SFFILM 62 Day 7: Confidence Game

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival began a week ago and runs through April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A scene from Kathleen Quillian's Confidence Game, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM

Confidence Game (USA: Kathleen Quillian, 2018)
playing: 8:30PM today at the Roxie as part of the Shorts 4: Animation program

Some of my favorite things seen so far at SFFILM this year have been shorts. Madeline Anderson's I Am Somebody, for instance, screened as part of her Persistence of Vision Award presentation Saturday, was a rousing, formally inventive half-hour documentary about a 1969 hospital workers' strike in Charleston, South Carolina, that included footage of Coretta Scott King orating in support of the strikers just a year after her husband's assassination. On a completely different tack, the latest nine-minute mindfuck from Guy Maddin and his recent co-directors Galen and Evan Johnson is called Accidence, and it's probably my favorite new Maddin work in dozen years, starting as a planimetric riff on Rear Window and turning quickly into something much more diabolical. It was the warm-up for each screening of The Grand Bizarre over the past few days.

But tonight I'll finally begin to start watching some of the Golden Gate Awards-eligible shorts at the festival. The Shorts 4: Animation program includes ten separate pieces representing seven North American and (mostly Eastern) European countries. Six are by women animators, including the only one by a filmmaker whose work I'm already familiar with: Kathleen Quillian. Her piece Confidence Game made its local debut on a program that I was able to attend a year ago at Craig Baldwin's notorious Other Cinema (where, incidentally, she'll be premiering another new work this coming Saturday) and I liked it enough to place it on my list of top 20 shorts as part of Senses of Cinema's latest World Poll. I've written a bit about Quillian's work before, for instance on the occasion of her 2011 piece Fin de Siècle screening at a 30th Anniversary marathon presentation at Artists' Television Access. But Confidence Game feels like another leap forward for her. Her tendency to center objects in the frame, when repeated against various collage backdrops, gives the piece a hypnotic effect that I'm certain is completely intentional, given the thematic interest in cults of personality that the work is clearly expressing. She ends Confidence Game with an almost psychedelic finale that includes stroboscopic flashing backgrounds, so be forewarned if that sort of thing gives your senses too much of a workout.

I haven't made a terribly close comparison, but it seems like there are more shorts programs in this year's SFFILM than I've ever seen in 20 years of attending. In addition to Shorts 4: Animation there the usual Golden Gate Award contender programs devoted to shorts by and for youngsters. The usual two programs of GGA-nominated documentary and narrative shorts have been expanded to three, and the New Visions program of experimental and form-expanding works appears to be quite strong this year, with new work by Akosua Adoma Owusu, Zachary Epcar, Laura Huertas Millán, Sandra Davis, etc. The New Visions section of the Golden Gate Awards was on the chopping block twenty-five years ago, and saved only due to an outcry from the local experimental film community. You can read a bit about that in this excellent interview between Russell Merritt and SFFILM artistic director Rachel Rosen.

One program that's gone missing this year, after nearly as long, is the annual co-presentation between SF Cinematheque and the Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). This was another set of experimental short films, differing from the New Visions program in various ways over the years. Perhaps because it was an out-of-competition program it tended to involve more 16mm and sometimes even 35mm prints, more work by established artists (though not exclusively so), and more flexibility in terms of the recency of completion; sometimes a program would include a new restoration of a short film made decades prior among a program of new works, and sometimes even the new works weren't always so new, having traveled on the generally slower experimental film festival circuit for a few years before making their way to their first San Francisco and Berkeley screenings. One might argue the need for two programs of experimental work at the festival has been made unnecessary by the sprouting of new festivals devoted entirely or almost entirely to such work: Crossroads, Camera Obscura and Light Field come quickly to mind. But I'm not as certain of the stability of all these younger organizations when compared to the venerable San Francisco International Film Festival, and more importantly I think there's a lot of value in SFFILM's long-standing "big tent" approach to bringing together different, sometimes fractuous communities together to see each other's work and have discussions about it. The loss of one program, even one that's run for 24 years straight, doesn't destroy that but it puts a damper on it.

I'm curious to know the reason for the loss of this program. I wasn't satisfied by the answer I got when I asked about it at SFFILM's program announcement press conference in March. I was told the reason for the change is because the festival wanted all the shorts programs to feature works in competition. That doesn't seem to hold water though, because of the existence of the Shorts 8 program, bringing together two of three Netflix-owned shorts. Both are out-of competition even though the third Netflix short, Life Overtakes Me,appears in the Shorts 1 program and is Golden Gate Award eligible. There must be some other reason.

Anyway, the festival has more than made up for absence of the SF Cinematheque/BAMPFA program in quantity at any rate, by highlighting shorts in their Persistence of Vision Award presentation, to the shorts presented in last night's Evening With Kahlil Joseph and in the Friday night live music presentation that I talk a bit about in the last paragraph of this post. Read on...

SFFILM62 Day 7
Other festival options: Today's the final screening of the Vanguard section of SFFILM, Lapü, about the Wayuú people, who also feature in the recent crime saga Birds of Passage. It screens 4:00PM at YBCA, followed by the final festival showings of the Uruguayan feature Belmonte at 6:15PM, and finally Mariam Ghani's documentary on the re-opening of Afghanistan's national film archive, What We Left Unfinished at 8:30PM. I've heard good buzz on all three so it might be a good place to camp out for the afternoon and evening.

Non-SFFILM option: A terrific set of 16mm shorts comes to the Coppola Theatre at San Francisco State University at 6:30 tonight. There's animation (Sally Cruikshank's Quasi at the Quckadero), documentary (the Miles Brothers' Mt. Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway), found footage classics (Arthur Lipsett's Very Nice, Very Nice and Bruce Conner's Valse Triste) and live-action based experimental films (Bruce Baillie's Mass for the Dakota Sioux and Maya Deren's A Study in Choreography for Camera, which is not among the Deren shorts screening digitally with a new, live soundtrack replacing Teiji Ito's scores at the Castro Friday), showcasing some of the diversity of treasures in the J. Paul Leonard Library collection at SFSU. This collection was the source for one of my favorite film screenings so far this year; it holds one of two known prints of SFMOMA Art In Cinema curator Frank Stauffacher's own filmed mini-masterpiece Sausalito, which showed in late January at BAMPFA with Stauffacher's widow Barbara Stauffacher Solomon on hand to discuss its filming and reception among other topics. Though Sausalito is not among tonight's showings, it will hardly be missed in such a strong line-up (I vouch for five of the six films and perhaps if there's a large enough turnout future screenings from the J. Paul Leonard Library collection might be organized. Best of all, this program is FREE to all!

