Brazil (1985)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

WHO: Terry Gilliam directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: This may be Gilliam's most deeply black comedy, set in a near-future dystopian society that places great importance on bureaucracy, security, consumerism, and ceiling ducts. Jonathan Pryce plays a middle-aged everyman who dreams of escaping his life as an office drone to become a winged knight, to get a taste of life in the tropics as might be described in a dated samba song (from which this film derives its meridional title), or at least to get to better know the truck-driving young woman that he keeps fleetingly encountering. As he juggles his job duties, his visits with his plastic-surgery-obsessed mother, and unorthodox visits from the underground repairmen resistance, he comes closer to learning the cruel truth about his position in this society.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre, at 2:15 and 8:00 PM.

WHY: This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of this film's release in the United States. lthough it had screened all over the world starting as early as February in Europe, September in ustralia and October in the nation sharing its name, Even the 132-minute version that Gilliam was able to eventualy convince Universal to release just before Christmas 1985 was missing 10 minutes of footage now expected to be included in the print showing at the Castro today (according to the theatre's claim of a 142-minute runtime).  This is considered to be the definitive version by most modern fans, and it includes a few more overt references to the Christmas season, during which many viewers tend to forget the film is set.

There are still plenty of other Xmas-themed movies screening in Frisco Bay cinemas over the next several days. For the traditional-minded, the Stanford shows its usual December Lubitsch film The Shop round the Corner this week from Monday to Wednesday (on a double bill with The Wizard of Oz) before screening its annual 35mm Christmas Eve It's a Wonderful Life show. It's sold out of course, but the Castro screens the same film digitally on Tuesday, December 22nd.

The Roxie, meanwhile, has a MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS-presented double bill of Christmas-themed eighties movies, Die Hard and Gremlins, that provide a different sort of Yuletide experience than a Lubitsch or Capra classic, but that are increasingly well-remembered as Christmastime films by new generations of movie lovers. These are both to be screened as DCP (Digital Cinema Package) files on the Roxie's far -improved digital projection system installed this past pril.

I finally had an opportunity to see the Roxie's digital system in action this past Friday when I went to see another 30th-anniversary screening, a presentation of The Last Dragon, introduced by comedian W. Kamau Bell and with its Tae Kwon Do expert star Taimak on hand for a very lively audience q&a. Though I was initially very disappointed that the screening was not presented in 35mm as originally advertised (mainly because it meant I was missing a 35mm print of The Straight Story across town at the Castro), I do see a silver lining in that I got to see for myself that the Roxie's main house can project digitally as well as anywhere (something that recent years' experience had left me in serious doubt of), in addition to the fact that I got to see a film I'd never seen before in a packed house of devoted fans more racially diverse than I can recall seeing a movie anywhere. I sat with a couple of friends who told me they'd experienced 35mm projection problems at the Roxie the Friday before, and although I'd just seen a truly flawless presentation of Brothers Quay shorts on Sunday December 3th, I pieced together from their comments and those of a Roxie staffer I spoke to briefly before leaving the screening after the q&a, that there'd been a recent pattern of 35mm projection problems at the cinema that had led them to decide to screen The Last Dragon digitally.

The next day I mentioned the issues on my twitter feed, and within a few hours received a very thorough e-mail from the Roxie's new Executive Director Dave Cowan, detailing the three separate problems the venue recently had projecting 35mm prints, and how they were resolved. He explained that the decision to project The Last Dragon digitally was made because of "issues with the mechanisms that align and advance the positive and negative carbons in our old Peerless Magnarcs." I've never operated a 35mm projector myself, much less a vintage carbon arc projector, but I believe the problem they were trying to avoid is one I've seen occur several times at the Roxie (though never at the Stanford, which also projects carbon arc, but which is run by a wealthy cine-philanthropist who can easily afford to keep all gear in top condition at all times.) Perhaps you have too: a film's image suddenly fades to dark as the soundtrack continues to play, until a few seconds (which can feel like minutes) later, the image is restored as bright as before the problem. Not as disruptive as a frame melt (which I've experienced this year at the Castro and YBCA, once apiece) or certain digital glitches, but something that certainly would have put a damper on an otherwise positive screening.

I'm glad to hear from Cowen that the Roxie believes it has now solved this carbon alignment issue, and will test further in the following days before its next scheduled 35mm screenings of Casablanca (a film that plays a key part in a humorous scene in Brazil) on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and of Strange Days on December 30th. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend any of these showings myself, but I encourage readers who do to report back either via comment or by emailing me.

HOW: On a 35mm subversively Christmas-themed double-bill with Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Ménilmontant (1926)

WHO: This was written and directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff, and starred his wife Nadia Sibirskaïa who, according to Monica Nolan's just-published SF Silent Film Festival essay, may lay some claim to being a co-director on at least some of their collaborations.

WHAT: Though I just saw this a couple weeks ago, I'm in a rush, so let me quote my friend Jeremy Matthews, who just ranked this film #14 on a list of the 100 Best Silent Films which made me realize just how similar our tastes are (although he loves Buster Keaton far more than I even do):

Watching Ménilmontant is a deeply felt experience. Impressionist filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff takes the dreamlike qualities of silent cinema to their natural conclusion, letting the story float by alongside haunting imagery without any intertitles directing hot to interpret the story. Kirsanoff made only one other film before this bold work, which starts abruptly and brutally with a man murdering a couple, then follows a love triangle involving the dead parents’ two daughters once they’ve grown. For all his cinematic innovations, Kirsanoff is not too hoity-toity to to tug the heartstrings, and a scene with a kind old man on a park bench is one of the most touching you’ll ever see.

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

WHY: The beginning of the month saw the tail end of the 20th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which I'm still in the midst of writing my final wrap-up report on. In the meantime, you can check out the preview pieces linked at Keyframe Daily and wrap-ups by Donna Hill, Meredith Brody, Mary Mallory, David Mermelstein, and, if you have the inclination toward the spoken rather than written word, the Cinephiliacs podcast, in which attendees Peter Labuza and Victor Morton discuss several of the screened films. Peter kindly name-checks me in this episode, even though I've been so lax in keeping this blog up-to-date that I haven't even mentioned yet the fact that I was honored to be a guest on a prior episode of his podcast in which we talked about my path into cinephilia, the San Francisco screening scene, and other topics but especially Christopher Maclaine's 1953 masterpiece The End.

