SFFILM 61 Day 2: Barry

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

Image from Barry supplied by SFFILM

Barry (USA: Bill Hader & Alex Berg, 2018)
playing: 6:00 tonight only at the Victoria

This is perhaps a perverse choice for the initial daily spotlight from a dedicated cinema blogger who has never seen an episode of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, The Wire, Six Feet Under, or practically any of the marquee titles in the era of "prestige television" that has turned the attention of many potential attendees of thoughtful film presentation toward their home screens with the force of a rare-earth magnet. But this crime comedy series, the first three episodes of which are screening tonight with actors Sarah Goldberg and Henry Winkler (yes, "The Fonz" and the director of Memories of Me and Cop and a Half) expected to attend in lieu of co-creators Hader and Berg, happens to be the only thing playing the festival today that I've had a chance to sample so early in the festival. I spent last weekend in Los Angeles (missing a BAMPFA screening of Salaam Cinema that I later learned was a harbinger of a larger Mohsen Makhmalbaf retrospective there this Fall) and though I didn't go to any movies, my fiancée and I did relax on one of our hosts' comfy couches where she showed us the first (and thus far only available) episode of Barry via her HBO streaming set-up. I wouldn't say I was immediately hooked by the set-up of the eponymous affectless Afghanistan War vet (Hader) being manipulated by an oily opportunist (Stephen Root) to use his savant-like military skills to earn a living as a hit man, but I can't deny enjoying the "worlds collide" frictions that emerge when Barry stumbles into an acting class run by a pricey coach (Winkler) from the "tear-'em-down-to-build-'em-up" school, and befriends one of the more volatile students (Goldberg), and the backstage/showbiz humor hits a little closer to where I live. I'm not sure I'm likely to give up a rare chance to see a foreign film just to catch this on a much bigger screen (even with talent in tow) but if there was nothing else in its slot calling my name, I certainly would consider it, especially knowing how long it will likely take me to get around to watching it as a non-subscriber to HBO.

The paradox of the television vs. cinema debate is that, at least under current conventions in this country, television is prohibited from being legally presented in cinemas while movies screen everywhere from IMAX houses to, eventually (and dishearteningly), smartphones. So the kind of rare opportunity to see a new show that, if it isn't quite on the artistic level of Fassbinder, is certainly destined to be more popular than Eight Hours Don't Make A Day, will surely be of interest to viewers who find more appeal in serialized, character-driven narratives than the kinds of narrative-exploding cinematic attractions I tend to seek out. Who knows, perhaps some TV fans will stick around to check out more of the festival, which is certainly a home for a sort of binge watching they might not be so familiar with.

SFFILM61 Day 2
Other festival options: Speaking of film festival television, as of this writing there are still a few FREE tickets for tonight's 8:45PM screening of BBC/PBS co-production Civilizations: How Do We Look (episode 2) at SFMOMA. I doubt it's crucial to have seen episode 1 before diving into this. It's in fact the only one the SFFILM free events not currently at RUSH status. Today also marks the first festival screenings of titles like The Rider, The Workshop, and Angels Wear White, to name a few I've heard strong advance word about.

Non-SFFILM option: Tonight is Artist Television Access's monthly 8PM Open Screening event, where anyone can show their work to the assembled masses on Valencia Street's last outpost of underground, un-gentrified cinema. A wonderful article on ATA's Open Screenings was published earlier this year in Xpress Magazine.

Requiem For A Dream (2000)

Screen capture from Lionsgate DVD

WHO: Ellen Burstyn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress (her fourth in that category, in addition to a Supporting Actress nomination for The Last Picture Show) for this film. I believe it is to this day the only leading-role Oscar nomination for a film initially rated NC-17. (Ultimately the film was released unrated rather than be slapped with that rating).

WHAT: This nightmarish, pummeling film about the horrors of addiction is not the sort of film I typically expect to see at a film festival, although it premiered at Cannes and (for North America) Toronto before its Fall 2000 release in the United States. Simply put, it's just so intense. It's hard to imagine watching it in the afternoon, much less doing so and then shuffling off to another screening right afterward. Many people who have seen it already (myself included) consider it one of those films we're not sure we ever want to view again, no matter how much we may admire its technical virtuosity and/or its eagerness to "go there" in its unflinching displays of some of the grisliest outcomes of drug dependency. (I might note that, since viewing it at the Lumiere fifteen+ years ago, I've encountered some impassioned arguments against the film's outlook as "propagandistic" and its style as "immature", but not having endured another straight-through watch, I don't quite know if I'd find these objections meritless or not.)

One thing I feel sure about, even after the passage of so much time, is that the film's impact depends greatly on the audience's ability to relate to its characters, and thus its performances are paramount. None more than Burstyn's as Sara Goldfarb, the mother of Jared Leto's young junkie, who begins the film addicted to nothing more than her television shows and her illusory relationship with her son. We see how easy it is for her to become sucked into a cycle of dangerous prescription drug-taking when she visits a shady doctor in the hopes of finding a pharmaceutical shortcut to weight loss. Her performance, which was not just guided by director Darren Aronofsky but her own agency as an established Hollywood star taking an opportunity to try something new in an independent film, is the soul of the film, and the main reason I'm considering revisiting it.

