narratives of practically every genre and length to documentaries, animation, newsreels, home movies and even advertisements. But the bulk of these collections is given over to two general categories that tend to fall through the cracks for most commercial DVD-releasing enterprises: silent films and avant-garde films. Though their first set is perhaps their most eclectic in both themes and time periods, sets two, three, and five are almost exclusively devoted to silent-era filmmaking. The fourth set was given over entirely to this country's rich avant-garde filmmaking tradition, and the announced sixth set will be a sequel released next year. Correspondingly, there are three film festivals coming to Frisco Bay in the next couple months that celebrate silent films and avant-garde films: The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, and Crossroads.

Since it begins first- this evening, as a matter of fact- I'll take on Crossroads for a few paragraphs first. The third annual initiative on the part of venerable experimental film exhibition organization SF Cinematheque to program a full-fledged festival of artist-made film and video, Crossroads will screen more than fifty works from around the globe between now and Sunday. Many of today's most interesting truly independent moving image artists have work in the festival, from established masters like Scott Stark, Ken Jacobs, and Saul Levine, to rising talents such as Linda Scobie and Sylvia Schedelbauer -- I've seen Scobie's Craig's Cutting Room Floor and Schedelbauer's Sounding Glass and am certain both with make a strong impression on Crossroads attendees. Max Goldberg has written a fine preview focusing mostly on new works getting their Frisco Bay premieres at the festival.

Of great interest to the preservation-minded, however, is tomorrow afternoon's program of films made by Chick Strand, the co-founder of Canyon Cinema, the 1960s exhibition predecessor to SF Cinematheque that still operates as a distribution company today. Strand's film Fake Fruit Factory was included on the fourth NFPF DVD set and is available for online viewing in their virtual screening room. Last December, two years after Strand's death in 2009, the film was included on the list of new entrants to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry along with far more famous titles like Bambi  and Faces. I think it's great that she now has a film on the registry list, but am still a bit baffled as to why that particular one was chosen, fine as it is. The Crossroads festival will be screening two of Strand's (in my book) far greater masterpieces, her joyous 1966 film Angel Blue Sweet Wings and her 1979 tribute to Anne Frank, Kristallnacht. Also screening is her rarely-shown 54-minute 1979 film Soft Fiction, which I have yet to see. The program is titled Woman With Flowers after the name of a film that was originally also slated to screen; that title has been replaced with her 1979 found footage film Cartoon Le Mousse. I don't know the reason for the switch, but it's interesting that Woman With Flowers was completed by the filmmaker in 1995, yet she never created a distribution print. According to the website of the Pacific Film Archive, which screened the film last October, the Academy Film Archive completed post-production on the film posthumously, but that "no creative interpretation or intervention was necessary."

Contrast that statement against what preservationist Bill Brand has to say in the liner notes to the recent Criterion Collection DVD release of Hollis Frampton's films, which have been scarcely seen on Frisco Bay screens in recent years. Brand insists that preservation of avant-garde films invariably involves creative work, as film companies discontinue the stocks filmmakers originally used, and digital transfers demand compromises and aesthetic judgments. A 16mm print of the late Frampton's 1969 film Lemon plays the Crossroads festival on Sunday evening along with two other experimental film "classics": Bruce Baillie's simple yet breathtakingly rich 1966 film All My Life, and Morgan Fisher's Picture and Sound Rushes. All three have been programmed to compliment a five-film set of films by Basque filmmaker Laida Lertxundi, who comes fresh from the Whitney Biennial and counts these works among her influences. I haven't seen ant of Lertxundi's films yet, but I marvel at the programming of Lemon at a time slot coinciding with a rare annular solar eclipse. Lemon is often remarked on as an erotic interpretation of a citrus fruit, but the way its lighting scheme gradually shifts over the course of seven minutes recalls the (apparent) movement of a familiar solar orb around our own globe. Assuming the program runs continuously without extended breaks for introductions, the (partial in San Francisco) eclipse ought to peak right about the time when the films finish. But you probably won't want to race out of the Victoria Theatre to peek at it, for two reasons: looking directly at the sun, even during an eclipse, is far more dangerous to the eyes than looking at an on-screen lemon, and Lertxundi has been flown into town to speak about her work following the screening.