I'd wanted to write a post of footnotes about the many points I in retrospect wish I could've expanded upon during our fast-paced discussion, but I have a feeling that's not going to happen which is just as well as I'm very happy with the way the piece came out thanks to Peter's editing, and humbled to be added to his illustrious guest list. I will say one thing about the podcast: that I hope no listener has the impression that I've programmed more than one film for YBCA, that being The Company during last summer's Invasion of the Cinemaniacs series, as Joel Shepherd is handily taking care of that himself (this month's New Filipino Cinema and the upcoming David Cronenberg series prove he knows exactly what he's doing). I've programmed only a little more than that for the San Francisco Public Library, but tomorrow afternoon's free 16mm "ATA @ SFPL" showcase at the Noe Valley Public Library is one I and my co-programmers are particularly proud of.

Steering back to Ménilmontant: it a highlight of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for many people, but I'm glad it's showing again tonight as the second program in the PFA's final 2015 calendar. Final because the PFA will soon be moving its screening space from the "temporary" location it's inhabited at the corner of Bowditch and Bancroft for more the fifteen years. It's final day in the purple-chaired classroom-style room is August 2nd, and the institution is expected to reopen in 2016 at a location on the West side of the UC Berkeley campus, closer to BART and Shattuck Avenue. Glad because it will be great to see it paired with another Kirsanoff/ collaboration Autumn Mists, put into greater context as part of an incredible centennial tribute to La Cinémathèque Française's legendary founder Henri Langlois that also includes rarely-shown films by Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Grémillon, Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Erich von Stroheim and many more, and woven into the fabric of eight weeks of PFA programming that shows its commitment to both expanding the canon and offering chances to reaffirm it in the best possible projection setting as well as ever. This weekend's launching series include tributes to comics W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy and a forgotten silent serial, and later on the venue will host a night of Indian video art and 35mm-heavy Andrei Tarkovsky, John Stahl and Victor Erice retrospectives, the latter paired with a hefty selection of his own favorites drawn from cinema history.

I'm also glad because...

HOW: When Ménilmontant screened at the Castro nearly two weeks ago it showed digitally with a score by the ever-reliable Stephen Horne. This presentation was strong enough to fool at least one filmmaker in the house into thinking it was 35mm, but tonight's screening is a chance to see the real thing: the Cinémathèque Française is supplying a print, which will be able to screen at 18 frames per second rather than the digital standard (unless you're a hobbit) of 24 fps. The musical accompaniment will be by another of my very favorite pianists, Judith Rosenberg, bucking the tradition of silent-era films shown in silence that Langlois is famous for. This is a tradition that barely exists in the Bay Area cinemas, and as a silent-film-music appreciator (and occasional practicioner) it's not one I'm particularly eager to see get a foothold. But I am curious why, if the PFA is not planning to employ Rosenberg to play music for Queen Kelly on July 24th anyway, they don't give us a little sample of this Cinémathèque Française sonic tradition, just to hear what it's like for once.

I Only Have Two Eyes: 2014 Edition

Screen capture from Warner DVD of Macao

We're already well into the 2015 film-going year, but it's not too late to take time to reflect on the cinematic character of 2014 before it recedes into memory too far. One major release bucked trends by bringing 35mm and 70mm projectors back to life in a few cinema spaces. Otherwise, 35mm screenings of new films all but disappeared from the Frisco Bay screening landscape, with only the 4-Star in San Francisco and the Bluelight Cinemas in Cupertino by year's-end still regularly playing whatever new commercially-available films they're able to track down prints for from the studios still striking them. Remaining film projectors at a place like the Opera Plaza were so under-utilized in the past twelve months that learning that the venue just the other day removed them from all but one of its tiny screening rooms (installing DCP-capable equipment into its two comparatively "larger" houses) felt completely unsurprising and barely disappointing at all to me. It's safe to say that film festivals are no longer a home for 35mm either; as far as I'm aware the only new films that screened in that format at any local fests in 2014 were the throwback short Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret at the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival in June, and Yoji Yamada's The Little House at Mill Valley in October.

Most of the major local festivals have only kept the embers of sprocketed film warm in 2014 either by showing 16mm works by "experimental" artists still employing celluloid, or by showing a few revival titles in 35mm. Indeed, revivals and repertory houses are now where almost all of the action is at for those who like to view light passing through 35mm strips onto screens. Frisco Bay still has venues where this is a major component of programming, as well as a growing contingent of cinema spaces finding creative ways to attract audiences out of their home-viewing patterns (which are shifting themselves) by embracing digital-age developments. I'm eager to see what 2015 will bring to the cinephiliac landscape in San Francisco and its surroundings. Changes are afoot; the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley will be closing midyear to prepare for a move to a new, more transit-connected space; meanwhile the biggest DCP advocate among its programming team has just retired. The Alamo Drafthouse is expected to open its first branch in the region in 2015 as well, at a site within walking distance of several cherished repertory haunts. As highlighted in the new Film-Friendly Links section of the Film On Film Foundation website, Alamo CEO Tim League appears committed to involving 35mm in his company's continued expansion. I'm excited to see how that shakes out.

My annual "I Only Have Two Eyes" survey of local cinephiles' favorite screenings of revival and repertory films may have more mentions of digital screenings than ever for 2014, but as you'll see as I unveil the various contributions over the next week or so, there is plenty of diversity of format, venue, and of course the films themselves, in their selections. I'm so pleased to have gotten a strong turnout for this year's poll, including many participants from the past seven years when I've conducted it, as well as new "faces". Enjoy perusing their lists and comments as more are added!

January 26: Veronika Ferdman, who writes for Slant Magazine, In Review Online and elsewhere.
January 26: Lucy Laird, Operations Director for the SF Silent Film Festival.
January 27: Michael Hawley, who blogs at his own site film-415.
January 27: Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, educator at the Academy of Art & MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS
January 28: Margarita Landazuri, who writes for Turner Classic Movies & elsewhere.
January 28: Ben Armington, Box Cubed Box Office guy for many Bay Area Film Festivals.
January 29: Terri Saul, a visual artist who posts capsule reviews on Letterboxd.
January 29: Lincoln Spector, the proprietor of Bayflicks.
January 30: Michael Guillén, schoolmaster of The Evening Class and contributor to other publications.
January 30: David Robson, editorial director of Jaman and caretaker of The House of Sparrows.
January 31: Jonathan Kiefer, critic for SF Weekly and the Village Voice.
January 31: Adrianne Finelli, artist, educator, and co-curator of A.T.A.'s GAZE film series.
February 1: Haroon Adalat, a designer, illustrator and video editor.
February 1: Maureen Russell, cinephile and Noir City film festival volunteer.
February 2: Ryland Walker Knight, a writer and filmmaker with a new short at SF IndieFest.
February 2: Carl Martin, film projectionist and keeper of the FOFF Bay Area Film Calendar.
February 3: Claire Bain, an artist, filmmaker and writer.
February 4: Brian Darr, a.k.a. yours truly.

