Sean McCourt on Black Francis and The Golem

The San Francisco International Film Festival is chugging along, and will wrap up its festivities on Thursday night with a Vanity Fair-sponsored charity screening of Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson at the Castro Theatre (before that venue embarks on its post-SFIFF schedule with a week-long engagement of Godard's Contempt). I've been averaging about a film a day, and of those films that still have screenings before the festival's end, I can recommend the Secret of the Grain, Ballast and My Winnipeg the most highly.

I'm excited to present a piece on a recent festival event by fellow film junkie Sean McCourt, who has written for the Guardian and elsewhere. Now he lends his skillful observations to Hell On Frisco Bay. Take it away, Sean:

* * * * *
Beginning with his stint as the principal songwriter and leader of seminal alternative rock band the Pixies, Black Francis (nee Charles Thompson, a.k.a. Frank Black) has made a career of defying the norm, of charting his own course, and of branching out and trying new things, be it with his Pixies band mates, or during his eclectically varied solo releases—so it was not surprising when the announcement was made that he would be taking part in this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, performing his new original soundtrack for the classic silent film The Golem.

A line wrapped around the block at the Castro Theatre on April 25th as fans anxiously awaited the live premiere of the new score for the 1920 film that tells the tale of a Rabbi that creates a creature out of clay and uses supernatural powers to bring it to life. Much of the audience was composed of, as one would surmise, Generation Xers and younger fans of Francis' work. There was, however, a healthy sampling of older people who came to check out the event as well. In any case, it was a full house at the theater, with festival staff getting on a microphone shortly before start time and asking to see if there were any empty seats so that some of the many people still standing outside hoping to get in could be accommodated.

The handpicked group of musicians that Francis selected to work with him for the project was composed of Eric Drew Feldman on keyboards, Joseph Pope on bass, Ralph Carney on horns, Duane Jarvis on guitar, and Jason Carter behind the drum kit. Feldman, Jarvis and Carter have all worked with Francis in the past in different capacities, while the rest of the group has performed with artists such as Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, the B-52s and Angst. Francis and his band, who were already seated and warming up when they were introduced, were positioned on the floor in front of the stage, much like an orchestra at an opera or traditional stage production. Once the lights went down and the film started, the band launched into their material with a quick count-off from Francis, and immediately propelled the audience into the ethereal world of The Golem.

The collection of songs that Francis wrote for the score weaved lyrics that were sometimes based on the proceedings seen on screen (such as when he sang “You be the master/I’ll be the servant” as the Golem followed the Rabbi to the Emperor’s palace), while at other times seeming like he was trying to capture a feeling or emotion instead of telling a straight ahead narrative based on the events in the film. Francis incorporated the loud/quiet/loud dynamic that he has become known for over the past 20 years into the soundtrack, but not as heavily as he once did with the Pixies—the caterwauling noise and guttural screams from the Surfer Rosa era were mostly absent, and he concentrated more on sweet melodies and including some tasty horn licks from Carney into the mix. It's not the first time that Francis has based his songwriting on early films—the Pixies' hit song Debaser (“Got me a movie / I want you to know / Slicing up eyeballs / ha ha ha ho”) was of course written about Luis Buñuel's 1929 surrealist picture Un Chien Andalou, and the Pixies also covered the tune “In Heaven” from David Lynch’s cult favorite Eraserhead.

Since the Golem's soundtrack was written as a collection of songs, as opposed to a consistent background score,there were pauses in between scenes which led to some awkward silences—and opened the door for what was the one big drawback to the evening—the annoying interruptions of "Master of Ceremonies" Roy Zimmerman, who would occasionally interject with what he apparently thought were funny little quips and observations, but they only distracted from the dream-like state that the music and film created together. Pointless cracks about scenes being available on You Tube and comparing the Golem's hairstyle to that of "Diane Feinstein, circa 1986" drew a few chuckles from the audience, but in the grand scheme of things, Zimmerman's microphone should have been cut off—his participation detracted from what was otherwise a largely successful blending of modern music and vintage film.