Broncho Billy's Wild Ride (1914)

Publicity photograph provided by Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

WHO: Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson directed and starred in this.

WHAT: A short film featuring Anderson, Marguerite Clayton, True Boardman and a number of local schoolchildren from Niles, California where Anderson's studio was located. David Kiehn's page-turner of a history book, Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company, indicates that part of the story took as inspiration a real-life injury that would haunt Anderson well into his retirement. That book's short synopsis of the plot is as follows: "Billy, an outlaw on trial, escapes from court, but is caught after he saves the judge's daughter on a runaway horse."

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, at 7:30PM.

WHY: I wrote about Niles in a PressPlay/Indiewire article a few years ago, that has for some reason unknown to me be taken down:

Niles nestles against the hills of Fremont, California, 30 miles east of San Francisco and 350 miles north of Los Angeles. Filled with antique shops and humble residences, it’s a town steeped in motion picture history. The first cowboy movie star, G.A. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, and Charlie Chaplin were among those who encamped there to shoot pictures in the mid-1910s, before Hollywood became THE go-to site in California for filmmaking, 

Now, nearly a hundred years later, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum keeps the past alive with weekly Saturday evening screenings of silent movies backed by live musical accompaniments. It’s one of the few public venues where one can regularly see 16mm and 35mm prints of all kinds of American and occasionally European silents.

Tonight's Niles screening is the 500th Saturday night silent film show scheduled at the Museum's Edison Theatre since it was refurbished and reopened in 2005. 51 Saturdays per year (the only annual week off is the San Francisco Silent Film Festival weekend), film prints show on a very regular basis. Upcoming 16mm feature-film shows include The Lost World November 29th, and in December, parts 1 & 2 of Fritz Lang's epic Spiders (it's apparently the season for Lang's silent epics as the Castro shows Metropolis tonight digitally and the Berkeley Underground Film Society brings Die Nibelungen in two parts tonight and tomorrow), and finally for 2014, the delightful Colleen Moore film I dragged my family to the last time a Niles Saturday show fell on Christmas, Ella Cinders.

But one-reel and two-reel films that were the specialty of a studio like the one in Niles a hundred years ago, and programs made up of these are particularly popular today. Every month the museum programs at least one Saturday of silent comedy (November 22 is Chaplin in The Rink, Buster Keaton in The Boat, the Thanksgiving classic Pass the Gravy and Laurel & Hardy in Leave 'Em Laughing, while December brings Chaplin's Easy Street, Keaton's The High Sign and a pair of Christmas-themed shorts Their Ain't No Santa Claus and the anarchic masterpiece Big Business.) Tonight's program is an extra-special shorts program made up entirely of films shot in Niles, most around 100 years ago, including, in addition to Broncho Billy's Wild Ride, Arthur Mackley's The Prospector, the Snakeville Comedy Versus Sledge Hammers, and the first Chaplin film made entirely in the town back in 1915, The Champion.

The exception to the 100-years-ago rule is Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret, a brand-new silent Western shot in Niles with a genuine Bell & Howell 2709 hand-cranked camera (formerly used by John Korty) and starring Christopher Green, Bruce Cates, former silent-era child star Diana Serra Cary, and a slew of Western-garbed re-enactors. This film has screened in workprints and other preliminary versions before, but tonight is the official premiere of the finalized version at the Edison!

Tomorrow the Edison will host a screening of a independently-produced talking picture made in Niles in 2007. From the museum's press release:  

Weekend King is a romantic comedy filmed in Niles about a California dot-commer who buys a bankrupt town in rural Utah. Rupert is rich, but awkward, friendless, and loveless. In a quest to overcome his loneliness, Rupert expects to lord over the New Spring Utah populace, but ends up contending with people who don't buy into his newly invented confidence. But grappling with his bad investment turns out to be the key for finally finding friendship and love. See local characters in cameos in the local haunts including Joe's Corner, the Vine Cafe, the Mudpuddle Shop, and Belvoir Springs Hotel.

Before both days' screenings, there will be a free Walking Tour of Niles. This 75-minute tour will take you around downtown Niles and its neighborhoods, telling you tales of times gone by including film locations for the films being shown during the movie weekend. Nationally-recognized film historian David Kiehn, who is the film museum's resident expert on the Essanay film company, also knows his stuff about local buildings and historic sites. His walking tours always attract a crowd. This event is free but donations are gladly accepted.

HOW: All of tonight's films screen in 35mm prints with live music by Frederick Hodges.

Santa Cruz Del Islote (2014)

A scene from Luke Lorentzen's SANTA CRUZ DEL ISLOTE, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society. 

WHO: Luke Lorentzen is the Stanford-based filmmaker who directed this, and many other familiar Frisco Bay filmmaking names (consulting producer Jamie Meltzer, sound mixer Dan Olmstead, etc.) are found in the credits.

WHAT: I haven't seen any of the San Francisco International Film Festival's documentary features yet, but I'd be very surprised if many of them are more able to probe an otherwise-invisible corner of the globe with more artistic and documentary integirty than Santa Cruz Del Islote, a 20-minute short about the most densely-populated island in the world. Even Manhattan and Hong Kong have more open space per capita than this 1200-person, 2.4-acre speck off the coast of Columbia, made up of wall-to-wall fisherman's shacks. Eschewing talking heads and infographics for a visually sumptuous approach (every shot is simply gorgeous), Lorentzen allows the island's residents to provide a sparse narration to contextualize what we're seeing and hearing, but for the most part this is not a verbal but a sensory experience of what life is like in the built-up little town and out in the fishing boats. For the residents of Santa Cruz Del Islote, the sky above and the Caribbean around them is their only wilderness, and Lorentzen often frames the horizon low to emphasize the vastness of the island's blue surroundings.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program beginning tonight at 7PM and on Sunday, May 4th at 3:45., both at the Kabuki Theatre.