Cosmic Voyage (1936)

image courtesy San Francisco Silent Film Festival

WHO: Stars Sergei Komarov, the Soviet-era actor who also performed in previous San Francisco Silent Film Festival selections By the Law, Chess Fever and The House on Trubnaya Square, and directed A Kiss From Mary Pickford. He's also in tomorrow night's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks.

WHAT: In the words of Michael Atkinson, who wrote the essay on this film found in the glossy, 112-page program book provided free to every attendee of this year's Silent Film Festival, Cosmic Voyage is "a genuinely obscure silent-Soviet artifact that appears to not have been mentioned in any film history book known to the English-speaking world. This is hardly just an old silent-- it's a dream retrieved from the long-lost consciousness as well as an important progenitor of many of science fiction film's integral genre tropes."

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at 10PM tonight at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: Cosmic Voyage will be introduced by the one and only Craig Baldwin, who will share a little of his Other Cinema energy with a Castro Theatre audience as the SF Silent Film Festival's annual "filmmaker's pick". This program launched officially in 2008 when Guy Maddin gave a stirring defense of melodrama while introducing a screening of an imported French-intertitled print Tod Browning's The Unknown, for which he recited the English-language title cards. Since then, luminaries like Terry Zwigoff, Alexander Payne and Phillip Kaufman have provided introductions to selections from the festival programs. Last year the "filmmaker's pick" appeared to go on hiatus, although one might consider animator John Canemaker's presentation on pioneer Winsor McCay an unofficial iteration.

It's a wonderful tradition in my opinion, a perfect compliment to the many scholars and archivists who are brought in to introduce films at the festival each year. Though I wasn't able to fit her answer into my Keyframe preview on the festival, I was interested to hear what artistic director Anita Monga said about   Baldwin and the "filmmaker's pick" program when I spoke with her last week:

We don't just ask everyone. We're looking at their work and thinking, "how has early cinema influenced later cinema?" And there's something about Craig's work and that collage sense that has a direct correlation with the Soviet period. People often say "I'm not an expert on the silent film." But that's not why we're asking. We're trying to make the thread from the earliest cinema to today. In all kinds of ways, narrative filmmakers and underground filmmakers and experimental filmmakers had roots in the moving image of the silent era.

I also had the honor of being asked to interview Baldwin for the latest issue of a new Bay Area film site Eat Drink Films, just published earlier today. Please check out the interview and the other articles on the site including another Silent Film Festival-related piece on food in slapstick comedy, by Paul F. Etcheverry.

HOW: DCP with musical accompaniment by the Silent Movie Music Company (a.k.a. Günther Buchwald and Frank Backius). Frank Buxton will be on hand to read aloud an English translation of the Russian intertitles.

As for the digital nature of tonight's screening, I've already noted that there are more digital screenings than ever this year. Though I feel it's also worth noting there are also more film programs being screened on film this year than in any SFSFF year prior to Anita Monga's involvement in the festival. When I asked Monga about digital, she made some very interesting points:

At the beginning of DCP people made mistakes in the quality. They cleaned up too much. They made the image very flat. I am not one of the people who thinks that format is the paramount thing about these films. We're making these titles accessible in the best possible way. If I were going to be doctrinaire I would say I never want to see anything from the silent era on anything other than nitrate because there is a really qualitative difference between that and acetate. I'd like to continue doing other programs that address this."

All That Jazz (1979)

A scene from Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24- May 8, 2014. 

WHO: Bob Fosse wrote and directed this.

WHAT: A 1979 film by a director who'd already proved himself one of the great auteurs of the 1970s with films released in 1972 and 1974 (one of which earned him the Best Director Academy Award), but who found his film, probably his most ambitious to date, defeated by Robert Benton and Kramer Vs. Kramer at the Oscars that year. At least he had the consolation of a shared Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for this magnificent work.

That last paragraph could describe Francis Ford Coppola and Apocalypse Now but it just as easily describes Fosse and All That Jazz, which for me is easily his cinematic masterpiece. Too-often ignored in accountings of the great films of the 1970s, this highly-personal work, something of a dance-film extension of the themes of Fellini's 8 1/2, is one of the great films about artistic creation in the face of physical and creative roadblocks. It makes a particularly good comparison piece for those of us who saw Abuse of Weakness last night, but it's absolutely worth seeing on the big screen regardless. As Melissa Anderson wrote earlier this year in Artforum:

This phenomenal 1979 film, a work of “depressive exhilaration,” in the astute words of Sam Wasson, author of the excellent, recently published biography Fosse, was the director’s third (and final) Hollywood musical, following Sweet Charity (1969), an adaptation of Fosse’s 1966 stage production of the same name, and Cabaret (1972). All three movies are obsidian prisms reflecting the darker, seamier aspects of show business, informed by the desperate ambience that Fosse observed first-hand as a teenage dancer in the burlesque halls of his native Chicago. Those formative, often scarring years as an entertainer are re-presented in All That Jazz, in which Fosse’s self-regard is no match for his self-excoriation.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive, at 8:30 PM, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: Although the San Francisco International Film Festival has made many changes in the 10 years I've been attending as press, the most talked-about changes (the five executive directors the festival has had during that time, most notably) don't appear (to me) to provide as much substantial transformation of the festival's character, in terms of the amount of quality works that an above-averagely-interested attendee could see every year. The more notable transformation, in my outlook, is the shift in dominant projection format over the years, to the point where I was earlier this week able to round-up all of this year's expected 35mm, 16mm and super-8 work in a single paragraph. Seeing Paul Clipson's incredible Bright Mirror shown from a Super-8 projector set up in the middle of the Kabuki's House 3, reminded me of how the festival a decade ago would set up a special projector in the middle of the room to show video works, as film was the Kabuki's standard format and the widespread dominance of DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) was only a futuristic imagining.