For those in the audience who had only seen The Golem on home video before, watching it on the grand screen at the Castro was indeed a special treat, not only for the size factor, but also because of the beautiful print that was secured for the occasion. Directed by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener (who also portrayed the Golem), the 1920 film was photographed by Karl Freund, known for his work on Fritz Lang's Metropolis and F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh. The filmmakers blended classic elements of German Expressionism such as strong symbolism and manipulation of light and shadows, and took advantage of sets, designed by Hans Poelzig, that played with the bizarre architecture of the fictional ghetto. All of which was wonderfully complimented by the new music.

All in all, the evening appeared to be a rousing success, the marriage of Francis’ score with the imagery of the film drew an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience at the conclusion of the screening. There is talk of the soundtrack possibly getting a future release, either with the film on DVD, or as a stand-alone album, both of which would be most welcome—though hopefully Roy Zimmerman won’t be allowed to add any sort of commentary track. Perhaps Asteroth can be summoned once again to take care of him.

--Sean McCourt

Marina Theatre

Yesterday was a day for watching superhero films. I went to the 7PM showing of Iron Man at the newly reopened Marina Theatre on Chestnut Street, and then to the 11PM showing of Big Man Japan as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. It's hard to picture two films tackling the subject of male power fantasy from more completely different angles. I enjoyed watching both and plan to write on them as soon as I have a chance.

But first, a few words on the Marina Theatre, which was opened in 1928 and showed second-run films for thirty-odd years before changing its name to the Cinema 21 and showing first-run engagements. It closed in 2001; the last film I saw there was Shadow of a Vampire and already I'd forgotten what the interior looked like until I peeked at this site. The new version of the Marina Theatre was designed to accommodate the Wallgreens pharmacy that has moved into a large portion of the ground floor. As the smaller of the two screens, both upstairs, is not quite ready for the public, Iron Man is only being shown in the larger, 250-seat theatre. It's probably now the "nicest" of the Lee Neighborhood Theatre screens, not quite as large as that of the Presidio's main house but in a symmetrical room that feels like it was built for showing movies.

Except for one drawback: the screen is a little low, and there's no way for people sitting on the left side of the theatre to exit without crossing in front of it. Which means that shadows of the heads tall people on a restroom run disturb the goal of immaculate projection. Also, for some reason all the house lights went up during the end credits. I know we don't want people tripping over each other as they head for the exits, but might it be possible to find an alternative solution? I like supporting a neighborhood theatre and not a downtown megaplex on the occasions when I want to see a screen-saturated Hollywood movie, but I'm not too crazy about having to strain to read the names of the people who worked on the film (a number of them Frisco Bay residents, as ILM worked on the Iron Man effects). After a while I got sick of it, and left like everybody else, thus missing a Samuel L. Jackson cameo I didn't realize was going to happen.

Iron Man is also playing at another Frisco neighborhood theatre, the Balboa, where tomorrow there will be prizes for people dressed up as their favorite Marvel villain. If only I had time to make that Taskmaster outfit I'd always dreamed of putting together when i was a kid...

Linking Feller: April

The San Francisco International Film Festival is going strong at the halfway point, and has sparked some terrific pieces online.

Michael Guillén of The Evening Class has a transcript of Catherine Breillat's remarks on opening night film the Last Mistress, which she directed.

The sf360 website, funded in part by the San Francisco Film Society which runs the festival, has an extended version of the interview Medicine For Melancholy director Barry Jenkins gave to Michael Fox, that was printed in last week's SF Weekly. Yeah, it's a real love-in here, when a blogger links to an interview with a director of a digital movie playing a festival that helps pay the journalist interviewing the director, who praises the blogger. But appearances of scratch-my-back aside, Medicine For Melancholy is a terrific and important piece of work. If you don't trust me, ask the people who saw it at SXSW. Lincoln Specter of Bayflicks has a rare dissenting view.

Jeffrey Anderson is filing daily reports to the Bay Guardian's Pixel Vision blog, and Jason Weiner is doing the same on his own site.

I don't mean to bury the lead, but check out this incredibly thoughtful conversation between Ryland Walker Knight, Kevin Lee and Jennifer Stewart inspired by the festival event awarding film critic J. Hoberman its Mel Novikoff prize and screening In the City of Sylvia. These folks are so smart I'm a little intimidated to join the discussion. I'm happy just to read it.

Moving away from the film festival, a couple weeks ago Kevin Lee got Paolo Cherchi Usai to talk about Frank Borzage's masterpiece Seventh Heaven over clips of the film, and it's a must-watch.