On the subject of flying in to film festivals, although it's undoubtedly too late to book a cheap flight to attend Crossroads, there's plenty of time for out-of-towners to plan to visit the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which announced its full program last week but doesn't commence until mid-July.  You'll hardly be alone, as scores of visitors from around the country descend upon the Castro Theatre every summer to join the thousands of locals in love with what has become the largest silent film festival in the country (and probably the largest one anywhere in the world that has yet to screen an Alfred Hitchcock silent film. Operative word, I hope: Yet.)  Continuing the aviation thread, the festival opens July 12th with the new restoration of William Wellman's World War I dogfight saga Wings, which will be accompanied by a live score from Colorado's Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and by Foley effects from renowned sound designer Ben Burtt (Star Wars). Though Wings, which stars Richard Arlen, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Clara Bow and Gary Cooper, is well-known as the winner of the Best Production award at the first Academy Awards ceremony - and often retroactively designated as the first Best Picture winner - few know that the other award the film won that year, for Best Engineering Effects, was designated equally for the film's ground-breaking visual effects and for the live sound effects that accompanied its gala premiere screening in Los Angeles. Silent films are by no means equivalent to silent screenings; though the prints include no sonic information, they have almost always been screened with musical accompaniments, sound effects, narration, etc. The SFSFF brings some of the best international accompanists to provide music for all screenings, and will experiment with narration for its July 14 screening of the 1919 British documentary South, for which actor Paul McGann will read from the diaries of the film's hero, Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, while Stephen Horne provides piano accompaniment. 

Clara Bow is represented at the festival not only by Wings but by Mantrap, a 1926 Paramount comedy released on DVD last year as part of the NFPF's fifth box set of Treasures From American Film Archives. Stephen Horne, again, will reprise the piano score he performs on that DVD, but the film will be screened on a 35mm print. Indeed, the SFSFF has a reputation of using the best possible 35mm prints for their screenings, and nearly all of the films in the 2012 festival are expected to screen on 35mm- the exceptions being Wings, Ernst Lubitsch's last surviving German film, The Loves Of Pharaoh, and the color restoration of A Trip To The Moon which screens before a 35mm print of Buster Keaton's The Cameraman to close the festival July 15th. Presumably, as in the few (I count three) other instances when the SFSFF has used digital rather than film prints, there are not 35mm versions of these restorations available for them to screen. The festival has screened Wings in 35mm before, way back in 1999. That was the first time I'd ever heard of SFSFF, and I unfortunately couldn't make the screening and have yet to see Wings on anything other than VHS. I hope the new restoration is worth the wait, and the presence of pixels.


G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box is the other repeat selection in this year's festival, and although I saw it last time around (in 2005), I won't want to miss it this time either, as it's an extended version with about 10 more minutes than any other available, it will be shown in a 35mm print of a full restoration funded by Louise Brooks fan Hugh Hefner, and will be musically accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble, the Swedish accompanists who are quickly becoming many fans' favorites of the SFSFF stable of musicians. They will also accompany Mauritz Stiller's 1920 Erotikon (not to be confused with Gustav Machaty's 1929 film with the same name, which screened at the 2009 SFSFF), which I've been wanting to see for years. 

And there's more- much more. Musicians I haven't yet mentioned include Wurlitzer organist extraordinaire Dennis James, who will accompany Douglas Fairbanks (not Jean Dujardin) in The Mark Of Zorro and  The Loves Of Pharaoh. The Alloy Orchestra will premiere a new score for Soviet co-directing team Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg's Nikolai Gogol adaptation The Overcoat- another film I've had on my to-see list for quite some time. Keyframe recently published an interview I did with Alloy co-founder Ken Winokur, if you want to know more about why I'm excited by this pairing. And pianist Donald Sosin will play for no less than four film programs including Chinese auteur Sun Yu's well-regarded Little Toys starring Shanghai's answer to Greta Garbo, Ruan Lingyu. He'll also back Pola Negri in a brand new restoration of The Spanish Dancer, and my favorite Josef Von Sternberg silent film The Docks Of New York (which I wrote about upon its DVD release here), but I'm most excited to hear his collaboration with local ensemble Toychestra for a set of seven Felix The Cat cartoons. Felix is undoubtedly my favorite silent cartoon star, and Sosin's keyboard style seems especially suited to his antics.