WHY: Santa Cruz Del Islote screens on the (numerically, not chronologically) first of the San Francisco International Film Festival's seven shorts programs (though one might call this Tuesday's Castro Theatre program an unofficial eighth). This program is nominally half-documentary and half-narrative, but there's definitely some bleedover. There's a documentary element to Jim Granato's comedic narrative Angels, for example, and though up for a documentary award, John Haptas, Kris Samuelson, and Seiwert's Barn Dance is really a performance staged for the camera. Throw in Bill Morrison's archival-footage-based Re:Awakenings, and it makes for a very diverse and surprising program, as SFIFF shorts programs so often are.

HOW: Digital

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 3 at the festival includes other shorts programs such as the also-excellent animation showcase. It's also the night of the first screenings of anticipated-by-me films like Tamako In Moratorium and Our Sunhi.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Other Cinema's weekly screening tonight features the local single-channel premiere of Sam Green's Study of Fog as well as other Frisco-centric offerings.

Muta (2011)

WHO: Lucrecia Martel directed this.

WHAT: Although this short work was commissioned as part of a series of high-end advertisements for an Italian brand of women's clothing, it's of much greater interest than most such (literally) commercial projects I've seen. Its storyline is as simple as it is enigmatic: a swarm of supermodel-shaped women behave rather like insects aboard an otherwise-abandoned ship. Interestingly, none of the women's faces are seen head-on or even in profile, which for me created an unsettling realization of the intensity of my desire to see faces attached to attractive screen bodies, which I'm sure I'd never have become aware of had it not been withheld. And though this conceit may have originated in an attempt to get viewers to focus less on the women and more on their clothes, that did not consciously happen in my case. Instead I found myself admiring the catalog of methods Martel uses to avoid showing the faces, from keeping the actresses heads turned away from the camera, or covered by a mask or hands, to keeping them out of frame, underlit, or out of focus.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts tonight and Saturday at 7:30, and Sunday at 2:00.

WHY: YBCA announced a good portion of its 2013-2014 season earlier this month, and some of the Film/Video department highlights are definitely worth anticipating. Annual events like the British Arrow Awards, the Human Rights Watch Festival, and the New Filipino Cinema series are planned to return (in January, March and June of 2014, respectively). I've mentioned before the Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective expected to run concurrently there, at the Roxie, and at the Pacific Film Archive, but now I know that YBCA's portion, at least, will happen over a three month period from October to December of 2013.

Also in November and December of this year there will be a series called "Age Limit May Vary in Certain Areas: A History of X-Rated Cinema", which, according to the promotional blurb, "looks back at a time when “adult cinema” meant something more than just porn." I can't resist speculating about films that might be brought in such a series (Visconti's The Damned? Russell's The Devils? Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris?) but the only concrete series title listed in the pdf version of the season preview is one of the last films to receive the X rating from the MPAA, and the first to receive the newly-created substitute NC-17 in 1990, Philip Kaufman's Henry and June.

But the above is only a partial list of upcoming screenings, and was presumably drawn up before the confirmed bookings of Benito Bautista's Harana, making nine repeat appearances in August after two sold-out screenings and the taking of the audience award at the New Filipino Cinema festival last month, or of a pair of documentaries on street art playing this September.

But before all that, there's this weeks' screening of Matías Piñeiro's Viola. I was as confounded as I was intrigued by Piñeiro's previous film Rosalinda a.k.a. Hold On, Rosalind at the venue three years ago; that 43-minute work was launched by Shakespeare's As You Like It while Viola relates to a play I'm a little more familiar with, The Twelfth Night. The numerous recommendations I've encountered make me very excited to see Viola, and I'm very pleased that its 65-minute run-time allowed YBCA programmer Joel Shepard to include Muta beforehand to help catch Frisco Bay audiences up with the work of two current Argentine directors at once.

HOW: Muta and Viola screen together digitally, and I'm almost certain both were shot on digital cameras.

Vow of Silence (2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Champion (1915)

WHO: Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, edited and of course starred in this picture.

WHAT: Of the five one- and two-reelers that Chaplin made while working at the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company's studio in Niles, California, this was one of the biggest hits of its time, and still gets laughs from audiences of all ages today. A boxing-themed picture that is sometimes seen as an early precursor to the astounding boxing sequence in Chaplin's 1931 City Lights, but perhaps not quite as meticulously timed for the proper frame rate (as I just heard silent accompanist Ben Model speak about) as he had the means and time to do sixteen year later. 

Joyce Milton's biography Tramp: the Life of Charlie Chaplin is not generally admired by Chaplin fans who are more interested in his artistry than his celebrity, but it does include some interesting information in its focus on his many lawsuits, scandals, etc. According to Milton, it was The Champion which inadvertently launched the famous wave of Chaplin imitators, when a legal attempt to block the distribution of a collage film mashing-up The Champion and a fantasy film called Daughter of the Gods provoked a soft decision from the judge: the pastiche film could be distributed as long as it was not advertised as a Chaplin picture. This judgement opened the door for imitators to make their own films; some of these imitators, Oliver Hardy and Harold Lloyd, for instance, would parlay their experience making such films into a successful career using their own more original characters.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today at 12:30 PM at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

WHY: This weekend has been the annual Charlie Chaplin Days celebration in Niles, California (a small town that became incorporated into what is now Fremont back in 1956. But almost hundred years ago it was for a few months the home of the most famous silent film actor ever, Charlie Chaplin.

Today, each of his five films made in town will screen, for a suggested donation of fifty cents apiece, at the Museum's Edison Theatre, the same room where Chaplin himself watched films when he was in town. They screen in chronological order, with his first Niles film A Night Out at 11:30 AM, and his last, The Tramp, at 3:30, with plenty of time in between showings to browse the museum or its giftshop, or to take in some of the other activities happening on Niles Boulevard today.

HOW: 16mm print, with live musical accompaniment.

Angels (2013)

WHO: Jim Granato directed this short.

WHAT: Thanks to the Sequester, Fleet Weeks all over the country are being cancelled, including New York's, which normally would be occurring today, with an air show by the Blue Angels in honor of Memorial Day today. San Francisco's Fleet Week is usually in October, but will be cancelled for 2013 as well.

I mention all this because Granato's brand-new short comedy is set during Fleet Week, although it's not expressly mentioned in the film; in fact the film's entire comedic premise is the knowledge gap between those of us who've been Frisco Bay residents long enough to understand the rhythms and traditions of our fine city, and those newcomers who can become confused when thrown into a situation they never experienced before coming here.

