Carl Martin: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Carl Martin runs the Film On Film Foundation's invaluable Bay Area Film Calendar.

Image courtesy Noir City film festival.

January 22, The Castro (Noir City): The Sleeping Tiger.  On this second viewing, Joseph Losey's bold sleight of hand stood out.  What looks like dubious psychology is a misdirection.  As in Ride the Pink Horse (seen later in the year in Elliot Lavine's series at the Castro), at film's end a female character comes to the fore and proclaims her centrality.

March 13, The Castro: Dead People (aka Messiah of Evil).  An ecstatically-shot slice of American Euro-trash.  The print was fragile and it was a privilege to be in its presence.

March 16, private screening: Darby O'Gill and the Little People.  This Disney live-actioner is notable for landing Sean Connery the lead in a certain iconic spy franchise, for its remarkably effective forced-perspective effects, and, if you make allowances for the somewhat watered-down ending and in your mind allow the film to be what it wants to be, for being pretty goddamn devastating.

April 24, The Stanford: Devil and the Deep.  I don't make it down (up?) to Palo Alto much but trust David Packard('s programmers) to turn up delightful obscurities like this.  The titles make a big deal about introducing Charles Laughton, who had made films before, but no matter.  He makes a meal of the scenery in this underwater potboiler. Gary Cooper and Cary Grant are also featured.

Screen capture from Warner DVD

June 1, The Castro (SFSFF): Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ.  I also revisited the Wyler (Heston) version, which is quite good, but the Niblo version has it beat.  The color sequences (with boobs!) are breathtaking.  Unusually for the Silent festival, a recorded score (by Carl Davis) was used, but it was brilliant.  To digress, I'm sad that the new restoration of Napoleon will exclude Kevin Brownlow and Davis, and of course that it isn't being done on film.

June 10, The Castro: Body Heat.  No great rarity i guess, but i'd never seen this wonderful and hilarious neo-noir.  Ted Danson's shining moment.

August 12, The Castro: Blue Steel. Kathryn Bigelow, paradoxical lady master of the male gaze, is on a hot streak with her third feature.  Gorgeous print!

August 27, The Castro: Dementia.  A movie from another planet!  Nothing about Dementia fits into a standard narrative of film history. Who are these people who think they can make a feature with no dialogue?  Even Chaplin was making talkies at this point.

October 2, The Castro: Assault on Precinct 13. Laurie Zimmerman is one of many totally badass things about this early John Carpenter slow-burn actioner.  It is Night of the Living Dead with gangs instead of zombies.

And, lastly, 3 small-gauge selections from different shorts programs.
March 5, Exploratorium: The Mysterious Villa (forgotten formats program).  A program of oddball film gauges unearthed this 28mm corker.  Hilarious!
June 18, The Lab: Postcard from San Miguel (See a Rose Hear a Bomb: films by Lawrence Jordan). The promise of the film's title is fulfilled: the beautiful amalgam of image, music, and text (by Garcia Lorca) had me "wishing I was there".

Screen capture from Fantoma DVD

November 9, New Nothing: Puce Moment (Other States: a program of films selected by Paul Clipson).  I must have seen this Anger film before but here its parade of sparkly dresses, brought by the simplest of tricks to life, struck me as a magical cinematic gesture.  The anachronistic psych music (added decades after photography) casts an eerie spell over the proceedings.

Ben Armington: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Ben Armington works for Box Cubed and participates in this podcast.

1. The Missouri Breaks (Roxie, presented by David Thomson) 

2. The Magnificent Ambersons (Rafael film center, Orson Welles retro, with Joseph McBride)

3. Alice in the Cities (Castro, Wim Wenders retro)

4. Unforgiven (Castro)

5. The Plague Dogs (YBCA, Not Suitable for Children series)

6. Hustle (Castro)

7. A History of Violence (YBCA, David Cronenberg retro)

8. Stoned (Exploratorium, Back to After School with Jesse Hawthorne Ficks)

9. Blue Steel (Castro)

10. Hypnosis Display (Victoria, Crossroads Festival)

Terri Saul: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Terri Saul is a Berkeley-based artist.
 

