The Red Book (1994)

WHO: Janie Geiser made this film.

WHAT: I have not seen The Red Book, but I've long been a fan of Geiser's puppet animations, two of which I wrote about when they appeared on DVD. Here's some of what Sara Maria Vizcarrondo says about this Geiser film in a fairly recent article on puppet animation:

her cutouts have a comforting lack of animus but are so charming you identify with them. Her immediate concern with the female body and the suggestion that being in a home forces the female into tailspin (while a man as emotive as an Irish setter looks on) and can’t help but feel like a personal statement, if not just an evocation of Sylvia Plath.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at Artists' Television Access, on a program presented by Craig Baldwin's Other Cinema starting at 8:30,

WHY: Tonight's Other Cinema program is a smorgasbord of film & video work involving stop motion and puppet animation of all sorts, from Willis O'Brien's cutting-room floor scenes from King Kong to the latest by Martha Colburn, Metamorfoza. The evening also includes tributes to a pair of puppetmasters passed from the planet in the past 12 months: Ray Harryhausen (famed for Jason and the Argonauts, etc.) and Gerry Anderson (of Thunderbirds renown). But I'm particularly excited about The Red Book, because though I've seen quite a few of Geiser's films this one has somehow eluded me thus far. I was pleasantly surprised to see it inducted into the National Film Registry four years ago, not realizing that it might be Geiser's most "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film". It's just these kinds of selections that make me appreciate the Library of Congress project; I'm glad that this and the John Landis-directed Thriller video and the admittedly odd sound-on-film experiment Gus Visser and His Singing Duck have been inducted onto the list before Kramer Vs. Kramer has been, as pointed out by this recent article. HOW: The Red Book screens digitally.

Focus (2009)

WHO: Christine Lucy Latimer made this.

WHAT: When we think of "animation" most of us usually think of cartoons, anthropomorphic characters, or both simultaneously. But animation is not so much a genre as a process, one that is distinguished from other filmmaking methods by its frame-by-frame approach. The camera is not integral to the animation process as it is to live-action and documentary filming, but rather serves as a means by which to capture pattern arrangements in a way that can be then screened using other, non animation-specific technologies. Winsor McCay could have made Gertie the Dinosaur using flipbooks instead of film, if he hadn't been as invested in that particular form of presentation. D.W. Griffith did not have another option like that (however impractical).

To that end, Christine Lucy Latimer has made a film that demonstrates the essence of animation much better than I can describe it. She has re-photographed super-8 footage of what looks to be a vacation in Africa- or perhaps just Florida- using a 16mm camera, treating each super-8 frame as a unit of animation. From the imdb description apparently written by Latimer herself.

Using glue and 16mm splicing tape, I place over 1500 individual super 8 film frames from a decimated home movie one-by-one on to clear 16mm film. The resulting floating film-within-a-film becomes a jarring landscape that prioritizes the structure of the super 8 frame over its photographic contents.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight as part of a program starting at 8:00 at Artists' Television Access

WHY: Tonight is another edition of the GAZE series of film & video work by female filmmakers, which has been periodic A.T.A. event for about a year and a half now. Tonight's is an all-animation program also including the local premiere of Jodie Mack's Let Your Light Shine, which has been the talk of viewers in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere this Fall. 

More short films films and videos by female filmmakers (as well as some by males) will screen Sunday at the Roxie as part of a San Francisco State University alumni program in this weekend's Cinema By The Bay series. Mothertongue is one film on that program made by a woman whose work has screened at GAZE before: Irina Leimbacher. Saturday night's Other Cinema program at A.T.A. also includes a high proportion of woman-made work.

HOW: I expect this to be a digital presentation.

Night Hunter (2011)

WHO: Stacey Steers made this.

WHAT: A collage/animation installation whose video portion was shown as a single-channel work at the Pacific Film Archive in September, at a screening described here. The title derives from the Charles Laughton-directed masterpiece Night of the Hunter, featuring Lillian Gish in a key role. Other films starring Gish in her silent-film heyday are incorporated into the work.

WHERE/WHEN: On display starting today at the Catherine Clark Gallery; its open hours are 11-6 Tuesdays through Saturdays.

WHY: Though film and video can be wonderfully experienced in the communal darkness of a cinema, it find another audience, and another form of appreciation, when presented in a gallery setting. Though I have not seen Night Hunter in this form yet, I'm very much looking forward to visiting the gallery and getting another perspective on a piece I enjoyed in the cinema context.

HOW: An installation involving sculpture and 35mm animation transfered to video.

Behind The Eyes Are The Ears (2010)

WHO: Nancy Andrews made this video work.

WHAT: I haven't seen much of Andrews' work but I really liked her 16mm film Haunted Camera, which I saw and wrote a bit about when it screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival back in 2006. Behind the Ears Are the Eyes is a video-produced piece from the Maine-dwelling filmmaker, but like its forebear it takes a syncretic production approach, utilizing silhouette animation reminiscent of Lotte Reiniger, collage cut-outs a la Stan Vanderbeek, anthropomorphic costuming recalling Isabella Rossellini's "Green Porno" series, and archival images from educational and other films (I spotted Miriam Hopkins from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and several animal stars from Chang myself). And more. 

It's all in service of a mad scientist tale about one Dr. Myes, a researcher doing self-experiments in a quest to increase the capacity of human perception. The genesis of the project was actually a song cycle composed by Andrews and musical co-conspirator Zach Soares, which forms much of the soundtrack to the 25-minute short. In turn, Behind the Eyes Are the Ears is currently being transformed into a feature-length film called The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes starring Michole Briana White, Gunnar Hansen (who played Leatherface in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre), and Jennifer Prediger (from Joe Swanburg's Uncle Kent and other films). She was inspired to move into the realm of feature filmmaking after being inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives to consider features as a way to get more exposure to experimental work.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a Pacific Film Archive program at 7:00 tonight.

WHY: Avant-garde film and video filmmakers and fans are converging on Toronto to experience the Wavelengths festival, and many of those left out are eyeing the just-announced program for the Views From the Avant-Garde festival happening in New York City in October. But what of those of us here on the West Coast, who can't make time or spend the cash to jet to an out-of-town festival? SF Cinematheque's Crossroads festival is a Spring event, and in 2013 provided us with opportunities to see terrific work like Scott Stark's The Realist and Jodie Mack's Dusty Stacks of Mom months before New York and Toronto viewers will get to. Hopefully some of the better works from these more-established festivals will find their way to Crossroads 2014. But in the meantime, there are a number of opportunities to see some of the works being presented at Views From the Avant-Garde, and other works by Wavelengths and Views makers at the PFA thanks to its Alternative Visions season, which has recently announced all programs through November on its website. Between these shows and the hot-off-the-press Other Cinema calendar for Saturday night experimental mayhem at Artists' Telvision Access, the Autumn is shaping up to have some good options for fans of "artist-made" cinema.

