Stalker (1979)

Screen capture from A Story of Film DVD, Music Box

WHO: Andrei Tarkovsky directed this, as well as contributing to the screenplay and production design. It was his last completed film to be made within the Soviet Union.

WHAT: Surely the most challenging film still impressively hanging on to a spot on the imdb's Top 250 list of films as ranked by users of the popular (and, for the most part, populist) movie website. It ranks 193 there, just behind The Best Years of Our Lives and ahead of Shutter Island, for what it's worth. The only other Tarkovsky film on the list is currently Solaris, barely clinging to the bottom at #250 for now. It's a film I waited years to see on the big screen, finally doing so in 2009 at SFMOMA. (It was worth the wait.) Since then at least one key collaborator on the film has died: Boris Strugatsky, who co-wrote the screenplay based on his and his brother Arkadiy's quite-different science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic. Stalker was rated among the top ten greatest by 39 critics and 14 film directors, placing it in the top 30 films on both the critics' and directors' 2012 Sight and Sound lists of all-time great films. And it is the subject of an unusual but very readable monograph by Geoff Dyer entitled Zona, also published in 2012. Though I'm not sure why Dyer feels it's important to diffuse accusations of being overly invested in The Art Film by describing how bored he was watching L'Avventura early in the book, he recovers and proceeds to provide intriguing anecdotes and insights. For instance, he talks about tracking down screenings of Stalker in whatever city he happened to be living in, reflecting on "the possibility of cinema as semipermanent pilgrimage site" in one of his footnotes that takes over the main body of the text:

That list of things and people I won't watch on TV does not stop at Top Gear and Jeremy Clarkson. It also includes....Stalker. One cannot watch Stalker on TV for the simple reason that the Zone is cinema; it does not even exist on telly. The prohibition extends beyond Stalker, to anything that has any cinematic value. It doesn't matter if the TV is HD: great cinema must be projected. It is the difference, as John Berger puts it, between watching the sky ('from where else would film stars come if not from a film sky?') and peering into a cupboard.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:30 PM.

WHY: There had been no 35mm presentations of Stalker in a Frisco Bay cinema between the 2009 SFMOMA screenings and this past Thursday, when it screened as part of the Pacific Film Archive's Tarkovsky retrospective. Perhaps this is why the screening sold out well in advance, and another screening (tonight's) added to the PFA's final week of showings at it current "temporary" (for the past 16+ years) space at 2575 Bancroft, before re-opening nearer to Shattuck Street early in 2016. For those of us who began frequenting the PFA after its move out of the Berkeley Art Museum basement in the late 1990s, this is a site of a great deal of nostalgia (to borrow another Tarkovsky title), and the place where we saw some of the greatest films we've ever seen, in some cases for the only time.

A sampling of distinguished guests who have graced this humble room might include Budd Boetticher, Donald Richie, Anthony Slide, Midori Sawato, Gus Van Sant, Sogo Ishii, Frederick Wiseman, Hedy Honigmann, Charles Burnett, Walter Murch, Michel Brault, Kim Longinotto, Clint Eastwood, Gunvor Nelson, Martin Reijtman, Kazuo Hara, Patricio Guzman, Phil Tippett, Mark Isham, Les Blank, Alex Cox, J. Hoberman, Kidlat Tahimik, Agnes Godard, Mati Diop, and Nino Kirtadze. Sadly I missed all of these events. But I did see Rob Nilsson, Guy Maddin, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Peter Kubelka, Kevin Brownlow, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Olivier Assayas, Lech Majewski, Terence Davies, Pedro Costa, Janet Bergstrom, Ernie Gehr, Lawrence Jordan, David Meltzer, Wilder Bentley II, Kelly Reichardt, Kerry Laitala (before I'd met her), Craig Baldwin, George and Mike Kuchar, Sam Pollard, Dave Kehr, Phil Solomon, Agnes Varda, Tony Buba, Sally Cruikshank, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Lana Gogoberidze, and J.P. Sniadecki talk about their (or in some cases, others') films, and had my perceptions of cinema changed in some small or large way by every single one of them. Not to mention stalwart pianist Judith Rosenberg and other musical accompanists that silent films have almost always been attended with over the years.

Though there is no guest expected at tonight's Stalker showing, the remainder of the week will feature daily appearances from Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice, who will be on hand to show each film in his small but powerful body of work since his 1973 masterpiece Spirit of the Beehive, showing Saturday, and perhaps if we're lucky, some of the films in the Erice Selects series concluding the PFA's final Bancroft screenings: Zero For Conduct (a free 35mm screening!), City Lights, Bicycle Thieves, The Kid, and my favorite of all of these, Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story. Just be aware that there is no BART service between San Francisco and the East Bay on August 1st and 2nd, and plan your transportation accordingly.

HOW: 35mm print

Christo's Valley Curtain (1973)

WHO: Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Ellen Giffard co-directed this.

WHAT: The first of six films the Maysles Brothers made documenting the creation of ambitious, if temporary, "environmental art" installations by Bulgarian-born visionary Christo and his artistic and matrimonial partner Jeanne-Claude, Christo's Valley Curtain is also at 28 minutes the shortest of these six films, and the only Maysles film to be nominated for an Academy Award. It documents the erection of a giant strip of orange fabric in a windswept valley in Colorado. Joe McElhaney writes in his top-notch book, Albert Maysles:

The film places great importance on the two remaining hours the workers have in which to get the curtain up before the winds change direction, thereby threatening not only the completion of the curtain but the lives of the workers. But time here is simply a question of deadlines to be faced -- a classical overcoming of obstacles, successfully achieved in all of these Christo and Jeanne-Claude films, which, with one exception, end on a note of triumph. These films return to a variation on the crisis structure of the Robert Drew films from which David and Albert Maysles had originally wanted to break away.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight as part of Oddball Films's 8PM Monumental Artscapes program, and will also screen during the week of May 8-14 (precise time/day to be announced) at the Vogue.

WHY: With the passing away of great filmmaker Albert Maysles earlier this month at the age of 88, an era of documentary production in America seems to have come to an end. The influential figure who, with his late brother David (as well as other collaborators) filmed such landmark non-fiction works as Salesman and Grey Gardens is deserving of as many cinematic tributes as can be thought up, especially in the Frisco Bay area, at the outskirts of which at least two of his greatest achievements were filmed (Gimme Shelter, portraying a Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway on the Eastern edge of Alameda county between Livermore and Tracy, and Running Fence, the second Christo/Jeanne-Claude film, set at the border of Marin and Sonoma counties.)

Tonight's Oddball Films show juxtaposes Christo's Valley Curtain with Robert Smithson's 1970 film of his own Spiral Jetty in Utah's Great Salt Lake, as well as films and footage focusing on artists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Claes Oldenburg and G. Augustine Lynas, providing an opportunity to contrast the Maysles documentary approach against other filmmakers'. A more jarring juxtaposition may be achieved by the opening double-bill in the Castro Theatre's just-announced April calendar, which pairs the Maysles' (and Ellen Hovde's and Muffie Meyer's) Grey Gardens with a 35mm print of the notorious John Waters gross-out Pink Flamingos. No fooling!