With the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley closed almost half of this year, my list of repertory and revival films watched in 2015 dwindled to a record low. I only watched two older films in movie theatres last year! How I rely on the PFA to see older films projected in front of an audience.

I did attend festivals, only to catch new releases, which leaves me falling short of ten films for this year’s “I Only Have Two Eyes.”

Screen shot from Criterion DVD

1) Andrei Rublev (1966) by Andrei Tarkovsky, screened at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, on Saturday July 4th at 7:00 p.m. I’d noted a number of the Tarkovsky series screenings on my calendar but got sidetracked and only caught this one. It was magnificent, larger than life.

2) El Sur (1983) with Victor Erice in person was the last film I saw at the PFA before the closure. This one screened on Friday July 31^st at 7:30 p.m. I loved The Spirit of the Beehive and had high expectations for El Sur, which were met and surpassed. Apparently this film was originally going to be a series of two, or a much longer story, but for a variety of reasons (censorship or funding issues, if I remember correctly), the follow-up never happened. Erice says, for him, it’s difficult to watch the truncated El Sur, knowing what would have come next (the part where we actually see the mythic South). Erice says he decided to let the work stand (paraphrasing) “it belongs to the audience” he said. It should not be associated with the missing story pieces that he and his crew alone hold.

3) As part of the 2015 San Francisco International Film Festival, the POV Award was presented to Kim Longinotto accompanied by a screening of one of her films, Dreamcatcher. I was under the impression that it was an older film, however IMDB lists it as a 2015 film. We discussed her earlier work, but I suppose even this film won’t count toward my list.

Lincoln Spector: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Lincoln Spector is the proprietor of the Bayflicks website. This commentary has been extracted and slightly adapted from a post on that site.

7. An entertainingly gruesome Halloween
Castro
35mm

On Halloween, my wife and i improvised costumes and headed for the Castro–not for the street party, but for the movies: a triple bill of Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Evil Dead. The show started with a hilarious selection of trailers–mostly of deservedly forgotten flicks. We skipped Massacre (I don’t care for it much) and enjoyed a very long intermission. The audience was rowdy and fun, and we ran into friends. Unfortunately, the print of Living Dead was badly battered.

6. Noir triple bill with the Stones (no, not those Stones)
Castro
Noir City
35mm (I think)
The Noir City festival is always fun. But in 2015, the festival’s highlight were three thrillers made by Andrew and Virginia Stone, a filmmaking team whose work I was completely unfamiliar with until this screening. None of them were masterpieces, but they were all well-made and enjoyable. The usual Noir City audience helped with the enjoyment.

5. Apu Trilogy 
Shattuck
DCP
I finally saw the Apu Trilogy this year, on three consecutive nights. It’s clearly one of the great masterpieces of cinema (or, arguably, three of the great masterpieces). And it has been beautifully reborn with one of the most impressive restorations in history. The original negatives were destroyed in a fire, but L’Immagine Ritrovata at the Cineteca di Bologna physically restored much of the melted negatives to the point where they could be scanned.

4. Visages d’enfants
Castro
San Francisco Silent Film Festival
DCP
I had never heard of this film before I read the festival program. It sounded interesting, but I didn’t know until it started that I was watching a masterpiece. Set in a small town high in the Alps, in what appears to be the last 19th century, Visages d’enfants follows the difficulties of what is now called a blended family–and–as is so often the case–it wasn’t blended very well. Beautiful restoration, and Stephen Horne‘s accompaniment–on piano, flute, and I’m not sure what else–just dazzled. Before the film, Serge Bromberg gave an informative and enjoyable introduction.

3. Oklahoma!
Elmwood
DCP
The new digital restoration allows us to enjoy the movie as it was meant to be seen–and that hasn’t been available for decades. Yes, the plot is silly and some of the cowboy accents are terrible, but when you see Oklahoma! on the big screen, with an audience, you discover what a remarkable piece of entertainment it is. The songs are catchy, the jokes are funny, and Agnes DeMille’s choreography is amongst the best ever filmed. And the new digital restoration allows us to experience it in something similar to the original 30 frames-per-second Todd-AO.

