The Sniper (1952)

WHO: Marie Windsor, MGM's one-time "New Joan Crawford", who ended up getting called "Queen of the Bs" because she featured in so many cheaply-made pictures after the studio dropped her. She's been immortalized in films noir such as Force of Evil, The Narrow Margin and The Killing, and is one of six women lovingly profiled in Noir City mayor Eddie Muller's 2001 book Dark City Dames. In The Sniper she has a supporting role.

WHAT: The Sniper is one of the first films I ever saw at a Noir City festival, the first one held in San Francisco in 2003, which was devoted entirely to (excuse the double entendre) shot-in-San Francisco movies. Imagine my surprise when the last name of Windsor's character was first revealed, and it was my own rather rare surname Darr, which I've never heard of a fictional character possessing, before or since. It feels like an honor to imagine such a lovely and talented chanteuse in my family tree (though my parents moved to Frisco after this half-noir, half social problem picture was released, so Jean must be from another branch of Darrs).

WHERE/WHEN: At the Castro Theatre twice today: a 1:30 matinee and a 7:00 evening show.

WHY: Though there probably won't be another theatrical showcase of Frisco Bay noir like the one held ten years ago anytime soon, Noir City annually sets aside at least one night at the Castro to showcase locally-filmed pictures. Tonight's that night, with a double bill of The Sniper and Blake Edwards' Experiment In Terror, which I also possess a personal connection to, as crucial scenes were filmed at my alma mater George Washington High School and the surrounding neighborhood. Both films are well worth watching no matter where you live, but are particularly notable for locals, as they utilize some of the best, most authentic location photography ever perpetrated on this city by Hollywood studios, meticulously documented at Reel SF. I feel especially confident saying this after recently spending an intense period of watching and rewatching San Francisco noir while writing an essay on the genre for the San Francisco entry into the World Film Locations series of books, which is expected to be published sometime later this year.

HOW: The Sniper will screen from a 35mm print, while Experiment In Terror will be showcased via a newly-premiering Digital Cinema Package from Sony.

Intruder In The Dust (1949)

WHO: Puerto Rico-born actor Juano Hernandez, directed by Clarence Brown.

WHAT: In 1968, Andrew Sarris published a book calling director Clarence Brown a "subject for further research." The same year, Kevin Brownlow wrote:

Clarence Brown is one of the great names of American motion pictures -- one of the few whose mastery was undiminished by the arrival of sound. Thanks to the widespread fame of his Garbo pictures Anna Christie, Conquest, and Anna Karenina, Clarence Brown is unlikely to become a neglected master. His Intruder in the Dust, a study of racial conflict in the South, is the finest picture ever made on that subject. His The Yearling has become a classic. Yet his films of the silent era have been completely forgotten. 

What a difference a generation makes. I'm probably not the only one these days who actually feels more conversant in Brown's silent films (particularly his wonderful The Goose Woman and Flesh and the Devil) than with his talkies. I'm very excited to see Intruder in the Dust, one of his most highly-acclaimed pictures and one that I can't recall screening anywhere nearby in recent years.

As for Juano Hernandez, you may remember him from his roles in Jacques Tourneur's wonderful drama Stars In My Crown, or in Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (seen at last year's Noir City). The latter film gets a multi-article spread in the Noir City Annual #5, which I mentioned yesterday, including an article specifically on Hernandez, written by Robert Ottoson.

WHERE/WHEN: 9PM tonight at the Castro Theatre

WHY: Lets face it. Mid-century Hollywood filmmaking was marked by a systematic exclusion of complicated and sympathetic portrayals of non-white Americans from the screen. The Noir City audience includes people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, but there would be something strange about spending ten days each year celebrating this era without ever commenting on this exclusion. One way of commenting is to showcase the rare exceptions, and Intruder in the Dust by all accounts qualifies. There were many noir films that used black actors in memorable roles that paid decent salaries, but these roles were usually very small, were often uncredited, and frequently reinforced stereotypes that helped contribute to feelings of white superiority. A seemingly-innocuous shot of African-Americans in a piano bar scene in the 1947 Repeat Performance, shown the other night, for example, was placed to illustrate how the adulterous romance of two white characters forces them to frequent locales where they'll never be discovered by their fancy friends from Broadway. I'm excited to see films tonight that treat black characters as more than set dressing. 

Intruder in the Dust may have been a commendable exception for its studio MGM, but it is paired tonight with a film that shows us what Hollywood simply would not touch when it came to on-screen portrayals of non-whites: the 1951 version of Native Son, starring the novel's author Richard Wright in the role of Bigger Thomas. The story could not be filmed in the United States at that time, so it was made in Argentina with a crew headed by respected French director Pierre Chenal (you may have seen his 1935 version of Crime and Punishment at the PFA last month). Released in a cut version (the full story is told in the same Noir City Annual #5), tonight will see the West Coast premiere of a new restoration of this rarity.

HOW: Both films will screen in 35mm prints.

The Kiss Before The Mirror (1933)

WHO: James Whale, best known as the director of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein.

WHAT: I don't really know anything about this film, and I don't want to know, not before seeing it tonight. All I need to be excited is to know that its' the film Whale made between The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man. A fertile period for the director indeed.

WHERE/WHEN: 8:25 PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: Thirteen of the 264 pages of the handsome new fifth edition of the Noir City Annual, available for sale this week only on the mezzanine of the Castro during the Noir City festival, are devoted to an interview with festival founder Eddie Muller, conducted by Jesse Fankhausen. This interview is a must-read, not only for Noir City supporters, but for anyone interested in the last ten or so years of classic film exhibition in this country, and particularly here in San Francisco. There's more candid information about this festival's storied relationships with the Castro Theatre and other Frisco Bay venues it's been associated with, than I've ever seen committed to text.

