Adam Hartzell Only Has Two Eyes

It's impossible for any pair of eyes to view all of Frisco Bay's worthwhile film screenings. I'm so pleased that a number of local filmgoers have let me post their repertory/revival screening highlights of 2011. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Adam Hartzell, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in sf360, koreanfilm.org, Kyoto Journal and elsewhere.

As much as I've been enjoying the curation provided for the San Francisco Film Society's new screening venue at New People, the only New People events that made my list were before New People became the home of the San Francisco Film Society screenings. Otherwise, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts comes in twice and the Pacific Film Archives once. I went to other rep houses this year, such as The Roxie and The Castro, I even took the train out to Sacramento to catch the Sacramento French Film Festival at The Crest Theatre but none of the films at those venues that fit the parameters Brian requested have surpassed the impact of the five repertory events I list below.
　
5) EVANGELION 2.0: YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE (Anno Hideaki, 2009, Japan) - VIZ Cinema (before it became New People Cinema officially)
　
This anime screening makes my list because it was a fun event, rather than an enjoyable movie. I had never experienced a packed VIZ Cinema before. Not being an anime otaku, I had no idea what to expect. As much as I was bewildered by the plot, I was entertained by the knowledgeable audience appropriating what was most valuable for them on screen. This is film-watching as public performance as opposed to passive reception. So much about watching films for me is about where, when, and with whom I see a film, and this was an example of those three W's being entirely responsible for the enjoyment.
　
4) INTANGIBLE ASSET #82 (Emma Franz, 2009, Australia) - PFA
　
I only ventured to the East Bay for cinema three times this year. Once to re-watch THE TOPP TWINS: UNTOUCHABLE GIRLS (Leanne Pooley, 2009, New Zealand) with my cousin to support its theatre release and once to get a taste of the latest Canadian sensation, Nicolas Pereda during a retrospective on him at the Pacific Film Archive. As much as the latter provided a nice surprise run-in with Michael Guillén, my favorite PFA experience was with Emma Franz's travelogue of jazz drummer Simon Barker's musical discovery of Korean drummer Kim Seok-chul. It's not a perfect film, but it is a film on a topic I've been wanting to see for a while. I still don't fully comprehend the nuances needed to appreciated Korean traditional music forms, but INTANGIBLE ASSET #82 got me a little bit closer on a journey that I still have a long ways to travel.
　
3) CENTRE FORWARD (Pak Chong-song, 1978, North Korea) - YBCA
　
What a wonderfully rare opportunity to watch a North Korean film. YBCA never ceases to amaze me with the surprises they roll out on celluloid (and, yes, occasionally on pixels). But the best YBCA event was clearly . . .
　
2) THE JEONJU DIGITAL PROJECT (2000-2010).- YBCA
　
The highlight of my cinema events this year, YBCA brought all the shorts that were part of the Jeonju International Film Festival Digital Project since it began in 2000. (Unfortunately, two of the shorts were missing from what was sent to YBCA.) There were so many gems amongst the lot. James Benning's simple drama of a steel refinery loading up it's molten product into awaiting trains in PIG IRON (2010), Darezhan Omirbaev's reworking of Checkov in modern Uzbekistan in ABOUT LOVE (2006), Bahman Ghobadi's real life artisans in DAF (2003), and my favorite director Hong Sangsoo's first short ever, LOST IN THE MOUNTAINS (2009). This also provided the opportunity to see two shorts I've been anxious to see for some time, Eric Khoo's commentary on domestic laborers in his native Singapore in NO DAY OFF (2006) and Bong Joon-ho's incredibly entertaining appropriation of surveillance cameras in INFLUENZA (2004). Just like YBCA, neither disappointed.

1) THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE (Ozu Yasujiro, 1952, Japan) - VIZ Cinema (now New People Cinema)
　
Ozu fails to disappoint me and so often completely enthralls me. This one even won over my wife, who is not (yet) a fan of older Japanese cinema. Simply put, I left with a smile on my face after watching this film that lasted throughout the weekend. Here's hoping SFFS keeps this tradition of occasional screenings of the older Japanese masters at New People!

Kurtiss Hare Only Has Two Eyes

It's impossible for any pair of eyes to view all of Frisco Bay's worthwhile film screenings. I'm so pleased that a number of local filmgoers have let me post their repertory/revival screening highlights of 2011. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Kurtiss Hare, cinema enthusiast and blogger at cinefrisco.com, where this article was cross-posted.

As 2011 draws to a close, there are no shortage of best-of lists to be found on the internet. My friend, Brian Darr (aka. HellOnFriscoBay), asked a group of Bay Area cinema-goers to bring their top ten repertory/revival experiences of the year to the table, since we only have two eyes apiece. The films listed here are, of course, fantastic on their own, but the real celebrities are the theaters, organizations and curators that make this list possible – a special possibility indeed. In no particular order:


Good Morning (Ozu 1959) @ VIZ Cinema, seen 07/03/2011.

Here, Ozu makes the kind of observations he makes best, this time protracting out from the family to its surrounding neighborhood. Politesse under duress has never been so silly. I remember being very enticed with the VIZ Cinema’s crisp projection of one of Ozu’s few color films.


Lola (Mendoza 2009) @ YBCA, seen 10/02/2011.

It’s monsoon season in the Philippines and two matriarchs brave the impenetrable downpour to keep their families afloat. Heartfelt, stunning and complicated. It was the kind of screening that makes you want to hug a curator.

Woman in the Dunes (Teshigahara 1964) @ VIZ Cinema, seen 6/21/2011.

Meaningful allegories, for me, work best when they aren’t needed. On a granular level, this film is a compelling piece of horror/suspense with sensual visual details. A larger reading of the protagonist’s existential tightrope-walk manages to enhance without usurping. Again, the VIZ’s projection was acute enough to leave me sandblasted.

Kuroneko (Shindō 1968)
House (Obayashi 1977)
@ The Castro Theater, seen 3/23/2011.

OK, so there are two films here, but they were part of a delightful Japanese feline horror-themed double feature. From Kuroneko’s sexy & vicious apparitions to House’s ultra-campy blood floods, this was one hell of an afternoon altercation.


Days of Heaven (Malick 1978)
Badlands (Malick 1973)
@ The Castro Theater, seen 8/25/2011.

A somewhat less creatively curated duo, but no less appreciated. I sometimes think Malick's quiet internal monologues were positively designed to resound through the Castro's arched ceilings before reaching the ear. This was my first time seeing Days of Heaven, and while sometimes a theatrical screening makes me want to hug a curator, other times the curator beats me to the punch.


