Larry Chadbourne Has Two Eyes

The Frisco Bay repertory/revival scene cannot be taken in by a single pair of eyes. Thankfully, a number of local filmgoers have agreed to share their favorites from 2009. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Larry Chadbourne of the Film On Film Foundation:

My 6 favorite Rep/Revival Screenings from 2009
In historical order

1. J'Accuse (1918) I had only seen the truncated American version of Gance's lyrical pacifist epic, so the North American premiere at the Castro of the restoration made a tremendous impression, aided by the skillful transposition from organist Robert Israel of his original symphonic score. And the timing -- the week of Obama's heartbreaking Oslo speech -- added to the emotional impact.

2. Lady Of The Pavements (1929) - Castro. The stand-out entry in this year's SF silent film fest, a rarely shown late Griffith, benefited from the vocals by pianist Donald Sosin's wife Joanna Seaton, in an attempt to reconstruct some of the missing sound discs. Her rendition of Berlin's "Where Is The Song of Songs For Me?", which at one point seemed to match the lip-movements on screen of the lovely Lupe Velez, evoked gasps from the audience.

3. La Tete D'Un Homme (1932) PFA's Duvivier series was the year's archival goldmine, with numerous seldom shown classics revisited and several rare items projected with special electronic subtitles. Of these the Simenon adaptation as well as the later 1957 Pot Bouille, a work of literary craftsmanship made just before such artistry would be overwhelmed by the New Wave, stood out. I single out La Tete D'un Homme for its Sternbergian pictorial texture, its striking use of the Brechtian street singer, and its anticipation of American film noir.

4. Jeanne Dielman (1975) SF Moma's interesting Akerman series allowed me to finally catch up with this modernist landmark.It is the kind of film that changes the way you look at things, if only such mundane matters as cleaning one's bathtub. The showing was enriched by the scholarly introduction by B. Ruby Rich, one of the best intros to a film I've ever heard.

5. Inglorious Bastards (1978) Yerba Buena's clever revival of the inspiration for the Tarantino was (in contrast to J'Accuse) a beautifully colored fantasy flashback to childhood-memories-of playing with war toys. If only for this one film, the supposed schlockmeister Enzo Castellari looks worthy of further scrutiny.

6. Who Will Watch The Watchmen? (2003) PFA's Karel Vachek series offered those with the stamina to spend five Sunday afternoons immersed in Czech history, culture and politics the rewarding-payoff. In Watchmen, Vachek's wandering eye was anchored somewhat by the need to keep returning to rehearsals of a Smetana opera not well known in North America, "Dalibor". This more than made up for the other moments of frustration making-one's way through this massive oeuvre.

Ben Armington Has Two Eyes

The Frisco Bay repertory/revival scene cannot be taken in by a single pair of eyes. Thankfully, a number of local filmgoers have agreed to share their favorites from 2009. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Ben Armington, Frequent Film Festival Box Officer:

1. THE LAST COMMAND (Pacific Film Archive)

Co-Starring William Powell, this emotionally devastating epic flashback through flip-flopping power struggles, love-hate triangles and stinging humiliation was my favorite in the PFA's wonderful series on the cinema's premier fool-for-love, Josef Von Sternberg.

2. VOYAGE IN ITALY/THE CARDINAL (PFA/Film On Film Foundation)

One of the most surprisingly rewarding pairings of the year. I really enjoyed how both films used their carefully chosen locations to heighten the emotional kick of their characters' meanderings. Seen on an exceptionally dour, rainy Sunday, which may have helped.

3. NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (PFA)

Shown on a new 35 print with the original Japanese language with English subtitles, this afternoon screening of Miyazaki's early masterpiece was an absolute delight that defies any attempts at explanation. Since it was a "matinee for all ages", the theater staff served complimentary ice cream after the film.

4. BLACK CHRISTMAS (4 Star, Thrillville)

Hosted by the couple Will the Thrill and Monica Sugar-Mama (& Tiki-Goddess) of Thrillville, it dawned on me while sitting down for the self-consciously crap-tastic introduction (sample joke: "the alternate title for this movie is 'African-American Christmas'") and that this might be a screening where the audience was supposed to lob MST3K-style witticisms and gummy candies at the woefully stupid movie darting across the screen in front of us...not my cup of coffee. so i was happily surprised when the audience, after some initial outbursts, calmed down and settled into what was one of the most terrifying and disturbing moviegoing experiences of the year. I especially enjoyed Margot Kidder's foulmouthed turn as the house drunk. A cult movie that lives up to and even surpasses it's reputation.

