Outer Space (1999)

Screen capture from Other Cinema DVD "Experiments In Terror"

WHO: Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky created this.

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Darr: IOHTE

Screen capture from Columbia DVD

Thanks for reading the 2015 edition of I Only Have Two Eyes, my annual survey of Frisco Bay cinephiles' favorite cinematic revivals seen in local cinematheques, arthouses, museum screening rooms, movie palaces and other public spaces between January 1 and December 31, 2015. The hub page for this year's results will point you to the selections and, in many cases, eloquent write-ups, by sixteen esteemed allies in appreciation of the screen, the programmers, and of course the films that could be seen in Frisco Bay venues last year. Though not all by one person, as the name of the survey should suggest.

I compile a survey that eschews new releases in favor of focusing on our cinematic heritage not because I don't have interest in new films (you can see some of my own favorites listed here), but because I feel there are plenty of others covering that ground. And, perhaps as importantly, because I feel that the usual film rankings often obscure the circumstances under which they're viewed. So many variables play into how a viewer receives a film: method of delivery, reaction (or lack thereof) of fellow viewers, preconceptions before viewing, mood of viewer, among others competing with "quality of the film" in shaping a judgment. I know there are fastidious critics who take care to rewatch a film multiple times, often in multiple ways, before committing it to a top ten list, but though I admire the approach, it feels too much like a vain attempt to cram opinions into boxes made for facts for me to adopt it myself. Rather I prefer to present a year-in-review that emphasizes the unique nature of every viewing of a film. In-cinema screenings of older films are easier for most of us to think of as unique, I feel (in part because they very often are!)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

I suspect the timing and placement of my first-ever viewing of The Honeymoon Killers couldn't have been better for appreciation of this exceedingly disturbing 1969 portrait of the murderous Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck. It was the final film shown at the January 2015 edition of Eddie Muller's Noir City film festival, pushing an audience who'd just taken in a week full of mysteries, thrillers and melodramas made in the classical Hollywood style (square frame, presentational acting style, continuity cutting, the works) out into the world on a completely different note. It's the only film written and directed by opera composer Leonard Kastle, with a few scenes filmed by a very young Martin Scorsese until the producers determined his methods ate up too much of the film's quick schedule and extremely low budget. Kastle created a raw and unflinching window into a notoriously lethal marriage, filmed mostly in long takes, in cars and in non-descript dwellings, giving the feeling of a nightmarish home movie exploding in widescreen on the the Castro screen. I felt shell-shocked after the screening and felt like I wouldn't want to watch another noir again for at least another year (although this wore off eventually, certainly in time for me to see the majority of screenings in the Castro's summer noir series hosted by Elliot Lavine.)

2015 was the last year, or should I say half-year, of the Pacific Film Archive's existence at its 16-year "temporary" location at 2575 Bancroft, across from a lovely Julia Morgan- & Bernard Maybeck-designed gymnasium. I witnessed so many outstanding screenings inside this corrugated shed, and though the new location holds great promise, I'm sure I'll miss the cozy purple-cushioned seats and the walks from the BART station through the forested campus quite a bit, if not as much as I'll miss some of the staff that was not invited to make the hyperspace jump to the new screening space when it opened this past week. Luckily I took great advantage of the old space during its final few months, sampling great retrospectives for filmmakers like Billy Wilder, Gregory Markopoulos, John Stahl, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Victor Erice. But I think my favorite PFA screening of 2015 was a mystical film completely unknown to me before viewing it in February: The Day is Longer Than the Night, with the director Lana Gogoberidze on hand to discuss her poetic, pictoral approach to national narrative (my tweet at the time), in a nation that didn't exist independent of the Soviet Union at the time she made it, and the fallout from its success at a crucial moment in Soviet film history. I wish I'd been able to take in a lot more of the PFA's monumental survey of Georgian film during late 2014 and early 2015, but I'm sure glad I at least caught this precious work.

Screen capture from Lionsgate DVD

There's no getting around it: now that I no longer live three blocks from the Roxie Theatre (since moving to Grant Avenue almost two years ago) I don't find myself there nearly as often as I used to. It may just be an optical illusion that has me thinking there's not quite as many can't-miss screenings happening there since I moved away- at least for a film-on-film proponent (though not purist). I did get to see perfectly-projected 35mm prints of Brandy In the Wilderness, Takeshi Miike's Audition, and a set of Quay Brothers shorts there in 2015, and am glad that Polyester screens in 35mm AND Odorama tonight (though I'll be helping present The Fall of The I-Hotel at the nearby Artists' Television Access instead). But my favorite recent-ish screening there has definitely been last March's showing of Kathryn Bigelow's solo directorial debut Near Dark, a post-punk vampire variant set in rural American states where, (as I tweeted after the screening) "blood flows as cheaply as beer & gasoline". I think it's my new favorite Bigelow film. The screening was presented by the Film On Film Foundation, which paired the film with the schlocky Stephanie Rothman grindhouser Terminal Island, but my mind really connects it with a more closely-kindred film seen at the Castro a month and a half before: Abel Ferrara's 1993 Body Snatchers remake.

More than fourteen years ago, after I saw my first Budd Boetticher Westerns midway through a Pacific Film Archive series, I started to visually devour as many as I could get my eyes on, whether via VHS tapes or Turner Classc Movies airings (at my neighbor's house, since I've never subscribed to that channel myself). But for some reason I'd always held that series opener The Tall T (pictured at the top of this post) at arm's length, in the hopes of another theatrical opportunity arising. Meanwhile, the movie was released on DVD, and then went out of print, and then back in again (this time only as an on-demand DVD-R), with no such screenings appearing in this cowboy-hat-averse region until this past April when the intrepid Yerba Buena Center for the Arts finally booked it as part of a very fine Western series (couched as "Noir Westerns" to help lure in horse opera skeptics). It proved itself to be the most formally and narratively "perfect" of Boetticher's Ranown films made with unassuming star Randolph Scott. A case in which my patience really paid off in a tremendous first-time viewing.

