Outer Space (1999)

Screen capture from Other Cinema DVD "Experiments In Terror"

WHO: Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky created this.

WHAT: One of those experimental short films that has the power to impress open-minded cinephiles who normally find themselves too bored, confounded, or otherwise alienated from the 'avant-garde' to enjoy non-narrative underground filmmaking, Outer Space is a triumph, both conceptually and in terms of the painstaking processes that created it. Tscherkassky started with a print of Sidney J. Furie's horror film The Entity, in which Barbara Hershey plays a single mother who survives repeated attacks from a ghostly rapist who has invaded her suburban home and ultimately attempts to defeat the titular assailant with the qualified aid of a team of parapsychologists. He manipulated footage of some of the film's spectral assaults on a light table, creating a film in which Hershey appears to be attacked by the material of film itself. It's an astonishing film, and the highlight of the Other Cinema Experiments in Terror DVD, but it works best when seen on its native 35mm format.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 9:30 tonight only at the Castro Theatre

WHY: The Castro doesn't frequently show experimental short films in front of the feature-length films that are its bread and butter, but when it does it's a cause for celebration among fans of this mode of filmmaking. Unfortunately it's not always a cause for celebration among all viewers. I heard reports that when Outer Space played before John Carpenter's The Thing in March 2007, there was a great deal of consternation from certain audience members who couldn't wait an extra ten minutes to see a gory remake of a Howard Hawks alien invasion movie. I heard that audiences were better behaved when it played there along with its more natural companion The Entity in early 2013. Here's hoping tonight's Halloween horror crowd is ready for its visceral scares when it plays between two established classics.

I'm pleased to announce that Tscherkassky's most recent film, The Exquisite Corpus, is also planned to screen in San Francisco soon; to be specific at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on a bill with a new (digitally-distributed) documentary about film projection called The Dying of the Light, playing there November 3rd and 6th. I'm excited to see both, but the 35mm print of The Exquisite Corpus is the special draw for me; I've been waiting for this one since his last film Coming Attractions played here more than five years ago.

HOW: 35mm print preceding the 9:30 35mm screening of Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (note: NOT the 4:30 PM screening as well), the second half of a double-feature also including the digital director's cut of William Friedkin's The Exorcist.

Sixty Six (2015)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW: Digital screening with filmmaker in attendance.

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

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

A Pattern For Survival (2015)

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

WHO: Kelly Sears made this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Movie (1958)

Screen shot from digital transfer of Facets VHS release.

WHO: Bruce Conner made this.

WHAT: Conner didn't bother with warning shots. His first film was a torpedo fired directly at moving image culture as it was in the late 1950s, and honestly as it still is today. Though it wasn't the first film to have been constructed completely out of pre-existing film material (Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart beat it by 32 years, and Soviet filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub had preceded Cornell) it was probably the first to do so with such exuberantly rapid editing and biting humor, in tribute to a memorable moment from the final reel of Leo McCarey's Duck Soup. Today Conner's aesthetic feels familiar and perhaps even stale on a single viewing, at least to those of us raised on music videos and popular compilations that "normalize" Conner's then-radical strategies. But multiple viewings reveal more about the film. Kevin Hatch has written:

With each encounter, the rhythm of the editing appears more natural and the shot selection less arbitrary, until the film's logic becomes intuitively evident. With each viewing of the film, we become accustomed to the abrupt breaks between shots and more comfortable allowing them to reveal unexpected formal relationships and trigger involuntary mnemonic associations. What at first appears chaotic comes to seem, with repeated viewing, compulsively ordered.

Hatch spends quite a bit of time going into more detail on A Movie in his book Looking For Bruce Conner, but one thing he neglects to mention are the dissolves that appear in the last few minutes of the film; previously all edits were of the simple cut-and-splice variety that reconcile with Conner's recollections of having used only the most rudimentary tools of "a little splicer and a rewind and a viewer" to make his earliest films. But in 1958 it was possible to instruct a film lab to insert a dissolve into a print when processing it, for a small fee, so it seems likely that Conner exploited this option to create images like the above crossfade from a smoldering volcano to a ecclesiastical coronation.

