SFFILM 62 Day 7: Confidence Game

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival began a week ago and runs through April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A scene from Kathleen Quillian's Confidence Game, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM

Confidence Game (USA: Kathleen Quillian, 2018)
playing: 8:30PM today at the Roxie as part of the Shorts 4: Animation program

Some of my favorite things seen so far at SFFILM this year have been shorts. Madeline Anderson's I Am Somebody, for instance, screened as part of her Persistence of Vision Award presentation Saturday, was a rousing, formally inventive half-hour documentary about a 1969 hospital workers' strike in Charleston, South Carolina, that included footage of Coretta Scott King orating in support of the strikers just a year after her husband's assassination. On a completely different tack, the latest nine-minute mindfuck from Guy Maddin and his recent co-directors Galen and Evan Johnson is called Accidence, and it's probably my favorite new Maddin work in dozen years, starting as a planimetric riff on Rear Window and turning quickly into something much more diabolical. It was the warm-up for each screening of The Grand Bizarre over the past few days.

But tonight I'll finally begin to start watching some of the Golden Gate Awards-eligible shorts at the festival. The Shorts 4: Animation program includes ten separate pieces representing seven North American and (mostly Eastern) European countries. Six are by women animators, including the only one by a filmmaker whose work I'm already familiar with: Kathleen Quillian. Her piece Confidence Game made its local debut on a program that I was able to attend a year ago at Craig Baldwin's notorious Other Cinema (where, incidentally, she'll be premiering another new work this coming Saturday) and I liked it enough to place it on my list of top 20 shorts as part of Senses of Cinema's latest World Poll. I've written a bit about Quillian's work before, for instance on the occasion of her 2011 piece Fin de Siècle screening at a 30th Anniversary marathon presentation at Artists' Television Access. But Confidence Game feels like another leap forward for her. Her tendency to center objects in the frame, when repeated against various collage backdrops, gives the piece a hypnotic effect that I'm certain is completely intentional, given the thematic interest in cults of personality that the work is clearly expressing. She ends Confidence Game with an almost psychedelic finale that includes stroboscopic flashing backgrounds, so be forewarned if that sort of thing gives your senses too much of a workout.

I haven't made a terribly close comparison, but it seems like there are more shorts programs in this year's SFFILM than I've ever seen in 20 years of attending. In addition to Shorts 4: Animation there the usual Golden Gate Award contender programs devoted to shorts by and for youngsters. The usual two programs of GGA-nominated documentary and narrative shorts have been expanded to three, and the New Visions program of experimental and form-expanding works appears to be quite strong this year, with new work by Akosua Adoma Owusu, Zachary Epcar, Laura Huertas Millán, Sandra Davis, etc. The New Visions section of the Golden Gate Awards was on the chopping block twenty-five years ago, and saved only due to an outcry from the local experimental film community. You can read a bit about that in this excellent interview between Russell Merritt and SFFILM artistic director Rachel Rosen.

One program that's gone missing this year, after nearly as long, is the annual co-presentation between SF Cinematheque and the Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). This was another set of experimental short films, differing from the New Visions program in various ways over the years. Perhaps because it was an out-of-competition program it tended to involve more 16mm and sometimes even 35mm prints, more work by established artists (though not exclusively so), and more flexibility in terms of the recency of completion; sometimes a program would include a new restoration of a short film made decades prior among a program of new works, and sometimes even the new works weren't always so new, having traveled on the generally slower experimental film festival circuit for a few years before making their way to their first San Francisco and Berkeley screenings. One might argue the need for two programs of experimental work at the festival has been made unnecessary by the sprouting of new festivals devoted entirely or almost entirely to such work: Crossroads, Camera Obscura and Light Field come quickly to mind. But I'm not as certain of the stability of all these younger organizations when compared to the venerable San Francisco International Film Festival, and more importantly I think there's a lot of value in SFFILM's long-standing "big tent" approach to bringing together different, sometimes fractuous communities together to see each other's work and have discussions about it. The loss of one program, even one that's run for 24 years straight, doesn't destroy that but it puts a damper on it.

I'm curious to know the reason for the loss of this program. I wasn't satisfied by the answer I got when I asked about it at SFFILM's program announcement press conference in March. I was told the reason for the change is because the festival wanted all the shorts programs to feature works in competition. That doesn't seem to hold water though, because of the existence of the Shorts 8 program, bringing together two of three Netflix-owned shorts. Both are out-of competition even though the third Netflix short, Life Overtakes Me,appears in the Shorts 1 program and is Golden Gate Award eligible. There must be some other reason.

Anyway, the festival has more than made up for absence of the SF Cinematheque/BAMPFA program in quantity at any rate, by highlighting shorts in their Persistence of Vision Award presentation, to the shorts presented in last night's Evening With Kahlil Joseph and in the Friday night live music presentation that I talk a bit about in the last paragraph of this post. Read on...

SFFILM62 Day 7
Other festival options: Today's the final screening of the Vanguard section of SFFILM, Lapü, about the Wayuú people, who also feature in the recent crime saga Birds of Passage. It screens 4:00PM at YBCA, followed by the final festival showings of the Uruguayan feature Belmonte at 6:15PM, and finally Mariam Ghani's documentary on the re-opening of Afghanistan's national film archive, What We Left Unfinished at 8:30PM. I've heard good buzz on all three so it might be a good place to camp out for the afternoon and evening.

Non-SFFILM option: A terrific set of 16mm shorts comes to the Coppola Theatre at San Francisco State University at 6:30 tonight. There's animation (Sally Cruikshank's Quasi at the Quckadero), documentary (the Miles Brothers' Mt. Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway), found footage classics (Arthur Lipsett's Very Nice, Very Nice and Bruce Conner's Valse Triste) and live-action based experimental films (Bruce Baillie's Mass for the Dakota Sioux and Maya Deren's A Study in Choreography for Camera, which is not among the Deren shorts screening digitally with a new, live soundtrack replacing Teiji Ito's scores at the Castro Friday), showcasing some of the diversity of treasures in the J. Paul Leonard Library collection at SFSU. This collection was the source for one of my favorite film screenings so far this year; it holds one of two known prints of SFMOMA Art In Cinema curator Frank Stauffacher's own filmed mini-masterpiece Sausalito, which showed in late January at BAMPFA with Stauffacher's widow Barbara Stauffacher Solomon on hand to discuss its filming and reception among other topics. Though Sausalito is not among tonight's showings, it will hardly be missed in such a strong line-up (I vouch for five of the six films and perhaps if there's a large enough turnout future screenings from the J. Paul Leonard Library collection might be organized. Best of all, this program is FREE to all!

