Nashville (1975)

WHO: Robert Altman's signature piece as a director.

WHAT: What is Nashville? Perhaps better to ask, what isn't Nashville? Majestic and subversive, angry and gentle, musical and talky and extraordinarily cinematic, this is a film that seems to have everything you might want from a movie, except for maybe F-14 dogfights (and it's been a few years since I've last seen it, so maybe I'm forgetting a scene when I say that.)

WHERE/WHEN: 1:00 PM and 7:30 PM today only at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: Nashville plays on a double-bill with Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, reminding us of a time when Hollywood made movies that were long for good reasons. These films depend on duration: every can of film is well worth its shipping cost. I'm not so sure some of today's long movies have goods reasons for their length; more like excuses enabled by the DCP delivery system. Anyway, I'm all for a double-bill like this, and hope it's enough of a success to inspire a sequel; I think Cimino's Heaven's Gate and Altman's A Wedding (for instance) would combine for a similar running time.

HOW: The Castro calendar includes this fearsome note on Nashville: "This may be your last chance to see this classic in 35mm at the Castro!"

The 39 Steps (1935)

WHO: Alfred Hitchcock directed.

WHAT: The 39 Steps is one of Hitchcock's most celebrated films, and perhaps the most celebrated of all the films made during his "British period" before he moved to Hollywood. If you've only seen it on home video, alone, it might be difficult to understand why this has been true. Sure, it has a perfectly acceptable spy-thriller plot and fine performances from its cast, but what distinguishes it from all the other well-crafted films he made in the 1930s? Seeing it on a big screen makes its reputation understandable. Surrounded by an audience, one is more likely to appreciate how this is not just a thriller but also one of Hitchcock's funniest films, and how its treatment of male-female relationships mirrors the developments in the screwball comedies of Hollywood of the same era. One also realizes how Hitchcock employs no fewer than three separate scenes to explore ideas about performers and audiences (as he later would in The Man Who Knew Too Much's remake, North By Northwest and elsewhere), making this one of his first, and most powerful, meta-cinematic films.

WHERE/WHEN: At 5:55 PM and 9:15 PM at the Stanford Theatre tonight and tomorrow night only.

WHY: Every few years the Stanford programs a month or two of Alfred Hitchcock films. This year's collection includes 18 films, all on double-bills (The 39 Steps is paired with the equally-excellent The Lady Vanishes) and runs from this last Thursday until April 7th. It's not as extensive as the Pacific Film Archive's current Hitchcock series, which has 28 features and a short, with more on the way. But the PFA is only showing each film one time apiece, while the Stanford shows each of its selections six or eight times per week. If you haven't been attending the PFA series it's possible to see all but two (the frequently-confused Sabotage and Saboteur) of the films you missed at the Stanford.

HOW: 35mm prints only in this series.

Pootie Tang (2001)

WHO: Lance Crouther plays the title role, and will be introducing the film in character and giving a not-in-character q&a after the screening.

WHAT: I hope I never get so wrapped up in the investigation of sophisticated works of cinema by important auteurs that I can never find time to appreciate a silly, broad comedy. It's true that most Hollywood-produced comedies over the past fifteen years haven't made me laugh nearly as hard as everyone (me, the filmmakers, anyone I watched the film with) had hoped I would. Pootie Tang is a notable exception. I missed seeing it in a theatre- it opened the same weekend as the much-anticipated A.I. and quickly disappeared from screens, so a lot of cinephiles missed seeing it that way. But upon being turned onto the film shortly after its video release, I soon found myself rewatching it frequently and spreading the Pootie Tang gospel with anyone I could find who wasn't simply put off by the title. That admittedly was not a lot of people. It doesn't sound like a movie title but the punch line to a very nasty and unfunny joke. Even co-star Chris Rock used it as such when he hosted the Academy Awards one year.

