Tokyo Family (2013)

WHO: Yoji Yamada directed and co-wrote the screenplay for this film, based on the classic Tokyo Story directed by Yasujiro Ozu and written by Ozu and Koga Noda.

WHAT: I have not seen this film, but as a big Ozu admirer I'm terribly curious about a remake helmed by Yamada, the beginnings of whose career at the Shochiku Studio overlapped with the final years of the great master's. Mark Schilling's review is mixed but that doesn't deter me.

WHERE/WHEN: 1:30 PM this afternoon only at the Lark Theater in Larkspur, presented by the Mill Valley Film Festival.

WHY: Aside from last Thursday and Friday's revival screenings of Raoul Peck's Lumumba, Tokyo Family is the only MVFF title this year to be screening in 35mm. I was unaware that the Lark had even retained the ability to project film when they installed their 4K DCP technology- I hear that most theatres can get better financial deals on the latest digital projection equipment if they remove their 35mm projectors from the booth. I'm hoping to visit the venue for the first time today, and to see a print that is very unlikely to wind its way back to Frisco Bay.

HOW: 35mm.

Teorema (1968)

WHO: Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote and directed this.

WHAT: From what I've heard, the most expensive Pasolini film for an institution to procure a 35mm print of, which is probably why it has not been part of every stop on the current national tour of his films (UCLA for instance passed on showing it). A shame, since it's one of his best, and an especially good entry point for a Pasolini newbie.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 6:30.

WHY: Support the PFA's commitment to providing an essentially complete Pasolini series by attending a screening that (if the figure I heard quoted to another venue is correct) is mathematically incapable of making back its print rental cost through ticket sales.

Now's as good a time as any to mention other upcoming PFA series I've not highlighted on this blog. Most of them were just revealed this past week.

October 10-27: Moumen Smihi: Poet of Tangier, dedicated to a Moroccan filmmaker I'm unfamiliar with, but who has been making films since the days of Pasolini and Fassbinder (both of whom shot films in that country).

November 4-22: Afterimage: Agnès Varda on Filmmaking. The "mother of the French New Wave" will be on hand to screen four of her films on November 4th and 5th.

November 8-December 8: Beauty and Sacrifice: Images of Women in Chinese Cinema. Two films starring 1930s Shanghai film icon Ruan Lingyu, two starring Maggie Cheung (including one where she plays Ruan), and Cecile Tang's 1969 film The Arch, which I've been wanting to see for ten years or more.

November 13-17: Arrested History: New Portuguese Cinema. 6 recent films from one of the most interesting European national cinemas today. Includes in-person appearances by filmmakers Susana de Sousa Dias and João Pedro Rodrigues, and the 1st Frisco Bay screening of Miguel Gomes's acclaimed Tabu since last year's Mill Valley Film Festival (but this time in 35mm.)

November 21-24: Behind the Scenes: The Art and Craft of Cinema with Randy Thom, Sound Designer. Three in-person screenings of diverse films featuring sound work by an Academy Award-winner whose film career started with work on one of the greatest-sounding films American of all time, Apocalpyse Now.

December 1-15: The Resolution Starts Now: 4K Restorations from Sony Pictures. Grover Crisp will be on hand two evenings to try to sell us skeptics on the merits of high quality digital projection of nine classic Columbia pictures.

HOW: New 35mm print.

The French Connection (1971)

WHO: William Friedkin directed this.

WHAT: I finally recently watched, on DVD, ten years after it was first released, Richard LaGravenese & Ted Demme's documentary on 1970s Hollywood filmmaking A Decade Under the Influence. It's a slick doc filled with interviews with many of the more famous directors and some other figures who had their careers made in that turbulent cinematic era. Its reverence for the landmark films made during the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations goes down smoothly, except for in a rare critical moment when Julie Christie notes the paucity of juicy female roles when compared to male ones- I could have done with more exploration of this angle and more moments like it. (The film also elides mention of Elaine May, Joan Micklin Silver, Barbara Loden and any of the decade's other women directors I may be failing to think of right now- which seems a worse omission than that of any other single director like John Carpenter or Stanley Kubrick.) 

What A Decade Under the Influence is best for is getting the viewer excited about watching or revisiting the (mostly) famous films excerpted in clips during its 3-hour run time, and for hearing figures like Francis Ford Coppola, Jon Voight, Ellen Burstyn, Peter Bogdanovich, etc. speak about their work and their peers' work in their own voices. But of all the directors speaking about both topics, the most eloquent and illuminating in the film must be William Friedkin. Here's a sample of his  commentary on his Oscar-winning film The French Connection, which I haven't seen in about twenty years and definitely need to revisit.

I could see that I could induce the documentary style into this story. I would talk to the lighting cameraman, Owen Roizman, and give him a general area of where the action was gonna take place. I would talk separately to the operating cameraman, who was a guy named Ricky Bravo, who was a Cuban exile, who actually photographed the Cuban revolution at Castro's side. I'd set up a scene with the actors but I wouldn't show it. I then put Ricky in the room with the camera, and it was up to him to find rhe action. I'd say, "A guy's gonna be running down the street over there", and Ricky would say in his broken English, "Okay, I use the wheelchair?" "Yeah." We'll put him in a wheelchair and wheel him along. We never laid dolly tracks down. A lot of the stuff in the chase was an accident; was never planned! There weren't supposed to be any crashes in that chase. They were all supposed to be near-misses. There was no optical effects or anything. It was all done the way you saw it, and the camera captured it as best it could on the run.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at the Empire and other Cinemark Theatres around the Bay Area today at 2:00, at the Kabuki on Wednesday, September 4th at 2:10 and 7:00, and at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive on September 14th at 8:30.