Further down on the horizon, details are just starting to come out about a week-long Maysles tribute at Frisco's forgotten single-screen cinema the Vogue, on May 8th-14th. Sixteen films co-directed by Albert Maysles will be collected together, presented by luminary special guests including (but perhaps not limited to) Jon Else, Joan Churchill, Stephen Lighthill, and (by Skype) D. A. Pennebaker and Susan Froemke. All of the aforementioned Maysles films will screen at least once during the festival, as well as Meet Marlon Brando on May 8th, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! on May 9th & 14th, and more Christo/Jeanne-Claude films The Gates May 10th and both Islands and Umbrellas on May 12th. More information is forthcoming. The festival is the brainchild of Brisbane documentarian David L. Brown, who I suspect was involved in the film screening at this "Sneak Preview" tribute to another non-fiction legend, Les Blank at the Sebastapol Documentary Film Festival tomorrow night.

HOW: Tonight's Oddball screening will be all 16mm; I'm told Christo's Valley Curtain is a particularly lovely print. The May festival's formats are as yet unspecified, although I would bet on digital knowing how infrequently the Vogue has screened celluloid in the last couple of years.

Broncho Billy's Wild Ride (1914)

Publicity photograph provided by Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

WHO: Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson directed and starred in this.

WHAT: A short film featuring Anderson, Marguerite Clayton, True Boardman and a number of local schoolchildren from Niles, California where Anderson's studio was located. David Kiehn's page-turner of a history book, Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company, indicates that part of the story took as inspiration a real-life injury that would haunt Anderson well into his retirement. That book's short synopsis of the plot is as follows: "Billy, an outlaw on trial, escapes from court, but is caught after he saves the judge's daughter on a runaway horse."

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, at 7:30PM.

WHY: I wrote about Niles in a PressPlay/Indiewire article a few years ago, that has for some reason unknown to me be taken down:

Niles nestles against the hills of Fremont, California, 30 miles east of San Francisco and 350 miles north of Los Angeles. Filled with antique shops and humble residences, it’s a town steeped in motion picture history. The first cowboy movie star, G.A. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, and Charlie Chaplin were among those who encamped there to shoot pictures in the mid-1910s, before Hollywood became THE go-to site in California for filmmaking, 

Now, nearly a hundred years later, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum keeps the past alive with weekly Saturday evening screenings of silent movies backed by live musical accompaniments. It’s one of the few public venues where one can regularly see 16mm and 35mm prints of all kinds of American and occasionally European silents.

Tonight's Niles screening is the 500th Saturday night silent film show scheduled at the Museum's Edison Theatre since it was refurbished and reopened in 2005. 51 Saturdays per year (the only annual week off is the San Francisco Silent Film Festival weekend), film prints show on a very regular basis. Upcoming 16mm feature-film shows include The Lost World November 29th, and in December, parts 1 & 2 of Fritz Lang's epic Spiders (it's apparently the season for Lang's silent epics as the Castro shows Metropolis tonight digitally and the Berkeley Underground Film Society brings Die Nibelungen in two parts tonight and tomorrow), and finally for 2014, the delightful Colleen Moore film I dragged my family to the last time a Niles Saturday show fell on Christmas, Ella Cinders.

But one-reel and two-reel films that were the specialty of a studio like the one in Niles a hundred years ago, and programs made up of these are particularly popular today. Every month the museum programs at least one Saturday of silent comedy (November 22 is Chaplin in The Rink, Buster Keaton in The Boat, the Thanksgiving classic Pass the Gravy and Laurel & Hardy in Leave 'Em Laughing, while December brings Chaplin's Easy Street, Keaton's The High Sign and a pair of Christmas-themed shorts Their Ain't No Santa Claus and the anarchic masterpiece Big Business.) Tonight's program is an extra-special shorts program made up entirely of films shot in Niles, most around 100 years ago, including, in addition to Broncho Billy's Wild Ride, Arthur Mackley's The Prospector, the Snakeville Comedy Versus Sledge Hammers, and the first Chaplin film made entirely in the town back in 1915, The Champion.

The exception to the 100-years-ago rule is Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret, a brand-new silent Western shot in Niles with a genuine Bell & Howell 2709 hand-cranked camera (formerly used by John Korty) and starring Christopher Green, Bruce Cates, former silent-era child star Diana Serra Cary, and a slew of Western-garbed re-enactors. This film has screened in workprints and other preliminary versions before, but tonight is the official premiere of the finalized version at the Edison!

Tomorrow the Edison will host a screening of a independently-produced talking picture made in Niles in 2007. From the museum's press release:  

Weekend King is a romantic comedy filmed in Niles about a California dot-commer who buys a bankrupt town in rural Utah. Rupert is rich, but awkward, friendless, and loveless. In a quest to overcome his loneliness, Rupert expects to lord over the New Spring Utah populace, but ends up contending with people who don't buy into his newly invented confidence. But grappling with his bad investment turns out to be the key for finally finding friendship and love. See local characters in cameos in the local haunts including Joe's Corner, the Vine Cafe, the Mudpuddle Shop, and Belvoir Springs Hotel.

Before both days' screenings, there will be a free Walking Tour of Niles. This 75-minute tour will take you around downtown Niles and its neighborhoods, telling you tales of times gone by including film locations for the films being shown during the movie weekend. Nationally-recognized film historian David Kiehn, who is the film museum's resident expert on the Essanay film company, also knows his stuff about local buildings and historic sites. His walking tours always attract a crowd. This event is free but donations are gladly accepted.

HOW: All of tonight's films screen in 35mm prints with live music by Frederick Hodges.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

WHO: Humphrey Bogart stars in this.

WHAT: If you go to the corner of Bush Street and Burritt Alley, you'll find a plaque that reads: "On approximately this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O'Shaunghnessy". It must be the only plaque in San Francisco that memorializes not a historical event, but a key moment in fiction, namely the Dashiell Hammett detective novel template known as The Maltese Falcon. At least, the only one that bears no indication of its fictionhood, or that it constitutes a "spoiler" for anyone who might not have read the book or watched one of the movie versions made from it. Such as the 1941 version written and directed by John Huston.

Other versions (the 1931 one sometimes called Dangerous Female, or the 1936 Satan Met a Lady) have their points of interest, but the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is the one that became a cultural sensation and launched (with High Sierra) Humphrey Bogart's career as a leading man, Huston's as a director, and film noir as a powerful cinematic thread through the 1940s, 50s and beyond. San Francisco movie lovers are proud that their city plays such a key role in such a key film in such a key genre of Hollywood filmmaking, even if they know that apart from a few library-footage shots of the Bay Bridge and the city skyline, Huston's film does not feature actual footage of their city. As Nicola Balkind wrote in the recently-published book World Film Locations: San Francisco:

The camera descends and we are introduced to an office announcing 'SPADE AND ARCHER' where Sam Spade is working as the Bay Bridge gleams through a large window. The office interior was shot in LA but the location is estimated to be 111 Sutter Street at the corner of Montgomery in the heart of the Financial District - not far from neo-noir's favorite location: Chinatown. Although The Maltese Falcon was made in Hollywood, we're never allowed to forget it is set in San Francisco.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens daily at the Stanford Theatre at 5:40 and 9:25.