When comedian Louis C.K. starting becoming widely famous a few years later, I was late to realize it, as usual with pop culture figures. Friends would talk about his stand-up or his television show and I'd pipe in with, "oh, the writer-director of Pootie Tang?," which sometimes got me strange sideways looks. But more and more I find myself meeting out-of-the-closet Pootie Tang fans, some of whom have been fans at least as long as I have. It's easier to be a proud Pootie Tang lover as respect for Louis C.K. and Wanda Sykes increases. Occasionally I still encounter resistance from skeptical cinephiles. That's when I point out that Pootie Tang's cinematographer was Willy Kurant, who shot Masculin-Féminin for Jean-Luc Godard, The Immortal Story for Orson Welles, Under the Sun of Satan for Maurice Pialat, Trans-Europ-Express for Alain Robbe-Grillet and Dinky Hocker for Tom Blank.

WHERE/WHEN: 10PM tonight at the Castro Theatre, presented by SF Sketchfest

WHY: Sketchfest is in its final days but there are still quite a few events of interest to movie fans. Just before tonight's Pootie Tang screening, Peaches Christ will present a screening of Welcome To the Dollhouse with star Heather Matarazzo on hand. Tomorrow afternoon there's a showing of The Naked Gun with David Zucker and Priscilla Presley attending, followed by two sold-out shows (thanks to Patton Oswalt's involvement methinks): Twilight and Army of Darkness.

Though I'd had mixed experiences with Sketchfest shows in prior years, I'm feeling very good about the popular event after Wednesday night's Roxie screening of Animal House, before which Inside Joke's Carl Arnheiter spoke with the film's director John Landis. Arnheiter struck just the right balance as interviewer, I felt, between making wisecracks and encouraging Landis's joke-telling instincts (this is a comedy festival after all), and eliciting some incredible stories about his first years in Hollywood, working in the Fox Studio's mailroom, rubbing elbows with George Stevens (who bought him lunch because he was a rare young American who could name his films), Bruce Lee (whom Landis did a looney impression of), and Robert Altman (who was apparently a hard man to find on the M.A.S.H. set). Best of all was Landis's demonstration of just how new the art of the motion picture is: his frequent editor George Folsey Jr, is the son of the cinematographer George Folsey, who during one of his conversations with Landis casually spoke about interacting with Edwin S. Porter, inventor of much of narrative cinema language before D. W. Griffith or anyone. This was pure cinephile catnip, and I'm so glad I was able to be there, even if Animal House isn't exactly Pootie Tang.

HOW: 35mm print, thankfully. Now that it's become difficult to pry 35mm prints out of the clutches of certain studios unless the screening involves the presence of the talent who had worked on the film, it feels like a wasted opportunity when a festival invites talent yet screens from a digital copy. So I'm pleased that although Sketchfest only involved one 35mm screening two years ago (Broadcast News), this time around they conduct four of them. Animal House was shown in a practically pristine print, and Welcome to the Dollhouse and The Naked Gun join Pootie Tang as shows expected to use 35mm prints.

Silence Has No Wings (1966)

WHO: Directed by Kazuo Kuroki.

WHAT: In the mid-1960s, the studio system in Japan was facing serious structural problems and began exploring new strategies to holding the attention of audiences. When Toho Studio distributed Hiroshi Teshigahara's independently-produced Woman in the Dunes it became a hit in Japan and abroad. Toho asked the film's producer Yasuo Matsukawa to provide a follow-up for them to distribute. Matsukawa enlisted Kuroki, a director of documentaries who had always been interested in breaking into features, to make the film, which ended up being Silence Has No Wings. With all the publicity already set for its distribution through  the studio, once Toho executives viewed the completed film they cancelled its intended release, calling it a "lunatic film". It was instead distributed by the Art Theatre Guild, a company that specialized in releasing films by European auteurs to Japanese cinemas, a much more natural home for a film by a director profoundly influenced by Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. A year and a half later, the ATG released the first in a string of dozens of films produced under its own auspices: Shohei Imamura's remarkable A Man Vanishes.