WHY: Today and Wednesday's digital screenings of The French Connection can be an appetite-whetter for the six-film William Friedkin tribute coming to the PFA in a couple weeks, at which The French Connection will screen in 35mm. Friedkin was just honored with a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival where he also debuted a new digital version of what I agree with him to be his greatest film, Sorcerer. The September 19 Berkeley screening of this DCP in the United States, after a long battle between director and studio to get it back on the market. Film purists may wish this event had been set up before the DCP version was ready, as the last time a 35mm print of Sorcerer screened in the Bay Area was 2007 at the Castro (I was there, thankfully). But I'm glad it'll be screening at all, and that Friedkin will be interviewed in person by my friend and fellow film-blogger Michael Guillén, who interviewed the director for Mubi last year. 

Friedkin will also be on hand for a book signing of his memoir, and screenings of Crusing and Killer Joe on September 21st. Both of these will also be shown digitally, but the first three films in the series (To Live and Die in L.A. and The Boys in the Band along with The French Connection) will be in 35mm, though not with the director present.

HOW: As noted above, The French Connection screens via DCP at the Cinemark & Kabuki, and via 35mm at the PFA.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

WHO: Stanley Kubrick.

WHAT: 2013 would have been the 50th anniversary of Kubrick's last (and perhaps greatest- though The Killing certainly gives it a run for its money at the least) black-and-white film, had it premiered in December of 1963 as originally scheduled. The film wrapped production in April of that year, but the first advance press screening wasn't scheduled until November 22. This screening was cancelled when news came of President Kennedy's assassination that day, and the film would not be unveiled until January of 1964, as it was felt that audiences would be in no mood for pitch-dark political comedy so soon after. There has even been speculation that the infamous "pie fight" ending of the film was cut because it showed Peter Sellers as President Muffley being hit by a custard confection; Kubrick later maintained he cut it because it didn't fit with the rest of the film's tone.

Bill Krohn describes the film in his excellent book on Kubrick:

Made in England on sound stages and on futuristic locations, Dr. Strangelove (1964) was a meteor. Kubrick had fused documentary realism and grotesque comedy to portray the American military-political establishment as fools and madmen, putting on the screen for the first time the kind of satire made popular by Mad magazine.

WHERE/WHEN: Today at 3:30 and 7:15 at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: With the current news about probable air strikes in Syria, it may not feel like the best day to watch a film that turns the raw material of bombs and international diplomacy into fodder for humor. Then again, maybe today's just the right day to see a thoughtful satire made at the height of the Cold War. Dr. Strangelove screens with another 1960s nuclear-themed comedy made in England, Richard Lester's The Bed-Sitting Room; I haven't seen that one as it's far rarer, but Kubrick's film, at least, doesn't feel the least bit like escapism. Sometimes comedy is the best method of addressing the horrors of the world.

HOW: Though its double-bill-mate The Bed-Sitting Room screens in 35mm, Dr. Strangelove will screen digitally from a 4K restoration prepared by Sony's Grover Crisp. This version has screened before in the North Bay and the South Bay but I'm pretty sure this is the debut presentation of this digital version in San Francisco. Sort of.

In July 2012 the San Francisco Silent Film Festival brought Crisp to the Castro to show off the digital Dr. Strangelove by giving it a head-to-head competition against the first reel of a 35mm print of the film, both with the sound muted so Crisp could speak and answer questions from the audience. It was an interesting presentation, held on a much larger screen than a similar presentation in New York earlier in the year. I would be more interested to see a head-to-head between a digital Strangelove (or any 4K restoration) and a newly-struck print of a photo-chemical restoration, rather than with an average release print struck years ago. But those who felt the DCP handily "won" the match-up will finally get to see the full version at the Castro today.

If you've ever thought Dr. Strangelove would be better or truer to Kubrick's vision if the level of image detail was so clear that you could identify objects on the table reflected in the mirror behind Tracy Reed in the bravura single-shot scene pictured above, you might prefer this DCP version. I for one am not convinced that this degree of image clarity was intended by Kubrick (who surely considered the contemporary capabilities of lab reproduction of prints as well as he did other details like attendance patterns at urban theatres across the U.S. or projectionist changeover) in the first place. I hope the presence of a DCP version of Dr. Strangelove doesn't mean we'll never see a 35mm print and its attendant flicker and filmic quality that Kubrick probably never expected his films to lose when projected in cinemas. I have a feeling the Castro will also show The Shining on DCP when it comes (via the new September calendar) a month from now. But I'd love to be proven wrong when the theatre announces the formats for the coming month's films, which I expect to be any day now.

Suspension (2008)

WHO: Vanessa O'Neill made this film, and makes up one half of the duo Beige, which will be presenting the film as a live performance

WHAT: Suspension was one of the highlights of the Crossroads festival presented by SF Cinematheque this past Spring. As the program note for the screening/performance said, Suspension "layers a toned and black-and-white reel creating subtle shifts of hue and tone of abstracted seascape."

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 8:00 at the Temescal Art Center in North Oakland.

WHY: Though many moviemakers and watchers have given up on the future of physical film as a production and exhibition medium, I think that "death of film" epitaphs are short-sighted. Ideally, I can imagine film professionals realizing that some of the essential virtues of the motion picture artform are being lost in the current global conversion to digital cinema, and a concerted effort being made to turn back the tide of transformation. In a worst-case-scenario I can picture the death of physical film as a mass production and distribution medium, but a core of committed artists and technicians continuing to keep the reel and projector alive through more artisanal means.

