Gideon's Army (2013)

WHO: Dawn Porter directed this.

WHAT: I haven't seen this documentary about Deep South public defenders 50 years after the Earl Warren Supreme Court's landmark Gideon v. Wainwright decision, so let me quote from a review by Tambay A. Obenson:

The minimalist, verite-style documentary is free of any embellishments - even a soundtrack, except for the occasional muted drone or beats. Director Porter simply documents the action, on camera, sans voiceover narration, or any visual gimmicks. She doesn't lead the audience nor insert herself into the picture, which I appreciated, as it could've lessened the impact audiences would experience of this rather cold, stark, all-consuming, even dangerous and potentially depressing world that the film's subjects exist in - both the public defenders and their primarily impoverished clients.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Little Roxie at 9:00.

WHY: When SF IndieFest's DocFest showcase moved its position on the annual festival calendar from October (as it was in 2012) to June 6-23 this year, it gave the programming team access to a greater number of documentaries that had played at, and even perhaps won awards at, the Sundance Film Festival (still one of the top showcases for brand-new documentaries, especially those made by U.S. filmmakers), but had not yet found a venue for a Frisco Bay theatrical premiere. Gideon's Army fits this profile perfectly; it won the "best editing" award from Sundance, but had DocFest not been around to screen it, it might have skipped local cinemas entirely as few venues seem likely to want to touch a documentary after it has its HBO television premiere, as this will in two weeks.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digital production.

The Source Family (2012)

WHO: Co-directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos.

WHAT: Want to spend time in a vegetarian, psychedelic, mystical personality cult? No? How about just 98 minutes? This documentary about a Los Angeles religious community active in the early 1970s is well worth your time if you have any interest in California counterculture of that era. The Source Family, sometimes known as the Aquarians, was a commune of followers of a World War II vet named Jim Baker, who opened several popular health food restaurants, the last of which, The Source, was frequented by the likes of Goldie Hawn and Steve McQueen, and even made cinematic appearances in Hollywood films like Alex in Wonderland and Annie Hall (the doc provides relevant clips).

Inspired by the Kundalini Yoga teachings of Yogi Bhajan, Baker changed his name to "Father Yod" and selected a 19-year old named Robin to become "Mother Ah-Om" to help him set a new religion based on "the best" of all existing ones. 140 youngsters were drawn to his charismatic presence and came to live on his compound, donate their savings, work in his restaurant, and travel with him down a spiritual path involving the usual sex, drugs and rock and roll, but that ultimately took some bizarre turns. Though nothing as massively tragic as what's depicted in Oakland filmmaker Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: the Life and Death of Peoples Temple; the Source Family may have some superficial connections to Peoples Temple in that both attracted seekers trained by the 1960s political climate to distrust traditional father figures even if they still craved a kind of paternal authority, but it's clear that they were not very similar in some fundamental ways.

Made up mostly of interviews with former Source Family members, as well as the personal archive of Isis Aquarian, the now-septugenarien "family historian and temple keeper", The Source Family is no formal ground-breaker. It has a "generally favorable" rating on Metacritic, which seems fair enough. But I notice that the two most unfavorable reviews (neither outright pans) fault the film for not including more of an attempt to place The Source Family into the social and religious context of its time. It's true that directors Wille and Demopoulos largely avoid panning out to a view of the forest, preferring to examine the story at tree-level, almost as if the audience is experiencing the history of the movement from the perspective of someone who was a part of it at the time. Writer Erik Davis and a few other outsiders do provide a bit of analysis and context, mostly their commentary revolves around the musical recordings Father Yod and his followers published, which we also hear samples of throughout the soundtrack, and which now fetch pretty prices in psychedelic record collecting circles.

But though this approach meant that the film took a little bit of time to truly blossom into a compelling story, it also feels respectful of the audience, which is nonetheless given plenty of information and allowed to make up its own mind about went on in Father Yod's group (I know I'm being vague, but I don't want to give away any of the most unexpected revelations. If you want to know more than even the film tells you about Father Yod and his legacy, this article and the currently-active comment thread below might do the trick. But it may make a viewing of The Source Family less enjoyable.)

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the New Parkway at 7:00.

WHY: Lots of documentaries at The New Parkway this week. This plays this as part of its weekly Doc Night held each Tuesday. The venue will also host a documentary tomorrow night: After Innocence, sponsored by the ACLU and screening for free. Friday through Sunday, it joins the Roxie in hosting SF Indie's Doc Fest. And Monday it shows Crossing The Line, about a US Army defector now living in North Korea.

HOW: Digital projection, as always at the New Parkway.

Elena (2012)

WHO: Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa made this.

WHAT: Not to be confused with Andrey Zvyagintsev's 2011 drama with the same title, this first-person documentary was undertaken after Costa had an inspirational viewing of Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès. I haven't seen it, but after several impassioned recommendations from cinephiles who have, I'm very excited to. Let me quote from Jordan M. Smith's recent review:

Elena was a Brazilian dancer turned movie bound New Yorker, dead set on becoming a star. Following in her sister’s footsteps, Petra has taken up the camera, performs before it and let’s her voice lay elegantly aloft the starkly personal collage she’s constructed.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie Theater at 9PM.

WHY: I haven't yet had a chance yet to attend this year's edition of SF IndieFest's annual showcase DocFest, which began last week and runs through June 20th at the Roxie and other Frisco Bay venues, after which it takes up a three-day residency at Santa Cruz's Rio Theatre. Though the festival began last Thursday, there are only a couple of fest selections that audiences won't have at least one more chance to see over the next two weeks. Check David Hudson's handy round-up of press previews to get a full sense of the program. But although none of the linked previewers mention Elena, my sense from the Facebook and Twitter endorsements I've spied is that it will be one of the festival's biggest highlights.