SFFILM 62 Day 4: The Grand Bizarre

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival began Wednesday night and runs through April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A scene from Jodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM.

The Grand Bizarre (USA: Jodie Mack, 2018)
playing: 3:30PM today at BAMPFA in Berkeley, and Monday, Apr 15 at 8:45PM at YBCA.

Although I was able last November to see a digital projection of this film (SFFILM audiences will be treated to a 35mm print at each screening) and placed it on my list of my five favorite undistributed features of 2018, I don't feel up to the task of writing much of a review. Not when a critic as perceptive and eloquent as Michael Sicinski has already written three terrific paragraphs about Mack's latest. Let me excerpt a few sentences:

Mack’s film is whimsical, features some sick beats (including a riff on the Skype theme), and is so personal that it ends with the artist’s own sneeze. But the fact that it may be the most purely pleasurable film of the year shouldn’t prevent us from appreciating its exigency. The Grand Bizarre is a film about embracing all the colors and patterns of the wide, wide world, and in that regard, it’s exactly the film we need right now.

I must confess I don't love The Grand Bizarre as much as Mack's previously-longest opus, Dusty Stacks of Mom, but that's surely in large part because I'm just inherently more fascinated by the world of rock poster distribution than that of colorful textiles. But even I can recognize that there's a bit more thematic "heft" to this project, not just because it's a bit longer, but also because it's more international in scope at a time when the need to reach out across borders seems greater than ever. For anyone with an open mind about the parameters of what an animated feature can be (The Grand Bizarre descends from the lineage of Norman McLaren's landmark Neighbors, but ends up with a far more radical approach to narrative), it's one of the real must-sees of this year's festival.

SFFILM62 Day 4
Other festival options: Expect more traditional animation techniques to be on display at the Castro Theatre's 10AM Shorts 6: Family Films program; I attended last year's set for the first time with my young nephew, and we both had a great time seeing a mixture of the latest cartoons, documentaries and short narratives with definite kid-appeal. This year's group includes the Oscar-nominated One Small Step. Another animation program is aimed more for adults: Shorts 4: Animation, having its first showing 5PM today at the Roxie. But to make that you'll have to miss the Persistence of Vision Award presentation to African-American documentary pioneer Madeline Anderson at SFMOMA. No animation expected in this set, but expect a wonderful conversation with a veteran filmmaker finally getting her due.

Non-SFFILM option: In memory of the April, 18, 1906 earthquake and fire that reshaped San Francisco, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum is devoting its weekly Saturday 16mm film screening showcase to films that shed light on this tragic event. First, a pair of documentaries shot by the Miles Brothers, one shortly before and one, recently re-discovered, shortly after the destruction. After an intermission, they'll show one of the best of the surviving early features starring Lon Chaney, Sr., The Penalty, which was filmed in 1920 throughout a rebuilt San Francisco (a wonderful website devoted to its filming locations is found here).

SFFILM 61 Day 12: Drop By Drop

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival is almost over; it 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 Drop By Drop provided by SFFILM

Drop By Drop (PORTUGAL: Alexandra "Xá" Ramires & Laura Gonçalves, 2017)
playing: 3:00 today at the Roxie, as part of Shorts 3: Animation.

Drop By Drop is in my opinion the most visually impressive of the animated short films found in either the Shorts 5: Family Films program (in which Louise Bagnall's Late Afternoon and Erick Oh's “Pig: The Dam Keeper Poems” Chapter 4 are the standouts) or the Shorts 3: Animation program intended for mature audiences (not that they're particularly racy this year; in fact they're far less juvenile than the typical "Sick & Twisted" fare you might find on some animation programs).

A great example of documentary/animation hybridization, Drop By Drop takes audio interviews of Portuguese villagers reacting to the social and environmental impacts of climate change and desertification on the Iberian peninsula and imagines a fantastic visual landscape based on the metaphors in its interviewees' descriptions. Not only is the imagery striking and strong, the animation itself is a wonderful example of the under-utilized concept of "camera movement" in animation. Where so many independent animations have a very closed-off, shoebox feel (which can be beneficial to certain, but not all, subjects), Drop By Drop moves in all directions, creating a sense of vastness that befits its theme of long-rooted traditions becoming upended as families scatter to the four winds.

Other noteworthy selections in the Shorts 3 program include Oscar-nominated Negative Space by Max Porter & Ru Kuwahata, which is probably the best example of character animation in the set (I sorely wish it had won the Oscar over the self-important celebrity promo Dear Basketball), Leah Nichols' sweet, locally-focused rotoscope doc 73 Questions, and the humorous Icebergs by Elrini Vianelli.

The one that got to me emotionally was Oh Hi Anne, from local artist Anne McGuire, perhaps best known for her reverse-ungineered 1970s blockbusters like Snatchers Body The Of Invasion and Strain Andromeda The, or her performances as half of The Freddy McGuire Show. Here she also takes documentary audio, in this case voicemail messages left by underground film & video legends & longstanding Mission District residents George Kuchar (1942-2011) and his brother Mike, and applies a simple set of drawn images to them to create a little narrative about her friendships with her former teacher George, and later Mike. Combined with audio of a lovely song written and performed by McGuire, that I've gladly had running in my head for over a week now, and my own memories of meeting George, and showing him an article I'd written about one of his films Wild Night in El Reno, shortly before he died, I was in tears by the end of the short.

However, judging by the dismissive reaction of audience members around me during and after last weekend's Roxie screening, Oh Hi Anne was done a disservice by being placed into a program that, while perhaps pushing the boundaries of narrative and documentary animation, never really pushed past those boundaries. There used to consistently be a few examples of experimental animation in this program in the festival. With no selections like 2016 San Francisco International Film Festival picks All Rot by Max Hattler or Kazue Monno & Takeshi Nagata's Track to warm the audience up to expanding their ideas of what animation can do and be, it was easy for some viewers to pick on Oh Hi Anne as overly earnest or seemingly crude (I don't suppose any of the grumblers I heard are aware of McGuire's exquisite watercolor "Dark Universe", currently on display (along with Mike Kuchar's 1980 drawing "Faery Tale" and a slew of other great work by local artists from throughout history), at BAMPFA's must-see Way Bay exhibit). Admittedly, by most definitions of animation I'm aware of, Oh Hi Anne doesn't really qualify. But to me it feels like an essential piece of this year's SFFILM, challenging aesthetic boundaries and linking back to a gentle giant of Frisco Bay filmmaking who is still sorely missed by many members of the local community. I suspect if the experimental animation ハネムーンHanemun Honeymoon had been plucked out of the Shorts 4: New Visions program and put into the Shorts 3 set, perhaps in place of the slick, cute, but ultimately go-nowhere selection Hybrids, McGuire's film wouldn't have been the first in the show to totally upend audience expectations, and had a better chance of hitting with some of the cynics in the crowd.