WHY: World Film Locations: San Francisco is starting to get a few reviews, such as this one in the Bay Area Reporter. It's available online and at stores such as City Lights, Moe's and even the DeYoung Museum gift shop. I'm proud to have contributed an essay on film noir in the city for the book, in which I quickly trace film noir history from Hammett and Huston to Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, to the post-war vogue for on-location shooting and into the ways noir was transformed in the mid-to-late fifties and ultimately found expression in the still-vibrant neo-noir genre.

That's just two pages of the book's 1928, however, most of which are devoted to individual films from the silent era to relatively recent history (Steven Soderbergh's 2011 Contagion being the most current entry). Forty-six films are matched with forty-six of their most iconic San Francisco locations and presented fully-illustrated and even mapped. The pages for Greed show us the Cliff House in 1924 and today, while The Conversation is represented by One Maritime Plaza and Raiders of the Lost Ark is an excuse to show us City Hall, for example. 

San Francisco moviegoers can hardly get enough of seeing our own city on cinema screens, and there are many opportunities to do so in the coming months. The Stanford's current "Best of Bogart and Film Noir Classics" series gives us one almost every weekend in late September and October. After The Maltese Falcon this week, the venue brings Out of the Past (with the Caribbean-set To Have and Have Not) September 26-29, and Dark Passage (Oct. 10-13 with The Blue Dahlia), The Lady From Shanghai (Oct. 24-27 with Key Largo) and The Caine Mutiny (Oct. 31-Nov. 3 with Touch of Evil) each have their own entries in World Film Locations: San Francisco as well.

Two of the three features playing at Oakland's Paramount Theatre as part of its fall movie classics series are also featured in the book: Bullitt, which screens this Friday, and All About Eve, which was set in New York and Connecticut but had a key scene shot at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, screens there October 15th. (The third Paramount movie classic this fall is Huston and Bogart's Uganda-shot adventure film The African Queen on November 18th). Both of the films screening at the Pacific Film Archive's free outdoor movie series in the coming weeks also get WFL:SF entries: Harold and Maude and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And Vertigo (of course also in the book) screens November 1st at Davies Symphony Hall, with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra performing Bernard Herrmann's incredible musical score live.

Perhaps the most unexpected upcoming showcase of Frisco Bay films comes courtesy the San Francisco Film Society, which is hosting at New People Cinema October 18-20 an event called Zurich/SF, which is a cinematic celebration of the ten-year anniversary of San Francisco's sister-city partnership with Switzerland's largest city. This mini-festival collaborates with the Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective coming to the PFA, YBCA and Roxie this fall to plug the Autumn's German-language cinematic gap caused by the Berlin & Beyond festival's move back to a January timeslot after a few years having a go in the Fall, by showing films such as Kurt Früh's rarely-seen The Fall and Andrea Štaka's Fraulein (both in 35mm) as well as five other films by Swiss filmmakers. But it also brings four showings of films in which San Francisco is more than mere backdrop to action but a major element of character and theme. Of these, The Conversation and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (the latter of which will screen on 35mm) merit entries in WFL:SF, while Medicine For Melancholy is discussed in one of the other contextualizing essays in the book. As for 1970s buddy-cop oddity Freebie and the Bean, it will have to wait and see if sales on the book merit a sequel.

HOW: The Maltese Falcon screens on a 35mm double bill with Casablanca.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

WHO: Composer John Williams is, as far as I'm concerned, the most crucial creative contributor to this film.

WHAT: Everyone knows this film. But did you know that an important scene in this film was shot (though not set) in San Francisco, with both Harrison Ford and Karen Allen filmed on location in a familiar SF environment? No, I'm not talking about the brief, actorless shot of the Golden Gate Bridge represented by the screen capture above. Hint: it's a location shared by Gus Van Sant's biopic Milk.

I thought I was a pretty eagle-eyed spotter of my city in films, and had even accepted the task of writing a short essay on the subject in the book World Film Locations: San Francisco, which is newly available for purchase at finer Frisco Bay stores including City Lights and Moe's. But it wasn't until I opened my copy of the book that I realized the San Francisco connection to Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

The format of the World Film Locations series (of which there are more than twenty published so far) is that each book features about forty-five individual scenes from about forty-five different movies, each highlighting one of about forty-five different locations in the city. Most of the featured films are better known for their San Francisco-ness than Raiders of the Lost Ark but I was glad to learn about it and other unexpected entries among the selections. Now I want to revisit the film again, as it's been years since I've seen it in its entirety.

WHERE/WHEN: This morning at the Balboa Theatre only at 10:00 AM.

WHY: George Lucas has long been one of the foremost proponents of digital production and presentation, so it's no surprise that his movies are among those no longer available in 35mm distribution prints. As more and more titles fall into this category it leaves a neighborhood theatre like the Balboa with the option of screening a Blu-Ray or nothing at all. I've heard rumors that some companies (Disney and Fox were mentioned) are becoming reluctant to allow their library to be screened via Blu-Ray in cinemas, meaning only theatres with DCP capability can host showings of their titles. 

Thus the Balboa is holding what I believe to be the first "go digital or go dark"  kickstarter campaign to hit San Francisco. These crowd-funding appeals for funds to purchase new DCP-level projection equipment have been spreading across the nation in 2012 and 2013, thanks to major studio threats to make it impossible for a commercial theatre to legally screen any of their properties in formats other than DCP. The closest-to-home theatre to attempt one of these campaigns before the Balboa was the Rio Vista, a Quonset hut cinema up on the Russian River Noeth if Frisco Bay. Their campaign was successful, and it's looking pretty good for the Balboa too, as it's about halfway to its goal for bringing DCP to one of its two theatres, with 40 days left in the campaign. 

Meanwhile the venue is showing, along with 35mm prints of two of the only mainstream releases available that way (the Butler and Elysium), less-than-DCP quality digital screenings of all three 1980s Indiana Jones movies on successive Saturdays in August, and a documentary on VHS tape collectors that was reviewed by Cheryl Eddy in this week's Bay Guardian.

Finally, for fans of Lucas and John Williams and Harrison Ford and digital projection, it's just been announced that the Mill Valley Film Festival will screen Return of the Jedi at the Corte Madera Cinema October 7th. Beside Still Waters is the only other announced festival title so far; it plays October 12th.

HOW: Raiders of the Lost Ark screens as a Blu-Ray projection. A free popcorn and drink are included in the $10 ticket price.

Godzilla (1954)

WHO: Eiji Tsuburaya was the mastermind behind the visual effects in this film.

WHAT: The biggest movie ever produced in Japan in 1954 (taking that crown from the just-released Seven Samurai, another film featuring actor Takeshi Shimura and produced at the Toho studio under production chief Iwao Mori), the original Godzilla was like no film made before it. It's also like no Godzilla film made since; for one it's the only film in the 28-entry series in which Godzilla is the lone monster star; all subsequent productions faced him off against another kaiju creation like Mothra or Rodan or King Ghidorah or all of the above at once. It's also the only Godzilla film to feature the beautiful black-and-white compositional creations of cinematographer Masao Tamai, who shot so many masterpieces for the great director Mikio Naruse in the 1950s. 

But the most lasting achievements of the film can be put at the feet of effects wizard Tsuburaya, the subject of one of the most attractive and informative books in my collection, by local author August Ragone. Here's an excerpt of what Ragone says about the first Godzilla movie:

Originally, Tsuburaya wanted to bring the nuclear nightmare to life using stop-motion effects, as King Kong had been made. When asked how long it would take to produce such effects, Tsuburaya told Mori it would take seven years to shoot all of the effects required by the screenplay, based on the current staff and infrastructure of at Toho. Of course this was out of the question--the film had to be in theatres by the end of the year. Tsuburaya decided that his department's considerable expertise in miniature building and visual effects photography could accommodate working with a live actor in a monster costume instead of using stop-motion techniques. 