A secondary reason would be Jennifer Connelly's performance as Leto's girlfriend Marion, who I've found a renewed fascination for after stumbling upon Alla Gadassik's remarkable video essay Marion and Gen.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today only at the Victoria Theatre courtesy of the San Francisco International Film Festival, following a 2PM conversation with Burstyn about her career.

WHY: Burstyn in person should be motivation enough, right? Traditionally these events consist of an on-stage interview, so if the film becomes too relentless of an experience for you to handle, you can leave the screening without missing out on the celebrity conversation, unless today's presentation doesn't hold to expected form.

Burstyn is the first of the festival's several honorees this year to come before the festival public. While she will receive the Peter J. Owens Award for acting, the first female prize-winner since Judy Davis in 2012, Mira Nair becomes the first woman to receive the festival's Irving M. Levin Directing Award (going back to the 1980s days when it was called the Akira Kurosawa Award). She'll be at the Castro for a 35mm screening of her biggest stateside hit Monsoon Wedding tomorrow afternoon. This leaves only the Kanbar Storytelling Award as the festival's only remaining all-boys' club. Tom McCarthy becomes the eleventh recipient of this award (formerly called the Screenwriting Award and presented mostly to writers not generally known for their directing careers; McCarthy is about equally acclaimed for both) and will present a 35mm print of his debut feature The Station Agent at BAMPFA on Tuesday, April 26.

Next weekend the honorees are Janus Films and the Criterion Collection, receiving the Mel Novikoff Award annually presented to "an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the film-going public's appreciation of world cinema". Because the U.S. is part of the world, the selected screening for the Saturday, April 30 Castro event is the Texas-filmed Blood Simple, screened as a DCP (a transfer I'm sure we can someday expect to see get the Criterion Blu-Ray treatment), with both of its co-directors Joel and Ethan Coen on hand for the showing. Finally, the Persistence of Vision Award, which goes to an filmmaker whose work aligns with the mission of the festival's longstanding Golden Gate Awards (to short films, documentaries, animation, an experimental film & video work - anything but live-action scripted/acted feature films). Aardman Animations, the beloved U.K. stop-motion studio, becomes the first animation recipient of this award since Don Hertzfeldt in 2010 and the fourth ever (Faith Hubley was honored in 2000 and Jan Svankmajer was the inaugural awardee in 1997.) On May 1st a retrospective of Aardman-produced short films and clips will screen at the Castro Theatre, including the Academy Award-winning The Wrong Trousers, a more recent Wallace & Gromit outing called The Turbo Diner, and even the music video for Peter Gabriel's hit song "Sledgehammer".

Most of these awards were announced in time to be included in the handy printed festival guides you may have seen floating around festival venues, bookstores, coffee shops and elsewhere. But Burstyn's Award was solidified after the printing deadline, as was McCarthy's, so they're not found in the guide. Other added screenings to the festival include single screenings of the following films: Jason Lew's The Free World at the Victoria on April 30th, Todd Solondz's Wiener Dog (also featuring Ellen Burstyn) at the Victoria on May 2, Andrew Neel's Goat at the Alamo Drafthouse on May 3, and Yorgos Lanthimos's The Lobster at the Victoria on May 5th.

HOW: Requiem For a Dream will screen via a projected Blu-Ray.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Tonight is the sole SFIFF screening of Werner Herzog's documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World at the Castro Theatre. The first festival screenings of Chevalier, with director Athina Rachel Tsangari in person, the cargo freighter doc Dead Slow Ahead, and the manga adaptation Assassination Classroom all occur today at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission as well tonight. Finally, this afternoon marks the first screening of Jem Cohen's Counting, at the Pacific Film Archive.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: It's the second-to-last day of the Stanford Theatre's Alfred Hitchcock season, featuring a double-bill of 35mm prints of Tippi Hedren's two films made for Hitch, The Birds and Marnie.

The Apostate (2015)

A scene from Federico Veiroj's THE APOSTATE, playing at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 21 - May 5, 2016. Courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Uruguayan autuer Federico Veiroj directed this as his feature-length follow-up to A Useful Life from 2010. He also co-wrote and co-produced it.

WHAT: I haven't seen, or even heard much about The Apostate yet, but here's a passage on it from Amber Wilkinson's Filmmaker Magazine report from the San Sebastian Film Festival where it screened last Fall:

There’s comedy and plenty to think about, too, in Federico Veiroj’s third feature The Apostate, a wry character study of a man faced with a wall of bureaucracy as he tries to extract himself from the Catholic Church at the same time as facing his own existential demons. The winner of a Special Mention from the main jury and the international critics’ FIPRESCI prize, it is much funnier than the title might suggest. It features a great debut performance from Álvaro Ogalla, loosely riffing on his own life; there’s also a slyly impressive nod to Luis Buñuel, and Veiroj retains a lightness of touch and a warmth that draws you to his hapless hero.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 8:45 PM tonight at the new BAMPFA (Pacific Film Archive), 8:30 PM Tuesday April 26th at the Victoria, and 3:30 PM Wednesday April 27 at the Alamo Drafthouse at the New Mission, all part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: The Apostate is exactly the kind of film I depend on the San Francisco International Film Festival to see. It's a follow-up to a film that failed to get a theatrical release in the Bay Area, but which I loved and which inspired me to delve into a national cinema I knew nothing about. This one has a distribution deal, but one that seems unlikely to give the film a post-festival reprise on Frisco Bay cinema screens. If I'm wrong about that, I doubt I'd be wrong to predict it won't show on a screen larger than some of the smaller ones at the Opera Plaza or 4-Star. Seeing this on a bigger screen at this year's SFIFF is one of my priorities this week.