SFFILM61 Day 12
Other festival options: Today's menu options include the presentation of the George Gund Craft of Cinema Award to collaborative filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman before a screening of their short doc End Game and the so-called "Closing Night" showing of Gus Van Sant's Don't Worry He Won't Get Far On Foot with Van Sant and composer Danny Elfman expected in person (I can't help but wonder if, with Elfman's former girlfriend Kim Gordon in the film, and speaking at the Nourse tomorrow night, she might make a surprise appearance as well. Pure speculation on my part), both at the Castro Theatre. BAMPFA's last day as a festival venue looks strong, with Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, Wajib, a set of 16mm Nathaniel Dorsky shorts including Avraham, and Michael Hazanavicius introducing his Godard, Mon Amour. Meanwhile YBCA closes out its time as a 2018 SFFILM venue with Angels Wear White, Shirkers and Carcasse, and The Children's Creativity Theater says goodbye to its first festival year with Bisbee '17 and A Prayer Before Dawn. None of the titles mentioned in this paragraph will play during the final two days of the festival when it contracts to fill only the Roxie and the Victoria.

Non-SFFILM option: Another festival opened yesterday at a former SFFILM venue I have a lot of fondness for, Japantown's New People Cinema; they're hosting the 2nd Annual Cherry Blossom Film Festival, highlighting features made in Japan. Yesterday they had a 3-title tribute to a filmmaker I first encountered via the San Francisco International Film Festival, Shunji Iwai, but the rest of the festival is devoted to animation, such as The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, by the great Studio Ghibli master Isao Takahata, who passed away this week. Today's offerings include a Japanese-dubbed, English-lauguage version of Takahata's partner Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro (which originally was released in Japan on a head-scratching double-bill with Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies), and the more recent Miss Hokusai.

SFFILM 61 Day 6: Chew-Chew Baby

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

Screen capture of Chew-Chew Baby from Universal DVD

Chew-Chew Baby (USA: James "Shamus" Culhane, 1945)
playing: 8:00 tonight at the Castro Theatre as part of A Celebration of Oddball Films With Marc Capelle's Red Room Orchestra

Chew-Chew Baby is the thirteenth of twenty-five theatrical cartoons starring Woody Woodpecker (after his debut in the Andy Panda 'toon Knock Knock) produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures before Lantz had a falling out with Universal and first took his cartoons to United Artists, then stopped production for most of 1949 and 1950 (he returned to Universal in time to release a Woody cartoon in January 1951). It's the fourth Woody cartoon directed by former Disney & Chuck Jones animator James "Shamus" Culhane, who Leonard Maltin called "the best thing that happened to Woody, and to Lantz, in the early 1940s". The frenetic musical finale of Culhane's first Woody Woodpecker cartoon The Barber of Seville famously used a style of "fast cutting" inspired by Soviet montage. Similarly, Chew-Chew Baby uses an almost subliminal upside-down frame that seems borrowed from the avant-garde to make a gag have extra impact late in the cartoon.

You won't see Chew-Chew Baby on any list of SFFILM festival selections on their website or in the paper program guides sprinkled around town. The list of 16mm prints from the late, great Stephen Parr's Oddball Films collection screening tonight at the Castro hasn't officially been made public. I learned that Chew-Chew Baby is planned to be among them by listening to DJ Marilynn's March 26, 2018 episode of KPOO-FM's "Let Me Touch Your Mind" (archived here) in which bandleader Marc Capelle talks about some of the films his Red Room Orchestra has prepared musical accompaniments for, also including what I think are probably the 1989 Neutrogena infomercial Choosing a Sunscreen described here, and Denys Colomb de Daunant's surreal A Dream of Wild Horses, a frequent Oddball Films screening selection.

Chew-Chew Baby was screened at Oddball in a 2016 drag cinema survey curated by Kat Shuchter, and a few years prior at one of Parr's own Strange Sinema shows. Though I didn't catch these particular screenings, Oddball was one of the few Frisco Bay screening venues that regularly showed animated film prints, usually in excellent condition. Parr often talked of how much of his archive came from the deaccessioned collections of Bible Belt university libraries, where the sports films were run ragged and the art films totally pristine. Perhaps vintage cartoons fell closer to the latter category. I can't count the number of great ones I had the pleasure of viewing in his twice-weekly screening showcases before they ended in December 2016 (he hosted a few more shows in his labyrinthine Mission District loft in 2017, before he died in October.) Soon after Parr's passing, I compiled a twitter thread of fifty of my favorite films seen at his space, 48 of them for the first time. A good third of the list was animation (most of the rest of it falling into "documentary" or "experimental" categories) and it includes Pantry Panic, the third Woody Woodpecker star vehicle made by Lantz (prior to Culhane's arrival) and by my reckoning the only one from the 1940s I've ever seen projected in a cinema space- until tonight, that is.

Beyond sussing out a few of the Oddball Films collection prints screening, I'm not precisely sure what's going to happen at the Castro tonight. Crucially, I'm not sure if the prints being shown that already have music and dialogue (including Chew-Chew Baby) will screen with the Red Room Orchestra's musicians and spoken word artists' sonic contributions integrated into the original soundtracks, or presented instead of them. Either approach may have its own aesthetic appeal, but both approaches treat the Oddball collection less as in its role as a repository for curated screenings, in which films were usually shown as their creators (whether these were celebrated auteurs or uncredited artisans working on behalf of faceless creators) intended, and more in the spirit of its existence as a stock footage archive, supplying hard-to-find images (more often than sound) for documentaries and features, including SFFILM 2018 selections Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, RBG and closing night feature Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot. Using existing art to create new art.

Purists may cry foul, but before they do I'd just like to talk about an amazing event at the Luggage Store Gallery on Market Street, where Stephen Parr and Other Cinema's Craig Baldwin faced off in a kind of "dueling archivists" presentation of their 16mm material, screening films in part or in full as they pleased, creating connections across their "sets" of each about an hour that helped unlock certain thoughts about media filmed in and about my hometown that had never occurred to me before, and that in many cases probably wouldn't had each film played out as intended by its makers. Parr showed certain favorites like A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire, Blackie the Wonder Horse Swims the Golden Gate, Jerry Abrams' Be-In and the untitled home-movie footage known lately as San Francisco Excelsior: Low Rider Car Show in complete prints, but let an excerpt from Let's See: Lopsideland bleed into a section of San Francisco: Queen of the West which bled into some of USA Poetry: Allen Ginsberg & Lawrence Ferlinghetti (this last of which, incidentally, will screen for free in its entirety at the SFPL Main Library as part of a Poetry Month event I've helped organize on April 28th), a kind of editing-as-performance that would probably have infuriated a prior version of myself as much as soundtrack tinkering would have, but that I responded to deeply. This event happened to occur on the day Andrew Sarris died, as if to hammer home the point that filmmaker intentions are not the be-all, end-all of film appreciation and understanding. Like Baldwin (who projected an equally impressive "set"), Parr was an example of archivist as auteur.