At one point in the interview, Muller asks "why haven't other genres gotten this treatment?" It's a question I asked (completely independently- the interview was conducted over a year ago and I didn't read it until yesterday) in my article about last year's festival. I still am not quite sure of the answer, but at the risk of repeating myself, I'll observe again that one of my favorite things about Noir City is that its programming doesn't reflect a genre-purist approach. Noir is its main mission, but the festival is also a showcase for borderline noirs of interest to aficionados and deserving of wider exposure. Already this week's audiences have seen one film that falls in that border zone if not well beyond it: Curse of the Demon, a bona fide horror movie made by a director (Jacques Tourneur) and starring two actors (Dana Andrews and Peggy Cummins) frequently associated with noir. 

Despite having been made by Whale, I don't believe The Kiss Before The Mirror is a horror film, but nor does it fit anywhere near the traditionally-defined noir period of 1941-1958 or so, having been made in 1933. It's part of a what the festival is calling a "Pre-Code Proto-Noir Triple Bill" along with William Wyler's 1931 A House Divided and the ultra-obscure (only 5 imdb votes!) Laughter In Hell from 1933. I'm grateful Noir City is able to shine its spotlight on pre-code films for the second year in a row. For those of us who can't get enough of seeing the spottily-enforced censorship of the 1930-1934 period on the big screen, and who can't wait for the Roxie's next pre-code series to kick off in about a month, attendance at the Castro tonight is a must.

HOW: All three films tonight screen in 35mm prints.

The Two Eyes Of Jonathan Kiefer

If you didn't attend some wonderful repertory/revival film screenings in 2012, you missed out. As nobody could see them all, I've recruited Frisco Bay filmgoers to recall some of their own favorites of the year. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Jonathan Kiefer, a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, whose reviews are collected at jonathankiefer.com.

Five faves, in chronological order:  

1. The Robert Bresson retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive, January-February

2. Napoléon at the Paramount, March

3. Pretty much the entirety of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the Castro, July

4. The double bill of La Jetée and Meshes of the Afternoon at SFMOMA, August

5. L’Age d’Or at YBCA, September

No film was screened during Geoff Dyer and David Thomson’s public conversation at Tosca in March, but Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the subject of Dyer’s lively latest book, was happily discussed. 

My Man Godfrey (1936)

WHO: Carole Lombard and William Powell.

WHAT: I haven't seen it in many years, so let me give you the words of someone who hasn't seen it in about as many decades, Graham Greene:

My Man Godfrey, for three-quarters of its way, is acutely funny. The adventure of a sane man among the witless wealthy, the story opens with a 'scavenging party' at the Waldorf-Ritz to which competitors are expected to bring, besides assorted objects as bowls of goldfish, goats and mangles, 'a forgotten man'.

What did Greene think of the last three-quarters? Ask the Self-Styled Siren.

WHERE/WHEN: At the Stanford Theatre at 5:45 and 9:35 PM, the last day of a four-day stand.

WHY: If you're impressed with Silver Linings Playbook's Oscar nomination haul including a matched set of nominations in each of the four acting categories (male & female, supporting and lead), you should know that My Man Godfrey did it first. Literally, the first year the Academy Awards split the acting awards into lead and supporting categories, Lombard & Powell were nominated and joined by supporting players Alice Brady and Mischa Auer. And don't mention it around Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Jacki Weaver or Robert De Niro, but none of them won.

HOW: In 35mm, double-billed with James Whale's Show Boat, also from 1936

Vertigo, Vertigo-ing, Vertigone.

Last week, San Francisco Chronicle columnists Matier & Ross reported that the owners of a house at the corner of Lombard and Jones Streets had recently completed a major remodel to the exterior of their home. Normally I wouldn't take notice of changes made to a private residence, but here the building in question has historic significance to cinephiles. It's 900 Lombard, the residence of Jimmy Stewart's character Scottie in Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo.

Though the indoor scenes in Scottie's apartment were shot at a Hollywood studio, the view from his window, with the phallic Coit Tower looming over the landscape, remains essentially unchanged from when it was synced, through the magic of 1958 Hollywood technology, to these crucial interior shots. But the facade, which features in two just-as-crucial scenes, now is no longer recognizable as a Vertigo location from the street.

One would think the owners of the house, who apparently own a business dependent on the tourist trade, would want to honor the historic nature of their home. Surely they were aware of the movie connection when they moved in 23 years ago, as by this point it was a well-known fact, documented in Michael Oliver-Goodwin and Lynda Myles's 1982 San Francisco magazine article (reprinted in this book). But, according to Matier & Ross, they made the change precisely because they were getting too much attention from Vertigo location hunters.

It seems rather preposterous to me that there would be many cinephiles ringing the doorbell of a private residence, as if expecting a red-robed Kim Novak to answer the door. But what do I know. Maybe there are a lot more unmannered Hitchcock diehards out there than I realized. I do know that I've personally avoided mentioning the addresses of private residences when writing abut film locations (including Vertigo's) on this blog and elsewhere- until now. And when I've visited 900 Lombard I've been careful to respect the privacy of the owners by keeping my voice down and avoiding getting too close to the property, much less trespass.

Reading through the many reader comments on the Matier & Ross article at sfgate.com is depressing to someone like me. The general gist of most of them is: "it's only a movie", "private property rights trump all other concerns" and "film buffs are a pathetic and slovenly lot", although there are a few welcome counter-examples. I don't know. Maybe I'm sensitive because I recently wrote an essay about 1940s & 50s San Francisco location filmmaking for a book expected to be published next year (as part of this series.) Or maybe I've just seen too many Hitchcock movies and have gone overly suspicious, but I feel like there's something else happening here, and the Vertigo connection is more of an excuse than a reason for the remodeling.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I made an excursion to Jones and Lombard to take a look at the changes up close. I went with local filmmaker Sean Gillane, who earlier this month saw his ambitious narrative feature directing debut CXL get its world premiere screening at the SF Film Society's Cinema By The Bay festival. Another world premiere at this festival was Alejandro Adams's fourth feature Amity, which for me is his best picture since his own feature debut Around The Bay. Take that endorsement as you will, as in the past few years I've become friends with Adams, and he and his girlfriend Sara Vizcarrondo (another friend) once invited me to participate in an on-camera discussion of another of my favorite filmmakers (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) on their show "Look Of The Week". Likewise, Gillane (who re-used more than one Vertigo location for his CXL) suggested he film me discussing Vertigo and its role in the psycho-geography of San Francisco at the site, and so he did. I don't know what the fate of this footage will be once it's been edited, but I trust it's in good hands, and will certainly keep Hell On Frisco Bay readers posted.