There is already a growing network of film proponents who have taken on the task of developing means of producing and exhibiting film with ever-decreasing reliance on industry. I think the core of this potential infrastructure are the practicioners of "expanded cinema" or "projector performance". People who create or appropriate film works to screen in performance settings, often involving multiple projectors, multiple projectionists, extra-celluloidal interventions, and live musicians and/or sound artists as part of each exhibition, which involves enough improvisation or other performance elements that it's comparable as a one-of-a-kind an event to a music concert.

I was only dimly aware of this piece of the film world as little as three years ago, when I began to explore the scene thanks to venues and performers such as the Pacific Film Archive, SF Cinematheque, Other Cinema and its founder Craig Baldwin, Stephen Parr, Paul Clipson, etc. Last summer saw the opening of a dedicated series devoted to presenting these kinds of performance works to the public- and for free, no less. Shapeshifters Cinema launched with an orgy of projectors screening all kinds of collected films, some as well known as Norman McLaren and Denys Colomb Daunant but most as obscure as they were beautiful. It was a performance by the Cinepimps (Alfonso Alvarez and Keith Arnold, the latter of whom is better known as programmer for the Castro Theatre.) In the past year, Shapeshifters Cinema has brought a wide variety of film peformance practicioners (as well as a few video-based performers) to Oakland for unique monthly shows. Right now they reserve the second Sunday of each month for these events. Tonight it's Kent Long and Vanessa O'Neill performing under the name Beige; Along with O'Neill's Suspension, the duo will perform with Long's lovely 2003 work The Waves, and a pair of completely collaborative pieces: Which Ceaselessly Float Up (which was performed at the New York Film Festival's Views From the Avant-Garde last autumn) and The Pass. Next month Shapeshifters Cinema will screen video work with live musical performance by Kadet Kuhne, who is fresh from a dual-retrospective showcase with Texas Tomboy at Frameline last month, which was my first exposure to her exuberant, clever work.

Another performative video piece, this one involving live narration from its maker, is Love Letter to the Fog, by Sam Green (whom you may have seen perform The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller or Utopia in Four Movements). It's had recent screenings on the East Coast including New York City and Waterville, Maine, but had its genesis in Green's Artist-in-Residency at San Francisco's Exploratorium, which just re-opened a few months ago. The museum's Cinema Arts program is up-and-running with regular screenings on certain Wednesdays and Saturdays (including this Wednesday and Saturday), but look further on its web calendar and you can see an October 2nd date for something called Fog City, which I suspect is another name for Love Letter To the Fog or an iteration thereof.

HOW: Suspension will screen with three other works as a multi-projector performance with live sound.

Regeneration (1915)

WHO: Raoul Walsh directed and co-wrote the scenario for this.

WHAT: I haven't seen Regeneration except in a few clips such as those included in the short biographical documentary on Walsh found on the Fox DVD for The Big Trail. In that doc, critic and historian Tag Gallagher calls Regeneration "still a dazzling film today," and compares Walsh's direction to the Ford's Theatre scene from the most famous film by his mentor D.W. Griffith, in which Walsh portrayed John Wilkes Booth:

He makes you part of the movie. If you see The Thief of Bagdad and there's Douglas Fairbanks flying over Bagdad on a flying carpet, you're on a flying carpet. In A Birth Of A Nation, for example, Griffith keeps the camera in the orchestra. Now six months later comes Walsh's first feature Regeneration. There you see Anna Q. Nilsson looking at some boys an a wharf, and she beckons at the boys. She does it directly into the camera, looking at you. So the camera is now with the actors, part of the actors, and it brings you into the movie.

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

WHY: The PFA's Raoul Walsh series got off to a roaring start last Friday with a perfectly-matched double bill of Sailor's Luck and Me And My Gal that had me in equal measure thankful that this series is happening at all, and ruing that it's only fourteen titles long. While introducing the series, PFA video curator Steve Seid made mention of the Italian Walsh retrospective I mentioned in my first article on this series, and talked of how attendees swooned over his 1951 movie with Gary Cooper Distant Drums even though it had to be shown in a French-subtitled print, the only known available. The undercurrent of his comments seemed to be that PFA audiences deserve to see only the best-quality prints of the films programmed there. I'm not so sure I'd be so distracted by the presence of foreign-language subtitles on a Hollywood film (I used to see prints like that all the time when I was living abroad), but I understand the reluctance to have the PFA spring for the cost of shipping a less-than-ideal print, especially if, as Seid indicated, he was personally less than enthusiastic about Distant Drums. But his tantalizing words just made me eager to see it for myself somehow.

As Seid noted in a recent article posted to the PFA blog the institution has been "scrimping and saving" to purchase a new 4K digital projector capable of showing DCP, the now-industry-standard replacement for film reels. The device was installed a couple months ago, and I have yet to sample it. I have mixed feelings about it. Though it will allow the PFA to screen more of the new artist-made video works which are increasingly made available by their makers through DCP (perhaps David Gatten's The Extravagant Shadows might finally make its Frisco Bay premiere?), the use of such projectors to show digital versions of films made using photochemical processes seems to me to be a triumph of convenience over integrity. As Seid notes,

Films transferred to digital acquire a new kind of received illumination—it’s no longer simply light passing through a plastic strip but endless bits of information shuttled through a light array. These files are also output with perfect stability whereas film moves through the projector with a perceptible shudder, a fragile physical object making its way through a tolerant pathway.

Luckily the entire Walsh series is to be shown on 35mm film, the way it was intended by everyone involved in its creation. Or would be luckier to have a DCP version of Distant Drums as part of the series, were such a thing available? It's a conundrum, and not one likely to be solved in a way that satisfied my format-purist instincts. At any rate Walsh's Regeneration and What Price Glory? are two of the six silent films planned to screen on 35mm at the PFA this summer. The other four are the Gainsborough-produced films in the Alfred Hitchcock silent series coming to the venue in August- the same four shown on 35mm at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Castro Theatre presentation last month, which I discussed at the time. As for Hitchcock's British International Pictures-produced silents, they would have to be left out of the PFA's Hitchcock 9 series if the 4K projector had not been installed.