2. Piccadilly
Castro
San Francisco Silent Film Festival A Day of Silents
The last silent film I saw theatrically this year was one I’d wanted to see for years. The Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong finally gets the great part she deserved in this British drama about dancing and sex in a London nightclub. Musicians Donald Sosin (on piano and Macintosh) and John Mader (on percussion) put together an often jazzy, occasionally Chinese score that always served the story.

1.Three-Strip Technicolor Projection Experiences
Pacific Film Archive
35mm archival print & 4K DCP
In July, quite by happenstance, I was able to compare the old and new ways to project a film shot in Technicolor’s three-strip process. The first, Jean Renior’s The River, was screened pretty much as the original audiences saw it–in a 35mm dye-transfer print manufactured in 1952. The second, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann, has been digitally restored and was digitally projected. Each was wonderful in its own way.

Claire Bain: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Claire Bain is a Canyon cinema filmmaker, artist and writer. Here's her website.

Singin' in the Rain screen capture from Music Box Films DVD: The Story of Film

All at the Castro, I ended the year with: Cyd Charisse elongated Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon. This pair of musicals dipped into dance and song with script dadafying zeal.

Breakfast at Tiffany's had Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard as courtesan and gigolo, respectively. A hilarious party scene and Hepburn singing and (really!) playing guitar on "Moon River" were among my favorite moments in this interesting film.

Max Goldberg: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Max Goldberg lives in Oakland and collects his writings on film at mgoldberg.net.

Yugoslav Avant-Garde Cinema, 1950s-1980s: Ex-Film from an Ex-Land (Series at Pacific Film Archive, March)
I had no idea.

Visages d’enfants, dir. Jacques Feyder (San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theatre, May 30)
 I was completely unprepared for this exacting portrayal of a child’s grief and subsequent coming of age.

Out of the Blue, dir. Dennis Hopper (Castro Theatre, June 3)
A one-of-a-kind, end-of-the-line film with Neil Young’s voice shakier than usual echoing in the Castro. Hopper’s update of Rebel Without a Cause offers a final flameout ahead of the Reagan years.

Only Yesterday, dir. John Stahl (Pacific Film Archive, June 20)
All the evidence you would ever need to dispel the simplistic opposition of “melodrama” and “realism.” A deep bow to Margaret Sullavan’s performance—her debut, amazingly.

Screen capture from Music Box Films DVD: The Story of Film

Mirror, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky (Pacific Film Archive, July 11)
When I last saw this film projected, it was in an empty theatre. The PFA, by contrast, was turning people away all throughout its Tarkovsky retro. I continue to find the Russian auteur's cult a little baffling but must admit that it was quite moving to watch such a personal film in a sold-out house.

Nightfall, dir. Jacques Tourneur (Castro Theatre, September 3)
Cinephiles often glorify the theatrical experience for the quality of the image, but Nightfall was a case where seeing it on the big screen really brought home the insidious logic of the cutting. This film has a marvelous way of stitching disparate spaces together into its cracked vision of Fifties America.

Amy Halpern Canyon Cinema Salon (New Nothing Cinema, October 5)
It's always refreshing to see an experimental filmmaker creating work with extraordinary technical chops, and that is certainly the case with Halpern’s films.

The Boys from Fengkuei, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien (SFFS Taiwan Film Days at the Embarcadero, October 13)
How considerate for SFFS to have programmed this for a chaser to The Assassin. I only wish some of those people turned away from the Tarkovsky films might have filled more of the seats at the Embarcadero.

I Only Have Two Eyes: 2014 Edition

Screen capture from Warner DVD of Macao

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

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

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

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

I Only Have Two Eyes 2013

Though we've been conditioned to expect the cinema to be a place to watch brand-new movies, and for our exposure to cinema history to come largely from our own personal screens at home (and, increasingly, on the go), I've often wondered why this state of affairs couldn't be reversed. So many of the modern movies filling communal screens feel as disposable as the planned-to-be-obsolete technologies that we surround ourselves with, while the cinema experience cries out for "content" (to reclaim a tech-world term I'v grown to hate) as timeless as the moviegoing experience has been over the century or so that dedicated movie theatres have been in existence.

