My 2018 Eyes*

I'm oh-so pleased that I was able to convince sixteen other cinephiles to allow me to publish their lists of favorite repertory/revival screenings seen in San Francisco Bay Area cinemas and other exhibition spaces. Though I don't use this blog space for much anymore (if you want my latest quick thoughts on the Frisco Bay cinema scene and a few other topics I encourage you to check my twitter feed), I'm proud that I can still occasionally use it for something I think is still valuable: a collective "thank you" to the people who make Frisco Bay a still-vital site for audience re-appreciation of the world's cinematic heritage. 

My own cinema-going year in 2018 was just about as exciting as ever, despite it being the first full year that I removed an active 35mm revival venue from my moviegoing itinerary; please read the first two paragraphs of this post to learn why I no longer attend the New Mission/Alamo Drafthouse. I do give an early-2017 screening there a nod in my make-up list of 2017 repertory cinema highlights at the very bottom of the piece you're currently looking at.

As usual, I focused the following selections on films brand-new to me, mostly because I'm usually so much more energized by falling in love with a new-to-me movie for the first time than by even the most fruitful re-visitation of an old friend. Although 2018 brought some very fruitful re-visitations, such as seeing 70mm prints of 2001: A Space Odyssey and West Side Story (the latter for the first time in that format), and 35mm prints of Eyes Wide Shut and Shadow of a Doubt (again, the latter for the first time in that format), all at the Castro, or revisiting Sátántangó in 35mm at BAMPFA and viewing an IB Technicolour print of All That Heaven Allows at the same venue. I even saw, under not-to-be-disclosed circumstances, a collector-held original-release IB Tech print of the first film I ever fell in love with as a young child, which was quite the nostalgia trip. But in most every way I appreciated all the following screenings even more:

Alexander Nevsky screen capture from Janus DVD

Alexander Nevsky, February 16, 2018

Though this list is made up about equally of films I'd barely if ever heard of before they appeared on a local repertory calendar and films I've been wanting to see for many years, this early-year BAMPFA presentation not only fit squarely in the latter category, it was perhaps the most prominent and long-standing example of it. My desire to see Alexander Nevsky preceded my cinephilia, going back to my youthful days as a Sergei Prokofiev-loving prospective music major. My mother sang in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus when they accompanied it at Davies Symphony Hall in the 1990s, while I was attending college in the Midwest. Having missed that chance, I kept hoping for a reprise to be my first experience with Sergei Eisenstein's sync-sound debut, but upon seeing the Symphony's cinematic programming moving away from foreign-language masterpieces featuring music composed by concert-hall regulars, in favor of Hollywood hits, I decided to give up on such dreams and take the first 35mm opportunity I could get, which ended up being this extremely stirring screening. I'm actually glad I first saw this extraordinary 1938 work of form & emotion in a setting in which the music did not threaten to overwhelm image any more than it occasionally does, but then the push-pull of the two Sergeis in its creation is one of the most dynamic aspects of a film that shouldn't be categorized only as anti-Nazi propaganda, though it is of course that too.

Merrily We Go To Hell, March 14, 2018

No single 2018 series at the always-35mm Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto matched 2017's spotlight on five decades of Warner Brothers films in its breadth of satisfying films from various eras & genres, but the follow-up focus on 1930-1935 Paramount was at least as welcome, for its willingness to unearth more rarities (and to also include cartoons, in this case mostly featuring Betty Boop instead of Bugs Bunny). I caught five of the series double-bills including a knockout pairing of Mitchell Leisen's barely-known debut Cradle Song with Josef von Sternberg's severely underrated An American Tragedy. But the single-best new discovery for me of the set was director Dorothy Arzner's 1932 Merrily We Go To Hell starring Frederic March essentially reprising his Jekyll & Hyde role but through the avatar of a Depression-era dipsomaniacal journalist, and with Sylvia Sidney excelling in the audience-stand-in role of a young woman who falls in love with him. The film is proof that the appeal of Pre-Code Hollywood goes well beyond the "naughtiness" that often gets played up in promotions of the era's films, and that these early talkies were elegant vehicles for discussions of serious social problems in a serious (yet no less entertaining) way that tended to dissipate once the Hays Code became generally enforced in 1934.

