Hell On Casco Bay

Five years since I updated this blog in any way (that festival blogroll to the right freezes the COVID-19 cancellations in amber) and getting close to six since I've actually published a post here... today just feels like the right moment for an abbreviated explanation. 

My wife Kerry Laitala and I moved to her home state of Maine in 2021. We miss the Bay Area's cultural scene, and I still keep an eye on it from 3000 miles away. Starting in November 2023 I've been an occasional contributor to the excellent Screen Slate website and newsletter. I'm no longer on Twitter, but I've also been active on Letterboxd since 2022.

And of course we still visit our friends and family in San Francisco once or twice a year, and in fact are in town right now. Come see me present tomorrow (Saturday) night at Craig Baldwin's Other Cinema program on 992 Valencia Street if you want to say hi, or if you want to learn about an obscure classical music record label based in Greenville, Maine that put experimental, electronic, and other niche recordings on vinyl from 1966-1991. There is a moving-image component to the presentation as well, including several short videos Kerry made to help illustrate the black-light-sensitive album covers this unique label produced for many of its releases.

SFFILM 61 Day 6: Chew-Chew Baby

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began last week and runs through April 17th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

Screen capture of Chew-Chew Baby from Universal DVD

Chew-Chew Baby (USA: James "Shamus" Culhane, 1945)
playing: 8:00 tonight at the Castro Theatre as part of A Celebration of Oddball Films With Marc Capelle's Red Room Orchestra

Chew-Chew Baby is the thirteenth of twenty-five theatrical cartoons starring Woody Woodpecker (after his debut in the Andy Panda 'toon Knock Knock) produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures before Lantz had a falling out with Universal and first took his cartoons to United Artists, then stopped production for most of 1949 and 1950 (he returned to Universal in time to release a Woody cartoon in January 1951). It's the fourth Woody cartoon directed by former Disney & Chuck Jones animator James "Shamus" Culhane, who Leonard Maltin called "the best thing that happened to Woody, and to Lantz, in the early 1940s". The frenetic musical finale of Culhane's first Woody Woodpecker cartoon The Barber of Seville famously used a style of "fast cutting" inspired by Soviet montage. Similarly, Chew-Chew Baby uses an almost subliminal upside-down frame that seems borrowed from the avant-garde to make a gag have extra impact late in the cartoon.

You won't see Chew-Chew Baby on any list of SFFILM festival selections on their website or in the paper program guides sprinkled around town. The list of 16mm prints from the late, great Stephen Parr's Oddball Films collection screening tonight at the Castro hasn't officially been made public. I learned that Chew-Chew Baby is planned to be among them by listening to DJ Marilynn's March 26, 2018 episode of KPOO-FM's "Let Me Touch Your Mind" (archived here) in which bandleader Marc Capelle talks about some of the films his Red Room Orchestra has prepared musical accompaniments for, also including what I think are probably the 1989 Neutrogena infomercial Choosing a Sunscreen described here, and Denys Colomb de Daunant's surreal A Dream of Wild Horses, a frequent Oddball Films screening selection.

Chew-Chew Baby was screened at Oddball in a 2016 drag cinema survey curated by Kat Shuchter, and a few years prior at one of Parr's own Strange Sinema shows. Though I didn't catch these particular screenings, Oddball was one of the few Frisco Bay screening venues that regularly showed animated film prints, usually in excellent condition. Parr often talked of how much of his archive came from the deaccessioned collections of Bible Belt university libraries, where the sports films were run ragged and the art films totally pristine. Perhaps vintage cartoons fell closer to the latter category. I can't count the number of great ones I had the pleasure of viewing in his twice-weekly screening showcases before they ended in December 2016 (he hosted a few more shows in his labyrinthine Mission District loft in 2017, before he died in October.) Soon after Parr's passing, I compiled a twitter thread of fifty of my favorite films seen at his space, 48 of them for the first time. A good third of the list was animation (most of the rest of it falling into "documentary" or "experimental" categories) and it includes Pantry Panic, the third Woody Woodpecker star vehicle made by Lantz (prior to Culhane's arrival) and by my reckoning the only one from the 1940s I've ever seen projected in a cinema space- until tonight, that is.

Beyond sussing out a few of the Oddball Films collection prints screening, I'm not precisely sure what's going to happen at the Castro tonight. Crucially, I'm not sure if the prints being shown that already have music and dialogue (including Chew-Chew Baby) will screen with the Red Room Orchestra's musicians and spoken word artists' sonic contributions integrated into the original soundtracks, or presented instead of them. Either approach may have its own aesthetic appeal, but both approaches treat the Oddball collection less as in its role as a repository for curated screenings, in which films were usually shown as their creators (whether these were celebrated auteurs or uncredited artisans working on behalf of faceless creators) intended, and more in the spirit of its existence as a stock footage archive, supplying hard-to-find images (more often than sound) for documentaries and features, including SFFILM 2018 selections Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, RBG and closing night feature Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot. Using existing art to create new art.

Purists may cry foul, but before they do I'd just like to talk about an amazing event at the Luggage Store Gallery on Market Street, where Stephen Parr and Other Cinema's Craig Baldwin faced off in a kind of "dueling archivists" presentation of their 16mm material, screening films in part or in full as they pleased, creating connections across their "sets" of each about an hour that helped unlock certain thoughts about media filmed in and about my hometown that had never occurred to me before, and that in many cases probably wouldn't had each film played out as intended by its makers. Parr showed certain favorites like A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire, Blackie the Wonder Horse Swims the Golden Gate, Jerry Abrams' Be-In and the untitled home-movie footage known lately as San Francisco Excelsior: Low Rider Car Show in complete prints, but let an excerpt from Let's See: Lopsideland bleed into a section of San Francisco: Queen of the West which bled into some of USA Poetry: Allen Ginsberg & Lawrence Ferlinghetti (this last of which, incidentally, will screen for free in its entirety at the SFPL Main Library as part of a Poetry Month event I've helped organize on April 28th), a kind of editing-as-performance that would probably have infuriated a prior version of myself as much as soundtrack tinkering would have, but that I responded to deeply. This event happened to occur on the day Andrew Sarris died, as if to hammer home the point that filmmaker intentions are not the be-all, end-all of film appreciation and understanding. Like Baldwin (who projected an equally impressive "set"), Parr was an example of archivist as auteur.