WHERE/WHEN: A Movie screens tonight at 7:00 at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: Though it's hard to find many bright spots in yesterday's election results, I did enjoy a reminder, through a glance at the facebook page of the proprietor of the Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland, that Bruce Conner in 1967 ran a losing campaign for Supervisor that garnered more votes than some recent winners of Supervisor races have (though at the time elections were citywide rather than district-by-district, and therefore unfair to compare). As I wrote in a 2006 blog on Conner, his campaign speech was nothing more than a list of sweets.

I can think of no better cinematic post-election hangover cure than to see a Bruce Conner movie and a Craig Baldwin movie on the same bill. Baldwin's Tribulation 99 screens after A Movie tonight at the PFA, making a near-complete piecemeal retrospective of the living legend of San Francisco underground curation and filmmaking in the last few months, after terrific screenings of Mock Up On Mu, Sonic Outlaws and more at Artists' Television Access back in September. Tribulation 99 is probably Baldwin's most quintessential and essential film, and he'll be at the theatre to discuss it with anyone who dares to attend.

Tonight's program is part of the PFA's Alternative Visions series of experimental films, which winds down this month with shows devoted to Polish artist Pawel Wojtasik and to recent experimental films made by filmmakers who I'm guessing would probably acknowledge a debt to Conner in their own work. Many of them would likely acknowledge a debt to Baldwin as well, but probably none as vociferously as Linda Scobie, whose playful collage Craig's Cutting Room Floor is a 16mm film-assemblage of just what it describes: the material found beneath Baldwin's feet as he works in the editing room.

These may be the last three strictly experimental film programs at the PFA for a while, as recent tradition has held that the Alternative Visions series has been a Fall-only program with Spring devoted to cutting-edge documentary. With the PFA closing after July 2015, to re-open in a new, more BART-friendly, location in 2016, if the pattern holds it may be a couple years before we get a shot at seeing this kind of material in Berkeley again. Although there are some who would consider Jean-Luc Godard's films (especially his more recent ones) to be experimental films as well, and the PFA promises to continue with their retrospective of his work next Spring (presumably to culminate in his newest Goodbye To Language 3D, which in the meantime premieres locally next week in San Rafael). The current installment of this Godard retro covers his 1982-1994 work, and starts with his masterpiece Passion this Saturday. I'm pleased that a greater proportion of this segment of the Godard series is screening via 35mm prints than did in the last segment focusing on the 1970s. In fact the lion's share of the PFA's November-December calendar is 35mm, including everything in the Hou Hsiao-Hsien series, nearly everything in the Georgian film series that will also continue into 2015, and more than you might expect in the political documentary series entitled I’m Weiwei: Activism, Free Expression, Human Rights.

Of course the PFA is not the only place to show experimental films in the Bay Area; far from it in fact, when there's an organization like SF Cinematheque entering into a particularly busy month including tomorrow's Castro Theatre(!) screening of Andy Warhol's dual-projection epic Chelsea Girls and Friday's YBCA showing of Warhol's Hedy, both with fascinating and eloquent Factory star Mary Woronov in person, its annual art (and film) auction and benefit November 15th, and much more.

HOW: A Movie and Tribulation 99 both screen from 16mm prints in the PFA's own collection.

Fin de Siècle (2011)

Image from artist website.

WHO: Kathleen Quillian made this short animation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children's Party (1938)

WHO: Joseph Cornell made this film, and gave it to Lawrence Jordan to finish shortly before his 1972 death. Jordan writes that he left the editing structure intact, and that his contribution was that he "made the films printable".

WHAT: I've seen quite a few of Cornell's collage films (and a few of his other, later collaborations with Rudy Burckhardt as well), but I don't believe I've seen this or the other two films that make up what is called "The Children's Trilogy" (Cotillon and The Midnight Party) before. I do know that, like the majority of Cornell's films, they were not screened publicly until decades after they had been conceptualized and created. Few sources seem to agree which year these films even belong to; I've seen them dated as early as 1930 and as late as 1970, and frequently using multiple years (presumably in reference to the time when they were originally made and when they were finally printed and projected) or, as in the Canyon Cinema catalog, a vague range (1940s). 