HOW: DocFest is all-digital this year, but that' makes sense as so few documentaries are shot on film anymore. This one mixes footage shot using digital and analog video cameras with that from a Super-8 film camera, which may be confounding to would-be format purists trying to decide whether to attend or not.

Burn On (1973)

WHO: Shirley Muldowney is one of the drag racers briefly interviewed in this documentary.

WHAT: I've already mentioned "interviewed" and "documentary" in the same sentence (twice now!) and it may have made your eyes roll. But this film is a flurry of images and sounds from the Epping, New Hampshire drag racing track where it was filmed, and the interviews comprise a very small component of its sixteen-minute running time. I've found very little reference to it outside of racing enthusiast circles, but it ought to be known by cinema enthusiasts as well. It hearkens back to an era when formal experimentation and non-fiction storytelling were less mutually-exclusive categories.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 9:05 PM

WHY: When I found out Burn On was screening tonight, I just had to feature it today.

Last night I got back from a week-long trip to New Hampshire, the state where it was filmed. I steered clear of racetracks and high speeds but ticked off quite a few rental car miles while driving around the state with my wonderful girlfriend, award-winning filmmaker Kerry Laitala, who is spending part of the summer there thanks the generosity of the MacDowell Artist Colony. I helped her gather footage, photographs, materials, and even a few interviews that she'll be using as raw material in her next film project about the New Hampshire icon the Old Man of the Mountain (which you may or may not be aware was the indirect origin of Buster Keaton's nickname "The Great Stone Face".)

While her residency at the MacDowell Colony is a boon, her film requires additional expenses that she's hoping will be able to be funded by a Kickstarter project currently in-progress. I'm obviously close to the project, but I think it's going to ultimately produce a fascinating and beautiful investigation of the human relationship to landscape, the nature of impermanence, and the relevance of the past to our own faced-paced age.

This all may seem like a huge digression from Burn On, but I feel the New Hampshire connection and the fact that the racing documentary exhibits certain experimental film techniques in a lineage of visual vocabulary that Laitala's work is not so far from, gives me an excuse to pitch this project to my blog readers. I don't often use this blog to promote my friends' crowd-funding projects, but this one is particularly close to my heart. I've never placed ads on my site or asked for donations before either, so if you appreciate my efforts in covering the Frisco Bay film scene, please click the link to her project, and consider pledging to her project or (just importantly) sharing it with people you think might also be interested in supporting her, or receiving some of her unique art object rewards. And do it soon, as there's only a week left to go in her campaign!

HOW: Burn On plays prior to a screening of Monte Hellman's great road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, and after a 7:00 showing of Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. All three in 35mm prints.

A River Changes Course (2013)

WHO: Kalyanee Mam directed this

WHAT: The winner of the San Francisco International Film Festival's Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature (I reported on all the festival's awards last month), this is a polished and interesting documentary about the ecological and economic pressures facing average families in Cambodia. When placed in comparison to the more probing and poetic (and frequently more harrowing) documentaries of the great filmmaker Rithy Panh (who just won a Cannes prize for his latest film The Missing Picture), it comes across as a somewhat lesser work, at least for someone like me who has visited the country and is generally familiar with its many problems and wonders. But Mam's take functions as an ideal "Cambodia 101" for people who haven't heard much about the small country beyond the famous horrors caused by American intervention in the region forty years ago.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 7:00 at the Goldman Theater in the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley, as part of the San Francisco Green Film Festival.

WHY: A River Changes Course is not strictly about environmental issues, but then again environmental issues and their potential solutions are impossible to extract from other human challenges. Thus it's a good choice for the 2nd annual San Francisco Green Film Festival, which opened the other night and runs through June 5th. The underutilized New People Cinema is the main festival venue, but there are screenings at various other Frisco Bay venues, including a free San Francisco Public Library screening of Plastic Paradise, which shows us images from Midway Atoll, a chain of islands affected tremendously by the accumulation of petroleum product waste in the North Pacific Gyre. 

Tonight's screening is one of two at the David Brower Center, a venue I've yet to investigate for myself. The other screening at the space is Tuesday's showing of Breathing Earth - Susumu Singu's Dream, the latest feature by director Thomas Riedelsheimer, who made two wonderful previous documentaries called Rivers and Tides and Touch the Sound, both about unique artists working with  materials in ways that set them apart from some of the ecologically-unsustainable practices used in many sectors of the art world. This portrait of a wind sculptor, and this afternoon's other Riedelsheimer screening Garden in the Sea, about an underwater installation in the Sea of Cortez, seem to fit this pattern as well.

More documentaries of interest to eco-minded cinephiles are to be found at the Rafael Film Center this week and at SF IndieFest's DocFest showcase opening the day after the SF Green Film Festival ends.

HOW: Digital screening of a natively-digital work.

Present Tense (2012)

WHO: Belmin Söylemez directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: This film, about a Turkish fortune-teller named Mina, with dreams of emigration, just won the San Francisco International Film Festival New Directors Prize, an award previously given to promising auteurs like Jia Zhang-Ke (for Xiao Wu in 1999), Miranda July (for Me and You and Everyone We Know in 2005), and Pedro González-Rubio (for Alamar in 2010). 

I have not seen Present Tense yet so let me excerpt from an absolutely fascinating article that uses this digital feature as an example of the kind of film being crowded off even Turkey's screens thanks to homogenization pressures created by wholesale DCP conversion of cinemas, written by Emine Yildirim:

Mina could be the epitome of many women living in this country -- aching for a better and more independent life in the midst of uncertainty and economic destitution. The fortune telling sequences in which Mina's predictions are juxtaposed with the faces of many different women promises to become a classic in Turkish cinema; for those of us who live in this culture always want to hear the same future: a way out of our brooding existence into a refreshing place with certain happiness and good fortune.