I have no problem watching DCPs of new films at SFIFF, especially those shot on video cameras in the first place (increasingly more of them), and my Senses of Cinema article on the 2005 festival used the role of digital production and distribution in fulfilling a film festival's mandate as a frame. If I were to write an update today, I'd stress how we're now at the point in the evolution of digital filming and presentation technology where a filmmaker insisting on shooting or projecting on film is now making a deliberate choice to greatly limit his or her options for processing, exhibition, and so on throughout the chain of getting images in front of audience eyes. Even films created in the age of celluloid, by makers who expected the subtleties of their manipulation of chemistry to impress their vision onto screens, are steadily being transformed (though the industry buzzwords are the paradoxical "digitally restored") into collections of electronic signals. Generally, the more high-profile the revival, the more likely it is to be digital-only and to replace all legitimate film-on-film distribution of a given title. The 2014 Cannes Classics line-up, for instance, will be the first-ever in that sidebar to present only DCPs and no 35mm prints.

Though I'm increasingly finding myself able to appreciate a DCP screening of classic films, I'm far less apt to go out of my way to see one than a 35mm print. Knowing that the latter is becoming scarcer and scarcer only ups the ante on the sense of "unique event" that running a physical print through a projector really was all along, no matter how ubiquitous it seemed. Scarcity of digital screenings of any given title feels far more artificial; there's far less of a physical barrier to a cinema projecting a digital copy of a classic than there is to screening one of a finite number of prints. Still, sometimes I want to see a movie on a cinema screen no matter how it's presented. It never really bothered me that prior SFIFFs included video-projected showings of Latin American rarities like Los Inundados and We Are The Music; how else was I going to see these great works otherwise? Short of going back in time to 2009 (the last time All That Jazz showed in 35mm in the Bay Area, as far as I can recall), tonight's showing is as good as we're likely to get.

HOW: All the usual sources have said that All That Jazz screens from a DCP. But the Film Foundation's own website lists it as a 35mm print. This discrepancy raises an eyebrow only because last year the Film Foundation shipped both a DCP and a 35mm print of The Mattei Affair to the festival, which was lucky because the DCP proved to be technically troublesome at the PFA. Assuming the festival is similarly prepared this year, might it be worth crossing fingers for a snafu?

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: SFIFF's Day 9 features another revived title: Lino Brocka's Manila In The Claws of Light. The final screening of the gripping marital-conflict drama If You Don't, I Will starring Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos and the sole festival screening of Boyhood with director Richard Linklater in person also happen today, although if you don't have a ticket already you'll need to wait in the Rush Line for these latter two showings.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: A double-bill of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Sorry, Wrong Number defies the trend of DCPs superceding 35mm prints forever, as the latter fairly recently screened at the PFA as a DCP, but will show in 35mm, like the rest of the Stanford's current Barbara Stanwyck series. It runs through Sunday.

Bright Mirror (2013)

A scene from Paul Clipson's BRIGHT MIRROR, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014 

WHO: Paul Clipson made this.

WHAT: Though I mentioned it as one of my favorite undistributed new films seen in 2013, I never wrote anything about Bright Mirror last year during my post-a-day chronicling of the Frisco Bay film screening scene. I actually saw it on a DVD I borrowed during the Canyon Cinema pop-up last December, so I'm excited to finally see it projected in a cinema thanks to the San Francisco International Film Festival. 

I usually get a lot of pleasure from watching local filmmaker & film projectionist Clipson's work in a public setting. His unique eye for capturing beautiful light & color patterns and arranging them, often through in-camera editing and/or multiple-exposures has provided him with a robust body of work that frequently gets showcased in cinemas, galleries and live music spaces across Frisco Bay and beyond. But Bright Mirror feels like a step into new territory for him; though it contains visual trademarks that are unmistakably his, it feels like it hearkens back to a tradition of metaphor and body movement reconnecting him to the psychodramas of Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson and early Stan Brakhage, that dominated the mid-century explosion of avant-garde filmmaking in California. If these sorts of images make a resurgence among up-and-coming experimenters in the coming years, I wonder if we'll be able to trace it back to Bright Mirror and Paul.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a SFIFF program playing today at the Pacific Film Archive at 5:45, and at the Kabuki on April 30th at 9:30.

WHY: While announcing the SFIFF line-up at a press conference earlier this month, Director of Programming Rachel Rosen noted that "16mm is going to outlast 35mm in the festival setting", and for new films this appears to have already been proven true. Barring some kind of unexpected last-minute change, there will be no recently-made films screened on the once-dominant theatrical exhibition format at the 57th edition of the longest-running film festival in North America. (This would make last year's second screening of Kerry Laitala's Conjuor's Box the final new 35mm film to play during the SFIFF'a fifty-six years in the 35mm era). There are several a few 16mm shorts screening in the Shirts 5 program, including Lawrence Jordan's Entr'Acte and Charlotte Pryce's A Study In Natural Magic, as well as Bright Mirror, which screens on its native Super-8 film format, but the rest are either revived titles (Bruce Baillie's Little Girl from 1966; Jim Jennings's Lost And Found from 1988) or digital projections. Just like the rest of the SFIFF program this year. And apart from this shorts program, even the revivals are mostly being presented digitally; All That Jazz, Queen Margot and Manila in the Claws of Neon are all newly-made DCPs for example. The counter-examples come mostly in the live music programs at the Castro Theatre; Eastman House has provided 35mm prints of both Charlie Chaplin's brilliant short The Pawnshop for its Tuesday April 29th screening (along with other works) accompanied by live music from Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, and of Tod Browning's depraved 1927 masterpiece The Unknown, which Stephin Merritt (of Magnetic Fields) will accompany May 6th. The only other 35mm screening we can expect at SFIFF is of Barbet Schoeder's Reversal of Fortune, for which Jeremy Irons received the 1990 Best Actor Academy Award, and which therefore seems to be the obvious choice for his Wednesday, April 30 evening in-person tribute at the Kabuki.

Note that experimental film legend Bruce Baillie is expected to be among the guests at today's PFA screening of Little Girl, but that he won't be at the Kabuki screening of the film. Clipson will be doing double-duty as filmmaker and by helping out on the 16mm and Super-8 projection of the films at the Kabuki, in order to help make the San Francisco screening as technically smooth as it's likely to be at the PFA.

HOW: As noted above, Bright Mirror will screen in Super-8, on a program with 16mm and digital video work.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today's your last day to see the wonderfully strange and funny Serge Bozon film Tip Top at the festival. Definitely a polarizing film that despite nominal distribution seems highly unlikely to appear on a Frisco Bay screen again in the near future. It's also the day of "New Queer Cinema" icon Isaac Julien's on-stage conversation with B. Ruby Rich with a single-channel screening of his installation piece Ten Thousand Waves.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Castro Theatre is counter-programming SFIFF (on the days when it's not being rented by them) with a healthy dose of older films shown on 35mm prints, and tonight's double-bill of Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North and Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin is one of the most cinephile-enticing on their schedule in the coming weeks.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

WHO: Jennifer Lawrence stars in this.