The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Herzog 1974) @ Red Vic Movie House, seen 3/30/2011.

Kaspar was not the last film I saw at the Red Vic, but it will be the one by which I choose to remember our departed. Here, Herzog puts the entire genre of science fiction to shame by excavating human gems from a plausible, if controversial, case of man-in-the-wild.


It (Badger 1927) @ Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, seen 5/28/2011.

As in, Clara Bow has got "it." Her charisma and peppiness are monuments unto themselves, having injected a potent substance into the veins of our modern outlook on celebrity and Hollywoodland romance. This evening at the Niles-Essanay gave me a taste of silent film the way its original audiences might have enjoyed it.


The Goose Woman (Brown 1925) @ The Castro Theater, seen 7/16/2011.

Another silent, this time during the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at The Castro. Some alpha-noir stylings and an enthralling characterization of haggard, piercing irrelevance by Louise Dresser left me quite taken. We have our own Stanford Theatre Foundation to thank for its preservation.


Gaslight (Cukor 1944) @ The Castro Theater, seen 1/22/2011.

One of the more psychologically twisted (my favorite kind!) noirs I saw this year. I don't know its technical term, but I just googled "the derivation of pleasure from simulated insanity," so that should tell you something. Oh, according to wikipedia, the word "gaslighting" has been appropriated for just such an occasion.


Streets of Shame (Mizoguchi 1956) @ The PFA, seen 6/25/2011.

For me, this very much more focused film is "streets ahead" of Mizoguchi's sweeping epic, Sansho the Bailiff, which I also saw as part of the Pacific Film Archive's Japanese Divas series. It's structured to examine multiple facets of prostitution that are typically hidden behind the bamboo curtain of everyday sensibilities. This was one film in an excellent series overall.

Does Netflix Cause Cancer?

Short answer: probably not. Not any more than cellphones, power lines, microwave ovens, and the other accoutrements of the modern world, anyhow. But that heading got your attention, didn't it? Remember when your mother told you that sitting too close the television screen would wreck your eyesight or worse? She was probably wrong too, but her overall point that getting too transfixed by home appliances may be unhealthy for us (intellectually and emotionally, if not physically) still has validity.

Don't get me wrong- it's impossible to deny the utility and convenience of home delivery systems for our entertainment, and though I haven't personally embraced streaming or downloading video, I do watch DVDs with some frequency. However, I hope I never get so habituated to doing so that I no longer feel like going out to see a movie playing on a shared screen.

One argument made by some of the proponents of digital delivery systems in favor of traditional 35mm film distribution has been the environmental benefits of moving away from the chemical processes required to make film prints, and the necessity to ship heavy film cans long distances. These benefits are hard to dispute, but the idea that technology is bringing us to some sort of entertainment eco-topia is even harder to swallow. Can we remove the desire to use new technologies to watch movies from the factors encouraging us to buy endless personal computers, media players, and screens, all subject to the little tyrannies of planned obsolescence? Would the impoverished peasants living and laboring in the so-called "e-waste villages" where they come into constant contact with the toxic components of discarded electronic devices, shipped from overseas, consider the decrease in photochemically-based film delivery an environmental boon? I think not. From a certain point of view, the popularity of Netflix, whose streaming services are often said to make up 30% of this country's internet traffic during peak periods (though that figure's been contested), indeed may contribute to increased cancer rates in other countries.

Accepting that we live in an age of ever-expanding personal screens (and typing this on my computer, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to pretend I don't accept it, albeit with reservations) doesn't necessarily mean that we should celebrate when traditional film distribution methods disappear. I'm a little heartsick that the greenest cinema in town is almost certainly going to close before the end of the month. Barring some kind of deus ex machina intervention by a well-funded angel, the Red Vic Movie House, which has solar panels on its roof and sells its popcorn and drinks in reusable bowls and cups rather then industry-standard disposable containers, is set to close after its 31st anniversary and annual screenings of Harold And Maude July 22-25. The theatre's July calendar is filled with the kinds of wonderful films that a group of passionate programmers might want to bring to audiences one last time before finally shutting the theatre doors: Vertigo July 5 & 6, Babe on July 10 & 11, What's Up, Doc July 12 & 13, Stop Making Sense July 15 & 16, Touch of Evil July 17 & 18, and (sadly fittingly) The Last Waltz Jul 19 & 20. They're also holding one last poster sale, and having cinephile-musician Jonathan Richman perform and present a screening of Romani filmmaker Tony Gatlif's Vengo.

Six months ago I wrote a blog post focusing on the impending fate of the Red Vic, as well as on the VIZ a.k.a. New People Cinema. Last week, the San Francisco Film Society announced a plan to bring year-round film programming to New People starting this fall. It's very welcome news, as the state-of-the-art venue has been underused in the half-year since my post. There is a current set of weekend matinee screenings of Japanese classics by Yasujiro Ozu (the Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice and, as seen in the top image on this post, Good Morning, neither of which have shown theatrically on Frisco Bay since 2003), Akira Kurosawa (a 35mm print of Red Beard and a digital showing of Scandal) and Shohei Imamura (a 35mm print of Vengeance Is Mine and a digital showing of The Pornographers) and upcoming showings of Das Boot and of K-20: the Fiend with Twenty Faces, the latter as a Japanese earthquake and tsunami benefit. But, with a few exceptions, these screenings peppered throughout the month represent more cinematic activity than New People has seen of late. Michael Hawley has written a characteristically thorough post on the deal that I suggest reading for more context.

One question that Hawley brings up is how this deal impacts upon the Film Society's historical use of Landmark Theatres for many of its Fall screening activities (French Cinema Now, New Italian Cinema, et cetera. September 2011 brings a Hong Kong series into the Film Society fold.) Another that he hints at is what this may mean for the future of Frisco's most venerable art house, the Clay, which has been regularly playing foreign films since the 1930s (when films by Marcel Pagnol, Sascha Guitry and Fei Mu, for instance, had runs) and midnight movies since the 1970s, and which was expected to close nearly a year ago. The SF Film Society's expressed interest in using the Clay for year-round-programming seemed to delay its closure. But now that this New People deal has made clear that Film Society negotiations with the Clay property owner went nowhere, I once again must wonder how long the latter venue will remain open. For now, Landmark has Michael Winterbottom's The Trip playing there, and it's expected to open French comedy The Names of Love Friday, July 29 and host a screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show the next Saturday at midnight. Then, Sam Sharkey is to bring his popular monthly midnight screenings of the bizarrely, brazenly bad cult movie The Room from its former Red Vic home to the Clay on the second Saturday of August, September and October. We'll see.