Screen capture from Parlour DVD

"If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You might as well be dead. You're not even a citizen of the United States." The greatest film I saw at the San Francisco International Film Festival this past Spring was a 45-year-old revival of the sole feature film directed by its star, who also wrote the screenplay and won an award at the Venice Film Festival back in 1970. There's not much new I can say about Barbara Loden's Wanda in a world where Bérénice Reynaud's essential Senses of Cinema article on the film exists, but I will add that Rachel Kushner's introduction to the Castro Theatre congregation not only quoted a passage from her novel The Flamethrowers that discussed the film, and gave shout-outs to Frisco's fallen repertory houses (the York, the Strand, the Red Vic), but debunked one notion in Reynaud's article: that Wanda never screened in the United States beyond an initial New York run. The SFIFF catalog refers to at least 1970 screening in San Francisco, and Kushner spoke eloquently of how her mother saw the film in an Oregon arthouse and always maintained it was the best film ever made. Watching with those words ringing in my ears, it was hard to disagree, at least for the 102 minutes it played, which is the most I can ever ask of a film anyway.

This past May's San Francisco Silent Film Festival was filled with gems, and I didn't even have time to see all of them, I'm sure. Most of my festival favorites (Ben-Hur, the Swallow and the Titmouse, the Bert Williams presentation) have been mentioned by other IOHTE contributors this year, but since nobody else mentioned another silent film event that happened earlier that month and opened my eyes equally wide to the place of pre-talkie cinema history in modern life, I'm going to use this slot to give it some attention. It's an experimental silent film called The Big Stick/An Old Reel by Massachusetts filmmaker Saul Levine, who made a rare Frisco Bay public appearance courtesy of an SF Cinematheque co-presentation at Oakland's more underground Black Hole Cinematheque, an admission-always-free screening space that will celebrate its fifth year of operation later in 2016. The Big Stick/An Old Reel is quite simply one of the most effective "found footage" films I've ever witnessed, and a 10-minute manifesto of how "old" films don't survive simply to be seen, but to be applied to our lives. Between 1967 and 1973 (it took him six years to perfect), Levine expressed this by splicing together footage of police trying to quell a mass protest, shot with his regular-8mm camera off a television broadcast, with fragments from 8mm reduction prints of pertinent Charlie Chaplin comedies. Namely 1914's Getting Acquainted, in which the Little proto-Tramp evades Edgar Kennedy's Keystone Cop as he interacts with Mabel Normand, Mack Swain, Phyllis Allen Cecile Arnold and Harry McCoy (strangely, much of the literature identifies this film as In The Park, which Chaplin filmed in San Francisco with an entirely different cast for Essanay in 1915), and 1917's Easy Street, in which Chaplin himself plays the cop- and a pretty outrageously abusive one. As if juxtaposing these three sources together didn't create an intense enough layering, Levine creates even more with additional interventions such as blackening parts of the image and varying the rhythm of the cuts. Indeed the very nature of 8mm splices, which leave a highly noticeable scarring on the frame (perhaps exacerbated when blown up to 16mm, as I believe the print I saw was?) creates more texture in an already-dense film. And context adds yet another level of layering. Watching cycles of violence so embedded into a film print in 2015 Oakland of all times and places felt like a particularly apropos summoning.

Screen capture from Universal Vault DVD

Last year the Stanford Theatre provided opportunities to watch all of the feature-length talking pictures Ernst Lubitsch directed up through 1939, and I took advantage of the opportunity to see the two from this period that had eluded me up to now: The Man I Killed, his sole pure drama during this period, and which is also known as Broken Lullaby, and the film I now think might be the summation of his powers, the 1937 Marlene Dietrich/Herbert Marshall/Melvyn Douglas love triangle Angel (which could also bear the title Broken Lullaby, as I noted in a post-viewing tweet). It was released after the longest period of apparent inactivity in Lubitsch's career as a director, which I can't help but notice coincides with the period of strict enforcement of the Hays Code (the precise date was July 1, 1934, two weeks before the end of principle photography on Lubitsch's prior directorial effort The Merry Widow). It's as if he needed a period of time to regroup and rethink how to extend his "Touch" into a more censorious Hollywood environment. He found some marvelous solutions, creating a masterpiece that walks a fine line between marital drama and aching comedy that somehow befits the strange combination of satisfaction and melancholy I feel at the thought that I'll never again see a 1930s Lubitsch feature for the first time. At least there are still a couple from the 1940s and a slew from the 1910s and 1920s I can look forward to making the acquaintance of...

The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco presented its third annual tribute to a filmmaker from "the beautiful country"; after Pasolini in 2013 and Bertolucci in 2014 this year's maestro was Vittorio De Sica, still world famous of course for Bicycle Thieves, but whose lesser-known works like Shoeshine and Miracle in Milan are more beloved to me personally. The second Castro screening that September day was another for me to add to that list: Gold of Naples, a wise and witty portmanteau film made on the streets of De Sica's hometown, featuring six (approximately-) equally-wonderful Giuseppe Marotta short story adaptations. Sofia Loren plays a philandering wife with a misplaced wedding ring. Silvia Mangano a prostitute who takes revenge on a self-loathing nobleman. De Sica himself plays an inveterate gambler (a role that his friends considered his most autobiographical) and Totò (another Neapolitan) a put-upon clown. Other segments portray a neighborhood problem-solver and a haunting funeral procession for a dead child. Each vignette could stand on its own as a top-notch short film; together they conspire to create a filmic work worthy of standing with Rossellini's Paisan and Pasolini's Trilogy of Life films as proof that Italians have understood the power of portmanteau better than anyone.