2012 has been quite a roller-coaster year for lovers of Hitchcock in general and Vertigo in particular. For every previously-lost film he assistant-directed made available for free on-line, there's a dreadful-looking, currently-in-theatres Hitchcock docudrama (which focuses its attention on Psycho and not Vertigo; I haven't seen it yet and am not sure I want to). I've mentioned here before that Vertigo unseated Citizen Kane in the most highly-regarded critical poll of the "Greatest Films Of All-Time" this August. It was an ascent 50 years in the making, as when Kane first took that honor in 1962, the four-year-old film Vertigo was selected by only three voters, all Frenchmen: Eric Rohmer, Jean Douchet & Jacques Siclier. From there Vertigo placed #12 in 1972's Sight & Sound Poll, #7 in 1982's, #4 in 1992's and #2 in 2002's poll before achieving top spot this year, being named among the ten best of all time by 191 critics and curators (including Flicker Alley founder and president Jeff Masino, who I interviewed for Keyframe recently.)

But it was hard for many Vertigo fans to properly celebrate this changing of the guard, knowing that one of the film's leading champions had died just days before. I wrote a bit about Chris Marker's Vertigo connection in my obituary for the cinephile and filmmaker, and linked to a pdf of his 1994 essay on Vertigo, but without comment. Though Marker's 1983 essay film Sans Soleil avoided using the 900 Lombard location, this essay references it, without mentioning the house number:

San Francisco, of course, is nothing but another character in the film. [screenwriter] Samuel Taylor wrote to me agreeing that Hitchcock liked the town but only knew ‘what he saw from hotels or restaurants or out of the limo window’. He was ‘what you might call a seden­tary person’. But he still decided to use the Dolores Mission and, strangely, to make the house on Lombard Street Scottie’s home ‘because of the red door’.

If Marker and the red door no longer exist, Vertigo and Sans Soleil still do. The former film will appear in 35mm at the Pacific Film Archive March 13th as part of the Spring semester's Film 50 afternoon screening and lecture series devoted to "The Cinematic City". The latter film recently played the same venue as part of a compact Chris Marker tribute which concludes tonight.

Shortly after publishing my Marker blog piece last July, I was honored to receive an e-mail from one of Marker's local allies: Tom Luddy. Though I never visited the Pacific Film Archive during Luddy's time as programmer there, in recent years I've seen him at local film events rather frequently, whether in the audience, on stage (as when he received an award on behalf of the Telluride Film Festival, which he co-directs, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival last summer), or even on-screen (as a key participant in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which after years of watching on VHS and DVD, I finally saw in a cinema this year thanks to SFMOMA). Luddy cleared up some of the information I'd written about Marker's film Junkopia. The print of this film which I'd seen twice at the PFA was in fact his print, on deposit at that institution. He has graciously allowed me to quote from his e-mail for readers:

Chris came to the Bay Area fairly often in the '70s and '80s, when I was at PFA ('72-'79) and Zoetrope ('80 to the present), sometimes on stopovers to Japan, and sometimes for the two major films that had sequences he shot in Northern California -- Sans Soleil and The Owl's Legacy. I helped him on both. He also did a little second-unit work on Rumble Fish for Zoetrope for a brief moment.

He always stayed in Berkeley, sometimes at my place and sometimes at the Hotel Shattuck. I drove him to SF many times in the '70s.  He was fascinated by the Emeryville Mudflats and one day asked me if anyone had made a film on the ever-changing gallery of objects on display there. I said I did not think there was a film, and he said "let's make one".

So I recruited John and Frank from Zoetrope, and some equipment, and in no time we were shooting there. He was very generous in putting in the credits "Filmed by Chris Marker, John Chapman, and Frank Simeone." But in fact this is a film by Chris Marker in the authorial sense. He gave me a Credit for SPECIAL EFFECTS.... don't ask to explain what for?

He called his producer for many films --Anatole Dauman-- in Paris. Anatole agreed to cover all the costs of the film. Anatole wanted to pay me for my work on the film. I refused to take any money but I said it would be great if I could get a 35mm print as a kind of compensation.  He said fine as he did on Sans Soleil as well. I have a 35mm print of Sans Soleil on deposit at PFA too.

I worked on films with great film-makers (Godard, Agnes Varda, Francis Coppola, etc) and with many more thru my work at PFA, Telluride, San Francisco Film Festival and so on.... Chris is/was the most impressive of them all -- a genius as a writer, photographer, film-maker, collage artist, sound designer, historian, poet...and a great human being.

Tom Luddy's print of Junkopia will screen at the PFA again tonight on a program with a chapter from Marker's 13-part The Owl's Legacy, and with two Marker works made well before his association with Luddy: Les Astronautes (pictured above) and La Jetée. Also screening is Emiko Omori's new documentary To Chris Marker, an Unsent Letter, which Luddy appears in along with other Frisco Bay-connected film personalities like David Thomson, Peter Scarlet, Erika Marcus and David and Janet Peoples. Be there!

In-fest-ed

If quantity is a measure of riches we live in a Golden Age of film festivals. According to Mark Cousins, writing in last year's Film Festival Yearbook 1: the Festival Circuit, "the film festival regulation body FIAPF (Federation Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Film) reckons there are 700 of them in total, the New York Times reckons there are over 1,000. The numbers have rocketed in the last decade." Knowing how many film festivals occur here over the course of a year, and how many other places in the world are increasing their own film festival counts, both the FIAPF and NYT numbers seem grossly outdated or otherwise underrepresentative. It seems I learn about a new festival somewhere in the world at least once or twice a month, and I'm not necessarily pricking my ears for such news (most recently I learned of new festivals in Luang Prabang, Laos and Oaxaca, Mexico), unless it concerns festivals sprouting here on Frisco Bay.