Nancy Andrews isn't in Wavelegths or Views this year, but two makers who are part of next week's Alternative Visions program, Lost And Found: Recent Experimental Animation are in the latter. James Sansing's Verses, which was a real highlight of the SF International Film Festival's avant-garde programming, will appear at Views, and Jodie Mack has a one-woman show of brand-new works. We'll have to wait to see those, but we will get to see her beautifully fibrous Point de Gaze on a program that also includes new work from local legend Lawrence Jordan and (full disclosure: my girlfriend) Kerry Laitala, as well as Stacey Steers, T. Marie, and Evan Meaney. Steers, Laitala, Jordan, and Sansing are all expected to be on hand for the screening.

Canadian Marielle Nitoslawska will present her new work about Carolee Schneemann, Breaking the Frame at the PFA October 9th, just after its Views From The Avant-Garde premiere. The following week, the great Phil Solomon will be here present two programs of work at the PFA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, including his new Views piece Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow at PFA. ELSA merdelamerdelamer, one of two new Abigail Child works playing at Views will be part of the PFA's in-person screening of film and video from the last thirty years of her career. Unfortunately we won't see Wavelengths/Views selection Three Landscapes at the PFA's November 6th showcase on Peter Hutton, but his beautiful work shows rarely enough that we might be happy enough to see the four 1990's-era 16mm films programmed.

And there's more. A showing of Holy Motors with the brilliant Jeffrey Skoller on hand to help contextualize it, a student work showcase, and in-person screenings with Portugal's Susana de Sousa Dias (showing 48) and Lynne Sachs (showing Your Day Is My Night, which also plays Other Cinema November 16th) help make the Fall 2013 Alternative Visions program a very diverse and enticing one. See you Wednesdays!

HOW: Digital presentation along with another Andrews work called On A Phantom Limb.

Your Face (1987)

WHO: Bill Plympton made this short film.

WHAT: So much animation, even that made by the greatest masters of the artform, relies either on the formulaic elements of story, character, and gag (mastered by Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, etc.) or else these elements' complete erasure (think of the abstractions of Oskar Fischinger or Len Lye). Your Face somehow sits in between these poles perfectly. There is a character, in the form of a man depicted shoulders-up, but he remains an undeveloped everyman whose only real trait is his propensity to be unpredictably manipulated. Gags are decidedly unconventional as well. As for story and structure, it can be summed up as a stream-of-consciousness exploration of the animator's imagination gone wild.

The result is a film that can bring visual pleasure to traditionalists and experimentalists alike. A related but different sort of pleasure is derived from reading Jerry Beck try to describe the action in his 2003 book Outlaw Animation: Cutting-Edge Cartoons from the Spike & Mike Festivals:

The man's head crawls off his neck and runs down his shoulder, his face expands and explodes, it slice apart, it implodes and becomes cubist, and it wraps around itself. Another version of the man enters his right ear and exits his left. His large smile cuts the top part of his head off, his nostrils engulf his face, and multiple heads grow multiple heads.

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM tonight only at Oddball Films. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117.

WHY: Your Face screens on a program entitled "Totally Strange 80's - Sex, Drugs and Roller Skates", which features other unusual items made during the last truly robust decade of 16mm distribution.

HOW: All films in tonight's program screen in 16mm.

Autumn Spectrum (1957)

WHO: Hy Hirsh made this short film. Hirsch was a friend and contemporary of Harry Smith and Jordan Belson, and would perhaps be as well known as these compatriot animators if his life had not been cut short by a 1961 automobile accident in Paris.

WHAT: "Sensuous reflections in Amsterdam canals". There is very little written about Autum Spectrum in the literature I've been able to come across. Amos Vogel's five-word program note for a March 1959 showing along with films by Robert Breer, Stan Brakhage, etc, is perhaps the most useful I've found, although others have also noted its use of the Modern Jazz Quartet's performance of "Autumn in New York", and its similarity to Dimitri Kirsanoff's 1929 film Autumn Fire. I have not seen the film yet myself, but I've enjoyed the handful of Hirsh films I've seen thus far very much.

WHERE/WHEN: 8:30 tonight at the Exploratorium.

WHY: When the Exploratorium moved to its new Pier 15 site in April after three months of closure following a 44-year stint at its original Palace of Fine Arts location, there was great optimism about the possibilities offered by a brand new space. Many filmmakers and film lovers had great affection for the old McBean Theatre, a geodesic dome constructed within the cavernous old site, and a venue for afternoon and (occasionally) evening screenings of films that "nurture [audience] curiosity about the world around them", in line with the museum's mission statement. Just last December I said "good-bye" to the McBean at a screening of several short experimental films including one of my favorite "old film" discoveries of last year, Barry Spinello's Sonata For Pen, Brush and Ruler. But the promise of a brand-new, ahead-of-the-state-of-the-art screening space with more comfortable seats, better sight lines, and a highly innovative multi-channel sound set-up, even though it was not expected to open until Fall of 2013, made the future of Cinema Arts at the beloved institution seem bright.

This space, the Kanbar Forum, has begun being used ahead of schedule, with little fanfare amongst local cinephiles. Earlier this summer I attended an outdoor screening of rarely-shown films and videos by Charles & Ray Eames, Rock Ross, Thorstein Fleisch, Jessica Oreck, and others on the terrace of the museum, a lovely spot to watch solar-themed shorts on the eve of the summer solstice. Two more outdoor screenings were to follow in July and August, but tonight's showing has, according to the Exploratorium website, been moved to the Kanbar. If so, I'm hoping to check out that space for the first time, and hope it will be the first of many visits to the space. Another screening (a space-themed one) occurs there three times this Saturday, while on September 28th the venue hosts a tantalizing collection of fog-centric films including Gary Beydler's Hand Held Day, which I've been desperate to see since reading Max Goldberg write on it a few years ago. More upcoming Kanbar screenings including local premieres of Exploratorium-commissioned works by Sam Green and Paul Clipson.

With last week's Chronicle article on financial woes at the unique museum resulting in large-scale layoffs, I hope that the Cinema Arts department isn't sunk before it's been given a chance to make much of an impact in its new space.  A comment appearing to be made by an employee on the article leads me to wonder if lower-than-projected attendance figures are the only major reason for the layoffs of longstanding staff, so I'm not going to jump to any conclusions. But I think the Frisco Bay cinephile community would like to do its part to support the venue no matter what the behind-the-curtain problems may be going on, especially when rare and important films like this one are among those being shown there.

HOW: Autumn Spectrum screens as a 16mm projection, on a program of other "films that reflect on the changes in our landscapes—and psyches—as the seasons shift."

An American Tail (1986)

WHO: Steven Spielberg was executive producer and lent his grandfather's name Fievel to the main character of this film. Former Disney animator Don Bluth directed it as his follow-up to The Secret of NIMH.