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at Oakland's Paramount Theatre at 8:00.

WHY: I recently wrote about how my disappointment in Pacific Rim stoked a desire to see the original Japanese giant monster movie again, especially considering it's coming to the kaiju-sized Paramount screen for only five dollars. I won't repeat all of that again here, but I will stress that a full house at the theatre tonight would be a great signal that not only is Godzilla fandom alive and well here on Frisco Bay, but that there's considerable interest in seeing films from other countries enter the rotation of Paramount Movie Classics, which as long as I can remember have always been drawn from a rather narrow slate of Hollywood productions (the August 23rd showing of North By Northwest is at least the third showing of that film in that venue in the past ten years or so, for example.)

True diehards can make this a real kaiju weekend in Oakland, as the New Parkway is screening King Kong Vs. Godzilla Sunday August 11th, with an introduction by the aforementioned Japanese cinema expert Ragone.

Finally, it seems worth mentioning that the Pacific Film Archive's ongoing tribute to the Japanese animation world's most respected company, Studio Ghibli, includes a few films with giant monsters in them as well. The series has been popular enough that the venue has decided to add an extra screening of My Neighbor Totoro August 25th, I've never heard Totoro referred to as a kaiju, but he's got to be the only giant Japanese creature that might rival the Big G in international popularity.

HOW: Godzilla screens in its original Japanese-language version, via 35mm print from Rialto Pictures, and will be preceded by at least one cartoon, newsreel, and trailer, all also in 35mm.

Fog Over Frisco (1934)

WHO: Bette Davis stars in this, looking astonishingly young to anyone who has her performance in All About Eve, made sixteen years later (or even in Now Voyager, made eight years later) burned into their brains.

WHAT: Film historian William K. Everson called it the "fastest film ever made" and compared it favorably to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin as a screen textbook for film editing. But for viewers interested the history of San Francisco's depiction in Hollywood films, Fog Over Frisco takes on special significance. It's one of the very few big-studio productions of the 1930s that actually brought some of its cast (although not Davis, as far as I can tell) and crew to the City By The Bay in order to film sequences on location here.

There's a dynamic sequence in which a gaggle of reporters await Margaret Lindsay (who plays Davis's sister) outside her family's mansion in order to ambush her with their cameras. This is shot in Pacific Heights, right at the corner of Octavia and Washington, and you can clearly see Lafayette Park, Spreckels Mansion (pictured above, and currently resided in by novelist Danielle Steel) and other still-standing structures in the scene. The cable-car line on Washington Street, however, is no more.

Another scene in the film calls for a bridge- but since the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges had only just begun construction in 1933, the filmmakers utilized the Third Street Bridge (now known as the Lefty O'Doul Bridge) in China Basin- a neighborhood that has evidently changed its appearance far more than Pacific Heights has since 1934.

These sequences make Fog Over Frisco one of the most extensive on-location Hollywood film to use 1930s-era San Francisco that I've ever come across. Films like Ladies They Talk About (1933), Barbary Coast (1935), San Francisco (1936) and Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) for instance,  use stock photography of the city or none at all, evoking San Francisco entirely through the construction of Hollywood sets. It's a very different story from that of the 1920s, when films like Moran of the Lady Letty (1922) and Greed (1924) were just a few of the productions able to shoot extensively in town (without sound crews, of course), or of the 1940s (particularly the post-World War II era) when developments in cameras and film stocks helped usher in a vogue for location photography in this city that has essentially never looked back. But any student of history wants to fill gaps in the record however possible, so a chance to see what 1930s Frisco was like, through the lens of a First National production, is all the more precious.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight and tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre at 6:10 and 9:05, and the West Portal Branch of the San Francisco Public Library at 6:30 PM on July 23rd.

WHY: I'm thinking a lot about San Francisco-shot films this week because I just received an advance copy of World Film Locations: San Francisco, a book tracing the history of San Francisco moviemaking in a fun and informative way. I'm proud to have been able to contribute to this handsome volume packed with maps, images, and short write-ups on forty-six of the most notable films made in my hometown, each represented by a different scene and location. There are also six essays contextualizing certain recurring trends (the Golden Gate Bridge, car chases) and filmmakers (Hitchcock, Eastwood) involved in shooting here, and a seventh that discusses the current reigning local favorite filmmaker (at least according to a plurality of SF Bay Guardian readers), Peaches Christ.

I've mentioned here before (perhaps too frequently) that my contribution was one of these contextualizing essays, in my case on the topic of film noir in the 1940s and 50s. Though I had free reign to approach this topic how I liked, for which I graciously thank editor Scott Jordan Harris. I had no input in the rest of the book, including the selection of the 46 featured and mapped titles. Of course there are some omissions I'd have stumped for if it had I been involved in that part of the process, but that's a natural reaction any movie fan would feel. Perhaps there can be a sequel if this edition is a success- I think it will be. Overall the book does a great job in bringing together the famous films everyone around the world associates with this city, with a healthy dose of unexpected surprises.

So no, Fog Over Frisco is not featured in the book, but that doesn't mean Spreckels Mansion isn't. It gets its own two-page spread as the chosen location from George Sidney's 1957 musical Pal Joey, starring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak. I don't want to give away too much about the contents of an unpublished book yet, but I will note that nine of the book's forty-six featured films are planned to screen for free this month at San Francisco Public Library branch locations as part of a twenty-title SF Library Film Festival. (To further narrow a few guesses, I'll hint that two of the three of these titles screening Thursdays at the Main Library are in the book).

HOW: At the West Portal Library, Fog Over Frisco will screen via projected DVD. At the Stanford, it screens on a 35mm double-bill with the Of Human Bondage, the career-defining Davis role that was filmed just before, and released just after, the filming of Fog Over Frisco.

The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)

WHO: David Bowie stars, Buck Henry (pictured), Candy Clark and Rip Torn support, and Nicolas Roeg directs.

WHAT: This non-escapist science fiction film was Bowie's first role as an actor, and may be the most delicate of Roeg's works. Whether you find it an entrancing masterpiece or a pretentious bore may depend largely on your circumstances when seeing it; I thought it was pretty close to the latter category upon my first viewing nearly twenty years ago, but that was a version cut down by twenty minutes. If you think it's paradoxical to think of a longer cut of a film as better-paced than a shorter cut, think of the endless examples where it is (you may not agree with everything on this list but then again you might).

One fan of the film, at least of an aspect of the film central to his own cinematic interests, was activist and film historian Vito Russo, who throughout the 1980s frequently cited it as one the few examples of commercial cinema to depict a gay character in a way that was neither stigmatizing nor patronizing. He wrote in his chapter on the 1970s in The Celluloid Closet: 

Homosexuality was almost never incidental or second nature to a screen character; after all, sexuality was always the reason for using a gay character in the first place. In fact, except for the hitchhiking funny lesbian ecology freaks (Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil) whom Karen Black and Jack Nicholson pick up in Five Easy Pieces (1970), Buck Henry's incidentally gay lawyer to Davdi Bowie's alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) and Robert Altman's unobtrusively integrated, happy lesbian couple (Heather MacRae and Tomi-Lee Bradley) in A Perfect Couple (1979), American cinema was unable to portray gay characters without their being sex-obsessed or sex-defined.