Landmark is certainly the theatre chain that brings the most film titles of interest to a Frisco moviegoer weary of Hollywood sequelitis and remake fever. Recent Landmark hits include Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Terence Malick's the Tree of Life, and I expect upcoming bookings of Errol Morris's Tabloid (opening July 15) and of the Rialto Pictures revival of Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth (opening September 9) to do well also. The chain also screens a lot of titles that you have to closely follow the independent film and film festival world to recognize. (What will we do without David Hudson?) That's why I was actually rather excited to learn that local Landmark Theatres (along with most local AMC Theatres, a San Jose theatre devoted to South Asian cinema called Big Cinemas Towne 3, and the South Bay's Camera Cinemas mini-chain) were on the list of theatres participating in the pilot program called MoviePass, announced as launching this month as a kind of Frisco Bay beta-test. For $50 a month, moviegoers were to be admitted to any film playing at any of the participating theatres, as long as they didn't go to more than one movie per day, or (presumably as a precaution against fraud) go to any movie more than once. The thing is, these "participating theatres" weren't really participating-- the deals had been arranged through their online ticketing partner movietickets.com without input of the chain owners. Soon it was announced that the program would be canceled before it began, with theatre staff instructed not to honor tickets purchased through the MoviePass program. Still, it seems like a similar plan along such lines, if it ever were to be enacted, would hold great appeal to a segment of Frisco Bay cinephiles (though perhaps not the same segment that owns smartphones) and might even be effective in luring bargain-hunters not normally attracted to documentaries and foreign films into expanding their cinematic horizons. Lets hope future endeavors on the part of MoviePass are more thought-through.

Thanks for indulging on this rambling ride through a number of issues that have been on my mind lately. I managed to work in references to some of the notable screenings on Frisco Bay's horizon, but continue on with me and I'll share a few others I'm excited about.

The Pacific Film Archive's new calendar for July & August begins tonight withthe first of a set of American films noir set at least partly in Mexico, from rarities like Anthony Mann's The Great Flamarion to classics like Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (which also features on the Castro Theatre's July calendar on a double-bill with another amazing Robert Mitchum starrer Night of the Hunter). Check what Dennis Harvey and Max Goldberg say on the series. The calendar continues with a great, if incomplete, series of Bernardo Bertolucci films, all in new prints, and a very welcome Jerzy Sklomowski series including what I believe to be Frisco Bay premieres of at least two films, his latest Essential Killing, starring Vincent Gallo, and Four Nights With Anna. I saw Essential Killing in Toronto last September and was both mightily impressed with it and embarrassed I'd never seen any of Skolimowski's films, other than a few he wrote for other directors (Roman Polanski & Andrej Wajda) early in his career. The Berkeley venue also presents a set of films written (and sometimes directed) by the previously mentioned Marcel Pagnol, programs presented by animator John Musker and animation scholar Karl Cohen, Kon Ichikawa's The Makioka Sisters, and a free outdoor screening of It Conquered The World. And the Japanese Divas program continues on from June. Jason Sanders has been putting together beautiful collections of images of the featured actresses from classic Japanese fan magazines on the BAM/PFA's own blog. Looking ahead to September and October, it's been learned that the PFA will play host to a series of films directed (some of them from inside prison walls) by persecuted Turkish filmmaker Yilmaz Güney.

The Roxie is playing host to a number of smaller film festivals this summer, and has announced a number of interesting screenings. Most interesting to me are the July 29-August 4 run of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's World on a Wire, which I saw at the last SF International Film Festival, a two-night stand of Surrogate Valentine, my favorite film of the last SF International Asian American Film Festival, and perhaps most exciting of all, a small Monte Hellman retrospective including the only one of his films I've seen thus far, Two Lane Blacktop, his well-regarded Cockfighter, and two films singled out as "Acid Westerns" by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting. Hellman will even be on hand July 22 to introduce his new film Road To Nowhere; he'll be at the Rafael Film Center in Marin County the next evening introducing the latter two films. Ride in the Whirlwind and Two-Lane Blacktop (though not Cockfighter) will play the Rafael that week as well.

The Rafael is also one of five screening venues for the 31st edition of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. This year, I'm particularly intrigued by the archival selections playing the festival, all at the Castro Theatre. Most impressively, Kirk Douglas has agreed to come to a Sunday afternoon, July 24th screening of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus. How many legends of his stature still have the ability to make personal appearances? Suffice to say this is an incredible coup for the festival. If you're wondering what the overt Jewish content in Spartacus might be, let me just divert your attention over to the festival's other Kirk Douglas film The Juggler, directed by blacklist victim Edward Dmytryk in 1953. A third archival selection is a newly-subtitled 1939 Yiddish-language film Tevye, based on the same set of stories that inspired Fiddler On The Roof years later. I first heard of the film when I learned it had been inducted into the National Film Registry, and I'm excited to finally have a shot at seeing it, especially at the Castro.

The Castro is well worth frequenting in July as well. In addition to already-mentioned events, there's a 9-film tribute to the year 1984 hosted by Jesse Hawthorne Ficks as part of his MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS programming. July 20 brings a Todd Haynes double-bill: Poison and Safe. And the month bleeds into August with the first in a while of the Castro's now-trademark series devoted to great film composers, this time Max Steiner, which gives an excuse to show an astonishing array of beloved Hollywood classics: the original Mildred Pierce, Gone With The Wind, White Heat, King Kong and The Searchers are just some of these.

Of course July 14-17 are my own favorite days in the Castro's upcoming programming; it's the weekend of the Silent Film Festival, with which (I feel compelled to frequently mention, in the interest of full disclosure) I've been tangentially associated with, as a researcher and writer, for five years now. I'm very impressed with their program this year, and plan on discussing it in more detail at a future date. In the meantime, I notice that the Stanford Theatre is planning to bring back a summer silent screening series for the first time in several years. Buster Keaton films yet to be determined will be screened, and I'd bet that the July 15 date will feature organist Dennis James, who'll be in San Francisco July 16-17 to perform for the rediscovered Douglas Fairbanks comedy Mr. Fix-It and the Lois Weber-directed drama Shoes, and to share his perspectives on performing for silent films at the SFSFF's July 16 Variations on a Theme panel hosted by experienced silent film accompanist Jill Tracy. Silent film enthusiasts should also note that the Niles Film Museum also has its July-August calendar available as a pdf on its website. I'm most excited by the chance to see Leap Year, the final feature starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle made before his famous scandal.