WHERE/WHEN: Final San Francisco International Film Festival screening this afternoon at 2:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: It's the final day of SFIFF, and there are still plenty of movies left to watch; it would be absurd to imagine someone having been able to see them all. I can certainly recommend The Search For Emak Bakia (which also screens post-festival at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco a week from tomorrow) and Leviathan if you haven't seen them yet. Or, if you want to end the festival on an enormously satisfying cliffhanger, the official closing night offering Before Midnight.  I don't think that's a spoiler; anyone who has seen the previous entries in this continuing Richard Linklater/Julie Delpy/Ethan Hawke serial, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, should know what to expect in the way of narrative structure even if they're sure to be surprised by the details.

But with most of the festival's awards now announced (audience awards are usually revealed during the closing night film presentation), there are a few more recommendations of films on today's festival slate, made by the festival's various juries of filmmakers, curators and critics. In addition to Present Tense, one of the two New Directors Prize runners-up, the Peruvian The Cleaner also has a final showtime today. The other runner-up La Sirga and the FIPRESCI Jury pick Nights With Theodore have no further festival screenings.

Then there are the Golden Gate Awards, the longest-standing of the SFIFF awards given as they go back to the 1957 inaugural festival's prizes for Pather Panchali, Uncle Vanya and The Captain from Köpenick. It was fifty-one years ago that The People Vs. Paul Crump, a documentary about a death row inmate, won a Golden Gate Award for its young director William Friedkin, just starting out on his filmmaking career. Friedkin returned to SFIFF this year to give a master class and screen his terrific 1985 film To Live & Die In L.A. If you missed it at the festival, I've recently learned it will circle back to Frisco Bay this September when it's included in a six-film Pacific Film Archive retrospective for the director, also to include The French Connection, Cruising and (in my opinion) his greatest film Sorcerer, the latter along with an in-person conversation between Freidkin and my friend Michael Guillén.

But back to this year's GGAs and their winners (any of whom might be a future Freidkin?): The Documentary Feature GGA went to Kalyanee Mam's introduction to social and environmental issues in Cambodia entitled A River Changes Course. It has no more SFIFF showings but will screen at the just-announced SF Green Film Festival on June 1st. The Bay Area Documentary Feature GGA went to Dan Krauss's The Kill Team, which you may have heard about via On the Media; it screens one last time at SFIFF tonight at 6:00.

Twelve different shorts were also winners or honorable mentions for GGAs in various subcategories: narrative, documentary, animation, youth works, family films, etc. If you missed out on seeing these on this year's shorts programs, there's still one chance to see three GGA winners (and four other shorts) on the Shorts 4: New Visions program this evening. The New Visions category winner was Alfredo Covelli's single-take documentary of the aftermath of a violent event, Salmon, and both the first-prize and second-prize winners in the Bay Area short category also came from the New Visions section: 3020 Laguna St. In Exitum, Ashley Rodholm & Joe Picard's enigmatic documentation of an unusual Cow Hollow art exhibition won first prize, while Jonn Herschend's hilariously uncomfortable spoof of the in-house industrial video, More Real, took second. All three of these screen at 8:30 at New People.

HOW: Present Tense was shot on video, and will be screened on video, as will all the other screening titles I mention in this post. Except for, I'm hoping, the Freidkin films coming to the PFA in September.

The Search For Emak Bakia (2012)

WHO: Man Ray is the elusive (though not entirely so) subject of this piece.

WHAT: One of the most surprising discoveries of the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival for me has been this feature-length retracing, re-examining, and even remaking of Man Ray's experimental short Emak-Bakia. I'm pleased that Terri Saul has agreed to premiere an excellent (and essentially spoiler-free) review of the film for Hell On Frisco Bay readers:

Oskar Alegria's The Search For Emak Bakia is not a film that was made in the editing room; it was lived. The rough translation of Emak Bakia is a Basque term meaning, gruffly, "Leave me alone." 

Ekphrastic, the film-slash-poem-slash-collage, is a work of art that is made in reaction to, or to explore, another work of art, a 1926 film by Man Ray. It is art as dialog, a dialog requiring patience. If made in the traditional way the director would be constantly telling his backers, "Leave me alone. I'm not finished and I don't know when I will be."

The SFIFF audience reaction was a highlight of Saturday's experience. Alegria's curiosity made the audience curiouser and curiouser, alive, observant, awakened. He had an historian's sense of wanting to acknowledge truth, the forgotten past, a list of disappearing words, places, place names. 

Stepping into the unknown, not only linguistically (The film is primarily in French and Alegria began the project not speaking French) he took on the role of art historian, cultural anthropologist, and a poet who is also a linguist. 

Journalist and film-maker, Oskar Alegria told himself, "Let's follow a rabbit's path, down the rabbit hole." He knew his idea to chase a mystery by unconventional means, such as following a plastic glove blowing down the middle of a street, would never be fully supported by his occupational, rational journalist self who enjoyed reporting serious facts, counting the number of boats in a harbor for example. Alegria said during the Q&A that he wanted to kill his inner journalist, the editor with a sellable story in mind. 

One of Alegria's interview subjects, a Basque musician, also acknowledged what I call "salvage anthropology," those who attempt to rescue or are "addicted to" their own ancestral-patterned past vs. those who want to remember the past and yet adapt to their current context in a more musical way than via forced salvaging. 