Might as well mention the three other films, which I knew little or nothing about before the SFSFF program announcement: The Wonderful Lie Of Nina Petrovna starring Brigitte Helm of Metropolis, with music by Mont Alto, and two more for the versatile Stephen Horne: Stella Dallas (no not the Barbara Stanwyck version) and The Canadian. Not to leave out the program perhaps most pertinent to this blogathon, the annual "Amazing Tales From The Archives" program, free to the public, in which archivists from around the world present some of the latest, most fascinating finds for an audience of peers and newbies. I've met people who decideded to enter the field of film preservation after attending one of these enlightening sessions, and it was at such a presentation nearly two years ago that I was lucky enough to be among the first participants in a For The Love Of Film Blogathon to see the fruits of the project's first stab at fundraising: a brand-new 35mm print of The Better Man, with Horne doing his first improvisational run-through of the piano score he'd eventually record for the NFPF's fifth DVD set.

If I don't see you at Crossroads or at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, perhaps I will at the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, running June 29 through July 1st at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in the otherwise-sleepy town of Niles, California. This festival will also include a 35mm print of a film found on the fifth NFPF DVD set: Mack Sennett's The Tourists, starring Mabel Normand as a visitor whose stay in Albuquerque turns out to be longer and more exciting than she expected. And of a Clara Bow film: Helen's Babies, also starring Edward Everett Horton and Diana Serra Carey a.k.a. Baby Peggy (who, at age 93, will be in town for the festival). I've written about Niles and the unique screening venue for this festival before, and I usually make it out to their regular Saturday night screening series at least once or twice a year, even though it's not exactly simple to get there from San Francisco without a car. But I've never attended their biggest annual event. This year, as the festival celebrates its fifteenth year of existence, and the 100th anniversary of Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson's arrival in Niles to make some of the first cowboy pictures, I'm determined to attend at least one or two festival screenings. This year's line-up puts a particular focus on films made precisely 100 years ago, in Niles or elsewhere, including five films by Anderson, two by D.W. Griffith, and even one of the few feature length films made in this country that year: Charles Gaskill's Cleopatra.


But if you have a few bucks to drop on attending one or more of these festivals for your own enjoyment, why not also donate so that not only you, but anyone with an internet connection can benefit from film preservation. I just donated myself. I can't wait to see The White Shadow, through any legal channel available to me.

Great Directors, Part One

So much I could/should write about in the Frisco Bay film scene right now. Why are there three costume-centric collections of film screenings happening here this weekend? I don't know. How mandatory is the April 14th pair of films at the PFA? pretty mandatory. What do I think of the lineup for the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival? I'll get to that.

But for the moment, all the oxygen in my writing brain is being taken up by Napoléon, which I was extremely lucky to be able to see twice in a period of nine days at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. The first time, I was sitting in the third row (the cheapest seats) and my senses were absolutely overwhelmed. The second time I was in the third-to-last row of the orchestra section and found myself able to enjoy the film on a more analytical level. I realized why this film so easily overcomes my general dislike of biographical films, for instance.

Watching most biopics, I find myself unable to trust the filmmakers' lens onto true historical events. When grinding facts into drama, filmmakers usually want to include the most iconic, seemingly pivotal scenes from an individual's life. Some will approach a well-documented event as careful to maintain historical accuracy as they can be, while others are more interested in re-enacting the way these events are passed down as legends in the popular imagination. How to deal with a less-documented event is more troublesome, especially when the storyteller's instinct to create character arcs, foreshadowing, and other techniques of dramatic license kicks in. An event springing from the screenwriter's imagination can try to pull the same dramatic weight as one documented by the most careful historians, leading to a flattening-out that feels oh-so-fraudulent to me about 95% of the time. In Napoléon, such pitfalls are avoided with the simple usage of the word "historical" in certain intertitles to indicate which scenes are drawn from verified accounts, and perhaps more importantly, by the word's absence, which are not. Rather than creating a cinema of footnotes, this distinction freed me up to appreciate the drama, as well as director Abel Gance's technique and point-of-view on the material.

On point-of-view, I must contest those who summarily insist that Gance's view of his subject is wholly uncritical and therefore counter-revolutionary or even fascistic. Remember that Napoléon is only the first installment of his planned hexalogy of films on Bonaparte; that it was only one of two he was able to film deprives us of knowing just how certain threads (such as the apparitions of Robespierre, Marat, etc. urging the general to carry their reforms outside the French borders, which Gance may well have intended to be a self-justification) would have resolved in later episodes. I hope a local venue can facilitate a chance to see Gance's 1960 reworking of his Part 3, Austerlitz, and/or Lupu Pick's silent-era filming of Gance's scenario for Part 6, Napoléon At St. Helena, sometime.