The fact that The Man Who Fell To Earth was actually a British-produced film that happened to be filmed and released in the United States makes his comment all the more damning to Hollywood portrayals of the era.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:00.

WHY: Though the PFA's recurring A Theatre Near You programming was conceived of to bring new restorations and art-cinema releases that bypassed the dwindling East Bay arthouse screens during recent commercial releases, and indeed this Saturday's screening of Buñuel's Tristana (on DCP rather than Blu-Ray as when it played in San Francisco in January) fits this bill, it seems the philosophy behind the "series" (which I've sometimes called a "non-series" due to its eclecticism) seems to have shifted somewhat. Now it seems to be more of a catch basin for any film that hasn't been able to be fit into any other recent PFA series (like the ongoing Studio Ghibli and Agnès Godard sets or the upcoming programs devoted to Eastern European classics and Raoul Walsh) but would likely appeal to PFA audiences. Which is fine. It means films like The Man Who Fell To Earth and the Mill and the Cross, both of which screened down the hill at the Shattuck in the Fall of 2011, have another excuse to unspool in 35mm. 

Though tonight's screening probably indicates that no Nicolas Roeg retrospective is planned for the PFA anytime soon (might I suggest he's a tad overdue for one?), later this year the venue will be hosting at least three more retrospectives devoted to great auteurs of the 1970s. Last month I mentioned that William Friedkin is expected in town for an (at least partially) in-person retrospective in September. Since then I've received a fundraising letter from the institution that tipped off a couple more: one for Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose last PFA retro was almost six years ago and very incomplete) and one for Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which I hear will include his entire filmography, and will be mirrored in San Francisco by complimentary Fassbinder screenings at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Roxie Cinema this Fall (this is confirmed by a note at the bottom of the latter's summer calendar, in case you haven't been eagle-eyed to catch it already.)

Friedkin. Pasolini. Fassbinder. All three factor into Russo's The Celluloid Closet, but only Friedkin gets more of a mention than The Man Who Fell To Earth does. Russo has frequently been criticized for not factoring the work of gay European auteurs into his thesis about the inadequacy of cinema to provide images of gay and lesbian characters that queer and queer-friendly audiences could be proud of. Such criticism seem oblivious to the fact that, as Michael Schiavi points out, The Celluloid Closet was in fact a reaction against a previous text about homosexual portrayals in cinema, Parket Tyler's Screening The Sexes, which looked more closely at examples from the avant-garde and the European "art cinema" tradition than it did the Hollywood Russo as more interested in for multiple reasons.

Friedkin, on the other hand, was discussed extensively by Russo, thanks to two particular films in his ouevre: The Boys In The Band and Cruising, which bookended the 1970s and in a way defined the decade vis-a-vis Hollywood's role in the national conversations about gays in that era, at least according to Russo's persuasive telling of it. For my part I've never seen The Boys In The Band and hope it's among the films the PFA brings as part of its Friedkin retro. I have seen the more controversial Cruising, and while it's probably my least favorite of the director's films, that doesn't make it not worth watching, or revisiting (it will be part of the PFA series in the fall, I'm told).

I'm getting around to the fact that the twin shadows of Russo and Cruising loom over the so-called "Cannes  of gay film festivals" (a title surely no less applicable even after last month's Cannes victory for a lesbian-themed film entitled Blue Is The Warmest Color), which begins tonight: Frameline. Russo because his always does; he was in 1986 the first recipient of the Frameline Award (this year going to Jamie Babbit) was the subject of last year's festival-opening documentary Vito, and because to this day there is probably no greater inspiration to LGBT filmmaking than the groundwork he laid with The Celluloid Closet. Vito's director Jeffrey Schwartz screens his new biographical doc I Am Divine (about the John Waters actor fetiche, naturally) at the Castro this Sunday afternoon.

Later that night the same venue will play host to Interior. Leather Bar., Travis Mathews & James Franco's exploration of the Cruising mythology, which apparently attempts to imagine what Friedkin's cutting-room floor may have gathered during the editing of that film to avoid an 'X' rating. And you thought Cruising was provocative?

I'll have more to say about Frameline over the next few days (here's my previous post from when the line-up was announced), but for now, I'm off to the PFA to see The Man Who Feel To Earth.

HOW: 35mm print of the full 140-minute version.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

WHO: Robert Altman directed this.

WHAT: Smack dab in the middle of Altman's unbeatable string of truly great films that ran from Brewster McCloud in 1970 to Nashville in 1975 (and that perhaps extended even longer on both ends for people who like MASH and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson a bit more than I do) is his version of Raymond Chandler, the missing link between (for instance) Murder, My Sweet and The Big Lebowski. It's been far too long since I've last seen it, though I've read a lot of writing about it in the meantime, including a great take by James Naremore, from whom I shall now quote:

The underlying concept is intriguing: Elliot Gould is intentionally miscast as Philip Marlowe, and the setting is updated to contemporary, dope-crazed Los Angeles, where the private eye becomes a ridiculous anachronism.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Phyllis Wattis Theatre at the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, at 7:00.

WHY: With SFMOMA shutting its revolving doors for an extensive remodeling project in a week and a half, the Wattis, one of the key venues for film projection in San Francisco, will be out of commission for more than two years. It's hard to think of a more aptly-titled film to mark tonight's final 35mm projection at the museum before the projectors are to be removed.

The good news is that tonight's "long goodbye" is really a "see you later," because the projectors are just going into storage for the extensive construction period, and are expected to be re-installed in time for the museum's reopening in early 2016. And when they are, they may get used more frequently than ever, as part of the museum makeover is the addition of a separate entrance to the theatre from the outside, so that screenings will be able to happen at times when the museum galleries are closed. Which means the Wattis, previously been limited to Thursday evening and daytime screenings, will have the flexibility to hold evening programs more than once a week upon reopening. So while a piece of the Frisco Bay specialty film-screening puzzle will be missed for a while, it has the potential to come back with more passion and power than ever before.

If you've been immersed in the Roxie's classic noir series (which ends tonight with a double-bill of Criss Cross and The Crooked Way) over the past two weeks, The Long Goodbye may be a good way to ease back into the modern world with a merely forty-year-old detective film rather than the sixty- or eighty-year-old films that made up the bulk of that series.

And if you want to see another Altman film on the big screen soon, try the Balboa Theatre, which will screen Popeye on June 8th as part of a weekly Saturday matinee series of kid-friendly films, that started last week.

HOW: 35mm print

Shakedown (1950)

WHO: Joe Pevney's final credit as an actor (in a small role), and his first as a director.

WHAT: I've mentioned its imminent publishing before, but I've just noticed that a book I contributed to, World Film Locations: San Francisco, is now available for pre-order through Powell's and Amazon. My contribution is an essay tracing the special relationship between San Francisco and the cycle of 1940s & 50s noir produced by Hollywood, frequently shot on location right here in the city.