One scene intermittently illuminates a silhouette of a cat watching lightning strike the subject of the film's treasure hunt. The cat has the same approach as the film-maker, to alternate between patience and curiosity to see what develops. Alegria seems to be saying: "Don't just MAKE a film. Don't make ONLY a film." In other words (spoiler alert), sit in the pigsty with the pigs in order to get your shot. 

While shooting a bull, engaging its eyes, Algeria kept rolling while wind blew his camera 360 degrees, violating, as did Man Ray, the horizon. We rolled with the camera then, remembering a soundtrack of whistling oak branches recorded earlier, in situ. 

When Alegria filmed volunteer "eyelid models," he juxtaposed their dreaming gaze with Man Ray's shots of freshly opened actress' eyes, fluttering not so much like butterflies, but more like like sleepy bulls in the aforementioned breezy field, matching the film's unselfconscious dream-state. 

A group of older women leapt from the audience to ask questions after the screening, notably those born prior to the digital age. Happily, Alegria treated the nonagenarian women in his art-story with the respect and attention typically reserved for the young and conventionally beautiful in the world of film, festivals, and media events. He also gave his festival audience the same. 

The film will probably not enjoy a release to DVD because as Alegria himself says, it's not a commercial project. It's not a film. It just happens to use film as its medium.

WHERE/WHEN: Two more SFIFF screenings: one tonight at 8:45 at the Kabuki, and one on Thursday, May 9th, at 3:30 at New People.

WHY: I'm fascinated that Alegria has been able to make a poetic, humorous, informative, and never-dull feature-length documentary about an experiment in film form, by investigating it from just about every conceivable angle except for its formal qualities. Emak-Bakia is explored through its documentary aspects, its linguistic aspects, as psycho-geography and as cultural artifact. But certain aspects of Ray's film are barely touched upon, particularly its cameraless and more abstract segments. Part of me feels that this means there's something important missing from Alegria's film, but another part rejoices that a self-described (in the q&a) non-filmmaker could put together such an elaborate and engaging work without demonstrating much in the way of Ray's technique. I'd love to see a similar approach applied to a film by Stan Brakhage or Paul Sharits or Chick Strand someday.

The SFIFF has one more screening of a short film made using some of the cameraless techniques pioneered by Man Ray: Conjuror's Box is, like Emak-Bakia, a silent film, and it will screen with a live electronic organ accompaniment by the one and only V. Vale as part of a shorts program on Thursday May 9th at 8:30 at New People.

HOW: Digital presentation of a digitally-shot feature.

Spend It All (1971)

WHO: The late, great Les Blank directed this.

WHAT: Some critics, curators, and historians try to group Les Blank's documentaries into three categories: the music films typified by The Blues Accordin' To Lightnin' Hopkins and Chulas Fronteras, the food films such as Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers and All In This Tea, and the "everything else" films like Burden of Dreams and Gap-Toothed Women. In truth, all of his films that I've seen (not the entire catalog, but a good-sized selection) are rich in scenes depicting the preparation and/or consumption of food. They all prominently feature music, usually by accomplished 'folk' or 'roots' musicians. And they all contain a great deal of "everything else". 

Spend It All, one of Blank's (in Max Goldberg's words) "city symphonies set to the languid pace of Cajun country" is exemplary of this. If I had to classify it in one of the three categories I wouldn't know how to choose. There's plenty of  music, performed by fiddlers and accordionists like The Balfa Brothers, Nathan Abshire and Marc Savoy, a familiar face in later Blank documentaries J'ai Été au Bal, Yum, Yum, Yum!: A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking and Marc and Ann. There's plenty of food, too, with copious scenes of shellfish, crustaceans, and even coffee being prepared Louisiana-style. But there's a lot of "everything else" as well: shots of young (and younger) jockeys at a country horse racing track, for example. And most poignantly for a film screening so soon after its maker's death, we get a tour of a brushy cemetery, including a shot of a tombstone engraved with a common Cajun name very similar to his own: "LeBlanc".

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at 7:00 at New People and 8:45 Friday at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Spend It All is part of a three-film tribute to Les Blank, who was known to be dying of cancer when the SFIFF announced these screenings last month, and who indeed succumbed a week later. The set of three rarely-seen shorts includes two not featured in last summer's PFA retrospective: the 1967 Christopher Tree, which Blank photographed and edited but is not credited with directing, and Chicken Real, Blank's own favorite of the sometimes-subversive industrial films he made for hire, early in his career, for various American companies including Shakey's Pizza, Smucker's Jam, and in this case factory farming pioneer Holly Farms. 

Blank's son and fellow filmmaker Harrold is expected to attend the screenings.


HOW: All three films will screen in brand new 16mm prints of recent restorations by the Academy Film Archive.

Sofia's Last Ambulance (2012)

WHO: Dr. Krasimir Yordanov, nurse Mila Mihaylova and ambulance driver Plamen Slavkov are the subjects of this documentary, with one of their faces shown in nearly every shot.

WHAT: The close-up, as one of the elements of cinema that most clearly distinguishes the medium from storytelling forms like the novel or the play, has received quite a bit of scholarly inquiry. I wonder if much attention has been paid to close-ups in documentary work. In this portrait of three members of an ambulance unit in Bulgaria's capital city, close-ups captured both by dashboard-mounted cameras and by director Ilian Metev in scenes in which the team deals directly with patients, seem less an aesthetic strategy than an ethical strategy, allowing patient faces to remain anonymous for privacy's sake. But an ethical strategy becomes an aesthetic one by fiat, allowing these three medical professionals to become the true centers of identification in what becomes a story about their compassion and heroism in the face of a cash-strapped municipal health system.