And sprout they do, in defiance of advice from protectors of cinema like Simon Field and James Quandt, who in an interview in another recent publication in the new field of film festival studies, dekalog 3: On Film Festivals, agree that "generally...festivals should be in anonymous cities with few distractions," something that San Francisco has never been accused of being. The many local film festivals (I count at least eighteen occurring here right now, or in the next six weeks, alone!) often interact with these "distractions" by involving them- integrating cinema screenings with live music performances, museum exhibits, book readings, etc. Perhaps most of the festivals that occur here don't qualify under the criteria Field and Quandt had in mind during that moment of their interview, as unlike a Cannes or a Sundance, they generally don't compete for red carpet world premieres of the most critically and/or commercially anticipated films on the calendar, functioning as glittery news events with the entire world of cinephilia eagerly observing from afar. Instead, they exist as one form or another of "audience festival", that is, the kind of festival that exists in order to provide paying audiences with opportunities to see films and meet filmmakers they otherwise would not be able to see or meet. As long as there are audiences looking for films they wouldn't ordinarily run across at the multiplex or elsewhere, these audience festivals will remain an important matching service.

Currently running are the 14th Annual Arab Film Festival, the 9th San Francisco Documentary Festival, the 17th Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival, the 34th(!!) Marin County Italian Film Festival, and the Artists' Television Access Film and Video Festival, which ends tonight with Kerry Laitala's dazzling Afterimage: the Flicker of Life. Opening tonight are the Petaluma International Film Festival, the United Nations Association Film Festival in Palo Alto, and here in Frisco proper, the Berlin & Beyond festival of German-language films, previewed extensively at the Evening Class this year as it moves to October from its traditional slot in January, and the first of four geographically-centered showcases being put on by the San Francisco Film Society, Taiwan Film Days.

After shining its key light on Taiwan, the SFFS brings French Cinema Now to the Embarcadero Cinema October 28-November 3, closing with two screenings of the eagerly-awaited new film from Abbas Kiarostami, Certified Copy. Then they turn attention to locally-produced filmmaking at Cinema By The Bay at the Roxie November 5-8; this event marks the first time any motion picture by the South Bay's Alejandro Adams, in this case his recent Babnik, will be publicly screened here in San Francisco. New Italian Cinema is the Film Society's longest-standing autumn companion to its San Francisco International Film Festival in April, and it runs at the Embarcadero on November 14-21, right on the heels of a methodologically-, rather than geographically-organized event, the SF International Animation Festival.

The 3rd i South Asian International Film Festival runs November 3-7 and includes a Castro Theatre 35mm screening of the Bimal Roy classic Madhumati (pictured in the topmost image in this post), featuring a screenplay by Ritwik Ghatak. Then on November 5-13 there's the American Indian Film Festival, the longest-running such showcase of its kind and one that is frequently overlooked by local cinephiles (including myself- I regretfully have never been). Frank Lee brings his Chinese American Film Festival back to the 4-Star Theatre November 17-23. That does it for festivals within the San Francisco city limits, for now. More are certain to be announced in the coming weeks, so check my sidebar or my twitter feed, both of which I update more frequently than I actually post.

Upcoming festivals I'm aware of coming to other Frisco Bay counties include the Poppy Jaspar Short Film Festival November 12-14, and the return of the prodigal International Buddhist Film Festival to the region after a five-year absence. It lands at the Rafael Film Center in Marin (which incidentally just played host to the 33rd Mill Valley Film Festival), and it includes the Frisco Bay premiere of one of the most talked-about films of the current year, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, which won the top prize at the last Cannes Film Festival. I was lucky to be able to see the film at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, but as a confirmed Apichatpong fan, there's no question whether or not I want to see it again as soon as I can. The Rafael's website is promoting this screening as the "US West Coast premiere", though it's placement in Los Angeles's AFI Fest contradicts that claim. Nonetheless, I'm excited that the Buddhist Film Festival is likely to bring attention to the film from outside the usual cinephile quarters. The festival will also have a stint at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts here in Frisco December 9-19, but there's no word yet on which titles will be available at that venue as well.

Whew!

That's a lot of festivals, but of course festivals make up only a part of what makes Frisco Bay such a special place for cinema-going. There's also theatrical releases of films that don't always get a fair shake in other markets, and a strong repertory film scene. Some highlights from the latter:

The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto has revealed its programming plans for the rest of 2010; it's a typically strong set of Hollywood classics of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, featuring a diverse set of actors and directors. This season they're holding a special focus on films noir; the most popular of revived genres blackens the Stanford screen with double-bills every Thursday and Friday until December 10th. There's also a few noirs scattered into the Saturday through Monday programs, including a December 4-6 stand of Eddie Muller's favorite noir In A Lonely Place. Outside the noir line-up I'd heartily recommend the November 6-8 pairing of two of my favorite, sometime overlooked Preston Sturges comedies the Great McGinty and Hail the Conquering Hero, and the December 16-17 placement of two films (Charulata and Mahanagar) from one of the few foreign-language filmmakers the Stanford favors, India's Satyajit Ray.

The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley also has a brand new calendar to show off; it includes continuations of its recent big series on Italian Neorealism and Bay Area Alternative Film & Video. These are joined by: a Burt Lancaster series that provides big-screen opportunities to see the hunky star as directed by Carol Reed, Jules Dassin, John Cassavetes, Frank Perry, and others. By a weekend with Kelly Reichardt in conversation with critic B. Ruby Rich, which allows us to catch up with her entire filmography in preparation for the eventual (who knows quite when, as of yet) Frisco Bay release of her stellar Meek's Cutoff, another film I was able to catch in Toronto. And by rare screenings of the legendary Flaming Creatures, of Every Man For Himself (for my money Jean-Luc Godard's best film from the last 35 years), and more. But for many cinephiles the pièce de résistance of the PFA's November-December calendar will be the all-but-complete Carl Theodor Dreyer retrospective including a PFA-presented screening of the Passion of Joan of Arc in Frisco Bay's grandest movie palace, the Paramount. All of Dreyer's other silent films will be shown at the PFA with Judith Rosenberg accompanying on piano. Six of his sound films with screen there too, joined by two films he did not direct but which he certainly affected in a major way; Lars Von Trier's 1987 television work Medea, made from a previously unrealized Dreyer script, and the Passion Of Joan of Arc-inspired Vivre Sa Vie (for my money Jean-Luc Godard's best film, period.)