So I'm opening my mind to have an experience guided less by filmmakers such as Culhane and Daunant and more by Parr's collector instincts and by the musicians who have been assembled. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to speak with one of them, experimental percussion master William Winant, about the musical portion of the presentation. I've seen Winant peform in various diverse capacities over the years, such as with my then-favorite band Oingo Boingo at the Warfield in the early 1990s, and with his own ensemble at the annual Chapel of the Chimes Garden of Memory solstice event in Oakland. And he was part of one of my favorite San Francisco International Film Festival live music/film events in recent years, the 2013 presentation of Paul Leni's Waxworks accompanied by Winant, Mike Patton, Matthias Bossi and Scott Amendola, which is why I wanted his perspective on tonight's event. He told me that event (which is documented on youtube, though I'm not certain the sound & image line up precisely, thanks to the difference in film & video frame rates) was "99.9% improvised" outside the cover of Jacques Brel's "La Mort" that ended the show. Winant said that tonight's show will be "completely different", as "everything is in song form. The lot of the stuff is through-composed. People will be reading charts, or people will be reading lead sheets, and basically, they're song forms, or jazz forms where the musicians play over lead sheets." He named Capelle, Dina Macabbee, Devin Hoff and Ben Goldberg as among the Red Room Orchestra members who have composed and arranged a song or multiple songs to be performed alongside each of the Oddball film prints.

Finally, though this is a particularly overstuffed piece, it seems like a good place for me to publish a letter I composed this past January, when the Roxie hosted a memorial for Parr that I was unable to attend. The memorial is available to view online, as is a wonderful video tribute to Parr called 275 Capp Street made by one of his collaborators, Adam Dziesinski. Here's the (slightly edited) text of my letter:

Sadly, the plane flight Kerry Laitala and I had to come back from our New England holiday trip just got cancelled due to a snowstorm, and were unable to book another flight until Monday, so we’ll be missing this event we’d both looked forward to so very much as a way to commune with friends and strangers who’d been so deeply impacted by Stephen as we had.  

Kerry, a filmmaker, had been honored to collaborated with Parr on at least a half-dozen showings of her own work, and of work they’d collaboratively curated from their own archives. Few San Francisco curators have been as loyally supportive of Kerry’s work over the years as Steven, and enthusiasm like his means a lot to a mid-career filmmaker trying to sustain an exhibition portfolio. 

I, a voracious cinephile, feel embarrassed I never attended Oddball until I moved directly across the street from it from 2010-2014, but during that time (and to a slightly lesser extent since) I went many dozens of times and felt so welcomed by Stephen and his staff. I’m glad I got to know him not just as a film lover but as a neighbor who at any minute could come over and borrow an unusual piece of AV equipment like it was a cup of sugar (I lived with musicians & these occasional lendings went both ways across Capp Street).

When Kerry and I met at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2011 the fact that we quickly realized we had a few mutual friends was key to the encounter turning from a random flirtation to something deeper. Stephen was one of these few, and we so wish he were still around, not simply for the selfish reason that we’d want to let him know we’ve finally decided to get married this year, but because we know he had so much more to share with the world.

SFFILM61 Day 6
Other festival options: Today is the second of three screenings of Hong Sangsoo's unassuming little delight Claire's Camera, and the final screening not currently at RUSH status. Tonight also marks the sole SFFILM showing of Olivier Assayas's Cold Water, a 1994 film recently made available via DCP by Janus; I wouldn't expect another chance to see it in 35mm (the last in these parts was 2007) coming around soon, or maybe ever, so you'll have to shelve your anti-DCP biases if you want to see this in a cinema.

Non-SFFILM option: Speaking of animation, Oakland's all-digital New Parkway Theater is in the midst of an Animation Week and today's offerings include Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis, which I can definitely recommend. Today they also screen Cowboy Bebop: the Movie, which I haven't seen, and (inexplicably) the particularly terrible dubbed version of Hayao Miyazaki's glorious Princess Mononoke. Wait to see that one subtitled.

Beggars of Life (1928)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

WHO: Louise Brooks features as one of the three lead performers in this film, her first major dramatic role according to the Louise Brooks: Looking For Lulu documentary found on the Criterion edition of Pandora's Box, and which features short clips from Beggars of Life including the one I took a screen capture from for the above image (which doesn't do anywhere near justice to how this film looks on 35mm). I wrote a long-ish essay on Brooks the last time the San Francisco Silent Film Festival opened with one of her films, Prix de Beauté, and don't have much of an update of thoughts about her after less than three years. But read on:

WHAT: Brooks fans who fall in love with her European phase are sometimes disappointed that she plays a less traditionally glamorous role in this film, but in all honesty it's a terrific, if superficially atypical, performance for her. Reportedly she enjoyed making this film more than any other. But it's also a great showcase for Richard Arlen, made after Wings but before Thunderbolt, the Four Feathers and Tiger Shark (to name a few of my other favorite Arlen films), and was in fact sold as a Wallace Beery picture upon its initial release.


On some days, I think Beggars of Life is my very favorite film in which Louise Brooks appeared (noting that I have yet to see a few important ones, including her screen debut The Street of Forgotten Men). It's a constantly surprising train thriller with great performances all around-- only one character's arc (Blue Washington as Black Mose- a very interesting character undermined in his last reel) is a disappointment. And the filmmaking is frequently astonishing- some of director William Wellman's best work, deploying multi-exposed frames as a storytelling engine with a boldness unparalleled in narrative cinema until the the 1960s, unless I'm forgetting something.

If you want to read more about Beggars of Life you can't go wrong with Laura Horak's essay originally published in the 2007 SFSFF program guide. (Much more on that in a bit.) This was the last public screening of the film in a Frisco Bay cinema, according to Thomas Gladysz of the Louise Brooks Society, who has posted a comprehensive list of all local theatres that ever advertised screenings of the film, going back to 1928. He's also prepared a collection of international screening ephemera, and I might as well also link to his review of the 2007 Castro showing.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre, opening the 21st San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

WHY: Writing this post inspired me to pull out one of the program guides I saved from the 2007 SFSFF, in which Beggars of Life also screened. It put me in a wistful mood, so let me recount my full history with the festival, something I've never done on this blog before. 