A word on the technique. It's just as astonishing as everyone says. I don't feel the need to go into the detail of how his shots were achieved, or even which moments were particularly dazzling to me. I was of course impressed by Gance's use of quick-cutting, of irises and filters, of overlapping images, of splitting the screen (all in-camera, as optical printing had not yet come onto the scene), of animation, of removing the camera from its tripod and shooting hand-held or using an imaginative array of makeshift dollies, and of shooting scenes with three cameras for the magnificent three-projector, three-screen panoramic finale, Many of these are often considered "avant-garde techniques" even today. Seeing them applied to a thoroughly accessible, crowd-pleasing film like Napoléon makes me want to retire that term though. Perhaps there are no "avant-garde techniques" but only "avant-garde" applications.

Though I understand the temptation to use the shorthand. Kevin Brownlow makes a convincing case that Gance's 3-screen Polyvision inspired major Hollywood studios to attempt widescreen processes (particularly Cinerama), arguably the purest application of his triple-projection vision today is a strand of multi-projector performance practiced by underground/experimental filmmakers through the tradition of "expanded cinema". Kenneth Anger once told Scott MacDonald that he was inspired by Gance's film to create his three-screen version of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which has not screened since the 1950s. Since then, Andy Warhol, Roger Beebe, Bruce McClure, and a host of others have made multi-projector work, and there will be opportunities to see modern-day examples by the likes of Greg Pope and Kerry Laitala at SF Cinematheques' upcoming Crossroads festival in May. More details on that forthcoming.

After these two screenings, I'm convinced that Abel Gance was a great director. I long to see Brownlow's documentary on him entitled The Charm of Dynamite. I'm sure it would be a wonderful addition to the currently-running screening series at Yerba Buena Center For The Arts. I've been able to preview a number of the selections in this series, entitled Great Directors Speak!, and I think it's a brilliant programming idea that hopefully will be successful enough to become a regular series at the venue. Of those I've been able to see so far, Marcel Ophüls, Jean Luc-Godard, John Cassavetes, Chantal Akerman, and Robert Bresson are each profiled in fascinatingly diverse ways in these documentaries, and I'm sure one's own experience and relationship with each director will make viewing the films a different experience for every single viewer.

Tonight's pairiing is of two hour-long pieces. Marcel Ophüls and Jean-Luc Godard: the Meeting in St-Gervais is simply documentation of an onstage discussion between the two directors (with very minimal contribution from moderators) after a screening of Ophüls' film about French Resistance and Nazi collaboration during World War II, The Sorrow And The Pity, in Godard's hometown of Geneva, Switzerland a couple years ago. The discussion is fascinating to me, even though I've never seen the Ophüls film (or any film made by the son of Max Ophüls, I must shamefully admit). Godard's eyes open up wide like the aperture of a camera trying to collect the maximum available light as he describes his own wartime boyhood, his admiration for Ophüls, and the shelving of the two directors' plans to make a film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict- or was it more generally about "Jewishness"- together in recent years. Ophüls for his part maintains a polite smile even when the discussion becomes contentious; "I don't want to be your Jewish whipping boy," he at one point exclaims. For one who has followed some of the controversies regarding Godard's alleged anti-Semitism since the release of Richard Brody's biography Everything Is Cinema, it's particularly illuminating to have Godard speak about some of the issues that caused contentiousness in his own voice.

The second screening tonight is of a 1968 episode of the French television program Filmmakers of Our Time, focusing on another legend often compared to Godard: John Cassavetes. (For instance, both Godard's Breathless and Cassavetes' Shadows were remarkable in their day in part for their unabashed employment of jump cuts, albeit in different ways.) Here Cassavetes is energized as he shows his French visitors around his Los Angeles studio in the midst of editing his second independent feature Faces, and less so in an interview conducted after the film's completion and uncertain release. Cassavetes diehard fans are likely to have seen this documentary before, as it is included as a special feature on the Criterion DVD set. For someone like me, who is a Cassavetes admirer but not obsessive, it's a very rewarding viewing. The famous director even comments briefly on the first version of Shadows which was rediscovered by Ray Carney some years ago and suppressed. Hearing what he has to say to the camera in the presence of his wife Gena Rowlands puts a new perspective on that controversy as well.