Between the PFA's Dreyer series, its December 5 screening of Rossellini's Voyage in Italy, and the Ozu films recently brought to the VIZ Cinema (as i mentioned in my previous post), nearly all of the film titles mentioned in Nathaniel Dorsky's slender but splendid book Devotional Cinema will have screened in a Frisco Bay cinema this year. Just in time for an SFMOMA showing of Dorsky's four most recent films (the same four that played last month in Toronto to great acclaim) on December 16th. The rest of 2010 at the musuem provides only a few other opportunities for film viewing there, but each of these few seems worth taking. Next Thursday's double-bill of witch films by George Romero and Dario Argento is the ideal way to cinematically ring in Hallowe'en, especially for only $3 per ticket. Christmas holidays get more obliquely celebrated with a pair of Red & White-themed screenings of French films directed by Albert Lamorisse and Hou Hsiao-Hsien. I'm not sure what holiday the November 18 SFMOMA program Bay Area Ecstatic might be observing, if any, but it promises to be one of the most compelling of the season. I say this not because the films were selected by my friend Brecht Andersch, with whom I've been collaborating on an investigation of Christoper Maclaine's seminal The End (have you seen the latest installment of our project yet?), but because he's selected some great and/or rarely seen films. Perhaps my favorite Kenneth Anger film Invocation of My Demon Brother and perhaps my favorite Bruce Conner film Looking For Mushrooms (contrary to prior expectations, the superior short version which prompted a correspondence between Conner and John Lennon will be screened) will be joined by Larry Jordan's mysterious Triptych In Four Parts and Timoleon Wilkins's The Crossing, which I've only seen once apiece, and four other films I've never seen at all. Mark your calendars and tell your friends!

A number of first-run theatres have realized that an occasional repertory film on their program adds visibility to their venue, and may even be able to turn a profit on its own merit. The Cerrito, the Alameda Theatre and the UA Berkeley have evening screenings; I recently attended Luc Besson's the Professional at the latter, and though I didn't much like the film, I was impressed with the size of the audience for a 35mm print of a 1994 action movie on a Thursday night. Other theatres opt for the midnight movie route; Camera Cinemas in the South Bay has a midnight series I was just recently made aware of, and of course the Rocky Horror Picture Show couldn't celebrate its 35th Halloween without screenings in local Landmark Theatres this weekend and next. And the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland has just jumped on board the modern midnight movie phenomenon the Room, now showing there every third Saturday of the month.

Of course the first Frisco Bay venue to host regular screenings of the Room was the Red Vic, which still plays the bizarre cult object on the last Saturday of every month, including October 30th. Come in costume (you can do better than Patton Oswalt can't you?) The Red Vic has a new calendar out too. Zombie action movie Planet Terror plays Halloween and the day after. This is the first time I've noticed a theatrical booking for the Robert Rodriguez half of Grindhouse on its own- his latest film Machete, which germinated in that 2007 extravaganza, plays Dec. 10-11. Werner Herzog's Aguirre: Wrath of God seems an ideal way to end Thanksgiving weekend. And the second half of December becomes almost pure repertory, with screenings of Breathless, Triplets of Belleville, the Seven Samurai, and more.

The Roxie celebrates Halloween with three events: a double bill of 1950s horror/sci-fi October 29, another double-bill the next day featuring archive prints of David Cronenberg's the Brood and the Hammer studio's Corruption, and a third on Halloween night consisting of two films by director Alex Cox -- who will be present at the screenings! (and at the Rafael Film Center the following night). November 19 at the Roxie brings a "punk rock double bill" of the extremely rare Surf II and Times Square. There's also an intriguing animation showcase November 19-25, and on November 20th, a trio of After-School Specials presented by Jesse Ficks of MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS.

Ficks also has events upcoming at his usual venue, the Castro Theatre, again on Halloween where he brings an afternoon matinee of Creepy Disney films. He's also engineered a five-film marathon of robot movies November 20th. The Castro's in-house programming staff have scheduled a Ray Bradbury adaptation double-bill October 29th. They've also brought back Club Foot Orchestra to play live scores to silent movies on November 14th- when I attended their performance of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu a couple years ago, the inventiveness of their music almost made up for the fact that they sourced their images from truly lousy digital prints. Here's hoping for a better presentation this time around. I'm more (cautiously) optimistic about the San Francisco Film Society's December 14 pairing of a silent film I've never seen before (Mauritz Stiller's Sir Arne's Treasure) with a musical act I first saw perform in a quiet coffeehouse in 1996, the Mountain Goats. It's hard to imagine how such a lyric-focused musician as Mountain Goats frontman John Darnelle will translate his musical skills which work so well in an intimate venue (whether a coffeehouse or a small nightclub like the Independent) to the grand Castro stage, working in concert with a reputed masterpiece like Sir Arne's Treasure. Which is why I just have to see and hear it for myself!

No Time Like Cinema Time

The are only two days left to see Dogtooth on the San Francisco Film Society Screen at the Sundance Kabuki. I had hoped to write a full review of this remarkable, unsettling film about one family's bizarre home-schooling experiment gone to the extreme, which I was able to catch at the Greek Film Festival back in May. A modern-day application of classical Greek philosophy- particularly Plato's concept of The Cave, it's one of the best films I've seen all year, and it demands to be seen on the big screen, where one is held captive to cinema's traditional nature as a purely time-based medium (a quality compromised by the existence of the DVD player's pause function). Unfortunately time has not been on my side on this matter, so I must refer you to recent reviews by Cheryl Eddy and Dennis Harvey instead.