Screen capture from Mileston/Oscilloscope DVD

I knew I'd be filling a major gap in my understanding of documentary history when I went to a 35mm showing of Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity at the Rafael Film Center. I didn't realize, however, just how much I'd learn from, be moved by, and even, dare I say, entertained by, this 1969 epic (over four hours, not including intermission) of cultural history and its intersection with "harder" political history. Ophuls, in San Rafael to receive a Mill Valley Film Festival tribute and to introduce a newer film as well as this one, sat and watched this one along with the audience, as if he hadn't already viewed it countless times before. Here he tears apart the myths associated with resistance in Nazi-occupied France, not as a radical but as a sly provocateur, using techniques that have since becomes hallmarks of successful documentary: the incorporation of disturbing "ephemeral" film footage (years before The Atomic Cafe solidified an American vogue for such), and of "enough rope to hang themselves" interviews like that of a merchant asked to explain why he took out an a newspaper ad proclaiming himself "100% French". Few of the interviews were as self-incriminating as this one, but they all wove together a damning self-portrait of a nation still unreconciled with its past. I'll never watch a Maurice Chevalier film in quite the same way again.

Finally, another French film that might never have been made without the unwitting participation of Nazi Germany: Fritz Lang's only film completed during his brief stay in Paris after fleeing Hitler's Germany (in style), albeit less abruptly than he'd maintain in later interviews. The film was Liliom, a 1934 adaptation of the same Ferenc Molnar play that Frank Borzage had made with Charles Farrell in 1930. The Stanford Theatre screened both back-to-back as part of a rapturous 100-year anniversary  tribute to the Fox Film Corporation, providing opportunities for me to rewatch rarely-revived personal favorites like the Borzage Liliom and Henry King's State Fair, and to see great works like John Ford's Steamboat Round the Bend for the first time. But none I'm as glad I made sure to trek to Palo Alto for as Lang's Liliom, which emphasizes the fatalistic elements of Molnar's play while presenting a "poetic realist" setting for its events to unfold in. Charles Boyer is particularly wonderful here as the title character, effectively differentiating his performance between different phases of life in a way that Farrell didn't even attempt. And the scene in which he watches his life unfold via a film projection is one of Lang's most inspired ever. Apart from a few late-career Satyajit Ray films co-produced by Soprofilms or Canal+, this is the first French film (made under the Erich Pommer-led Fox Europa) that I can recall the Stanford screening in the decade-and-a-half I've been paying attention to the venue's programming. I'd certainly be happy to see more.

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Screen shot from Kino DVD

WHO: Robert Weine directed this

WHAT: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is huge in cinema history and in my own personal history with cinema. It's frequently (incorrectly) cited as the first horror movie, and its iconic imagery has been borrowed shamelessly by other filmmakers from the silent era to Tim Burton and beyond. With few of its director's other films available for view, it generally frustrates auteurists, especially those highly influenced by the theories of realism put forth by the influential French critic Andre Bazin, who labeled Caligari a "failure" under his criteria for worthy photographic art. 

When I first became interested in exploring silent film history many years, ago, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was one of the first films from the era that made a very strong and immediate impression upon initial viewing. Though I was watching a rather muddy VHS transfer, I loved what I saw, and became a little obsessed. I read about every article or book I could find about it (including David Robinson's excellent monograph), purchased an 8mm print on ebay (my first and ever such purchase, even though I didn't have a projector at the time) and even dressed as the somnambulist for Halloween that year (immortalized in a photograph I've recently cycled in as my twitter avatar). 

WHERE/WHEN: 9PM tonight at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

WHY: Since my first viewing I've taken a few opportunities to see the film when it's screened in local cinemas (which happens less often than you might expect, actually), and have seen it projected from an even muddier video transfer at the Castro accompanied by the local ensemble Club Foot Orchestra, and have seen a 1950s-era retitled 35mm version at the Pacific Film Archive with Judith Rosenberg at the piano and accompanied by a lecture by film scholar Russell Merritt, who has just joined the board of the Silent Film Festival. 

None of these viewings, or of the DVD viewings I've also experienced in the interim, have been afforded use of a new 4K sprucing of the best original elements. This version premiered in Berlin earlier in 2014, and tonight is the US premiere. It's also the first time I'll be able to view a 4K digital file projected through the Castro's recent acquisition, a 4K projector to replace the 2K one they've had for several years and which had recently developed an "undead pixel" problem (which is even scarier than it sounds). Although I wish the Murnau Foundation would have made a 35mm print available of this new restoration, I'm curious to see what 4K projection at the Castro might look like when applied to a classic film that I'm very familiar with.

Tonight's screening is the capper to a full day of Silent Film Festival shows, the entirety of which have been enthusiastically rounded-up by my friend Michael Hawley of the film-415 blog (which I hope he never has to change to film-628). 35mm screenings for this all-day even include the 11AM program of Laurel & Hardy two-reelers, and the 7PM showing of Buster Keaton's The General with live musical accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra (who last performed this at the Castro in 2004- I was there and was very impressed by how a percussion-heavy score helps amp up the action-adventure elements of the classic Keaton comedy.) The Alloys' 3PM world-premiere presentation of their new, years-in-the-making score to Rudoph Valentino's allegedly best film Son of the Sheik will be sourced from a DCP, as will the BFI's A Night in the Cinema in 1914 show.

HOW: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari screens as a 4K DCP, with live music by the versatile keyboardist Donald Sosin. I've heard his eerie score for the Kino DVD and am very interested in hearing how he transforms it in a live environment.