I first learned about SFSFF in 1999, while attending a Truffaut double-feature at the Castro and seeing flyers out for the 4th annual program, which was to screen Wellman's Oscar-winning Wings among other films (I hadn't heard of the others before at that time: Love, By the Law and a set of short animations). I was intrigued but already had river rafting plans that weekend, so filed the event away for future investigation. I missed the 2000 festival because I was living abroad, but upon my return I made sampling the 2001 SFSFF a priority. Out of the four programs that July Sunday I selected the Italian Maciste all'inferno to attend, and was simply blown away, not by the film itself, which was rather mediocre, but with the enthusiasm of the costumed crowd around me, and the presentation itself, which included a surprise Koko the Clown short beforehand, an enlightening introduction, and of course a tremendous musical accompaniment, in this case by pianist Michael Mortilla. I regretted not having planned to attend the whole day of screenings, though in the meantime I've since caught up with the other three features shown that day. (Peter Pan and It in cinemas, and thus far Within Our Gates only on Turner Classic Movies; I'm excited to finally have another chance to see it at the Castro this Saturday!)

In 2002 & 2003 I caught half the programs, attending a full day of showings each year (the festival had just doubled in size) but having to work the other weekend day. These were my first experiences seeing Cecil B. DeMille, Harold Lloyd, and King Vidor films on the big screen, and I knew I was hooked. In 2003 I was able to volunteer for the festival as an usher, making the financial sting a little easier on my struggling wallet. In 2005 I volunteered in the festival office a couple days, got to meet the friendly folks who put on the event, and signaled my interest in joining the volunteer research committee, which prepared the information-packed festival essays and slideshows for each program. In early 2007 (after covering the festival as press on this blog in 2006) I was invited to join that group, which was and still is one of the biggest honors of my movie-loving life.

It was quite an experience for a humble blogger with lots of passion for silent film but only a short history watching it and no formal training or expertise, to sit down at a table with the other members of the group, which included SFSFF board member (now president and film restorer) Rob Byrne, TCM writer and editor extraordinaire Margarita Landazuri, the brilliant David Kiehn of the Niles Film Museum, and rising star scholar Laura Horak (who will present the Girls Will Be Boys program at the festival on Sunday, in conjunction with her newly-published book of that title about gender-fluidity in silent cinema). At that time there were still few enough programs, determined far enough in advance, for a group of nine of us (the amazing Shari Kizarian contributed to and edited the program book and slideshows from her home abroad) to discuss our research and writing ideas around a table of snacks in the festival office for months before the program needed to be printed. I learned so much, not only about silent film, but about writing and being edited, from being allowed in that group. No other single experience as a writer has marked my cinephilia in such a profound way.

I ultimately wrote seven 1200-word essays for the festival between 2007 and 2011, about films (sort-of) spanning five continents: Miss Lulu Bett (North America), Jujiro (Asia), Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans (set in an undetermined location, filmed in North America but based on a European story), The Gaucho (Hollywood-ized version of South America), West of Zanzibar (Hollywood-ized version of Africa), Man With a Movie Camera (Europe) and I Was Born, But... (again Asia). By the last couple years, however, the festival had expanded to four days and it became impossible to fit all the program book writers around a table in the festival office, or to lock in all the programs with enough advance notice for amateurs in the group (mostly I mean yours truly) to work at the pace we'd been accustomed to. The program book is more than an oversized pamphlet now, but a glossy publication, and the essays have stepped up a notch or three to match; now they're written by some of the leading silent film scholars, critics and journalists around (including some of the same folks who I was so honored to share a table with nine years ago-- I can't wait to read what David Kiehn has to say about the Wallace Beery submarine thriller Behind the Door when I pick up my program tonight!)

But thumbing through that old "oversized pamphlet" provides a stark reminder of some of the many changes to San Francisco over the past nine years, through the ads alone. In 2009 the booklet started placing them in the back, but in 2007 they were interspersed throughout the 48 pages. The inside front cover has an ad for KDFC, which still exists but has moved down the dial to the 90.3 frequency that my old favorite community radio station KUSF occupied until 2011. Film Arts Foundation, advertised on the same page as Kizirian's wonderful Hal Roach essay, completely dissolved into the San Francisco Film Society in 2008 and nothing really has emerged to fill some of its most important shoes (support for experimental work, providing access to equipment, etc.) An ad for the region's best source for rare movies on VHS and DVD, Le Video, sits between Landazuri's essay on Camille and Horak's on Beggars of Life; it shuttered late last year and although Alamo Drafthouse announced plans to integrate its collection into that of Lost Weekend Video, which as of this past April now occupies part of the New Mission lobby, I've yet to hear any indication that this will actually happen anytime soon. Turn the program guide page and there's an ad for Booksmith, which changed ownership in 2007 and jettisoned its once-incredible silent film book section; now SFSFF partners with Books, Inc. for its amazing line-up of Castro mezzanine book signings. Perhaps the hardest of them all is the loss of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which is advertised underneath Richard Hildreth's barnstorming essay on DeMille's The Godless Girl; this weekly paper had by far the best film, arts and politics coverage of any local print newspaper, and it pressed its last issue in 2014.

As sad as it is to contemplate all of these losses over the past near-decade (and as sad as losing a vital institution is, it cannot compare to the human toll change has taken on San Franciscans; it was such an irony that the SF Chronicle published an article praising Wellman's quasi-remake of Beggars of Life on the same day another of its cruel campaigns against homeless people succeeded) makes it all the more heartening that an institution like the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has thrived and grown in these years. Now in the business not only of presenting films in the best possible way, it also undertakes restorations of important classics and forgotten gems, like this year's record FIVE re-premieres: Mothers of Men, Behind the Door, The Italian Straw Hat, What's the World Coming To and Les Deux Timides. That all five of these are finished on 35mm ought to gladden celluloid purists who might take note that although there's a slightly higher proportion of digital presentations in this year's festival than ever before, SFSFF will still screen just as many all-35mm programs as it did back in 2007 when there were ten programs not counting "Amazing Tales From the Archives" (which still exists as a major part of the festival, and is still free, although donations are becoming more emphasized). 

 

And although the festival is noted for annually showcasing many of the world's most-anticipated silent film restorations, it's very nice to know that the 35mm print of Beggars of Life set to screen tonight is the same one, I'm told by festival director Anita Monga, that showed on Saturday night of the 2007 festival, the first and last time I and maybe a thousand or more people ever saw it on a big screen. The musical accompaniment, which I recall was wonderful last time, will be the same as well. In a world in which the new so frequently threatens to pave over the old, there's something very comforting about that kind of consistency.