Road House, May 18, 2018

Another surprisingly serious take on the deleterious effects of alcohol, this time focused less on the over-indulgers than on the capitalists battling each other to control profits from one town's drunks, smuggled into the skin of a corny 1989 action movie in which a beautifully be-mulletted Patrick Swayze plays a nationally-renowned bouncer. (I clearly do not travel in the correct circles to know if such a characterization has any basis in reality). Ben Gazzara plays the corrupt local kingpin and Sam Elliott has a role not so far-removed from the one he's currently up for a A Star Is Born Oscar for. On one level this Razzie-nominated movie hits you repeatedly over the head with all the most shopworn cliches of Rehnquist-era cable-television staples, but on another level it perfects and transcends all the cliches, becoming a ballet of bodies in motion that was staggering to behold on the Roxie Theater screen. I don't know anything about Rowdy Herrington, but for these 114 minutes he became my favorite director, and I can't ask much more from a movie.

Patty Hearst screen capture from MGM DVD

Patty Hearst, May 25, 2018

It appears May was a particularly strong month for 35mm prints of late-1980s American films with a touch (or more) of the exploitation film about them; just a week after Road House I saw Paul Schrader's 1988 docudrama about the inspiration for Citizen Kane's granddaughter and her infamous kidnapping into the Symbionese Liberation Army. But Patty Hearst makes its artfulness far more apparent, especially through Natasha Richardson astonishing performance and Bojan Bazelli's immersive cinematographic techniques. It didn't debut at Cannes for nothing, even if it didn't garner any prizes. Maybe it should have; for me it stands at least as high as Schrader's best-directed features like Blue Collar, Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters and First Reformed. Filmed locally in large part, Patty Hearst was part of a brilliantly-packaged set of films wrangling with "San Francisco's dark decade" that served as hangover to the Summer of Love at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; most unfortunately this was one of the final series programmed at YBCA by Joel Shepard before he and curatorial assistant David Robson were misguidedly dismissed by this shadow-of-its-former-self arts organization that appears bent on hastening its complete assimilation into the orbit of the nearby convention spaces that, like YBCA itself, rest on land that was until that "dark decade" home to more low-income residents than perhaps any other neighborhood in town. Tragically for cinephiles, YBCA's film program essentially doesn't exist any longer, replaced only by rentals from festivals and other organizations like SF Cinematheque, the latter a partnership I understand Shepard in one of his last acts encouraged to be continued in his absence.

The Lighthouse Keepers, May 31, 2018

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival continues to expand, this year for the first time moving its opening night to a Wednesday and running a full day of programming on a Thursday. That day wasn't easily-skippable stuff for cinephiles either, unlike some previous years' weekday programming choices; it included the Amazing Tales From the Archives program and two of my favorite films seen previously only in highly-compromised video copies: Carl Dreyer's Master of the House and Yasujiro Ozu's An Inn In Toyko. But the day ended with an eye-popping visual hurricane by a filmmaker I'd long wanted to acquaint myself with for the first time: Jean Grémillon, represented at the festival by his second feature film The Lighthouse Keepers from 1929. Presented in a rare 35mm print from the National Film Archive of Japan of all places, this cinematic approximation of an injured island-dweller's increasingly frenzied mental state also benefited from a dose of only-at-a-festival psychogeography. Set and shot on the Britanny coast, the film was accompanied perfectly by pianist Guenter Buchwald, who (I later learned) drew upon his young experiences living in and playing traditional music of that region. Buchwald has been a gifted SFSFF mainstay since 2013, but for me this was by far the best showcase for his talents I've seen, bettering even last year's SFSFF screening of Lubitsch's The Doll and that afternoon's Ozu presentation. (No coincidence, I suspect, that SFSFF percussionist Frank Bockius joined him on all three of these accompaniments; Bockius's contribution to An Inn In Tokyo particularly made me hanker to hear him anchor an entire score on his own sometime; perhaps another Ozu since he's typically so difficult to accompany). The Lighthouse Keepers cemented the festival's first jam-packed Thursday as the day to beat for the rest of the weekend, and though Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness on Friday, No Man’s Gold, Trappola and The Saga of Gösta Berling on Saturday, and perhaps especially the Serge Bromberg presentation and Stephen Horne accompanying Soviet phantasmagoria Fragment of an Empire on Sunday tried to give it a run for its money, I don't think any of them quite succeeded.