WHAT: Somehow I've never seen An American Tail, and had in fact almost forgotten about it until recently reading Art Spiegelman's book Metamaus about the creation and ramifications of his masterpiece of sequential art Maus, in which he relates how the animation became entwined with his anthropomorphic Holocaust tale after its work-in-progress appearance in RAW, the magazine he'd co-founded. A couple key excerpts:

In 1985, somebody showed me an interview with Steven Spielberg that indicated he was producing a feature-length animated cartoon about Jewish mice escaping the anti-Semitic pogroms of Russia to set up a new life in America. I believed that Don Bluth, the director, had seen the Maud chapters in RAW and I just imagined the story conference that led to An American Tail: "Okay. The Holocaust is kind of a bummer, you know, but maybe if we do a Fiddler On The Roof thing with cuter mice we could make a go of it." I was terrified their movie would come out before my book was finished...

...the confusion could have left me being perceived as somehow creating a kind of twisted and gnarled version of a Spielberg production rather than what I'm quite sure was the case: An American Tale was a sanitized reworking launched from the Maud concept. And just a few years ago my friend, Aline Kominsky told me that her mother had praised me: "That Art Spiegelberg, he's such a talented boy! Not only did he do Maus, but he did E.T.!"

This inspired Spiegelman to suggest the publication of Maus in two volumes rather than one, and ultimately An American Tail's production was delayed until after part one had been released, thereby avoiding any such confusion. 

WHERE/WHEN: 10:00 AM today only at the Castro Theatre, as part of the 33rd San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

WHY: The SF Jewish Film Festival started last Thursday and runs through this coming Thursday, August 1st at the Castro before fanning out to other venues around Frisco Bay over the following week and a half. Cheryl Eddy's SF Bay Guardian article on the festival covers several of the festival's documentaries, and notes the SFJFF's broadening of its focus this year, in that "plenty of SFJFF's programs do specifically address Jewish religion and culture," but that several docs she pre-screened "simply happened to be made by a Jewish filmmaker."

In the case of An American Tail, the theme may be Jewish (it must be among the most prominent American animated features to feature explicitly Jewish characters) but the director was not; Bluth is Mormon. But the film still seems like an ideal selection to bring a "family" audience to a festival better known for showing films that appeal to viewers old enough to read subtitles and/or to digest heady intellectual topics. It's also, perhaps unintentionally, a great selection to bring to a festival that is including a documentary on the Maus-termind himself: The Art of Spiegelman, which screens next week at just about every festival venue but the Castro. I for one am hoping to be able to attend both films.

HOW: An American Tail and the August 11 showing of the The Producers (the movie based on the musical based on the movie, not the original movie) at Oakland's Grand Lake Theatre are, according to the Film On Film Foundation, the only two 35mm screenings at this year's SFJFF.

The Blue Umbrella (2013)

WHO: Saschka Unseld directed this.

WHAT: Toy Story 3. Cars 2. Monsters University. Of the last four feature films made by Emeryville's Pixar Animation Studio, three have been sequels to previously-produced properties, populated by familiar characters, and the fourth represents the studio in its most Disney-esque of milieus- never mind that last summer's Brave was aimed at correcting the princess-passivity of the studio's parent company. There have been lots of technological advancements in the field of computer-generated animation in the meantime, and Pixar has been at the forefront of employing them. But in terms of the look of its films, the studio still embraces a very "cartoony" look- especially in its character designs. That Woody and Buzz, and Mike and Sully, look and move about the same in the 2010s as they did in 1995 and 2001 is probably a very good thing. Nobody really wants more "realistic" versions of these toys and monsters. But the arguable over-reliance on proven characters (next up: Finding Dory in 2015) may indicate a kind of water-treading in Pixar features that seems uncharacteristic of a company that not so long ago had an impressive 3-year run introducing (essentially) original characters in more-or-less exquisitely crafted stories: Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up.

Meanwhile, animation has become ever more a major part of Hollywood's so-called "live action" extravaganzas (Pacific Rim reportedly has 1594 animated effects shots), pretty much all of which try to avoid utilizing "cartoony" looks in favor of photorealistic approaches. Might Pixar want to prove its mettle in producing movies that match- or outdo- the work being done on "bake-off" contenders like Life of Pi and The Avengers? If so, their latest short The Blue Umbrella may give us a taste of directions to come. This sweet tale of an attraction between two colorful umbrellas in a sea of black ones sidesteps the uncanny valley by preventing us from seeing any human faces, but is set in a cityscape so believable that it has frequently been mistaken for a live-action/animation hybrid. In fact it was created entirely through animation, although photographs of San Francisco and New York were used as reference for the ultimate composite. Director Unseld has spoken of a character (named "Lisa") based on an object he saw on the sidewalk while walking in his San Francisco neighborhood. Going by a clue on his tumblr I believe I was able to track it down; if I'm right the object is still there in front of Paragon Cleaners on Bush Street, right at the foot of Dashiell Hammet Alley.

You might ask why an animation company might want to move away from "cartoony" looks when they ply a craft in a long tradition of masters from Winsor McCay to the Termite Terrace crew to Hayao Miyazaki, none of whom have ever needed to convince audiences they were looking at anything other than a cartoon. And perhaps they won't, and The Blue Umbrella will remain a one-off experiment in the Pixar filmography. But though countless styles of hand-drawn animation have been proven acceptable to mass audiences over the years, it's hard to deny that mainstream animated features these days have a tendency to look quite a bit like each other, as if their characters all could exist in the same universe (no matter whether it's Pixar or Dreamworks or another rival producing). It's hard to picture Betty Boop naturally co-existing with Tom & Jerry in the Yellow Submarine universe, but it wouldn't be such an aesthetic stretch to see The Incredibles battling Megamind or Despicable Me if their corporate masters allowed it. At this point I'd be excited for any new direction in the way mainstream feature animation looks, and I'd bet on Pixar being the most likely candidate to lead that way.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple showtimes daily at theatres around Frisco Bay. Today is the last day to see it at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, however. Read on.

WHY: I feature this short today because I believe it's the last chance we'll have to see it screened on 35mm, which is how it's playing at the Grand Lake today. You might wonder why it's important to see a digitally-created short on film, but it appears to be (along with Digital 3D) one of the preferred methods of viewing by Unseld, who says

If you see it in 2D I’d recommend looking out for a cinema that shows it on film because the film grain and the celluloid really adds a whole other dimension into it as well.

HOW: Screens before Monsters University, both digitally everywhere except for at the Grand Lake.

Kuroneko (1968)

WHO: Kaneto Shindo, who died in May 2012 at the age of 100, wrote and directed this.