HOW: 35mm print from George Eastman House, with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Just like in 2007, as noted above.

Nostalghia (1983)

WHO: Andrei Tarkovsky directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: Arguably the most rarely-screened of Tarkovsky's seven feature films, at least in the Bay Area. The last local 35mm screening I'm aware of was in 2004 at the Pacific Film Archive. Only The Sacrifice hasn't been seen on any local screen for longer, but at least that one had played at the Castro in 2003 and the Red Vic in 2001. I guess this is splitting hairs.

As I wrote a couple months ago, I consider Tarkovsky's films made for cinema to the degree that I'm reluctant to watch them at home. I'd rather patiently wait for a big-screen opportunity to see them. This means that, because I missed that PFA screening, I've been waiting more than nine years to see this, my last Tarkovsky film aside from a few of his early shorts.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight and Saturday, October 5 at 7:30, and Sunday, October 6 at 2PM, at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

WHY: The upcoming YBCA calender, now updated through December, includes more frequent 35mm screenings than the rest of 2013 has brought to the venue. After these three Nostalghia screenings, October 17th launches a series of ten Rainer Werner Fassbinder films (different titles from the seven screening at the Roxie starting tomorrow), and November 7th starts a fully-35mm series of eight classic art and exploitation films that have been saddled with an X rating at some point in history.

HOW: New 35mm.

Drug War (2012)

WHO: Johnnie To directed and co-produced this.

WHAT: In his essay in the 2007 book Hong Kong Film: Hollywood and the New Global Cinema, Peter Rist proposes that Johnnie To is "the most prominent Hong Kong film director/producer not to have tried his luck in Hollywood". If prominence is measured in critical acclaim and festival acceptance in Euope and North America, it's hard to think of another candidate for this title. (If there are other measurements, then Stephen Chow, Ann Hui, and other possibilities might be considered.) Though Rist's piece suggests the director could fit right into the Hollywood filmmaking system, in six years after publication, To has still resisted such a call. Instead, he's been making advances into mainland China and its rapidly growing theatrical market, Drug War is, like Romancing In Thin Air,  a Hong Kong/China co-production, and was filmed in China, in this case in the cities of Jinhai and Erzhou.

David Bordwell has published a detailed analysis of Drug War with special attention given to several of its most memorable scenes, but I'm equally thankful for his publication of Grady Hendrix;s analysis of the film as a viewpoint on China vis-a-vis Hong Kong. An excerpt from his analysis (published as an addendum to Bordwell's article) follows:

The cops in the film are China personified: they have unlimited resources, massive numbers, infinite organization, but they are heartless towards outsiders, unforgiving, and they don’t trust anyone. The criminals are all the stereotypes of Hong Kong-ers: they are family, they are stylish and chic, they eat meals together (Hong Kong people love to eat, after all) but they are only interested in money.

Drug War is one of the best new movies I've seen all summer, and is highly recommended if you can squeeze in a showing.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens through this Thursday at the 4-Star at 1:00, 4:50, and 8:40 daily.

WHY: When I hear the term "neighborhood theatre" I think first of the 4-Star, located in the heart of the Richmond District, where I grew up. There were other theatres in my old 'hood, including the Balboa (which still survives and is currently running a Kickstarter campaign in the hopes of extending its survival for at least another decade), the Alexandria (which has been closed for nearly a decade now but still stand), the Bridge (which just closed last December), the Coliseum (which was gutted in 2000 and is now virtually unrecognizable as a Walgreens) and the Coronet (which was shut in 2005 and has since been demolished). But the 4-Star was the closest to my house and the one I walked past just about every day on the way to school. Mostly it played art films of no interest to an average kid, but I do remember occasionally attending for a special repertory screening of something like The Wizard of Oz. When I first began reading newspaper movie reviews and articles as a teenager I remember being thrilled to learn that my neighborhood theatre was to be showing Vincent Ward's The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey and I determined to be among the crowds lining up for a first-day showing as I had for Tim Burton's Batman a few weeks (if I remember the timeline correctly) before. I was surprised to be one of a small handful of people in the theatre at all. I didn't quite get that there was a difference in public awareness and acceptance of a Hollywood fantasy film vis-a-vis a foreign-made, independently distributed one.

In 1992 the theatre operation was taken over by Frank Lee, who had grown up in the business of operating Chinatown theatres and was looking to expand Chinese-language cinema to a neighborhood sometimes called "New Chinatown" or "Second Chinatown". Since then Lee has frequently screened Chinese-language classics and new releases sent directly from Asian distributors, along with films distributed by American outfits. This is where I saw my first Milkyway Production, Too Many Ways To Be #1 (directed by Wai Ka-Fei), which instantly made me a fan, as well as many Johnnie To films including several which never had "official" US distribution but played for a week or more at the 4-Star: My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, Throw Down and (for my money To's greatest masterpiece) Sparrow come to mind. In the past several years the 4-Star's programming of Chinese-language films has become more sporadic than consistent, but I'm always glad to see when they program Asian films. I'm especially pleased that after Drug War's expected run ends Thursday, Wong Kar-Wai's latest film The Grandmaster will open for at least a week starting this Friday August 30th, in a 35mm print. I'll be surprised if this martial arts film, which was shot mostly on 35mm cameras, will be showing on 35mm anywhere else in the Frisco Bay region.

HOW: Drug War was shot digitally and is being projected digitally.

Marketa Lazarová (1967)

WHO: Czech director František Vláčil made this.

WHAT: The second and final full week of the San Francisco International Film Festival starts today. I was recruited to provide seven week 2 picks for the 7x7 website and the piece was just published. Since one of my picks is Marketa Lazarová, let me quote from myself:

If you thought Soviet master Andrei Tarkovsky was the only Eastern Bloc filmmaker to meticulously recreate the Middle Ages in a stunning, black-and-white widescreen epic, you need to see František Vlácil's 1967 film, Marketa Lazarová, perennially named the "greatest Czech film of all time." Its unblinking approach to medieval violence between pagans and Christians easily puts it in a class with Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev,

WHERE/WHEN: Final SFIFF screening tonight at 8:45 at New People Cinema.