On Friday, Dogtooth will be replaced by Change Of Plans on the SFFS Screen, and also joined at the Kabuki by a weaker new opening, Zhang Yimou's A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop. The latter is a remake of the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple that is at least (at most?) interesting in that it's more faithful to the original film in some of its aesthetic approaches, including a long wordless segment that mirrors the Coens' achievement, and even a recurrent sound effect surely intended to replicate the Balinese chant on the original film's soundtrack, than it is to the overall milieu, plot, tone, or character design. More broad Chinese-style slapstick than we Westerners are likely to forgive makes this remake a rather jarring one, even if certain individual scenes are impressive.

As the SFFS begins unveiling its Fall Season, it's also trying to negotiate a takeover of the Clay Theatre on Fillmore Street, which was expected to close near the end of last month but was spared for the time being; a French film Mademoiselle Chambon opens Friday. Michael Krasny recently hosted a fascinating radio program on the fate of the Clay and other single-screen theatres on Frisco Bay, in which the SFFS's Graham Leggatt outlined his hopes for the 100-year-old venue. In the meantime, R.A. McBride and Julie Lindow's book Left In The Dark has begun appearing on the shelves of Frisco Bay bookstores (City Lights and The Green Arcade, for two). I was honored to be quoted in a piece by Sam Sharkey, formerly of the Clay, now of the Red Vic, on the future of moviegoing; other essays by Chi-hui Yang, Eddie Muller, Gary Meyer with Laura Horak, and Sergio de la Mora help make this book a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Frisco Bay cinemagoing, but it's the superb photography by R.A. McBride which makes it a must-own for anyone with a coffee table or a bookshelf.

Another Frisco bay-centric film book entitled Radical Light focuses on the many permutations of experimental cinema made and screened here over the second half of the last century. After purchasing it at the Berkeley Art Museum Store on Friday, I've only been able to get about halfway through it so far, but it's absolutely required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in American avant-garde filmmaking, of which Frisco Bay has been the major center for much of the time period covered in the book (1945-2000). And since, despite having twice as many pages as Left in the Dark, it's actually got a cheaper list price, at least in paperback, I have to say I'm even more satisfied with this purchase (as unfair as it feels to compare these two very worthy and exciting publications). The Pacific Film Archive and SF Cinematheque will hold a spectacular array of special-guest laden screenings in conjunction with the book release over the next several months, beginning with a PFA screening September 19th that I cannot recommend more highly. Aesthetically diverse masterpieces from Dion Vigne's North Beach to Bruce Baillie's All My Life to Chris Marker's Junkopia will play together, and filmmakers Ernie Gehr and Lawrence Jordan will appear in person. BAM will also open a gallery exhibition of documents related to the book and to the experimental film scene on October 6th.

Among other tasks that took up my time in recent weeks was a very enjoyable one: writing a review of the new Josef Von Sternberg box set published over a week ago at GreenCine Daily. As I begin the review, Criterion has traditionally not been a major force in releasing American silent films, but with this set (of Underworld, the Last Command, and the Docks of New York), and its upcoming Charlie Chaplin releases, it seems intent on becoming a major player in this field after all. Criterion's affiliated company Janus is bringing five days full of Chaplin films to the Castro Theatre later this month, and I can't wait to see these films on the big screen.

Although I must admit, I may be a bit exhausted by the time the Chaplin series begins with his still-underrated The Circus September 18th. I'll have just returned from over a week at the Toronto International Film Festival, my first-ever visit to this festival, or indeed this city. In fact, I'd better wrap up this post now if I want to make my flight! See you in a week and a half!

The Cardinal

Of the countless functions of cinema, perhaps one of the most suited to the medium is "camera as peephole." The world is filled with closed-off spaces, from the bedroom to the boardroom, which you or I cannot simply enter and experience for ourselves inobtrusively. Writers and visual artists who have access to a cloistered locale can report on their experiences behind socially-constructed veils, but they act as a filter quite different from a camera and audio recorder working in tandem. Likewise, so-called "fiction" filmmaking generally employs a filter distinct from the documentary mode, but even a well-dressed Hollywood set populated by actors can simulate for an audience the look and feel of an otherwise-private sphere they could otherwise never expect to experience at all.

Herein lies the everlasting appeal of the confessional in cinema to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Films like Forbidden Games, the Godfather Hamlet and countless others memorably recreate this oh-so-priviliged space, exploiting its dramatic (or comedic) potential while reminding us that cinema is as much about the unseen (often, the priest on the other side of the wall is heard but never shown) as the seen. Otto Preminger's 1963 The Cardinal uses a confession booth as a key location, but more notably the film as a whole serves as a sort of peephole onto the inner workings of the Catholic Church. Preminger, coming off the popular success of the religious-themed epic Exodus, was allowed an unprecedented amount of access to the Vatican City for this adaptation of the 1950 bestselling novel by Henry Morton Robinson. None other than Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, was the liaison between the Church and the production.

The Cardinal is titled for its central character Stephen Fermoyle, a priest played by Tom Tryon who acquired the nickname as a youth, we're told, as he'd been preordained to go into the clergy since his birth into Boston's Irish Catholic community. An academic at heart, he's seemingly more comfortable in an ivory tower delving into his faith's distant history than out in the world helping parishioners live through history-in-action. The interwar setting of the film provides opportunities for Fermoyle to butt up against twentieth-century history, both its events and its changing social attitudes. Tryon plays him as a weak personality who employs strict Catholic doctrine as something of a surrogate spine, guiding his hard decisions no matter the personal cost.

The film is structured as a series of moral tests for Tryon's priest, and for the Catholic Church in general. Whether he (and Catholicism) passes or fails these tests will probably depend on your viewpoint on controversial subjects, though one might guess Preminger's own stances even if he's, on the whole, even-handed in his presentation. Fermoyle confronts bigotry, abortion, his family's desires for him to go against his professed beliefs, and his own ambition. He even turns away from the church for an extended sequence in Vienna, though because of a flashback-framing device, we know that he will eventually return to Rome with honor; all we don't know is just how.
"How" is the fundamental question in successful narrative, and in The Cardinal. Chris Fujiwara, in his Preminger biography the World and Its Double, argues that if The Cardinal "is one of Preminger's greatest films, it is also, inevitably, one of his most underappreciated, since the same things that make it great also make it resist appreciation." Another biographer, Foster Hirsch, introducing a screening at the Film Forum in New York City, calls it "very square" in that it deals with the inner workings of church hierarchy, an unfashionable subject in 1963 or now. But he also considers it something of a litmus test for Preminger affinity; "if you like the film, you like Preminger. If it doesn't get to you, and it won't get to all of you, Preminger is not for you."