Fortunately, the San Francisco Bay Area is still a place where we can watch a time-tested work of cinematic art in a movie palace or specialized screening space amidst other members of our community. Although the long-term future of the cinematic experience, and especially the experience of watching 35mm prints, has in recent years come into some doubt (a recent KQED blog does a very good job describing the stakes and the challenges), we're lucky here on Frisco Bay to still be able to experience a reasonably diverse array of moviegoing options other than the newest beneficiaries of hype.

This is now the seventh year I've conducted a survey of local movie lovers who make repertory and revival screenings a priority. As always, I've asked for up to ten choices of favorite screenings of (very to slightly) older films seen in Northern California cinemas in 2013. I'm always impressed with the thoughtfulness and breadth of selections made by participants, and would like to take a moment to publicly thank them all for their involvement. I'll be updating this page multiple times daily for the rest of the month with links to more participants' lists, so keep watching this space!

January 27: Michael Hawley, who blogs at film-415.
January 27: Terri Saul, cinephile, writer and visual artist.
January 28: Veronika Ferdman, who writes for Slant magazine and notcoming.com.
January 28: Lincoln Spector, who runs Bayflicks.
January 29: Susan Hahn, who blogs at six martinis and the seventh art.
January 29: Lawrence Chadbourne, whom you can follow on twitter.
January 30: Jason Wiener, who blogs at Jason Watches Movies.
January 30: Ben Armington, Box Cubed manager & moviegoer.
January 31: Maureen Russell, film festival volunteer, member and aficionado.
January 31: David Robson, who blogs at House of Sparrows.
February 1: Carl Martin, who maintains the Bay Area Film Calendar.
February 1: James Brown, cinephile, musician and blogger.
February 10: Michael Guillén, who blogs at The Evening Class.

February 10: Brian Darr, your host.

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY CREATED JANUARY 27, 2014, AND WAS UPDATED TO INCLUDE EACH NEW RESPONDENT.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

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

WHAT: My favorite new Coen Brothers film since No Country For Old Men at least, and perhaps going as far back as their last folk-music-centric film O Brother, Where Art Thou? And though I've seen it only once, I rank it a tentative #10 on my top 10 list of films for the year (the first time a Coen film has made my annual list since I began compiling them, I think). See below for more on that, and for a link to a full-fledged review of the film.

WHERE/WHEN: Multiple showtimes daily for the foreseeable future at various Frisco Bay theatres including the Embarcadero, Kabuki & Empire in San Francisco, the Piedmont in Oakland, the California in Berkeley, the Camera 7 in Campbell, and the Sequoia in Mill Valley, among others.

WHY: I picked the above screen capture (from the trailer to Inside Llewyn Davis) not only because it was one of my favorite shots in the film, but because I knew I'd be using the occasion of this post to roll out my annual year-end-lists of new movies seen in 2013. And the sentiment seems apropos for a post that feels in some ways as thought-out, ill-judged, and pregnant with indeterminate permanence as a graffiti scrawl.

This post also completes my experiment of putting a post-a-day about a local Frisco Bay screening up on this blog every day in 2013- more on that endeavor in a future post, I promise, but for now I'll say that the process definitely altered my viewing patterns for the year.  I found myself watching even more repertory and experimental films to the exclusion of new films than I usually have, and more commercial US fare than foreign films. I also, for the first time since 2005, didn't venture out of Frisco Bay to any film festivals this year, which I suspect has had a hand in shaping the character of this list as a whole. Finally, I made less time to rewatch favorite new films, which makes this selection feel a bit more shaped by first impressions than usual. This means the ordering of the list beyond #1 is fairly arbitrary, and that the runners-up may have some claim on some of the lower-rung slots.

On the other hand, because I was filling content for my blog every day, I ended up writing at least a few words, and sometimes a few more than that, on each of these films placed on my top 10. I have linked the appropriate article, and, since these writings are basically informal musings of varying lengths, added a link to a particularly favored review by someone who has taken the time and thought to craft a serious critical piece on each in my top ten.