SFIFF54 Day 5: The Troll Hunter

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival is going strong; it runs through May 5th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

The Troll Hunter (NORWAY: André Øvredal, 2010)

playing: 6:15 PM this evening at VIZ/New People, with no more screenings during the festival.
distribution: Set for a June 17th release at the Lumiere and the Shattuck, through Magnolia Pictures.

Norseman André Øvredal's debut feature presents itself as a found-footage object: a documentary recovered from the hands of a trio of student filmmakers traveling around the Norwegian back-country on the trail of the country's remaining specimens of these dangerous creatures. What fundamentally sets it apart from its most obvious precursor, the Blair Witch Project, is the presence of an intermediary expert, the titular character played by Otto Jespersen. Like the students, we can remain skeptical of the film's fantastic conceits, yet engaged, as long as we're interested in this grizzled oddball. Clever formal note: the film's cinematography style changes subtly but perceptibly when different members of the team are behind the camera.

SFIFF54 Day 5
Another option: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (GERMANY/FRANCE/UK/USA/CANADA: Werner Herzog, 2010) One of the hottest tickets of the festival is the beloved Werner Herzog's latest documentary about the 30,000-year old Chauvet Pont d'Arc cave paintings in Southern France, filmed in 3-D no less. Not one of the Bavaria-born filmmaker's masterpieces, but probably my favorite of his films since 2004's The White Diamond.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Baraka at the Red Vic. For many years this Haight Street cinema showed Ron Fricke's spiritual travelogue around Christmastime, but in 2010 they didn't. Perhaps they were saving it for Easter Sunday and Easter Monday 2011. Either slot seems an appropriate calendaring for the many Frisco Bay seekers of alternatives to traditional religious practices.

SFIFF54 Day 4: A Useful Life

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival is going strong; it runs through May 5th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

A Useful Life (URUGUAY: Federico Veiroj, 2010)

playing: 12:00 Noon at VIZ/New People, with two more SFIFF screenings later in the week.
distribution: The Global Film Institute has picked this up for distribution in the United States, but historically very few of the films in its roster have been gotten a true (week-long) commercial theatrical release in San Francisco. So while a DVD may eventually be forthcoming, these three SFIFF screenings could be the most significant in-cinema exposure this film will have for Frisco Bay audiences.

In The Woman Chaser Richard Hudson (played by Patrick Warburton in the 1999 film version of Charles Willeford's novel) can't believe the studio that hired him won't allow him to release his newly-minted action-thriller about the human condition, The Man Who Got Away, simply because of its length: 63 minutes, too short for to sell to drive-in owners and too long to sell to television. Both Hudson and everyone he shows the workprint to agree it's a kind of masterpiece in its current form, and can't imagine what cutting or padding could be done without destroying its potential impact.

Whatever has this to do with A Useful Life, a film very different from the Woman Chaser (although both are monochromatic films made in a multicolored age) or the fictional film within it? A Useful Life is sixty-seven minutes long, and I wouldn't have wanted it to be a minute longer or shorter. Though its story of a Montevideo cinematheque facing a funding crisis that might force it to close, and of the stalwart projectionist/programmer/archivist who must suddenly contemplate an existence outside of the cinema, may seem small, it's a start-to-finish parade of moments of veracity. As well as humor, depth, and even a tingle of romance. The subject of a threatened movie screen should attract cinephiliac viewers, and if they're like me they won't be in the least disappointed.

SFIFF54 Day 4
Another option: Tokyo - Ebisu (JAPAN: Tominari Nishikawa, 2010) Some may remember Nishikawa from the film he made while studying here at the S.F. Art Institute, Market Street. Interestingly, Callum Cooper's Victoria, George, Edward and Thatcher shares a few cursory similarities to Market Street. Both of these works play on the experimental shorts program The Deep End co-presented by SF Cinematheque, which has just announced its own film festival for mid-May.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Hairspray and Serial Mom make up the final double-bill of the Castro Theatre's John Waters Birthday weekend. Neither screens very frequently in 35mm prints.

Japan, Iran, and Newsmakers On Screen

When a foreign nation is in the news, do we find ourselves more drawn to the cinema of that nation than we had been before? I'm not sure that those of us who normally avoid subtitled cinema are much likelier to suddenly seek out the cinematic traditions of a country that, thanks to natural disaster or political events or anything else, is now on the "front burner" of our brains. But those of us who regularly watch foreign films anyway may be prompted by news-making events to choose a film made in a topical country, whether out of curiousity or in a gesture of solidarity with its suffering citizens. The latter is the motivation for next Saturday's Viz Cinema benefit screenings of Hula Girls, a cheery film about a 1960s dance craze, set in the region of Japan most severely affected by the recent earthquake. Though the VIZ is no longer in daily operation, it continues to hold more frequent screenings of Japanese films than any other Frisco Bay venue, mostly as special events. Its screen will be in use for more of April than it has in recent months.

In a recent conversation with Michael Guillén, scholar Thomas Elsaesser advises, "If you want to invest your money right now in a festival idea, get to know Egyptian cinema." He's referring to the fact that we Western cinephiles almost uniformly know little to nothing of Egypt's vast cinematic heritage. The imdb lists 2052 film titles with Egypt as a country of origin, surely an undercount. Compare against the eleven titles from Libyan cinema history - quite possibly not much of an undercount. I'm unaware of any locally planned Egyptian or Libyan screenings on the horizon- perhaps it's "too soon" from, at minimuim, an organizational standpoint. I suspect it's luck rather than intentional synergy with current events that brings a Tunisian documentary At The Bottom Of The Ladder to the Tiburon International Film Festival next month.

No, these kinds of programming maneuvers usually are the result of months of pre-planning, which is why I was so impressed that Yerba Buene Center for the Arts was able to announce a short series of Iranian films so soon after Tehran filmmaker Jafar Panahi was sentenced to prison for his "crime" of putting into production a film presumed to be sympathetic to the "Green Revolution". That The White Meadows, by Panahi's filmmaking compadre Mohammad Rasoulof was added to the program belatedly is a tribute to YBCA programmer Joel Shepard's commitment to making this as current and multi-faceted as a small series can be. The White Meadows was one of the gems of last Spring's San Francisco International Film Festival, and Frisco Bay audiences should be eager for next Sunday's chance to see this beautifully-shot film in a cinema.