WHY: Tonight's screening is a special event. Marketa Lazarová screens in honor of George Gund III, who chaired the board of the San Francisco Film Society until his death this past January. Gund was a tireless advocate of Eastern European and Czechoslovakian cinema in particular, and the print of Vlácil's masterpiece I first viewed at the Pacific Film Archive more than ten years ago came to the PFA directly due to Gund.

I was always too shy to approach the SFFS board president when I saw him at festival events. Part of this must have been due to a sense of regret planted in me from childhood. Growing up in a middle-class household less than a block from Alamo Elementary School in the Richmond District, I attended that school and befriended Gund's son Gregory, who was exactly one day older than me and was a member my first-grade class. When we became friends I had no idea how wealthy Greg's family was; all I knew is that hockey was a big deal in his household, but that he was also the only boy in my grade who was willing to forego playing team sports during recess and lunch in order to hang out with an unathletic kid like me and play word games and pore over Safari cards. Once I was invited over to the family home- I'd never knew about mansions with elevators before. My friendship with Greg ended when he moved to Idaho the summer after first grade (presumably a move related to the Gund connection to the Sun Valley Suns). I lost touch with him as most kids tend to do when friends move, and by the time I seriously thought of trying to contact him again, it was too late, as he'd recently been killed in a plane crash.

So I'll be attending tonight's screening not just to see a great work of cinematic art, but to pay some small tribute to the man whose parenting produced a little boy who made early elementary school far more bearable for an introverted kid like me.

HOW: 35mm print.

Into The Abyss (2011)

WHO: Werner Herzog directed this documentary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW: Into the Abyss screens in 35mm.

The Sniper (1952)

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

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

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

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

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

On The Air

Yesterday I went to San Jose, where I taped a segment for a new film discussion series hosted by Sara Vizcarrondo of Box Office Magazine and Rotten Tomatoes. Honored to follow in the footsteps of the terrific Slant Magazine critic Fernando F. Croce, who discussed the Hollywood films of Fritz Lang on the first episode of the series, I was recruited to speak about Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, presumably because I can pronounce his name without butchering it (having taught English in Chiang Mai for a year and a half has resume applications after all!) I watched his new film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives twice at the Kabuki last Friday in preparation, and hope to see it again at least once more before it departs from the San Francisco Film Society Screen this Thursday. It will open for a week at the Elmwood Theatre in Berkeley on Friday. I don't want to give away anything I might have mentioned on the program, but I will say this: if you haven't already, you should see Uncle Boonmee too! Watching this on a computer or even a large television screen is simply not going to do justice to Apichatpong's visual strategies, which I feel are so important to the film as a whole.

Another guest interviewd by Vizcarrondo on this episode was local filmmaker Jarrod Whaley, whose new picture The Glass Slipper is part of San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival line-up this year; it plays March 9th and again on March 12th. I have not yet seen The Glass Slipper, but I was impressed by Whaley's feature-length debut Hell Is Other People, as I wrote last year. The episode with Whaley and I in it should be edited and posted by the end of the week; keep an eye on my Twitter feed for a link as soon as it's ready for viewing.

I'm actually not too familiar with much of this year's Cinequest program, in fact, but there are a couple of noteworthy films I've seen that will be playing the last few days of fest. F. W. Murnau's silent Nosferatu, of course, is always a treat on the big screen, and sure to be particularly so at the California Theatre March 11 with Dennis James performing at the organ to a color tinted 35mm print. I know I'm not the only one to feel that Nosferatu is particularly necessary in today's vampire movie landscape; people need to be reminded to feel frightened when they encounter the undead, not lustful.

Another Cinequest film I've had a chance to preview is Raavanan starring India's most famous actres Aishwara Ray Bachchan. She plays Ragini, the wife of a law enforcement official named Dev (played by Prithviraj) who falls into the clutches of his arch-nemesis Veera (played by Vikram), who takes her as a hostage while he mounts a popular insurrection against the government authorities. Of course Ragnini develops a Stockholm-Syndrome-like attachment to her rugged and powerful captor, which raises the stakes on the inevitable confrontation between law-maker and law-breaker. Bound by conventions of Indian popular cinema (plenty of action, musical numbers that stand in for love scenes, an anything-goes approach to filming technique, etc.), Raavanan nonetheless surprised me on more than one occasion, thanks to its toying with audience sympathies for its various characters. It helped that, if I had learned its classical source material prior to viewing, I had forgotten it (i.e., don't look it up unless you're completely unfamiliar with ancient Indian literature or else don't mind missing out on the surprises I was pleased to experience.)

After playing Cinequest, Raavanan will also play at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, which opens this Thursday with a screening of West Is West. After 29 years of operations, more than a decade of it under the sure stewardship of former festival director Chi-hui Yang, the programming team for the SFIAAFF now has new faces of leadership in Masashi Niwano and Christine Kwon, who have brought together a set of 108 films and videos, most of them from young Asian and Asian American filmmakers. Though the lineup may include fewer "known-quantity" directors than I've come to espect from this festival, there are a number of new films by relatively established artists that I've admired, leading off with China's critically-acclaimed master Jia Zhang-Ke, whose controversial I Wish I Knew plays twice at the festival, on March 12th at the Kabuki and on the 15th at the Pacific Film Archive. Other filmmakers I'm personally excited for the opportunity to follow are Zhang Lu, whose Grain In Ear impressed me at the 2006 SFIAAFF, and Chang Tso-Chi, whose The Best Of Times was a favorite at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival. Their new films are Dooman River and When Love Comes, respectively. Add in new documentaries on Anna May Wong and Mongolian film history, and archival screenings of Charlie Chan At The Olympics (with author Yunte Huang on hand to contextualize that film's complex racial issues) and Nonzee Nimibutr's 1999 hit Nang Nak (the first Thai film I ever saw, and part of a three-film focus on South-East Asian horror), and there's plenty of attractions to fill a film lover's viewing schedule.

The festival's closing night selection should appeal not only to cinephiles but to Frisco Bay's many indie music enthusiasts. It's called Surrogate Valentine, and it's a comedy about a musician performing in coffee houses and other small West Coast venues, and though I must admit I had low expectations going into the press screening (perhaps leftover from the bland taste I had in my mouth from the last SFIAAFF gala presentation I saw, last year's opening night film Today's Special), these were very pleasantly upended. I will publish a full review of Surrogate Valentine after a press embargo lifts this Saturday, when it makes its world premiere at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, but for now I'll just recommend it. It plays the last SFIAAFF night in San Francisco on March 17th, and the festival's last day in San Jose on March 20.