Girish Shambu has written on these films evocatively. An excerpt:

He inserts title cards but only holds them for a frame or two, with the result that they fly by in a flash and are impossible to read. On the other hand, he’ll take an ordinary image—a boy sleeping or a girl sneezing—and will freeze-frame it and hold it, forcing us to examine every inch of it with care. In other words, elements of the film that might provide information about plot, character, narrative causality, etc., are purposely de-emphasized, while our eyes are redirected to stay with ‘unexceptional’ images on their own and in conjunction with other images (through montage), so that they start to appear anything but banal.

WHERE/WHEN: Scheduled to screen at 6:45 and 8:20 tonight only at the Kadist Art Foundation's Mission District storefront.

WHY: Children's Party and its sisters in the "Children's Trilogy" screen, along with Michael Snow and Carl Brown's dual-projector Triage and Anthony McCall's seminal 1973 para-cinematic piece Line Describing A Cone (which I've been dying to see for years and especially since hearing Robert Davis & J. Robert Parks discuss it on a podcast last year), as part of the launch of a Canyon Cinema Pop-Up in which the Kadist space will become the site of a kind of temporary avant-garde cinema DVD rental store for titles you'll never find through Netflix or Redbox or probably even Le Video or Lost Weekend. More details on that here. 

If you can't make tonight's screening event, there will be three more events at the space in the next two weeks; a live performance of Kerry Tribe's tribute to Hollis Frampton's 1971 film Critical Mass this Saturday, an as-yet unannounced selection of humorous experimental films (that I strongly suspect will include Robert Nelson's The Off-Handed Jape) on the following Saturday, December 14th, and a presentation of films selected by Janis Crystal Lipzin and Denah Johnston on December 18th.

HOW: All of tonight's selections screen from 16mm prints from Canyon Cinema.

Night Hunter (2011)

WHO: Stacey Steers made this.

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

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

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

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

Behind The Eyes Are The Ears (2010)

WHO: Nancy Andrews made this video work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Clock (2010)

WHO: San Rafael-born artist Christian Marclay is responsible for this 1440-minute-long looped installation made up entirely of clips from thousands of movies and (a comparative few) television shows.

WHAT: After five visits and a total of 10 1/4 of its 24 hours logged over the past two months, I'm still not sure what exactly I think of The Clock, but feel like I'm starting to finally get a sense of what makes it tick- and what doesn't. I haven't spied any more clips of documentary or animation (including any such special effects- clips from CGI-dependent films used scenes that weren't.) after ten hours than I had after two, unless you count shots of televisions showing newscasts or Simpsons episodes being watched by fictional characters. I also haven't noticed any shots of timepieces in space, and none from sword-and-sandal movies or medieval fantasy either, though the appearance of a sundial (in a clip from this movie, I think) had me wondering why not. There's something too-clever-by-half about the construction of this artwork, and I can't help but wonder if it would be at all compelling if it weren't for its monumental scale. But I keep coming back to it, perhaps because I want to figure out why I was so moved by Marclay's inclusion of one particular clip: the opening scene of a movie I haven't seen in which a teacher asks a classroom of children for ideas of things to put inside a time capsule.

My friend Miriam Montag has seen more than I have, and has written an impression of what it's like for a cinephile to attend this exhibit.

Christian Marclay’s 24-hour behemoth video installation The Clock is, as a complete work, is loaded with the tension of letting go and hanging on. It gives and it takes away, and the net effect of the whole process might not seem clear at first.   

From the outset, while there may be enough hours in the day, a wait is involved. Even those who enjoy a swami-like freedom from bodily functions will likely require multiple visits, with the accompanying waiting time in most cases, to see the whole blasted thing. The wait, about two hours usually and thoroughly expected by most attendees, acts as a bizarre vacation from time. Once the art-lover has committed a chunk of time to The Clock and its related wait, this time has a deliciousness to it that a holiday Monday can’t quite match. One has let go of the idea that there isn’t enough time. Books will be read, email inboxes will be cleaned out, old friends caught up with, alliances formed, the names and menus of eateries in Madrid divulged.

What must be left go of is a lot harder to quantify, particularly for the cineaste’s often neurotic needs. It will be worth it. 