WHAT: I pretty intensely disliked the first Hunger Games movie, feeling that it was the very model of a popular literature adaptation that was made to compliment a reading of the book, and not to stand on its own as an interesting-in-its-own-right cinematic work. But somehow I got the urge to see this sequel nonetheless, and found it far superior in just about every way. I haven't read more than a few snippets of the original novels (just enough to discern that Suzanne Collins is a better world-builder than prose-spinner), but I imagine that if I had, I'd agree pretty much wholeheartedly with Matt Prigge's review.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily (except for Christmas Day) through January 5th on the Tech Museum of San Jose IMAX screen, and on many other "normal" cinema screens around Frisco Bay.

WHY: With 35mm distribution of major studio films down to its last days (there were rumors prints would be completely phased out by the end of 2013 but it hasn't quite happened yet, and I'll believe it when I see it), it seems worth also turning to the state of the 70mm IMAX presentation world. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is a good excuse to talk about the local IMAX scene, as a good portion of it was filmed using IMAX film cameras and is intended, where possible, to be screened in that immersive way. This article explains more. It's rumored that next year's Christopher Nolan film Interstellar may be the final major Hollywood release to be filmed and available for projection on 15-perforation, 70mm film on IMAX screens. 

There are currently three Frisco Bay IMAX screens with the capability to show 15/70 film reels, as opposed to the (in my opinion) falsehood that is called "digital IMAX", and two of those screens have recently made the conversion so that they can screen both forms: the Metreon in San Francisco (where I saw Gravity digitally on its IMAX screen) and the Regal Hacienda in Dublin. I believe both of these venues screened The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in 15/70, at least for a few days. I was told by Metreon employees that either their 70mm print or their projection system itself caused a technical problem that forced them to switch over to the digital IMAX for Catching Fire screenings in the middle of Thanksgiving weekend. Nonetheless, the Metreon is currently showing The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug in 15/70, although it was not filmed using 70mm cameras but digitally, so I'm not sure how important it is for purists to see it that way. The Regal Hacienda is currently showing The Hobbit digitally only.

But the third local IMAX (not just "LieMAX") screen in the area is the Tech Museum of San Jose, which has not yet made the digital conversion to my knowledge, and has been confirmed by Carl Martin, keeper of the Bay Area Film  Calendar, to be showing the 15/70 version of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire as well as its usual selection of nature documentaries through the end of the year. On January 6th the venue expects to close its run and resume to showing documentaries only for a while. Perhaps until Interstellar? If you're not just an IMAX fan but a Star Wars fan there's a double reason to visit the Tech Museum soon, as there's an exhibit devoted to the 1977 film and its offspring up through late February.

HOW: 15/70 IMAX at the Tech Museum, and digitally elsewhere.

12 Years A Slave (2013)

WHO: Steve McQueen directed it, Chiwetel Ejiofor (above) starred in it, John Ridley adapted it from the original memoir, and Sean Bobbitt was cinematographer.

WHAT: I finally saw the film that most people who care to hazard guesses about future Academy Awards results think is likely to win to prizes such as Best Picture. I'm still sorting out my thoughts, but for the most part I was extremely impressed with the film. It's not the simplistic, pandering sainting of a historical figure that we often expect in films released at this time of year. It shows a segment of the kinds of horrors that my ancestors were in some way complicit in perpetrating upon people of African descent until less than a century and a half ago. But I found its greatest strength to be the set of questions it raises about the way different people (both blacks and whites) developed social strategies to survive the slavery system, and the moral, psychological and (for blacks) physical toll these different strategies might take on them.

Some interesting articles on the film that have been informing my post-screening thoughts on the film include Glenn Kenny's spotlight on dialogue present in Ridley's screenplay, Peter Malmud Smith's comparison of the film to Schindler's List that raises interesting points that I don't have the time presently to work on refuting, and Ann Hornaday's controversial article about modern cinematography- and videography- as relates to filming skin tones darker than Max Factor Pancake 101. Among its other problems, the latter article fails to note that 12 Years A Slave was in fact filmed on 35mm stock and not digitally.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at least through Thursday at the 4-Star, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki, AMC 1000 and many other theatres throughout Frisco Bay.

WHY: Yesterday the San Francisco Film Critics Circle announced their awards, and the big winners were 12 Years A Slave and Gravity, which received three and four total awards, respectively. As usual, the most interesting selections were their "special citation", for the UFO-of-a-movie Computer Chess and, their (slightly diluted in impact due to a first-ever split decision) Marlon Riggs Award to Fruitvale Station writer-director Ryan Coogler and to Roxie Theatre E.D. Christopher Statton. This was also the first year the SFFCC decided to announce publicly their "nominees", a decision that for me also diminished ever-so-slightly the group's credibility as a collectively confident film-evaluation unit.  Perhaps a contradiction in terms, but you'll never catch the New York or Los Angeles critics groups releasing a memo-to-the-Academy-style listing of five finalists for each of their awards, I'd wager.

But since the SFFCC has given us the data to play with, I'll do a little. It is sometimes somewhat interesting to notice what was strongly considered, and what wasn't, by a critical consensus. I'm not going to do much second-guessing, because although I've seen all but one of the award-winning films (American Hustle) I haven't seen many of the "nominees" that ended up going home empty-handed, such as yet-to-screen-publicly-in-Frisco-Bay titles like Inside Llewyn Davis and The Wolf of Wall Street. That said, there are only a few categories in which a "nominated" title that I've seen seems to me measurably superior than a winning title that I've also seen. Splitting the Best Picture/Best Director category seems odd to me when coming from a critics' group (I guess they're not all auteurist critics, I might jokingly aside) and maybe odder when the Director winner (Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity) has more mainstream appeal than the Picture winner (12 Years a Slave). And I'd probably go along with Mick LaSalle's public disappointment that Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue is the Warmest Color failed to beat Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine in the Best Actress category, even though I was not that excited by either movie as a whole.

The most passionate armchair critiquing of the SFFCC picks this year I'm going to engage in, which I'd probably bring up even if their nominees had not been made public, is in the cinematography category. I've mentioned before that I think the visual achievement of Gravity is better termed as "visual effects" or perhaps even "animation" than as "cinematography", and having seen Sean Bobbitt's work on 12 Years A Slave makes me feel strongly that there's an award-season "victim" of this miscategorization. Bobbitt's images, captured (like Bruno Delbonnel's for Inside Llewyn Davis) on 35mm film, are stunning. It makes me wonder how many of the critics who helped pick Gravity in this category had seen 12 Years A Slave projected on film rather than digitally.