I had a very pleasant time researching this essay by watching and re-watching dozens of Frisco Bay noirs. I used Nathaniel Rich's 2005 San Francisco Noir as a starting point but also found quite a few titles not mentioned, much less profiled, in his book. It's a wonderful publication, but it contains certain errors of omission. The most glaring, to me, concerns Shakedown, which Rich lumps in with Undercurrent and Blonde Ice as films that "feature no shots of the city nor do they even pretend to be set in any actual San Francisco locations. They rely on flat backdrops, soundstages, and stock footage to create an ersatz San Francisco."

I have to wonder if Rich was ever even able to see a decent copy of Shakedown before writing this. I remembered (from a 2009 Noir City screening) that it had quite a rich cross-section of real city views, not simply grabbed by a second unit but integrated into scenes with the principal cast (Howard Duff, Brian Donlevy, Anne Vernon, etc.) who surely were here to shoot at least some of their scenes. Re-watching it via an exceedingly poor copy (most likely a bootleg from a bad 16mm print, as there has never been a commercial home video release of this title) at a library study center, I could barely make out most of these locations, but the film's sordid tale of an overeager photojournalist fascinated by money and power still sucked me into its grip. I'm certain that this is one of the best noirs ever made in this city, and it's a mystery why it's become a practically-forgotten title.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie at 8:00.

WHY: This rare screening comes at an opportune time. For one, with Star Trek Into Darkness as the new movie of the moment, it's worth noting that Shakedown director Pevney was one of the key directors of the original Star Trek episodes, and the one who suggested bringing in Walter Koenig (with whom he'd made an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents) to play Chekov.

But more importantly, Elliot Lavine's ongoing I Wake Up Dreaming series includes not just this one Pevney film but also his 1955 Female on the Beach, which screens this Sunday.  I've been wanting to see that Joan Crawford starrer for a while now, and I think seeing Shakedown again first will provide the perfect warm-up.

HOW: On a double-bill with William Castle's Undertow, both screened via 35mm prints.

Helsinki, Forever (2008)

 

WHO: Peter Von Bagh made this.

WHAT: I have not seen this film, so let me quote from a short piece by Jonathan Rosenbaum:

a lovely city symphony which is also a history of Helsinki (and incidentally, Finland, Finnish cinema, and Finnish pop music) recounted with film clips and paintings

Sounds great, and perhaps not so dissimilar from Thom Andersen's amazing 2003 visual essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, which argues a history of that city through clips from fiction films shot there. And it turns out this comparison has been made before by writers who have seen both works.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screening this afternoon at 3:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: First of all, the subject of the film sounds just up my alley and makes me think I'll be trying to track down a copy of World Film Locations: Helsinki soon after the screening. Which reminds me to mention that the volume in that series of books that I contributed an essay to, World Film Locations: San Francisco, is now available for pre-order.

But the occasion of the screening would make me want to attend even if the film didn't sound as interesting to me as it does. Director Von Bagh will be on hand for the show, as he is receiving the Mel Novikoff Award for work that has "has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema"- an award that has gone to critics like Manny Farber and Roger Ebert, archivists like Kevin Brownlow and Serge Bromberg, and programmers like Bruce Goldstein and Anita Monga. Von Bagh is not only a filmmaker but a historian and the director of the Midnight Sun Film Festival held in Sodankylä, Lapland at the time of summer each year when night never falls above the arctic circle, making the inside of a cinema the darkest place around 24 hours a day.

I don't know when I first heard rumor of this festival, but read more about it in Kenneth Turan's book Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made, which immediately shot it to the top tier of my list of festivals I dream of attending one day. Looking at a partial list of filmmaker guests over the years make it clear that Von Bagh and his programming team have terrific taste, and my understanding is that Von Bagh is something of a film-on-film purist, insisting on film screenings even in the waning days of its viability as a mass-market medium.

The other day, I happened to be at a screening sitting next to another award recipient at this year's SFIFF: Philip Kaufman, who will be at the Castro Theatre tomorrow evening for an on-stage conversation before a screening of his great 1978 shot-in-San Francisco remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We got to talking, and he told me he'll be at the Midnight Sun festival for the first time this summer, and that he's currently trying to track down good prints of films he hopes to show there. Invasion of the Body Snatchers will be shown tomorrow digitally, however. 

But as film purist Carl Martin notes in his latest SFIFF round-up, last night's screening of Marketa Lazarová began with an announcement that another Castro screening of a 1970s film tomorrow will be screened on 35mm instead of previously-expected DCP. The film is The Mattei Affair, a political thriller by Francesco Rosi, a filmmaker who, like Kaufman, received an award from the SFIFF (in 1981) and later went on to attend the Midnight Sun festival (in 1999). Why is it being shown in 35mm even though the Film Foundation has helped prepare a new DCP they're trying to show off? The answer lies in Frako Loden's latest SFIFF round-up article, in which she reports on last weekend's  Pacific Film Archive screening via its new digital projector, in which subtitles froze on screen and essentially ruined the experience for non-Italian speakers in the audience. Rather than risk a repeat of such a snafu at the Castro, the festival has opted to use a trusty 35mm print for the 1:30 PM matinee. 

HOW: Helsinki, Forever screens in 35mm.

Headshot (2011)

WHO: Pen-ek Ratanaruang wrote and directed this. He's coming to town this weekend; his first visit to San Francisco, apparently.

WHAT: The latest feature by the Thai director is, I believe, his first shot digitally. (UPDATE 4/7/13: it's his second after Nymph, as it turn out.) His usual cinematographer Chankit Chamnivikaipong used the famed Red One camera for this so-called "Buddhist neo-noir" piece about a Bangkok policeman who gets embroiled in a world of gangsters, corruption and conspiracy against his will. He receives a headwound which leads to an unusual form of brain damage in which his vision is turned upside down. Luckily, the audience doesn't get too many disorienting point-of-view shots from this topsy-turvy perspective. One gently humorous scene involving a television set reminds us that when the world around us (or even just our perception of it) has been upended, it's comforting to at least be able to spend some time watching images on a screen that don't make us feel completely out-of-sync with reality. This might be a good summation of Pen-ek's motivation for filming in the first place; in a 2009 interview recently published in the book Southeast Asian Independent Cinema he stresses his desire to make films that connect him to like-minded audiences around the world who are alienated by the fare that dominates international cinema screens. A quote:

Lonely people tend to like my films a lot. Happy people don't seem to get my films. When I meet someone who says she liked my films, ninety percent of the time she prefers funerals to weddings, and its also a fan of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and Nick Cave, like myself. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 7:30 at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts screening room. Pen-ek is expected to attend.

WHY: This screening kicks off a six-title retrospective of most of Pen-ek's feature films (his promising debut Fun Bar Karaoke and his third film Mon-Rak Transistor, which seems more and more to be the biggest stylistic and thematic anomaly in his filmography, are omitted) at YBCA, including the local premiere screenings of his three films which inexplicably never screened in the Bay Area. There has been a good deal of worthwhile press for this event, including articles by Valerie Soe, Cheryl Eddy and Jonathan Kiefer. Though one might expect films that other venues have passed on to be markedly inferior to the ones that have played here; I bet the average uninitiated attendee of this series wouldn't be able to guess that Ploy failed to make it into any local festivals while Nymph succeeded, or that 6ixtynin9 had a week-long run here but Invisible Waves didn't. (Last Life in the Universe remains Pen-ek's most fully satisfying film and it won't be a surprise to anyone that it's had the most Frisco Bay cinema showtimes of all his works).