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.

House of Wax (1953)

WHO: André de Toth directed this.

WHAT: There's Raoul Walsh, who directed Gun Fury. There's John Ford, who directed (uncredited) the final scenes of Hondo when John Farrow was contractually forced to give up his director's chair to go make another picture. There's even the little-remembered Herbert L. Strock, who directed the science fiction picture Gog. But of all the one-eyed filmmakers of the 1950s, the one most famous for making a 3D picture is André de Toth. This is probably because he was first out the gate; before House of Wax no major studio had released a color 3D picture, and the horror film became an immediate sensation. De Toth secured his legacy as a stereoscopy specialist by following House of Wax up with two 3D Westerns starring Randolph Scott, 1953's  The Stranger Wore A Gun and 1954's The Bounty Hunter, although the latter was filmed but never shown in 3D as by the time of its release the 3D craze was already over- to lie dormant for decades.

WHERE/WHEN: 5 screenings: Tonight, Sunday and Monday at 6:30 PM, and tomorrow and Sunday at 2:15 PM, all at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

WHY: A big week for special screenings at the Rafael; in addition to these five shows there's also a 30th anniversary screening of the epic astronaut drama The Right Stuff with director Philip Kaufman tomorrow night at 7:00. Both showings seem timed perfectly with the popularity of current 3D astronaut movie Gravity. The rest of Halloween week at the Rafael is filled out by a Tuesday tribute to television horror hosts and two showings of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu with a recording of Hans Erdmann's original 1922 score for the film on Wednesday and Thursday. In addition, seven screenings of the so-called "final cut" of director Robin Hardy's 1973 cult film The Wicker Man occur between tonight and Thursday. Some good comments about the latter item were made by my friend David Robson.

All of the above are digital screenings, but the Rafael plans to flex its capability to screen 35mm prints at least a couple more times before the year is out, according to the latest calendar (pdf). On November 10th local filmmaker Rob Nilsson brings a new 35mm print of his ultra-naturalistic 1979 Cannes-prize winning film Northern Lights to the Rafael November 10th (shortly after showing it at the Pacific Film Archive). And on December 12, Randy Haberkamp returns for an annual visit to Marin to screen Lois Weber's astonishing Suspense, D.W. Griffith's The Mothering Heart, and other films and excerpts from "The Films of 1913" with live music from pianist Michael Mortilla. At least some of the films will screen via a vintage 1909 hand-cranked 35mm film projector.

House of Wax was a remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, itself influenced by the 1924 German film Waxworks, which screens tomorrow at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. If San Rafael or Niles are to far-afield for your Halloween screening excursions, the Roxie is hosting a Saturday night "Spooktacular Slumber Party" but has not revealed any details of what it will be showing. My curiosity is piqued.

HOW: House of Wax will screen using modern digital 3D technology; it would be nice to see it in its original dual-35mm-projector version but Frisco Bay theatres haven't screened prints this way in years (the Castro in 2006 and the Stanford back in 2000) and there's no sign they'll start again anytime soon.

Carrie (2013)

WHO: Kimberly Peirce directed this.

WHAT: Brian De Palma's 1976 film Carrie is not just my favorite of that director's films; it's also my favorite American horror movie made in my lifetime, and my favorite film made from a Stephen King novel (both high praise, if only for the existence of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.) So of course I had to see this new remake on its opening weekend.  I did not expect to like it as much as I did, given some of its fundamental flaws, evident early on in the picture. I don't have time to review it, so instead will point to two polar opposite reviews that make compelling cases for and against the movie: Walter Chaw's and Armond White's.

WHERE/WHEN: Multiple showtimes daily at various multiplex theatres in every Frisco Bay county at least through the end of the month.

WHY: Halloween approaches! After posting about Halloween/horror screenings arriving at Frisco Bay cinemas in coming weeks, I was reminded by a reader comment that the Balboa is also hosting two October evenings of horror screenings, namely three silent-era films that have been given new soundtracks (not just music but sound effects and, it appears, dialogue as well) in an attempt to appeal to silent-film averse audiences, and a documentary on local television horror host Bob Wilkins.

After Halloween, the venue is screening a double-bill of 1930s Bela Lugosi horror films The Black Cat and White Zombie on November 7th. For the price being charged I would hope these would be 35mm prints, but I'm skeptical because the event is meant to be a benefit, and a big part of the draw is the presence of San Francisco resident and  horror movie memorabilia collector (oh and Metallica guitarist) Kirk Hammett, along with the display of some of the pieces from his collection which have recently been photographed for publication in a coffee table book. The Another Hole In The Head film festival is also on the horizon at the Balboa and the Roxie, with a just-announced schedule that includes now-rare 35mm screenings of Jaws and The Shining at the Balboa.

HOW: Shot on digital cameras and screening exclusively on digital projectors.

Dracula (1931)

WHO: Tod Browning directed this.

WHAT: An otherwise-excellent scholarly article by Elisabeth Bronfen (pdf) repeats the common misconception that Dracula was the "first sound film of the horror genre", over looking the fact that Universal Pictures followed up silent horror hits like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera with early talkies The Last Warning and The Last Performance in 1929 and The Cat Creeps in 1930. But Dracula was the first to become a real popular sensation, followed shortly by Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and a host of sequels and spin-offs. It remains a classic today, though in-cinema screenings have become rare.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:30 tonight only at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: This is only one of the horror and Halloween-related screenings this month announced since my last round-up devoted to the season. Here are some others:

through Thursday, Oct. 17 at the Rafael and Roxie: Escape From Tomorrow.
Thursday, Oct. 17 at Oddball Films: Halloween-themed show including fantastiques from Georges Méliès, digest prints of Universal Horror classics, Winter of the Witch and more.
Friday, Oct. 18 at the Castro & Roxie: MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS dual venue triple-bill of The Blair Witch Project, Ringu, and Dario Argento's Demons. 
Saturday, Oct. 19 at Artists Television Access: Other Cinema presentation of Room 237 with director Rodney Ascher in person.
Friday, Oct. 25-Monday, Oct. 28 at the Rafael: 1953 House of Wax in digital 3D.
Friday, Oct. 25-Thursday, Oct. 31 at the Rafael: a supposed "final cut" of The Wicker Man.
Saturday, Oct. 26 at Artists Television Access: Other Cinema presents Spine Tingler: the William Castle Story and more.
Tuesday, Oct. 29 at the Castro: I Am A Ghost with director H.P. Mendoza and cast in person.
Tuesday, Oct. 29 at the Rafael: a tribute to Creature Features and the history of local TV horror hosts.
Wednesday, Oct. 30 & Thursday, Oct. 31 at the Rafael: the 1922 Nosferatu.

HOW: Dracula screens on a 35mm double bill with Bride of Frankenstein

Scanners (1981)

WHO: David Cronenberg wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Sandwiched between the ripe-for-analysis The Brood and Videodrome in Cronenberg's career, Scanners today seems like a comparatively overlooked entity in the Canadian filmmaker's mid-career period of rising budgets, increasing international exposure, and deepening intellectual approach to genre filmmaking. Everyone remembers the opening and closing scenes in this film about telekinetic combat between warring corporate and underground factions, but rarely are the rest of the film's plot details, or its aesthetic strategies, discussed at any length. One essay that delves into a particularly neglected example of the latter is Paul Theberge's Cronenberg-focused chapter of Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema. Here's an excerpt:

the most significant uses of electronic sounds take place in relation to the theme of telepathic power: as this power is essentially invisible, Cronenberg must turn to sound in order to make it manifest. Indeed, it is through sound that the scanning power is not only made manifest but, also, given th kind of physical intensity that justifies its enormous effects on other individuals and on the external world. Typically, the sound of the scanning tones (derived from raw oscillator sounds and other effects associated with the 'classic; electronic studio of the 1950s and 1960s) increases in intensity until its power is suddenly unleashed and its effects made visible in the cinematic image

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

WHY: With new retrospectives, film series, and film festivals being announced an an almost daily basis, we're now entering what must be the busiest couple months for Frisco Bay cinephilia. From now until Thanksgiving we can expect a bare minimum of one film festival running every weekend. It's about enough to make your head explode.

Another strand of cinephilia over the next month and a half is the annual procession of horror films programmed to get us in the mood for Halloween. What better a day than Friday the 13th to mark the unofficial launch of this particularly welcome programming thread. The Castro is a favored venue for gatherings of scary movie lovers, and is doing a great job getting us prepared for the spooky season. After tonight's Scanners screening there's a brilliant double-bill of the art-horror classic Carnival of Souls with the creepy (but not normally thought of as horror per se) Last Year in Marienbad this Sunday, Burnt Offerings and the "Amelia" segment of the made-for-TV Trilogy of Terror as part of a tribute to the recently-deceased Karen Black on September 18th, a pairing of The Shining with The Changeling September 27th, and a day of digital 3-D versions of the two most famous 50s-era 3-D horror films House of Wax and Creature From the Black Lagoon, along with a matinee screening of the 2008 documentary Watch Horror Films -- Keep America Strong. 

That's September 29th, but Castro's October horror programming has also been partially revealed on its website, including a new restoration of The Wicker Man October 4-5, an Isabelle Adjani (at her palest) show of Nosteratu the Vampyre and Possession October 6, Psycho (with Marnie) October 13,  Alien (with Dark Star) on the 23rd, and an early 1980s werewolf duo of Joe Dante's The Howling and John Landis's American Werewolf In London. Elegantly capping the month on Friday November 1st is a disturbingly amazing double-bill of what are probably Cronenberg's scariest films The Fly and Dead Ringers.  

The MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS website has not been updated to reflect the rumors that its October 18th Castro show will involve a pair of horror movies famously frightening for what's *not* seen on-screen, or that after its Castro screenings of Can't Hardly Wait and Rules of Attraction next Friday, September 20th, the MANiACS will be crawling to the Roxie for a very rare 35mm showing of Ted Nicolaou's dementedly Cronenberg-esque Terrorvision. There's not much else horror-related on the Roxie's latest printed calendar, except for the Film On Film Foundation's presentation of The Witch Who Came From the Sea, a 1970s exploitation rarity that involves more psychosexual melodrama than straight-up horror. It (along with another Matt Cimber-directed film called Lady Cocoa) constitutes the first FOFF presentation in over two years, and is thus a welcome return for the organization (which has dutifully maintained the ever-useful Bay Area Film Calendar in the meantime). 

I hesitate to mention Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, screening at the Roxie this Sunday, because although it is sometimes grouped with horror films because of its extremely disturbing imagery and the horrific situations it depicts, approaching the film as some kind of a forerunner to 21st Century "torture porn" horror movie rather than as the expressly political work it is, does no favors to Pasolini or to the audience watching it. The Pacific Film Archive is screening it on October 31, which seems more appropriate because it makes it the last film of the venue's roughly-chronological September-October retrospective, than because it makes for an ideal Halloween activity. The more other Pasolini films you can see before watching Salò, the better, in my book. In fact, I think it should be all-but required for a first-time Salò viewer to have seen at least one film of the director's "Trilogy of Life" (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights) before viewing his last and bleakest film. If you're a Pasolini virgin planning to see Salò at the Roxie Sunday, please make an effort to watch one of his other films playing at the Castro or Roxie this weekend before you do, or you may get a very mistaken impression of the filmmaker and the meaning of his swan song. The PFA's Pasolini chronology is a highly-recommended one.