Upon entering the exhibition, it is clear that a lot more than the satisfactions and disappointments of narrative of will be sacrificed. As a video installation, the beauty and vagaries of film were not to be expected, of course. Seamlessness required a uniformity of screen format. Cropped widescreen, such as Tonino Delli Colli’s compositions for Sergio Leone, and partially scalped shots from The Twilight Zone both bow to this directive. For Academy ratio films blown up from poor VHS copies, the distortions took on a poignant cast that they would not have for a full viewing. A decades' worth of image quality discernment, out the window! Film-going bugaboo number one and two hit the gray carpet with nary a thud. 

For those who log a few minutes on imdb.com playing “Where Have I Seen That School Marm Before?” or have some sort of similar post-viewing compulsion, The Clock says “Eat my dust!”. Attempts to jot down details of unfamiliar clips to figure out what the devil they are just will just be a mocking reminder after the fact. “Jess Walter/ W. Beatty b/w”? Why? Really, why? If the title of the film where Jerome Cowan and Edward Everett Horton sing about champagne is worth looking into, the question will come to mind after the viewer has showered, napped and eaten a proper meal. Impulses toward all consuming knowledge will need to settle to the bottom of the sensible viewer’s brain pan or tragedy is in the cards. 

A somewhat fussy baby might burble and sightlines might not be all one wishes, but the annoyances of a typical night at the local Bijou melt away in submersive experience of this singular work, only to be replaced by nuttier ones. People who check their light up watches for the time are just a source of bemusement.   

Note taking? You want to account for as many minutes of Marclay’s day as you can? The more rabid the film-goer, the closer this approaches to Death Match territory. If a seat in the eyeline of the unseasoned viewer is occupied by one “getting” more titles, it is tempting to just write any old crap down just to look worldly. Let it go, that guy wasn’t making any notes during To Sir With Love, and the theme was playing in the clip as Sidney Potier ironed is shirt, so who cares what he thinks? He’s never heard of Abram Room, see any version of OUT and probably thinks Judy Geeson is Lulu. He and his superior knowledge of teen films of the 90s can go to hell!  At this point, dear viewer, please consider going home. 

What’s holding us? The nagging suspicion that the longer the session, the deeper the experience of the work. The clock as a time compression device in films is turned on its head most violently here. It’s apparent that a certain moody teen being relieved from the “You’ll sit here till you eat that dinner, Missy!” treatment is sweeter for the folks, who hours before, saw the punishment being meted out. They’re glad they stayed and how would they have known of this pay off otherwise? The tedium of being booked by the cops is brought home by its reappearance, hours later with a different time on the clock and you were THERE. Yes, Travis and Betsy are going for coffee during her next break at 4 pm . . . but will The Clock be there? Will there be a dead general at dawn? What time of day does napalm smell best? Some chimes, oh say, about 12 AM? 

Is it rational to risk one’s health and well-being just because one is dissatisfied by the only clip of Michael Caine screened during your puny 4 hour stretch? Yes, it is. This is where the tenacity and endurance only a veteran of Jacques Rivette retrospectives can claim comes in, and god dammit, it is a proud and untamable madness! It’s morning and Harry Palmer will soon be waking to one very annoying alarm clock. So stay. You’ll never come back to fill in the upcoming 3 hour gap, so stay. You can’t believe there’s no Godard, so stay. It will never return, not really, so stay. It seems like you’ve just had a second (third, fourth) wind so stay.  Stay, stay, stay.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 24 hours a day at SFMOMA until June 2, after which the museum closes for an extensive remodel. But it's only available to view during the museum's open hours, which are 11 AM-5:45 PM today, 10 AM-9:45 PM Thursday, 10 AM to 5:45 PM Friday, and a final 31 hour blow-out starting 10 AM Saturday until 5:45 PM Sunday.

WHY: I don't know if Miriam's correct about her prediction, "It will never return" but why risk it? If you have some time to devote to this piece before it disappears, you really ought to try it, if only to see for yourself what this thing really is. I predict that every half-hour spent waiting in line outside the museum before it opens will save you at least an hour wait time in the museum if you arrive during its open hours.

HOW: Projected video installation.

The Pervert's Guide To Ideology (2012)

WHO: Sophie Fiennes directed this.