Sisters, June 28, 2018

The Castro Theatre is probably the ideal venue for any film festival aiming to bring revived classics to a large and appreciative audience, as proven not just by the aforementioned Silent Film Festival but also Noir City (where I had great first-time screenings of films like Address Unknown, Jealousy, Bodyguard and The Underworld Story), Frameline (which hosted a moving presentation of a newly digitized Buddies) and Cinema Italia SF (which included a rare showing of A Special Day in a Mastroianni marathon). But I'm equally appreciative when the venue screens, between its festival four-walls and second-run showings of recent multiplex and arthouse fare, great repertory selections programmed in-house. Some of 2018's highlights along these lines included my first big-screen viewing of John Boorman's Deliverance and my long-awaited first-ever viewing of Frances Ford Coppola's One From the Heart. Very enjoyable, but neither as gleefully enjoyable as my first-ever viewing of the breakthrough film by another New Hollywood director who happens to share my first name. I don't think that's the reason I find I have a particular affinity for Brian De Palma's films (well, not all of them, but the ones that hit me hit deeply) as I was a Carrie fan before I knew or cared what a director was. At any rate, Sisters was a film I'd wanted to see for many years but, like Alexander Nevsky, was willing to wait to catch in ideal circumstances. The Castro Theatre in 35mm, surrounded by sparsely-assembled but devoted Margot Kidder mourners, fit that bill. On twitter afterward I called it "the last horror movie of the pre-Roe v. Wade era", which may or not be technically true but feels spiritually so. At any rate, it's the earliest De Palma film I've seen that clearly has his Hitchcock-infused brand stamped clearly upon it.

A Moment of Innocence screen capture from New Yorker Video DVD

A Moment of Innocence, September 6, 2018

How did I let myself go so long as a cinephile without seeing this metacinematic masterpiece made the year I first began actively turning my eyes toward non-mainstream cinema, 1996? I guess my excuse is that I was then still taking baby steps and films like Lone Star and Dead Man were my idea of "non-mainstream". Iranian cinema wasn't on my radar screen until a couple years later, and though I did enjoy early films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf like Boycott and The Cyclist when I caught up with them on home video, I never dove deeply into his complete filmography. So I was very glad for BAMPFA's Autumn showcase of films directed by Makhmalbaf as well as his wife and two daughters. I'd actually seen most of the womens' films before, but none of the five by Mohsen programmed; I was able to catch up with three of them, all via imported 35mm prints: his Istanbul-filmed Time of Love, the also-amazing Salaam Cinema and this investigation into the very hows and whys of making and re-making cinema. It's the kind of film that recalibrates your understanding of the arbitrariness of lines between professional and amateur, of spectator and maker, of documentary and fiction, etc. And the titular "moment" is just perfection. There was talk of a follow-up series of Abbas Kiarostami films coming to BAMPFA soon (perhaps this year?) but with the political impediments to bringing Iranian films into the US under the current culture-hostile regime, I'm not sure how likely that has become; I'm told a November screening of Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow was hindered when the new DCP was confiscated by our customs officials and BAMPFA was forced to track down an inferior transfer already within US borders to screen.

Forty-six films by Kurt Kren, September 22-23, 2018

Located just one block from the 16th & Mission BART station, The Lab is a crucial performance and art space that in recent years, under the direction of Dena Beard, has become an increasingly important square in the quilt of local film exhibition, especially of the "bubbling up from the underground" sort. In 2017 the venue hosted Frisco Bay's only guaranteed all-celluloid film festival, Light Field, and a March 2019 iteration has been unveiled as well. It was also venue for a years-in-the-making near-complete two-evening retrospective of the films of Vienna-born experimentalist Kurt Kren, with introductions by archivists, scholars and people who knew the filmmaker before he died in 1998. I don't know if I've ever had quite this kind of intensive immersion in a moving image artist's work before; one Saturday afternoon I'd seen just a single Kren film in my lifetime (31/75: Asyl) and less than thirty-six hours later I'd seen almost all of them.  The forty-five that were new to me can't be summed up in a sentence or a paragraph as they ran the gamut of approaches and effects, and I didn't even like all of them; some went way over my head and others (especially the naked body-, food-, and fluid-filled "Action Films" documenting Otto Mühl performances in the mid-1960s) were varying degrees of repulsive. But finding that films as singular as 2/60: 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test and 47/91: A Party or 36/78: Rischart and 46/90: Falter 2, or 18/68: Venice Destroyed and 32/76: To W+B came from the same individual's camera was almost unbelievable and rather inspiring. I think my very favorite of the films was 3/60 Trees In Autumn, a kind of skyward update of Oskar Fischinger's Walking From Munich to Berlin that I was very glad to see again amidst a handful of Kren films a month and a half later at BAMPFA, alongside work by a modern-day filmmaker whose work owes much to Kren's: Tominari Nishikawa, whose Lumphini 2552 felt particularly connected to this botanical strand of Kren's work, as well as its use of its year of creation in its title as Kren always did (in the case of the Nishikawa the year number is the Thai solar calendar equivalent of 2009). Almost every major experimental film screening organization in town (besides Other Cinema I guess) had a hand in the Kurt Kren weekend; it was co-organized by Black Hole Cinematheque, Megan Hoetger & Canyon Cinema, the latter of which also put on contending highlights in its salon series (seeing Sky Hopinka present Peter Rose's The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough among other works was extremely memorable). And the community sponsors included SF Cinematheque, via which I also saw great 16mm revivals like The Hart of London and All That Sheltering Emptiness, and BAMPFA, whose Fall Alternative Visions series provided me with great big-screen experiences with new-to-me films by Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Enrique Colina & other Latin American avant-gardists, while First Person Cinema did the same with 16mm works by Ute Auraund, Margaret Tait & Marie Menken. It will take a similarly collective effort on a larger scale to save The Lab and the other non-profit organizations, writers and artists that make use of the historic Redstone Labor Temple from displacement in the face of the current real estate speculation boom in San Francisco. Please sign a petition and/or attend a FREE event if you want to be involved in keeping this space available for amazing events like the Kren immersion for the foreseeable future!