The only real horror title on the current PFA calendar is not playing at the theatre at all, but is an outdoor showing of Phillip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers in downtown Berkeley. Other upcoming East Bay horror and horror-related screenings include the "Monster In Our Shorts" program at the Oakland Underground Film Festival, most of the digitally-projected classics announced to play the New Parkway in late September and October, and most of the 16mm programs screening at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum on October, including the German expressionist Waxworks, and the early spook-house movie The Cat and The Canary. Even the 'Rex' the Wonder Horse film playing at Niles October 5th has a spooky title: The Devil Horse.

HOW: Scanners screens in 35mm tonight as part two of an SFMOMA-presented double bill with The Manchurian Candidate.

Tenebrae (1982)

WHO: Dario Argento directed this, and Goblin provided the musical soundtrack.

WHAT: I haven't seen this one before, so I'll leave the description to Argento biographer James Gracey:

Now recognised as a slyly reflexive and deconstructive commentary on not only Argento's own body of work but also the conventions of the Italian giallo, Tenebrae has experienced a critical reappraisal because of its underlying theme of the effects of violent entertainment on audiences. The twisted tale of an American mystery thriller novelist who becomes caught up in a slew of sadistic murders, seemingly inspired by his latest book, Tenebrae marked Argento's return to the giallo after a successful detour into the supernatural gothic horror of Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980).

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Roxie at 11:45 (or is it 11:59, as presenter Jesse Hawthorne Ficks indicates?).

WHY: If you've been making sure to attend all the Castro Theatre's theatrical screenings of Argento features over the past year, you've seen Phenonema, Deep Red and Suspiria. It's a far better 12-month stretch for seeing his horror movies in the company of other fans than this town has seen in a while. It's as if it's all to get San Francisco amped up to see Goblin perform on its first U.S. tour ever, on October 20th at the Warfield (previously the show was expected to be at the Regency Ballroom but the Market Street former movie palace is more spacious.) Certain other cities are getting a live cinema event in which the band plays in front of a screen showing one of these classic Argento movies. I'm not disappointed that here we'll be having separate experiences, spreading the Goblin joy out over a longer period of time.

Tonight's screening is the opening of a new chapter in the history of stalwart Frisco Bay screening series MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS, which has brought outre and underappreciated fare to San Francisco cinemas for over a decade now, starting out at the 4-Star (which opens Johnnie To's Drug War for a week today, by the way) and moving over to the Castro in 2005 and has been screening almost monthly there (and occasionally at the Roxie or other venues) ever since. The triple-bills thematically curated by Ficks have grown increasingly diffused over the years, as the difficulty of securing 35mm prints to show has grown ever-more staggering. But the loosening connectivity has also been a benefit to getting wider exposure to the lesser-known titles programmed; if a theatre full of Predator and The Thing fans can have their minds blown by My Life as a Dog or if Kickboxer can work as a chaser to Bring It On and Hairspray, it's MiDNiTES audiences who'll be able to experience it.

I call tonight's screening a new chapter because at last month's showing of Josie and the Pussycats, Velvet Goldmine and Wild in the Streets Ficks announced that the latter would be the final MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS midnight show at the Castro. No more than a couple hundred audience members had stuck around to see the last of these three films about rock-and-roll celebrity power, and keeping the 1400-seat theatre running and it's staff on the clock may not be worth it after the witching hour when there aren't more seats filled. Especially when there's an alternative! Tonight's MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS bill with be split between two venues; Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Evil Dead 2 will play back-to-back at the Castro Theatre at 7:00 and 9:30, and then Tenebrae will screen just a ten-to-fifteen-minute walk away at the Roxie just before midnight. You've heard of a "pub crawl"? This is a cinema crawl, and the presentation of a ticket stub from the Castro double-bill will get you into the Roxie for the Argento film for only an additional $5.

It will be interesting to see how many people take advantage of this dual-venue triple-bill, and how many stick to just one or the other. I for one feel like I've seen the Spielberg and Raimi films enough times for a while but am interested in finally checking out the Argento. Others may be more interested in the better-known films at the Castro than the relative obscurity at the Roxie. I wonder if Ficks is waiting to see how tonight's crawl works out before announcing the details of his next event, expected to happen on September 20 with unrevealed films and venues involved.

HOW: Tenebrae screens via a 35mm print. So does The Evil Dead 2, but Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is currently only available for digital screenings, and will show on DCP.

The Wicked Lady (1945)

WHO: Margaret Lockwood, so excellent as the heroine in The Lady Vanishes, plays a delicious anti-heroine in this.

WHAT: Secret passageways, highway robbery, disreputable inns, cross-dressing disguises, and midnight horse rides all factor prominently in this meticulously-constructed but deliriously romantic web of betrayals shot by Jack Cox in the expressionist-influenced style laid down by Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith in the silent era. No actual bodices are seen to be ripped, in part because of the British censors (who were thankfully less restrictive than the American ones who reportedly forced reshoots of many scenes but with higher necklines before the hit could be imported), but also because Lockwood's Barbara Worth is a woman who for most of the film wields complete control over her own sexuality, even when this agency threatens to destroy the lives of the men and women around her. Her charisma is overwhelming even when her self-awareness is not. The film benefits greatly from the fact that she's in every scene, and it seems appropriate that it ends not with a bang but with a fizzle ignited by her disappearance from the diegesis.

WHERE/WHEN: A three-day run beginning yesterday continues 7:30 tonight and tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre.