It's also a celebration of San Francisco traditions, particularly those of the cinematic variety. Settings include some of the Mission District's most vital purveyors of alternative culture, Artists' Television Access, Other Cinema curator Craig Baldwin, and the Roxie (pictured above). Both of these venues need to be supported, especially in these times of massive immigration (and its accompanying displacement) into the neighborhood, by people who may be so used to whatever mall multiplexes and streaming services they used to see movies in their former residences, that they would never even think to look for a cinema that might be screening films and videos they'd be hard pressed to find using any other distribution channels.

But Angels is a comedic tribute, not a harangue. It'll be through the gentle catalyst of humor, if it gets Mission residents (whether long-timers or newcomers) excited about the storied traditions of San Francisco moviegoing - and moviemaking. Indeed, Granato takes a mid-film shift from semi-naturalistic urban comedy (not so far removed from the tradition of American slapstick that grew up mostly on the streets of Los Angeles in the silent era with the outdoor-shot pictures of Mack Sennett and his competitors) to a more fantastic, meta-cinematic mode when he starts making explicit reference to some of the great films shot here in the past. 

What films? I don't want to spoil the surprises and perhaps the biggest laughs in the picture, but with the 2013 Cannes Awards just announced, I'll give a few hints: one of them is the only San Francisco-located film to have won a previous Palme d'Or at Cannes, and another's star handed out one of the awards at the French festival yesterday.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie at 7:30 PM.

WHY: There's no better place to see Angels than in the Roxie, one of its most prominent locations, so this is the perfect place for its world premiere. I previewed it on my home computer and, though I enjoyed it, I felt a bit rueful that I'll never be able to watch it for the first time with an audience to laugh along with, and to see the 104-year-old cinema's cameos on the screen being depicted.

I covered this a bit in my "WHAT" section above, but it's great that the venue is hosting periodic "Neighborhood Nights" to help engage the community with their local big screen. The last one was Sean Gillane's CXL earlier this month, and I'm liking this frequency. Hopefully there will be more on the Roxie's forthcoming summer calendar. In the meantime, there are plenty of other enticing film and video programs at the venue, including Czech That Film, a selection of new films from a European country that Mission Bohemians ought to be able to relate to, and a 6-title Jon Moritsugu series including his brand new Pig Death Machine. Both of these series begin later this week.

HOW: Angels will be screened with Granato's award-winning documentary feature D Tour, about a local musician named Pat Spurgeon, who must contend with a failing kidney while embarking on a tour with his band Rogue Wave. Granato will be on hand at the screening, and so will the band, who will perform a live acoustic set following the digitally-projected short and feature.

Morning of St. Anthony's Day (2012)

WHO: João Pedro Rodrigues directed this.

WHAT: Have you ever felt like you were in a George Romero movie on the morning after a full-fledged Bacchanal? The stars of Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day sure have. It may be useful contextual information to know that St. Anthony's Day is a municipal holiday in Lisbon, Portugal (where this was shot), marking the June 13, 1231 death of the Franciscan monk, who was canonized only a year later. His statue in that city's Alvalade Square, and lines from a poem by Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (although not the lines that mention St. Anthony) also figure into this piece.

To get a written feel for the work, I can't really improve on Jorge Mourinha's description:

Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day is a deadpan, dialogue-free look at the aftermath of a night spent partying, precisely choreographed as a sort of hungover, slow-motion zombie flash mob and shot as if an alien Big Brother was watching humankind and asking what the hell is going on. Even if slightly overlong, it’s by far the loosest, cheeriest work of a director usually not known for his sense of humour, though this is more the Roy Andersson variety of dry, poignant wit.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at 9:30 and Thursday May 9th at 8:30, both at New People Cinema.

WHY: As much excitement there may be in the selections of films the programming team brings to SFIFF every year, every cinephile who pays attention to the international festival scene probably can think of at least one or two that haven't been brought but they wish were. For me, new films by two directors, whose prior films (Wild Grass and To Die Like A Man) were among my favorite SFIFF films in 2010, stand out: Alain Resnais's You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet and João Pedro Rodrigues's The Last Time I Saw Macao. While I hope both play Frisco Bay cinemas at some point in the next several months, I'm glad to be tided over in the latter instance by this Rodrigues short that has gotten less international exposure.

Morning of St. Anthony's Day screens as part of an eclectic program going by the title Shorts 4: New Visions, but it's actually quite a substantial work. At 25 minutes in length, it's more than twice as long as any of this program's other shorts, which range from five to twelve minutes in duration. With all the feature-length (and, in the case of Penance and Eight Deadly Shots, much longer) possibilities to cram into a festival schedule, many attendees systematically avoid scheduling shorts programs. But people who came to be fans of a filmmaker like Rodrigues (or of Joan Chen or of Grégoire Colin, both of whom have directed shorts playing in other festival shorts programs) through features may want to rethink this strategy, and they may be exposed to some great work by filmmakers who regularly eschew feature-length running times as well.

HOW: Digital video screening of a digital video work, as part of a program of five other video works along with one 35mm silent film with live musical accompaniment.

The Realist (2013)

WHO: Scott Stark. I wrote about another of his films, Speechless, earlier this week. 

WHAT:  Michael Sicinski has already written an excellent, thought-provoking analysis of Stark's new experimental mannequin melodrama The Realist on the eve of its world premiere. Let me extract an excerpt:

through Stark’s manipulations, the mannequins command our attention. They shimmy, seduce; they seem to march in unison, as if preparing to mobilize in some sort of capitalist-couture guerrilla faction; they gaze as us like kitsch statuary.

A very good description. Sicinski also points out that Stark's juxtapositions "disguise the anteriority between and among shots within a single scene". Indeed. Previewing a not-quite-finalized version of The Realist on DVD the other day, it was remarkable to me how this work retains a sense of created "cinematic time" i.e. an illusory feeling of narrative progression as scenes and sections move forward, against all reasonable odds. Stark employs a method of transforming stereoscopic imagery into two dimensions by jumping back and forth between what each eye would individually see, a method I jokingly referred to as the "Ken Jacobs effect" before I realized other filmmakers such as Stark have employed it as well (then again, perhaps the joke holds, as anyone who has seen the right 1950s National Film Board of Canada documentaries knows Ken Burns didn't invent panning and zooming photographs). Though most films are not edited in-camera or even shot in sequence, most do not bear signs that they at least theoretically couldn't be. The Realist literally makes a cut with every frame. Thanks to its generous use of cross-fading techniques, one could say it makes a minimum of one cut per frame in fact. But the rapid alternation between two or more perspectives somehow assimilates in the brain much like a single shot might.