The truth is, more and more new so-called "restorations" of silent films are being made available only digitally. In the previous four years the SFSFF had only screened one to three programs of digitally-presented work per festival. This year there will be as many as five essentially-DCP programs, matching the number of DCP shows in the Hitchcock weekend. The opening night presentation of Prix de Beauté starring Louise Brooks and Sunday afternoon's showing of The Weavers both exhibit new "restorations" from European archives, unavailable on formats other than DCP. In addition, the Sunday morning shorts program featuring Chaplin, Keaton, etc. and the closing film Safety Last! are both currently-touring thanks to US distributors, and also unavailable through these middlemen except via DCP. I'm as yet unclear on the format of the Winsor McCay animation program presented by scholar and animator John Canemaker. When he came to the PFA to showcase these films several years ago, he used 35mm prints, but there is no indication one way or the other on the SFSFF website.

Still, these 4-5 programs make up less than a third of the total programming at the SFSFF this year. I'm excited to revisit favorites like Tokyo Chorus and The Patsy on 35mm with new (to me, at any rate) musical scores, to finally see long-sought titles such as The Half-Breed, Legong: Dance of the Virgins, The House on Trubnaya Square and The Joyless Street, and to discover titles I was (at best) only dimly aware of before the festival announcement, like The First Born, the Golden Clown, Gribiche and The Last Edition. And I'll probably stick around to check out some of the digital versions as well- how else am I going to see rarities like Prix de Beauté or The Weavers these days?

HOW: Regeneration will screen via an archival 35mm from the Museum of Modern Art, with live musical accompaniment from pianist Judith Rosenberg.

Easy Virtue (1927)

WHO: Alfred Hitchcock directed this, and appears in one of the first of his famous cameos, "strolling past a tennis court" according to Patrick McGilligan.

WHAT: Based on a Noel Coward play, Easy Virtue was Hitchcock's fifth film completed as a director, and it may have been the last time he directed a film based on a work written by someone more famous than he was. The program book for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation of the "Hitchcock 9"- the director's nine surviving silent films- says of Hitchcock's contribution: 

he excels himself in Easy Virtue. As he had in The Pleasure Garden and Champagne, he opens the film with an innovative trick shot. A giant mock-up with mirrors was used for the shot of the judge looking through his monocle, refelcting the actor standing behind the camera leading into a perfectly-matched close-up of the prosecuting counsel.

WHERE/WHEN: Today at 2:30 PM at the Castro Theater and Friday, August 30th at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Following up on yesterday's post discussing this weekend's Hitchcock 9 screening formats, I recognize there are divisions among silent movie fans about the best way to see a 1920s motion picture. Some prefer screenings that employ essentially the same technology cinemas used in the era these films were made: the 35mm projector and print, with the accompanying flicker and other characteristics of celluloid, including any dust, scratches or other marks on the frame left by previous runs through the projector. Others prefer the un-degradable, completely steady image projected by a high resolution video projector sourced from DCP (Digital Cinema Package) drives.

What practically every silent cinema aficionado agrees upon is that the best way to see these films is with a professional musical accompanist. Of the DCP projections I've seen at the Castro this weekend so far, I found Blackmail's and The Ring's to be a bit distractingly smooth for my tastes. But while watching The Manxman (probably an overall inferior film to either of the others) I was barely bothered by the digital quality while watching. Perhaps this is because more care was taken to create a film-like digital restoration and transfer. Or perhaps it's simply because I was too pulled into the story and its accompanying moods by the music to notice.

British pianist/flautist/accordionist Stephen Horne performed the music for The Manxman last night, with an assist from Diana Rowan on harp. He incorporated traditional Manx melodies beautifully into his own romantic playing style; at one point his arpeggiations brought to my mind Michael Nyman's celebrated score for Jane Campion's The Piano, but for most of the performance the music felt entirely connected to Hitchcock's film, and it alone. I expect I will have trouble being able to enjoy watching The Manxman with any other score, this one felt so close to definitive. I can't wait to hear his performances for The Farmer's Wife and The Pleasure Garden today, and his five accompaniments planned for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in July; Horne's scores are always among the sonic highlights of a SFSFF event in which they are featured.

The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra takes a fundamentally different approach to its scores, as we learned during the delightful digital slide presentation shown during the intermission of last night's performance of The Ring. Compared to Horne's approach, Mont Alto's is arguably more authentic to the historical record we have of what might have been performed by a chamber group at a silent movie house in the 1920s, and perhaps a bit more conducive to a more academic, less emotional, appreciation of a film's direction, editing mechanics, etc. (And perhaps the print quality as well.)  I really liked what they cooked up for Blackmail on Friday night, and was very impressed with their ability to shift between the classical tradition and jazz-style dance music for party sequences in The Ring.  They will perform for The Lodger this evening to close the weekend.

But I'm also excited to hear Judith Rosenberg perform for Easy Virtue today. Coming out of the world of dance accompaniment, she's a regular silent accompanist at the Pacific Film Archive (where in August she will perform for all nine of the Hitchcocks showing at the Castro this weekend) and the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum (where in two weeks she will perform for a set of European animated films as part of Frisco Bay's next big silent movie event, the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival.) But this weekend marks her debut at the Castro Theatre. Since I had to miss her performance to Champagne yesterday, I realize I've never heard her accompany a silent picture on a grand piano before! (Both the PFA and Niles are outfitted with uprights.) What's more I believe her appearance at the Hitchcock 9 marks the first time a SFSFF-presented event has featured a woman as solo accompanist for any of its films. (There are plenty of women who have performed at SFSFF as part of an ensemble, such as Britt Swenson and Dawn Kramer of Mont Alto, or who have joined with another performer like Rowen did with Horne last night.)