The inclusion in the YBCA series of Close-Up, the meta-cinematic masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami provides context and counterpoint. After Close-Up secured his spot as Iran's most internationally-known director, Kiarostami contributed the screenplay to Panahi's first feature film The White Balloon. But Kiarostami's recent response to his country's suppression of filmmakers has been to work outside of Iran. His latest film, Certified Copy, is a thoroughly European production, and I saw it at last year's French Cinema Now festival hosted by the San Francisco Film Society. It's every bit the masterpiece that Close-Up is, in part because of the way it transplants Kiarostami's usual concerns into an entirely new environment for him. It's now playing at the Clay and other Frisco Bay venues, and should be a high priority for any cinephile to see on the big screen.

Panahi, by contrast, insists that he does not want to make films outside of Iran. Though his films are made with formal rigor, their social critique seems inextricable from the society he knows first and best, although proposed readings of Offside, for example, which plays at 2PM today at YBCA, have also suggested he may be commenting on restrictions he's encountered trying to bring his films to an international audience as well as restrictions in his homeland. Three of Panahi's films will play this YBCA series. I recently revisited Offside, and found it to be even more stunning than I'd remembered it. the technical feat of shooting documentary-style at a live sporting event is jaw-dropping on its own terms, and that leaves aside the panoply of social observations the film makes. Crimson Gold, his previous feature, is probably his most critically beloved, although it's the one I've seen least recently in this series and will therefore withhold personal comment.

Preceding both today's and next Sunday's screenings of Panahi's last two features will be the last film he was able to complete before his sentencing, The Accordion. Made as part of an omnibus film Then And Now: Beyond Borders and Differences, which just had its world premiere in Geneva, this piece is so short (under six minutes, not inlcuding titles and credits) that to say almost anything about it seems to constitute a spoiler. I was able to preview a screener copy of it, and I can say that it's brilliantly Panahi for its entire running time. It particularly showcases one of the filmmaker's great stregnths: his ability to shoot characters moving naturally through a crowd. There's a tempatation, as might be expected, to read the Accordion at more than just face value as a grander political statement, and I'm not sure the title card "Any reference to real facts or real people is purely accidental" is likely to diffuse this tendency (it might in fact exacerbate it!) Anyway, if you can make it to either of the Panahi screenings, don't be late because you won't want to miss this short!

Brecht Andersch's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from filmmaker/projectionist Brecht Andersch, who writes for the SFMOMA Open Space Blog and who co-founded the Film On Film Foundation:

Ahh..... 2010 is the year I met my cinemaniac Waterloo. After decades of dashing round that hamster's wheel of immediate gratification, I found myself transferred by my Masters to a new, smaller wheel which one could only hope to "traverse" by means of application of fingers to a qwerty-pad. My fingertips have become calloused to match the scars in my heart, and yet the fingers march on and on...

Sadly, I have only a few moments of cine-glory to share with you, but share I've promised, and share I shall.

1) The year began with the heaven-and-hell clash of perhaps the most strangely apt/un-apt double bill I've yet encountered, the PFA's January 23rd pairing of Playtime and Salo. I meant to write a piece on this utopian/dystopian death match, with the resonating, and irresolvable question: which, in fact, was which? But time escaped me, and I was forced to narrow, or at least alter my considered theme. No doubt this was for the best, for such concerns, dragged into the public sphere, can only lead to the dubious but justified rewards of the shamed exhibitionist.

2) My friend Ross Lipman flew into town, in part, for a Sunday, February 28th afternoon screening of his restored versions of the great amateur filmmaker Sid Laverents. I worked up an Open Space post covering this show, as well as Ross's other many exciting activities, and showed up on that glorious sun-graced Sunday to find myself part of an audience of eleven, of which Lucy Laird was another. This was the moment I discovered the power of the press. Who loves the sun? Not I, since it broke my heart... It was a great show anyway, and since then, I sleep days.

3) Again we go with the PFA. On March 6th, I treated my wife to a double feature of Joseph Losey's M and The Big Night for her birthday. Included was the short Youth Gets a Break, which, unlike the features, I'd never before seen. Gents, I gotta tell you -- when you splurge on the little woman's big day in this manner, you won't have to wait 'til heaven to receive your rewards.

4) Later that month, I wrote about the PFA's screenings of Eve and Accident, then savored the narcissistic delusion, as the lights dimmed, that I was in some fashion the ringmaster. Of course, as the light hit the screen in each case I was immediately brought up short -- for in Losey, only the Goddess calls the shots.

5) Not April 1st, but the 2nd and 3rd proved my Fool's Days, or rather nights. On each there was a Cinematheque programmed Jim McBride/Stanton Kaye double bill at Yerba Buena: Fri, the 2nd's was McBride's David Holzman's Diary with Kaye's Georg, and the next night it was Kaye's Brandy in the Wilderness and McBride's My Girlfriend's Wedding. Of these, I'd only seen David Holzman, but that's a film I've watched obsessively since my first screening in '86, appropriately by means of a 16mm print in my own tiny filmmaker's abode. McBride and Kaye were scheduled to be there, and indeed they showed up both nights and did due diligence to all fifteen-or-so people in the audience. The Cinematheque's director, Jonathon Marlow, does things in style, and parties were thrown and catched (or is the term crashed?) by those daring enough to stick their noses amongst their betters. I remember scotch-fueled discussions with Jim and Tracy McBride, as well as one Mr. Brian Darr, and lo-and-behold! Who did I find amongst the crowd other than my hero, Holzman himself -- L.M. Kit Carson! I swiftly made my approach to commence that long-promised "talk about Vincente Minnelli". Yes, for those who're curious, he's indeed a fan... One of my favorite moments of this weekend was standing next to my friend Mindy Bagdon as he reunited with Stanton Kaye after forty-plus years. Mindy had worked for a bit in some kinda cinematographic capacity on Brandy all those years ago, but had never seen it. Imagine his joy and surprise to discover it a semi-masterpiece...

6) A couple of weeks later found me again at Yerba, finally catching up with a film always a block or two ahead of me these past couple decades -- Marguerite Duras's Le Camion. For those who've heard about but haven't seen, it does indeed consist of long conversations between Duras and Gerard Depardieu at a table discussing a proposed screenplay, intercut with images of a camion driving thru the French countryside. I gotta tell you, tho -- that camion's some truck! If Duras were with us today, I'd exhort her to "Keep on Camionin'!"