The Goddess screen capture from Music Box DVD of The Story of Film: an Odyssey

The Goddess, October 21, 2018

Another opportunity for diving into the filmography of an under-screened moving image artist was provided in the screening room at SFMOMA, which made Bengali auteur Satyajit Ray the focus of the seventh iteration of its recent Modern Cinema collaboration with SFFILM. I'm told the current "eighth season" was programmed by SFMOMA's Gina Basso on her own, and future sets such as a summer 2019 spotlight on book-to-film adaptations will be all hers as well, part of a much-welcome expansion of the screening program at San Francisco's most prominent artistic institution. But if the Ray series was the last of these triannual partnerships, it was apropos, as SFFILM's San Francisco International Film Festival provided the U.S. premiere and two prizes for Ray's debut Pather Panchali as part of its inaugural festival in 1957. It was also extremely valuable to someone like me, who'd seen a little more than a handful of Ray's films but was able to double my exposure to his work in the space of three weekends. New favorites included some of his delvings into the darker corners of post-colonial Indian society such as The Big City, The Coward, Company Limited and The Middleman, but I think the most powerful of them all was The Goddess, also frequently referred to as Devi. Arguably as cynical as any of those four but in a period setting rather than a contemporary one, this 1960 piece takes religion as its central theme and has the benefit both of Sharmila Tagore's magnetic screen presence and a sumptuous visual design unmatched in any Ray film I've seen other than (perhaps) The Music Room. It was the new-to-me highlight of one of 2018's deepest auteurist dives, just as The Spook Who Sat By The Door was the new-to-me highlight of a very solid summer series focusing on African-American directors, and Chocolat of an emotionally-fraught set of films by Claire Denis and her cinematic ancestors. It was during this February series that SFMOMA's lead projectionist Paul Clipson unexpectedly died, leaving a gaping abyss in the middle of not only the Bay Area film community, but in the wider circle of interlocked international communities of experimental film and music performances in which Paul traveled. Less than a week after his death SFMOMA organized a memorial tribute in which the five 16mm prints of Clipson's own magnificent film work held by Canyon Cinema were presented to a mourning public. Though I'd had the great pleasure of knowing Paul for several years, and seen dozens of screenings of the prolific artist's work in various contexts, I had never before seen one of his greatest single-channel masterpieces Union before; it's a stunner and perhaps deserves its own slot on this list, but somehow it feels more appropriate to honor a 35mm screening of a gorgeous Indian film, projected by Paul's protégés in the SFMOMA booth where he seemed so at home.

The Emperor's Nightingale, December 15, 2018

Frisco Bay cinemas provided a good number of director retrospectives that I unfortunately was unable to take advantage of as thoroughly as the previously-mentioned Kurt Kren or Satyajit Ray concentrations. Most of them were held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which is conveniently closer to BART in its now-three-year-old "new" location, but inconveniently tends to spread its series programming out across weeks, months, or even (in the case of a 2018-long Ingmar Bergman focus) a whole year. I'm sure this pleases the majority of BAMPFA customers, especially those who live in Berkeley and don't particularly relish seeing more than one movie a day, but still aspire to catching every screening in a given series. But as someone who lives across a bridge and likes to save time and BART fare, I miss being able to see more than one film in a series on a single trip, something that used to happen occasionally at the old Bancroft Way location, but now seems to occur only when a filmmaker is in town (like Ulrike Ottinger next month). On the other hand, I now am more likely to sample at least one program in almost every series programmed, at the expense of honing in on one or two per calendar. In 2018 I caught just a couple films in BAMPFA's Alain Tanner series (I particularly liked The Middle of the World), their Lucrecia Martel restrospective (The Headless Woman was wonderful to revisit), and their Frederick Wiseman spotlight (Belfast, Maine was a highlight), while finding time for just a single film apiece in hefty programs dedicated to Aki Kaurismäki and Luchino Visconti (La vie de Bohème and Conversation Piece both knocked me out), and just one program from a series dedicated to Czech animator Jiří Trnka. The Emperor's Nightingale, the main attraction in this two-film program, was quite simply one of the greatest stop-motion animation films I've ever seen, by a filmmaker I'd been barely familiar with previously and might not have sampled if this showing hadn't landed on a day in which two programs from other series tempted. Based on this 1949 film, it's clear that Trnka created an absolutely unique style influential to but not fully assimilable by descendents like Jan Švankmajer and Arthur Rankin Jr., and that (as I noted in a post-screening tweet) "calling it ‘puppet animation’ is too limiting, when lighting, lenswork and even film grain itself are as crucial the illusion of movement in this Fabergé world."