So I'm opening my mind to have an experience guided less by filmmakers such as Culhane and Daunant and more by Parr's collector instincts and by the musicians who have been assembled. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to speak with one of them, experimental percussion master William Winant, about the musical portion of the presentation. I've seen Winant peform in various diverse capacities over the years, such as with my then-favorite band Oingo Boingo at the Warfield in the early 1990s, and with his own ensemble at the annual Chapel of the Chimes Garden of Memory solstice event in Oakland. And he was part of one of my favorite San Francisco International Film Festival live music/film events in recent years, the 2013 presentation of Paul Leni's Waxworks accompanied by Winant, Mike Patton, Matthias Bossi and Scott Amendola, which is why I wanted his perspective on tonight's event. He told me that event (which is documented on youtube, though I'm not certain the sound & image line up precisely, thanks to the difference in film & video frame rates) was "99.9% improvised" outside the cover of Jacques Brel's "La Mort" that ended the show. Winant said that tonight's show will be "completely different", as "everything is in song form. The lot of the stuff is through-composed. People will be reading charts, or people will be reading lead sheets, and basically, they're song forms, or jazz forms where the musicians play over lead sheets." He named Capelle, Dina Macabbee, Devin Hoff and Ben Goldberg as among the Red Room Orchestra members who have composed and arranged a song or multiple songs to be performed alongside each of the Oddball film prints.

Finally, though this is a particularly overstuffed piece, it seems like a good place for me to publish a letter I composed this past January, when the Roxie hosted a memorial for Parr that I was unable to attend. The memorial is available to view online, as is a wonderful video tribute to Parr called 275 Capp Street made by one of his collaborators, Adam Dziesinski. Here's the (slightly edited) text of my letter:

Sadly, the plane flight Kerry Laitala and I had to come back from our New England holiday trip just got cancelled due to a snowstorm, and were unable to book another flight until Monday, so we’ll be missing this event we’d both looked forward to so very much as a way to commune with friends and strangers who’d been so deeply impacted by Stephen as we had.  

Kerry, a filmmaker, had been honored to collaborated with Parr on at least a half-dozen showings of her own work, and of work they’d collaboratively curated from their own archives. Few San Francisco curators have been as loyally supportive of Kerry’s work over the years as Steven, and enthusiasm like his means a lot to a mid-career filmmaker trying to sustain an exhibition portfolio. 

I, a voracious cinephile, feel embarrassed I never attended Oddball until I moved directly across the street from it from 2010-2014, but during that time (and to a slightly lesser extent since) I went many dozens of times and felt so welcomed by Stephen and his staff. I’m glad I got to know him not just as a film lover but as a neighbor who at any minute could come over and borrow an unusual piece of AV equipment like it was a cup of sugar (I lived with musicians & these occasional lendings went both ways across Capp Street).

When Kerry and I met at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2011 the fact that we quickly realized we had a few mutual friends was key to the encounter turning from a random flirtation to something deeper. Stephen was one of these few, and we so wish he were still around, not simply for the selfish reason that we’d want to let him know we’ve finally decided to get married this year, but because we know he had so much more to share with the world.

SFFILM61 Day 6
Other festival options: Today is the second of three screenings of Hong Sangsoo's unassuming little delight Claire's Camera, and the final screening not currently at RUSH status. Tonight also marks the sole SFFILM showing of Olivier Assayas's Cold Water, a 1994 film recently made available via DCP by Janus; I wouldn't expect another chance to see it in 35mm (the last in these parts was 2007) coming around soon, or maybe ever, so you'll have to shelve your anti-DCP biases if you want to see this in a cinema.

Non-SFFILM option: Speaking of animation, Oakland's all-digital New Parkway Theater is in the midst of an Animation Week and today's offerings include Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis, which I can definitely recommend. Today they also screen Cowboy Bebop: the Movie, which I haven't seen, and (inexplicably) the particularly terrible dubbed version of Hayao Miyazaki's glorious Princess Mononoke. Wait to see that one subtitled.

Sledgehammer (1986)

Screen capture from Rhino DVD

WHO: Nick Park, Peter Lord, Richard Starzak and the Brothers Quay animated this under the direction of Steven J. Johnson.

WHAT: I'm pretty sure I've never written about a music video on this blog before, but why not break the mold today with the video that turns up on nearly every list of the greatest music videos of all time, and that as recently as 2011 still reigned as the most-played video ever on MTV (and I'm guessing it would remain so if someone updated the tally today).

My family never paid for MTV when I was growing up, however, so I didn't see Sledgehammer until November 1989, when we had a month-long free cable-box trial that coincided with MTV's countdown of the Top 100 videos of the 1980s. I actually saw and was blown away by Johnson's other Peter Gabriel video Big Time first thanks to a friend who lent me a VHS he'd recorded it onto at one point. So when I saw Sledgehammer out of order from most of the rest of my generation it couldn't quite match the reputation I'd expected for it after more than three years of build-up.

But going back and watching the pair on the DVD Peter Gabriel: Play The Videos, it's clear that Sledgehammer is the more thoroughly creative and impressive piece. It involves so many varying techniques, from the opening manipulation of scientific footage, to Norman McLaren-esque pixilation, to Jan Svankmajer-esque stop motion, to things I'm not quite sure how to describe (the ice-sculpture sequence, for instance). Johnson developed a technique for lipsynch animation that had apparently never been tried before. And the shoot involved the musician far more thoroughly in its creation, particularly in capturing the white clouds in a blue sky frame-by-frame repainted over his face. And it integrates the creative sensibilities of some of my favorite animators despite their diversity: the sequence created for the second iteration of the chorus, in which the singer is covered over by a confining wooden structure from the Street of Crocodiles universe and then emerges as an oh-so-Aardman clay figure (complete with hammer-hands) that then goes through a series of quick transformations leading up to the famous "chicken dance", is one of my favorite half-minutes of animation of all time.

WHERE/WHEN: Sledgehammer screens as part of a program happening at 5PM today, at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: I don't know if the Sledgehammer video, obviously made-for-television, has ever been shown on a cinema screen as large as the Castro's before, but it certainly gets me excited just thinking about it. It screens as part of a score of films, videos, advertisements and episodes displaying the full range of short-form creativity at the Aardman studios. Yes, the wonderful Oscar-winners Creature Comforts and The Wrong Trousers will be among them, but so will the bizarre and disturbing The Pearce Sisters and a good number of early rarities. Oh, and Aardman co-founder Peter Lord will be on hand to receive an award from the festival and talk about his company's impact on the international moving image scene (most recently with the feature-length Oscar nominee Shaun the Sheep Movie).