7) Ryland Walker Knight has already waxed well on our ventures with Brian Darr to southern climes to take in McCarey masterpieces (Make Way for Tomorrow and Ruggles of Red Gap), both of which I'd only seen before on 16mm or video. I'll come down on the side of Make Way for diversity's sake, and because I love to have my heart broken. (But yes, we all need more of Ruggles's joy.)

8) In May and June, in my role as projectionist at SFMOMA, I enjoyed the hell out of warlocking the spindles o' magick for screenings of Model Shop and Play Misty for Me, with all their sun-drenched Californian autocentricity... If Eastwood had kept up the level of Play he'd begun at with Misty (no doubt with help from mentor Don Seigel), he could justifiably be discussed with directors on the level of Jacques Demy on a regular basis. (Sadly, this is not the case.) Demy's film, on the other hand, is fully emblematic of a directorial vision which seems to broaden and deepen with every screening of almost any one of his films...


9) Nine?! Already? Time for to make the mad dash thru all the pictures I really shoulda talked about -- the three days in a row in August I managed to make it out to revisit semi-favorite Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence at the VIZ, Death in Venice (for me one of the great Transcendent Masterpieces of Cinema) at the Roxie, and The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (again at PFA). It's true I gotta penchant for all that homoerotic farrin' stuff, but what my id's really hankerin' for is just one -- just one measily hour to rampage in the proper heterosexist, fanny grabbin', Tommy-gun tottin' Legs Diamond manner 'til goin' down in my very own glorious blaze of bullets, only to wake and thank my luck stars, that no, indeed, I'm not that wayward mick run amok... Thank God, and thanks very much, Mr. Budd Boetticher. Then there was my 2nd 35mm viewing of House of Bamboo (9/10 PFA), some much later viewings of Dreyer films (Nov. and Dec. at PFA), such as uber-favorites Ordet, and Gertrud (the latter for the first time in 35), and my first-ever encounter with Two People, which, if they had been directed by anyone other than Carl Th., would be considered at least the inhabitants of a minor masterpiece, but instead have to suffer the ignominious status of having been disowned by the severe Dane. There was also that sacred work of degradation, Accattone (12/10), which I hadn't seen for some time, and finally I must make mention of my first-ever viewing of Rolling Thunder (9/2 Roxie, part of Not Necessarily Noir, programmed by Elliot Lavine) amidst my on-going Jacob/Devil wrastlin' match (I'll leave it to you to figure out who was who) with my extended series on the 70's work of Paul Schrader, which came just in time to deliver a key line (both for his oeuvre and my piece): "You learn to love the rope… That’s how you beat people who torture you — you learn to love them."

10) At last we are at our final number which invokes for me a work by that recently departed figure who ranks amongst the Greatest (and most profoundly underrated) of Major American Film Directors. But this isn't the time for your eulogy, Blake (that time will come), but rather to truly wrap up the wrap-up by conducting those readers not yet appropriately alienated by this Big Parade of Vanity thru the most glorious of my gloriest involvements in the local cinematic scene, i.e. those I've been directly involved with in some fashion: there was the FOFF screening of Endless Love (8/22 PFA), with its screenwriter, Judith Rascoe, in attendance; Bay Area Ecstatic, the first show I've been allowed to program and present at SFMOMA (and let me just say in passing I'm very gratified to see mentions of these programs by my fellow wrap-uppers), and last, and by far the most exciting was the 9/29 screening of 1953's The End (at the PFA, as part of the fantastically extensive series conjoined to the book Radical Light). This was a key moment in the project I've been involved with for most of the last year with Brian Darr to investigate, document, and analyze all things having to do with Christopher Maclaine's Very Great Masterpiece. After making contact with Wilder Bentley II, who plays Paul, one of the film's rotating protagonists, we now found ourselves seated next to "Paul" himself for this latest unspooling of The End upon the PFA screen. As the Paul episode came up, I couldn't help surreptitiously glancing back and forth between "Paul"s. This was truly a glorious moment.

Adam Hartzell's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from writer Adam Hartzell, who regularly contributes to sf360, koreanfilm.org, and Hell On Frisco Bay:

10 & 9) DIARY OF A LOST GIRL (G.W. Pabst, 1929, Germany) THE FLYING ACE (Richard E. Norman, 1926, USA) - Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theatre in mid-July
　
Of the four films I saw at 2010’s SF Silent Film Festival, these two are the standouts, particularly THE FLYING ACE due to my interest in portrayals of disability, in which a character played by a single-leg amputee finds a clever use for his crutch when (if I recall correctly) chasing a villain.
　
8) SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE (Park Chan-wook, 2005, South Korea) at VIZ Cinema in early August.
　
VIZ provided us a chance to revisit THIRST and Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy this summer. It was a pleasure to re-visit SYMPATHRY FOR LADY VENGEANCE, more awake this time, since my first viewing was a drowsy one in Toronto. I must ask, though, when will we ever get a chance to see his first two films before JSA?
　
7) BEFORE TOMORROW (Marie-Helene Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu, 2009, Canada) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of a curated FASTRUNNER Trilogy of Canadian First Nations films in early April.
　
This was a film where the discussion with Cousineau afterwards added so much to the film. The YBCA film series makes me so happy so often.
　
6 & 5) M. HULOT’S HOLIDAY (Jacques Tati, 1953, France) & TRAFIC (Jacques Tati, 1971, France) at YBCA as part of a Jacques Tati retrospective in late January/early February.
　
Tati is so much fun. And although nothing compares to a 70mm screening of PLAYTIME, these two films didn’t disappoint. Now onward soon to the Tati screenplay animated in THE ILLUSIONIST.
　
4) WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE at the Clay Theatre in mid-March as part of the San Francisco International Asia American Film Festival, a curation of omnibus shorts by Apitchatpong Weerasathakul, Jia Zhang-ke, Tsai Ming-liang, and Hong Sangsoo.
　
Let me sneak this one in here, because film festivals do provide an opportunity for first-run theatres to have a brief flash of repertory-ness. And, come on, Weersathakul, Jia, Tsai, AND Hong!!!??? It’s an Asian all-star omnibus! And possibly my new favorite film by my favorite director, Hong Sangsoo.
　
3 & 2) EARLY SPRING (Ozu Yasujiro, 1956, Japan) & RECORD OF A TENEMENT GENTLEMEN (Ozu Yasujiro, 1947, Japan) at VIZ Cinema as part of a brief Ozu retrospective in mid-June.
　
I will never tire of watching Ozu, so to every SF rep house, feel free to bring his films anytime.
　
1) REFRIGERATOR FETISH: VINTAGE INDUSTRIAL DESIGN FILMS (various ephemeral films) as curated by film archivist Dennis Nyback for a series on Architecture and Design films at YBCA in July and August.
　
Freaking amazing! Underscores how important our film archivists are. The gem of the collection was the sumptuous, dazzling color of the National Film Board of Canada documentary on the making of pencils. Seriously, it’s mesmerizing.