Watching Plamen Slavkov's face as he maneuvers his vehicle through dangerous city traffic, or Mila Mihaylova's as she tries to console a gurney-bound child who had a wardrobe topple onto her fragile body, or Dr. Yordanov's as he dispenses critical advice to 28-year-old heroin addict and his invisible but obviously distraught mother, illustrates their dedication to providing crucial services to a desperate populace, despite the incredibly low wages that have other members of their profession to seek work in other fields or other countries. These real people may not be human saints along the lines of Joan of Arc, but close-ups become a portal to emotion in a way that recalls Maria Falconetti's portrayal of her in that most famously compassion-eliciting of films, Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings at the Pacific Film Archive tonight at 8:50, and at the Kabuki May 3rd at 3:30.

WHY: The SFIFF press department provides lists of "Special Interest Categories" for festival-accredited journalists who might be daunted by the task of combing through the entire program guide to find the comedies, or the films about seniors, or the films made by women directors (for the record, there are 19, not counting shorts, according to the list provided).

One list is of "Health / Medicine"-related films, and includes, of course, Sofia's Last Ambulance as well as another documentary highlighting medical professionals called After Tiller. There are also four fiction features on this list, each with at least one more festival screening, whose characters must contend with disease: Big Blue Lake, Rosie, Unfinished Song and Youth. At least two more festival films might be sensible additions as well, both of them added screenings announced after the original lists were compiled. Both are also 1990s-era Hollywood thrillers that involve the shadowy, conspiratorially corporatist influence on health and health care. Michael Mann's The Insider is based on the true story of a whistle-blower within the American tobacco industry, and screens in 35mm as part of a May 8th on-stage tribute to its screenwriter Eric Roth. The film to accompany Harrison Ford's May 7th tribute has just been revealed as well: it's the now-twenty-year-old The Fugitive, in which Ford plays a doctor framed for the murder of his own wife, and who must use his physician skills to survive and find the real killer while on the run from Tommy Lee Jones, after fate spectacularly derails his punishment for this crime he did not commit. 

HOW: Sofia's Last Ambulance is a digitally-shot documentary and will screen on DCP.

Leviathan (2012)

WHO: Lucien Castaing-Taylor (of Sweetgrass) and Verena Paravel (of Foreign Parts) co-directed this documentary.

WHAT: If documentaries shine clarifying light into mysterious corners, Leviathan illuminates just how literally tenebrous a subject can be. Bookendend in blackness, brushstrokes of light captured by ultra-portable videocameras paint, detail-by-detail, what ultimately becomes a canvas illustrating the workings of a Northeastern seafood trawler. First harshly machine-like, this floating factory's human operation comes into focus before fade-out. If Herman Melville'd had access to GoPro technology, would we still read Moby Dick?

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at 8:45 at the Pacific Film Archive, with an added screening at the Kabuki, at 5:30 on May 9th. 

WHY: The capsule review in the above "WHAT" section of this post is exactly seventy-five words long. I counted because this is the maximum credentialled press are allowed to use when writing on certain SFIFF films each year. Called the "hold review" policy, it's meant to encourage writers to save detailed reviews and articles until the theatrical releases of features with distribution. Sometimes it makes perfect sense; when Olivier Assayas's Something In The Air is set to open locally on May 17th, or even when Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing has a farther-in-the-future release date of August 9th, it makes sense for the festival and its distributor partners to put pressure on critics to wait to have their full say at a time when it will most benefit theatres who've booked a commercial run, the distributors themselves, and arguably the audiences, who will have more options for viewing than just a few festival screenings at very select theatres and times.

In the case of Leviathan, whose distributor is the admirable but small Cinema Guild, a local commercial release in a Frisco Bay cinema is a more open question. A week-long run in New York City occurred over a month ago, and the accompanying reviews have already been published. Considering the popularity of this particular doc at SFIFF, it's not out of the question that the Roxie might chance a booking (in which case I'll be trumpeting it as loudly as I can to anyone who'll listen), but I wouldn't count on it. So hopefully my seventy-five words are enough to help you decide whether or not to get a festival ticket, because this may be your only chance to see it on a local cinema screen.

HOW: DCP presentation of an all-digital work.

Into The Abyss (2011)

WHO: Werner Herzog directed this documentary.

WHAT: Here's how Roger Ebert began his November 2011 review:

Into the Abyss may be the saddest film Werner Herzog has ever made. It regards a group of miserable lives, and in finding a few faint glimmers of hope only underlines the sadness.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:00 PM tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Roger Ebert and Les Blank: two "men of cinema" who died of cancer in the past week. It's hard to believe they're gone. I already miss knowing they're around. I have a lot more to say about each of them, but no time to say it all, at least not yet.

For today, I just would like to acknowledge the link Werner Herzog was in a chain that connected one to the other. Though I think Nosferatu the Vampire was probably the first Herzog film I saw, back when I was a teenager and didn't really care about foreign films, it also may have been Aguirre: Wrath of God, which I liked even better. I know first watched the latter at around the same time, with my father, a religious viewer of Siskel & Ebert and the Movies. I remember looking it up afterwords in his copy of Roger Ebert's Home Movie Companion, which I suspect I consulted more frequently than he did, making the fact that I gave it to him as a birthday or Father's Day or Christmas gift seem rather suspect now that you mention it. 

Seeing that film and reading that review (I'm not even sure it was a full review; it may have just been a write-up accompanying its place on his 1982 all-time top 10 list) must have planted a seed that would eventually blossom into cinephilia in my post-college twenties (yes I'm a bit of a late bloomer compared to most cinephiles I know who were movie-mad by age 18 if not earlier).  It was in this period that I started catching up with Herzog's other films (an ongoing process as I've still yet to see a few, most notably Heart of Glass, which Ebert preferred to Aguirre as late as 1980), which led me of course to Fitzcarraldo and its inevitable companion Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's remarkable making-of documentary that's better than the original film. After a decade of watching Blank's films at least as fervently as I had Herzog's, I had the great privilege of interviewing him at his El Cerrito studio. I excerpted a piece from that interview on this blog just the other day, where I got to see the preserved remains of the shoe Herzog didn't quite finish during the event that Blank filmed and released as Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.