WHAT: I once tweeted that this film is a missing link between Kenji Mizoguchi's classic samurai-era-set ghost story Ugetsu from 1953, and Nobuhiko Obayashi's feline-themed haunted house phantasmagoria Hausu from 1977. It's the kind of statement that probably deserves more qualification than 140 characters of text can provide. In truth there's a rich tradition of ghost stories in Japanese cinema, and these three films happen to be three of the perhaps four or five best-known examples of this tradition internationally (as evidenced- and perpetuated- by their appearance on DVDs by both Criterion in the US and Masters of Cinema in the UK). I'm not well-exposed enough to Japan's kaidan-eiga history to really say whether Ugetsu directly influenced Kuroneko or whether it in turn influenced Hausu, or whether instead any similarities between the films can be better explained within a broader cultural context of Japanese stories involving spirits and transformations. Although it feels worth pointing out that Shindo apprenticed under Mizoguchi before becoming a director himself, and that Hausu and Kuroneko were made at the same studio, Toho. If Obayashi and Shindo were not intentionally referencing or reacting to the prior films in this make-shift "trilogy" they were at least aware of them. Consequently, if you're a fan of Ugetsu or Hausu or, especially, both, you'll definitely want to see Kuroneko as well. The lighting effects alone distinguish it from the average chiller.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:30 PM

WHY: I hope it's not giving too much of the story away to say that Kuroneko involves shape-shifting between human and animal forms, a theme that recurs in a number of other Japanese films screening at the PFA and other venues in the coming months. No, I'm not speaking of Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog, which screens there next Saturday; that film only compares city dwellers to canines and doesn't imagine them as avatars of one another. But the titles in the Studio Ghibli season of anime includes quite a few animals who take human form, or vice versa; for instance tomorrow's raccoon-dog saga Pom Poko, next Sunday's story of a pilot under a spell to make him look like a pig, Porco Rosso, or next month's Howl's Moving Castle, a film filled with transformations, including the title character's avian tendencies.

Did you know that the director of Howl's Moving Castle was at one point not expected to be the revered Hayao Miyazaki at all, but a younger animation director named Mamoru Hosoda, best known for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time? Hosoda's newest film Wolf Children is another film with a shape-shifter theme, and it gets its San Francisco premiere July 28th and August 4th at the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco at New People Cinema. I'm not sure if any of the other films on this brand-new festival's program (which also includes Himizu by Sion Sono and Lesson of the Evil by Takeshi Miike) involves shape-shifting.

And though it doesn't seem into include any shape-shifting-themed films, and in fact falls outside my usual purview here at Hell On Frisco Bay, I might as well mention that the Sacramento Japanese Film Festival occurs from July 12-14 at that city's Crest Theatre. When your festival opens with the latest film by Masahiro Kobayashi, Haru's Journey starring Tatsuya Nakadai, and includes a retrospective screening of Mikio Naruse's masterful silent Every Night Dreams, you get my attention. I'm thinking about a little road trip...

HOW: Kuroneko screens in a 35mm print.

Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

WHO: Hayao Miyazaki directed this.

WHAT: One of the best of the feature film animated at Studio Ghibli (the company name makes a cameo on the side of the bus in the above scene), and the biggest box-office success of all Japanese films released in 1989. Its tale of a young (benevolent) witch in training is one of the most affecting girl-empowerment fables committed to the screen.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Pacific Film Archive at 4:00 PM.

WHY: Starting with last week's screening of Castle In the Sky, the PFA's  Studio Ghibli series brings 35mm prints of the majority of Miyazaki and his cohort's beloved films to Berkeley every Sunday this summer. Most of the screenings will employ Japanese versions of these films, with English subtitles. These versions are widely considered superior by fans, as there's no doubt some of the versions prepared for American release employ distracting dub jobs involving Hollywood celebrities. For me, Princess Mononke is the worst offender of these, and I'm glad the PFA is planning to show the subtitled version instead on July 28; when the film screened at the Bridge last fall the version with Billy Bob Thornton giving his unmistakeable twang to the character Jigo was unfortunately was the one screened.

The four exceptions to the PFA's plan of showing these films with their original soundtracks are Howl's Moving Castle and (in my opinion the least-distracting of the Americanized Ghibli dubs) My Neighbor Totoro, both showing in August, next week's Ponyo (which I don't believe has ever screened on Frisco Bay in an English-subtitled 35mm print), and Kiki's Delivery Service today. This is not one of the best or the worst of the English-dubbed Ghibli versions out there; it may take a while to get used to hearing Phil Hartman voicing Kiki's cat Jiji, but for the most part he does a good job keeping his performance restrained. This familiar may have a familiar voice, but it ought not bring to mind any particular Hartman character from Saturday Night Live or the Simpsons or the rest of his career. There are some changed musical cues on the Americanized soundtrack.

Even these compromised versions are worth seeing on the big screen however. In fact, I think each of them should be seen at least once by any Ghibli fan not fluent in Japanese. When spending portions of time during a film looking at subtitles, even a fast reader can miss some of the detail and even the kineticism of the beautifully animated images, and for me it's usually a very acceptable trade-off to have an "impure" soundtrack experience if I can watch the whole frame for the whole movie. For me, this rule applies to high-quality animation far more than to live-action films, where I really long to hear the voices of the actor I'm seeing on screen. But those who extend their dislike of "dubbing" in cinema to Japanese animation might keep in mind that virtually all animation released in that country is in fact "dubbed"- in Japanese. I've written a bit about this here and here and don't want to repeat myself, but it seems relevant to this discussion.

HOW: 35mm print of the English-dubbed version of Kiki's Delivery Service.

The Story of Hansel and Gretel (1951)

WHO: Ray Harryhausen directed, produced and animated this short film by hand, and who died at age 92 last week.

WHAT: In Alex Pappademas's lovely obituary, he writes of the feature films that the master worked on:

They were all conceived as showcases for Harryhausen's effects, and he was supposedly heavily involved in every stage of their production, from script to art direction to principal photography, but they tend to fall down a deep well entertainmentwise whenever the puppets yield the screen to people. "I could kick myself when I think of how I didn't insist on more from the director or the studio," Harryhausen once said, admitting that some of his finished pictures made him "heartsick."

It's true that, although Harryhausen's effects have a timeless quality to them, the feature films they appear in work better as entertainments for young children than sophisticated adults. Clunky dialogue and frequently unimaginative camera placement weigh down, say, 20 Million Miles to Earth or The 7th Voyage of Sinbad when Harryhausen's monster creations are not on the screen, and perhaps can only really be appreciated by discerning, aesthetically attuned moviegoers when they are able to summon their inner-child sense of wonder.