My choice of screens are three that I've yet to see a SFIFF film at, as I believe they're all brand-new venues for the festival. Of course the Pacific Film Archive has long been a key SFIFF partner, but having moved operations down the hill, a block from the Downtown Berkeley BART station this year, and rebranding more officially as BAMPFA in order to highlight its reunion with the Berkeley Art Museum physical space, it's hardly the same venue where I've seen so many wonderful SFIFF screenings in the past decade or so. Though I expect the same high quality (and popcorn-free) presentation standards that I've experienced at the prior venue and at most of my visits to the new space since it opened a few months ago.

The Victoria is one of San Francisco's oldest surviving theatres, but I've never heard of it used as a SFIFF venue. (Granted my direct history with the festival doesn't even span two full decades of the nearly six the organization has existed, but if the Victoria was used between the festival's 1957 founding and my late-1990s participation, it hasn't been mentioned in the histories I've read, which highlight other historical festival venues like the Metro and the Palace of Legion of Honor). Earlier this month I attended another festival (Crossroads) at the Victoria, and can vouch for the size and quality of the digital projection and sound there (I plan to discuss that venue's 16mm projection in a future post, although it's a moot point during SFIFF as all screenings there are expected to be digital) although not the popcorn, which is some of the worst in the city.

Finally, the Alamo Drafthouse at the New Mission. This is the opposite of BAMPFA's new building for a venerable organization: the New Mission is a very old building that hadn't been used as a cinema for about twenty years before being refurbished and since December 2015 operated by a new (to Frisco Bay) organization: the Texas-based cinema/restaurant chain Alamo Drafthouse. There's no question that Alamo's new presence at Mission and 22nd Street has shifted some of the gravity in San Francisco's screening scene, and there's probably no clearer evidence of this than SFIFF's abandonment of the Kabuki Theatre and the Western Addition/Fillmore/Japantown by making the New Mission its 2016 flagship venue. My first visit to the Drafthouse upon its opening was decidedly mixed- I found the wait-staff very distracting despite their attempts to be inobtrusive while delivering all kinds of food and drink (including very expensive, though admittedly tasty, popcorn) to other patrons. More recent visits have been more pleasant if not perfect; some ninja training must have been put into place, although there are certain seats I will still try to avoid so as not to be frequently bumped or otherwise bothered. SFIFF screenings at the New Mission will NOT be employing the usual Alamo Drafthouse advance-seat-selection method. We'll see how that plays out.

More coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival is being collected at Keyframe Daily. I'd particularly like to highlight my friend Michael Guillén's interview with SFIFF lead programmer Rachel Rosen.

HOW: All screenings of The Apostate will be digital.

OTHER SFIFF SCREENINGS: Tonight at 6:00 is the sole SFIFF screening of Barbara Kopple's new music documentary Miss Sharon Jones! at the Castro Theatre. Today also marks the first festival screenings of new films by Zhang Yang (Paths of the Soul), Chantal Akerman (No Home Movie) and Hong Sangsoo (Right Now, Wrong Then).

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Not far from most of the other SFIFF venues in the Mission, at 8PM Artists' Television Access is screening several Paul Clipson 16mm and Super-8mm films in their native formats. What's most notable about the showing is that they'll be screened in silence for the first (and possibly last) time ever- Clipson normally works with musicians who provide soundtracks to his films, and it should be a very different experience to see them unspool in a manner more like a Stan Brakhage or Nathaniel Dorsky film. I somehow think Henri Langlois and Jonas Mekas might approve...

In The Street (1948)

Screen capture from Flicker Alley DVD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Girls Against The Rain (2012)

WHO: Sopheak Sao directed this.

WHAT: I've only seen a few brief online clips of this short-as-it-is documentary, but from what I've seen it looks like a sincere portrait of two lesbians in Cambodia who have been a couple since the days of the Khmer Rouge, in the face of family and societal pressure for them to deny their identities.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 7PM at the Victoria Theatre, as part of a Frameline festival.

WHY: I went to three Frameline screenings over the weekend, all at the Castro Theatre. Briefly, I enjoyed But I'm A Cheerleader but was perhaps hoping for a bit more depth to it, especially after seeing how rich I found the preceding short film by its director Jamie Babbit, Sleeping Beauties. Big Joy: the Adventures of James Broughton, however, was about all I could ask for in a documentary about an experimental filmmaker. The interviews with friends and family were fascinating and often poignant. The archival footage (both from his films and from the contextualizing era) was generously excerpted, and some of it was in the "deep cuts" category (I suppose I could quibble a bit about some of the image quality and identification labels, but this honestly felt minor). I felt like no major aspect of Broughton's life was glossed over, and though I've read a fair bit about his filmmaking and far less about his poetry, I learned quite a bit about both. 