I'm not sure if Hirsch's challenge is foolproof; I did like the Cardinal, but to be honest it's the first of his films that has truly captured my fascination. Perhaps it's the circumstances of viewing; seeing the Panavision print secured by the Film On Film Foundation projected on a large screen at a press preview a few weeks ago was naturally more involving than viewing even the likes of Laura or Anatomy of a Murder on videocassette years ago. Perhaps I've just learned better how to view such an auteur-centric film over the years.

If so, it's not small part in thanks to reading books like Film As Film, written by V. F. Perkins in 1972. (And to Girish Shambu for instigating me to read it!) The book is an eye-opening investigation of the building blocks of narrative cinema, and though Perkins draws examples from across the range of classic cinema, from Griffith and Eisenstein to Nicholas Ray and Michaelangelo Antonioni, no director save Alfred Hitchcock gets more citations in the index than Otto Preminger. Two passages single out scenes from The Cardinal. One (page 95-6) takes the instance of a bell ringing upon Fermoyle's arrival in a small, impoverished Massachusetts parish as an example of the richness in meaning available through the use of sound in cinema. The other (page 87-88) contrasts the aptly motivated moving camera in a shot of Fermoyle and Anne-Marie (played by Romy Schneider) cycling through the Austrian countryside against camera movements he considers unmotivated in John Frankenheimer's the Train. Perkins writes of the shot: "Preminger's image does not cease to offer information in order to impose a mood or meaning. Instead the viewpoint is used to provoke, out of all the possible responses to the action, the ones most relevant to the film's design." As I interpret him, he's arguing on a micro leveal that the Cardinal at a macro level is a fully-controlled work from a master who knows exactly the effects he wants to achieve with each shot. Even what is arguably an episodic or unfocused source novel has been tamed and assimilated into Preminger's cinematic worldview.

I am excited to view more Preminger films in the retrospective currently running at the Pacific Film Archive through a lens informed by reading Fujiwara and Perkins, and by my experience viewing and considering The Cardinal. The series ends December 20th with a pairing of two highly-regarded works, Bonjour Tristesse and Bunny Lake Is Missing. In the meantime, a rare chance to see the Cardinal, which was left off the official PFA Preminger program, will occur this Sunday, December 6th at that venue, thanks to the Film On Film Foundation's rental of the theatre. It occurs just after screenings of Heddy Honigmann's the Underground Orchestra and Roberto Rossellini's masterful Voyage In Italy; Frisco Bay cinephiles will need airtight excuses not to be in Berkeley that day!

Adam Hartzell: Plaza of the Pavements

Brian here. Some months make me remember why I call this blog "Hell on Frisco Bay". June was a busy, stressful month for me, mostly outside the world of moviegoing, and so far July has been less stressful but even busier. Clearly, one of the things that has gone by the wayside in this time has been my ability to maintain this blog as a reliable and timely pointer to the myriad of terrific film events happening here on Frisco Bay. I'm keeping a better log of the latest local film screening announcements on my Twitter Stream, and you don't even have to register for anything to read it. But my time and energy for writing longer pieces for this site seems to be temporarily at a low ebb, even as practically every venue on my sidebar has a summer schedule well worth blogging about, even on-again, off-again cinemas like the Paramount in Oakland and the California in San Jose. Click the links to the right of this text and see.

Of course, the Silent Film Festival is opening this evening, and I am pleased to have a pass, some time off from work, and hopefully the stamina to see every program like I did last year. I certainly have the enthusiasm, built up over the past few months thanks to my connection with the festival, explained here. More previews of the festival are popping up everywhere, from authors such as Richard Von Busack, Thomas Gladysz, Carl Martin, Dennis Harvey and Michael Hawley.

Another preview of the festival films here at Hell On Frisco Bay seems extraneous. Which is why I'm also filled with enthusiasm to publish this piece by my good friend Adam Hartzell, on the 17th Street Plaza, which ought to enhance this year's festival experience as it lies mere inches from the line into the Castro Theatre that snakes around the corner of Castro and 17th Streets. Fascinatingly, this reclamation of space from motorized vehicle traffic is connected to the era during which silent films had their heyday. After reading, you may find the connections Adam makes resonating with your viewing of the masterful Underworld, with its depictions of police officers and getaway cars, or of So's Your Old Man, in which W.C. Fields plays an inventor of an automobile part. Adam will explain:

In spite of the fact that we sit in a theatre, often reclining in a fairly comfy chair, for many film-goers, cinema is not a passive activity. Hence the needs for a term like ‘film-goer’ which illuminates the more active process of watching cinema. Many of us prepare for the films we seek by reading about them or engaging in conversations about the films, either face to face with friends or in the comments section on blogs like these. Following the screening, we return to those spaces, the text on a page of a blog or the face of a friend, in order to sort out what we just actively saw.

This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival (running from July 10th through the 12th) allows for a unique opportunity for examining active cinema. If you can’t make it to Pordenone, Italy, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is the second best stop for those who find silent film as invigorating as any talkie. In this way, the Silent Film Festival is a festival acted upon by cinema-goers. And when this season’s patrons seek to break their silence inside the theatre and talk about the film outside the theatre, they have a new space in which to have that conversation.

As usual, the Silent Film Festival will be taking place at the cinematic temple that is the Castro Theatre. But this year, halfway up the block where 17th street nudges between Castro and Market Street, is the recently established "17th Street Plaza" (an alternate name for it is "Castro Commons"), a retrofitting of a street into a pedestrian plaza where people can cross at their leisure, as well as sit, talk, read, watch, and eat. Taking a cue from the long term plans of New York City to transforms spaces such as Times Square into pedestrian paradises, San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks project states on its website that it "...seeks to temporarily reclaim unused swathes and quickly and inexpensively turn them into new public plazas and parks."