The lesser-known short films Harryhausen directed before his feature-film career, however, do not suffer from the same lack of artistic sophistication, perhaps because they were don't involve the blending of live actors with the animated environments. The Story of Hansel and Gretel, for instance, utilizes some creative camera angles and compositions in telling a very familiar story. It's an apparent paradox, because this short film was intended expressly for children while the later science fiction and fantasy films were aimed at wider audiences. But if you can appreciate the enclosed artistry of a Disney Silly Symphony or a Frank Tashlin cartoon, you may find more complete fulfillment from this film than from a Harryhausen vehicle in which his artistry is not evident in every frame.

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM tonight only at Oddball Films. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117.

WHY: Many commentators (most recently David Bordwell) have pointed to the increasing importance of film archives to allowing us access to our moving image heritage, in the waning days of 35mm as a mass distribution medium. Movie lovers now have so many convenient (if compromised) methods of seeing films on a whim, and the barriers to providing timely programming to cinema audiences seem to be increasing rather than decreasing as more and more screens go digital-only.

But archives, when they screen their own holdings, as Oddball does every Thursday and Friday evenings, can demonstrate a flexibility few other venues can have. I'm sure that upon Ray Harryhausen's death, programmers at the Castro and Rafael and perhaps other local venues with a history of connecting audiences with his film work, immediately began investigating the possibility of a tribute program. But though none have been announced yet, Oddball has already been able to tribute the stop-motion master twice, first with a film added to last week's Czechoslovakian animation program, and now tonight with The Story of Hansel and Gretel anchoring a program of tasty films that will also include a short featuring Woody Allen and the late Jonathan Winters, an excerpt from an I Love Lucy episode, and a rare showing of Ub Iwerks's 1934 cartoon Reducing Creme. 

Animation fans should also look forward to next week's Oddball screenings: a Devilish set including Betty Boop in Red Hot Mamma, and a Toy-fest that ranges from Gumby to Charles & Ray Eames.

The Bay Area's other big archive, Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, has also just announced its entire summer programming slate. Though there's a lot to peruse and comment upon, the two series most relevant to this particular post are the Sunday-afternoon, 12-film focus on Japan's greatest animation studio Ghibli, and a selection of screenings of Eastern European films from the archive's own collection, donated by George Gund III, and presented as a memorial to his long life, which ended earlier this year.

HOW: Tonight's Oddball program, including The Story of Hansel and Gretel, will screen virtually entirely in 16mm.

Verses (2012)

WHO: Local artist James Sansing made this film.

WHAT: I was fortunate to view a version of Verses at an informal artist salon several months ago, and it absolutely stunned me. Though the above still provided by the San Francisco Film Society gives a sense of what a single frame from this work looks like, it can't evoke the eerie morphings that are created by it and its brothers in a frame-by-frame, page-by-page animation.

I encourage you to click on the image to enlarge it, however. You should be able to make out parts of the handwritten ledger entries about  the residents of the long-abandoned juvenile hall where Sansing found this book, which he ultimately used as raw material for his film. Lines like "These boys are to be kept in their rooms until Estes talks to their school and contacts us" and stray discernible words like  "confronted", "depressed", "insulin" and "psychologist" can be read in the spaces between the mildew and ink stains, evoking both the mundane details and the psychic melancholy that must have been in the atmosphere of this place when it was functioning.

If the motion of the film can't be expressed by a still, neither can these scrawls be seen by an audience watching the mold patterns evolve as pages turn from front cover to back. Yet a viewer can get a sense of some of the concerns written about in the ledger even if the origin of the artifact is unknown (as it was to me when I saw it). Not only because the stains resemble Rorschach blots throbbing with an uncanny lifeforce (the magic of animation), but also because of the way Sansing has photographed them, as if a historical document under glass and illuminated by an archival-quality light source. Meaning is imbued into these images by their very presentation, and only amplified if we know their original provenance.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:45, and at New People this Tuesday at 7:00.

WHY: Carl Martin has dutifully compiled a schedule of all the SFIFF films that are expected to screen using actual film reels. As we now see only the dying embers of 35mm film stock as a mass distribution medium for motion pictures, it's still unclear what role film festivals will play in preserving exhibition using film formats. Prints are still struck for preservation purposes if nothing else, but it's becoming increasingly rare for audiences to get opportunities to view them. (Spring Breakers for instance, was shot on film but has only, finally, been released on film to a Frisco Bay theatre --the Balboa-- this week after over a month of digital screenings at other local venues.) 

Carl's list includes all five of the new feature films that SFIFF is screening on 35mm, as well as the new-ish Helsinki Forever and the four revival programs of films made between 1922 and 1999 that will be shown on film. He also includes the three shorts programs which involve film-on-film projection. Verses is one of two shorts (the other being Lonnie von Brummelen & Siebren de Haan's View from the Acropolis) in the program entitled Shorts 5: Experimental: Artifacts and Artificial Acts that will be screen on film. I'm very excited for the chance to view Verses on 35mm for the first time, but I'm also excited to see new work by Deborah Stratman, Katherin McInnis, Karen Yasinsky, Scott Stark in a cinema. Video is absolutely a legitimate moving-image-art-making medium, as I suspect anyone else who attended last night's screening of Leviathan will be able to attest. I'm glad that film still figures into SFIFF exhibition, even if in a diminished (less than 10%) portion of the entire program. I expect tonight's program, curated by Kathy Geritz of the PFA and Vanessa O'Neill of SF Cinematheque, will demonstrate how the two media can harmoniously co-exist side-by-side in a festival program.


HOW: As noted above, 35mm film on a program with other short experimental works, most of them screened on video.

Audition (2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

WHO: Did you know Chuck Jones was responsible for the animation that runs during the opening credits of this film?

WHAT: My first thought when approaching this post was to write about how Mrs. Doubtfire is one of the forgotten masterpieces of the 1990s, that best demonstrates how director Chris Columbus's mise-en-scène stands with that of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Theo Angelopoulos and Abbas Kiarostami as some of the most sophisticated and powerful in the world's cinema of that decade. It is April Fools Day after all. But honestly, I have not rewatched more than a few clips of Mrs. Doubtfire in nearly twenty years, long before I'd heard of any of those guys. It wasn't a particular favorite when I last saw it in my early twenties, but why mock a movie that I barely remember?

Thus the Chuck Jones angle. Though his work heading up the creation and animation of a half-cartoon featuring a parrot named Pudgy and a cat named Grunge (this was the early nineties remember) is perhaps not at the same level of creativity as his best work, it nonetheless bears some of the signature characteristics of the director behind most of the Wile E. Coyote and Pepe Le Pew cartoons. The Mrs. Doubtfire "Behind-The-Seams" DVD includes three versions of the full, uncut version of Jones's animation, including animated pencil tests, the final full-color version, and an unused version with alternate backgrounds.