Michael Hawley's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from cinephile/critic Michael Hawley. He blogs at film-415, where this list has been cross-posted:

The Bay Area continues to be an incredible place to experience repertory cinema. There are few places on the planet where it's possible to see a film every day of the year and not watch a single new release. In 2010 I caught 47 revival screenings at various local venues. Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the most memorable.

Showgirls (Castro Theater)
What better way to celebrate the 15th anniversary of my fave film of the 1990s. Peaches Christ brought an expanded version of her infamous Showgirls Midnight Mass preshow to a sold-out Castro, complete with exploding on-stage volcano and free lapdances with every large popcorn. It inspired me to inaugurate my iphone's movie camera feature and create a YouTube channel to post the results. Apart from Peaches' Castro world premiere of All About Evil, this was the most fun I had at the movies in 2010.

Armored Car Robbery (Castro Theater, Noir City)
I was blown away by this taut and tidy 67-minute slice of obscure 1950 B-Noir about the aftermath of yes, an armored car robbery outside L.A.'s Wrigley Field. It would be brought back to mind months later with the Fenway Park heist of Ben Affleck's The Town. Other 2010 Noir City highlights included the double bill of Suspense (1946) and The Gangster (1948), both starring British ice-skating queen Belita, and 1945's San Francisco-set Escape in the Fog, which begins with a woman dreaming about an attempted murder on the Golden Gate Bridge.


Pornography in Denmark (Oddball Cinema)
There's something weird and wonderful going on each weekend at Oddball Cinema, a funky alternative film venue tucked inside the Mission District warehouse digs Oddball Film + Video. In the spring they screened a 16mm print of this landmark 1970 documentary by local porn-meister Alex de Renzy, which became the first hardcore to show in legit U.S. theaters and be reviewed in the NY Times. Introducing the film was writer/film scholar Jack Stevenson, who was on tour promoting his book, Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s.

Freddie Mercury, the Untold Story (VIZ Cinema, 3rd i's Queer Eye Mini-Film Festival)
3rd i is best known for the SF International South Asian Film Festival it puts on each November. Back in June they packed SF's snazzy subterranean VIZ Cinema with this revival of Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher's 2000 documentary – seen in a new director's cut with 43 extra minutes. The audience went nutso at the climax of "Barcelona," Mercury's soaring duet with Montserrat Caballé from the 1986 summer Olympics. Further repertory kudos to 3rd i for bringing an exquisite 35mm print of 1958 Bollywood classic, Madhumati, to the Castro.

Mädchen in Uniform (Castro Theater, Frameline)
A whole lot of LGBT folk must've played hooky from work to catch this mid-day, mid-week revival from 1958 – itself a remake of a 1931 queer cinema classic. Romy Schneider and Lili Palmer are respectively radiant as a student obsessively in love with her boarding school teacher – to the extreme consternation of battleaxe headmistress Therese Giehse. Shown in a gorgeous and rare 35mm print, with the inimitable Jenni Olson delivering a dishy intro. Frameline34's other revelatory revival was Warhol's 1965 Vinyl, in which Factory beauties Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick dance a furious frug to Martha and the Vandellas "Nowhere to Hide." Twice.


The Aztec Mummy vs. The Human Robot (Pacific Film Archive, El Futuro Está Aquí: Sci-Fi Classics from Mexico)
If anything's capable of luring me out of the city on a Saturday night during Frameline, it's bunch of Mexican monster movies from the 50's and 60's. This was double-billed with Santo vs. The Martian Invasion, which had a little too much rasslin' for my tastes. But it boasted a hilarious opening scene in which the Martians explain why they happen to be speaking Spanish. It killed me to miss Planet of the Female Invaders and The Ship of Monsters, also part of this series.

Metropolis (Castro Theater, SF Silent Film Festival)
"When you've waited 83 years, what's another 40 minutes?" Eddie Muller quipped to the antsy, capacity crowd awaiting the Bay Area premiere of Fritz Lang's finally-complete expressionist dystopian masterpiece. In spite of the late start time and disappointing digital format, this was still the repertory event of the year. The Alloy Orchestra performed its celebrated score live and Muller conducted an on-stage conversation with Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña, the Argentine film archivists who discovered the 16mm print of Metropolis with 25 additional minutes. The Alloy Orchestra would return to the fest two days later to perform their heart-stopping score to Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.

The Cook/Pass the Gravy/Big Business (Castro Theater, SF Silent Film Festival)
Each year this festival invites a filmmaker to program a Director's Pick – and past pickers have included the likes of Guy Maddin and Terry Zwigoff. This year Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc., Up) assembled a program of three comic shorts titled The Big Business of Short Funny Films, each of them screamingly funny. First, Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton had a go at each other in The Cook, followed by some hysterical nonsense involving feuding families and a prized rooster in Pass the Gravy. Finally in Big Business, door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen Laurel and Hardy declared war on a disgruntled customer, taking tit-for-tat to absurd heights.

The Boston Strangler (Pacific Film Archive, Criminal Minds)
This ranks as my personal discovery of the year. Director Richard Fleischer employs a wry tone and magnificent use of wide and split screen to tell the story of 60's serial killer Albert DeSalvo. A restrained Tony Curtis, whose title character doesn't appear until the midway point, gives what must surely be the best dramatic performance of his career. Oscar ® didn't care. With Henry Fonda, George Kennedy and an early appearance by Sally Kellerman as the one girl who got away. Double-billed with 1944's The Lodger, a compelling Jack the Ripper yarn starring Merle Oberon, George Sanders and Laird Cregar.

Johanna (Roxie Theater)
I was woefully resigned to never seeing Kornél Mundruczó's 2005 filmic opera about a junkie performing sex miracles in a subterranean Budapest hospital, which had never screened in the Bay Area or been released on Region 1 DVD. Then the Roxie answered my prayers by showing a gorgeous 35mm print for two nights in November, double-billed with the director's follow-up, 2008's Delta. Earlier in the month, the Roxie revived 36 Quai des Orfèvres, a gritty and stylish 2004 policier that had also inexplicably gone unseen the Bay Area, despite starring Gérard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil.