It's a good reminder that there's a lot more to program a cinema or a festival than just sussing out quality. The fiscal states, marketing plans, or simple whims of distributors, sales agents, or filmmakers themselves can have more impact on whether a given film screens here than the best efforts of the smartest programmers can. It's important to remember this during the week of the San Francisco International Film Festival's announcement. If you follow the goings-on at other festivals around the country and the globe, there's surely a film or two (or more) that you were practically certain would/could/should appear at SFIFF this year. I like to channel such frustrations into hopes that another programmer might give the film a shot at another nearby venue. If, for example, you wonder why Carlos Reygadas's Cannes 2012 entry Post Tenebras Lux has yet to rear its head locally, be heartened that YBCA's Joel Shepard is bringing it in May 30 through June 1st.

HOW: Though the rest of this series is sourced from 35mm, Headshot was shot digitally and will be screened that way.

...And God Created Woman (1956)

WHO: This is an early role for Jean-Louis Trintignant, in this case playing opposite Brigitte Bardot.

WHAT: I think it would be difficult to find a serious critic willing to go to bat for this as a truly great film; Kevin B. Lee concisely outlined most of the film's limitations as well as strengths in one of his early Shooting Down Pictures videos; if you'd rather read than hear his illustrated essay, the transcript is here. I wouldn't know how to make a case for it as a successful film in any meaningful way, although it was successful financially in its day and successful in helping get the gears turning on the beginning of the French New Wave. Unlike Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette & Chabrol, director Roger Vadim never wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, but because he was able to make such a splash with his first feature before age thirty he became an inspiration to these cineastes (Godard and Truffaut both singled out ...And God Created Woman for praise), and to French financiers looking to tap into market desires for films by youthful directors.

There is something interesting about the film's mise en scène nonetheless. Richard Neupert in his A History of the French New Wave quotes Vadim as saying, "Our generation does not want to retell stories with the same vocabulary that has been used for so long and that not even the neorealists could escape: long shot, medium shot, close up, shot/reverse shot. It has become a nightmare. All films look the same." In ...And God Created Woman the director almost completely eschews close-ups and the shot/reverse shot schematic, building his visual style almost completely out of medium shots and especially long shots, reminiscent perhaps of a Jacques Tati film of the 1950s. Of course this style of filmmaking is no longer very unusual at all especially on the international festival circuit, and directors like Tsai Ming-Liang and Lisandro Alonso have pushed it even further, and to more apparent aesthetic purpose than Vadim's (which seems largely engineered to show off his Saint-Tropez locations, and perhaps to emphasize his stars' bodies over their faces. At any rate it makes what seems to most viewers today to be a rather routine family drama with some uncomfortable social and political undercurrents more than just that for those carefully attuned to how the camera is being used to capture the cast.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. 6:30 PM.

WHY: ...And God Created Woman marks the beginning of the PFA's eleven-film retrospective for the actor currently on minds and screens thanks to his turn in Amour, that lasts this month and next. The series has its share of great films, such as Rohmer's My Night At Maud's, Bertolucci's The Conformist and Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ Express. But any good retrospective should include work that shows a range of quality so as not to give the impression that its subject was only involved in masterpieces. So although I appreciate the the opportunities to rewatch favorite films with Trintignant's performances particularly held in mind, I'm just as curious to see how react to films I haven't cared for before (perhaps because I've seen them only on video) like ...And God Created Woman and Z, and to see relatively lesser-known works like The Outside Man, which also plays the Castro March 8th, on a double-bill with The Terminator for some reason.

HOW: 35mm print imported from Institut Français.

Faust (1926)

WHO: F.W. Murnau directed this four years after making what is now his most famous film, the original vampire movie Nosferatu. 

WHAT: The tale of the silent film figure whose career died because he or she couldn't make the transition to talking pictures is all too commonly told. Even more tragic are the stories of those whose lives were cut short too soon, and therefore never were given the opportunity to transition or to fail. For some the absence of a significant sound-era career seems to intensify the iconic status of their silent work: think of acting legend Lon Chaney, Sr, who died in 1930 after making just one talking picture (a remake of his silent-era tour-de-force The Unholy Three) or comedienne Mabel Normand, who died the same year and whose voice was never recorded on film. Murnau, who died in a car accident in 1931, just after putting the finishing touches on one of the last silent films released by Hollywood (Tabu) is another such figure. His status as one of the greatest masters of silent film language solidifies with each passing decade, perhaps partially because his silent masterpieces do not have to compete for attention with the talkies that he never filmed. Last year his 1927 film Sunrise rose to fifth place in Sight & Sound Magazine's influential poll of the greatest films of all time. Faust received some votes in that poll, too, from prestigious sources such as curator/historian/critic Pierre Rissient and director Shinji Aoyama. 

But, as Matt Elrin notes in his chapter on Faust for the book Weimar Cinema, Murnau's film was not well-received in Germany upon its 1926 release. It was considered a faulty adaptation of Goethe's literary masterpiece by the majority of German critics, and failed with audiences as well, making back not much more than half of its enormous production cost for the Ufa studio. Elrin makes an interesting case that Murnau was not interested in representing Goethe's classic for the screen, however, but repurposing it as a metaphor for German culture in general and cinema in particular, with Mephisto representing the seductive "director" figure and Faust himself representing Germany's literary tradition, the soul of which is being contested by those who would use or misuse it for their own purposes. 

Whether Murnau had all this on his mind at all while making the film or not, I've always wondered if he knew while making it that Faust would not be well-received in its day. By the time he started production on the film, he had already proven himself one of the world's greatest directors with his 1924 The Last Laugh. He had already secured an unprecedented deal with the Fox Film Corporation to come to the United States to make films (the first of which would be Sunrise). Mary Pickford's favorite cinematographer Charles Rosher was brought to Berlin to serve as an unofficial consultant on the film, but Murnau's interactions with him revealed a man with his mind already on what he might be able to do with the resources of Hollywood at his disposal. Did Murnau sense that his fortunes might not be tied up with the success or failure of Faust, and therefore feel free to make a film without regarding how it would be understood in his homeland?

Regardless, Faust was more successful in the international market than in Germany, and it wouldn't be so long after his death that it began being cited at one of Murnau's greatest achievements. Elrin translates a passage from critic/director Eric Rohmer, who asserted that with this film Murnau "was able to mobilize all the means at his disposal to ensure total mastery of [cinematic] space." This is typically how Faust is typically seen by cinema lovers today.

WHERE/WHEN: 9:00 PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre

WHY: Faust screens as the capper on a big day of silent cinema at the Castro, presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Full previews of the festival have been written by the stalwart Michael Hawley and Thomas Gladysz, but I'll give a brief run-down as well. Prior to Faust the festival screens (in order of appearance on the screen) a 1916 version of Snow White that is said to have inspired Walt Disney to make Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs 20 years later, a trio of two-reel comedies by the can't-go-wrong Buster Keaton, the classic Douglas Fairbanks adventure film The Thief of Bagdad, which I hope is a harbinger of more films directed by Raoul Walsh that I know are currently making the rounds internationally, and Mary Pickford's final silent film My Best Girl. As strong as this program promises to be, especially with the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra or pianist Donald Sosin providing live musical accompaniment, Faust is the one I'm most excited to see on the Castro screen for many reasons, one of which is that it gives a week's preparation for another rare opportunity to see a Murnau film in a cinema, as his penultimate film City Girl plays next Saturday at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont.

