Feast Your Eyes

This weekend is the SF Film Society's annual Cinema By The Bay festival, a smörgåsbord of film screenings showing off the quality and diversity of Frisco Bay filmmaking, and culminating in an awards ceremony tomorrow honoring documentarians Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, Allie Light and Irving Saraf, impresario/filmmaker Joshua Grannell, writer/editor Susan Gerhard, publicist Karen Larsen, and the 50-year-old distribution institution Canyon Cinema. All exceedingly worthy honorees, and I wish I were available to attend the event tomorrow evening.

Not long ago I sat down for an interview with one of last year's honorees, the amazing, undervalued chronicler of music, cuisine, and the cultures encircling and encircled by them both, Les Blank. The interview was for an article to be published in the next issue of First Person Magazine, entitled "Radical Foods". When editor Betty Nguyen told me of this theme, Blank came to mind immediately as an ideal person to get involved. One of the most unique aspects of his filmmaking is his integration of food into the presentation of his films, as I experienced several years ago at a screening of his 1980 film Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers. Here's Blank's response to my question about the difference between "Smell-O-Vision" and "Aromaround":

Well, I've never used Smell-O-Vision. I use Smell-Around. Smell-O-Vision was, I believe, a patented system. When they first brought this concept out in the theatres I think they piped in smells. One theatre I think even had them under the seat. They had an exhaust fan to get 'em out, but they had trouble getting one smell out in order to make room for the next one.

John Waters had scratch and sniff cards. I didn't care for that myself. No one I know has the actual food being cooked in the actual theatre. When I'd screen Always For Pleasure and cook red beans and rice, I'd call that Smell-Around. If I was showing Yum Yum Yum or Spend It All, which has gumbo in it, I would call it Smell-Around too. But the garlic film, I'd always call Aromaround.

An elaborate version would be to take the pot of beans that hasn't been completely cooked yet. They're still in the small-making phase. Once you start cooking they let off their aromas and then, the aromas dwindle down, so the cooking beans don't really smell that much towards the end of the cooking period, but if you take a portion of the beans you're gonna be serving the public, and hold them back, then get 'em going to the point where they make the most smell, then you take that into the theatre, and one person carries the pot, one person stirs the pot, and the other person has a fan and they fan the fumes into the audience. You walk all the way around the theatre so everyone sees this whole operation. during the part of the film, where the film is being cooked or served, or in the cajun films, there's the gumbo.

With the garlic film you put toaster ovens in the front or the rear of the theatre, and then you turn on the oven to 350 degrees. If you turn it on in the beginning, the smell will be full strength about halfway through, about 20-25 minutes in. I like it best when it hits its peak when Alice Waters says "can you smell the garlic?" The audience might yell back. It might laugh, or sigh.

To read more from my interview with Blank, you'll have to find a copy of the magazine. I'm not sure of all the locations where it will be sold as yet, but it will certainly be available at the issue launch event this Thursday night at St. John's Church. The ticket price includes a dinner prepared by issue co-editor and artist chef Leif Hedendal, an edible sculpture presented by artist Leah Rosenberg, and Les Blank in attendance with a screening of Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers. Hope to see you there!

Adam Hartzell on Three Upcoming Documentaries

I'm slowly recovering from the busiest time of my year, Halloween. I haven't blogged in weeks, haven't tweeted in days, and am just about to get back into my cinephile swing. Today's the right timing, as tonight the new November-December Pacific Film Archive calendar launches with The Unstable Object, the first of four Alternative Visions screenings Wednesdays this month. The Castro Theatre screens four masterpieces in a Nick Ray centennial mini-fest today and tomorrow, and the Roxie chimes in with a fifth Ray (Johnny Guitar) Sunday as part of its Not Necessarily Noir 2 series. And the SF Film Society closes French Cinema Now tonight and opens Cinema By The Bay tomorrow; I'm intrigued by the screening of the 1926 silent The Bat and the films by Lawrence Jordan, Carolee Schneeman, etc. playing the Canyon Cinema spotlight. But my friend Adam Hartzell has just added three more upcoming films to my to-see list, each sampled at the Mill Valley Film Festival last month. Here, Adam writes on the discoveries made in his cinemagoing travels:

In order avoid adding to both our financial and carbon footprint debt, my wife and I have been limiting our plane-dependent vacations to one a year. And we never travel by car anymore. But we still long to 'get-away'. So we've been venturing around the Bay Area, to places that can be reached by ferry, train, or bus. And many of these advanced 'stay-cations' have been for film festivals. We've taken Amtrak to Sacramento for the French Film Festival where we got to see Alex Deliporte's Angèle & Tony and the Audrey Tatou vehicle Beautiful Lies before San Francisco French Cinema Now attendees did this past week. It was also in Sacramento that we got to see the wonderful scene where Je t'aime . . . moi non plus is first heard by Serge Gainsbourg's record company in Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life that opened at the Embarcadero this past weekend. We've also made the Tiburon International Film Festival an annual trip since it's such a green convenience to walk off the ferry right smack dab into the festival.
　
The Mill Valley Film Festival makes it a bit more difficult to travel to on a green stream. They do provide a shuttle from the San Rafael and Mill Valley venues, but we chose films showing in Mill Valley and there wasn't a direct bus from the Larkspur Ferry as far as we could tell, so we grabbed a cab to get to Mill Valley for our overnight stay. (We did take the shuttle to San Rafael in order to take Golden Gate Bus back, however.)
　
Although we didn't plan it this way, all three of the films we caught at MVFF will be released in San Francisco before the year is out. Coming to the Balboa December 2nd will be Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey's Eames: The Architect and The Painter. I had heard about the Charles and Ray Eames's marriage and professional partnership in a past podcast (the name of which escapes me), so I was ready for the most revealing aspect of Cohn and Jersey's documentary; that is, how important Ray Eames's work was to the success of their designs. They were a couple speeding past the Zeitgeist of the 50's, having to negotiate the respect Ray wanted and Charles wanted for Ray within the patriarchal narratives demanded of the times. The television clip where the hostess can't seem to integrate the female half of this couple is a very valuable moment of archival retrieval. Eames: The Architect and The Painter is an example of the value and necessity of what is often called 'revisionist history', a term sadly intended negatively by too many mindless talking heads. Much history is 'revisionist history' in that it is the applying of recently excavated information to create a new narrative that is hopefully more representative of what actually happened and why. In this way, Eames: The Architect and The Painter brings a lathe to refine the record of the impact of the Eames studio. It's no longer just Charles who gets a seat at the table since he wasn't alone in the creation of those seats and tables.

Our Saturday morning show, Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, was disappointingly lacking in the young folk hoped for as part of the DocFest just past or the Lumiere in SF or Rafael Film Center in San Rafael come December 16th. Or, as my wife suggested, perhaps the kids didn't want the magic of Elmo ruined by seeing the man behind him. The man that brought a voice and aesthetic to Elmo that no other puppeteers were able to bring, Kevin Clash, definitely makes an effort to move his body away whenever he meets kids in real life, as if his contortions are abracadabra gesticulations maintaining the magic. The film is about a dreamer, a geek picked on at school, who works hard at his craft and eventually makes his way to the big leagues as well as the respect of his peers. His parents support is endearing and tantamount to Clash's success, as is the public funding that contributed to Clash's career trajectory. Besides the public television funding that made Sesame Street successful along with the massive research and talent that was part of the Children's Television Workshop that Clash became a part of, military research has a place to play in a particularly puzzling aspect of professional puppetry for young Clash. (I'm going to be vague about it to allow for the pleasure of that reveal.) The public money behind Elmo provided opportunities for artists and researchers to leverage their interests, skills, talents and dreams, resulting in tremendous benefit for individuals, communities and economies. If you're cynical to the joy Elmo has brought to so many children, Elmo did, after all, do more than tickle the economy in all the ancillary products sold.
　
As much as I enjoyed the Eames and Clash documentaries, the best film I saw at MVFF will possibly be the best film I see all year. Judy Lief's Deaf Jam is a celebration of American Sign Language poetry that doubles as a primer of Deaf Culture, triples as a personal story of Israeli and Palestinian friendship, quadruples as a snapshot of the economic impact of our immigration law, and multiplies as many, many other things. This is truly a beautiful, powerful film, providing a mesmerizing experience that I have not had in a theatre for a long time. Lief's dance background is clearly on display in her framing of the hand, body and facial movements that make up the ASL equivalents of phonemes, words, and sentences. She gives us a precise primer on ASL Poetry and thrusts us into the world of ASL Poetry performance by taking the text of subtitles and swirling them around in the translation with such vibrancy that it truly works, rather than coming off as a gimmick. This effort to struggle with how to demonstrate the vitality of ASL through translation even includes a segment where the piece is left respectfully un-translated.
　
Deaf Jam's main subject Aneta Brodski is that charismatic individual many documentarians hope to capture. When we hear the immigration issues she runs up against, you can't help but see how the obstacles financially imposed upon Deaf folks will hit her even harder. Hopefully she will be able to negotiate the college education and later employment she deserves in spite of these obstacles, but you do worry that such a vibrant spirit might be hardened, if not squelched, considering what she will be forced to maneuver around in the future.
　
Screening in a truncated form as part of the Independent Lens series on PBS networks on Thursday November 3rd, Deaf Jam is an example of the tremendous value film festivals can provide through the different lenses they focus onto the world. (And Deaf Jam is another example of the huge benefits provided by public funding - thank you, ITVS!) Even with the chain of transit options we have to step on to get there, MVFF has consistently been a festival worth the journey.