HOW: 12 Years a Slave screens digitally everywhere except for at the 4-Star, which shows it on 35mm until Thursday, after which it will be replaced by American Hustle.

The Arch (1969)

WHO: Cecile Tang Shu Shuen wrote, directed, and performed in this, her first film.

WHAT: I was hoping to get a chance to view a screener of this film before posting about it today, but a week of Jury Duty has screwed up my plans. Instead, I'll lean on a review by Kamran Ahmed from earlier this year, which I shall now excerpt from:

Cecile Tang Shu Shuen’s The Arch (1969) remains a visual masterpiece, whose formal rhetoric profoundly speaks to the inner dimensions of human existence. A film, in her words, about the “interior feeling of woman,” The Arch uses techniques and special effects, such as zooms and superimpositions/dissolves, to express the ineffable qualities of experiencing life as an isolated and repressed young woman in China during the difficult times of the Cultural Revolution.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Pacific Film Archive at 3:00.

WHY: Today's screening of this rare film, championed by French cinephile Pierre Rissient among other leading international figures, looks to be a highlight of the PFA's final week of 2013 screenings. The rest of the week is filled out with the last three films in the PFA's Rainer Werner Fassbinder series, a 35mm print of Johnny Guitar, and a five programs in my least favorite PFA series of the year, The Resolution Starts Now: 4K Restorations from Sony Pictures; nothing against the films but with the digital presentation. Check my post on one of the films showing Friday the 13th, Dr. Strangelove, for more details on that.

I've seen the PFA's January/February calendar and am pleased to report there are no series like that 4K series on the horizon. Though there are some DCP showings of photochemically-created works on the schedule of the one series available to view now on the venue website, Film 50: History of Cinema, they're balanced by rare 35mm showings of things like Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow and Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life. Otherwise, most of the upcoming films showing at the PFA will be shown using the medium of their creation: digital in the case of the African Film Festival, 35mm in the case of most of the selections in a focus on Golden-Age Hollywood comedy (from the Marx Brothers to Hepburn/Tracy to Billy Wilder), most of the screenings in the first installment of the PFA's year long Jean-Luc Godard series beginning January 31st with Breathless and Le Petit Soldat, and I believe all of the films in the first segment of an extended Satyajit Ray retrospective. I have a feeling Ray's cinematographer Subrata Mitra, who also filmed The Arch, would approve were he alive today.

HOW: 35mm print from the PFA's own collection.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

WHO: Preston Sturges wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Can an artist who has only known privilege make art that speaks to the experiences of people without privilege? This is the question at the heart of Sullivan's Travels, a laugh-out-loud comedy made in the early 1940s, when the Great Depression had officially ended but poverty continued. A pompous but good-hearted movie director, tired of making studio fluff, determines to experience the "real" America by going out on the road, and ends up farther from his Hollywood mansion than he'd ever expected. Filled with the romance, adventure, witty dialogue, and wonderful character actors that typify classic-era movie-making at its best, this film is frequently cited as one of the best comedies ever. Has the Hollywood myth machine ever been subject to more hilariously honest satire?

WHERE/WHEN: Only at the Stanford Theatre tonight through Sunday at 7:30, with additional matinee screenings tomorrow and Sunday at 4:10.

WHY: It's a pretty weak weekend for 35mm film screenings in Frisco Bay, believe it or not. The Castro is given over to the all-digital Good Vibrations Erotic Short Film Competition tonight and digitally-projected Sing-A-Long Sound Of Music the rest of the weekend. The Pacific Film Archive is screening its own 35mm print of the Hong Kong New Wave landmark The Arch Sunday and an imported print of Fassbinder's Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? tonight, but the latter is surely the same moderately scratched, extremely color-faded print I saw at Yerba Buena Center For The Arts last month. Otherwise it's showing Fassbinder's Despair on Blu-Ray and turning over the rest of the weekend to 2K & 4K digital presentations of classic films known for their great photochemical-era cinematography. At least Sony archivist Grover Crisp will be on hand to defend DCP as a format for the Saturday showings of Louis Malle's Alamo Bay and Scorsese's Taxi Driver. I hope he's asked some pointed questions.

But there are bright spots for 35mm-goers besides The Arch: YBCA is showing Querelle on 35mm Sunday (quality of print unknown), the 4-Star is giving the brand-new, shot-on-film 12 Years a Slave what I believe to be it's first local 35mm showings, and there's always the Stanford, which is wonderfully old-fashioned enough not to have the capability of screening anything digitally. Nor does it have the capability of selling advance tickets online or by phone, so if you want to ensure a seat at its annual, always-sold-out Christmas Eve screening of It's A Wonderful Life, you'll have to make your way to the theatre box office sometime shortly after tickets go on sale tomorrow. While you're there, why not catch a great film or two? Preston Sturges's closest-to-canonized classic Sullivan's Travels screening with my personal favorite Marx Brothers picture Horse Feathers? You can't go wrong.

HOW: Both films on the double-bill screen in 35mm as always at this venue.

The Shining (1980)

WHO: Stanley Kubrick.

WHAT: You don't have to be a Kubrick fan, a horror movie fan, a Jack Nicholson fan, or a Stephen King fan to love and/or be obsessed by The Shining. It incorporates all of those broad categories of fandom but transcends them as well. So much has been said about this film, but I'm sure there's more to say. I'll have to leave that for another day however, and simply link to this amazing site for The Shining devotees.

WHERE/WHEN: 9PM tonight only at the Balboa Theatre, presented as part of Another Hole In The Head.

WHY: Unless you're a big Jaws fan this is clearly the greatest film playing this year's Another Hole In The Head film festival (I'm prejudging a lot of unseen horror films by saying this, but we're talking about what I consider to be an all-time masterpiece here). It's also the last "HoleHead" screening at the Balboa before the festival moves to New People in Japantown (where a digital "backwards and forwards" screening inspired by the movie Room 237 will occur next Thursday night.)

Not only that, it's screening in 35mm, an occurrence I'd expected to disappear now that a digital version of the film has been the go-to theatrical distribution method for Warner Brothers. The Castro and Roxie have both been forced to show The Shining digitally in recent years, and a "last-ever" 35mm screening happened over a year and a half ago (with the last Frisco Bay screening further back in history than that; my last viewing was almost precisely four years ago). I have no idea where and how the SF IndieFest folks who run HoleHead got this print and the permission to show it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's not another long while before there's another chance to see it unspool this way. If ever.

