The Iron Horse (1924)

WHO: John Ford directed this.

WHAT: It's not my personal favorite of Ford's silent films (that'd be, of those I've seen so far, Four Sons) but The Iron Horse is still a lovely example of one of the great American filmmakers' early access to the poetry of landscape. I think of it as something of a spiritual precursor to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo: a fictionalized version of a true story of 19th-Century "New World" economic expansion, that nonetheless was filmed in certain ways almost as if a documentary: Herzog's crew actually sent that ship over that mountain, and Ford's actually laid at least a mile and a half of railroad track while filming the story of the construction of the transcontinental railroad. In lieu of a Burden of Dreams-style documentary on The Iron Horse, do read David Kiehn's terrific article, written for the 2010 San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation of the film.

Another similarity between the Ford and Herzog films highlights what's probably their most fundamental difference: both have complicated- one might also say problematic- relationships to the Indian tribes that made up a good portion of each film's cast and crew.  Fitzcarraldo ends, intentionally, like an art movie, all tangled up in conflicted feelings about the relative success and failure of the white capitalist/art lover and the Campa-Ashaninka Indians to achieve their goals. 

The Iron Horse has a relatively traditional, happy, "Hollywood ending" for its characters, for American history, and certainly for its producers, as the film outgrossed every other US release in 1924. But a modern or so-called "enlightened" audience can also have conflicted feelings about this ending- these endings- especially from the perspective of the Paiutes who performed in the film. Ford films a simple scene of laborers reunifying with their fellows after being separated onto different work crews with such warmth and emotion, while the ceremonial conclusion of the film, with the driving of the Golden Spike, feels more like a tacked-on addendum, even with its wrapping up of the romantic plot. One wonders if this contrast reveals something of Ford's own feelings about the human stories caught up in the sweep of history. 

WHERE/WHEN: 4:00 PM today only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Musuem.

WHY: This afternoon's screening is part of LaborFest and its FilmWorks United selection of screenings happening at various venues around Frisco Bay throughout July. I believe this is the first year of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's involvement as a venue. Most of the FilmWorks United screening selections are documentaries (last Friday saw the local premiere of Ken Loach's latest, for instance) but there are three silent features as well, all of them involving the railroad, which seems apropos after last week's BART strike. Last night it was William S. Hart in The Whistle, also at Niles. Today it's The Iron Horse. And on Thursday July 18th (unfortunately the opening night of the SF Silent Film Festival) LaborFest will host a screening of Sergei Eisenstein's depiction of a 1903 locomotive factory Strike at 518 Valencia.

Also worth mentioning although not officially connected to LaborFest: The Weavers, about the Silesian Weaver Revolt of 1844, has been called the "German Potemkin" and screens at the Castro July 21st. And Potemkin screens this month too, on July 28th at Davies Symphony Hall with live accompaniment by organist Cameron Carpenter. Tickets start at $15 for nosebleed seats, but it's a pretty big screen.

HOW: The Iron Horse is a 16mm screening with live piano accompaniment by Bruce Loeb.

Into The Abyss (2011)

WHO: Werner Herzog directed this documentary.

WHAT: Here's how Roger Ebert began his November 2011 review:

Into the Abyss may be the saddest film Werner Herzog has ever made. It regards a group of miserable lives, and in finding a few faint glimmers of hope only underlines the sadness.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:00 PM tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Roger Ebert and Les Blank: two "men of cinema" who died of cancer in the past week. It's hard to believe they're gone. I already miss knowing they're around. I have a lot more to say about each of them, but no time to say it all, at least not yet.

For today, I just would like to acknowledge the link Werner Herzog was in a chain that connected one to the other. Though I think Nosferatu the Vampire was probably the first Herzog film I saw, back when I was a teenager and didn't really care about foreign films, it also may have been Aguirre: Wrath of God, which I liked even better. I know first watched the latter at around the same time, with my father, a religious viewer of Siskel & Ebert and the Movies. I remember looking it up afterwords in his copy of Roger Ebert's Home Movie Companion, which I suspect I consulted more frequently than he did, making the fact that I gave it to him as a birthday or Father's Day or Christmas gift seem rather suspect now that you mention it. 