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

WHY: Silence Has No Wings opens a spectacular series at the Pacific Film Archive, Chronicles of Inferno: Japan's Art Theater Guild. It's three weeks of rarely-shown works made by filmmakers associated with the ATG, all of them legendary in the history of the Japanese New Wave. Although this weekend's in-person appearance by another documentarian-turned feature filmmaker Susumu Hani unfortunately has been cancelled, his ATG-distributed She And He will still screen Saturday night, while two of his early classroom-set shorts and his best-known film, The Inferno of First Love (produced by the ATG) screen in his absence Sunday. 

Hani's sudden cancellation is disappointing because chances to meet key figures of 1960s Japanese filmmaking are all-too-rare here in the Bay Area. Takahiko Iimura is the only director from that era that I can recall making a public appearance here in the past 10 years or so that I've been faithfully paying attention to such matters. (Two of Iimura's films are part of a complimentary/competing series of films even more underground than the Art Theatre Guild, happening at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, incidentally.) And opportunities for this to occur are disappearing rapidly. Ten years ago, eight of the nine directors with films in this PFA series were still alive (all but Shuji Terayama, who made Pastoral: Hide And Seek but died in 1983 after making his, and the ATG's, final film, Farewell to the Ark.) With the mid-2000s passings of Imamura, Kuroki, and Kihachi Okamoto (Human Bullet), and more recently of Koji Wakamatsu (Ecstasy of the Angels), who died last October, and of Nagisa Oshima (The Ceremony) who died less than a month ago, there are only three filmmakers in this series still among us: Hani, Masahiro Shinoda (Double Suicide) and Toshio Matsumoto (Shura).

HOW: 16mm print. The entire series screens on either 35mm or 16mm.

The Wind (1928)

WHO: Victor Sjöström directed this.

WHAT: On a first viewing, I must admit, this film didn't do much for me. But seeing it for a second time at the 2009 San Francisco Silent Film Festival made me realize just what a masterpiece it is. Here's an excerpt from Benjamin Schrom's excellent essay for that festival's program book:

The Wind marked the end of an era. It was the final silent major motion picture released by MGM, the final silent film by one of the era’s great directors, Victor Sjöström, and the final silent film for of one its greatest stars, Lillian Gish. It was also a box office failure, simultaneously panned and hailed by critics, called an “American western” as well as a “European” film, loved by those who worked on it and hated by those who produced it. 

WHERE/WHEN: The Wind screens as part of a two-film Pacific Film Archive screening of Sjöström films that begins at 7:00 PM. The other film was made by the director in 1917 when he was still working in his home country Sweden: Terje Vigen.

WHY: Singling this film out today is my not-so-subtle way to draw attention to the SFSFF's recently-redesigned website. There's lots to explore there, but I'm most interested in pointing out that for the first time, all of the program essays about past festival films and musicians, are easily readable (and share-able) online. Schrom's essay on The Wind is a fine example. If you'll allow me to toot an old horn, I'm excited that seven essays I wrote for the festival are now archived there as well, so if you're interested in reading about Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But..., Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera, Tod Browning's West of Zanzibar, Douglas Fairbanks as The Gaucho, F. W. Murnau's Sunrise, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro, or William de Mille's Miss Lulu Bett, I've just provided handy links to each article I've written for a SFSFF screening. 

I'm excited to see the films playing at the festival's upcoming (February 16th) Silent Winter, including a 1916 version of Snow White, a selection of Buster Keaton comedies, Raoul Walsh directing Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad, Mary Pickford's final silent film My Best Girl, and Murnau's final film before coming to Hollywood, Faust. Nearly as exciting as that are the live musical accompaniments planned for the day, with the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra handling the Fairbanks, organist Christian Elliot tackling the Murnau, and pianist Donald Sosin taking on the rest. But nearly as exciting as that, is reading the essays on these films by the current SFSFF stable of researcher/writers. The souvenir program books the festival produces get better and better every year.

HOW: Both films at the PFA tonight will run in 35mm prints, Terje Vigen imported from Sweden and The Wind from the PFA's collection. The Wind will feature Bruce Loeb's live accompaniment on piano, while Terje Vigen will feature a live string quartet score.