Fans of Surrogate Valentine's star Goh Nakamura who are intrigued by his prominence in one of the highlighted features might find themselves checking out other SFIAAFF programs as well. Music and film are often seen as competing forms of entertainment, but Frisco Bay's festivals have become saavy about finding ways to involve passionate seekers of out-of-the-ordinary music in their events. In a particularly brilliant move, the San Francisco International Film Festival has announced (among a few other early SFIFF program indications) that the Castro Theatre stage will play host to the Tindersticks on May 2nd, where the group will perform live under a screen showing excerpts from six of the Claire Denis films they've provided the musical score to. This makes attendance at the Pacific Film Archive's current Denis retrospective all the more imperative as preparation for this one-of-a-kind film/music event. Of the six films to be excerpted for this performance, only White Material has already had its PFA screening. Nénette et Boni plays March 25, Trouble Every Day on April 2nd, L'Intrus on April 8th & 9th, Friday Night on April 15, and 35 Shots of Rum on April 16th.

It wasn't so long ago that I considered myself much more of a music aficionado than a cinephile myself. The first film I tried to buy a ticket for at the SFIFF was Iara Lee's electronic music documentary, Modulations. It was sold out, and I ended up seeing it during its theatrical run, and waiting another year before actually attending SFIFF. I've recently been reminded that my first excursions to truly independent movie theatres the Red Vic and the Roxie were facilitated by frequent ticket giveaways from my favorite radio station I've ever regularly listened to, 90.3 KUSF-FM. Without my interest in keeping on top of exciting independent music curated by the KUSF DJs, I might never have gotten into the habit of attending these alternative screening venues. Even after my attention to music became eclipsed by my attention to movies, I became a loyal listener to the Movie Magazine International radio program produced by Monica Sullivan out of the station. It was a great way to keep on top of festivals, revivals, new releases, etc. And yes, they had ticket giveaways on that weekly program as well.

In case you haven't heard about the University of San Francisco's decision to sell off the 90.3 frequency earlier this year, here's a good primer. At the end of last month, I was one of many who sent a letter to the Federal Communcations Commission in Washington, D.C., asking that they deny the premature transfer of the frequency the public had entrusted the University to operate in the interest of the local community (which KUSF had, with great panache, as it hosted over a dozen foreign-language broadcasts and partnered with countless local businesses and non-profit organizations to get the word out on important activities.) While KUSF supporters wait to hear what will happen next on the legal front, they continue to rally support for their cause by organizing events to benefit the cost of fighting the transfer. Tomorrow night, a special screening of the punk rock documentary A History Lesson, part 1 will be held at the 9th Street Independent Film Center, and this Saturday at midnight, a screening of a surprise film (perhaps you can figure it out from this blurb) will be presented at the Red Vic (whose March and April calendars are as strong as any two months at that venue as I can remember). Proceeds from both screenings will go to the Save KUSF campaign. Of course, if you can't make it to either screening, the fight to keep San Francisco airwaves locally-controlled in the face of media consolidation can also be aided with a direct donation.

My Two Eyes

I've been so pleased with the participation in this year's "I Only Have Two Eyes" project, collecting lists of favorite repertory/revival film watching experiences had in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010 from 21 other Frisco Bay film-watchers. The entire set of contributions is collected here. But I haven't yet published my own list of ten. Here it finally is, in the order in which I saw them:

Pitfall
Outfitted with a series pass, I was able to catch more of Noir City 8 than any of its previous Castro Theatre editions. The best of the set, to my determination, was the this series opener, a still-underrated marital thriller directed by Andre De Toth. This searing critique of post-war America's stifling suburban ideal stars Dick Powell at his most embittered, with Lisabeth Scott and Jane Greer terrific in supporting roles. However, it's Raymond Burr who nearly steals the show as the extremely menacing villain of the picture, a role that prefigures his own future as one of filmdom's most effective heavies, as well as the terrorizing Burl Ives role that drives the action in De Toth's later masterpiece, Day of the Outlaw (which later in the year played the Roxie if unfortunately in a severely compromised 16mm print).

Trafic
Only two things could have enhanced this year's complete Jacques Tati retrospective, held on both sides of the Bay at the Pacific Film Archive and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (with other Tati screenings at the Red Vic and Rafael): a supplimental 70mm screening of Playtime at a venue equipped to show the increasingly-uncommon format, and a showing of Tati's first feature Jour de Fete at a time that didn't conflict with my unavoidable non-cinephile activities. The plus side of the latter "defect" in the otherwise tremendous undertaking is that I still have an unseen Tati film to look forward to. Trafic, which I also had never seen until YBCA's screening in early 2010, is something of a spiritual sequel to Playtime, and nearly as great. Where the 1967 film wanders through Paris like a seemingly-directionles tourist, this one takes a more linear road-movie approach to its playful but cutting jibes at modern transportation and leisure.

That Night's Wife
In 2010 I was thankful that the VIZ Cinema provided numerous opportunities to revisit some of the best films by perhaps my most consistent favorite of Japanese directors, Yasujiro Ozu: Late Spring, Tokyo Story, Late Autumn, etc. But this Pacific Film Archive screening of Ozu's 1931 silent That Night's Wife, shown with an accompaniment by the superb pianist Judith Rosenberg, trumped even those screenings in opening a window to a younger filmmaker's creative range; the sequence of a vigil in a cramped apartment space shows just how radical (and dramatically effective) Ozu's approach to cinematic temporality could get.

Dodsworth
More than any other cinema on Frisco Bay, the Stanford (or the St. Anford, as a friend recently re-Christened the venue) functions as a temple to one man's cinematic taste. Lucky for us, David Packard has great taste in 1930s-50s Hollywood (and British) cinema! I shuttled to Palo Alto more often than usual in 2010, and was particularly excited to see a 35mm print of the heartrending Make Way For Tomorrow, which I'd only ever seen on a bootlegged VHS tape before. That its previously-unfamiliar-to-me double-bill mate, William Wyler's Dodworth was nearly able to match Leo McCarey's masterpiece in its emotional pull, and even surpass it in its unpandering sophistication, seemed miraculous and still does months later.