Because I didn't run a "I Only Have Two Eyes" survey at this time last year, I also present (without commentary) my favorite repertory/revival screenings of 2017:

The Limits of Control, February 15, 2017, Alamo Drafthouse at New Mission Theatre
Goshogaoka, February 18, 2017, SFMOMA
Los Ojos, I Change I Am the Same, Filmmaker, Rumble & Peyote Queen among others, March 2, 2017, Exploratorium
Angels of Sin, March 5, 2017, BAMPFA
Until They Get Me, June 23, 2017, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum with Frederick Hodges accompaniment
Marie Antoinette, June 25, 2017, Roxie
Captain Horatio Hornblower with One Way Passage & Rabbit Hood, August 23, 2017, Stanford
Phantom Lady, October 2, 2017, Castro
Sweet Charity, November 11, 2017, YBCA
Spite Marriage, December 3, 2017, Rafael Film Center with Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra accompaniment

Ian Rice's 2018* Eyes

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2018. An index of participants can be found here. 

First-time IOHTE contributor Ian Rice is part of the curatorial committee putting on ATA@SFPL events at the Noe Valley library, including an upcoming 16mm screening of Lee Grant's The Willmar 8 March 5th. He decided to provide a list of favorites from 2017 as well as one from 2018.

Soft Fiction

Jan 13: Soft Fiction (Palace of Fine Arts, 16mm) A 2018 continuation of last year’s Chick Strand revelations, this too is a unique masterpiece in her catalogue, from its haunting (and subsequently symbolic) structuralist introduction to its harrowing storytelling and its brilliant musical interludes; it only grew more powerful on a second viewing a few months later. 

Feb 10: I Can't Sleep (SFMOMA, 35mm) Denis structures her narratives more elliptically and ultimately elegantly than most contemporary filmmakers, making them a sort of puzzle whose demands of engagement (similar to Altman’s theory of layered sound) encourage a heightened awareness of details and technique. The Intruder kept me reinterpreting its design for days and weeks afterward, but the force of the drama of this film - and its intimate, sensual compositions of skin of many colors - give it more of an edge. 

The Night of June 13

Feb 20: The Night of June 13th (Stanford, 35mm) An incredible rarity in the Stanford’s Paramount series, there are no especially great stars or auteurist signposts to recommend it - unless, with some justification, one is a Charlie Ruggles completist. It wanders across a small town with great sensitivity toward distinct characters and slowly develops its conflict only to resolve it in a remarkably radical pre-Code conclusion, not so far off from Renoir's M. Lange.

Feb 22: Elements (New Nothing, 16mm) Several more of her films would show later in the year at a Lamfanti screening the night of the Space-X launch, the same program at which “Antonella’s Ultrasound” received its world premiere, but this Julie Murray short at a Baba Hillman Canyon salon stood apart from those also-excellent works of dread and sex and mutilated found footage as a more lyrical, gorgeous journey through natural landscapes with hypnotic rhythm. 

Zodiac screen capture from Paramount DVD

May 27: Zodiac (YBCA, 35mm) My last time at the YBCA - at least until management sees the error of their ways, reinstitutes their cinema program and rehires its excellent programming/curatorial and projection staff - this was a brilliant send-off as part of a seamy San Francisco series, one of whose shooting locations I realized afterward was a few blocks’ walking distance away. Its accumulation of small details and slowly-becoming-psychotic performances are hypnotizing. 