The Castro is the only major SFIFF venue I haven't yet talked about this year. It's not only by far the largest 2016 festival venue, it's also the only one that has now been in use by SFIFF on an annual basis for more than two years. In fact the festival has been using the theatre since the early eighties, at least (does any long-time festgoer want to chime in and tell me if its use goes back to the 1970s or earlier?) Which is why seeing High Rise with an absolutely rabid audience of J.G. Ballard fans there last night, my first Castro event at this year's SFIFF, felt like such a heartening, traditional San Francisco event, even if I'm not quite sure what I think of the film twelve hours later. (I hope to see it again sometime, preferably after reading the book this time.) If you haven't been to the Castro for a SFIFF event yet you have a few more chances, including today's Aardman tribute and a 2PM showing of queer cinema classic The Watermelon Woman with director Cheryl Dunye in person, tomorrow's showing of Carl Dreyer's Vampyr with a live improvised music score by members of Mercury Rev and the Cocteau Twins (I'm skeptical of this one but may have to see it for myself anyway), and Thursday night's closing film The Bandit, a documentary about the making of the famous Burt Reynolds star vehicle directed by the man behind The Overnighters.

HOW: All the Aardman shorts including Sledgehammer are expected to screen digitally.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Unfortunately forking The Watermelon Woman's sole festival screening, today is the first screening of Kirsten Johnson's highly-buzzed Cameraperson at the Victoria (Tuesday's Alamo Drafthouse showing has long been at RUSH status). Today is also the final showing of any of the Drafthouse Dark Wave selections, the Iran-set horror movie Under the Shadow, screening 10PM at the New Mission.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: It's the final day to see 35mm prints of A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront at the Stanford Theatre. This Friday (the day after the SFIFF ends) the Palo Alto venue begins a 9-week centennial tribute to Olivia de Havilland.

NUTS! (2016)

Screen capture from trailer

WHO: Penny Lane, director of Our Nixon directed this as a follow-up. She also was an editor, cinematographer and producer on the documentary.

WHAT: Another hold review; sorry to make it two in a row. But I can't resist plugging this one. My 100-word capsule:

Ever wondered why Buster Keaton brings his horse to a "goat gland specialist" in Cops? Thanks to John R. Brinkley these were the Viagra of the 1920s, except they didn't work. Brinkley's treatments were questionable at best, but his innovations in promotion & distribution were game-changers still impacting our economic landscape. Lane collages archival audio and film footage (in its correct aspect ratio - avoiding a common pet peeve in history-centric documentaries) with myriad animation techniques, digitally-rotoscoped re-enactments especially effectively, to explore a corner of weird American history that's unfortunately been forgotten. Perfect entertainment for this erection year.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at BAMPFA at 6:15 PM, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: If you weren't aware of Penny Lane from Our Nixon, perhaps you read her open letter to the Tribeca Film Festival last month in protest of their announced (and subsequently withdrawn) screening of the anti-vaccination propaganda film Vaxxed. I haven't seen Vaxxed (it opened at the Opera Plaza yesterday, which is very disappointing to this longtime Landmark Theatres patron) but I don't have to see it to know that a co-directing credit from a proven research fabricator marks it as an anti-scientific example of 21st-Century quackery.

I hate to trot out the "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it" cliche, but NUTS! reminded me how little I actually know about certain aspects of American society in the 1920s and 30s, despite devoting a great deal of time immersing myself in the popular culture of the era. Any regular attendees of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (which recently announced its 2016 slate), for example, should definitely see NUTS! to get a fuller sense of the era in which its films were initially received. The fact that it includes a brief excerpt from Cops is a pleasant bonus for Buster Keaton fans.

HOW: Digitally projected.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today marks the final SFIFF screenings of No Home Movie and of Sixty Six, both also at BAMPFA. The sole festival screening of the Johnny To-produced action thriller Trivisa is at 11:30 PM tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission. At 3PM Joel and Ethan Coen will appear at the Castro Threatre to present the festival's Mel Novikoff Award to Janus Films and the Criterion Collection; the Coens named a character from Inside Llewyn Davis after Novikoff as belated tribute to his championing of their first feature Blood Simple more than thirty years ago; it will screen at the event. Finally, Wesley Morris delivers the festival's annual State of the Cinema Address at the Victoria at 1PM; it's the first time a film critic has been given the job since 2004 when B. Ruby Rich did it. (I strongly approve but am still waiting for an archivist to get a chance at-bat.)

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Niles Film Museum screens Buster Keaton's masterpiece Steamboat Bill, Jr. as well as his short film The Bellboy and a Mutt & Jeff comic short The Big Swim. All are 35mm prints, the latter tinted.

Sixty Six (2015)

A scene from Lewis Klahr's SIXTY SIX, playing at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival, on April 21 - May 5, 2016. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society

WHO: Los Angeles-based experimental filmmaker Lewis Klahr made this. Here's Jordan Cronk's interview with him.

WHAT: "I don't think of myself as an animator. I think of myself as a re-animator". Lewis Klahr said this at a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening in December 2011 which inspired me to write, shortly after:

Klahr's collage films can provide a closer look at vintage comic book art than even the most finicky collector is likely to take unless scrutinizing that line between "very fine" and "near mint". We see the visual DNA of colors and shading magnified, and at the same time we read between the panels, guided by the filmmaker's temporal and spatial dislocations. The standout of a strong set of new-ish work Klahr brought for local premieres this year, Lethe is a remix of a 1960s Doctor Solar story that becomes a noirish drama set to Gustav Mahler.

I still agree with all that, but the brief paragraph doesn't begin to convey how Klahr's films and videos aren't really for comic book obsessives (though they might appeal to some of the more adventurous among them, and I'd love to see what would happen if Pony Glass -which I briefly described here- screened before a showing of one of those big-budget spandex-fests that all the kids go crazy for these days), but use their detritus to tap into universal emotions and conditions. Such as Helen of T, which is clearly more about the ravages of human aging than paper aging. Klahr screened it at an SF Cinematheque show in February 2015 and detailed how the main character was torn from the pages of an unusual comic book with a science fiction theme, I believe (I don't seem to have taken notes at the screening and am relying on memory). Or Ichor, which screened in an SFIFF program two years ago, and which marries a narration of fortune-cookie-esque pronouncements to cut-out images of midcentury men on the lam, weaving a fractured narrative on the theme of fate. The images he employs once told one story, but now they've been decontextualized and appropriated for Klahr's own purposes. This must be what he means when calling himself a "re-animator".