Finally, though I don't feel like naming A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge a new personal favorite (I'll grant it superiority over the film it sequelizes), I was thrilled to finally see Pecahes Christ's Midnight Mass return to its proper witching-hour time slot, and was dazzled by the creativity and panache of her slickly-designed and choreographed pre-show performance, which filled the Castro stage perfectly; I'd previously only seen her stage shows at the too-snug Bridge and Victoria Theatres, and while more enjoyably homespun, they could never quite reach the arch outrageousness of this weekend's winking performance. Oh, and the interview with Mark Patton was pretty good too.

There's still almost a full week of Frameline screenings left in the festival, but I feel remiss not having already linked to the previews by Tony An and Adam Hartzell of some of the many Asian-made films in this year's program, most of which still have at least one screening. After several years of relatively slim selections of LGBT films from East Asia, this year's program has multiple films from several countries across the Pacific Rim from us, including South Korea, Thialand Cambodia mainland China and Taiwan, and a film apiece from Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and even the festival's first-ever selection from the (less East, more inland) country of Nepal.

 Two Girls Against the Rain screens on a program called Between Ring And Pendant, named for a Hong Kong short in the program, which is described by Frameline thusly:

This stellar collection of Asian & Pacific Islander shorts take us on a journey across the Pacific Rim and back to the Bay Area with fearless tomboys, aspiring pop divas, and some deeply complicated familial bonds.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digitally-produced doc. The only remaining film in this year's Frameline festival program expected to screen on film is The Shower, a Chilean film from 2010 screening in tomorrow night's program Tu Recuerdo.

The Realist (2013)

WHO: Scott Stark. I wrote about another of his films, Speechless, earlier this week. 

WHAT:  Michael Sicinski has already written an excellent, thought-provoking analysis of Stark's new experimental mannequin melodrama The Realist on the eve of its world premiere. Let me extract an excerpt:

through Stark’s manipulations, the mannequins command our attention. They shimmy, seduce; they seem to march in unison, as if preparing to mobilize in some sort of capitalist-couture guerrilla faction; they gaze as us like kitsch statuary.

A very good description. Sicinski also points out that Stark's juxtapositions "disguise the anteriority between and among shots within a single scene". Indeed. Previewing a not-quite-finalized version of The Realist on DVD the other day, it was remarkable to me how this work retains a sense of created "cinematic time" i.e. an illusory feeling of narrative progression as scenes and sections move forward, against all reasonable odds. Stark employs a method of transforming stereoscopic imagery into two dimensions by jumping back and forth between what each eye would individually see, a method I jokingly referred to as the "Ken Jacobs effect" before I realized other filmmakers such as Stark have employed it as well (then again, perhaps the joke holds, as anyone who has seen the right 1950s National Film Board of Canada documentaries knows Ken Burns didn't invent panning and zooming photographs). Though most films are not edited in-camera or even shot in sequence, most do not bear signs that they at least theoretically couldn't be. The Realist literally makes a cut with every frame. Thanks to its generous use of cross-fading techniques, one could say it makes a minimum of one cut per frame in fact. But the rapid alternation between two or more perspectives somehow assimilates in the brain much like a single shot might.

I would also like to mention that the sense of narrative and "melodrama" in The Realist is greatly aided by Stark's musical selection, a work by composer Daniel Goode, a former student of Henry Cowell's. His propulsive, post-minimalist piece from 1988 Tunnel-Funnel sets a very agreeable rhythm for Stark's editing. I'd love to see a small ensemble (the piece was written for a group of thirteen flutes, trombones, string players plus a pianist and a percussionist) take on a live performance to accompany Stark's images someday.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 5:30 this afternoon at the Victoria Theatre.

WHAT: This screening of The Realist is the centerpiece of a program of Stark's recent work presented by the Crossroads Film Festival which ends today. Because it's a piece with an entirely musical soundtrack, it ought to completely sidestep the sound clarity problems that can trouble screenings of dialogue-dependent films and videos at the Victoria Theatre. I always wish the theatre might channel some of its rentals from film festivals (in addition to Crossroads, the SF Underground Short Film Festival, which happens next weekend, and Frameline are among the more established festivals regularly using the venue) into making improvements to the sound system. Luckily few Crossroads films and performances involve much dialogue at all.

I finally really appreciated why Cinematheque likes to use the space last night during the projector performance piece Tejido Conectivo presented by the Spanish duo Crater. What began as a diverting single-, dual- and triple-projected presentation of birth, backyard & travel home movies running against an electronic musique concrète soundtrack opened out into a glorious display of illusionism, seemingly the entirety of the human condition spilling off the screen and onto the cavernous white walls via no fewer than seven 16mm and super-8 projectors. I expect The Realist to have no less epic an impact in that space.  

HOW: Made and screened via digital video.

Kudzu Vine (2011)

WHO: Josh Gibson, who directed this, has also made documentaries about Chang and Eng Bunker, the original "Siamese Twins", about Lake Victoria's invasive fish species the Nile Perch, and other subjects.

WHAT: I've only sampled a five-minute online clip of this 20-minute documentary on the fast-growing kudzu plant, which was introduced to this continent from Japan 137 years ago, but now covers more than 7 million acres of land in Southern states like North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. Five minutes was enough to know I can't wait to see the whole thing projected on the big screen.