Jul 22: Wieners and Buns Musical (Minnesota Street Project, 16mm) Thanks to an eleventh-hour update on the Bay Area Film Calendar I was able to find out about this year’s Canyon Cinema cavalcade in time to squeeze in several rare masterworks from their catalogue, including pieces by Friederich, Gatten, Brakhage, Benning, Mack, Glabicki and many others seen last year as well at the Exploratorium. This McDowell short was the most fun and perhaps the most radical musical ever filmed, with some of the best low-budget opening titles. It screened again later that year but the sound was much better the first time. 

Commingled Containers screen capture from Criterion DVD "By Brakhage"

Aug 21: Comingled Containers (Little Roxie, 16mm) Because Canyon Cinema only has a handful of his films in their catalog, the year’s many well-deserved tributes to Paul Clipson's work ran the risk of overplaying things, especially by the point in the year at which a Little Roxie tribute screening appeared. But the brilliance of this particular night was that it - overseen by a good friend - was curated by Clipson himself, fitting his works into a wide array of others in an incredible dialogue and refreshment of films that had come to feel very familiar. This Brakhage short was one of many masterpieces (including works by Marie Menken and Konrad Steiner among others) I saw for the first time, utterly and unutterably magical in its light and shapes. 

Aug 22: One from the Heart (Castro, 35mm) The second half of one of the year’s greatest two-venue double features after Todd Haynes’s spellbinding Velvet Goldmine, I began this viewing feeling like the cinematography (maybe the finest hour both of Vittorio Storaro and of Hollywood studio technique) was far better than the flimsy and insipid narrative but soon had the epiphany that this was (or at least might have been) Coppola’s intention all along - the plot is there merely as the simplest of archetypes to push the mind and eye back toward the power of the image, a different sort of “pure cinema.” 

Sep 15: The Caretaker's Daughter (Niles Essanay, 16mm) Despite discovering a slew of incredible new Laurel & Hardy and Keaton films this year there was something to me more special about getting to know the work of Charley Chase - namely the intricacy and machinations of his plots, which slowly accumulate small details that eventually coalesce into extraordinary gags, as with the pinnacle of this one, a setpiece that anticipates and even outdoes a similar one in Leo McCarey’s later Duck Soup. 

The Day I Became A Woman screen capture from Olive Films DVD

Sep 29: The Day I Became a Woman (PFA, 35mm) An early-in-the-year screening of Salaam Cinema became a prelude to a wonderful series that encompassed the whole Makhmalbaf family of filmmakers, none of whose work I’d ever seen before and almost all of which was quietly poetic in its storytelling while enchanting in its imagery. This tripartite work by the cinematriarch of the family gets special recognition from me because (among many other things) its middle section features the best depiction of any film I’ve seen of the experience of riding a bicycle, both how it feels to be humming along the road and how it feels to be avoiding other encroaching issues! With Lupino’s Hard, Fast and Beautiful, further proof that more women should direct sports films.

Here's top 2017, in order of screening date only, culled from a larger list: 

Jan 14: Showgirls (Roxie, 35mm) 
Feb 4: Come and See (YBCA, 35mm) 
Jun 18: Les enfants terribles (PFA, 35mm) 
Jul 28: Footlight Parade (Stanford, 35mm) 
Aug 4: Election 2 (SFMOMA, 35mm)
Oct 14: Loose Ends (ATA/Other Cinema, 16mm) 
Oct 15: Crystal Voyager (YBCA, 35mm) 
Oct 18: Chromatic Phantoms (PFA, 3 x Super 8) 
Oct 24: Take Off (California College of the Arts, 16mm) 
Dec 10: Light Music (The Lab, 2 x 16mm)

Joel Shepard's 2018 Eyes

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2018. An index of participants can be found here. 

First-time IOHTE contributor Joel Shepard is an independent film programmer.

A pregnant wife and the loss of my longtime job made 2018 an odd, wonderful and challenging year, and my list of notable (not necessarily “best”) rep screenings possibly reflects this...

Image from San Francisco Silent Film Festival

1. Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness (Castro)

This downbeat drama about the working poor in Weimar Germany was the revelation of the 2018 San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

2. Deliverance (Castro)

John Boorman’s poetic meditation on landscape and violence was the highlight of the Castro’s much-appreciated though poorly attended Burt Reynolds tribute series.

3. Zodiac (YBCA)

Still David Fincher’s best film, an overwhelming portrait of minds ruined by the impossibility of resolution.

Screen capture from Anchor Bay DVD of Halloween

4. Halloween (Castro)

Very strange to see this film again, so long after having been completely electrified and terrified by it at the age of fourteen at a neighborhood theater in Edina, Minnesota. On this viewing, the sexism is a little annoying, as is the fact that hardly anything happens until the last reel.