When the festival showtimes were first announced in March, Easy Virtue was to have been accompanied by an (at the time undetermined) organist. Within a few weeks, this plan had been changed because of the current physical condition of the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer, a problem which the theatre's regular organist David Hegarty is trying to raise funds to solve. While I love hearing the organ accompanying silent films, it's certainly true that not all films have an aesthetic quality that matches its timbral range; as I said to Anita Monga in our interview last week, A Cottage On Dartmoor would not work so well with organ accompaniment, while The Mark Of Zorro fits with the Wurlizter perfectly. Monga had this to say about the Silent Film Festival's use of the organ: 

We can't use organ at all this time because of vagaries with the people who own the organ and are going to be out of town. The organ needs major upgrading. We're not able to use it for the Hitchcocks. We have one show in the summer, with the proviso that if something happens we're able to switch to piano. 

When I followed up with a question about the likelihood of the Castro Wurlitzer being able to handle more SFSFF shows by July 2014, Monga replied:

We're just waiting to hear, but the Taylors are the family that own the organ, and they're retiring. It's really too risky for us to use it when they're not around. I've been at the Castro when the "oboe A" got stuck on, and no one can do anything. It's not like you flip a switch. You have to go up into the organ loft. That would be a disaster for us.

As much as I miss the organ, I'm very pleased that its disappearance from the Hitchcock 9 line-up made room for Judith Rosenberg to join the SFSFF rotation of musicians.

HOW: Easy Virtue screens from a 35mm print accompanied by Judith Rosenberg at both shows.

Downhill (1927)

WHO: Alfred Hitchcock directed this.

WHAT: Though Hitchcock disparaged its dialogue and the naïveté of one of its most memorable sequences, and though some modern critics find fault with its thematic misogyny, Downhill is a feast for admirers of the director's visual flourishes, second perhaps only to Blackmail among the silent Hitchcocks I've seen up to now in this regard. Most seem to lay the blame for the film's nearly-uniform negative portrayals of women at the feet of the film's star Ivor Novello, the semi-secretly gay movie idol who wrote the play Downhill was based on, and whose stardom had helped make The Lodger Hitchcock's first box office success. Only four films into his directing career, Hitchcock was still at the mercy of the projects he was assigned, but in the case of Downhill he certainly made the best of it, despite it really being Novello's show in the eyes of most of the public. Bill Krohn describes in his book Hitchcock At Work how at least one showing of the film exploited Novello's celebrity:

In one London theatre where the picture was playing, the lights and the screen went up half-way through the projection to reveal Ivor Novello on a stage dressed with props from the film, where he proceeded to give the public the next ten minutes of the film in sound - and 3-D!

I don't expect this kind of stunt to be tried at any modern screenings of Downhill, but if it were, I suppose the best person to hide behind the screen for such an unveiling would be Jeremy Northam, who played the long-deceased Novello in Robert Altman's 2001 film Gosford Park.

WHERE/WHEN: This afternoon at 4:00 at the Castro Theatre and August 24th at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: If you skipped the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation of Blackmail last night, you missed one of Hitchcock's best, but also one of his historically most frequently revived early pictures. Today's slate includes four far--lesser-known titles, although the recent BFI restorations of the so-called "Hitchcock 9" should do a lot to rescue them from obscurity. For discussion of Champagne, The Ring, and The Manxman, as well as all the other Hitchcock titles screening at the Castro this weekend, there's no better place to turn than the link round-up compiled by David Hudson.

I single out Downhill because it's the only film playing the rest of this weekend that I've seen on 35mm before (at a slower frame rate at the PFA) and because it's the sole film showing on 35mm film in today's set. The other three, along with last night's Blackmail and tomorrow's The Farmer's Wife, are being distributed only digitally, Made at British International Pictures rather than at the Gainsborough studio, these slightly-later features now are distributed world wide by Studio Canal, and are being made available in the US by Rialto Pictures only on DCP.

The four surviving Gainsborough pictures (The Pleasure Garden, The Lodger, Downhill, and Easy Virtue), on the other hand, have been made available in 35mm prints through the BFI, and will be shown this way at both the Castro this weekend and at the PFA in August. Earlier this week SFSFF Artistic Director Anita Monga told me some fascinating information about the decision to show these films on film rather than DCP:

We were going to present on DCP, and really it was the president of our board who said, "Oh, you have to show 35mm". It's a huge expense to bring 100 pounds of film over. It also requires us to show at 20 frames per second. The Castro no longer has a 3-blade shutter, so 20 frames can be flickery. In our summer festival we are going to install [a 3-blade shutter]; it's like a thousand dollars to install the 3 blade shutter and uninstall it- and we have to increase the lumens on screen. 

The reason the Castro took out their 3-blade shutter, which makes for projection of slower films, is because they had to put so many lumens on screen to get over the 3-blade shutter's leak of light. You have to get so many lumens on the screen to get a good picture, that they were burning out their reflector. So for them, economically, it didn't make sense to have the 3-blade shutter. Because we're showing several films that are screening at lower than 20 frames per, it's a necessity, or else you're seeing an extreme flicker.

Monga told me there will be some DCP at the summer festival as well (expect it for Safety Last!, the comedy shorts program and The Weavers, and don't expect to ever see that latter in a cinema any other way, as no prints exist) but assured me that The First Born, which was co-written by Hitchcock's wife and creative partner Alma Reville, will screen from a 35mm print.