If you've ever driven through kudzu-affected regions,you know how overwhelming its effect on the landscape can be, covering hillsides, houses, trees, and seemingly everything in its path. There's definitely an otherworldliness to a kudzu invasion, so it's appropriate that Gibson has made not a straight-ahead documentary but one that takes on the eerie quality of a 1950s science fiction movie, aided by his use of the cinemascope frame and 35mm hand-processing. For more on the film and its making, check out Eric Ferreri's interview article.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 4:30 this afternoon at the Victoria Theatre.

WHY: According to the Internet Movie Database, Christian Marclay's The Clock is a documentary. At one level this is absurd, and just another indication of the imdb's limitations as a resource for accurate information about anything other than a certain narrow (if generally 'popular') slice of the world's motion picture output. If you've seen any part of The Clock, now on display at SFMOMA, you know it's a 24-hour looped video installation made up entirely of carefully-edited timepiece-centric shots and scenes from thousands of movies (and some television shows for good measure). The only thing it objectively "documents" is what the current time is, as it's shown onscreen and/or mentioned on the soundtrack at least once every minute.

On the other hand (the long hand, perhaps?), perhaps we need to loosen the definition of documentary somewhat. We could go as far as Jean-Luc Godard, who once said "Every film is a documentary of its actors", but that seems to take what was meant as a provocation perhaps too literally, and render the term meaningless. More useful, I think, may be to take a cue from a term from the literary word, that is often used synonymously with "documentary" anyway: "non-fiction". In most libraries, the fiction section is composed entirely of stories set in constructed worlds that may resemble or disresemble the one we live in, but only to the extent that they are controlled and described by their authors. Non-fiction, while often thought of as a term for truthful or factual expression, is as it's name suggests: a catch-all category for "everything else". Where will you find mythology, poetry, musical scores, or books comprised entirely of Salvador Dali paintings? Almost certainly not in the fiction section, despite the often contra-factual elements of these publications. And not usually in separate sections of their own either, but interfiled with the historical and journalistic accounts, the essays, the how-to guides, and other materials we may feel more entirely comfortable calling "non-fiction". 

Similarly, perhaps "documentary" could be a more useful, less constraining (and for some, dismissive) term if it were more frequently applied to all moving image works that aren't stories set in constructed and controlled fictional "film worlds" described through the ineffable "film time" created by shot duration. By this definition, The Clock is a documentary; it doesn't contain its own story, and its "film time" is not constructed or controlled by Marclay but by the filmmakers he and his assistants have selected to appropriate from. It seems worth noting that in the 2 1/2 segment of The Clock I previewed, there appeared to be no images taken from non-fiction films of any sort- or from animation for that matter.

Last night I viewed two programs of Crossroads works while thinking about this possibly expanded view of "documentary". None of the works would qualify as documentaries under the strictest, most conventional definitions, which necessitate genre conventions like voice-over narration, talking-head interviews, etc. Several, such as Paul Clipson's lovely city symphony Absteigend or Jeanne C. Finley & John Muse's seemingly diaristic Manhole 452 or Jodie Mack's delightful feat of animation and musical storytelling Dusty Stacks of Mom, might (like Kudzu Vine) be considered documentaries by most definitions. Others, like Luther Price's unburied Nomadic Flesh or Suzan Pitt's painted Pinball would be easy to call non-fiction but rarely considered as documentaries of anything other than their own creation. But perhaps that's enough.

HOW: Kudzu Vine screens as 35mm print, as part of program 4 in the Crossroads festival, which also includes work screened in 16mm and digital video.

Audition (2012)

WHO: Karen Yasinsky is the artist who made this piece of animation. Her work often contains contains cinephilic content, for instance her series of drawings inspired by the films of Robert Altman, Robert Bresson and Jean Vigo.

WHAT: When Audition screened at last year's Views From The Avant-Garde sidebar of the New York Film Festival, Genevieve Yu wrote about it for Reverse Shot. Let me excerpt:

Yasinsky works over a few frames from John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, animating and repeating, in an intricate pattern that mimics dot-matrix commercial printing, the image of a woman prancing across a strip club stage, her skirt swirling Loie Fuller-like around her. Sit too close to the screen, and the image becomes illegible; it loses coherence the more closely it’s examined. The second half of the film features a book of early Japanese photographs whose pages are flipped before the camera.

The bridge between these two segments becomes the audio track: the music from the Cassavetes scene,  a beautiful piece called "Rainy Fields of Frost and Magic" by Neil Young sound-alike singer-songwriter Bo Harwood, whose demo-esque "scratch track" recordings used in this and other Cassavetes films retain a raw quality that fits the famous director's style as a maker of films that, in the words of Roger Ebert (R.I.P.): "gloriously celebrated the untidiness of life, at a time when everybody else was making neat, slick formula pictures".

Yasinsky has repurposed images from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in which a strip-club owner (played by Ben Gazzara) consoles himself after his gambling losses by auditioning a waitress (played by Trisha Pelham) alone one morning. There's a rather queasy sense of seduction in the original scene, violently interrupted when his girlfriend appears, but Yasinsky confines her animation to earlier moments of motion where the audition seems more innocent. This abstracted ambiguity when contrasted with the clarity of the yakuza-style tattoos on some of the subjects in the photo book provides grist for consideration of the human stories lying behind stereotypical underworld imagery, as Cassavetes' film does within the confines of the gangster narrative.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 9:15 at the Victoria Theatre on the corner of 16th Street and Capp in the Mission District of San Francisco.