And finally, on to a couple other Frisco Bay film festivals on the horizon. Another Hole in the Head (June 5-22) has announced its full line-up. And Frameline (June 19-29) has announced a few titles and is beginning to sell tickets and passes.

Cine Elsewhere

Here is my first GreenCine Daily dispatch from the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. I discuss the two revival screenings at the festival this past weekend- though I suppose I could also have included Bruce Conner's Cannes-bound Easter Morning from the Alternate Geographies shorts program (which plays again on Friday afternoon) as it's a reworking of his little-known 1966 work Easter Morning Raga.

An excerpt from my dispatch:

If the Leave Her to Heaven screening was a happy occasion to bridge the gulf between these two groups - classic cinema devotees and curious newbies - the previous night's screening of The Golem illustrated that trying too hard to connect a new audience with an old film can be fraught with complications.

SFIFF: the Sundance connection

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS SITE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 5/7/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION.

* * * * *
The 51st SF International Film Festival began last night, with a screening of Catherine Breillat's the Last Mistress at the Castro Theatre. Earlier tonight the festival expanded to its other venues, the PFA and the Kabuki, where it will stay for the next two weeks, drawing hardcore cinephiles and curious culture-watchers alike (the Clay and a few other venues broaden the festival's reach in the days to come.) The festival, more than any other film event of the Frisco Bay calendar year, feels like a party that the anyone in the city can join in, as long as they're willing to pay a $12.50 single-ticket admission price.

That price is a tad higher than most moviegoing around here will cost you, and with the elimination of matinee pricing this year there's all the more incentive for particularly active attendees to become a film society member (or, like me, a PFA member) to get a couple bucks lopped off each ticket price. However, all but a few specially-priced gala events will cost a non-member less than a ticket to, say, last year's Silent Film Festival, or an advance-sales ticket to a Sundance screening should you be in Utah when that festival rolls around. And, in fact, regular tickets cost less than certain screenings of non-festival fare at the Kabuki do, now that the theatre's been bought and made-over by the new Sundance Cinemas venture, with its amenities fees charged for assigning seats. While the SFIFF makes its home at the Kabuki, seats will not be assigned in advance and amenities fees will not be charged on top of the festival ticket price.

I've attended the Sundance Film Festival twice now; once as a member of the ticket-buying public, and once with a press pass that saved me a few hundred dollars in ticket costs. I have a press pass for the SFIFF too, but as usual I've purchased tickets to a certain few shows that I Absolutely Do Not Want To Miss (like Aditya Assarat's Wonderful Town), knowing that there is often greater demand for press tickets than there is supply. Though I honestly can only remember being shut out of a film once, for the Iranian film Iron Island, in the past five years that I've had a pass for the SFIFF, I don't like to take chances. Sundance is run differently; there's less incentive for press to buy advance tickets because their pass can be used to acquire a comp. ticket in any wait-list line.

Sundance is different from the SFIFF in many, many other ways, of course. For example, the programming at Sundance is far more AmerIndie-centric, leaving foreign films on the sidelines. Here's a good quote on the matter I recently found via the cinetrix, from former SFIFF director Peter Scarlet:

If you’re the maker of a foreign film and you accept an invitation to go to Sundance, it’s a little like getting a last-minute reservation at a trendy restaurant. You get a nice dish for you and your companion, you wear something sexy, but it turns out you’re seated at the tiny table right next to the restroom. I won’t even get into the aromas and whatnot.

It's a harsh statement, but there's certainly truth in it, as the lion's share of the attention at the Utah fest gets lavished upon homegrown productions. By contrast, the SFIFF and a good portion of its audience see foreign films, especially those directed by the world's master filmmakers, as a central piece of the festival mission. If not the core.