Honorable Mentions
Traffic (1971, dir. Jacques Tati, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts)
Insiang (1976, dir. Lino Brocka, Sundance Kabuki, SF International Asian American Film Festival)
Black Narcissus (1947, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, Pacific Film Archive, "Life, Death and Technicolor: A Tribute to Jack Cardiff")
Hausu (1977, dir. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, Castro Theater)
A Night to Dismember (1983, dir. Doris Wishman, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Go to Hell for the Holidays: Horror in December")

Start Your New Year Right

"The tendency to watch movies on the small screen...makes for a changed experience of the movie no longer as a world that takes us over but one we peer into and catch glimpses of." -- Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost, 1998

As the last hours of 2010 fly past, I find myself wondering what the purpose of all the year-end recapitulation that dominates the media for much of December can be. I participate in it myself, having submitted a "best films of 2010" list and a set of reflective quotes to the sf360 website. I'm also preparing my annual multi-participant survey of the year in Frisco Bay repertory/revival screenings, which you can expect to see on this site by mid-January.

Surely the main reason to reflect on a year as it passes into history is to hope the process helps us learn something we can apply to the year to come. One of the lessons I hope I've learned over the past year is that I cannot expect many of my friends to follow my example and regularly take advantage of the panopoly of filmgoing options we all have before us in this town, and that blogging or tweeting about screenings I'm anticipating is not going to create enough intertia to get people out of the habit of watching all their movies from the comfort and convenience of home. If I want the people I care about to share my appreciation of big-screen movie-watching, I should specifically invite them along on my expeditions into the cinematic wilderness, where they're certain to relish an experience they hadn't consciously realized they'd been missing.

Last week I organized a group outing to Japantown's VIZ Cinema to view a great 35mm print of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 masterpiece High And Low. Most of the people I brought had never before seen this still-underappreciated kidnapper vs. detective saga, or had never been to the VIZ, or both. I don't think there was a single attendee who regretted a single dollar of the admission price, or a single minute of this extremely compelling thriller. The first hour and a half or so of the film is simply unimpeachable, especially when its wide Tohoscope images are displayed on an immersive screen.

Like the Bridge and the Red Vic, the VIZ Cinema was M.I.A. from Jonathan Kiefer's list of San Francisco's remaining single-screen theatres found in his relatively-recent, otherwise-worthy SF Weekly article on the uncertain fate of Landmark's Clay. Most people I talk to about the VIZ have never heard of it, even if they're fans of Japanese filmmakers and have visited the mall in which it is located. And while attending the venue for dozens of screenings in 2010 (only the Pacific Film Archive and the Castro attracted me more often) I don't think I've ever seen it more than half-full. Thus, it was with sadness but no surprise that I reacted to news from a ticketseller that the venue would be ceasing daily operations early next year. The coming week provides opportunities to catch the end of the Kurosawa-Toshiro Mifune series, including the Seven Samurai (January 2nd only), Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, and two final showings of High And Low (Jan. 3 & 6), but the theatre then closes for ten days of maintenance, and I don't think we should expect it to continue programming films much beyond its late-month digital screenings of the anime Evangelion 1.0 and Evangelion 2.0.

Though the VIZ is shuttering its screen after only a year and a half in operation, the Red Vic has surivived thirty years on Haight Street only to find itself in imminent danger of closing down as well, as this article brought to the surface. As I mentioned at sf360, the Red Vic was the first place where I ever bought a ticket to a repertory film back in the mid-1990s (it may have been Blade Runner but I can't be certain). It's still the only theatre in town with solar panels, wooden (that means reuseable, washable) popcorn bowls, seven-dollar Tuesdays, a cozy combination of movie seats and loveseat-like benches, and the most entertaining "no smoking in the theatre" trailer this side of John Waters. It also has its own unique approach to film programming, playing a recent art-house freakout like Enter the Void in the same month as a Hollywood classic like Breakfast At Tiffany's (Blake Edwards R.I.P.), and letting Godard's astonishing Every Man For Himself rub shoulders with Steve Martin in The Jerk for the first time since the early eighties (if not ever!)

Any trips to the Red Vic are going to help put the theatre closer to black, but two official benefits are scheduled on the Red Vic's February calendar: a February 12 program of politically-minded underground films Bold Native and All Power To The People (a documentary on the Black Panther Party) and a February 24th multi-media event celebrating San Francisco movie theatre history, presented by Rebecca Solnit, Christian Bruno, Sam Green, Chip Lord and Julie Lindow. If you didn't get Lindow's book documenting this history, Left In The Dark, as a holiday gift, it's certainly an apropos time to buy it for yourself.

I'm equally excited about the Film On Film Foundation's also-beneficial rental of the theatre for a "tripple" bill of Gumby: The Movie, The Adventures Of Mark Twain and Peter Jackson's debut Meet The Feebles. Perhaps improbably, the only one of these I've seen before, years ago, is the Adventures of Mark Twain, a feature-length Will Vinton Claymation that absolutely enchanted me when I was a jaded teenager. (The top image in this post is from the film.) I cannot wait to see it on the big screen and to bring some of my most jaded friends along for the ride.

Advertising campaigns help film festivals and new releases attract audiences. This is why, when the Castro hasn't been four-walled by German Gems or Sketchfest or Noir City or the Silent Film Festival, that venue seems to prefer showing a mediocre (at best, imho) "re-bake" like Tron: Legacy than the kind of programming its staff excels at, but that can be a risky draw for customers, like last year's Samuel Goldwyn tribute or its upcoming set of Alfred Hitchcock's less culturally-canonized films. Sadly, repertory film is threatening to die out in this town, as it has in so many others, and the troubles of the VIZ and the Red Vic are merely the latest symptoms. There's still a great scene to be pieced together if you're willing to put in the effort of calendar-tracking (and if you regularly read my blog, you probably are). What's lacking in San Francisco is a single cinema where every day is a blast from the past. In lieu of that, most minds turn toward the home viewing option when in the mood for a movie released anytime earlier than last month.

I don't know if there's realistically a way to reverse this trend. If all the Netflix subscribers who canceled their accounts in favor of a free service like the public library, used the money saved to visit a theater for a movie or two per month that they otherwise wouldn't have gone to, places like the Red Vic might thrive. I'm not much of one for New Year's Resolutions, but in 2011, I hope to share more of my favorite films and theatres with friends and acquaintences that I don't normally see at the movies. Why didn't I think of this before?