WHY: Audition opens the second of eight programs in SF Cinematheque's fourth annual film festival devoted to personal, artist-created film and video, Crossroads. Last year, my favorite program was a selection of cosmically-considered works that all happened to be made by female directors (with one male co-director). Yasinksy's piece kicks of this year's only all-woman-made program, leading beautifully into The Room Called Heaven by Basque filmmaker Laida Lertxundi (who had a full program of her own at last year's Crossroads), and other works before the program finale, the world premiere of a sure crowd-pleaser by Jodie Mack, Dusty Stacks of Mom. The latter is one of the festival works highlighted by Cheryl Eddy in her fine SF Bay Guardian preview.

I was able to sample a few of the weekend's screenings in advance myself, and I selected Audition to highlight today because it's a good reminder of the place of personal, truly-independent filmmaking in larger cinephile culture. Not just as something to be looked at, but as an expression of its makers' own engagement with the moving images that move us to become movie lovers. When we think of the economics of Hollywood production we often forget it, but filmmakers, at least those not chasing after big box-office receipts, are usually cinephiles themselves, expressing their cinephilia in ways no less (and arguably more) valid than writing reviews or making lists or collecting DVDs, or obsessively going to the movies. I have a feeling that many of the filmmakers in attendance for Crossroads will trying to find ways of squeezing in trips to the two other major cinephile events happening in town this weekend: namely, the opening of Christian Marclay's The Clock at SFMOMA and the 35mm Roman Polanski retrospective at the Roxie.

Also note that Yasinsky's Life Is An Opinion, Fire Is A Fact will screen twice at the San Francisco International Film Festival, in its annual program co-presented with SF Cinematheque.

HOW: Audition screens as a digital video projection, but there are 16mm works on this program as well. Other Crossroads programs involve 35mm, 16mm, Super-8 and video projection.

Dyketactics (1974)

WHO: Barbara Hammer

WHAT: Let me step aside and quote Ariella Ben-Dov's piece on the film from the Radical Light book: 

In 1974 Barbara Hammer came out to viewers not only as a dyke but also as a fearless experimental filmmaker who is credited by some as creating the first-ever film by a lesbian about lesbian lovemaking for lesbian viewers. In a mere four minutes, and a poetic and titillating montage of 110 images, Dyketactics, which Hammer calls a "lesbian commercial," reveals the pleasures of looking at the female nude from a female perspective.

Ben-Dov's piece is brief, but I've cut off the above excerpt before she gets into her best analysis, so I urge you to read the entire piece on page 195 of the book. I'd also add, as if it didn't go without saying, really, that one doesn't need to be a lesbian viewer to recognize the formal acuity of Hammer's film. I haven't seen much else of Hammer's work, but this is just great.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at 7PM at SFMOMA's Phyllis Wattis Theater.

WHY: Although SFMOMA's impending closure removes a key screening space from the Frisco Bay fabric of venues that periodically present 16mm films by "underground" makers like Hammer, the local film community can be glad about other institutions that will continue to show such work after tonight's Phyllis Wattis Theater sign-off for the format.

For instance, on April 2nd the San Francisco Art Institute lecture hall will play host to a free screening of 16mm, Super-8 and video work by SFAI alum Scott Stark, who will be present for the event. Titles to be screened include two of my favorites of his, the brilliant Noema and Shape Shift. I haven't yet seen his Under A Blanket of Blue or More Than Meets The Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda or Speechless but my girlfriend who (full disclosure) is organizing this show assures me they're brilliant as well. More information on this event is to be found here.

The following weekend, eyes turn to the Victoria Theatre, where SF Cinematheque's biggest annual screening event, the Crossroads festival takes up residence with eight full programs held over three days (April 5-7).  Scott Stark will once again be featured, this time with more recent work such as Longhorn Tremelo, Traces and the world premiere of his long-anticipated The Realist. The weekend's seven other programs include films by talents such as Luther Price, Paul Clipson, Kelly Sears, Laida Lertxundi, Ben Rivers, and Michael Robinson among many others. 

SF Cinematheque is currently running a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help pay for the Crossroads festival, confidently timing the last day of the fundraising period to be Thursday April 4th, just a day before the screenings begin. As of this writing the campaign is just over halfway to its goal, so if you have interest in supporting this vital organization and making sure the festival is as good as it needs to be, please do see if you can open your wallet to donate. As usual with these things, donations at certain levels are reciprocated not only with good "underground film" karma but with gifts, which range from DVDs and books (such as the aforementioned and indispensable Radical Light as well as Barbara Hammer-signed copies of Hammer: Making Movies out of Sex and Life) to passes to Crossroads and Cinematheque screenings, to tote bags featuring artwork by the late great George Kuchar. A full list of these gift/benefits for donors is found here; click now because some of these items are in limited supply. I've really enjoyed each of the three previous Crossroads festivals, and at the first one I was able to meet several visiting filmmakers including Barbara Hammer, who was one of the featured guests at the festival. At that time I had not yet seen any of her films, but she was most gracious to me anyway. Crossroads is an unpretentious place for both experienced experimental film viewers and relative newcomers to rub elbows and discuss the works on display.

HOW: Dyketactics screens in 16mm, as does the feature (also by Hammer) that it accompanies at this showing, her 1992 feature Nitrate Kisses.