Seeing that film and reading that review (I'm not even sure it was a full review; it may have just been a write-up accompanying its place on his 1982 all-time top 10 list) must have planted a seed that would eventually blossom into cinephilia in my post-college twenties (yes I'm a bit of a late bloomer compared to most cinephiles I know who were movie-mad by age 18 if not earlier).  It was in this period that I started catching up with Herzog's other films (an ongoing process as I've still yet to see a few, most notably Heart of Glass, which Ebert preferred to Aguirre as late as 1980), which led me of course to Fitzcarraldo and its inevitable companion Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's remarkable making-of documentary that's better than the original film. After a decade of watching Blank's films at least as fervently as I had Herzog's, I had the great privilege of interviewing him at his El Cerrito studio. I excerpted a piece from that interview on this blog just the other day, where I got to see the preserved remains of the shoe Herzog didn't quite finish during the event that Blank filmed and released as Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.

Anyway, I'm sure that many who attend tonight's screening will be thinking of Herzog's connections to both Ebert and Blank. These connections aren't just a creation of my own cinephiliac nostalgia kicking in. Here's a link to audio and a transcript of Herzog's comments after hearing about Ebert's death.

HOW: Into the Abyss screens in 35mm.

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.

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.

Jonathan Kiefer'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 journalist/critic Jonathan Kiefer, who archives reviews from his many outlets at JonathanKiefer.com:

Five local showings I’m ashamed to have missed in 2010

I need to get out more, by which I mean sit quietly in the dark with strangers for hours at a time more often than I already do. I’m still missing so much of the good stuff.

Of course the blessings of a professional obligation to see movies like Going the Distance and The Back-Up Plan sometimes can be mixed. And that’s all the more reason for me to be a better supporter of the persistently splendid Bay Area repertory scene. But I only have two eyes!

So here’s a shortlist of the many offerings from last year that I regret having missed.

1. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? God asked me the same question when that film played at the Red Vic in April and I didn’t go see it. David Lynch produces, Werner Herzog directs, Michael Shannon stars -- and I can’t even manage to show up? What the hell is wrong with me?

2. Thundercrack! at the Roxie, April. Written by and starring George Kuchar, directed by Curt McDowell, and rightly described -- even by Glenn Beck -- as “the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla,” yet still never seen in its entirety by me. The shame!

3. Orlando. In late July and early August, Landmark briefly offered another chance for a theatrical view of Tilda Swinton as the sex-shifting 400-year-old nobleman in Sally Potter’s 1992 movie of Virginia Woolf’s novel. Guess who apparently had better things to do?

4. I Want to Live! at the PFA, in July. Actually, I want to live at the PFA most months. Having studied the relentless, true-ish story of Barbara Graham’s mid-1950s stint on San Quentin’s Death Row, I am convinced that watching it on my flat-screen by myself instead of on a big screen with other people is indeed a miscarriage of justice.

5. In September, the Red Vic showed Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 horror-fantasy Hausu, which has been called “a fear too beautiful to resist!” And yet, unaccountably, I did resist it. Idiot!

Up at the Castro

On Friday, the Castro Theatre began showing the latest Pixar film, Up, directed by Pete Docter (who previously made Monsters, Inc.) I saw it there, and here are eight reasons why I think it's the ideal Frisco Bay venue in which to watch:

1. The Wurlitzer organ which plays before the evening screenings. When I attended the organist performed well-known Disney themes by the likes of the Sherman Bros. and other songwriters. Though Disney and Pixar are now joined at the hip (or at least the knee) Up thankfully contains no tacked-on pop songs intended to add to an Oscar nomination haul. Yet its music score composed by Michael Giacchino is nonetheless essential. Hearing the organ beforehand may also evoke the silent movie era for modern audiences- quite appropriate given that Up, even more than bleepity-blooping Wall-E, has an early sequence that deserves to be compared to the most accomplished visual storytelling of the silent era.