WHAT: If you saw Slavoj Žižek holding court on screen in Fiennes's 2006 feature The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, you know what to expect here: an often light-hearted lecture by one of the world's most colorful philosophers, illustrated by clips and wry recreations of set designs from twenty-four films, among them They Live, Jaws, Triumph of the Will, The Fireman's Ball, and one of Žižek's all-time favorites, The Sound of Music. I have not seen this "sequel" yet, but I understand that instead of investigating the cinema itself from the often contrarian (thus perverted- in the non-sexual sense of the term) point of view of its host, as the 2006 film did, The Pervert's Guide To Ideology utilizes cinema as a lens through which to re-examine our preconceived beliefs about society, history and ideology itself. How successful it is at this has been debated since its world premiere last fall. For a sense of the debate, try this Keyframe Daily post from last November.

The comparison may seem specious once I see it, but I can't help but think of parallels to Christian Marclay's The Clock, which also excerpts from cinema history in order to make the viewer ruminate not so much on movies and their formal qualities, but on their social uses and issues rippling far beyond the screen or the walls surrounding it.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screening tonight and on May 5th at 9:15 PM each night at the Kabuki, and at 3:30 on May 1 at New People

WHY: Since I haven't seen The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, I can't exactly recommend it, but it does appear to be one of the titles cinephiles might want to consider seeing today, the first full day of the festival. Others include Raúl Ruiz's swan song Night Across The Street, the critically-lauded fishing documentary Leviathan, and the latest from Takeshi Kitano, Outrage Beyond. 

These are just educated guesses; tomorrow I'll start posting about SFIFF films I've actually seen. But not having seen a film hasn't stopped me from mentioning it on this blog before (though I try to be careful to make sure it's clear whether I have or haven't) and the festival itself is promoting sight-unseen SFIFF picks by six local celebrities and a sports team. For truly informed suggestions for what to see over the next two weeks it's best to consult critics who have actually seen the films they write about. Again, try Keyframe Daily for links to reviews and capsules by just such critics.

Connections between The Pervert's Guide To Ideology and other films in the SFIFF program are probably legion. But I have seen one film that shares with it an engagement with The Sound of Music: Scott Stark's Bloom, which is part of the Shorts 5 program of experimental works screening tomorrow and this Tuesday. Two films Žižek is reported to excerpt are screening at the Castro over the next few days, though not at the festival: A Clockwork Orange and Brazil. I looked in vain on the list of 24 for a title starring the just-announced recipient of the Peter J. Owens Award: Harrison Ford, but he's nowhere to be found. Nor did he appear in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema; the clip of The Conversation used in that piece was not one of his relatively few scenes.

HOW: Perverts Guide To Ideology screens digitally, as it was made digitally (although the clips it excerpts from were shot on film, thus perhaps representing too much of a compromise for the most hard-core film-as-film purists).

Speechless (2008)

WHO: Scott Stark made this film. As Brian L Frye writes in Radical Light, "Stark imported the wry wit of seventies performance art to his films, which are best described as works that play games with how movies work." Sounds right to me.

WHAT:  I'm not up to the task of writing a full review or analysis of the thirteen-minute Speechless, especially when eloquent considerations of the film are available at just a click or two away. But I would like to encourage any open-minded reader to see it. Speechless is part of a cycle of Stark films that draws particular attention to the individual frame as the building block of the moving image. Motion in the film is created by juxtaposing still images together, creating graphic matches and mismatches between, in this case, photographs of female genitals from a medical textbook, and images of (mostly) natural landscapes shot by Stark himself. A great many of these landscape images were gathered right here in San Francisco, at the former military installation West of Lake Merced known as Fort Funston. (Others were taken in Oakland or New Hampshire.) A simple, calm electronic drone soundtrack consisting primarily of two alternating notes and overtones provides a suitable sonic backdrop for audience contemplation of the connections between human and earth-borne forms, of how the Bay Area in particular has been a site for expressions of female sexuality (though I suspect few find these particular images of vaginas erotic), and I'm sure many other subjects particular to each viewer's experience. It's a strange and lovely film.

WHERE/WHEN: This free public screening, with Stark present for a post-screening discussion, happens 7:30 PM tonight, only at the lecture hall on the San Francisco Art Institute, Stark's alma mater. But come early for a 7:00 artist reception and to take in some of the best views of Frisco Bay from this beautiful Russian Hill location.