I must disagree with San Francisco Pavement to Parks (SFP2P) referring to these spaces as 'unused'. In actuality, they are indeed 'used', just not as the modern day city planner intended them to be. To the city planner, spaces like where 17th meets Castro and Market are supposed to be streets. In our present day, this means a public space where cars are privileged and pedestrians are corralled into the crosswalk if permitted to cross at all. But SFP2P has taken note of how San Franciscans have been re-thinking certain urban spaces, where pedestrians have re-oriented streets from their previous plans, where cars have discarded these thoroughfares from their choice of options. The area where 17th meets Castro and Market was an area dominated by pedestrians, an epicenter of the queer geography that, roughly 50 years ago, began re-mapping Eureka Valley into the gay enclave we now know as the Castro. It is at this ambivalent intersection where pedestrian confidence has been so pronounced that cars began to use the street less and less. Seeing that the pedestrians had made the street theirs, SFP2P made what was unofficial official and inaugurated the Pavement to Parks projects with the 17th Street Plaza. Now we have a space where people can sit, people can wonder, with only occasionally having to be aware of the launching of another inbound run of the nostalgic beauty that is the F Market Street Railway fleet.

Part of what I've found to be a problem with some of the film festivals in San Francisco is that they haven’t had have a place to fall out of the theatre. The Castro Theatre’s outside atrium crowds up quickly, leaving some of us feeling a need to get out of the right-of-way of the pedestrians, disrupting the flow of conversation for the ease of pedestrian flow. Out-of-town festivals I’ve been to, such as The Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy or the Woman’s Film Festival in Seoul, have a public space at the ready for those who wish to carry their film-fueled conversations outside of the cramped spaces of the lobby without having to worry about moving along.

So this year I’m curious what the 17th Street Plaza will add to the already wonderful experience of the SF Silent Film Festival. How will the patrons appropriate this space? Will it be used as a space for cross-town friends to meet before queuing up for a screening? Will it be used as an impromptu lecture hall where signifying gestures will reveal ones thoughts, from the apathetic shrug of the shoulders to the full arm wailing rant or rave? Will it provide a space for kids to run around before or after the family-friendly fare on offer? (This year it’s Disney’s Oswald The Lucky Rabbit) Will it be a place to sip coffee from The Cheeseboard in order to stay alert for the next screening, or nosh on a bagel from Posh Bagel so one isn’t distracted by ones stomach growling? Or will it be a resting space for the lonely cinephile to reflect on where in their personal canon they will place what they’ve just seen?

What’s particularly poignant about the 17th Street Plaza placement outside the Silent Film Festival is what was going on in the U.S. at the time some of these films were initially screened, how cars were beginning to claim manifest destiny of city streets. Cars and streets have become so synonymous in our mental frames that the real history of streets as contested spaces between pedestrians and cars has been forgotten. It took University of Virginia’s Peter D. Norton to excavate that history for me. In his informative book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (The MIT Press, 2008), he reveals a surprising history of "bloody and sometimes violent revolution" that took place on city streets before they became the sole domain of automobiles in the 1930’s. Although we expect downtown businesses to resist plans to de-car Market Street, accepting their beliefs that such would adversely affect their profits in spite of recent studies demonstrating exactly the opposite, in the 10's and 20's of the 20th century, businesses were not fans of the automobile. Nor were police, since it often fell on them to direct traffic, and even the emerging field of traffic engineers initially found cars to be more a nuisance than a convenience. (Consider this quote underscoring the pedestrian’s traditional rights to the streets from a New York City judge in 1923, "Nobody has any inherent right to run an automobile at all." Such sounds like sacrilege, if not ludicrous, today.) The Progressive Movement of the late 19th and early 20th century that led to the necessary safety regulations in industry and the unnecessary prohibition of alcohol, also sought to severely restrict cars from acting like they had any claim to city streets. (Symbolic measures taken were monuments for children killed by automobiles erected in major cities like Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Along with photos of these monuments, Norton also includes propaganda fliers denouncing 'motordom', as the automotive industry was often referred to at the time, as basically child-killers.) It wasn’t until the automobile industry metaphorically connected the automobile with the concept of 'freedom' that our streets were envisioned as first and foremost for the car, placing responsibilities upon pedestrians (looking both ways, children not playing in the street, etc) that were never imposed upon pedestrians before. As Norton notes, "jaywalking", began as a term for people who blocked pedestrians from their right of way! Now the term, thanks to the efforts of the Boy Scouts and public safety week campaigns suggests a pedestrian is overstepping boundaries. (In our very own San Francisco in 1920, a safety campaign was implemented where jaywalkers were pulled from the street and immediately forced to face mock outdoor trials in order to teach them to feel shame about an activity that was, at the time, perfectly normal.)

Now as we begin the 21st century, the pedestrian is joining the critical mass cyclist in reclaiming the streets for active transport. As a result, cities have also begun a process of rethinking city streets. This is a result of the environmental concerns we were unaware of in the early part of the 20th century, the health benefits addressed by engaging in more active forms of transport, and the sociological needs to reconnect after suburbanization and digital technology increasingly isolate us from one another. We don’t want the bloody revolution Norton notes from our past. And SFP2P has taken care to lessen the possibility of conflicts between modern day motordom and pedestrians. In re-visioning spaces, they have thought ahead about possible obstacles. For example, concern about complaints of parking space loss led to SFP2P implementing an increase in parking around the upcoming "Guerrero Park" project. With The 14th Annual Silent Film Festival being the inaugural silent film festival for the 17th Street Plaza, here’s hoping this represents a roundabout where a significant portion of our city streets will return to the pedestrian promenades they were at the heyday of silent film.

Thanks Adam! Hopefully the discussion of the festival, and of the relationship between pedestrians and automobiles, will spill into the streets, and into the following comments section!