Anyway, I'm sure that many who attend tonight's screening will be thinking of Herzog's connections to both Ebert and Blank. These connections aren't just a creation of my own cinephiliac nostalgia kicking in. Here's a link to audio and a transcript of Herzog's comments after hearing about Ebert's death.

HOW: Into the Abyss screens in 35mm.

Hands On A Hard Body (1997)

WHO: S. R. Bindler directed this documentary.

WHAT: it's a story best-known as a This American Life broadcast, but it works even better as a feature-length video where we can see the spectacle and its participants: a group of twenty Texans engaged in a contest of endurance. The one who can stand beside a brand-new pick-up truck with at least one of his or her gloved hands in constant contact with the vehicle for days longer than any of the others, fighting sleep, soreness, pain, numbness, concentration and frustration, gets to drive it home and keep it. The contest typically lasts days on end.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight and tomorrow at the Roxie at 7 & 9 PM.

WHY: So The Clock has arrived in San Francisco at long last. As I mentioned the other day, I was able to sample a little of it- about ten percent of the twenty-four-hour installation, to be somewhat precise. It's been a fascinating topic of conversation over the weekend, but I haven't yet encountered anyone here with serious plans to watch all twenty-four hours in one sitting. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time. (So to speak.) For now, The Clock is viewable only during SFMOMA's regular open hours, but there will be four all-night screenings each Saturday in May, plus a sure-to-be-popular free one on the last weekend the museum will be open before it shuts for a multi-year renovation: June 1-2. All this information is on the SFMOMA website.

What isn't on the website is information on how to attempt a 24-four-hour continuous viewing of The Clock, or if it's even really possible to do. The Clock's creator Christian Marclay has repeatedly stressed that he doesn't intend the piece to be viewed in a a single marathon session, but neither were the many paths, running from the California-Mexico border to the 49th parallel, that make up the Pacific Crest Trail originally intended to be traversed in a single excursion, yet over a hundred thru-hikers complete that journey every year. 

Any marathon required preparation. Even cinephiles used to seeing four or five feature films per day at a film festival, or taking in ultra-long experiences like Napoléon or Sátántangó, aren't used to spending an entire day and night watching a single screen. A viewing of Hands On A Hardbody might be the ideal first step in such a preparation in the form of inspiration: the participants in the contest Bindler depicts each have a game plan for their expected multi-day challenge, and a would-be The Clock marathoner will be keen to note which ones pay off and which do not. Like the documentary's contestants, New York viewer Max Nelson allowed himself periodic breaks during his 24-hour Marclay immersion. I don't know how SFMOMA's wait times (frequently updated on twitter) might impact the marathon viewer, however.  Questions of food, drink, and restroom use also become paramount, and complicated by the museum setting. One thing I suspect anyone who watches Hands On A Hardbody in preparation for The Clock will surely be thankful for is the comfortable seating provided at the Marclay installation. Compared to the standing these truck-lovers must go through in Texas, a potential Clock-watcher has it easy. 

HOW: Hands On A Hard Body was shot on video and will be projected on video.

Kudzu Vine (2011)

WHO: Josh Gibson, who directed this, has also made documentaries about Chang and Eng Bunker, the original "Siamese Twins", about Lake Victoria's invasive fish species the Nile Perch, and other subjects.

WHAT: I've only sampled a five-minute online clip of this 20-minute documentary on the fast-growing kudzu plant, which was introduced to this continent from Japan 137 years ago, but now covers more than 7 million acres of land in Southern states like North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. Five minutes was enough to know I can't wait to see the whole thing projected on the big screen.

If you've ever driven through kudzu-affected regions,you know how overwhelming its effect on the landscape can be, covering hillsides, houses, trees, and seemingly everything in its path. There's definitely an otherworldliness to a kudzu invasion, so it's appropriate that Gibson has made not a straight-ahead documentary but one that takes on the eerie quality of a 1950s science fiction movie, aided by his use of the cinemascope frame and 35mm hand-processing. For more on the film and its making, check out Eric Ferreri's interview article.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 4:30 this afternoon at the Victoria Theatre.

WHY: According to the Internet Movie Database, Christian Marclay's The Clock is a documentary. At one level this is absurd, and just another indication of the imdb's limitations as a resource for accurate information about anything other than a certain narrow (if generally 'popular') slice of the world's motion picture output. If you've seen any part of The Clock, now on display at SFMOMA, you know it's a 24-hour looped video installation made up entirely of carefully-edited timepiece-centric shots and scenes from thousands of movies (and some television shows for good measure). The only thing it objectively "documents" is what the current time is, as it's shown onscreen and/or mentioned on the soundtrack at least once every minute.

On the other hand (the long hand, perhaps?), perhaps we need to loosen the definition of documentary somewhat. We could go as far as Jean-Luc Godard, who once said "Every film is a documentary of its actors", but that seems to take what was meant as a provocation perhaps too literally, and render the term meaningless. More useful, I think, may be to take a cue from a term from the literary word, that is often used synonymously with "documentary" anyway: "non-fiction". In most libraries, the fiction section is composed entirely of stories set in constructed worlds that may resemble or disresemble the one we live in, but only to the extent that they are controlled and described by their authors. Non-fiction, while often thought of as a term for truthful or factual expression, is as it's name suggests: a catch-all category for "everything else". Where will you find mythology, poetry, musical scores, or books comprised entirely of Salvador Dali paintings? Almost certainly not in the fiction section, despite the often contra-factual elements of these publications. And not usually in separate sections of their own either, but interfiled with the historical and journalistic accounts, the essays, the how-to guides, and other materials we may feel more entirely comfortable calling "non-fiction". 