WHY: Depending on when you read this post, the program for the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 25-May 9) may or may not be publicly available; the press conference announcing all programs happens this morning. Michael Hawley has done a stellar job running down all of the pre-conference announcements (and making guesses as to what else might screen) but shorts are not usually in his areas of interest. However, word is already out that Stark's eerie 2012 piece Bloom is also expected to screen as part of the SFIFF. Festgoers who see it will never hear the sound of music in quite the same way again.

But before that, two full programs of Stark's work show in local venues. Speechless screens tonight as part of a set of film and video works investigating the human body, each made between 1996 and 2008. (I listed the other films in the program here).  Then, this Sunday, three of his more recent video works screen as part of the Crossroads festival hosted by SF Cinematheque at the historic Victoria Theatre on 16th Street between Misson and Capp. On the program are a dual-projector screening of Compressive/Percussive, Stark's study of light and shadow upon an Austin, TX freeway, and Longhorn Tremolo, another Texas work that made my 2011 list of favorite films in the "yet to screen in a Bay Area cinema" subcategory. This screening marks its local debut, and also the world premiere of Stark's elegant, monstrous The Realist, which was shot partially in San Francisco and is sure to go down as one of 2013's most important releases into the experimental film & video world. Seeing tonight's program, and Speechless in particular, will be good preparation for appreciation of this brilliant new work.

HOW: Speechless will screen as a 16mm projection.

No (2012)

WHO: Directed by Pablo Larraín, completing a sort of trilogy of films made about Pinochet-era Chile.

WHAT: The Wikipedia article on Cinema of Chile suggests that filmmaking within the country's borders from 1973 through 1989 was negligible. If true, it's understandable, as dictatorships can produce a "brain drain" of artists with distinctive voices; the two best-known names of the "New Chilean Cinema" movement, Raúl Ruiz and Patricio Guzmán, fled their homeland and made their names internationally known while working in exile. Tony Manero, the first in Larraín's trilogy, involves a Chilean obsessed with a cinematic icon not from his own country but from one of the Hollywood imports that dominated Chile's cinema screens in the seventies (Saturday Night Fever). I have not seen Post-Mortem yet, but based on Tony Manero and No Larraín's trilogy is clearly interested in exploring dialogues between moving images and citizens living under dictatorship. In both cases television becomes the arena for local image production.

I don't want to recount a plot summary of No other than to say its drama concerns the political use of television advertising. There are a lot of recent reviews of it out there, and probably the most thoughtful and thorough one I've come across is by Roderick Heath. I just want to comment on Larraín's aesthetic strategy of shooting the entire feature on the very outmoded analog video format of 3/4-inch videotape. Though there are examples of movies shot using this medium (also known as U-Matic) such as Rob Nilsson's 1986 feature Signal Seven and some of George Kuchar's video diaries, its domain was really the world of television. It seems safe to call No the first feature film made in this format since the advent of digital video in the 1990s.

This use of analog video cameras certainly makes Larraín's film stand out visually. Artifacting makes forms appear to have softer edges, often with unnatural color interference. Color is muted and made pastel throughout the film (making bright yellow subtitles stand out all the more), and when Larraín lands his camera on a light source, whether a lamp or a reflection or even the sun, color can be blown out almost completely, a screen-whitening effect very different from that of filmic looks cinemagoers have grown accustomed to. But this aesthetic choice is not a mere gimmick, as it reduces distinctions between the film-world diegesis and the frequent television imagery incorporated into the film, much of it real archival video that was shot on 3/4-inch tape and broadcast into Chilean homes in the late 1980s. On a few occasions Larraín's editing rhythms give viewers the disorienting sensation of not being sure if the image we're seeing is part of a broadcast being watched by characters, or part of the world they're existing in at that moment. This boundary blurring, impossible to achieve had Larraín used more conventional technology, plays right into No's themes of political image vs. political reality, of observing vs. taking action, etc. There are few films that can have characters use a word like "semiology" and get away with it without coming across as hopelessly academic. In fact, No may be the only one I'm aware of. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at many venues around Frisco Bay through April 4th, from the Camera 3 in San Jose to the Summerfield in Santa Rosa, including the Rafael in Marin, and at Landmark cinemas in four cities: the Embarcadero in San Francisco, the Shattuck in Berkeley, the Piedmont in Oakland, and the Aquarius in Palo Alto.