5. MARTIN (PFA)

George A. Romero is a master filmmaker and a very tall man. Like BLACK CHRISTMAS, this is a film that comes highly recommended and it delivered magnificently, both as an urban/ gothic thriller and an evocation of the awkwardness and loneliness of adolescence. Sexier than TWILIGHT.

6. THUNDERCRACK! (VICTORIA, Frameline Film Festival)

The various film festivals I work for were too busy for me to sneak off to sample the goods oftentimes this year, but I did clear my schedule for this sweaty little gem. Highlights include a woman puking into a toilet, dropping her wig into the toilet, putting the wig back on. George Kuchar and his mustache gave one of the most insanely committed performances I've ever seen. I'm still kind of in awe.

7. THE BURGLAR/WITNESS TO MURDER (ROXIE, Film Noir series)

I usually pull over the car when I see Dan Duryea's name on the marquee, so i was delighted to find the man in the lead role in the demented fever dream that is THE BURGLAR...a film in which no bedpost goes unclenched when our hero is overcome by memory and/or emotion! WITNESS To MURDER proved to be a delicious double, with a game Barbara Stanywk outwitting the diabolically Nietzschen George Saunders, who, when not menacingly reciting German, appears to be in danger of taking a nap. Excellent!

8. SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (PFA)

Fritz Lang's thriller, known for it's Freudian subtexts, begins with the heroine almost impaled by a stray knife (an experience that kind of excites her) then dares us to follow her whirlwind courtship with an obviously untrustworthy architect, whose hobbies include obsessively recreating historical "death rooms" in his palatial estate. People in the audience jumped during the climactic suspense sequence.

9. LIQUID SKY (CASTRO, Midnites for Maniacs)

This was a tough call, because, out of all of the great m4m programs this year, this was the one I least enjoyed. NEAR DARK, ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING, RED DAWN, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and ICE CASTLES were all much more gratifying experiences. I dozed off a bit towards the end of SKY. But...this is the one that stuck with me the most and i really feel like it's some kind of berserk masterpiece. Was it the trippy, witchy visuals or the obscure narrative logic? Beats me. Priceless dialogue bit: "I take quaaludes like you take aspirin!"

10. LABYRINTH (PIEDMONT, midnight series)

This was a hugely enjoyable midnight screening that reminded me why I like going to movies so much in the first place. Jim Henson's puppetry is still dazzling. Complete with Bowie karaoke before the show.

Brecht Andersch Has Two Eyes

The Frisco Bay repertory/revival scene cannot be taken in by a single pair of eyes. Thankfully, a number of local filmgoers have agreed to share their favorites from 2009. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Brecht Andersch, who blogs about cinema for SFMOMA and the Film on Film Foundation, where a lengthier version of this piece is cross-posted:

Ah... I would be recruited to this task the very year - due to other unavoidable obligations - I'd eased up on my decades-long mad-cap cinephiliac pursuits... Going over my 2009 calendar has prompted more pain than pleasure - all those once-in-a-lifetime this print runs through these projectors experiences which can never be repeated in exactly the same way, now lost, lost forever, on a river of no return, non-experienced moments disappearing like tears in rain... No, it is too late! We must move on!.... Despite the pain occasioned, I've managed to come up with a list:

1) The SFMOMA Projectionist/Open Space Blogger Experience:

Perhaps the greatest thrill over the past year has been to write about a film screening for the SFMOMA blog, then project the show. To engage for days and weeks of communion/mind-meld with a given film artist, write a piece on a specific work, and then devote several nerve-wracking hours towards getting it on the screen perfectly is quite a blast, so I hope to be forgiven for beginning this list with a vanity shout-out to Jeanne Dielman (2/26, 2/28), Stalker (4/9, 4/11), Portrait of Jason, (7/9, 7/11), Subversive Documentaries (9/1), Interiors (10/29), and Kenneth Anger (12/17). The last show was particularly anxiety-inducing as Anger was in the audience and has been known to put hexes on both writers and projectionists who've displeased him, so I was anticipating a potential double-whammy... Fortunately, as far as I can currently tell, everything went fine, but if my life takes a sudden nose-dive in the near future, you'll know the cause. On the other hand, I didn't have to project the Subversive Documentaries, and writing about Franju's Hôtel des Invalides and Resnais' Le Chant du Styrène, then coming in to see them in 35 for the first time (impeccable prints, immaculately projected) in the theater in which I work was an ecstatic experience, indeed!