The Two Eyes Of Carl Martin

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

The following list comes from Carl Martin, film projectionist and keeper of the Bay Area Film Calendar.

on the silver globe: may 13, ybca

watching a near-incomprehensible 3-hour mess during the height of my allergic bout last year was torture.  i couldn't say what happened moment to moment--in broad strokes, astronauts alight on a far-flung planet and recapitulate in compressed time the evolution of human culture and religion.  i do know it's chock-full of shockingly beautiful shots, like that of a forest of pole-sitters perched on a beach.  this wildly ambitious relic was left unfinished, a victim of shifting political tides, the balance filled in years later via voiceover paired with fish-eyed guerilla subway footage--as if an andrzej zulawski (possession) film needed any help being totally schizoid.

white dog: june 3; arne sucksdorff shorts: june 7, private screenings
anti-wellesian high-angle shots implicate the viewer in perennial racial pot-stirrer sam fuller's sordid, methodical tale of a racist dog.  fortuitously preceded by skipper learns a lesson, the 16mm educational film that so moved a young kristy mcnichol it inspired her participation in fuller's film, in which she gives a brave, emotionally naked performance.  morricone score!  a few days later, a pair of lovely and intimate nature documentary shorts, part of a larger shorts selection curated by k. wiggin.  shadows on the snow depicts the stalking of a bear, carefully balancing the fortunes of hunter and prey; rhythm of a city: a film from stockholm, because of its setting, also a city symphony of sorts.  as venues shut down or go digital and the studios increase their iron grip on prints, we'll rely increasingly on collectors and grey-area screenings to satisfy our celluloid cravings.

the man in the gray flannel suit: june 21, pfa
i did not expect this film to wander lustily into such a moral quagmire.  in flashbacks to his wartime experiences, "agreeable gentleman" gregory peck kills a man for his coat and conducts an affair while unambiguously still married.  one feels this to be an admirable corrective to the usual us-vs-them heroics of cinematic warfare of that time.  in a wonderful and prescient throwaway scene, peck wrests his kids from the tv and sends them off to bed, only to fall himself under its hypnotic spell.

valerie and her week of wonders: june 29, pfa
i'd seen this years before but was struck this time by its wondrous, dreamlike beauty.  as with on the silver globe there's a lot going on i can't make much sense of beyond its deep resonance.

five elements ninjas: july 6, roxie
after quick-zooming our way through the usual confused exposition, we get to the meat of the matter: a series of truly inspired confrontations with super-natural ninja foursomes representing gold, water, earth, wood, and fire.  balletic kung-fu at its best.

die wunderbare lüge der nina petrowna (the wonderful lie of nina petrovna): july 13, castro
probably one of my top three silent film experiences ever, with one of my favorite stars.  the emotive power of brigitte helm's face is stunning.  majestic ophuls-like photography and settings, with the edge in sensuousness.  franz lederer needs to stop gambling already!

awāra: july 28, pfa
the pfa's raj kapoor series featured some of the most horrid looking prints i've ever seen: black-and-white on inconsistently timed color stock full of all manner of printed-in defects.  incredibly, awāra, with its fatalistic melodrama and busby berkeley-caliber musical numbers, overcame all that.

walker: october 6, pfa
a troubling peckinpah-inspired masterpiece from alex cox--troubling for that world-beating american cowboy spirit and troubling for cox's career as a consequence.  ed harris goes on a messianic power trip in nicaragua in the best performance by him i've seen.  he won me over from the get-go in a tender signed scene with marlee matlin.

whisper of the heart: october 10, california
i never though i'd include an anime in this list.  but yoshifumi kondô's only film (as director) mostly eschews the wide-eyed te-heeing teens, moped hooligans, mystical animals, and steampunk fantasy embraced by miyazaki and his lessers in favor of bittersweet, down-to-earth, contemporary teen romance.  i still can't get olivia newton-john's country roads rendition out of my head.  one of the last films seen at my former workplace.

the frightened woman: november 17, victoria
a bizarre eurotrash revenge tale with so many delightful surprises involving props, sets, mise en scène, and plain wrongness that the plot twist at the end seems comparatively tame.  note to victoria: please adjust feed clutch so films don't break at the ends of the reels.

Austin Wolf-Sothern 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 comedian-actor-projectionist Austin Wolf-Sothern, whose blog is found here.

I moved to Los Angeles this year on June 5, so this list only covers up to that point. The reason I moved on the 5th of the month (costing me a few extra days of rent) as opposed to the 1st was because Sleepaway Camp, my favorite horror film of all time, screened on 35mm (my favorite movie format of all time) on June 4. It played as part of Peaches Christ's Midnight Mass, and as it happens, my very first experience with Rep in SF was their presentation of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! back in the summer of 2000, so it really couldn't have been a more perfect send-off for me.