WHY: Though I haven't heard much new on the topic in several months, last year there was a lot of discussion about the impending transition away from 35mm distribution towards digital. For habitues of multiplexes, the change wasn't impending, as a great many of them had already made the change by 2011. But last year was when traditional "art houses" began tearing out their 35mm projectors to make room for digital systems. Last fall, the Landmark Theatre chain turned several of its most frequented local theatres into digital-only ones, and ceased operation on two others, the Lumiere and the Bridge, leaving the company with only (by my count) the Opera Plaza and the Clay in San Francisco, the Guild in Menlo Park and the Aquarius as venues for 35mm presentation.

I've begun to hear rumors that another wave of transition is coming to Landmark theatres in the next few weeks or months. You know rumors, they can be awfully unspecific. But anyway I wouldn't be surprised if the Opera Plaza isn't the last remaining Landmark venue running a 35mm projection system before summer. According to the Film On Film Foundation the Clay is expected to screen Rocky Horror Picture Show in 35mm at least twice more: this Saturday and April 27th. But The Guild and the Aquarius could make the changeover at any time. Right now the Guild is screening Quartet, directed by Dustin Hoffman, while the Aquarius has No and the Walter Salles adaptation of On The Road; the latter will be switched out for Australian crowd-pleaser The Sapphires, but No remains.

HOW: Via the afore-linked Bay Area Film Calendar, No screens in 35mm right now at the Aquarius and the Camera 3, and presumably digitally elsewhere. I saw it via DCP at the Embarcadero but I'd be curious to catch it in 35mm to compare how its analog video look translates to an analog (non video) format rather than a (non analog) video one.

Memories To Light (2013)

WHO: Mark Decena (director of Dopamine among other films) has edited together home movies for the closing night presentation for this final evening of CAAMFest.

WHAT: I must admit I'm a bit unclear on some of the specifics here. I know that Decena has edited a film from his own family's home movie footage which is entitled The War Inside, as he talked about it on KALW radio earlier this week; the seven-minute interview can be heard here. 

But the Center for Asian American Media is also using tonight's event to launch a project they're calling Memories To Light, which intends to collect home movies from all over the United States for digitization and potential presentation. The rationale for this is best described on the still-under-construction website: 

Since the mainstream media has given us so few authentic images of the Asian American experience, home videos become the most real way to see how our grandparents, mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles lived their lives.

A more worthwhile and interesting initiative is hard to imagine; home movies can tell us so much that they weren't necessarily intending to communicate across time when they were filmed; not just about culture but about geography, ecology, fashion, and even the evolving relationship ordinary people have had with the camera over the decades. Although this project is Asian-American specific and I'm about as Anglo as they come, I'm tempted to dig back into my parents' reels of home movie footage to see if there are images of me playing with the many Asian-American friends I made growing up in the diverse Richmond District of San Francisco, that might be of use to CAAM.

I'm under the impression that CAAM already has collected quite a bit of home movie footage aside from Decena's, and that he may have been responsible for the editing of this other footage together for tonight's presentation as well as his own. Perhaps this compilation should be thought of as a film entitled Memories To Light, like the CAAM initiative. Those with tickets to tonight's event will soon be able to untangle all of this and report back; unfortunately I won't be able to attend myself.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at New People tonight only at 5:00 PM. Advance tickets are all sold but there may be "Rush" tickets available for attendees willing to wait in line at the venue about an hour beforehand.

WHY: The festival program gives special thanks to archivists Rick Prelinger and Antonella Bonfanti, both of whom I've become friends with over the past year or two, but that shouldn't make me, them, or you feel awkward when I decide to highlight their excellent work here on this blog. Bonfanti is interviewed about her role in digitizing home movies used in tonight's presentation in the organization's brief promotional video, which also features CAAM executive director Stephen Gong speaking about the project. 