When this sequence appears on screen in the movie, we only get a few unobstructed views; the purpose of this opening is not animation for its own sake, but to establish Robin Williams's character as a struggling voice actor who puts principles above professional gain. He's recording the voices for the parrot and cat we see on screen like a foley artist might do sound effects. This is not the way animation has traditionally been voiced in this country in fact. From Mel Blanc in the Looney Tunes that gave Chuck Jones his start, to Williams in 1992's Aladdin or the more recent Happy Feet films, voice actors generally record their character dialogue before the animators have their turn, if for no other reason then to make lip-synchronization appear smoother (and I'm sure animators could rattle off many other reasons). Incidentally, most Japanese animation does work the way Williams is shown to in Mrs. Doubtfire, with the animation coming before voice recording in the production chronology.

Since Jones was in effect parodying the famous canary-cat duo of Tweety and Sylvester with Pudgy and Grunge, it's worth mentioning that Tweety was one Warner character that Jones almost never worked with during the "Termite Terrace" era. Tweety was a creation of Jones's arch-rival Bob Clampett, that was taken over by another Warner cartoon director Friz Freleng when Clampett left the studio in the mid-1940s. Freleng pitted a modified Tweety against Sylvester, who had debuted in his 1945 cartoons Life With Feathers and Peck Up Your Troubles, matched against a lovebird and a woodpecker, respectively. By the time of Jones's work on Mrs. Doubtfire Clampett was dead of a heart attack, and Freleng was long-retired. One gets a sense from watching Jones interviewed for a segment viewable on the "Behind-The-Seams" DVD that he had some mixed feelings about taking on a cat-and-bird duo for his contribution to the film.

As for the rest of Mrs. Doubtfire, it's clearly beloved by many movie watchers of a certain generation, and may be especially fondly regarded by certain residents of San Francisco, where it was filmed.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie Theater at 7:15 PM.

WHY: When I last mentioned Chuck Jones on this blog, it was in part to point out how rare it is to see his cartoons projected in 35mm, and that despite a current Cartoon Art Museum exhibit coinciding with the animator's centenary year, no such local screenings were on the horizon as far as I knew. Tonight's showing breaks a long drought; although it's surely not the same as seeing a 35mm print of a classic-era cartoon, it is an opportunity to see his animation in 35mm regardless, if momentarily, and interfered with by credits and cutaways to Williams performing. Jones's Mrs. Doubtfire art is even a part of the Cartoon Art Museum exhibit, along with pieces from throughout his career.

For those more interested in the earlier cartoons, Sonoma Film Festival is bringing a program of Chuck Jones films to Sonoma's Sebastiani Theatre on the morning of April 13th. A selection of 35mm prints from Jones's private collection will screen at 9:30 AM. Because this is being marketed as a ticket-less event aimed at bringing representatives of the newest generation of young moviegoers to the well-established festival, it may be wise to arrive even earlier than the scheduled start time in order to obtain first-come, first-serve seats.

HOW: 35mm print.

Sita Sings The Blues (2008)

WHO: Nina Paley wrote and directed this partially-autobiographical animation.

WHAT: It's unfortunate that, because Sita Sings The Blues became a cause célèbre in the ongoing copyright vs. copyleft battles over corporate control of cultural heritage, discussions of the film often overlook how great an example of virtuoso animation it is. There's more expressiveness of character through movement, more diversity in motion styles, and generally more eye-popping visual material than anything I've seen using Flash. All this is crucial to making a movie that sustains visual as well as narrative interest throughout its 82-minute runtime.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at the New Parkway Theatre at 4:00 PM this afternoon, and at 12:30 PM tomorrow afternoon.

WHY: I haven't yet made a return visit to the New Parkway since my first trip (which I wrote a bit about here) but have noticed that the venue has really expanded its array of special programs in the past few months.  In addition to Thrillville and the Spectrum Queer Media events every Sunday, there's a Tuesday night doc night (upcoming screenings include The Game Changers Project and A Fierce Green Fire), a monthly Grindhouse series that has presented digital screenings of titles like Fulci's Zombie and Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (tonight it plays the original Evil Dead movie), and a music-themed screening series co-hosted by the Spinning Platters blog (coming Saturday April 13th: a Trapped In The Closet sing-along). Sita Sings the Blues screens as part of a Family Classics series, though the feature has appeal to animation fans of all ages. If you haven't seen it yet, the New Parkway is a perfect place to do it, with comfortable couches to sit upon, a variety of food and drink at your beck and call, etc. And if you haven't visited the New Parkway yet, this seems like a perfect screening to sample; it's a natively-digital work so it's a natural fit for an all-digital cinema like this one.

Meanwhile, Nina Paley is working on making her (possibly?) feature-length follow-up to Sita Sings The Blues, and it's called Seder-Masochism. Late last year she posted a segment of it entitled This Land Is Mine online. On April 27th this mini-movie will screen as part of a not-for-the-kiddies Other Cinema program called Animation in Action, which also features works by frame-by-frame experimenters like Dave Fleischer, Lewis Klahr, Martha Colburn, and Janie Geiser.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digital production.

The Egg Cracker Suite (1943)

WHO: Ben Hardaway, whose nickname "Bugs" became immortalized while he was directing cartoons for Warner Brothers, and drawings by Robert Clampett of a Wascally character in Hardaway's Porky's Hare Hunt cartoon became labelled "Bugs's Bunny".  

WHAT: This cartoon about a mechanized egg production factory (made a year before the famous Swooner Crooner) is the only one Hardaway directed after leaving the Warner Studio (after being demoted from director upon Friz Freleng's 1939 return from a period at MGM) and working for Walter Lantz, for whom he helped created the character Woody Woodpecker. It seems only fitting that it features a rabbit as lead character. In fact it's the final cartoon ever produced featuring the Oswald The Lucky Rabbit character once created by Walt Disney and star of several silent films. It was Disney's loss of the exclusive rights to make Oswald cartoons that inspired him to jealousy guard the control over his next character creation, Mickey Mouse.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at 8PM at Oddball Fillms. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117. 

WHY: This week David Bordwell wrote a lovely tribute to the 16mm film format and its history over the years. It read much like a euology. And perhaps it is, in a way. But although 16mm appears to be in its final, waning years as a format for working with as a medium of creation, there are still enormous quantities of 16mm film reels in archives and personal collections around the world. Leaving aside the many works natively created in this format, reduction prints are also the only method of reasonably accessing vast categories of films originally made in 35mm in a physical (as opposed to digital, or just as frequently, non-existent) form. So while I may have sounded dismissive when mentioning a 16mm print of Blood Money earlier this week, I was in fact thrilled to get any kind of chance to see that singular film, despite its less-than-perfect presentation.

16mm prints from the Oddball collection are also often less-than-perfect as well, but I've seen quite a few that were simply lustrous. And I always treasure a mediocre print viewing than a mediocre digital viewing; I doubt much of the Oddball collection is available on Blu-Ray or even good DVDs (the DVD versions of the Eames films screening there tomorrow night are adequate, but in my view still far inferior to watching 16mm prints). The Egg Cracker Suite was produced in 35mm but the odds of seeing it projected that way in your or my lifetime seems slim at best. I hope it's a good print, but I'll be glad just to see it one way or another.