HOW: Faust will screen from a 35mm print; for more information about its restoration, and details on the other festival films, do read what Carl Martin has dug up. Faust's sound will be provided live by Christian Elliott at the controls of the Castro's beloved Wurlitzer organ. This marks Elliott's first appearance at the SF Silent Film Festival since 2005, when he played wonderfully for the underrated Harold Lloyd comedy For Heaven's Sake, and for the World War I drama The Big Parade. I unfortunately missed the latter show, and have only heard Elliott playing for Keaton comedies at the Stanford in the meantime, so I don't know how well-suited he is to accompanying dramatic material like Faust. But I'm curious. I also missed Dennis James when he played the score to Faust at last year's Cinequest to much acclaim, so I hope I have an opportunity to hear that someday. I'm crossing my fingers that James will reappear at the Castro for the festival's July program; I'd especially love to hear his collaboration with Sosin on a piano/organ duet score for another German expressionist horror film: The Hands of Orlac.

Adam Hartzell on Bound By Flesh

With Noir City behind us, more film festivals are populating in Frisco Bay cinemas and on my sidebar. The next one to begin is SF IndieFest, which starts Thursday February 7th and continues for fifteen days. Michael Hawley has written a fine preview, and my friend Adam Hartzell has a review of one of the few documentaries in the program. Here's Adam:

When we build up hopes for a film from which we anticipate big things, we may be setting ourselves up to letting ourselves down.  Will my anxious awaiting for Park Chan-wook's Stoker or Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer, two South Korean ventures into U.S. production territory, live up to my expectations of those two directors?  Will the rest of the U.S. population finally get on the Song Kang-ho greatness bandwagon with his role in Snowpiercer like some in the U.S. finally have with Bae Doo-na in Cloud Atlas?  Or am I just building a poorly constructed infrastructure of hope that will only collapse from the slightest nudge of less-than-greatness?

The examples I gave above are for dramatic films, but I think the danger of high hopes causes the greatest harm for documentaries.  Particularly when those documentaries are done about topics on which we ourselves have engaged in a great deal of outside research.  Case in point for me, Lisa Zemeckis' Bound By Flesh (2012), screening as part of this year's SF Indie Fest running from Feb 7-21 at the Roxie and other San Francisco venues.  If I hadn't read Alice Domurat Dreger's exhaustive medical anthropological study of the lives of conjoined twins, One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal (Harvard University Press, 2004), would I have found Bound By Flesh more compelling?  Instead, I only experience disappointment at a missed opportunity for something greater than the life of Violet and Daisy Hilton told from limited perspectives.

Bound By Flesh details the life of the Hilton sisters, conjoined sisters from  England who eventually found their way to the U.S., via Australia, where they found huge success on the vaudeville circuit.  Most cinephiles know them from their role in Tod Browning's Freaks (1932).  (How Dreger deconstructs Freaks by flipping the script of the dramatic arc in in that film as her own narrative arc for One of Us is part of what makes her rigorous scholarship so accessible and so brilliant.)  Along the way to stardom, they suffered child abuse, both physical and emotional, including being surveilled every hour of their lives by their guardians.  Eventually the Hilton sisters secured emancipation, but since they were now on their own in society for the  first time, they made some less than ideal choices, the consequences of  which they survived temporarily.  But when the vaudeville circuit began to crumble against the enticements provided for audiences by movies and (later) television, the Hilton sisters eventually found themselves impoverished in a new labor market where their skills didn't secure the income and  companionship to which they had previously become accustomed.

The life of the Hilton sisters is compelling and propels the linear narrative in Bound By Flesh.   The talking heads interspersed between the stills, film and TV footage,  and audio recordings of the twins have interesting details to add.  The most engaging of the talking heads is Amy Fulkerson, the curator of collections at The Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas.  To Zemeckis' credit, leaving in The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton's author Dean Jensen's giggles when talking about what he knows of their sexual lives reveals the prurient fascination some male audiences had for the sisters.  But when the former sideshow promoter Ward Hall chooses the word' handicapped' rather than 'freaks'  at one point, stated in a way by him that seems to dismiss liberal calls to re-think our language, it's an unintentional fissure in the text  that illuminates the primary problems with Bound By Flesh.

Why weren't any conjoined twins included amongst the talking heads?  Yes,  there aren't that many to choose from, but country singer conjoined  twins Lori and George Schappell are still boot-scootin' and as conjoined twin performers, they are as appropriate, if not more, than any of the talking heads dominating the film.  (Readers might know the Schappell twins as Lori and Reba, but in 2007, Reba began identifying as male and now goes by George.)   The historical notes on the impact of American entertainment choices is valuable, but so much important  history is still missing.  There's no mention of the lives of other conjoined twins in the circus, of earlier times or contemporary to the Hilton sisters.  For those who don't know, the reason conjoined twins were referred to as 'Siamese twins' was because the first world famous ones were Chang and Eng Bunker who were Chinese-Malay conjoined twins  born in what was then called Siam.  They were successful enough after their circus careers to purchase a plantation with slaves in North Carolina.  They also married two women who were themselves sisters,  although not conjoined, and had 21 children between them. (Darin Strauss wrote a fictional account of their lives called Chang and Eng: A Novel where Strauss decides to whip up some psycho-sexual speculation for some reason.)  Reference to the experience of conjoined twins past (Chang and Eng) and present (Lori and George) along with the seeming paradox that, although objectified, some performers, such as the little person Charles Sherwood Stratton (aka General Tom Thumb) were able to establish fulfilling careers through work in the circus would have expanded the lives of the Hilton sisters beyond an isolated 'freakish' moment in history.

An equally important history to weave in to the story of the Hilton sisters is the history of the Disability Rights movement.  Part of how such context would be helpful is in explaining how the isolation of the Hilton sisters later in life is partly related to issues of accessibility. Bound By Flesh briefly notes how the loss of a U.S. train network impacted the sisters' mobility, but the over-arching commentary of this historical fact is how 'out of touch' the Hilton sisters were with the contemporary Zeitgeist, not how disastrous our national  transportation policies have been for certain segments of the U.S. population.  The Disability Rights movement, like other civil rights movements, spawned a Disability Studies scholarship.  Inclusion of such scholarship in the documentary would have helped deconstruct the 'infinite wisdom' of the able-bodied savior of the Disabled that creeps in to 'save' the Hilton sisters when they are down on their luck along with countering the antics of the former sideshow promoter.

If the Schappell twins were not available, at the very least a film like this demands consideration of Dreger's book if not splicing in interviews of Dreger speaking herself.  As a result of the vast lacunae that unbounds Bound By Flesh, the fact that the life of the Hilton sisters was not conjoined with Disability Studies constructs is the biggest flaw of the film.  If Dreger's One of Us would have been one of the texts used to prepare Bound By Flesh, we would not only have learned that the Hilton Sisters' lack of desire to be separated was not an exception, but the very norm of conjoined twins, we might also have had a documentary that doesn't disappoint the  viewer who has come prepared with background knowledge before the screening, or who chooses to investigate the wider subject afterwards.