1. Leviathan (Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor) - Max Goldberg
2. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach) - Vadim Rizov
3. Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami) - Kenji Fujishima
4. The Place Beyond The Pines (Derek Cianfrance) - Michael Sicinski
5. Drug War (Johnnie To) Hua Hsu
6. 12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen) - ReBecca Theodore-Vachon
7. The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski) - Ryland Walker Knight
8. All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor) Dana Stevens
9. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth) - Cheryl Eddy
10. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) - Adam Nayman

Runners-up, alphabetically by title: At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman), Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski) Metallica Through the Never (Nimród Antal), Our Nixon (Penny Lane), Passion (Brian De Palma), The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)

Ten (as far as I know) undistributed favorites, alphabetically by title: Big Joy: the James Broughton (Stephen Silha, Eric Slade & Dawn Logsdon) Bright Mirror (Paul Clipson), Dusty Stacks of Mom (Jodie Mack), Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 8 (Rick Prelinger), My Way To Olympia (Niko von Glasow), The Realist (Scott Stark), The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher), Tokyo Family (Yoji Yamada), Verses (James Sansing), Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang)

HOW: Inside Llewyn Davis has digital showings only, which is a shame because it was shot on 35mm by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, and is rumored to be the last Coen Brothers film to be shot on film (Delbonnel has already stepped into the digital world with next year's shot-in-North Beach release Big Eyes). Or perhaps it's not such a shame after all, as the Coens note they edit digitally and in fact pioneered the use of digital intermediates with  O Brother, Where Art Thou?)

In A Year of Thirteen Moons (1978)

WHO: Written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

WHAT: According to Wallace Steadman Watson this was one of the three films that Fassbinder, when asked about his favorites of his own films shortly before his death in 1982, cited as "important" along with Beware of a Holy Whore and The Third Generation. Ed Gonzalez has insightfully drawn a link between Beware of a Holy Whore and In A Year of Thirteen Moons as films marked by devastating events in Fassbinder's personal and professional life just prior to their production; In A Year of Thirteen Moons was made just after the suicide of Fassbinder's ex-lover Armin Meier following their breakup. Meier had appeared in several of Fassbinder's films, at least twice (in Fear of Fear and Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven playing the husband to a shrewish Irm Herrman housewife. I have not seen In A Year of Thirteen Moons yet myself, however. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today at 5:15 at the Pacific Film Archive and 7:30 next Saturday, December 21st at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

WHY: I've long been warned that although In A Year of Thirteen Moons is one of Fassbinder's most rewarding films, it's also one whose rewards may not be apparent to a viewer who has little experience with and understanding of the writer-director through his other films, so I've held off on seeing it. With a good portion of the multi-venue retrospective held over the past months under my belt, I think it may be time for me to finally seek out this reputed masterpiece (ranked 3rd of Fassbinder's films by the contributors to the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll behind Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Berlin Alexanderplatz, and tied with the latter for 3rd by the directors polled that year, who put Veronika Voss in the #2 slot). It seems fitting, then, that both the PFA and YBCA series, and in fact their entire slate of 2013 film programming, ends with this film.

HOW: 35mm imported print

I Only Have Two Eyes 2012

It's time to present my annual survey of cinephiles' favorite repertory and revival film screenings at Frisco Bay venues. This is one of my favorite uses of my blog -- a way to collectively honor the entire chain of people that go into the creation of a meaningful cinema culture. The filmmakers (some long-dead) who originally produced these works. The archivists over the years who kept them safe for the current and future generations to appreciate, and in many cases performed important restoration work to make sure they look as their makers intended. The specialty distributors (or the increasingly-marginalized specialty distribution arms of major studios) who make them available for theatrical booking, sometimes after going to great expense to strike brand-new prints. The non-profit festivals and screening venues (along with a few for-profit businesses, usually small and family-owned rather than big and corporate) that take risks with their programming choices to ensure that there's a healthy alternative to the Hollywood mainstream on local screens. The projectionists and other theatre workers who help ensure that the presentation of these films maintains, or even improves upon, the standard of care displayed by the other links in this chain. And last but not least the moviegoers themselves, who help fund all the above activities with their box office dollars and cents, and whose enjoyment and intellectual stimulation is arguably the whole meaning of the entire enterprise.