Similarly, perhaps "documentary" could be a more useful, less constraining (and for some, dismissive) term if it were more frequently applied to all moving image works that aren't stories set in constructed and controlled fictional "film worlds" described through the ineffable "film time" created by shot duration. By this definition, The Clock is a documentary; it doesn't contain its own story, and its "film time" is not constructed or controlled by Marclay but by the filmmakers he and his assistants have selected to appropriate from. It seems worth noting that in the 2 1/2 segment of The Clock I previewed, there appeared to be no images taken from non-fiction films of any sort- or from animation for that matter.

Last night I viewed two programs of Crossroads works while thinking about this possibly expanded view of "documentary". None of the works would qualify as documentaries under the strictest, most conventional definitions, which necessitate genre conventions like voice-over narration, talking-head interviews, etc. Several, such as Paul Clipson's lovely city symphony Absteigend or Jeanne C. Finley & John Muse's seemingly diaristic Manhole 452 or Jodie Mack's delightful feat of animation and musical storytelling Dusty Stacks of Mom, might (like Kudzu Vine) be considered documentaries by most definitions. Others, like Luther Price's unburied Nomadic Flesh or Suzan Pitt's painted Pinball would be easy to call non-fiction but rarely considered as documentaries of anything other than their own creation. But perhaps that's enough.

HOW: Kudzu Vine screens as 35mm print, as part of program 4 in the Crossroads festival, which also includes work screened in 16mm and digital video.

Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)

WHO: Les Blank directed this. Word is the legendary documentarian is not doing so well.

WHAT: A year and a half ago I had the honor of interviewing Blank at his studio in El Cerrito, for an article published in the "Radical Foods" issue of First Person Magazine. There are still a few copies of this gorgeously-designed publication (which also includes interviews with individuals at the nexus of food and art such as Sandor Ellix Katz, Jon Rubin, Marije Vogelzang, Ben Kinmont, and more) at Park Life in the Richmond District. I excerpted a segment from my interview prior to the launch party which included a screening of Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, but here's another brief excerpt from Blank's remarks to me, about the time when he showed a work-in-progress version of the film to a Museum of Modern Art audience in New York that folkorist Alan Lomax attended. 

I was waiting to hear from him, since I respected his opinion so much. He said, 'Your film makes me so mad I want to punch you in the nose.' I was taken aback and wanted to know why. He said, 'Because it shows all these yuppies out in California playing in their food and thinking their garlic is so lovely and wonderful. Garlic is really the food of the people who live close to the earth-peasants, poor people, the starving. Garlic is what ties it all together for them. You trivialized it. I'm ashamed of you.' When I got over being mad at him, defensively, I decided that he had a point. I then went out and looked for people from other cultures who would demonstrate using garlic.

A "who's who" of some of the individuals seen in Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers has since been compiled by John Harris, who appeared in the film as seen in the above image.

WHERE/WHEN: Plays at 7:00 tonight at the Roxie.

WHY: Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers screens as part of the inaugural Food and Farm Film Festival, which pairs each foodie-centric screening with delicacies prepared by local chefs. Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters, who appeared in this film as well as in Blank's Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, will introduce tonight's screening. The festival began last night, but today it will also host a 35mm matinee showing of another locally-made food film, Pixar's Ratatouille and a shorts program, with more screenings to be held at the Roxie tomorrow.

It's time to flip over the Roxie's Spring 2013 calendar if you've got it hanging on your refrigerator. You'll probably notice a photo of Roman Polanski but no film titles listed. Well, just last week titles and (most) showtimes were announced online for next weekend's three-day tribute to the director, during which Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne will Skype with Polanski after the audience takes in an afternoon screening of that 1974 classic.

HOW: Evidently Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers will be a digital screening.

Pianomania (2009)

WHO: Stefan Knüpfer is the piano tuner profiled in this documentary.

WHAT: I haven't seen this so let me quote from Frako Loden's review from when it screened at the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival in 2010:

For those who love piano and the mysteries of sound, this documentary will be a treat. It's also a 90-minute-long commercial for Steinway & Sons, being a profile of its master tuner Stefan Knüpfer and a career that matches the exacting artistry and high professional standards of the pianists he serves—big names like Lang Lang, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Alfred Brendel. Knüpfer is remarkably patient and diplomatic with the extremely minute, sometimes incomprehensible demands of the artist preparing for a big performance at a major concert hall.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens for free tonight only at 7:30 PM at a South of Market venue called Parisoma, hosted by Salon97, a local organization that brings the pleasures of classical music to audiences disinclined to seek it out using the traditional paths of academia and the concert hall.

WHY: Pianomania won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival three years ago; if you missed it then or during its brief theatrical run in 2011, tonight's another chance to see it projected with an audience. I'm reminded that earlier this month the SF Film Society which runs the SFIFF, announced the competition slates for the New Directors Prize and the Documentary Feature Golden Gate Awards for 2013 (nominees for short-form categories will be announced with the full festival slate on April 2nd - though even sooner for members). 