Prelinger is Frisco Bay's, and perhaps even the country's, leading advocate for increased prominence of home movies in cinemas and in our conversations about moving images. He annually puts together the extraordinarily popular Lost Landscapes of San Francisco events at the Castro Theatre, and his passion for home movies is perhaps most succinctly and eloquently expressed in words in this Open Space blog post from last year. I'm very excited that on May 5th the San Francisco International Film Festival will host the hometown premiere of his brand-new film No More Road Trips? also at the Castro. This film (which I've seen a brief but powerful excerpt from) is compiled from home movie footage and intended to spark a dialogue about the connections between the car culture of the past century and that of today, whether it's sustainable into the future, and if not, what that means.  Preferably this conversation will be carried out during the screening itself among the audience, as like his Lost Landscapes shows, he has designed the presentation to be an interactive one for an audience encouraged to provide a kind of crowd-sourced benshi soundtrack of comments, questions, and other verbal expressions.

HOW: Memories To Light will be a digital presentation with live "performance controlled" music by Davin Agatep. I'm not sure if the audience will be encouraged to interject during this screening like they are at Prelinger's, but I'm sure they'll be told one way or another beforehand.

The Cheer Ambassadors (2012)

WHO: Linguist and photographer Luke Cassady-Doiron makes his documentary directing debut with this. As a US citizen living in Bangkok since 2005, he could qualify as an "American Asian" filmmaker included at a festival that specializes in films made by Asian American filmmakers. Close enough, right?

WHAT: The Cheer Ambassadors is a documentary as peppy, poppy, and eager to inspire audiences as is its subject: the Bangkok University coed cheerleading squad, which made a splash at the 2009 Universal Cheerleaders Association international competition in Orlando, Florida. 

Like a stereotypical cheerleader, it's an attractive film full of enthusiasm, but is not intellectually deep. Heady topics relevant to the story are touched upon but not really explored. Is cheerleading a real sport or a form of performance? Is there a difference? What is it like for male and female athletes to compete on one team together, especially in a country that considers itself conservative with regard to relations between unmarried men and women? What does it say about globalization that such an American activity has caught hold so firmly among young people half a world away? These questions may be raised but not much progress is made toward helping the audience come closer to answers to them. That's okay. Cassady-Doiron does a good job of making an engaging entertainment out of his material, taking a more emotional than intellectual route to resonance and depth by spending time interviewing the Bangkok cheerleaders about their own dreams, life histories and personal struggles trying to stay focused on their training and development as athletes and teammates.

What most interests me about The Cheer Ambassadors is how it was constructed. The various aspect ratios, levels of resolution, and styles of camera movement suggest that many different cameras and cinematographers were used to capture footage in the film. Clearly some shots come directly from television broadcasts, while others appear to be handheld, consumer-grade (perhaps even cellphone) cameras. Yet the interviews and much of the training footage appears to be shot in HD by Cassady-Doiron himself. Though all the footage is edited together deftly to create a clear narrative, with the addition of some handsome animated sequences to fill certain gaps (the latter technique used by Caveh Zahedi among other seasoned documentarians), an attentive viewer may wonder if the director and his camera were even on hand for certain critical moments, including the Florida culmination. All documentaries are chronicles of history once they hit the screen of course, but might this one be, like Budrus or Grizzly Man, a film in which the director got involved in its making after the story was already over, and more a feat of collecting and editing pre-existing footage (while adding supplemental contextual material like the interviews), than a feat of embedded documenting, like in Restrepo or The White Diamond? If so, perhaps it also explains why my friend Adam Hartzell in his otherwise-positive review noticed that demonstration of the specific innovations the Thai team brought to international cheerleading felt missing from the film. And it makes the all-but-seamless construction of the film seem all the more impressive an achievement on the part of Cassady-Doiron and his editor Duangporn Pakavirojkul.

WHERE/WHEN: One last CAAMFest screening 8:30 tonight at the Kabuki.

WHY: If you've been watching too many slow-paced movies on grim subjects (as there are certainly some in the program, though not unworthwhile) at this weekend's CAAMFest, The Cheer Ambassadors might be just the right pick-me-up. Not that there aren't moments of darkness in the film, but it certainly maintains an appropriately cheery outlook for most of its running time. 

It's an extremely tenuous connection, but yesterday the latest issue of the Australian film journal Senses Of Cinema dropped, including my new article on a completely different film featuring an American-style performance/athletic activity imported to an Asian country: Carmen Comes Home, starring Hideko Takamine as a striptease dancer visiting her traditional Japanese village for the first time since her career change.

HOW: Digital screening of a digital production.