I've done this for five years in a row before now, and I'm always amazed at the number of different films and venues that get mentioned by my generous contributors. I really appreciate the time they've taken to reflect upon their cinematic year and share it with anyone who happens upon this blog. Here's the list of contributors:

Adam Hartzell, writer for koreanfilm.org and many other sites
Rob Byrne, who blogs at Starts Thursday.
Ryland Walker Knight, writer and filmmaker whose web presence has a hub here.
Jonathan Kiefer, a film critic whose reviews are collected at jonathankiefer.com.
Victoria Jaschob, freelance writer and Event Planner for the SF Silent Film Festival.
David Robson, proprietor of the House oF Sparrows.
Lincoln Spector, the man behind Bayflicks.
Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, the mastermind of MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS.
Jason Wiener, who frequently Watches Movies.
Michael Hawley, who blogs at film-415.
Maureen Russell, cinephile and film festival volunteer.
Ben Armington, Box Cubed chieftain, Roxie pinch hitter, furtive film-goer.
Frako Loden, film studies teacher and Documentary magazine contributing editor.
Terri Saul, cinephile, writer and visual artist.
Lawrence Chadbourne, long-time video collector and recent tweeter.
Carl Martin, film projectionist and keeper of the Bay Area Film Calendar.
Kurtiss Hare, who operates Cinefrisco.
Mark Wilson, an artist/filmmaker who features in an upcoming East Coast exhibition.
Brian Darr, a.k.a. me.

THIS POST WAS CREATED JANUARY 14, 2013, AND WAS UPDATED DAILY UNTIL JAN. 24, 2013.

The Two Eyes Of Brian Darr

Thanks for indulging my annual round-up of Frisco Bay cinephiles' favorite repertory/revival screenings of 2012. I hope you've enjoyed reading what I've posted here so far. The full list of contributions can be found here. 

I'm not quite done; this year, I'd asked respondents to name one brand-new film that they saw in a local venue in 2012, in which something about the venue conspired with the film to make for a particularly memorable and enjoyable experience. Not every contributor responded to this request, and  I decided to collect all the responses to this question into a single post, which I'll be putting up soon. 

But for now, here is my own list of ten favorite films from our cinematic past, revived on Frisco Bay cinema screens in 2012, in the order I saw them:

Underworld USA
2012 started off like gangbusters, literally, with the 10th Annual Noir City festival at the Castro Theatre, and particularly with this late (1961; some would say post-) noir by the iconoclastic Hollywood figure Sam Fuller. It immediately became my new favorite Fuller film, as it expresses both his cynical view of the connections between American crime and business, and his tabloid-headline expressionist approach to cinematic language extremely authentically. I now have the perfect starting recommendation for anyone wanting to explore the black-and-white precursors to Scorsese's & Coppola's gangland epics.

Four Nights Of A Dreamer
At the Pacific Film Archive's near-complete Robert Bresson retrospective I was able to plug several of the most yawning gaps in my experience with the French filmmaker. Undoubtedly, his films are challenging and I must admit I've in the past had better luck approaching an initially satisfying comprehension of them in the home video arena, with its pause and rewind buttons, than in cinemas. But these films were made for theatres, and for the first time I finally felt I had a cinematic communion with a Bresson print, truly sensing myself on the right wavelength with the film's every move. Perhaps it's because this 1971 film is Bresson's most impressionist work, or perhaps because I was previously familiar with his source material (Dostoyevsky's White Nights.) At any rate, I'm especially likely to treasure this rare screening as Four Nights of a Dreamer is reputedly troubled with rights issues holding up a proper DVD release. 