As Pianomania was an Austrian/German co-production, and last year's Documentary Feature GGA winner It's The Earth Not The Moon came from Portugal, it's no surprise that the twelve features in competition for that prize this year come from around the world as well; among the competitors are a finnish film about Chinese artists (Chimeras), one about evangelical Christianity in East Africa (God Loves Uganda), one made in Japan by the Mexican director of the wonderful Alamar, Pedro González-Rubio (Inori), a Frisco Bay filmmaker's portrait of Cambodian farmers and fishers (the River Changes Course), a Spanish filmmaker's pilgrimage to find the locations for an avant-garde Man Ray film (The Search for Emak Bakia) and seven others.

HOW: DVD projection of a digitally-produced documentary.

Urine Man (2000)

WHO: The Urine Man himself is in some sense the auteur of this film, as he demanded control over when the camera could be turned on or off before he'd allow himself to be interviewed- although 'interviewed' may not be the correct verb as he also demanded no questions be asked of him during the filming. But as he proved to be anonymous and untraceable, it makes sense that local filmmaker Greta Snider get the credit as director; she certainly deserves credit for instigating the filming of the Urine Man and presenting him to the world.

WHAT: "You are what you eat. You can't be yourself unless you eat yourself." If one takes the initial aphorism literally, the Urine Man's conclusion bears an impeccable (and in the context of the rest of his rant, hilariously disgusting) logic.  However.

Filmed in 1999, this piece was released after the ringing in of the new millennium, an act that in itself discredits its subject, as he makes Y2K predictions that obviously had not come to pass by the time any wider public heard them. His error ensures that the rest of what he says cannot be taken as a mystical tapping into secret wisdom, but rather a particular, (and perhaps particularly "entertaining") expression of irrationality. Perhaps it could even do some good as a kind of reverse-psychology public service message: don't do what the Urine Man recommends, unless you want to be like him.

A compassionate viewer may resist laughing at or being entertained by the Urine Man's monologue. Pity or anger or more complex feelings may arise instead of, or along with, such reactions. This is how Snider's film works as not just reportage but art. Sara Herbet probably says it best when she identifies it as a film that "straddles voyeurism, taking advantage of a crazy person, and giving voices to the underrepresented." Urine Man's formal simplicity is as deceptive as the structures its subject imagines are cloaking the kind of "wisdom" he has to share with us.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at Artists' Television Access, as part of a full program of films that begins at 8:30.

WHY: Tonight's ATA screening is part of Craig Baldwin's weekly screening series entitled Other Cinema, one of the Bay Area's most convivial and unpretentious showcases of mindblowing experimental film and video work, as well as one of its longest-running. Other goodies on offer this evening include Kathryn Ramsey's West: What I Know About Her, Marcy Saude’s Sangre de Cristo, Vanessa Renwick's Portland Meadows, Brigid McCaffrey's AM/PM, and Bill Daniel's Texas City. Future Other Cinema attractions in the coming weeks include an April 13th magic lantern presentation by Ben Wood channelling Eadweard Muybridge, a 4/20 premiere of Baldwin's own double-projection Nth Dimension, a May 4th space-age slide show from Megan Prelinger, the annual blowout "New Experimental Works" on May 25th, and much much much much much more.

HOW: I believe Urine Man is planned to screen digitally, if only because usually the Other Cinema calendar page explicitly mentions when a 16mm or Super-8 film is expected to be shown. Among tonight's program selections only West: What I Know About Her is called out as a 16mm showing.

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.

Marilou Diaz-Abaya: Filmmaker On A Voyage (2012)

WHO: Marilou Diaz-Abaya, the subject of this documentary, directed Reef Hunters, Jose Rizal and more than a dozen other films before her death of breast cancer at age 57 last October.

WHAT: Constructed mostly of talking-head interviews with figures in the Phillipine film industry, including generous clips of Diaz-Abaya speaking about her career, this television-friendly profile doesn't break cinematic ground in its own right, but does a good job of chronicling how a Filipina director broke ground in a male-dominated industry for more than thirty years. We learn how Diaz-Abaya began making films as an acolyte of the famed Lino Brocka, how she maintained her career through the 1980s and 1990s, how she innovated in broadcast media, producing television satire such as Sic O' Clock News, how she became an advocate for social and environmental issues through her filmmaking as well as outside of it, how she devoted herself to teaching a new generation of filmmakers through her film school outside of Manila, and how she persevered as a director in the 2000s despite her battle with cancer. 

This is not an impartial piece of journalism but a loving tribute made by Diaz-Abaya's brother-in-law's ex-wife Mona Lisa Yuchengco, a Filipina making her film directing debut at age 62. But it still serves as an excellent introduction to the inspiring life and work of a neglected artist; numerous clips from her filmography tantalize the viewer who hasn't seen many (or any) of her completed works. I've only seen two myself years ago; I loved Reef Hunters, a gripping morality tale investigating the authority adults wield over children, especially in an isolated environment like that of an ocean vessel, and was less enthralled by New Moon, a well-intentioned plea for empathy for the plight of innocent Muslims trapped by violent cycles in Mindanao. But after watching Filmmaker On A Voyage I want to dive into the rest of her films as soon as I can.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens via CAAM Fest at the Kabuki twice: a free screening this afternoon at 2:30 PM and a reprise showing at normal festival prices at 12:40 PM on Sunday, March 17th.

WHY: CAAM Fest is the longest-running film festival devoted to screening the work of Asian-American and Asian filmmakers, and though it began last night with a screening of the sports doc Linsanity, the deluge of viewing options begins tonight. Cheryl Eddy, Kimberly Chun, and Michael Hawley have each provided previews of selected films in this year's line-up, but none of them mention Marilou Diaz-Abaya: Filmmaker On A Voyage. Yet a film about an independent-minded filmmaker seems the ideal way to start a weekend of screenings, especially since its first showing is a freebie!

HOW: Digital projection of a digital production.