Ichor, Helen of T, and Lethe are among the twelve short works that Klahr has collected together to create Sixty Six, his new multi-chapter feature-length film set precisely fifty years ago, hence the title. Others (that as far as I am aware are making their Frisco Bay cinema debut at tonight's program) include Mercury, Mars Garden, Saturn's Diary, Jupiter Sends a Message, Venus (I'm starting to detect an interplanetary theme here), as well as Erigone's Daughter, Ambrosia, Orphacles (or is it a Classical mythology theme?) and The Silver Age (seeming reference to the comic books of Klahr's childhood). I'm excited to see them all together tonight. Manohla Dargis wrote a great review of it in the New York Times a few months ago, in case you're curious to hear more.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 6PM tonight at the Roxie and 8:30PM Saturday at BAMPFA, presented as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: When SFIFF announced that its 2015 program would be divided into categories like Marquee Presentations, Masters, Global Visions, etc. I wasn't so sure I liked the idea. It felt like a clear borrowing from the Toronto International Film Festival, SFIFF Executive Director Noah Cowan's former stomping ground, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I remember well my (sole) visit to that festival, and how much more attention and emphasis was given to programs in certain sections (Gala Presentations, Midnight Madness) at the seeming expense of the (to me) much more interesting things going on in sections like Discovery, Visions and Wavelengths. Noting that all the 2015 Marquee Presentations selections were either Anglophone or Francophone films, and that nearly all the Masters filmmakers were made men just a little bit more annoyed by the division.

But then I remembered that sectional programming like this is nothing SFIFF hadn't tried before; in fact the first year I really found myself delving into the program back in 2001, the festival had a Masters section (which helped guide me to great films by Agnes Varda, Jan Svankmajer and Bela Tarr, for instance), as well as Big Nights, Next Wave, Global Views, etc. And I realized how useful one particular section was for the festival: Vanguard. Though at TIFF this section name refers to cutting-edge genre films that are perhaps not quite so outré or outlandish to deserve Midnight slots, SFIFF is using it more to signify the most formally experimental films in the festival. Sticking with 2015 as the example, it was clearly quite helpful to the screening I attended of Jenni Olson's The Royal Road, for instance, that the film was positioned as something other than a straightforward documentary about Junipero Serra and the California-spanning thoroughfare he established. Audiences knew to expect an experimental essay film visually composed of landscape shots with no people in them, and seemed to respond well to what they saw.

For 2016, I'm pretty sure the Marquee Presentations are still limited to Anglophone and Francophone films (and that there are even fewer of the latter than there were last year). There are still too few female Masters (but at least the ones they've got are totally inarguable: Barbara Kopple and Chantal Akerman). But I'm fine with the categorizations now, if only because I've grown used to them after a year. And if the existence of the Vanguard section helped make it possible for the festival to program Sixty Six and target it to an appreciative audience, I'm more than fine: I'm all for it! 

Unfortunately nearly all the other Vanguard presentations at the festival have already passed. Other than Sixty Six's two showings, the last one remaining is Guetty Felin's "chorale for several voices in the wake of the Haiti earthquake", Ayiti Mon Amour, which screens once more at 9:15 tonight.

HOW: Digital screening with filmmaker in attendance.

OTHER SFIFF SCREENINGS: Today is the last chance to see screenings like Wild by Nicolette Krebitz, Southside With You by Richard Tanne, Les Cowboys by Thomas Bidegain and (as mentioned above) Ayiti Mon Amour, all at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission.

NON-SFIFF SCREENING: Tonight Oddball Films hosts its 99th monthly 16mm iteration of "Strange Sinema", this time on the theme of "Psycho Science". The program includes The Electric Eel,  Sun Healing: The Ultra-Violet Way With Life Lite and Living in a Reversed World (which I've seen, the last of them at SFIFF- all are extremely weird and entertaining) and Edgar G. Ulmer's Goodbye, Mr. Germ, (which I have not). Seems like the perfect program to warm up for Penny Lane's NUTS! (which I also haven't seen yet.)

A Pattern For Survival (2015)

A scene from Kelly Sears' A PATTERN FOR SURVIVAL, playing at the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23 - May 7 2015. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Kelly Sears made this.

WHAT: Sears is an animator who admits she's "not actually interested in learning how to draw" and therefore has embraced the cut-out animation tradition as a method of creating moving image work. I think I've seen nine of her completed short video works in about that many years; she's made double that in this time, so I know I'm operating half-blind when I make generalizations about her oeuvre. But from what I've seen, Sears is an excellent summoner of moods, plucking seemingly-ephemeral images out from still and motion-picture wastepiles and placing them in haunted dreamscapes invoking feelings like dread or dismay. But when I think back to the movies she's presented over the years, I tend to recall their image compositions first, their sonic environments second, and their actual motion component a distant third. Her most memorable animated moments have often been very subtle, as with Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise, or slow, as with The Drift.

With A Pattern For Survival, Sears has created her first (that I've seen) truly indelible movement study, putting an ingenious twist on her usual techniques of animating frozen moments from the flat and lifeless pages of periodicals, or of extracting frames from non-fiction films and reconfiguring them for her own narrative purposes. Here she takes photographs and drawings from old catalogs and how-to-manuals and overlays them into simple trembles resembling certain .gif art or even the chronophotographes of Étienne-Jules Marey. These images were always intended to be juxtaposed in space and not time, but are natural graphical matches, and thus feel as if they've been reunited by Sears like long lost sisters or brothers who never knew their siblings existed. They are joined with decontextualized quotes from what appears to be a 23-year-old edition of a U.S. Army wilderness survival manual, reflecting their thematic content (e.g. exercise, food preparation, weapon usage, and, as seen in the above image, first aid.) Without the voice-over found in many of Sears' prior works, the resulting narrative is relatively ambiguous, and I found myself imagining little narratives about each image's own original creation. Was the artist who drew each of three sportswear models tracing from the same original image? Was the photographer who shot a wound dressing documenting two close-to-consecutive points in a real-time motion, or was there a restaging involved? These images appear to be survivors from the site of some past trauma, but are they really?

WHERE/WHEN: Screens as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF)'s animated shorts program at the Kabuki tonight at 9:30 and May 3rd at 1:30.