Ran
I usually like to reserve slots on my own personal "I Only Have Two Eyes" lists for films I'd never seen before at all, but I had to make this exception this year, for this film that jumped most dizzingly highly in my estimation when finally viewed in 35mm. When I viewed it on VHS as a college student, it was my first exposure to Kurosawa and, indeed, to non-sci-fi Japanese motion pictures, though in fact at the time its 16th Century feudal mileu felt more alien to me than any animated robot or rubber-suited beastie. I'd never gotten around to revisiting it even after becoming a guarded Kurosawa fan, and still harbored the suspicion that it had been overrated by those who ranked it among his best films. But in 2010, "the Emperor"'s centennial year, when I was able to employ the VIZ & PFA to fill in a number of my Kurosawa-gaps (the Quiet Duel being my favorite new discovery) and revisit a couple favorites (Stray Dog, High & Low), it was the extended engagement of Ran at the Embarcadero which provided me with my most fundamental re-understanding of the master's bold artistry. It cannot hurt to know how closely the re-worked Lear story sometimes parallels Kurosawa's late-career struggles as a cast-off from the industry he did so much to build. It also cannot hurt to see those colors (all that blood-and-fire red!) cast in a glorious new print on a big screen.

Le Bonheur
Speaking of color. It seems fitting that I caught up with what I now think of as Agnès Varda's greatest masterpiece (though I love Cleo From 5 To 7, Vagabond and The Gleaners & I deeply) thanks to a PFA series devoted to preservation. Not just because it seems miraculous that these natural, vivid but never gaudy hues and cries could have been photographed in the mid-sixties, and restored lovingly for us today. But also because, in its way this painfully truthful fable is all about the possibilities and impossibilities of preservation and restoration of love relationships and families. Just drawing the film up in my mind again months after seeing it, I find myself shuddering to the memory of its beauty and its ultimate, still shocking agony.

The Chelsea Girls
I've never held much truck with the frequent assertion that the proper role of music in film is: not to be noticed. Becoming something of an aficionado of live musical scores to silent films has only solidified my position. It's harder to dispute that the performative element the projectionist provides to a film showing should be unnoticed if it's to be appreciated. But there are clear-cut exceptions, and The Chelea Girls is the most prominent one. With two projectors running reels side-by-side on the screen, with a fair amount of latitude available to toggle between soundtracks from the control booth, it's probably fair to say there can (and should) be no frame-definitive version of this Andy Warhol film, making a screening (this one was at SFMOMA) feel something akin to a maddening, exhilarating, frustrating, but somehow also illuminating concert experience. "Everything is more glamorous when you do it in bed," Warhol once wrote. I would hope he'd make an exception for watching The Chelsea Girls.

Pastorale D'ete
I could easily have made a respectible top ten, or twenty, or thirty, culling only from the locally-produced experimental short films I watched and re-watched as part of the still-ongoing Radical Light series in support of the fantastic book published last year. Supplemented by a number of SFMOMA screenings in the Spring (and a couple in the Fall), the Radical Light project made 2010 the year the filmic floodgates really opened for me, and the trickle of knowledge and appreciation I had for Frisco Bay's storied history of avant-garde film scenes became a hearty river. Any year allowing me to finally see Will Hindle's Chinese Firedrill, Kerry Laitala's Retrospectoscope, John Luther Schofill's Filmpiece for Sunshine, Dion Vigne's North Beach, Barbara Hammer's Dyketactics, Sidney Peterson's The Lead Shoes (three times!), Jordan Belson's Allures, Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuttle, Dominic Angerame's Deconstruction Sight and Premonition, Dorothy Wiley's Miss Jesus Fries on the Grill, Allen Willis, David Myers and Philip Greene's Have You Sold Your Dozen Roses?, Chuck Hudina's Icarus, and Frank Stauffacher's Sausalito, and to rewatch Tominaro Nishikawa's Market Street, Bruce Conner's Looking For Mushrooms, Take the 5:10 to Dreamland and a Movie, George Kuchar's Wild Night in El Reno, Curt McDowell's Confessions, Hy Hirsch's Eneri, Chris Marker's Junkopia, Gunvor Nelson's Schmeerguntz, and especially Bruce Baillie's The Gymnasts and All My Life (and meet the man himself), and just as especially Christopher Maclaine's The End (and become involved in an intensive collaborative project attempting to retrace Maclaine's steps and talk to survivors of his cohort, most notably Wilder Bentley II) is simply an astoundingly rich one. But above even all of these, it was a new restoration of Hindle's first film Pastourale D'été whose nine minutes burned most brilliantly into my retinal hippocampus during its PFA screening. Shot in the kind of hillside landscape I'd always incorrectly imagined to be typical of the famous Canyon, California until I finally visited the forested town last September, and edited to an Arthur Honegger composition on equipment built by Hindle himself, this nature study is the clearest justification of the zoom lens I've ever observed. The first film made by a director (scarcely) better known for his more claustrophobic later works, it won an award at the 3rd San Francisco International Film Festival in 1959.

Times Square
One of the most heartening developments on the Frisco Bay film scene last year was the re-emergence of the Roxie as a genuinely adventurous, calendered, repertory theatre that can play excellent host to imaginative events. The only known print of this feisty teenaged melodrama set against the punk and new wave scene in 1980 Manhattan provides a unique semi-documentary look at a very specific historical moment, but the film is also special because of how seriously director Allan Moyle takes the relationship between his two leads. Nicky Marotta & Pamela Pearl may represent the 'bad girl' and the 'daddy's girl' but they bust out of their archetypes thrillingly.

Braverman's Condensed Cream of the Beatles
I'm slightly embarrassed that after hearing about the place for years, it took my April move into a loft space shockingly nearby to Oddball Film & Video for me to actually start visiting this unique film archive and screening venue. I took in four of the locale's regular weekend evening shows, including a Saturday-after-Thanksgiving pair of not-exactly themed shorts programs compiled by Lynn Cursaro and Carl Martin of the Film On Film Foundation. Amidst delightful rarities like Red Ball Express, Doubletalk, and Zoo was Charles Braverman's (and Gary Rocklen's) psychedelic collage of music and graphics tracing the birth, growth and public separation of the Fab Four. Constructed between the Beatles' break-up and the tragic assassination that quashed all hope of a real reunion, this nostalgia head trip seems unlikely to ever be cleared for a commercial release in these intellectually proprietary times. It brought me waves of joy and reminiscence to my boyhood in a house where The Beatles ruled the record player over The Stones, The Beach Boys, and practically everybody else.