HOW: The Egg Cracker Suite screens as part of a full 16mm program of delectables, also including industrial training films like Rush Hour Service and breakfast-themed excerpts from The Ipcress File, a feature film made by Sidney J. Furie, whose The Entity blew minds at the Castro Theatre last Friday.

For Scent-imental Reasons (1949)

WHO: Directed by Chuck Jones, this is one of two Academy-Award-winning films he made in 1949. Although both awards went to his producer Edward Selzer, Jones remains the only director to have made films that have won Oscars in both the animated short category and the documentary short category during the same year.

WHAT: This is the first cartoon of the long-running series of Pepé Le Pew shorts produced at the Warner Brothers studio in which Pepé's character is fully-developed. In his first two appearances (Odor-Able Kitty and Scent-imental Over You) the passionate polecat's name is not Pepé but "Stinky", and in the former cartoon is in fact revealed at the end to be an American-accented philanderer named Henry only trying on a Charles Boyer impression. (This is probably the most zoologically logical explanation for a skunk to have a French accent; the Mephitidae family has no representatives native to Europe, although it occurs to me that he could in fact be a Québécois). An unnamed, nonverbal skunk with a Pepé-esque appearance also makes a cameo in the 1946 Fair And Worm-er, and is the focus of the 1948 Art Davis-directed cartoon Odor Of The Day, in which he acts totally uncharacteristically (read: unlasciviously). For Scent-imental Reasons begins a string of thirteen cartoons made over an equal number of years, all but one (Really Scent) directed by Jones, in which the skunk is definitely French, definitely attracted to female cats with white stripes painted down their backs, and definitely full of himself. In other words, definitely Pepé.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at 8PM at Oddball Fillms. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117. 

WHY: Oddball is the only screening local venue I can think of, other than perhaps the Paramount, which plays Warner Brothers cartoons on a semi-regular basis. Although I hope some Frisco Bay programmer decides to organize a 35mm screening of Chuck Jones films to coincide with the Cartoon Art Museum's current exhibition of static art produced by the most famous member of the Termite Terrace team of directors, I'll take what I can get, and for now, this appears to be the only opportunity to see a Jones film projected on film in the near future.

HOW: Oddball usually screens only 16mm prints from its own collection. For Scent-imental Reasons screens on a program of Oscar-nominated films and clips from past Oscar ceremonies, also including Saul Bass's Why Man Creates, Mel Brooks's The Critic, Isaac Hayes performing the "Theme From Shaft" at the 1972 ceremony, and an excerpt from one of that year's strangest winners, The Hellstrom Chronicle, which I saw in full at Oddball last December and called an "Eco-malthusian approach to arthropods as scientifically suspect as creationism but WAY more fun". I can't believe it actually won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. 

The Two Eyes Of Brian Darr

Thanks for indulging my annual round-up of Frisco Bay cinephiles' favorite repertory/revival screenings of 2012. I hope you've enjoyed reading what I've posted here so far. The full list of contributions can be found here. 

I'm not quite done; this year, I'd asked respondents to name one brand-new film that they saw in a local venue in 2012, in which something about the venue conspired with the film to make for a particularly memorable and enjoyable experience. Not every contributor responded to this request, and  I decided to collect all the responses to this question into a single post, which I'll be putting up soon. 

But for now, here is my own list of ten favorite films from our cinematic past, revived on Frisco Bay cinema screens in 2012, in the order I saw them:

Underworld USA
2012 started off like gangbusters, literally, with the 10th Annual Noir City festival at the Castro Theatre, and particularly with this late (1961; some would say post-) noir by the iconoclastic Hollywood figure Sam Fuller. It immediately became my new favorite Fuller film, as it expresses both his cynical view of the connections between American crime and business, and his tabloid-headline expressionist approach to cinematic language extremely authentically. I now have the perfect starting recommendation for anyone wanting to explore the black-and-white precursors to Scorsese's & Coppola's gangland epics.

Four Nights Of A Dreamer
At the Pacific Film Archive's near-complete Robert Bresson retrospective I was able to plug several of the most yawning gaps in my experience with the French filmmaker. Undoubtedly, his films are challenging and I must admit I've in the past had better luck approaching an initially satisfying comprehension of them in the home video arena, with its pause and rewind buttons, than in cinemas. But these films were made for theatres, and for the first time I finally felt I had a cinematic communion with a Bresson print, truly sensing myself on the right wavelength with the film's every move. Perhaps it's because this 1971 film is Bresson's most impressionist work, or perhaps because I was previously familiar with his source material (Dostoyevsky's White Nights.) At any rate, I'm especially likely to treasure this rare screening as Four Nights of a Dreamer is reputedly troubled with rights issues holding up a proper DVD release. 

Wagon Master
When Quentin Tarantino made recent comments about hating John Ford, both the man and the filmmaker, for his racism, I instantly thought of the Ford films which (unlike, say, Stagecoach), present a far more complicated picture of his racial attitudes than is often acknowledged. Consider Fort Apache, which illustrates the folly of the U.S. Cavalry treating Chiricahuas as nothing more than an enemy army, or The Searchers, in which John Wayne portrays a racist as a kind of victim of his own psychotic, narrow hatred of The Other. Having seen it as recently as March at the Stanford Theatre, I thought of Wagon Master as a vessel for Ford's most explicitly anti-racist statement of them all. The scene in which a Navajo (played by the great Jim Thorpe) is translated (by the late Harey Carey, Jr's character) to proclaim that white men are "all thieves", might not be so remarkable if it weren't for Ward Bond's sympathetic character's agreement with the sentiment. But race is only a part of what this grand, lyrical, often heartbreaking 1950 film is about. Its band of travelers, each holding diverse values and goals but all sharing in the hardships of the road, is a beautiful microcosm for the tolerance and compromise we must learn to cultivate to exist harmoniously in this world.

Napoléon
Insiders have been indicating for a couple years, that we are now seeing the final days of film-as-film screenings. Some people have suggested that the film reel might make a resurgence as did the vinyl record did even after tapes, compact discs and ultimately mp3s threatened to wipe it out. I'm not sure if that's possible, but if it's going to happen we may need to see more creative uses of the film projector in order to realize that its operator (the projectionist) can be an artist equivalent to a great DJ. 2012 was a big year for me to experience multi-projector performances, from seeing the cinePimps and (full disclosure: my girlfriend) Kerry Laitala at Shapeshiters in Oakland, to a dual-projector ephemera duel between Craig Baldwin and Stephen Parr at the Luggage Store, an event poignantly held on the day Andrew Sarris died. Though this face-off had me imagining a beguiling future in which curator, performer and auteur become fused into one role, even it couldn't hold a candle to the Silent Film Festival's Paramount Theatre presentation of (to my knowledge) the first film foray into multi-projector "performance" spectacle: the final reel or so of Abel Gance's Napoléon, which I wrote about here. Though the three projectionists involved in this event were performing an act of 85-year-old reproduction and not new creativity, the precision of their coordination is something any performer might aspire to if they want to truly set audience's eyes agog. 

Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
Too many of the locations for these "best of 2012" screenings sadly sit dormant already in 2013. New People/VIZ Cinema is one; the year saw the end of the San Francisco Film Society's experiment with turning it into a year-round screening venue. A week-long engagement of this delightful Eric Rohmer film was a real highlight of the year for me; the fact that it's gone unmentioned by other "I Only Have Two Eyes" contributors helps me understand that the state-of-the-art venue never was able to catch on as a repertory venue. Surely I'm not the only one who would consider this 1987 comedy about two young Frenchwomen with opposing but somehow complimentary backgrounds (made piece-by-piece while Rohmer was waiting for the right weather/light conditions for The Green Ray, which SFFS double-billed it with) to be among his high-water-marks, despite its episodic nature. Can't we consider the collections of A.A. Milne to be masterpieces? Mightn't The Martian Chronicles be as great a work as Fahrenheit 451? 

Land of the Pharaohs 
Here's where I really go out on a limb- or do I? I saw a lot of very great Howard Hawks films last year, thanks to hefty retrospectives at the Pacific Film Archive and the Stanford Theatre, but none made such a surprisingly strong impression as this film maudit did on the latter screen. It's the director's 1955 take on Ancient Egypt and the building of the Great Pyramid. I cannot help but wonder how many of the critics, historians, and cinephiles who continue to perpetuate its reputation as the one time the versatile Hawks took on a genre he couldn't handle, have seen it projected in 35mm on a big screen, as it was clearly made to be seen. Though the director was reportedly none-too-fond of it, his frequent screenwriter Leigh Brackett once went on record calling it one of Hawks's greatest films. Whether or not I'm willing to go quite that far on only a single viewing, I feel certain that seeing this visually stunning story of hubris and political machination unfold in Cinemascope above my eyes was one of my greatest film-watching experiences of the year.

Five Element Ninjas
"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film." I don't wholly endorse this quote by Werner Herzog, as I love Godard (on most days, more than I do Herzog), but I can't deny that I got even more pleasure and maybe even more intellectual stimulation from watching this 1982 Chang Cheh tale of vengeance for the first time at the Roxie than I did from rewatching Week End at the Castro earlier in the year. Chang's output is more uneven than Godard's but his best films, and this is one of them I reckon, are as excited about the possibilities of cinema (here he gets some very eerie effects out of fish-eyed pans, and has a simple but brilliant solution to emphasizing ninjas' skills at silence) and steeped in complicated codes (in this case numerology and Chinese-style alchemy) as any canonized art film. I hope hope hope that collector Dan Halsted makes very many future visits to town with more of his rare Hong Kong 35mm prints in hand.

La Cérémonie
Another screening of a brutal masterpiece by a director with the monogram CC. Here it's Claude Chabrol directing Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert to the hilt in a slow-boiling tale of (mostly) quiet class warfare in a French village. There's a methodicalness to Chabrol's depiction of wounded psyches in a feedback loop hurtling toward catastrophe that makes this 1995 film seem like a model for the clinical works of Michael Haneke or Bruno Dumont. But nothing I've seen from either of those mens' ouevres quite approaches what Chabrol is able to coax out of Bonnaire and Huppert here. Like many local cinephiles I frequently find Mick LaSalle infuriating, but I'm so glad his recent book publication created the excuse to play this as part of a Roxie (and Rafael) series of actress-centric French films.

Only Yesterday
It was with great pleasure and a bit of wistfulness that I took nearly-full advantage of the Studio Ghibli series that played this fall at Landmark's Bridge and California Theatres, catching up with all the films that I'd never seen before (except one, My Neighbors the Yamadas) and revisiting most of those I that had. The pleasure is obvious to any fan of Hayao Miyazaki and his cohort; nearly all of these films are wonderful, unique blasts of color in motion, with not-too-saccharine stories that stick with you for days and weeks and months after viewing, even when in such a near-marathon viewing situation. The wistfulness comes from the fact that the Bridge seemed already on its last legs as a viable Frisco Bay venue, and in fact announced its closure a couple months later, and that Berkeley's California Theatre was on the verge of decommissioning its 35mm projection equipment in favor of all-digital equipment shortly after the series ended. Also from the fact that I knew that with this series I no longer have any more unseen Miyazaki features to view for the first time (until his next one anyhow). But to mitigate this, this series turned me into a fan of fellow Ghibli director Isao Takahata (who also has an upcoming film), largely on the basis of my admiration of his 1991 adaptation Only Yesterday, which I saw at the Bridge. As much as I love Miyazaki's fantasy mode, Takahata's realistic approach here is in some ways more impressive; he creates two totally distinct yet believable palettes with the lush rural setting of its lead character's personal awakening, and the more subdued watercolor-style of her extensive childhood memory flashbacks. He even bucked anime tradition in his voice casting, built around the decision to record dialogue before animating rather than post-dubbing as is Japan's animation norm. The result is a film reminiscent in beauty and theme of Kenji Mioguchi's lovely 1926 Song of Home.

Sonata For Pen, Brush and Ruler 
Last but not least, another kind of animation seen in a (less-sadly) decommissioned venue, the Exploratorium's McBean Theatre, a shiny-ceiling-ed dome inside the Palace of Fine Arts that hosted a wonderful array of screenings over that museum's long stay in that cavernous venue. The Exploratorium is gearing up to move to a new location on Pier 15, and promises to have a made-to-order screening space. But no matter how wonderful it is, I know I'll miss certain aspects of the old McBean, and I'm so thankful that the museum's Cinema Arts department hosted a short series of Canyon Cinema films during its last few months open, as a kind of goodbye. I was able to catch the first and third of these programs, and loved getting a chance to see rarely-shown pieces by Alan Berliner, Gary Beydler, Stan Vanderbeek, John Smith (whose films I also got to see at PFA in 2012) and more. But the most astonishing of these was in the December program: Barry Spinello's 1968 Sonata For Pen, Brush and Ruler. Spinello is a painter and experimental musician, but the 16mm film strip serves as his canvas and master-tape. I'd been impressed by a few of his later works before (one of them, Soundtrack, screens at the PFA shortly with the artist in attendance) but Sonata is so exhilaratingly expansive, so joyfully elaborate, and so recognizably the product of one artist's immense effort that I now have a clear favorite of his films. As he once wrote: "It is my brain, and for ten minutes I expect (I hope, if the film is successful) that the viewer's brain functions as my brain." I think it does.