On my own trips to Sundance, I've attempted to swim against the tide and cover its foreign films with at least as much care and enthusiasm as the American offerings. One film I never quite got around to in my Sundance reports was the Jordanian documentary Recycle, which is also set to play at the SFIFF; an image from the film is featured on the cover of the festival's program guide. Recycle follows the routines of Abu Ammar, a resident of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's hometown of Zarqa. He drives his young son around the city, an industrial center in Jordan, picking up unused cardboard that he knows he can sell at a recycling center. It's a reminder that while recycling may still be seen as optional or even a luxury in opulent communities, the act becomes a necessity when poverty strikes. But Recycle's subject is not just recycling cardboard; he also saves notes to use in a book on religion he plans to write. He keeps sacks full of these paper scraps, and they're not the only evidence director Mahmoud al Massad presents that seems intended to make us wonder if Abu Ammar has been radicalized into a potentially dangerous fundamentalist along the lines of Zarqawi. Sometimes Al Massad's frustrating metaphor of a "recycled terrorist" seems at times heavy-handed and at other times vague, but the film is filled with enough sarcastic characters and absurd images, like a camel stand on the edge of town, or a cardboard eye becoming swallowed up by churning liquid at the recycling center, to make it much more than just a metaphor.

The other foreign films I saw at Sundance that also are set to play the SFIFF were all animated shorts that did not require subtitles: Madame Tutli-Putli from Canada and the Pearce Sisters and Yours Truly from the UK, which along with American Carson Mell's Chonto played a terrific Sundance shorts program that I reviewed here. As it features these four entires plus films by Kelly Sears, Stefan Mueller, Max Hattler and Aardman's Richard Goleszowski, I feel confident recommending the SFIFF shorts program the Human Kingdom. It plays tomorrow evening and Wednesday April 30th. I also enjoyed the Sundance screenings of a few short films playing on two other SFIFF shorts programs, for example the deservedly Oscar-nominated short documentary La Corona which plays the SFIFF as part of a program called the Feminine Mystique on April 28 and 29. Kelly Sears' the Drift and Leighton Pierce's Number One both play on Alternate Geographies; I intend to attend the program tomorrow, and I'll be glad to see them again, along with Bruce Conner's Cannes-bound Easter Morning, the highly-praised, much anticipated Observando El Cielo and more. That program plays again May 2nd.

Finally, a pair of American features I saw at Sundance will play SFIFF on the way to a wider release planned for this summer. Both films seem to brush up against the imaginary line between fiction and documentary, from either side of that electric fence. The fiction film, Ballast, uses non-professional actors all from the same Mississippi Delta region in which the film was shot, improvising dialogue to a predetermined scenario. The result is remarkably affecting and almost completely free from familiar character cliches. I spoke a bit more about the film with Robert Davis on his podcast here. The documentary, American Teen, in chronicling a year in the life of an Indiana high school, hand-picks four archetypal teenagers and follows them through their daily adventures, some of which seem quite possibly concocted by the teens just to add drama to their on-camera presence. I wrote a bit more about the film here.

Ballast and American Teen also provide an interesting case study for another issue that's been recently raised regarding the SF International Film Festival this year. The issue is that of digital projection vs. film projection, and has been extensively covered by Michael Guillen, who has provided a list of festival films expected to be screened using digital projection, gleaned from the Film On Film Foundation calendar; Guillen also interviewed Carl Martin from that group. The crux of the issue is that, for those of us who find something pleasurable, if perhaps somewhat ineffable, about the act of viewing a 35mm or 16mm film print, it's nice to know before we purchase a ticket to a screening and sit down to watch a film, whether the film we're about to watch is going to really be a physical film running though a mechanical projector, or else a digital projection. Likewise, those of us who are curious about the new frontiers of film distribution technology, and production technology with which it often though not always goes hand-in-hand, might like to know in advance what digital format a festival selection is being shown through as well.

Sundance, at least for the past two years, consistently marks the projection method, whether film or video, and what kind, in its program guide, but SFIFF does not. Thankfully, the Film On Film Foundation had the initiative to request that information from the festival, which was very helpful in agreeing to the request. The resulting list is pretty free of surprises; 1920's The Golem screened in a very nice-looking (if untinted) 35mm print for example, while Craig Baldwin's found-footage mash-up Mock Up On Mu will be shown digitally, as expected. It seems that most if not all of the films being projected digitally are the ones that were shot with digital cameras. I wrote about the way digital production and projection can open up a wider range of options for filmmakers and festival programmers in my SFIFF festival report three years ago (already a bit late to the issue). This year I feel confident saying that Ballast's pictoral virtues would be severely lessened if it were screened digitally instead of in 35mm, as is planned. Likewise, I can't imagine that American Teen could have been made as intimate as it is without the relatively unobtrusive presence of digital cameras. Everything has its place.