WHY: The tradition of animated films playing the SFIFF goes back to the festival's very first iteration in 1957, when John Halas's fun History of the Cinema and Bill Justice and Wolfgang Reitherman's soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated The Truth About Mother Goose screened amidst a program better remembered for its collection of art-cinema classics: Pather Panchali, Throne of Blood, Death of a Cyclist, etc. Over the years I've attended the festival, I've been fortunate to see screenings of great animations of both the feature-length (Spirited Away) and short form (Das Rad, Tyger, Verses) variety. This year I believe the only feature film prominently featuring animation is the live-action hybrid Luna, but there are several short film programs featuring animated work, including the Youth Works program, with the South Korean Godong's Party, the Family Films program, which is 80% kid-friendly animation (the other 20% being kid-friendly live action), and the Cibo Matto New Scene program, in which unnamed "animation by Calvin Frederick, Una Lorenzen, Miwa Matreyek and Grace Nayoon Rhee" and a 35mm print of Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema are part of an eclectic set of films (also including Yoko Ono's Fly) getting new live soundtracks thanks to the Japanese-expatriate alt-pop duo.

The only 100% animated screening in the 2015 SFIFF, however, is the Shorts 3 program playing tonight and a week from Sunday. Unlike previous years this program doesn't appear to be available for advance press viewing, but I'm such an admirer of a few of the animators involved that I'm almost willing to vouch for their works unseen. Don Hertzfeldt's newest, The World of Tomorrow, for instance, is one of my most highly-anticipated local premieres in the festival. The reliable Bill Plympton (whose feature-length Cheatin' still has a few more scheduled shows at the Roxie this weekend) is represented by a new work called Footprints. I was able to get an advance look at A Pattern For Survival because it was part of last Saturday's Other Cinema program at the Mission's somehow-still-surviving Artists' Television Access. It was the highlight of a very strong pre-intermission set of new work (after the intermission we were treated to classics from animators Lillian Schwartz and Mary Ellen Bute, as well as a terrific dual-projector performance from Other Cinema honcho Craig Baldwin himself!)

HOW: A Pattern For Survival, like the rest of the Shorts 3 program, will screen digitally.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: I'm not missing the 35mm Castro screening of Barbara Loden's Wanda this afternoon for the world; it's the sole SFIFF showing of this rarely-viewed film made 45 years ago. Today is also the only SFIFF screening of Guy Maddin's latest, The Forbidden Room, at the Kabuki, which unfortunately conflicts with Guillermo Del Toro's award presentation at the Castro and (digital) screening of The Devil's Backbone, which happens to be the first foreign-language film screening alongside a SFIFF Director's Award presentation since Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us back in 2000.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Tonight Other Cinema features another animation-heavy program; one focusing on animated documentary selected by local academic Jeffrey Skoller. It includes one brilliant piece I saw at a prior SFIFF edition, Ken Jacobs' Capitalism: Child Labor. I can't resist noting that this glasses-free 3D animation is also part of a big Brooklyn retrospective of 21st Century stereoscopic cinema that also includes a Chromadepth 3D video by local filmmaker (my girlfriend) Kerry Laitala. Tell your New York friends!

Fin de Siècle (2011)

Image from artist website.

WHO: Kathleen Quillian made this short animation.

WHAT: The cut-out animation tradition includes some illustrious names: Harry Smith, Stan Vanderbeek, Lawrence Jordan, Norman McLaren, Walerian Borowczyk, Terry Gilliam. More recently even Jan Svankmajer (who turns eighty today) has turned his hand to it. But in the last several years, it feels like women have been creating the most focused and fiery entries into this often disrespected corner of moving image art. Theoretically these kind of films seem comparatively easier to create than some other forms of animation: they don't necessarily require drawing skill or powerful software systems. But what they do require is an intense amount of planning, perseverance, and a knack for conceptualizing interesting movement in the face of limited parameters. Animators like Stacey Steers, Martha Colburn, and Janie Geiser have done wonderful work in the past decade or so, each creating pieces with distinctive thematic and stylistic attributes. Though Kathleen Quillian has not yet amassed a prolific output as these women have, she's working toward that, and her most recently-completed film Fin de Siècle, investigating the pessimistic and superstitious outlooks of many denizens of the late  nineteenth century, deserves to be compared to the works of Colburn, Geiser, etc. as David Finkelstein did in a Film Threat review I shall republish a brief sample of:

Quillian has a sharp eye for creating arresting, off balance visual compositions, and for using simple visual elements to create the sense of wonder and strangeness which permeate turn of the century writings on the occult and the longing to make contact with the supernatural. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program starting 8PM tonight at Artists' Television Access.

WHY: This month marks the 30th anniversary of Artists's Television Access, or as it usually nicknamed, A.T.A. The venue is celebrating by hosting a panoply of special events this month (and beyond), starting with tonight's "Open Screening" program of work made by current or former A.T.A. staffers including Dale Hoyt, Claire Bain, Mike Missiaen, Karla Milosevich and more, put together by filmmaker Linda Scobie. She writes, "this show is a wonderfully varied mix of the diverse community involved with A.T.A. over the years and a unique experience to see all their films showcased together."

There are too many events at the space for one person to see. Or are there?  A gauntlet has been thrown down to endurance-testing cinephiles with a 30-hour marathon screening of films selected by members of the A.T.A. community (also including Quillian and sound artist Gilbert Guerrero, her collaborative partner on Fin de Siècle and on running the Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland). It starts 1PM tomorrow, and it's possible to see everything for as little as $1 per hour of viewing. I must admit I'm tempted to try. Later in the month A.T.A. hosts new installments of popular series like the music/performance-focuesd Mission Eye & Ear, the kickoff to the Fall calendar for the Other Cinema series curated by the Mission iconoclast Craig Baldwin, an evening devoted to works by Baldwin himself: ¡O No Coronado!, Wild Gunman and Sonic Outlaws (his latest feature Mock Up On Mu is part of the marathon, appropriately scheduled for the witching hour), and a pair of screenings of work by the Mission's twin filmmaker legends, Mike Kuchar and his late brother George.

In an article at Eat Drink Films reminiscences about the unique Mission District venue have been collected by that site's new editor, Johnny Ray Huston. My own experiences with the venue date back to my earliest awarenesses of it as the most "beyond punk rock" of all of San Francisco's screening spaces, and along with Aquarius Records and Leather Tongue video (the latter now long-since closed although its iconic sign hangs in Bender's) symbolized Valencia Street for me as a teenager in the early 1990s as the mecca for media that I'd never heard of before and doubted I'd ever be cool enough or smart enough to understand. A part of my cinephilia may be rooted in a quest to unlock the mystique of a place like A.T.A., but I think I've learned that this is probably impossible. A.T.A. boggles the mind of everybody, even the people who are closely involved in its continued operation. With all the changes that Valencia street has gone through in the past 30, 20, ten, five, or even two years, A.T.A. is perhaps the street's most unlikely survivor, and for me its most welcome one. If you can't attend any of the screenings this week or month, please consider donating to an Indiegogo campaign determined to upgrade the venue's technological capacity so it can last for another thirty years.