Wagon Master
When Quentin Tarantino made recent comments about hating John Ford, both the man and the filmmaker, for his racism, I instantly thought of the Ford films which (unlike, say, Stagecoach), present a far more complicated picture of his racial attitudes than is often acknowledged. Consider Fort Apache, which illustrates the folly of the U.S. Cavalry treating Chiricahuas as nothing more than an enemy army, or The Searchers, in which John Wayne portrays a racist as a kind of victim of his own psychotic, narrow hatred of The Other. Having seen it as recently as March at the Stanford Theatre, I thought of Wagon Master as a vessel for Ford's most explicitly anti-racist statement of them all. The scene in which a Navajo (played by the great Jim Thorpe) is translated (by the late Harey Carey, Jr's character) to proclaim that white men are "all thieves", might not be so remarkable if it weren't for Ward Bond's sympathetic character's agreement with the sentiment. But race is only a part of what this grand, lyrical, often heartbreaking 1950 film is about. Its band of travelers, each holding diverse values and goals but all sharing in the hardships of the road, is a beautiful microcosm for the tolerance and compromise we must learn to cultivate to exist harmoniously in this world.

Napoléon
Insiders have been indicating for a couple years, that we are now seeing the final days of film-as-film screenings. Some people have suggested that the film reel might make a resurgence as did the vinyl record did even after tapes, compact discs and ultimately mp3s threatened to wipe it out. I'm not sure if that's possible, but if it's going to happen we may need to see more creative uses of the film projector in order to realize that its operator (the projectionist) can be an artist equivalent to a great DJ. 2012 was a big year for me to experience multi-projector performances, from seeing the cinePimps and (full disclosure: my girlfriend) Kerry Laitala at Shapeshiters in Oakland, to a dual-projector ephemera duel between Craig Baldwin and Stephen Parr at the Luggage Store, an event poignantly held on the day Andrew Sarris died. Though this face-off had me imagining a beguiling future in which curator, performer and auteur become fused into one role, even it couldn't hold a candle to the Silent Film Festival's Paramount Theatre presentation of (to my knowledge) the first film foray into multi-projector "performance" spectacle: the final reel or so of Abel Gance's Napoléon, which I wrote about here. Though the three projectionists involved in this event were performing an act of 85-year-old reproduction and not new creativity, the precision of their coordination is something any performer might aspire to if they want to truly set audience's eyes agog. 

Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
Too many of the locations for these "best of 2012" screenings sadly sit dormant already in 2013. New People/VIZ Cinema is one; the year saw the end of the San Francisco Film Society's experiment with turning it into a year-round screening venue. A week-long engagement of this delightful Eric Rohmer film was a real highlight of the year for me; the fact that it's gone unmentioned by other "I Only Have Two Eyes" contributors helps me understand that the state-of-the-art venue never was able to catch on as a repertory venue. Surely I'm not the only one who would consider this 1987 comedy about two young Frenchwomen with opposing but somehow complimentary backgrounds (made piece-by-piece while Rohmer was waiting for the right weather/light conditions for The Green Ray, which SFFS double-billed it with) to be among his high-water-marks, despite its episodic nature. Can't we consider the collections of A.A. Milne to be masterpieces? Mightn't The Martian Chronicles be as great a work as Fahrenheit 451? 

Land of the Pharaohs 
Here's where I really go out on a limb- or do I? I saw a lot of very great Howard Hawks films last year, thanks to hefty retrospectives at the Pacific Film Archive and the Stanford Theatre, but none made such a surprisingly strong impression as this film maudit did on the latter screen. It's the director's 1955 take on Ancient Egypt and the building of the Great Pyramid. I cannot help but wonder how many of the critics, historians, and cinephiles who continue to perpetuate its reputation as the one time the versatile Hawks took on a genre he couldn't handle, have seen it projected in 35mm on a big screen, as it was clearly made to be seen. Though the director was reportedly none-too-fond of it, his frequent screenwriter Leigh Brackett once went on record calling it one of Hawks's greatest films. Whether or not I'm willing to go quite that far on only a single viewing, I feel certain that seeing this visually stunning story of hubris and political machination unfold in Cinemascope above my eyes was one of my greatest film-watching experiences of the year.

Five Element Ninjas
"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film." I don't wholly endorse this quote by Werner Herzog, as I love Godard (on most days, more than I do Herzog), but I can't deny that I got even more pleasure and maybe even more intellectual stimulation from watching this 1982 Chang Cheh tale of vengeance for the first time at the Roxie than I did from rewatching Week End at the Castro earlier in the year. Chang's output is more uneven than Godard's but his best films, and this is one of them I reckon, are as excited about the possibilities of cinema (here he gets some very eerie effects out of fish-eyed pans, and has a simple but brilliant solution to emphasizing ninjas' skills at silence) and steeped in complicated codes (in this case numerology and Chinese-style alchemy) as any canonized art film. I hope hope hope that collector Dan Halsted makes very many future visits to town with more of his rare Hong Kong 35mm prints in hand.