2) The Film on Film Foundation Experience:

Since I'm still in vanity mode, I'll get this out of the way: being involved in programming and presenting rare films is always a thrill, especially ones I've a strong hankering to see. This was especially the case for Accident (4/5 PFA), our double-feature of Fear and Desire & The Delinquents (5/10 Roxie), and Patty Hearst (6/28 PFA). Aside from the Schrader, I'd only seen these on video (the bootleg of the Kubrick was like watching a documentary on snow shot in Pixel-vision), so seeing them in 35, for the most part in gorgeous prints, was a delight. Patty Hearst, a ludicrously underrated work (Schrader's best?), was given an extra boost by my Film on Film collaborationist Carl Martin pointing out in his intro that its opening shot had been lensed only a few hundred feet-or-so away from the PFA screen...

3) The Un- or Under-Seen Josef von Sternberg Experience:

At this point in my cinephiliac career, I'm less in heroic Deer Hunter-mode, than that of the yeoman farmer: I've planted my crops, and idly recline on the porch, savoring puffs from my corn-cob, and perusing the almanac (usually the PFA calendar) re. when to expect the harvest. This year, there was a bumper-crop of von Sternbergs, some of which I'd only seen in 16mm, or on video, while others I'd waited for for decades... The former category included Underworld (1/15) and The Last Command (1/18 - visionary masochism at Everest-heights of aesthetic accomplishment brought even further to precise fever-pitch by the astonishing improvisatory piano-accompaniment of the brilliant Judith Rosenberg), and the latter Thunderbolt (1/31), with George Bancroft's unanticipated (by me) sensitive performance as a Tough Con Cruel Bastard who ultimately reveals a heart partially made of gold. Thunderbolt added new layers to my understanding of Sternberg's masochism, and the film was this year, perhaps, for me the summit of that type of experience I seek in projected celluloid - that is, a personal vision expressed in profoundly passionate artistry, yoked to a deep knowledge and exploitation of the aesthetic effect film technology at its purest has on the reptilian brain - for me, this combo induces religious ecstasy.

To see Brecht's full list of ten "experiences" of 2009, please see the cross-posting at the Film On Film Foundation Blog.

Monsieur Hulot after the Holidays

The year's film festivals are now all in the rear-view mirror. This weekend marked the last of the 2009 film programming at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts and the Pacific Film Archive. Even the Castro Theatre turns its back on repertory for a few weeks after the end of its Alfred Hitchcock series this Wednesday. Yes, Frisco Bay's cinema screens are clearing room for moviegoers to focus on the year-end releases which angle for box office boosts from critical top ten lists and nominations from awards-giving bodies. If not for exceptions like the booking of a new print of Bicycle Thieves at the Roxie, Christmas-themed programming at the Stanford and San Jose's California Theatre, and the traditional booking of Baraka at the Red Vic, local cinema addicts would have no other option but to see a 2009 commercial release if they want to attend a movie. Of the new ones available, I highly recommend Frederick Wiseman's ballet documentary La Danse, perhaps his most musical film and thus one of his most accessible. It plays the Rafael and the Balboa and the Elmwood for a few more days before moving to the Little Roxie. Claire Denis's haunting 35 Shots of Rum is making its long-awaited return to Frisco Bay this week at the Lumiere and the Shattuck. And much to my surprise, I also liked Clint Eastwood's Invictus quite a bit; though not a perfect movie it has some truly remarkable scenes, and a smart self-awareness of both the facilities and the limitations of mass entertainment to motivate social change.

In January, Frisco Bay repertory will gear up again. Arguably the centerpiece of early 2010 is the newly-struck print of Jacques Tati's international breakthrough Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot a.k.a. Mr. Hulot's Holiday, which will appear at no fewer than four venues around the bay in the next couple of months. First, on January 14th, it kicks off the new semester at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and the complete Tati retrospective it's holding (other PFA attractions in January and February include but are not limited to tributes to Val Lewton and the early work of Frank Capra, the annual African Film Festival, and screenings of films by Jean-Luc Godard, Yasujiro Ozu, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Nathaniel Dorsky.) From January 15-21 Mr. Hulot's Holiday spends an entire week at the North Bay's Rafael Film Center (which has also announced its For Your Consideration series of international submissions for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award). Then on January 28th it stops at YBCA, which is also hosting the touring Tati retrospective, before taking up a two-day residence at the Red Vic on February 3rd and 4th.