WHY: After I wrote about another Gainsborough melodrama Madonna Of The Seven Moons two weeks ago, a friend commented that the title made it sound like a giallo - something like Mario Bava's Five Dolls For An August Moon or Dario Argento's The Cat O' Nine Tails. (An Argento title from a more simpler era of nomenclature, Tenebre, screens at the Roxie August 16th). It got me thinking how the gothic tendencies of these films might have influenced horror filmmakers of subsequent generations. And so it wasn't much of a surprise for me to look in the credits of The Wicked Lady to see Hammer horror master Terence Fisher's name as the editor of this picture (he also edited . The period costuming and sets, the moody painted backdrops and lighting, and the wonderfully wicked performances by Lockwood and James Mason must have served as an inspirational training ground for the man who'd graduate to the director's chair only a few years later.

Hammer films screen in Frisco Bay cinemas far too irregularly for my liking, and I'm sure the Stanford is one of the least likely local repertory venues for them to make an appearance. But it's great that the theatre plays even more rarely-unspooled British films like this one on occasion. After this week we won't see another British film at the Stanford at least until its current calendar runs out in early September.

HOW: On a 35mm double-bill with another Lockwood picture, Carol Reed's Bank Holiday.

Kuroneko (1968)

WHO: Kaneto Shindo, who died in May 2012 at the age of 100, wrote and directed this.

WHAT: I once tweeted that this film is a missing link between Kenji Mizoguchi's classic samurai-era-set ghost story Ugetsu from 1953, and Nobuhiko Obayashi's feline-themed haunted house phantasmagoria Hausu from 1977. It's the kind of statement that probably deserves more qualification than 140 characters of text can provide. In truth there's a rich tradition of ghost stories in Japanese cinema, and these three films happen to be three of the perhaps four or five best-known examples of this tradition internationally (as evidenced- and perpetuated- by their appearance on DVDs by both Criterion in the US and Masters of Cinema in the UK). I'm not well-exposed enough to Japan's kaidan-eiga history to really say whether Ugetsu directly influenced Kuroneko or whether it in turn influenced Hausu, or whether instead any similarities between the films can be better explained within a broader cultural context of Japanese stories involving spirits and transformations. Although it feels worth pointing out that Shindo apprenticed under Mizoguchi before becoming a director himself, and that Hausu and Kuroneko were made at the same studio, Toho. If Obayashi and Shindo were not intentionally referencing or reacting to the prior films in this make-shift "trilogy" they were at least aware of them. Consequently, if you're a fan of Ugetsu or Hausu or, especially, both, you'll definitely want to see Kuroneko as well. The lighting effects alone distinguish it from the average chiller.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:30 PM

WHY: I hope it's not giving too much of the story away to say that Kuroneko involves shape-shifting between human and animal forms, a theme that recurs in a number of other Japanese films screening at the PFA and other venues in the coming months. No, I'm not speaking of Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog, which screens there next Saturday; that film only compares city dwellers to canines and doesn't imagine them as avatars of one another. But the titles in the Studio Ghibli season of anime includes quite a few animals who take human form, or vice versa; for instance tomorrow's raccoon-dog saga Pom Poko, next Sunday's story of a pilot under a spell to make him look like a pig, Porco Rosso, or next month's Howl's Moving Castle, a film filled with transformations, including the title character's avian tendencies.

Did you know that the director of Howl's Moving Castle was at one point not expected to be the revered Hayao Miyazaki at all, but a younger animation director named Mamoru Hosoda, best known for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time? Hosoda's newest film Wolf Children is another film with a shape-shifter theme, and it gets its San Francisco premiere July 28th and August 4th at the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco at New People Cinema. I'm not sure if any of the other films on this brand-new festival's program (which also includes Himizu by Sion Sono and Lesson of the Evil by Takeshi Miike) involves shape-shifting.

And though it doesn't seem into include any shape-shifting-themed films, and in fact falls outside my usual purview here at Hell On Frisco Bay, I might as well mention that the Sacramento Japanese Film Festival occurs from July 12-14 at that city's Crest Theatre. When your festival opens with the latest film by Masahiro Kobayashi, Haru's Journey starring Tatsuya Nakadai, and includes a retrospective screening of Mikio Naruse's masterful silent Every Night Dreams, you get my attention. I'm thinking about a little road trip...

HOW: Kuroneko screens in a 35mm print.

I Walked With A Zombie (1943)

WHO: Val Lewton is credited as the producer and uncredited as a writer on this.

WHAT: It sounds like the basest of exploitation films from its title, but say I Walked With A Zombie enough times and you eventually may hear in it the poetry that Lewton and his director Jacques Tourneur were able to imbue into the film itself. Yes it deals with the supernatural but in perhaps the most elegant and honest way imaginable in a film. Lewton was tasked with creating low-cost films to compete with the iconic and incredibly popular monsters of the Universal House of Horrors, which in the 1940s was given to team-up films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, privileging characters over genuine chills. Lewton's studio RKO had no properties suitable for such treatment (how can you make a King Kong movie for less than $150,000?), which was all the better for Lewton: he applied his imagination and drew inspiration from his own biography (Cat People, his first film, in some ways mirrored his personal history as a Crimea-born immigrant from a Jewish-turned-Russian Orthodox family, who became baptized as Episcopalian upon arrival in the US) and from public-domain literature.

I Walked With A Zombie is loosely an adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, transposed to a fictitious Caribbean isle called Saint Sebastian. If it shares (as some commentators have noted) similarities to Alfred Hitchcock's Eyre-esque Rebecca, it wouldn't be a surprise as Lewton assisted in that Oscar-winning film's production while at his previous Hollywood job working under mega-producer David O. Selznick. But I Walked With A Zombie is, in my book, a better film than Rebecca. It packs twice as much eerieness and overwhelming mood into half the running time of the Hitchcock film, and includes unique-for-its-time commentary on relations between whites and blacks, and one group's relative obliviousness to the other. It's a masterpiece for all these reasons and more.