Start Your New Year Right

"The tendency to watch movies on the small screen...makes for a changed experience of the movie no longer as a world that takes us over but one we peer into and catch glimpses of." -- Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost, 1998

As the last hours of 2010 fly past, I find myself wondering what the purpose of all the year-end recapitulation that dominates the media for much of December can be. I participate in it myself, having submitted a "best films of 2010" list and a set of reflective quotes to the sf360 website. I'm also preparing my annual multi-participant survey of the year in Frisco Bay repertory/revival screenings, which you can expect to see on this site by mid-January.

Surely the main reason to reflect on a year as it passes into history is to hope the process helps us learn something we can apply to the year to come. One of the lessons I hope I've learned over the past year is that I cannot expect many of my friends to follow my example and regularly take advantage of the panopoly of filmgoing options we all have before us in this town, and that blogging or tweeting about screenings I'm anticipating is not going to create enough intertia to get people out of the habit of watching all their movies from the comfort and convenience of home. If I want the people I care about to share my appreciation of big-screen movie-watching, I should specifically invite them along on my expeditions into the cinematic wilderness, where they're certain to relish an experience they hadn't consciously realized they'd been missing.

Last week I organized a group outing to Japantown's VIZ Cinema to view a great 35mm print of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 masterpiece High And Low. Most of the people I brought had never before seen this still-underappreciated kidnapper vs. detective saga, or had never been to the VIZ, or both. I don't think there was a single attendee who regretted a single dollar of the admission price, or a single minute of this extremely compelling thriller. The first hour and a half or so of the film is simply unimpeachable, especially when its wide Tohoscope images are displayed on an immersive screen.

Like the Bridge and the Red Vic, the VIZ Cinema was M.I.A. from Jonathan Kiefer's list of San Francisco's remaining single-screen theatres found in his relatively-recent, otherwise-worthy SF Weekly article on the uncertain fate of Landmark's Clay. Most people I talk to about the VIZ have never heard of it, even if they're fans of Japanese filmmakers and have visited the mall in which it is located. And while attending the venue for dozens of screenings in 2010 (only the Pacific Film Archive and the Castro attracted me more often) I don't think I've ever seen it more than half-full. Thus, it was with sadness but no surprise that I reacted to news from a ticketseller that the venue would be ceasing daily operations early next year. The coming week provides opportunities to catch the end of the Kurosawa-Toshiro Mifune series, including the Seven Samurai (January 2nd only), Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, and two final showings of High And Low (Jan. 3 & 6), but the theatre then closes for ten days of maintenance, and I don't think we should expect it to continue programming films much beyond its late-month digital screenings of the anime Evangelion 1.0 and Evangelion 2.0.

Though the VIZ is shuttering its screen after only a year and a half in operation, the Red Vic has surivived thirty years on Haight Street only to find itself in imminent danger of closing down as well, as this article brought to the surface. As I mentioned at sf360, the Red Vic was the first place where I ever bought a ticket to a repertory film back in the mid-1990s (it may have been Blade Runner but I can't be certain). It's still the only theatre in town with solar panels, wooden (that means reuseable, washable) popcorn bowls, seven-dollar Tuesdays, a cozy combination of movie seats and loveseat-like benches, and the most entertaining "no smoking in the theatre" trailer this side of John Waters. It also has its own unique approach to film programming, playing a recent art-house freakout like Enter the Void in the same month as a Hollywood classic like Breakfast At Tiffany's (Blake Edwards R.I.P.), and letting Godard's astonishing Every Man For Himself rub shoulders with Steve Martin in The Jerk for the first time since the early eighties (if not ever!)

Any trips to the Red Vic are going to help put the theatre closer to black, but two official benefits are scheduled on the Red Vic's February calendar: a February 12 program of politically-minded underground films Bold Native and All Power To The People (a documentary on the Black Panther Party) and a February 24th multi-media event celebrating San Francisco movie theatre history, presented by Rebecca Solnit, Christian Bruno, Sam Green, Chip Lord and Julie Lindow. If you didn't get Lindow's book documenting this history, Left In The Dark, as a holiday gift, it's certainly an apropos time to buy it for yourself.

I'm equally excited about the Film On Film Foundation's also-beneficial rental of the theatre for a "tripple" bill of Gumby: The Movie, The Adventures Of Mark Twain and Peter Jackson's debut Meet The Feebles. Perhaps improbably, the only one of these I've seen before, years ago, is the Adventures of Mark Twain, a feature-length Will Vinton Claymation that absolutely enchanted me when I was a jaded teenager. (The top image in this post is from the film.) I cannot wait to see it on the big screen and to bring some of my most jaded friends along for the ride.

Advertising campaigns help film festivals and new releases attract audiences. This is why, when the Castro hasn't been four-walled by German Gems or Sketchfest or Noir City or the Silent Film Festival, that venue seems to prefer showing a mediocre (at best, imho) "re-bake" like Tron: Legacy than the kind of programming its staff excels at, but that can be a risky draw for customers, like last year's Samuel Goldwyn tribute or its upcoming set of Alfred Hitchcock's less culturally-canonized films. Sadly, repertory film is threatening to die out in this town, as it has in so many others, and the troubles of the VIZ and the Red Vic are merely the latest symptoms. There's still a great scene to be pieced together if you're willing to put in the effort of calendar-tracking (and if you regularly read my blog, you probably are). What's lacking in San Francisco is a single cinema where every day is a blast from the past. In lieu of that, most minds turn toward the home viewing option when in the mood for a movie released anytime earlier than last month.

I don't know if there's realistically a way to reverse this trend. If all the Netflix subscribers who canceled their accounts in favor of a free service like the public library, used the money saved to visit a theater for a movie or two per month that they otherwise wouldn't have gone to, places like the Red Vic might thrive. I'm not much of one for New Year's Resolutions, but in 2011, I hope to share more of my favorite films and theatres with friends and acquaintences that I don't normally see at the movies. Why didn't I think of this before?