The Top 8 Best Repertory Films/Experiences in SF in the First Half of 2011
1. Sleepaway Camp (1983), Midnight Mass with Peaches Christ, Bridge Theatre
2. Seed of Chucky (2004) with Jennifer Tilly in Person, Midnight Mass with Peaches Christ, Victoria Theatre
3. The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon (1976) / The Peanut Butter Solution (1985) / Cipher in the Snow (1973), Midnites for Maniacs, Roxie Theatre
4. Ninja Turf (1985) / Miami Connection (1987), Roxie Theatre
5. Beverly Hills Cop (1984) / The Last Dragon (1986), Midnites for Maniacs, Castro Theatre
6. Jesse Ficks' 35 Favorite 35mm Trailers, Benefit to Save the Red Vic, Red Vic Movie House
7. The Woman Chaser (1999) with Patrick Warburton in Person, Roxie Theatre
8. The Monster Squad (1987) with Fred Dekker in Person, Midnites for Maniacs, Castro Theatre

Maureen Russell Only Has Two Eyes

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

The following list comes from Maureen Russell, San Francisco film festival volunteer and cinephile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appetizers

Cinephiles the world over are poring over the announcements just made about the cinematic feast that is the Cannes Film Festival. But Frisco Bay cinephiles shouldn't get too distracted by these announcements, as we've got our own hearty meal coming out of the kitchen very shortly. The San Francisco International Film Festival opens next week, and tickets are selling briskly for certain shows (rush line only for Werner Herzog's 3-D Cave of Forgotten Dreams, for instance). Preview pieces by the likes of Michael Hawley, Max Goldberg and Richard Von Busack are appearing to help guide the hungry cinemagoer.

For those of us too famished to wait until April 21st, however, there are some mouth-watering appetizers being served up by other film venues and organizations. Tonight, for example Peaches Christ and Sam Sharkey host the San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival, returning to the scene at a new venue after a nearly three-year absence. I attended this one-program "festival" back in 2007 when it was an after-midnight event at the Bridge, and I expect this year's edition at the Victoria to be just as lively and surprising even though it's been moved to the prime time hour. Though nominally devoted to short films, the event includes the first showing of a locally-made feature, Devious, Inc. I'm more drawn to the shorts however, including new films by Beth Lisick and Frazer Bradshaw (who made Everything Strange and New), Lev (Tales of Mere Existence), and David Enos. Some of Enos's earlier works screened at last Friday's Berkeley Art Museum event I mentioned in my previous post, and I really enjoyed seeing how well they played on a good video-projection system in front of an unfamiliar audience. I'm excited for a chance to see him premiere a new video, Ankhs, co-directed by Mishell Stimson, tonight.

The following night is the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's annual tribute to the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, including a screening of the 1922 firefighting drama The Third Alarm, as well as a good print of the last filmed record of San Francisco before the 105-year-old disaster, a Trip Down Market Street by the Miles Brothers. Researcher David Kiehn of the Film Museum was recently interviewed by Sara Vizcarrondo on Look of the Week, and demonstrates a welcome sample of his remarkable knowledge. He'll appear at the San Leandro Public Library on Thursday April 21, to speak about the film and other earthquake-cinema related matters in greater depth and show a Trip Down Market Street as well as a modern documentary on the disaster. The latter is a free event.

Monday night brings another free event to local silent cinema fans: a 35mm print of Brazilian cinema pioneer Humberto Maura's Sleeping Ember. I wrote about another Maura film last year, but Matt Sussmann's article in sf360 has far more fascinating information about Monday's ultra-rare screening.

Yet another free screening happening, the day before SFIFF, is a Castro Theatre showing of the Richard Brooks classic Elmer Gantry, presented with an on-stage q-and-a with Shirley Jones, who won the 1960 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the film. Tickets must be reserved in advance at the Turner Classic Movies website.

One last appetizer before I get to the desserts (in my next post): this Saturday's all-afternoon-and-evening marathon of 1980s nostalgia entitled Heavy Metal Monster Mash should inspire almost a KISS-sized army of headbangers and horror fans to descend on Frisco's largest surviving single-screen theatre, and the highlight of the day for many of them is sure to be actor Fred Dekker's in-person appearance along with his most famous film The Monster Squad. You might want to read sometime Hell On Frisco Bay contributor Sean McCourt's interview with Dekker in the San Francisco Bay Guardian to prepare.

Frameline schedule announced

Frameline, the world's largest film festival devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender filmmakers and images, announced its full program earlier today. The festival runs June 19-29 here in Frisco at the Castro, Roxie, Victoria, and in Berkeley, the Elmwood. I missed the press conference myself and haven't had time to peruse thoroughly, but two items stick out at first glance-over.

First, Derek, Isaac Julien's documentary on the life and art of Derek Jarman, will be playing at the Castro on Sunday, June 29th at 4:30 PM, just before the closing night film, Breakfast With Scot. Derek was my favorite documentary seen at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and I wrote about it here. I know I responded to it so well in part because I knew so little about the boundary-shredding British filmmaker beforehand. I'm curious to know how Frisco's true-blue Jarmaniacs will respond. Meanwhile, Jarman's Sebastiane and In The Shadow of the Sun (with soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle) are playing a screening totally unconnected to Frameline at A.T.A. Wednesday, May 21.

Second, this year's Frameline Award is going to its own outgoing festival director Michael Lumpkin, and a seven-film selection of past Frameline hits with real staying power will be included in the festival. I've seen four of them (Gus Van Sant's Mala Noche, the Wachowskis' Bound, Joseph Gaï Ramaka's Karmen Geï and my personal favorite of the quartet, Pedro Almodóvar's Law of Desire) on the big screen before, but never with Frameline audiences. I've never seen the other three (Big Eden, Lilies and Yes Nurse, No Nurse) at all.

See anything else in the guide that looks particularly good?