5. Sisters (Castro)

This great and somewhat idiotic slab of gutbucket sleaze with an artsy patina looked superb on the giant Castro screen.

6. Time to Die (YBCA)

Flawed, but an austere sign of great things to come from the mind of Arturo Ripstein in his first feature from 1966.

7. Car Wash (SFMOMA)

Originally saw this when I was 12 years old at a downtown grindhouse. I found it just mildly amusing, but it brought down the house. It hasn’t aged well. 40 years later it felt like the whitest semi-blaxploitation film of the 70s.

Le chant du styrène screen capture from Criterion DVD of Last Year in Marienbad  

8. Le chant du styrène (SFMOMA)

Plastic has never been more beautiful than in this majestic industrial film by Alain Renais, with gleaming cinematography by Sacha Vierny. Presented as part of the Paul Clipson tribute, held in June.

9. Sleaze Apocalypse (Roxie)

OK, maybe I’m a dick for including my own program on my list, but seriously...this compilation of impossibly rare 35mm exploitation trailers was the hardest-edge and most darkly revealing 80 minutes of film archaeology presented all year.

David Robson's 2018 Eyes

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2018. An index of participants can be found here. 

Six-time IOHTE contributor and cinephile-at large David Robson documents his offline movie-viewing at a number of online film sites, like his own blog the House of Sparrows, and he cohabitates with those adorable simian cinephiles at Monkeys Go To Movies

I Know Where I'm Going! screen capture from Criterion DVD

In order seen, mostly: 

I Know Where I’m Going! – Castro Theatre, February 14 

The Castro Theatre had shown a couple of Powell & Pressburger films in January, right around a visit from director Paul Thomas Anderson – I regret being out of town for his chat with Castro Special Forces Director Stephen Eric Schaefer. A month later the strands of programming came together on Valentines Day, with a 35mm print of Anderson’s Phantom Thread paired with the Powell & Pressburger romance I Know Where I’m Going! This was indeed a day for lovers, and the latter film became a new favorite. It felt like a Scots counterpart to Ford’s The Quiet Man, but resonant in its own right as a deeply felt romance, with tangible chemistry between Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey. 

The WNUF Halloween Special image provided by contributor

The WNUF Halloween Special – Balboa Theatre (Unnamed Footage Festival), March 25 

I wasn’t able to catch as much as I would have liked of the Unnamed Footage Festival, a new fest (full disclosure: run by dear friends) dedicated to found footage horror and similar outlying genres. But I’m glad I got back to the Balboa in time for the fest-closing screening of this odd pastiche of Halloween news programming. It’s a winningly wacky and genuinely unsettling story loaded with spot-on parodies of independent television advertising, and even its somewhat mean-spirited ending didn’t reduce from the fun of seeing it with the Unnamed audience. 

To Be Or Not To Be - SFMOMA Wattis Theatre (San Francisco International Film Festival), April 14 

Always happy when our friends at SFFILM bust out a classic movie during the film fest. It was a joy to see this movie for the first time – a timely WWII offering that tackled the Nazi invasion of Poland with both necessary gravitas and genuine hilarity. The screening was given wonderful context by Mel Novikoff Award-honoree Annette Insdorf, whose engagement with history and profound cinematic intelligence made for a compelling afternoon. She even asked for, and got, a 35mm print of the movie, too. 

On Dangerous Ground – Stanford Theatre, May 2 

Delighted to get another shot at this Nicholas Ray/Ida Lupino feature, having missed a February screening due to illness. It’s a tight and intimate noir drama, with a bitter police detective (Robert Ryan) finding new reason to live courtesy the blind sister (Lupino) of a suspect he’s chasing through wintry upstate New York. And the Bernard Herrmann score turns it into a sweepingly romantic operetta, capturing my favorite cinematic subject: the rebirth of a human soul. Absolutely captivating, and paired by the Stanford with the nearly-as-engaging The Spiral Staircase. 

A Bronx Morning screen capture from Flicker Alley DVD "Masterworks of American Avant-Garde Experimental Film"

A Bronx Morning – Castro Theatre (Silent Film Festival), June 1

I would have slept on the avant-garde shorts program at the Silent Film Festival if my father (who visited SF for the festival, and wound up taking in eight programs) hadn’t indicated strong interest, and honestly I’d have been poorer for it. After a legendarily mind-expanding introduction by Craig Baldwin, the program ran with sterling musical accompaniment by the Matti Bye ensemble, a group whose contributions to the Festival I’d undervalued in the past. These largely familiar movies took on new life with their music, and the rainy, ambient music accompanying Jay Leyda’s eleven-minute city symphony brought it to life. I experienced the cinematic high that all IOHTE contributors spend our lives chasing, and this music, with this film, on this day, took me outside myself. 