2. The Castro is playing the film in 3-D, which, yes means paying extra for the new-fangled glasses, but it certainly adds to the experience, even if it's not essential to appreciating the film. If you don't care at all about stereoscopic gimmickry, or prefer viewing a 35mm print, the Presidio provides an opportunity for viewing without the 3-D surcharge. At any rate, the Castro ticket price makes it Frisco's second-cheapest option for viewing in 3-D, outside of certain matinee screenings at the Sundance Kabuki.

3. I really don't want to do more than hint about the content of Up, but I think it's not spoiling a key surprise to say that the film begins with a clever "Movietown" newsreel showing the exploits of an intrepid explorer, hero to our protagonist Carl, who sits in a darkened theatre looking up at the screen with his thick-rimmed glasses and aviator goggles on. It's an ingenious device to create cinema audience identification with the character; we are placed in his position from the outset, and as we're adjusting our 3-D glasses he's adjusting his goggles. As we're delighting to the images on screen, so is he. The sequence also works as a time bridge, placing us in the distant past- perhaps the late 1920's or early 1930's. Needless to say, the scene in Up is not set in a multiplex but in a single-screen theatre, and the technique is certain to work better the the latter than the former. Though the Century Theatre in Corte Madera, a fine venue in its own right, is also a single-screener on Frisco Bay in which to fully experience this dreamworld transference, it was built in the 1960s. Dating from 1922, the Castro is by far the best simulator of Carl's experience around.

4. The respectful audiences. Even when playing mainstream fare, the Castro draws a more informed, enthusiastic crowd than you're likely to find at the shopping malls. Part of this may be a function of attending opening weekend in a Frisco Bay venue, not so far from Pixar's Emeryville headquarters. Were all those people staying to sit and clap the credits just fans, or were they supporting their friends and co-workers who'd had a hand in Up's creation?

5. Perhaps the interest in seeing a new 3-D film in Frisco's grandest remaining cinema will get folks excited about seeing revival films in 3-D. The last time the Castro brought out the silver screen, the dual projectors, and prints of terrific fare such as Dial 'M' For Murder and Robot Monster was a few years ago. Might a successful Up run inspire another such series?

6. Not enough quality animation graces the Castro screen, period. Sure, we had the live-action/stop motion hybrid the Lost World (which Up clearly references) earlier this month thanks to the SF Film Society, and a somewhat recent $5 Tuesday night offering was a bill of out-of-copyright Fleischer Brothers films. But there are whole worlds of animation that would be wonderful to view on that screen. My own first visit inside the Castro's hallowed halls was during Spike & Mike's animation festival, but now both that event and the folks who tour The Animation Show use other Frisco Bay venues. Why not a Hayao Miyazaki fest in conjunction with his upcoming visit to Frisco Bay in July? Or a Tex Avery night at the Castro? Animation-heads need opportunities to be reminded how great a venue it is for our beloved medium. The next two and a half weeks provide many; here's hoping there's more to come.

7. The Castro is the venue where Frisco Bay Herzog fans were able to see the White Diamond, one of the best films the Bavarian auteur has made in the past couple of decades. I wrote a bit about that screening in a piece for Senses of Cinema back in 2005. Don't try to tell me that Up and the White Diamond are not brethren, if in a slightly oblique way. Credit Robert Davis for noticing it.

8. Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, Up seems particularly poignant in light of last week's news event which rocked California, and the Castro district perhaps especially hard. Though he is responding to an advance screening that took place last Tuesday, and goes further into plot detail than I personally feel comfortable sharing with readers who have not seen the film yet (he doesn't reveal anything from beyond the first twenty-five or so minutes, but as these were my favorite minutes of Up I'm still feeling conservative at this point), Arya Ponto has eloquently made a connection that I feel is worth highlighting. Somehow, it seems unexpectedly appropriate that the day after Up's Castro run ends on June 17th, the theatre is given over to the 33rd Frameline festival, which has been nicely previewed by Michael Hawley. Perhaps Frameline fans coming in from out of town might want to arrive a day early to catch Up in a unique venue.