La Cérémonie
Another screening of a brutal masterpiece by a director with the monogram CC. Here it's Claude Chabrol directing Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert to the hilt in a slow-boiling tale of (mostly) quiet class warfare in a French village. There's a methodicalness to Chabrol's depiction of wounded psyches in a feedback loop hurtling toward catastrophe that makes this 1995 film seem like a model for the clinical works of Michael Haneke or Bruno Dumont. But nothing I've seen from either of those mens' ouevres quite approaches what Chabrol is able to coax out of Bonnaire and Huppert here. Like many local cinephiles I frequently find Mick LaSalle infuriating, but I'm so glad his recent book publication created the excuse to play this as part of a Roxie (and Rafael) series of actress-centric French films.

Only Yesterday
It was with great pleasure and a bit of wistfulness that I took nearly-full advantage of the Studio Ghibli series that played this fall at Landmark's Bridge and California Theatres, catching up with all the films that I'd never seen before (except one, My Neighbors the Yamadas) and revisiting most of those I that had. The pleasure is obvious to any fan of Hayao Miyazaki and his cohort; nearly all of these films are wonderful, unique blasts of color in motion, with not-too-saccharine stories that stick with you for days and weeks and months after viewing, even when in such a near-marathon viewing situation. The wistfulness comes from the fact that the Bridge seemed already on its last legs as a viable Frisco Bay venue, and in fact announced its closure a couple months later, and that Berkeley's California Theatre was on the verge of decommissioning its 35mm projection equipment in favor of all-digital equipment shortly after the series ended. Also from the fact that I knew that with this series I no longer have any more unseen Miyazaki features to view for the first time (until his next one anyhow). But to mitigate this, this series turned me into a fan of fellow Ghibli director Isao Takahata (who also has an upcoming film), largely on the basis of my admiration of his 1991 adaptation Only Yesterday, which I saw at the Bridge. As much as I love Miyazaki's fantasy mode, Takahata's realistic approach here is in some ways more impressive; he creates two totally distinct yet believable palettes with the lush rural setting of its lead character's personal awakening, and the more subdued watercolor-style of her extensive childhood memory flashbacks. He even bucked anime tradition in his voice casting, built around the decision to record dialogue before animating rather than post-dubbing as is Japan's animation norm. The result is a film reminiscent in beauty and theme of Kenji Mioguchi's lovely 1926 Song of Home.

Sonata For Pen, Brush and Ruler 
Last but not least, another kind of animation seen in a (less-sadly) decommissioned venue, the Exploratorium's McBean Theatre, a shiny-ceiling-ed dome inside the Palace of Fine Arts that hosted a wonderful array of screenings over that museum's long stay in that cavernous venue. The Exploratorium is gearing up to move to a new location on Pier 15, and promises to have a made-to-order screening space. But no matter how wonderful it is, I know I'll miss certain aspects of the old McBean, and I'm so thankful that the museum's Cinema Arts department hosted a short series of Canyon Cinema films during its last few months open, as a kind of goodbye. I was able to catch the first and third of these programs, and loved getting a chance to see rarely-shown pieces by Alan Berliner, Gary Beydler, Stan Vanderbeek, John Smith (whose films I also got to see at PFA in 2012) and more. But the most astonishing of these was in the December program: Barry Spinello's 1968 Sonata For Pen, Brush and Ruler. Spinello is a painter and experimental musician, but the 16mm film strip serves as his canvas and master-tape. I'd been impressed by a few of his later works before (one of them, Soundtrack, screens at the PFA shortly with the artist in attendance) but Sonata is so exhilaratingly expansive, so joyfully elaborate, and so recognizably the product of one artist's immense effort that I now have a clear favorite of his films. As he once wrote: "It is my brain, and for ten minutes I expect (I hope, if the film is successful) that the viewer's brain functions as my brain." I think it does.