The PFA and YBCA Tati retrospectives are particularly exciting: not only chances to see Mr. Hulot's Holiday in a restored print with an audience to laugh along with, but a chance to contextualize the 1953 film into this woefully misremembered filmmaker's career. If Tati is thought of by modern cinema audiences at all, he is too frequently considered an anachronistic kindred to silent-era clowns like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Max Linder. It's true that like these gentlemen he developed his comedy in music halls before unleashing it on cinema screens, but unlike them his films exhibit a near-revolutionary understanding of the comedic potential of film sound. Sound effects, snatches of dialogue, and deceptively relaxing musical scores play as much a role in his peculiar brand of humor as do his physical gags and his democratic approach to mise-en-scene. Though my personal favorite of his films is Playtime (which plays the PFA Jan. 15 & 23, and the YBCA Feb. 11), it is Mr. Hulot's Holiday which introduced the character of Monsieur Hulot, and is likely the purest distillation of Tati's aesthetic. It's a film in tune with the elements: wind, water, sand, etc. The director gets great comic mileage out of the most seemingly insignificant things, like the sound a door makes when opening and closing, or a tennis swing, or the tide rolling onto the shore.

But don't take my word for it. Who better to talk about a French filmmaker than the most influential French film critic, André Bazin? Thankfully, his essay on Tati and Mr. Hulot's Holiday has been translated into English by Bert Cardullo and was published at Bright Lights Film Journal with a substantial introduction by Cardullo earlier this year.

The Evening Class has compiled the PFA and YBCA programs into one handy list. Though both venues will showcase shorts Tati directed and/or starred in as well as his features, and both include all four of the films featuring Tati's Hulot character as well as the barely-seen color version of his first feature Jour De Fete, only the PFA will be screening the director's swan song Parade. YBCA screened the latter twice earlier this month, and I attended one of the showings, never having seen Parade before. This final, post-Hulot work was shot on both film and video, showing off the advantages of both formats as they existed in 1974. It's a capturing of a circus performance filled with jugglers, animal acts, magicians and musicians, all of them doubling as clowns. Though in essence a non-narrative performance film, there are multiple micro-narratives to be found in Parade, many of them stemming out of the broken barriers between circus performers and audience members that Tati and his troupe have instigated. We follow one towheaded child from apparent boredom to full participation when he is invited to ride a mule around the circus ring, showing up animal-handling skills of the other audience volunteers attempting the task. It's one of many delights packed into this relatively brief, made-for-television feature.

The Criterion Collection DVDs of Mr. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle feature introductions by a comic director of another sort, Terry Jones of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Jones directed, or co-directed with Terry Gilliam, each of the Pythons' feature films. He will be in town early next year as well, appearing at the Castro Theatre January 21st for a double feature of Monty Python and The Holy Grail and The Life of Brian as part of the SF Sketchfest film programs. (Other Sketchfest screenings include UHF with "Weird Al" Yankovic in attendance, Brain Candy with Dave Foley in attendance, Waiting For Guffman with Fred Willard in attendance, two screenings celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, and a live heckling of Danger On Tiki Island from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 alums at the Castro.) I'm sure the Castro will have a massive turnout of generations of Monty Python fans eager to see the Knights Who Say 'Ni' and the Peoples' Front Of Judea on the largest possible screen, with one of the chief collaborators on hand with his perspectives. Wouldn't it be great if some who have never experienced a film by one of his chief comedic influences stepped outside the zone of 'comfort cinema' to enjoy the Tati screenings on offer as well?

The Cardinal

Of the countless functions of cinema, perhaps one of the most suited to the medium is "camera as peephole." The world is filled with closed-off spaces, from the bedroom to the boardroom, which you or I cannot simply enter and experience for ourselves inobtrusively. Writers and visual artists who have access to a cloistered locale can report on their experiences behind socially-constructed veils, but they act as a filter quite different from a camera and audio recorder working in tandem. Likewise, so-called "fiction" filmmaking generally employs a filter distinct from the documentary mode, but even a well-dressed Hollywood set populated by actors can simulate for an audience the look and feel of an otherwise-private sphere they could otherwise never expect to experience at all.

Herein lies the everlasting appeal of the confessional in cinema to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Films like Forbidden Games, the Godfather Hamlet and countless others memorably recreate this oh-so-priviliged space, exploiting its dramatic (or comedic) potential while reminding us that cinema is as much about the unseen (often, the priest on the other side of the wall is heard but never shown) as the seen. Otto Preminger's 1963 The Cardinal uses a confession booth as a key location, but more notably the film as a whole serves as a sort of peephole onto the inner workings of the Catholic Church. Preminger, coming off the popular success of the religious-themed epic Exodus, was allowed an unprecedented amount of access to the Vatican City for this adaptation of the 1950 bestselling novel by Henry Morton Robinson. None other than Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, was the liaison between the Church and the production.