The Shining – Castro Theatre, July 10 The Castro put together a nice series of Kubrick films around the new documentary Filmworker, which detailed the career and work of longtime Kubrick associate Leon Vitali. After acting in Barry Lyndon, Vitali began his arduous backstage career working on The Shining, his responsibilities revolving mainly around Danny Lloyd, the young lead of that film. I saw this movie again (and Filmworker for the first time) having just finished reading for the first time the source novel by Stephen King (and its decades-later sequel Doctor Sleep), and I was amazed by the parallels between both books and both films. A motif in the books – “When the student is ready, a teacher shall appear” – is naturally manifested in The Shining in the relationship between Danny Torrance (played by Lloyd) and Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers), but it also spoke to the relationship between Vitali and Kubrick, and extended to the friendship that evolved between Vitali and Lloyd. With the book fresh in mind, I appreciated more than ever how dedicated Kubrick was to both young Danny Torrance (the movie is VERY much his story) and the actor who played him. And I finally realized that despite the obvious commitment and energy he brings, Jack Nicholson’s lead performance is pretty terrible. 

Eve's Bayou image provided by contrbutor

Eve’s Bayou – SFMOMA Wattis Theatre, July 15 

SFMOMA and SFFILM juiced up their quarterly programming with some truly inspiring series, not the least of which was Black Powers: Reframing Hollywood. I didn’t get to nearly as many programs in it as I’d have liked, but was delighted to finally see Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou projected, its humid and swampy atmosphere (and uniformly solid performances, not the least of which an uncharacteristically downplaying Samuel L. Jackson) finally given celluloid space to breathe. I was overjoyed when, a few months later, the movie was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. 

The Smallest Show on Earth – Castro Theatre, August 19 

Sometimes the Castro’s booking philosophy seems to be “what the hell, let’s give everybody a present.” Such was the spirit animating this screening of an imported print of a black-and-white British comedy about newlyweds who inherit a rundown movie house, and their efforts to turn it into a successful business. It was a charmer, with fun supporting performances by Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford, and Bernard Miles, and at one point, in a marvelous instance of life imitating art, the film broke, sending the Castro audience into the same darkness experienced by the film’s characters. Joy. 

The Longest Yard – Castro Theatre, October 13 

The Castro gave three Wednesdays to double features starring and celebrating the late Burt Reynolds. This one wasn’t necessarily my favorite of the films screened, though I would agree with Joel Shepard’s assessment, offered repeatedly both before and after the screening, “It’s a really good movie!” I highlight it here as I felt it was the best showcase of Reynolds’ magnetism and star power, as well as the particular anarchic comedy that he always threaded through his performances so effortlessly; by the time of the film’s climactic football game the whole audience is on Burt’s team. All of this in a lovely 35mm print, no less. 

Time Regained image provided by contributor 

Time Regained – Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, March 18 and 25 

In previous years I’d avoided listing any movies that I watched or introduced at YBCA; there were feelings that there was a conflict of interest naming movies that I screened at my former workplace. Now that YBCA has scuttled its film program, however (with no apparent plans for a full-time replacement), I’m going to throw such concerns aside and say that Time Regained (screened in a beautiful digital restoration courtesy Le Petit Bureau with support from France’s CNC) was the best thing I saw last year, an incredible tour de force from Raul Ruiz that largely ignored the plot of Proust’s Remembrance of Times Past but explored the hell out of its themes, using devices from literature, theatre, and cinema to capture and explore the memories of the past that remain alive with us in the present. I introduced both screenings, taking as much pleasure in cramming Ruiz’ life and work into a three-minute intro as he did jamming seven volumes of Proust into a single three-hour feature, and stayed through both screenings, which were over before you knew it.

10HTE: Brian Darr

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

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

Heaven's Gate screen capture from Criterion DVD

Heaven's Gate, February 28, 2016

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

Foreign Correspondent, March 20, 2016

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

Black Sunday screen capture from Anchor Bay DVD

Black Sunday, April 7, 2016

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

Quixote, May 22, 2016

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

Gate of Flesh screen capture from Criterion DVD

Gate of Flesh, May 28, 2016

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

Anguish, August 9, 2016

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

Manhunter screen capture from MGM DVD

Manhunter, September 3, 2016

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

Viridana, October 14, 2016

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

So This Is Paris screen capture from youtube

So This Is Paris, December 3, 2016

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

I Gopher You, December 10, 2016

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