I would also like to mention that the sense of narrative and "melodrama" in The Realist is greatly aided by Stark's musical selection, a work by composer Daniel Goode, a former student of Henry Cowell's. His propulsive, post-minimalist piece from 1988 Tunnel-Funnel sets a very agreeable rhythm for Stark's editing. I'd love to see a small ensemble (the piece was written for a group of thirteen flutes, trombones, string players plus a pianist and a percussionist) take on a live performance to accompany Stark's images someday.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 5:30 this afternoon at the Victoria Theatre.

WHAT: This screening of The Realist is the centerpiece of a program of Stark's recent work presented by the Crossroads Film Festival which ends today. Because it's a piece with an entirely musical soundtrack, it ought to completely sidestep the sound clarity problems that can trouble screenings of dialogue-dependent films and videos at the Victoria Theatre. I always wish the theatre might channel some of its rentals from film festivals (in addition to Crossroads, the SF Underground Short Film Festival, which happens next weekend, and Frameline are among the more established festivals regularly using the venue) into making improvements to the sound system. Luckily few Crossroads films and performances involve much dialogue at all.

I finally really appreciated why Cinematheque likes to use the space last night during the projector performance piece Tejido Conectivo presented by the Spanish duo Crater. What began as a diverting single-, dual- and triple-projected presentation of birth, backyard & travel home movies running against an electronic musique concrète soundtrack opened out into a glorious display of illusionism, seemingly the entirety of the human condition spilling off the screen and onto the cavernous white walls via no fewer than seven 16mm and super-8 projectors. I expect The Realist to have no less epic an impact in that space.  

HOW: Made and screened via digital video.

15 (2003)

WHO: Royston Tan wrote & directed this, his first feature film.

WHAT: Well known to Singapore moviegoers but practically unknown elsewhere is the fact that the city-state has one of the most restrictive motion picture rating systems around. As one of the producers of 15, Eric Khoo, puts it in an interview with Tilman-Baumgärtel (published in his book Southeast Asian Independent Cinema):

I only wish they would bring down the age for R-rated pictures. I don't think anywhere else in the world, you have to be twenty-one to see a film. You can have sex when you are sixteen, but you cannot watch Borat!

Under such conditions, it should be unsurprising that 15 had to endure a record 27 cuts by Singapore censors before it could be released theatrically in the country it was made, And even then, only those over 21 were allowed to watch it. Combined with a ban on local home video release, it meant that teenagers of the age depicted in the film (the title derives from the age of the adolescents we see on the screen- most of them non-actors recruited from real youth gangs) would have to wait six years to be old enough to legally view the film. 

It's perhaps even less surprising that filmmakers like Tan and Khoo (whose first feature as a director was the punk-rock-inflected Mee Pok Man) would begin their feature filmmaking careers with films that pushed censorship boundaries- the most passionate independent artists are often inclined to press against whatever boundary they feel constraining them, and if, as in Singapore, that boundary is the censor's razor they gravitate to material that gives it resistance. 15 features drugs, violence, and full-frontal male nudity, among other screen taboos. No wonder it became one of the most notorious - and internationally popular - films ever produced on the island nation.

WHERE/WHEN: A CAAMFest presentation at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, tonight only at 7:00.

WHY: CAAMFest is one of the Bay Area's great examples of a film festival loyal to the filmmakers it helps local audiences discover, and to the audiences who appreciate discovering them. Royston Tan's relationship with the festival is a great example. Though the festival hasn't shown every one of his films made over the years, in 2002 (back when it was called the SF International Asian American Film Festival) it screened his short Sons (which is now viewable legally and for free via Youtube), followed up by programming a 35-minute version of 15 the following year. By this time the feature version was in the pipeline and it was screened at the 2004 SFIAAFF; that's where I saw it. I barely remember it so it's clearly time to view it again and the CAAM programmers know it, bringing Tan himself to discuss it and the rest of his career tonight in conversation with Valerie Soe. It's the culmination of a mini-retrospective of Tan's work that also included a festival reprise of his biggest hometown commercial success 881 and the U.S. premiere of his latest film Old Romances. It's great to have the festival bring back its tradition of hosting career surveys of Asian auteurs after a couple-year hiatus.

15 is not the only case of CAAMFest/SFIAAFF screening a short film and later an feature-length remake or sequel version. I'm sure there have been many over the festival history but what comes to mind right now is the 2002 screening of SF Art Institute graduate Michael Shaowanasai's To Be...Or Not To Be?: The Adventures of Iron Pussy III, which foretold a 2004 showing of Shaowanasai's The Adventure of Iron Pussy, co-directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I suppose I think of this example because the short video work that preceded Apichatpong's Mekong Hotel at CAAMFest screenings this past weekend, Jennifer Phang's Advantageous, is getting expanded into a feature-length film later this year. It's good news, because although the short is thought-provoking and emotionally powerful on its own, its science-fiction concept feels at times constrained by its 25-minute frame and deserves a larger canvas. Perhaps we'll see it screened at a future CAAMFest...

HOW: 15 shows via a 35mm print.

Gare Du Nord (1965)

WHO: Arguably the key figure in documentary filmmaking in the past sixty years, Jean Rouch, directed this. However, it's not a documentary but a narrative film.

WHAT: Gare Du Nord was Rouch's contribution to a six-film portmenteau produced by future director Barbet Schroeder, and the only one of the six films (also including contributions by Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Jean Douchet, and Eric Rohmer) to feature Schroeder in an acting role. Each of the six vignettes highlighted a particular section of Paris through the eyes of it's residents, and Rouch's segment is arguably the best of the set. It's a pointed critique of the aspirational tendencies of the neighborhood, distilled through a portrait of a young couple (played by Schroeder and Nadine Ballot) whose conflicts are both magnified and dwarfed by the construction happening outside their apartment window. When Ballot takes to the streets still upset by their quarreling, she is approached by a stranger (played by Gilles Quéant) who seems to offer a solution to her troubles that she's both attacted by and resistant to. To say much more might spoil the surprises of the film, so I'll just encourage readers to see it.