The Robert Bresson and Chantal Akerman episodes of Filmmakers of Our Time, which screen together at YBCA next Thursday were apparently released on VHS at one time, and an excerpt of the latter is found on the Criterion DVD of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. But to see them in full is rare today. François Weyergan approaches his interview with Bresson rather aggressively, stitching together a barrage of comments from the formidable auteur. Bresson distinguishes "cinema" from the higher form of "cinematography" that is not mired in roots of literature and theatre. When Weyergan asks when "cinematography" began to emerge, his subject answers, "It still hasn't happened. There have been attempts." Speaking this between The Trial Of Joan Of Arc (which, along with Pickpocket and the non-Bresson films Goldfinger and The Testement of Orpheus, the episode excerpts) and Au Hasard Balthazar, frequently considered his greatest masterpiece, made me wonder if he ever changed his mind about this- and if so, how soon afterward.

I have more to say on this series, and much more to say on the Frisco Bay screening scene, but I'd like to get this particular post published before tonight's screenings. So let me pause for now and continue in the near future. In the meantime, I highly recommend, either as a compliment to the YBCA screening series, or on its own, the new work by imprisoned Iranian director Jafar Panahi, This Is Not A Film; it opens for a week-long engagement tomorrow at the San Francisco Film Society Cinema a.k.a. New People. One of the major commercial releases of the year, I particularly recommend Noy Thrupkaew's review in The American Prospect for background on it. Might as well also link to Michael Sicinski's discussion of French director Bertrand Bonello, director of the also-excellent, but unfortunately-named House of Pleasures, which leaves town after tonight to make way for the Panahi film.

Silent Introduction

The silent film resonances in this year's Oscar nominees and winners The Artist and Hugo have been much-commented on by folks more impassioned and eloquent than I. I'm just glad I could get away with dressing as Georges Méliès at a friend's Oscar party this year. It's been a season of Méliès for me, as I finished up an essay on the indispensable French film pioneer, now up at the Fandor Keyframe blog in two parts.

Local film screening venues have been capitalizing on the silent film/Oscar resonances all Winter, and the reverberations continue throughout March and into the coming months as well. The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum includes Méliès films in three of its five Saturday night screening programs this month, including a hand-colored print of his Palace of the Arabian Nights March 31st. The Balboa Theatre also grabs a hold of Hugo this Sunday when it celebrates its 86th birthday. The tradition of showing a silent film during their annual bash continues, this year with a 35mm print of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last, the film from which comes the iconic image of a bespectacled wall-crawler hanging off a giant department store clock. Hugo presents this image prominently as well, when its main characters attend a film screening (although in the original book they attend the Rene Clair film Le Million.) Past Balboa birthday parties (I've attended three over the years) have been some of the best value-for-ticket-dollar experiences I've had on Frisco Bay. Not only is there a feature film with live musical accompaniment, but also other live entertainment, cake, door prizes and the opportunity for trivia prizes as well. Last year I made quite a haul, and would've even if I hadn't known my Charlie Chaplin trivia.

And then there's The Artist, the first French film ever to win the top Oscar. If you don't count its two scenes containing words and/or sound effects, it's also the first silent film to do so since the first Academy Awards in 1929, when Wings won an award called "Production of Most Outstanding Picture", which in most history books has been revised as "Best Picture" for consistency's sake. The Stanford Theatre showed William Wellman's Wings last Friday as part of a nearly-weekly series of silent films featuring Dennis James as organ accompanist; the series continues this week with Ernst Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle (a huge influence on Yasujiro Ozu and other filmmakers) this Friday, then goes on a little hiatus (during which James performs for F.W. Murnau's Faust with Mark Goldstein at the California Theatre for Cinequest) before resuming in late March and April.

According to a mailer sent out by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, a screening of Wings will open its annual festival at the Castro Theatre on July 12th with the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra providing music and soundman Ben Burtt proving audio effects live, in the spirit of the sound effects used during gala presentations of Wings in its day; the other Academy Award the film won in 1929 was for these effects as well as for the visual effects used to recreate World War I-era aerial action on screen.

But I would be remiss to look ahead to the SFSFF's July festival without pointing out that there are still tickets available for their once-in-a-generation screenings of Kevin Brownlow's reconstruction of Abel Gance's Napoléon at the palatial Paramount Theatre in Oakland. The festival's website has all the information you might need about this presentation, including an indispensable set of Frequently Asked Questions; the answers are an extremely compelling argument that anyone who loves film should attend at least one of these screenings. Which one? If you're the sort of hedging cinephile who waits to see what's happening at all the local film venues before committing to any one ticket, wait no more; pretty much everything has been announced. Check the Film On Film Foundation calendar for that week and see if there's not a day of the four (Mar, 24, 25, 31 & April 1) that you can make seeing Napoléon your priority. I don't want to hear any of my readers complaining a year or a decade from now that you didn't realize how unique and overpowering these screenings are likely to be, and therefore missed out. Even Hugo director Martin Scorsese is stumping for Napoléon. In a brief article written on the film for the latest issue of Vanity Fair he says the 1927 epic is "unlike anything made before or since. Gance ushered in every technical innovation imaginable."