HOW: Scobie notes that tonight "we're screening many different formats from super-8 to VHS, Hi-8, and a hybrid of 35mm slides and digital video. You'll see current works in progress being shown to classic films dating back to the early '90s." I expect Fin de Siècle to screen on digital video.

Face Like A Frog (1987)

WHO: Sally Cruikshank made this.

WHAT: A five-minute haunted-house cartoon mixes the anything-can-happen feel of 1930s animated shorts from the Fleischer Brothers, Robert Clampett, etc with a 1980s day-glo aesthetic. Creatures speak in cryptic wordplay, backgrounds explode with patterns and colors, and there's no such thing as a truly inanimate object. The largely-electronic music score was composed by Danny Elfman, who even takes a turn at the microphone in the middle of the film, voicing a sinister-looking chameleon singing "Don't Go In the Basement" (perhaps a reference to Friz Freleng's The Wabbit Who Came To Supper?).

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only on a 7:00 program of Cruikshank work at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: Sally Cruikshank will be in attendance at tonight's screening, a rare in-person appearance for a filmmaker who hasn't lived in Frisco Bay in nearly thirty-five years. After making her first film Ducky at Smith College in 1971, she voyaged West to connect with the underground comix scene here and study at the San Francisco Art Institute under the great Lawrence Jordan. There she made her "most experimental film" according J. Hoberman, Fun On Mars, a paper animation which utilized rotoscoping and other techniques. Both it and the following Chow Fun won prizes at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Cruikshank than moved into cel animation while working for an advertising animation company called Snazelle Films. During her time there she was able to work on her own projects Quasi at the Quackadero and Make Me Psychic, which both became midnight-cartoon-circuit staples; the former was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2009. These and Quasi's Cabaret all starred a recurring cast of characters centered around Anita, a glamourous waterfowl with Cruikshank's own voice characterization. She makes a brief cameo in Face Like a Frog. In the 1980s Cruikshank moved to Los Angeles and found work animating title sequences for features like Ruthless People and Mannequin (most recently she worked on Greg Araki's Smiley Face). The 1990s found her making segments for Sesame Street, several of which will screen tonight. She has been an enthusiastic early-adopter of internet animation technologies, creating a chatbot, online comics, and other endeavors using gifs and Flash. 

I was first exposed to Cruikshank's cartoons in 1997 when they were shown at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts on a program with films by Kenneth Anger, David Sherman, Tom Rubnitz and Ladislaw Starewicz. I'd never seen any work by any of these filmmakers before I stumbled into that screening room, and I credit the experience with opening my eyes to the wider world of filmmaking for spaces beyond the multiplex and the arthouse. It makes me particularly pleased that I was able to introduce a film screening in the same space a couple weeks ago as part of the Invasion of the Cinemaniacs series (which is sadly down one Cinemaniac because the expected print of Arturo Ripstein's Hell Without Limits went missing and the August 23 screening cancelled).  

Tonight's Cruikshank series is the last film in the Pacific Film Archive's summer focus on animation under the Alternative Visions banner. Alternative Visions returns in the Fall with focuses on local filmmakers past (James Broughton) and present (Jerome Hiler) as well as on multiple-projector work (including Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth October 1). More information on this and on the PFA's other fall programs (including a Stanley Kubrick retrospective) should be available on the venue website soon.

HOW: Tonight's PFA program of Cruikshank's films is entirely presented on new 16mm and 35mm prints; Face Like A Frog is 35mm.

Cosmic Flower Unfolding (2013)

A scene from Benjamin Ridgeway's COSMIC FLOWER UNFOLDING, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Benjamin Ridgeway created this work.

WHAT: There's long been a connection between San Francisco's experimental film scene and the concentration of interest in non-traditional and/or non-Western spirituality. In particular, Asian mystical and religious ideas have informed the work particularly of the Bay Area's legendary experimental animators, such as Harry Smith, Jordan Belson and Lawrence Jordan. Cosmic Flower Unfolding proves the durability of this confluence into the digital animation era. Ridgeway, a local university professor and video game animator, describes in a brief interview on the San Francisco International Film Festival's blog that he first visualized this very short (2-minute) work while meditating, and uses the Sanskrit term "mandala" to describe some of the neon forms he arranges and has pulsate throughout the piece, until they make the form of sage-like face. Ridgeway was influenced by the illustrations of nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel, but I was also reminded of snowflake geometries. Perhaps there's a mystic out there who'd argue that flowers, undersea creatures, ice crystals, and constellations of electronic data all are essentially the same thing in the scheme of things.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program starting 9PM tonight only at the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: If you have trouble accepting animation as anything other than cartoons for kids (by which I could mean either children or stoned college students) then you may have trouble with the SFIFF's Shorts 3 program, but if you are open to the breadth of how the medium can be applied in intellectually and sensorially stimulating ways, you'll likely find it to be a very worthwhile program. Ranging from exercises in eye-popping, near-complete abstraction such as Cosmic Flower Unfolding and two pieces by Max Hattler, to Subconscious Password, a piece of semi-autobiographical satire from Canada's Chris Landreth (who made the Academy Award-winning Ryan), this set of 11 shorts proves there are still a heck of a lot of ways to get your mind blown without taking drugs. 

Frequent SFIFF contributors Bill Plympton and Kelly Sears take their respective animating styles into extreme territories at polar opposite ends of the "cartoony or not" spectrum and both far, far from Pixar and its middle-of-the-road imitators. I was delighted to recognize Guilherme Marcondes's The Master's Voice: Caveirao as a worthy follow-up to the Brazilian-born animator's prior mini-masterwork Tyger almost immediately; it carries the same sense of menace and whimsy, and some similar visual elements even if it was created using wholly different techniques and is in a way far more ambitious. Another stunner is Gloria Victoria, by a Canadian filmmaker named Theodore Ushev that I was unfamiliar with but will be keeping an eye out for from now own; his striking Constructivist-influenced design style feels very attuned to his anti-war themes and his motion marches perfectly to the Shostakovich soundtrack he selected. But I picked Ridgeway's film to highlight in particular because he's expected to attend the screening tonight.

HOW: All the Shorts 3 selections will screen digitally.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 12 of the festival also includes the final screening of Manakamana- on the Kabuki's biggest screen!! - and of Kazakh film Harmony Lessons. It also features the first showing of Lukas Moodysson's We Are The Best!

NON-SFIFF OPTION: It's discount night at the Roxie Cinema so if you still haven't caught Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin on a big screen yet, tonight's your chance to do so for half the price of a regular SFIFF ticket.