WHERE/WHEN: 3:00 PM today only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: The PFA begins a 12-film retrospective of Rouch's work this afternoon with this short piece, which will precede the filmmaker's breakthrough Moi, Un Noir to set the tone for a series pairing full-length films and shorts that lasts until April 16th when his influential collaboration with Edgar Morin, Chronicle of a Summer screens along with Jackie Raynal's brief portrait of the filmmaker shot just before his death in 2004.

As if to get it out of the way, or to show that his aptitude for documentary did not indicate a lack thereof in the narrative department, or perhaps to argue that the line between fiction and non-fiction modes is more illusory than we think, the PFA is launching the series tributing the documentarian with this fictional piece. I haven't seen enough of Rouch's other work to weigh in on this curatorial decision yet, but I hope to be able to catch as many as I can, and perhaps share my thoughts on that subject later.

HOW: Gare Du Nord screens on 35mm, while Moi, Un Noir is a digital presentation.

Cops (1922)

WHO: The great Buster Keaton wrote, directed and starred in this, along with his frequent co-writer and co-director Edward Cline, who in this instance also appears in the film in a small role.

WHAT: Leave it to Buster to take one of the most overused clichés of silent cinema, the chase involving a bunch of bumbling police officers, and turn it into something brilliant and sublime, just by extending the scale of the trope well past the point of any semblance of logic. While the Keystone Kops films were extremely popular in the 1910s, one might say Cops expands on their concept in a way most appropriate to how the popular view of policemen changed after Prohibition.

This is not the only topical aspect of this film. There's a gag that depends on knowledge of "goat gland" treatments, a chapter in American quackery that is almost entirely forgotten today, but was widely enough known in the 1920s to become the nickname for silent movies which contained one reel of talking scenes, uniformly for publicity and not artistic purposes, when sound came to cinema later in the decade. Goat gland treatments were disgusting enough that I'm not going to get into their so-called "medical" details, but if you want to understand this gag you might want to read about John R. Brinkley, but please, not while eating. Honestly, it's just one gag and not "getting it" won't hinder the rest of the film in the least.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the beautifully restored and shamefully underused (as a film screening space, at least) California Theatre in downtown San Jose at 7:00.

WHY: Cops plays as part of the Cinequest Film Festival's annual silent film presentation at the California Theatre, always with a live organist performing. The festival ends with the weekend, but before it does there are three full days of screenings, including the local premiere of Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children a week before its appearance at CAAMFest, an Argentine film featuring film critic Jorge Jellinek, last seen on screen in A Useful Life, and a 4K digital presentation of the restoration of Dr. Strangelove that San Francisco Silent Film Festival audiences got to see a sample of last summer. (It had phenomenal clarity compared side-by-side against an unrestored 35mm print- perhaps too much clarity, as it might be distracting to be able to make out background details I'm not sure Stanley Kubrick expected to register on screen.) 

HOW: Cops screens prior to the feature-length Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last!, both in 35mm prints, with live musical accompaniment by my own favorite silent film organist Dennis James, whose performances at local venues I try hard not to miss, yet somehow I'm not sure I've heard him perform for a Harold Lloyd film before- he's certainly excellent with Keaton, and is the one who reminded me of the aforementioned "goat gland" gag while I was preparing this post. He also had this to say about Harold Lloyd:

I spent the entire Summer of 1972 as a guest at 'Greenacres'- Harold Lloyd's mansion up in Benedict Canyon above Hollywood. Harold had died earlier that year and my residency was arranged by the executor of his estate. They had kept the house staff under employment, so I had a laundress, cook and even chauffeur plus vintage Rolls Royce at my command . . . talk about seeing just how those movie stars lived!

One Is Business, The Other Crime (1912)

WHO: Directed by D.W. Griffith.

WHAT: It's a bit of a misnomer to call this one-reeler a "short film" as it was standard for most films 101 years ago to fit on just one projector reel; perhaps the comparatively few multi-reelers of 1912 should be labeled "long films" instead! But it's much easier for a writer to go with the current convention of distinguishing "shorts" from "features" when writing about an approximately fifteen minute film, no matter how anachronistic it is to apply to a film from this era. One Is Business, the Other Crime is a fairly straightforward moral lesson about the hypocrisies of social stratification. Made when the Gilded Age was still fresh in memory, its message is sadly no less relevant today than ever. And it allows Blanche Sweet to brandish a pistol! For more on Sweet, Griffith, and this film, do check out this excellent blog.

WHERE/WHEN: At the unique Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, California, which screens films from the first three dozen years of cinema history on fifty-one Saturday nights every year. 7:30 PM.

WHY: Every two months the Museum releases a new screening calendar, available as a mailing or a pdf download from its website. Local silent film researcher Thomas Gladysz has a habit of writing up a fine preview of the Niles offerings every month, but he can't cover every detail of every program- most Saturday nights include a feature-length silent film as well as two short films, though the popular monthly "Comedy Short Subject Night" ditches the feature to pack in more shorts. Tonight's feature is Behind The Front, a 1926 comedy that was part of a mid-1920s wave of World War I films launched by the massive popularity of King Vidor's smash hit war drama The Big Parade. It's always nice to see a Griffith film in a cinema, but it will be especially nice to see just a month before more Griffith films play at Niles to kick off its February schedule; though titles are not announced as yet, a number of the February 2nd Mary Pickford tribute selections are certain to be his.

HOW: Almost all of the films shown at the Niles Film Museum on Saturday nights are shown via 16mm prints, and always with live musical accompaniment. Tonight it will be Bruce Loeb at the piano.

No Day Off and the Jeonju Digital Project

Eric Khoo's No Day Off introduces us to Siti, a 24-year-old woman who uproots herself from her home in Sulawesi to attend a two-month training institute on another Indonesian island, so that she can become a live-in maid in one of the world's per capita richest countries, the city-state Singapore. She leaves behind a husband, a new baby and a mountain of debt, which she hopes she will be able to pay off by sending her salary home to the family. However, Siti's debts will grow before they shrink, as the recruiter, trainer and placement service demand such a large cut of her first year's worth of paychecks, that she'd barely be able to afford busfare downtown, even if she did have a maid's day off. As the title indicates, she doesn't; her entire existence is shown to be structured for the convenience and whim of the three distinct families she slaves for over the course of this 39-minute video work.