HOW: As noted above, both screenings are planned to employ 35mm prints, with live piano accompaniment. Today it's Stephen Horne providing the music, and in August it will be Judith Rosenberg.

Vow of Silence (2012)

WHO: Mercedes Cabral stars in this short directed by Anna Isabelle Matutina.

WHAT: I've only seen the trailer, but this looks like a potentially probing and provocative narrative exploration of Filipino patriarchy. Cabral plays a woman who is married with two children, but who has never experienced orgasm. The short reportedly "drew gasps from the audience with its portrayal of female sexuality and family relationships" at a recent short film festival in Finland.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at YBCA, on a program starting at 1:00 PM.

WHY: Today is the final day of the YBCA New Filipino Cinema series, unless you count next Friday's encore screening of the crowd-pleasiing music documentary Harana. Today's festival events include a free panel discussion and screenings of two features, but the day starts off with the only shorts in this year's festival. There's a program of four of them, all directed by women: Waiting To Whisper by Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo, Aurora, My Aurora by Janus Victoria, Last Strike by Aliess Alonso, and this one by Matutina.

Matutina and Cabral are firmly connected to the independent Filipino movie-making scene; Matutina came to directing through her work as an editor, for television but also for digital filmmakers like the pioneering Khavn de la Cruz; she edited his 2007 shot-in-one-day feature Squatterpunk, for instance. She also has early experience working with one of the most important figures in the scene, Lav Diaz. Meanwhile, Cabral began her acting career at a successful audition for a role in Serbis, directed by another of the most internationally-known Filipino filmmakers, Brillante Mendoza. She's appeared in four more of Mendoza's features, as well as Marlon Rivera's The Woman in the Septic Tank and Korean director Park Chan-wook's Thirst. But these are all supporting roles, so it'll be nice to see her playing a lead today.

HOW: I believe that all the selections in the 2013 New Filipino Cinema series are being projected digitally, most of them via DCP. I'm pretty sure that all of them (except for retrospective title Himala) were shot digitally, as video technology has for years been a key method for independent artists to distinguish their product from that of the major studios. Khavn de la Cruz was an early advocate, and I'll end this post with a decade-old quote from the last of four manifestos written between 1998 and 2003, and re-published in the book Southeast Asian Independent Cinema:

Digital film, with its qualities of mobility, flexibility, intimacy, and accessibility, is the apt medium for a Third World Country like the Phillippines. Ironically, the digital revolution has reduced the emphasis on technology and has reasserted the centrality of the filmmaker, the importance of the human condition over visual junk food.

Milk (2008)

WHO: Daniel Nicoletta was a historical consultant and still photographer for this film, performed in a cameo playing Harvey Milk's political aide Carl Carlson, and was portrayed as a young man by Lucas Grabeel (pictured above).

WHAT: You can nitpick its minor anachronisms or question some of the characterization and still find this Gus Van Sant-directed, multi-awarded biopic of San Francisco's first openly gay elected official to be a very moving film about a crucial moment in the city's, and ultimately the nation's and the world's,  movement toward freedom and equality. Sean Penn's performance as Harvey Milk is a career high, and one of the few recent Academy Award-winning impersonations of a historical figure that I think probably deserved all its accolades.

The decisions to shoot the film in San Francisco locations dressed to be as authentic as possible, and to fill the set with people who lived through the period depicted, available to help guide a younger generation of their own portrayers to verisimilitude, from the featured players down to the marching extras in mass protest scenes, may be foregone conclusions in retrospect, but they weren't the only approaches available to makers of films like Milk. And there's something very interesting about the kind of authenticity available and not available to filmmakers working this way. There's both a paradox and a beautiful expression of continuity that occurs when the audience sees a 25-year-old actor or extra in the same frame as the person he or she is portraying, who is now 55 years old and portraying an elder who may have inspired him or her at the time.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre, with showtimes at 2:00, 4:30, 7:00 & 9:30.

WHY: Every year since Milk came out, the Castro has shown it on Harvey Milk Day, which commemorates the life of the activist who would have turned 83 today had he not been slain. Today the screening also comes just one day after the announcement of the 37th Frameline Festival, which will come to the Castro and other Frisco Bay venues June 20-30. 

As we see in Milk, Harvey Milk's political career arose out of his experiences running a camera store just a block away from the Castro Theatre. This was one of the sets recreated in its original space for the film, and Jenni Olson's beautiful short 575 Castro St. documents that space in moments when it wasn't being utilized as a location for shooting, in a manner intended to remind us of the importance of this store as a hub not only of political activism but artistic expression. In fact the two activities were (and, I would argue, are) intertwined inseparably. Perhaps there's no better example of this than the historical fact that it was Milk's increasing involvement in politics that necessitated his hiring of Daniel Nicoletta at the store, to take on duties he was becoming too busy to handle himself. Nicoletta's presence at the store (depicted in the screenshot from Milk above), which was devoted to small-gauge motion picture processing as well as still photography, put him in the ideal place to help found the first-ever "Gay Film Festival of Super-8 Films" in 1977, an event that over the next few decades transformed into the Frameline festival we know today. As Olson writes, 

For its first few years the festival showcased the modest Super-8 imaginings of such prolific but obscure gay filmmakers as Jim Baker, Bern Boyle, Stephen Iadereste, Ric Mears, Allen McClain, Billy Miggins, T.K. Perkins, Wayne Smolen, David Waggoner, Ken Ward and Christine Wynne as well as festival founders Marc Huestis and Dan Nicoletta and Names Project founder Cleve Jones. Many of these films explored gay themes, but a good percentage of the work (like many other experimental films of the era) focused on simple light and motion studies.