WHERE/WHEN: Today and tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre at 7:30.

WHY: Although David Packard and his film booking team behind the Stanford have been known to program films based on current events (such as timing a run of the 1951 musical Royal Wedding with Prince William's), I can't remember ever detecting any acknowledgement of current Hollywood trends in the venue's programming choices. After all, the Stanford devotes its screen entirely to films made before the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential administration (with the very occasional exception made for a few certain favored filmmakers like Howard Hawks, Akira Kurosawa, Katharine Hepburn and Satyajit Ray). Why should they notice what's playing at the multiplexes in nearby Redwood City or Mountain View?

But today's double bill of two Lewton-produced films, I Walked With A Zombie and Isle of the Dead (a film about a plague and quarantine in Greece, and inspired by an Arnold Böcklin painting that is seen hanging in I Walked With A Zombie as well), seems somehow calculated as a response to the nation's current #2 movie at the box office, which has already in one week brought in more raw dollars (not adjusted for inflation) than any other zombie movie released in US history. I haven't seen World War Z so perhaps I should refrain from snide judgments- although I've never been a fan of its director Marc Forster. I Walked With A Zombie was a big box office hit in its day as well, and likely was sneered at sight unseen by certain moviegoers, and it lives on today as a cult classic appreciated both by horror fans and art-movie lovers.

More films appealing to arthouse and horror audiences playing on Frisco Bay this summer include Cat People, booked at the Stanford August 21-23 on a double-bill with the decidedly-non-horror (but exquisitely beautiful) Lewton picture Curse of the Cat People. The Castro Theatre brings a July 12th double-bill of The Exorcist (by avowed Lewton aficionado William Friedkin) in DCP, and a 35mm print of Dario Argento's Suspiria. The day before that another Castro bill places Charles Laughton's 1955 Night of the Hunter, which I dare say might be called Lewtonesque, with a film by another Lewton fan, Martin Scorsese; it's his 1991 remake of Cape Fear; both of these in 35mm. Horror is practically the only major genre not included on Silent Film Festival program, which brings comedies, dramas, a Western and a Scandinavian "Northern" to the Castro July 18-21. So the Balboa Theatre's July 13th screening of Paul Wegener's The Golem will have to suffice for silent film fans eager to see early precursors to the horrors of Universal and Lewton.

The Roxie, meanwhile, is showing another Dario Argento classic on 35mm: Tenebre, which like Suspiria was scored by the members of the band Goblin (who is making a stop at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco October 20th as part of its first-ever North American tour; tickets go on sale tomorrow). They also screen Berberian Sound Studio tonight (it's last night of a week-long run) and, as part of the Frozen Film Festival, a documentary about the making of Rosemary's Baby.

Finally, the Mission Street restaurant Foreign Cinema is showing Rebecca nightly from July 19 through August 4th. I've never actually attended this venue, and am not sure if they still show 35mm prints as they did when they first opened in 1999, nor whether it's at all a worthwhile place to watch a movie- most reports I've heard say the films are really used as no more than ambiance for the dinner experience; in other words it's no New Parkway. But I'd like to hear from anyone who has had experiences eating and trying to watch a movie there.

HOW: I Walked With A Zombie screens on a 35mm double-bill with Isle of the Dead.

Jaws (1975)

WHO: Steven Spielberg. John Williams. And a great cast headed up by a shark.

WHAT: To some cinephiles, the name 'Spielberg' is a baneful one. Two months ago when he was announced to head the jury awarding prizes among the competition films in the upcoming Cannes Film Festival (whose lineup has just been announced), there was quite a bit of wailing from certain quarters that he would impose his mainstream, Hollywood, formula sensibilities in an arena where artistry should be prized over entertainment value. But what if the two are not mutually exclusive? Can there be artistry in a horror movie? A blockbuster? If Jaws doesn't answer these questions affirmatively, I'm hard pressed to think of a Spielberg picture that can.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the CineArts Pleasant Hill at 2:00 and 7:00.

WHY: I don't often write about suburban multiplexes on this blog, especially now that they've all converted to all-digital projection, and become even more cookie-cutter than ever before because of it. But there's at least one five-screen theatre in Contra Costa County which stands out from all the other Frisco Bay cinemas I'm aware of: The CineArts Pleasant Hill, formerly known as the Century 5, and before that the Century 21. But I've usually just heard it referred to as "the dome." It opened in 1967 as the region's only massively-curved-screen D-150 cinema, and though it has since been modified (four additional houses sectioned off from the main screen, which is now only slightly curved, and an all-DCP projection system put into place) it's still not only unique to the East Bay but different from the other dome theatres in Sacramento and San Jose.

For the past several years the dome has operated as an art house, but this weekend is it's last hurrah. Demolition is set to take place this summer to make way for a sporting goods store, although there is a last-ditch grass-roots attempt to stop that. Other bloggers have recently written on the dome and the fight to save it, but it seems clear that your only certain chances to see a movie in this marvelous example of midcentury architecture are this weekend. The theatre will be showing its usual fare in the four side theatres, but is giving the dome over to three classics showing twice per day for only $3 a ticket.

Today it's Jaws, appropriate since the dome was, according to Cinema Trasures, one of the original 464 theatres nationwide to exhibit that film during it's initial "saturation booking" release in 1975. Tomorrow it screens The Sound of Music and Sunday it shows (most appropriate to the space-age design of the theatre when it was built) 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Since these will be digital presentations, it seems worth noting that film purists will be able to see another early Spielberg work in 35mm soon: Duel, which was made for television but will be shown in the rarely-shown theatrical cut at the Castro Theatre April 26th.

HOW: Jaws screens via DCP.