We catch nothing more than fragmentary glimpses of these employers, as the camera is always trained either on Siti or on the houses and objects she must attend to. The Singaporeans in the film are for us no more than disembodied voices, making demands on or insulting Siti in a language she barely understands. The first family is English-speaking and imperiously wealthy; a bottle of wine costs them more than their maid's salary. As alienating and confining as their mansion must feel to Siti, at least she doesn't have to subsist on unfinished scraps from their dirty dishes, as she does at her second set of employers, a financially struggling Chinese-speaking family that eventually cannot afford to pay her at all. Siti's third and final placement is in the home of a terminally ill father and his often-absent daughter. By far the most benign of the three employers, this household speaks a language Siti can comprehend (presumably Bahasa Melayu, one of Singapore's four official languages, and which I understand is similar, if not essentially identical, to the lingua franca of neighboring Indonesia.) A genuine bond is developed between the maid and the dying man, but it only makes more heartbreaking the moment when Siti must stand by emotionless as the daughter mourns her loss.

No Day Off takes on aspects of a polemic, evidenced by Khoo's insertion of title cards bearing data on the proliferation of the maltreatment of Singaporean immigrant maids between certain segments of the narrative. But, because of the matter-of-fact, diaristic storytelling (each scene is marked by a timestamp indicating how many days Siti has been away from her home and son) it's a remarkably humane one, not a surprise from the director of the lovely Be With Me. Siti's story becomes the empathetic stand-in for all the situations aggregated into the data Khoo periodically presents.

Khoo's short is one of thirty-six thus far commissioned by South Korea's Jeonju Film Festival, each a digital "film" created on a low budget by a one of the modern era's most intriguing filmmakers. The new batch of commissions premieres in Jeonju in April, and includes shorts by Jean-Marie Straub, Claire Denis (who is getting a full retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive next month), and José Luis Guerín. All thirty-three of the other shorts commissioned over the past eleven years of the festival have been screening at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts screening room over the past week or so. No Day Off plays this Saturday at 7PM, along with shorts by Thailand's Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe, Nymph) and Kazakhistan's Darezhan Omirbaev (Kairat, Kardiogram). Later in the weekend there will be entries by Pedro Costa, Eugène Green, Hong Sangsoo, and six other acclaimed filmmakers.

Unlike my friend Adam Hartzell, I haven't been able to attend each and every one of these screenings, but I have seen a sampling, including a rare few that have screened locally before this year. Hong's Jeonju-set Lost in the Mountains was seen at last spring's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and feels connected to the three vignettes that make up his latest feature Oki's Movie (I caught this excellent Hong film in Toronto, and hope it appears soon at a Frisco Bay festival or other venue). The version of Shinya Tsukamoto's Haze that screened Thursday night as part of the YBCA series is a condensed (though hardly less intentionally grueling) version of the hour-long existential horror movie that was presented here by IndieFest back in 2006. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Worldy Desires screened at YBCA a couple years ago as well, and I was very pleased to be able to revisit it in anticipation of the week-long release of Apichatpong's outstanding, entrancing new feature Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives at the San Francisco Film Society's dedicated screen at the Kabuki theatre, surely this season's theatrical release most eagerly awaited by the cinephiles in my circles. Worldly Desires takes place on a film set using day-for-night technique in the jungle, just as Uncle Boonmee uses day-for-night filters to achieve a sense of the eternal.

What the Jeonju project provides its filmmakers with is a kind of carte blanche they might have trouble obtaining in the increasingly commercialized world of film financing. The results are as varied as the directors themselves, but what they all surely have in common is that they represent a distillation of the fundamental desires each harbors as an image-maker. In the case of Eric Khoo, and perhaps also of James Benning, whose Pig Iron is a compelling single-shot portrait of the back end of a German steel factory, a socio-political point can be made, whether about immigrant labor or the environmental impact of our species' industrial processes. In the case of Apichatpong, or of Tsai Ming-Liang, whose A Conversation With God is a documentary compilation of Tawianese religious rituals and urban landscapes, the opportunity to purposefully create low-budget video work helps put into relief the filmmaker's approach to 35mm feature filmmaking. In all cases, these filmmakers' works are scarcely if ever shown here on Frisco Bay, which makes YBCA's initiative in showcasing the Jeonju Digital Project a real boon for local cinemagoers.

Adam Hartzell: SF Shorts Festival

After an August with comparatively few film festivals here on Frisco Bay, September is bringing the beginnings of an Autumn onslaught of them. Though the September staple Madcat Women's Film Festival is transitioning from a Frisco Bay-based event to a national touring program this year, a screening on Sept. 16 of festival favorite filmmakers including Kerry Laitala, Samara Halperin & others carries the tradition of El Rio outdoor music & film forward in 2009. The 2nd Annual Iranian Film Festival runs September 19-20 at the SF Art Institute. In San Rafael, the Global Lens Film Series runs September 25th through October 7th, after which the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center becomes one of the venues for the Mill Valley Film Festival. The 32nd annual program for the latter festival will not be fully revealed for another week, but in the meantime the festival has begun teasing us with announced special guest appearances: Clive Owen will be in Marin for the opening night screening of the Boys are Back, and French New Wave icon Anna Karina will be on hand to present her scarcely-seen recent directorial effort, Victoria on October 16th. Jean-Luc Godard's muse will also be represented at the festival by an October 13th showing of one of their most well-known collaborations, Pierrot Le Fou.

But before all this, the Red Vic is just about to play host to the 4th Annual SF Shorts festival, featuring six programs of short films over the next four days. Arya Ponto has a written brief write-up on the program. Here at Hell On Frisco Bay, Adam Hartzell has also previewed a few of the offerings and provides his take:

There’s a wonderful moment of Deaf storytelling that takes place in Cynthia Mitchell and Robert Arnold’s short All Animals. It goes on at length sans subtitles and is mesmerizing. Just a young Deaf woman (actress Sheena McFeely) sitting on the back of a pick-up truck signing with her whole upper body and the space that surrounds it, including the facial expressions so important to all Sign Languages, and the authentic Deaf voice John S. Schuchman has noted is so important to (Hearing) Children of Deaf Adults (aka CoDAs). It truly takes over the film, levitating the viewer trance-like into a completely different film from the larger short film that surrounds it. All Animals involved one of the California Schools for the Deaf. Perhaps the focus on Deaf storytelling germinated from this collaboration or was the very reason for this collaboration.