The Cardinal is titled for its central character Stephen Fermoyle, a priest played by Tom Tryon who acquired the nickname as a youth, we're told, as he'd been preordained to go into the clergy since his birth into Boston's Irish Catholic community. An academic at heart, he's seemingly more comfortable in an ivory tower delving into his faith's distant history than out in the world helping parishioners live through history-in-action. The interwar setting of the film provides opportunities for Fermoyle to butt up against twentieth-century history, both its events and its changing social attitudes. Tryon plays him as a weak personality who employs strict Catholic doctrine as something of a surrogate spine, guiding his hard decisions no matter the personal cost.

The film is structured as a series of moral tests for Tryon's priest, and for the Catholic Church in general. Whether he (and Catholicism) passes or fails these tests will probably depend on your viewpoint on controversial subjects, though one might guess Preminger's own stances even if he's, on the whole, even-handed in his presentation. Fermoyle confronts bigotry, abortion, his family's desires for him to go against his professed beliefs, and his own ambition. He even turns away from the church for an extended sequence in Vienna, though because of a flashback-framing device, we know that he will eventually return to Rome with honor; all we don't know is just how.
"How" is the fundamental question in successful narrative, and in The Cardinal. Chris Fujiwara, in his Preminger biography the World and Its Double, argues that if The Cardinal "is one of Preminger's greatest films, it is also, inevitably, one of his most underappreciated, since the same things that make it great also make it resist appreciation." Another biographer, Foster Hirsch, introducing a screening at the Film Forum in New York City, calls it "very square" in that it deals with the inner workings of church hierarchy, an unfashionable subject in 1963 or now. But he also considers it something of a litmus test for Preminger affinity; "if you like the film, you like Preminger. If it doesn't get to you, and it won't get to all of you, Preminger is not for you."

I'm not sure if Hirsch's challenge is foolproof; I did like the Cardinal, but to be honest it's the first of his films that has truly captured my fascination. Perhaps it's the circumstances of viewing; seeing the Panavision print secured by the Film On Film Foundation projected on a large screen at a press preview a few weeks ago was naturally more involving than viewing even the likes of Laura or Anatomy of a Murder on videocassette years ago. Perhaps I've just learned better how to view such an auteur-centric film over the years.

If so, it's not small part in thanks to reading books like Film As Film, written by V. F. Perkins in 1972. (And to Girish Shambu for instigating me to read it!) The book is an eye-opening investigation of the building blocks of narrative cinema, and though Perkins draws examples from across the range of classic cinema, from Griffith and Eisenstein to Nicholas Ray and Michaelangelo Antonioni, no director save Alfred Hitchcock gets more citations in the index than Otto Preminger. Two passages single out scenes from The Cardinal. One (page 95-6) takes the instance of a bell ringing upon Fermoyle's arrival in a small, impoverished Massachusetts parish as an example of the richness in meaning available through the use of sound in cinema. The other (page 87-88) contrasts the aptly motivated moving camera in a shot of Fermoyle and Anne-Marie (played by Romy Schneider) cycling through the Austrian countryside against camera movements he considers unmotivated in John Frankenheimer's the Train. Perkins writes of the shot: "Preminger's image does not cease to offer information in order to impose a mood or meaning. Instead the viewpoint is used to provoke, out of all the possible responses to the action, the ones most relevant to the film's design." As I interpret him, he's arguing on a micro leveal that the Cardinal at a macro level is a fully-controlled work from a master who knows exactly the effects he wants to achieve with each shot. Even what is arguably an episodic or unfocused source novel has been tamed and assimilated into Preminger's cinematic worldview.

I am excited to view more Preminger films in the retrospective currently running at the Pacific Film Archive through a lens informed by reading Fujiwara and Perkins, and by my experience viewing and considering The Cardinal. The series ends December 20th with a pairing of two highly-regarded works, Bonjour Tristesse and Bunny Lake Is Missing. In the meantime, a rare chance to see the Cardinal, which was left off the official PFA Preminger program, will occur this Sunday, December 6th at that venue, thanks to the Film On Film Foundation's rental of the theatre. It occurs just after screenings of Heddy Honigmann's the Underground Orchestra and Roberto Rossellini's masterful Voyage In Italy; Frisco Bay cinephiles will need airtight excuses not to be in Berkeley that day!