HOW: Billed as a "perfect" 35mm print.

Discopath (2013)

WHO: Renaud Gauthier wrote and collaborated with Marie-Claire Lalonde to direct and co-produce this, the first feature film for either of them.

WHAT: I have not seen it, so let's let an excerpt from Fangoria do the talking:

Everything about Discopath, in fact, feels appropriate to the period that’s its setting and its inspiration—the movie even looks just right, John Londono’s cinematography capturing the hues and image density of pictures from those decades past. Clearly a fan of the era, Gauthier doesn’t filter his affection through ironic detachment or condescend to the material; he’s simply created a film—making the most of his low budget, and bringing it in at a tight 80 minutes—that could easily have played on 42nd Street alongside the latest indie stalker flicks and Italian imports.

WHERE/WHEN: 9PM tonight only at the Balboa Theatre, presented as part of the Another Hole in the Head Film Festival.

WHY: I don't think of myself as a particular fan of horror movies, but I've checked my records and confirmed that I've always attended at least one, and sometimes up to as many as four or five of the programs in Frisco Bay's biggest annual festival of (mostly) new (mostly) horror films over the past ten years of its existence. This is not nearly as much as someone like Jason Wiener, who is a true loyalist to all of SF IndieFest's annual events, but for me it's unusual. As much as I like to keep tabs on Frisco Bay festivals, there are only a few that I make sure to attend year after year, and only one with more longevity (Noir City, soon to be in its 12th year in San Francisco) that I've been with since its inception. Affectionately nicknamed simply HoleHead, the Another Hole In The Head Film Festival (as in, "this town needs another film festival like it needs...") appeals to me because it shows things no other festival in town would even consider booking, like Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl, Andrew Lau's Haunted Changi, or Jason J. Tomaric's Cl.One. These and the other HoleHead films I've seen over the years are not exactly profound works of deep meaning, and some of them are certainly better than others, but they all are very confident of what they want to be, with little or no regard for conforming to the rest of the cinematic landscape.

This year I'm intrigued by several of the HoleHead selections, including Discopath, which screens tonight, and The Dirties, a favorite of my blog buddy Michael Guillén, who has called it a "tremendously entertaining low-budget feature that implicates the culpability of its audiences by way of an unidentified camera operator". Wednesday night and Thursday night are extremely special however; HoleHead has always included a retrospective component (the first show I attended my first year at the festival was a revival of Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer and last year an in-person appearance from director Richard Elfman at a digitally-colorized version of Forbidden Zone was a highlight), and this year it's a doozy: 35mm screenings of two classic horror films that I had thought had simply become unavailable to see on film any longer now that their rightsholders are committed to the DCP projection format: Jaws and The Shining. I've never seen the former on the big screen and had pretty much given up on the possibility of ever doing so on film. I have seen the latter in a good 35mm print and a good audience before, and it's one of the highlights of my life as a Kubrick admirer. Don't miss these screenings if you want to see these films the way their makers truly intended them to be seen!

HOW: Discopath screens digitally.

differently, Molussia (2012)

WHO: Forty-year old French filmmaker Nicolas Rey made this. He is not to be confused with the long-deceased director of They Live By Night and Rebel Without A Cause, Nick Ray.

WHAT: I haven't seen differently, Molussia yet, and in all likelihood neither has anyone else- at least not the precise version that's being screened tonight. There are actually 362, 880 possible versions of this film, an adaptation of a 1931 unpublished novel by Günther Anders, that has never been translated into a language that Rey understands. As Michael Sicinski writes in his Cinemascope piece on it:

The 80-minute feature is comprised of nine individual reels of varying lengths, and Nicolas Rey has designed the film so that their order of presentation should be randomly assigned. (Each reel is designated by a differently coloured title card: a pink reel, a green reel, a canary reel, etc.) That is, Rey has built the film from modules, each thematically linked to the others while retaining semi-autonomy with respect to order, narrative, and spatial orientation. They must all appear once, but can appear in any sequence.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:30 tonight only at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

WHY: Following Tuesday's Black Hole Cinematheque screening, tonight is another showcase by a filmmaker heavily involved in the artist-run film lab movement. Rey will be on hand tonight and has fascinating, informed perspectives on the state of the film medium in an age of digital convenience. I'll excerpt a pair of remarks from an interview conducted by Darren Hughes:

It’s very important to me to prove that you can still make films on film. There’s something very important about this. What’s at stake is organizing the possibility to continue producing on that medium. And showing films on that medium for people to curate. I’m surprised there’s not more questioning about that. Everyone has thrown up their hands and said, “It’s over. It’s over.”

And:

But even on the curating side it’s getting difficult. I’m amazed that cinematheques are willing to show films on digital formats, presented as “preservation.” They’ve abandoned showing the work in its original format. There was a big conference at the French Cinematheque and I didn’t hear them say, “We’ll show the films on film as long as we can. We’ll fight for that.” Not at all. Only the film museum in Vienna has made a strong stand on the matter.

I think anyone invested in the idea of watching films on film should be interested in hearing what Rey has to say to a San Francisco audience. I'll definitely be there tonight (although I rue the fact that I have to miss an opportunity to see an imported 35mm print of Stanley Kwan's Center Stage at the Pacific Film Archive to make it).

HOW: 16mm projection of what will almost certainly be a unique permutation of the film.

The Dear Colour, the Dread Colour (2005)

WHO: Dianna Barrie made this.

WHAT: I haven't seen this, but here's the filmmaker's description:

Tree ferns filmed and then re-filmed on black and white film are inter-cut to produce a collage of green tinted positive images and green toned negative images. As the ferns’ leaves are pale in dark surroundings, the tinted positive yields green leaves in a black background, and the toned negative green leaves in a white background. Excerpts from Schubert’s Schoene Muellerin lament and laud the colour green by turns.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight on a program screening at Black Hole Cinematheque at 8:30.

WHY: As I've spent this year documenting in my own way, the decline of film as an exhibition technology is real and, with sanction from a unified industry, seemingly unstoppable. But the film medium will outlive us all in one way or another; we've had a hundred and twenty years to determine how hardy it can be when properly (if sometimes accidentally) stored. How many new photochemical films will continue to be made is less certain with labs and producers of stock shutting down left and right, but the worst case scenario may be that certain artists with knowledge of the physical processes used to create and develop motion picture stocks will find ways to do it by themselves or in collectives.