This subtitle-less scene reminded me of the screening of Deaf director Peter Wolf’s I Love You But... (1994) at the Deaf Film Festival in February of 2003 at the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley, where it was explained that no subtitling or translation via headphones would be provided for Hearing viewers, in order to give Hearing viewers an idea of what it’s like for the Deaf to attend the cinema. Outside of the beauty of signed languages in general, the moment of expressive Deaf storytelling in All Animals is inaccessible to non-ASL fluent viewers just as the dialogue of English-language cinema is inaccessible to Deaf Americans. Rarely are subtitled or close-captioned prints of English-language films available for U.S. theatres and this limits the experience Deaf viewers can have in the cinema. And based on the screener I watched, I’m assuming the spoken dialogue will not be close-captioned at the Red Vic screening, making this film only partially accessible for the Deaf community. Whether or not that’s an oversight or due to limited funding options, I don’t know. But since the Deaf storytelling is so prominent, it appears its inaccessibility to me and other non-ASL fluent viewers is intentional. Yet in spite of that ‘inaccessibility’, I am still deeply affected by it.

Unfortunately All Animals also utilizes what Gallaudet University professor Jane Norman refers to as a ‘gimmick’ of Hearing-centric films where the sound is cut off as a false attempt to lead us into the Deaf character’s experience of the world. As the Hearing character notes when discussing the Opera, Deaf people do not experience the world in total silence, for vibrations are felt through other parts of the body. Such sensation of sound through the vibrations of the body is not the same as through the ear, but such is not total silence either. The sappy (but I love it nonetheless) Japanese Deaf film I Love You (Osawa Yutaka and Yonaiyama Akihiro, 2000) demonstrates this beautifully, but to write how it represents sound as ‘heard’ by Deaf people would be to ruin the tear-jerking moment up to which the film builds, so I’ll leave you to the difficult search to find that film to see how such clichés can be avoided.

Along with being a calling card for directors, actors, and others film industry folk to garner future projects, short films can also be a space for experimentation, which makes All Animals both compelling in its highlighting of Deaf storytelling, and disappointing in its reliance on an overused Hearing trope of Deaf characters. Of the few films I was able to see for the festival, nothing else jumped out at me as ‘experimental’, but the animated films The Mouse That Soared by Kyle T. Bell and Prayers for Peace by Dustin Grella both kept me transfixed by their drawings, Bell’s through digital rendering and Grella’s through the washing on and off of dreamy charcoal images.

Another film I was able to watch was Molly Snyder-Fink and Kiran Goldman’s Fast As She Can. With Usain Bolt dashing through the headlines as of late for his World Record 100 meter time of 9.58 seconds at the recent World Championships in Berlin, it’s nice to see a short film focusing on the amazing female athletes of Jamaica. Although there is some repetitive narration early on, the short serves its subjects and the topic well by showing the constant training in which these women engage and the encouragement and support many provide for these endeavors. The details of their training regimen offer a counterpoint to the speculative ‘reasons’ that are often given to Jamaican track and field success. In this way, we can see the self-serving claims of the yam seller in the film who claims ‘it’s the yams’ just as we doubted Mars Blackmon when he proclaimed ‘It’s gotta be the shoes!’ More disturbingly, but not mentioned in the film, sometimes the hard work that propels the success of black athletes is downplayed by the Pat Buchanan-esque racist assumptions about their bodies. And now these athletes must also confront the constant suspicion of doping, based, as a San Jose Mercury News reporter admits in the documentary, on little evidence outside of the record-breaking record-breaking. Everyone is looking for the secret to their success as if it were one simple thing proving their prejudices, rather than a complex network of things.

And like that journalist, I will proclaim on the little evidence of these four shorts that it looks as if the Red Vic will have much on offer for those with the heavily-concentrated attention spans and precise mental-compartmentalizing that short film watching requires.

SFIFF52 Day 7: The Lake

The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival is approaching its halfway mark; it runs through May 7th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about one film I've seen or am hotly anticipating.

The Lake (ISRAEL: Boaz Lavie, 2009)

playing: 12:15 PM this afternoon at the Kabuki, with no more showtimes later in the festival.
festival premiere: Ljubljana International Short Film Festival 2009 is the earliest I'm picking up.
distributor: none that I am aware of.

Some of the SFIFF's shorts programs are collected under a clear theme. Youth Bring the Truth showcases work by teenage filmmakers. No Voice Too Small compiles films made for children. A Thousand Pictures is animation not intended for kiddies. Parting Shots and Handle With Care are devoted to avant-garde films. Foreign Territories and Voices Carry are more curatorially amorphous.

I used the festival's press preview stations to take a look at films in the latter program and was unable to discern a unifying principle behind it. Voices that carry, I guess. No matter, it's an opportunity to watch a grab bag of short-form video work along with, according to the Film on Film calendar, one 35mm production entitled Next Floor, a dark, satirical, somewhat gruesome narrative piece from Canada. Other shorts in the program include the Conscience of Nhem En, an Oscar-nominated documentary short about the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, and 575 Castro St., which might find itself at home in one of the avant-garde programs, but has an emotional heft that deserves to be appreciated by viewers nervous about seeing a full program of experimental work.

I gravitate toward the documentaries, the avant-garde, and the animated shorts, but tend to be disappointed by the live-action narrative short video works, no matter what festival I see them at. It's nice to find an exception, though. I found one in The Lake, a comedy from a young Israeli writer-director named Boaz Lavie. It's a completely absurd piece about two brothers trying to make a living in Tel Aviv. A bizarre scenario is played with such straightforward deadpan earnestness that I could not help but laugh out loud in the oh-so-quiet viewing room. I suspect the Lake will appeal most to the sorts of people who have Fishing With John in their personal DVD collections, not because they're being Criterion-Collection-completist, but because they appreciate its off-beat humor. I also bet it's the only film ever made with songs recorded by Stevie Wonder, Vincent Gallo and Raffi all on the same soundtrack.

SFIFF52 Day 7
Another option: Khamsa (FRANCE: Karim Dridi, 2008) has been recommended by Carl Martin as well as other festgoers I've spoken with. Here is another review if you still need convincing to attend the film's last SFIFF screening today.
Non-SFIFF-option for today: the Clown and the Führer (SPAIN: Eduard Cortés, 2007) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I haven't seen it, but here is a review.