If you haven't been keeping an eye on the Wikipedia page for the Frameline Film Festival, you might like to know that it has recently exploded with historical information, particularly from the festival's first ten years. The page also points out that Frameline has scanned and made available all of its past program guides in a handy archive. From this archive, I've learned more about Nicoletta's own filmmaking than anywhere else. Some of his films shown at the first few "Gay Film Festivals" include a film, which he described as "an autobiographic film about my destiny, my love of San Francisco and life here", or Theatrical Collage: "a collection of theatrical footage from over the years" and Dancing Is Illegal, which is described as "produced for the stage by the Angels of Light".

Reading about this early festival history is a good reminder of the seemingly-humble beginnings that can lay the groundwork for a cultural movement (and considering Frameline is the longest-running and highest-profile LGBT Film Festival in the country and perhaps anywhere, I don't think it's overreaching to use terms like "cultural movement"). In the late 1970s, Super-8 was the most inexpensive motion picture medium around, and thus ideal material for use by independent-minded artists, especially those whose work would likely be systematically be excluded from traditional structures of creation and exhibition. 

Today the equivalently inexpensive medium is digital. It's something to keep in mind after learning at the Frameline press conference this morning that this year is expected to be the first time the festival doesn't screen a single new film on a non-digital format. There will be two 35mm retrospective programs (a matinee of Jamie Babbit's 1999 But I'm a Cheerleader with her 1998 short Sleeping Beauties, and a Peaches Christ-hosted midnight showing of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddie's Revenge) but, it seems, no prints of new titles.  

This may be an end of an era of a sort, but it's not at all unexpected. The ratio of film-to-digital presentations has been steeply declining at practically every festival I know of in the past few years. Last year I believe Frameline screened no more than a dozen films on film, and a good third of those were retrospectives. The good news is that higher-quality digital presentations are becoming more and more affordable for independent makers, so while those of us who take special pleasure in the illusionary intermittence of film projection may mourn the increasing scarcity of opportunities to watch it, at least we may be able to enjoy digital screenings more than we have in the past. I hope so, as there are quite a few new works at Frameline 37 that seem quite promising, including a ten-program regional focus entitled Queer Asian Cinema, and a new documentary on the great Frisco Bay poet and filmmaker James Broughton, appropriately entitled Big Joy after the kinds of feelings most of his experimental films can instill in an attentive audience. Perhaps another local venue will use this new doc as an excuse to rent 16mm prints of some of his films from Canyon Cinema and showcase them during or shortly after the festival.

HOW: Milk will screen as a DCP.

Helsinki, Forever (2008)

 

WHO: Peter Von Bagh made this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW: Helsinki, Forever screens in 35mm.

Verses (2012)

WHO: Local artist James Sansing made this film.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

WHO: Ennio Morricone wrote the score for this film.

WHAT: Other than the fact that Morricone's musical themes for this are among the more striking and memorable, at least from among those he composed for films I have yet to see, I don't know much about this Elio Petri-directed picture beyond basics. It won the Grand Prix (essentially second-prize to Robert Altman's M.A.S.H.) award at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival and later beat out Buñuel's Tristana and other films for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1971 Oscar ceremony. Thus proving that M.A.S.H. is better than Tristana, in case you were wondering.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:00 tonight only at the Lark Theater in Larkspur, CA.

WHY: The Lark is an art deco single-screen movie house in Marin County that I've never been inside. I've kept an eye on its programming for several years now, however, and though it does have a tradition of hosting special screenings, most of them tend to be of content frequently as available at other Frisco Bay venues as well, and I've never felt compelled to justify a visit. 

Seeing an uncommonly-shown Oscar-winning classic on the theatre's schedule this week, however, made my eyes perk up. That it's part of a four-film presentation of screenings of "library titles" (non-new-releases) in 4K digital presentation is a sign of the times; I'm not sure the Lark has 35mm capability any longer. If this were a film screening I'd be very interested in attending, but I just skipped a chance to see this film projected digitally at the Castro a couple months ago.

Then again, the Castro's projector is only a 2K model and the Lark's is now 4K, twice as powerful. Might this be a more special occasion because of that? I've yet to be really wowed by the digital image of a classic film shown digitally, but perhaps that's because the only time I've watched one in 4K it was something I'd seen multiple times in 70mm, not 35mm (Lawrence of Arabia).

These are the thoughts cinephiles are beginning to ponder as we enter the industry's final push to completely transform the exhibition landscape from a film-based to a digital one. More and more theatres are converting to digital, although there are still holdouts depending on the studios' continued production of 35mm prints, and there seems to be confusion about what's going to happen to them. For an interesting take on the current state of this transition, I recommend a recent Variety article that looks at the situation from multiple angles, with perspectives from film purists and digital proponents alike.

I was particularly interested in the fact that everyone quoted in the article seemed to agree about the need for "library titles" to be able to be screened in cinemas. And it isn't Martin Scorsese or famous film-on-film advocate Christopher Nolan, but James Cameron's producing partner Jon Landau who argues for the need to "preserve the infrastructure needed to continue to show library titles as they were created by the filmmakers of the past"- meaning on film. This is not the way the industry is trending, with the Virtual Print Fee system providing incentives for the decommissioning of film projectors as digital ones take their place (even in booths with room for both), and fewer and fewer new prints of older films being struck by most if not all of the studios.