One such collective is Melbourne, Australia's Artist Film Workshop, of which Barrie and Richard Tuohy have been two driving forces. Both filmmakers are touring the United States, showing their films and sharing their knowledge of hand-made filmmaking and processing with audiences in Colorado, Oregon, etc. Tonight it's Northern California's turn, and the venue is a former church-turned-cinematheque in Oakland which I've been remiss in not mentioning on this blog before today. I've been hesitant in part because I was only aware of its screenings through its Facebook presence, but have recently learned the venue has been running a blog with event details all of this time. Do take the time to see what kinds of events they've been running over the past two years, and you'll get a sense of what kind of a Black Hole you'll be pulled into if you decide to venture to this increasingly important Frisco Bay screening spot.

HOW: 16mm program

The Counselor (2013)

WHO: Cormac McCarthy wrote this screenplay; it is the first film produced from a script by the eighty-year-old author (a number of his novels have been turned into films by other writers and directors, including No Country For Old Men and The Road.)

WHAT: Seemingly every critical position on this nihilistic, comic thriller has been staked out by now: it's been eviscerated as "the worst movie ever made" and hailed as a "masterpiece" and called just about  everything in between.  Even the reviews have spun into their own sub-cycle; negative ones criticized as giving too much heat to "just a bad movie" and positive ones parodied. Find more takes at Keyframe Daily if you'd like to survey the battlefield.

I'm sure I'm not claiming any new position in the trench by saying I'm glad I saw it once, was never bored, but also never enthralled with it as cinema, would probably never see it again, and find it a pretty ideal project for a generally bland director like Ridley Scott, whose Alien and Blade Runner have given me a good deal of pleasure over the years (the latter notably diminishingly so) but who seems curiously over-praised as an auteur as most of his films live and to serve their screenplays and not the personality of their director.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 9:15 nightly through Wednesday, and 4:00 Sunday, November 30th at the Roxie, and multiple showtimes daily through Wednesday at the Metreon.

WHY: As opportunities to see 35mm prints of almost anything become scarce, fans of watching the flicker of projected film rather than the constancy of video should keep their eyes on the Film On Film Foundation's Bay Area Film Calendar to see when a movie that has been showing in theatres digitally-only for a while suddenly turn up on a film print. Last week the Roxie started putting a few showings of The Counselor on its weekly schedule, and this week the Opera Plaza is showing All Is Lost on 35mm. That both of these films were shot digitally might make certain format purists prefer to see them screened digitally, but I know I'm not the only 35mm fan who likes to support 35mm screenings wherever they may occur. Who knows how much longer we'll be seeing them in any commercial venues? Some have predicted that they'll be gone by the end of the year as studios strive to complete total transition from a projection medium they see as outdated to one they feel they can exert more direct control over (at least until that day when some intrepid hacker decrypts the DCP code, at any rate). I'm not so sure it'll come about quite that quickly, but I want to enjoy the film-on-film experience while it lasts, however long that may be.

HOW: 35mm print at the Roxie; DCP at the Metreon.

Contempt (1963)

WHO: Jean-Luc Godard wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Godard's biggest-budgeted film, and his only one featuring superstar Brigitte Bardot. Godard fans almost always count it among his greatest films, and even Godard non-fans tend to like it better than the rest of his filmography, too. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard recorded some great comments about shooting the film for the Criterion Collection.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at 4:45, 7:00 and 9:15 at the Castro.

WHY: I don't get quite the same excitement from getting an advance peek at the Castro calendar as I used to. As more and more of their bookings seem to be of digital presentations rather than 35mm prints, the anticipation is delayed until the the back page of the theatre's calendar is put to press, as that's what reveals the formats of each show. I can predict that among December's bookings Dial 'M' For Murder will be a digital 3D presentation and not a dual-system 35mm showing, and that Jesse Ficks's MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS presentations of Home For the Holidays, Love Actually, Valley Girl and Raising Arizona will probably be film-on-film. But anything else is merely guessing, so I'm not sure yet if I should cancel all my plans to catch Phantom of the Paradise in a uber-rare 35mm print December 14th, or if I'll be easily able to nonchalantly pass by another digital presentation that evening.

But with a film like Contempt I'm torn. It's been years since I've had a chance to see it on 35mm, and have been wanting to revisit it ever since finally seeing one of the films it most famously references, Some Came Running, earlier this year. But Contempt is not all that much easier to see via any of my other habitual methods right now. The Criterion DVD is out of print and all San Francisco Public Library copies have departed from the shelves. Not even every surviving local video rental store still has a copy, last I checked. So today's showing holds some appeal, if not quite as much as this Friday's 35mm screening of Vivre Sa Vie at the Pacific Film Archive, or next Wednesday's Band of Outsiders at the Castro.

HOW: DCP

Tabu (2012)

WHO: Miguel Gomes directed this.

WHAT: I have not yet seen this Portuguese-made film which takes its title and, apparently, much more, from F.W. Murnau's 1931 South Seas swan song, but I'm very excited to. Perle Petit has written a piece comparing the two films.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 6:00.

WHY: Increasingly, film festivals are not a place to see 35mm prints, especially of new films, even those that cry out to be seen that way. Of the eight current and upcoming local film festivals on my sidebar, I believe only one is planning to screen anything on film: the Another Hole In the Head genre festival which plans to show 35mm prints of Jaws and The Shining in December at the Balboa, which recently installed new digital projection systems but has been lucky enough to be able to retain 35mm projection capability. The San Francisco Film Society's Fall Season included 35mm prints in one of its festival showcases: the retrospective-minded Zurich/SF weekend. And the highest-profile local Fall festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, showed only two 35mm prints this year, one of them for a thirteen-year-old title (Lumumba), and the other for a remake of a 60-year-olf film (Tokyo Family). This is down from the dozen or so titles at the 2012 festival, a dozen that did not included its showings of Tabu despite it having been shot on film and appealing greatly to a good portion of those last cinephiles who still make an effort to support film-on-film screenings.

The upshot of all this is that tonight's PFA screening is not only the first theatrical showing of Tabu in Berkeley, and the first in the Bay Area in over a year when it played MVFF, but the first-ever local showing of the film in 35mm (not to mention the only 35mm screening as part of the PFA's New Portuguese Cinema series). I know it's available on DVD now, but I'm planning to head to Berkeley to see it tonight the way I'm sure it was meant to be shown.

HOW: As noted above, 35mm