I don't know if Scorsese will be taking his own article's advice and coming to Oakland for Napoléon. For those who want to see more of the famous preservationist and filmmaker, a Jonas Mekas-made documentary An American Film Director at Work: Martin Scorsese closes an 8-program series of documentaries about great film directors at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts; Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Chantal Akerman, John Cassavetes and Hou Hsiao-Hsien are among the other directors spotlighted. March and April provide a typically diverse and intriguing slate for YBCA, with the great directors joined by SF Cinematheque programs, architecture films and 2012 Human Rights Watch Film Festival screenings. My friend Adam Hartzell, who has frequently written on documentaries on this site and elsewhere, is here to write about Salaam Dunk, which opens the latter festival tonight, and its resonances with other similarly-themed sports documentaries.

Here's his article.

Happy Bastille Day at the Silent Film Festival!

Only hours until the San Francisco Silent Film Festival begins, and word comes from the twitter feed of London-based composed Carl Davis, that he will be conducting the Oakland East Bay Symphony as they perform the score to the 1927 Abel Gance film Napoléon as the film unspools on the screen at the Paramount Theatre of the Arts in Oakland. According to the trailer linked to by Davis, the performances will be on March 24, 25, 31, and April 1st, 2012.

This is momentous news for silent film fans, as it represents the first official announcement that two of last year's special Oscar award recipients, Kevin Brownlow and Francis Ford Coppola. have found their way to collaborate after many years of being at odds over the rights to show Napoléon. This article helps explain why the film has not shown in a US cinema in nearly three decades, and why the version restored by Brownlow and scored by Davis has never been seen by American moviegoers.

For my part, I've never seen Napoléon, other than in brief clips like those seen in Brownlow's excellent documentary series (co-produced by David Gill) Cinema Europe: the Other Hollywood. Too young to have known about the screenings put on with Carmine Coppola's score until they'd already happened, and not well-heeled enough to catch this outdoor screening in 1997, I've always sensed that seeing it in a theatre, as opposed to on the VHS tapes available at Le Video and a few other surviving rental stores, would be worth the wait. It's been a long one, but there are only eight more months of it to go!

This announcement more than makes up for the fact that this summer marks the first SF Silent Film Festival since 2005 in which there hasn't been a program devoted to French films (although a few French shorts appear on the festival's sole all-digital program, Wild and Weird, including the hilarious Arthème Swallows his Clarinet.) Happy Bastille Day!

Brownlow, as you may have heard, will be returning to the festival this weekend after being awarded last year, will be back to speak at the 10AM Sunday morning event Amazing Tales From The Archives. Having seen the man speak at length on his love of silent film before, I predict that this is going to be the highlight of the entire festival for many (if not all) of its attendees. And it's free! Thomas Gladysz agrees, and he should know, having been involved in the silent film world far longer than I have. Get to the Castro Theatre early for this one!

Some more articles on or related to the 2011 SF Silent Film Festival, in case you still haven't decided what to watch:

Carl Martin on the provenance of the prints and restorations.
Michael Hawley has a comprensive preview of the line-up.
Dennis Harvey writes about A Nail In the Boot for the SF Bay Guardian and on Shoes for sf360.
J. F. DeFreitas on the line-up, with a special focus on Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But.... (which is the film I wrote on for the program guide. Be sure to arrive at the Friday, 4:15 show a little early to catch the slide show on Ozu that I've prepared!)
It's Silent Film Week at the Fandor Keyframe blog, and I've contributed a piece on Douglas Fairbanks. I can't wait to see him in Mr. Fix-It on Saturday!
The festival's own blog has begun collecting more links as well.

I would also be remiss in neglecting to mention a few other Frisco Bay screenings of note, for those whose budget is too tight to wrap around Silent Film Festival ticket prices. Lech Majewski's incredible digital opera The Roe's Room plays tonight at SFMOMA. The new Stanford Theatre calendar is up, and it includes four Friday evenings of Buster Keaton films accompanied by Dennis James at the Wurlitzer, starting tomorrow night. And the Pacific Film Archive's upcoming weekend is full of rarely-screened but highly-regarded films, most notably a new print of Bernardo Bertolucci's epic 1900.