One aspect of the transition not mentioned in the article is particularly worth thinking about on Earth Day. Conventional wisdom holds that the old system of chemically producing thousands of 35mm prints and sending them in heavy cans around the country via petroleum-dependent vehicles, and finally destroying most of them to prevent their getting into the hands of pirates, collectors, etc., was incredibly wasteful, and that distribution via more lightweight DCP drives is far more environmentally friendly. It sounds logical but I'd like to see some data, or even just some projections, before I take this at face value. I've written before about the ecological effects of widespread home video vis-a-vis cinema screenings, which to me seems like a no-brainer to me: more individual screens means more waste. But digital projection in cinemas does appear to have some worthwhile environmental efficiency compared to 35mm. Those film cans are heavy, and wide releases in the multiplex age surely involved a lot of wasted resources.

On the other hand, 35mm projectors lasted a long time before having to be replaced. Digital projectors (and DCPs use resources as well, and even if the latter are lighter than multiple reels, that doesn't mean they were produced in a more ecologically-friendly way. What's more, we don't know how long it will take for 4K projectors to seem antiquated and in need of another environmentally-costly mass replacement with 8k projectors, and how quickly pressure will mount for that cycle to be repeated again and again. It feels to me that in the short term, the widespread switch from film to digital may well be taking a greater toll on the Earth's resources than status quo would have. In the long term, the ecological cost might eventually become lower, but if an arms race in resolution and screen size continues to be waged between cinema exhibition and home video, it could just as easily become much much greater.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, and would especially love to collect links to studies or articles or even just quotes by credible people about the ecological costs and benefits of the massive, worldwide shift from film to video exhibition.

HOW: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion screens digitally, in a 4K restoration that had its US premiere in New York last fall, and its local premiere, albeit through a 2K rather than 4K projector,

The Big Lebowski (1998)

WHO: Joel & Ethan Coen wrote, directed, co-produced and co-edited (under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) this picture.

WHAT: I first saw The Big Lebowski the way most people I know did: on home video. I remember renting the videocassette fifteen years ago and thinking, "hey that's better than most Coen Brothers movies" and then thinking little of it for quite some time. Until this weekend I had not seen it on the big screen.

But this film slowly and surely developed a following like few other films of its era. I'm pretty sure it's the only Coen Brothers film that has inspired its own religion (founded by an old acquaintance of mine, no less), and probably the one that has inspired more DVD editions (including one worked on by another friend) and more books than any other, as well.

Even Josh Levine, who published a book about the Coens in 2000 (when The Big Lebowski was their newest completed film), seems oblivious that it might be the one that would develop the most cultish fan attention, focusing his chapter on the film's preparation, and when talking about its reception limiting his observations to that of the critical consensus, and to the fact of its box-office disappointment in the wake of Fargo. But he does, in his final chapter, put his finger on why The Big Lebowski may be different from the other Coen works, calling it an exception to the rule that "every one of their films leaves the viewer feeling distinctly uneasy ... Even the comic Raising Arizona has a nightmarish quality, and the hero and heroine may have had their lives ruined by their own uncontrollable impulses."

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Clay Theatre at 11:55 PM.

WHY: The Clay is set to replace its 35mm projection equipment with DCP next Friday. They already have a lower-quality digital projector in place, which is being used to show this week's regular booking, the biopic Renoir, about the great French filmmaker's famous father. This means that tonight's midnight screening of The Big Lebowski will be the last time 35mm reels will be shown publicly at the venue.

The Clay is one of San Francisco's oldest movie houses, and has been projecting 35mm prints from all over the world for over a hundred years. In the 1930s, it showed a great many French imports; just just the widely-known ones by Renoir but still-relatively-obscure titles like Anatole Litvak's Mayerling, Sascha Guitry's Pearls of the Crown and Robert Siodmak's Personal Column. It also showed films from countries such as (for example) Russia, Sweden, Austria, China, and the U.K.

Though keeping its reputation for foreign film exhibition through the following decades, in the 1970s the Clay became a stop on the burgeoning midnight-movie circuit, screening fare like John Waters's Pink Flamingos to a late-movie-hungry crowd in an age before home video and widespread cable television. The Rocky Horror Picture did not make its original local debut at the Clay but, according to Gary Meyer, the Metro II, before moving to the Powell as a midnight movie. Now it screens monthly at the Clay, along with other periodic midnight screenings such as The Room, The Big Lebowski, etc. I've seen 35mm midnight shows of films from The Shining to Johnnie To's The Mission to Donnie Darko over the past ten years or so. 

But now it's time for the Clay to go "on hundred per cent electronic" as Jackie Treehorn might say. It's unfortunate that  the DCP industry has figured out a way to strong-arm most theatres to adopt a "no turning back" policy, removing 35mm projection equipment even from booths with the room to accommodate both. For a theatre like the Clay, the philosophy seems to be "adapt or die". For a 103-year-old movie house which has survived plenty of closure scares over the years, maybe it's good news as it seems to reflect confidence in future survival of the venue to invest in new technology for it. Hopefully it will mean the Clay can continue to show an increasingly diverse selection of midnight movies and foreign films to appreciative crowds for some time to come.

It seems a good time to mention the final three 35mm screenings happening at SFMoMA before their closure in just over a month, since they all seem to connect to The Big Lebowski in some (perhaps oblique) way. The museum's final 35mm showing will be May 23's The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's Raymond Chandler adaptation that seems to have held more influence on the Coens' approach to reinterpreting that author than other films by Howard Hawks, etc. May 16 they screen Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, the film that essentially launched Lebowski lead Jeff Bridges's stardom. And on May 9th SFMoMA screens The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese's documentary record of The Band's farewell concert, an event that Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski might well have attended a good decade or so before his days as a roadie for Metallica. No, no members of The Eagles are invited.

HOW: The Big Lebowski will screen from an excellent if not pristine 35mm print, accompanied by an assortment of rare, vintage trailers and other odds and ends prepared by the Clay projectionist to run through the gate one last time.