UPDATE 11/3/11: I've just learned from Adam that Eames: The Architect and the Painter will also be opening at the Elmwood in Berkeley and the Rafael in Marin on December 2nd, the same day it comes to the Balboa. I'm glad this documentary is going to be spreading out to various Frisco Bay venues. Is it too much to dream that one or more of them might track down a print of one of Charles & Ray's own wonderful short films (Powers of Ten, Atlas, Blacktop, etc.) to screen prior to the documentary feature?

Pinoy Sunday, by Adam Hartzell

Last Thursday the Mill Valley Film Festival opened, and with it a run of forty-five straight days of the thus-far foreseeable future where there will be a minimum of one film festival happening somewhere here on Frisco Bay every single day. According to the running list on this blog's right-hand sidebar, on most days there will be three or four festivals running somewhere in the area, and on a few as many as six or seven! It's a testament to the vitality of Frisco Bay audiences for movies outside the usual multiplex offerings that so many festivals can co-exist year after year in the same month-and-a-half period. But tickets sell briskly for many of these festivals, and it's worth obtaining them in advance if there's a particular film you're set upon seeing. There are still (pricey) tickets available for the MVFF closing night film gala The Artist this Sunday. I've seen it, and though it couldn't possibly live up to my expectations after its triumphantly successful screenings in Cannes and Toronto, I do think it will charm just about anybody else who watches it, and I'm not alone in hoping will function as an evangelizing force for the authentic silent film art that I so dearly love. Unfortunately, tickets to an MVFF feature I liked even better have been at "rush status" for over a week: tonight's screening of Pina, which is the best Wim Wenders film in in years if not decades. At least in my case, it's definitely an evangelizing force for choreographer Pina Bausch, who I previously knew next to nothing about, and for 3-D presentation of great dance. I'd certainly pay to see full versions of some of the works excerpted in Pina on a local 3-D screen.

Next to open are this weekend's Arab Film Festival (Jonathan Curiel has an article on Muslim lesbian drama Three Veils), the South Bay's Poppy Jaspar Short Film Festival, and the 10th annual edition of DocFest, which is called "SF's quirkiest festival" in Cheryl Eddy's new Guardian preview. And the San Francisco Film Society's Fall Season enters its next phase with Taiwan Film Days. I understand that the sf360 website is going to publish my writing buddy Adam Hartzell's preview of this mini-festival's selections imminently. In the meantime he has generously offered a piece on a film playing this Saturday and Sunday,Pinoy Sunday, for Hell On Frisco Bay. Here's Adam:

Ho Wi-ding's Pinoy Sunday is one of those films I watch while preparing a festival primer that has me itching to write more about it than a primer will allow. It isn't a brilliant film, but it is a fairly entertaining one that touches on issues I wish more films explored, in this case, the lives of migrant workers. And considering it's a Taiwanese film, (although with production help from the Philippines, Japan, and France, and a Malaysia-born director), I'm particularly happy to see the film highlight migrant issues unique to Taiwan, specifically the lives of Filipino migrant laborers in Taiwan. Along with the particular, Pinoy Sunday also enables more general discussion of the lives of migrants regardless of where they toil.
　
Pinoy Sunday follows two Filipino migrant laborers, Dado (played by Bayani Aqbayani) and Manuel (Jeffrey Quizon). Dado has a family back home but a girlfriend in Taiwan, posing an ethical quandary he seeks to resolve early on in the film. Manuel is the wanna-be playboy who puts up a good front to survive the romantic rejection he receives. He also is a bit of a player when it comes to the rules of the factory where he works, particularly the factory's curfew. Arriving on occasion just after the curfew, he is able to finagle his way around possible deportation from such violations of his contract by slipping the Taiwanese guard some betel nut for his troubles.
　
Besides his playboy dreams, Manuel has another simpler dream. He wants a couch, a sofa, (or what my grandmother called a davenport), for the top of their factory dormitory where they can sit and drink beer after a long day of manual labor. As Manuel and Dado recover from opposite ends of romantic rejection (Manuel the rejected, Dado the rejecter) in a public park, they stumble on an abandoned sofa. They begin their journey to take this sofa back to their dorm before curfew, a journey that has them at each others throats as well as discovering a deeper bond. They find kindness where it wasn't expected, along with finding themselves mistaken for heroes, thieves, and Indonesians.
　
Since Hell on Frisco Bay caters to the San Francisco Bay Area, most readers here are likely familiar with the slang term 'Pinoy'. Some may also be familiar with some of the controversy around the term. North Americans of Filipino descent often use the term affectionately, but some from the Philippines still hear the term tied up to ridicule from U.S. soldiers before and during World War II. In this film, as evidenced on his t-shirt worn early on in the film, Manuel wears the moniker with pride. (This same scene where the t-shirt is introduced also underscores a class/race transportation divide in that all the Filipino migrant workers are riding bicycles, perhaps made at the very factory where Dado and Manuel work, in contrast to the ubiquitous presence of the motorized scooter ridden by many, many Taiwanese.) The 'Sunday' in the title represents to the single day of the week many migrant factory workers in Taiwan tend to get off. The key words there are 'factory workers', since domestic laborers, mostly female and many Filipina, often do not get their Sundays off, or any day off at all. In Pinoy Sunday, Dado's girlfriend Anna, (played by Meryll Soriano), underscores this point in a nicely nuanced way. At first, you might assume she gets her Sundays off too because she and Dado meet up every Sunday at church. But then why is the elderly woman for whom Anna is a caretaker always with her? As much as Anna might get to do what she wants on Sunday, she still has to bring her ward with her. The ward is portrayed as mute, rather than demanding and difficult, partly as a means to contain the plot. But I find the nuanced portrayal here poignant. It hints at the conditions and differences between how gender is policed in the lives of migrant laborers rather than pummeling us over the head with it. (For those who want to explore that particular issue in more detail, check out an article from National Taiwan University professor Pei-chin Lan's available as a pdf here.)
　
Besides wrapping up issues faced by Filipino migrant laborers in a tight little title, there are other scenes particular to the transience of the migrant experience. There is the mall specifically catering to needs of Filipinos/Filipinas. These malls are often only open on the weekends. In these malls you will find restaurants serving Filipino food and the ubiquitously Filipino balakbayan box stores that send goodies back to families in the Philippines. A couple other issues the film highlights are the serious ramifications of violating curfew and the moment they are mistaken for Indonesian. According to Lan, the Council of Labor Affairs "dictates that a migrant worker can work for only one particular employer during a stay in Taiwan." There are some specific exceptions to this, but failure to make curfew at the factory could result in being sent back to The Philippines, and this strict policing of bodies is demonstrated at the very beginning of the film, when Dado runs into a fellow Filipino washing his face in the airport bathroom while still in handcuffs, escorted all the way to the airport gate to be sure he is deported. Such policing also confronts Manuel when a colleague is caught while on the lam. Another matter detailed in Lan's article is how Indonesian and Filipino migrant workers are played off each other in media stereotypes of fabricated essential natures. This makes the moment in Pinoy Sunday when the media mistake Dado and Manuel for Indonesian a much more layered critique, and the peppering of accusations upon brown bodies all the more poignant, as the film helps the political medicine go down by playing up the comedy involved in such outlandish media theatre.

One of my problems with Pinoy Sunday is the ending. But for spoiler-avoidance I won't go into how the ending ignores global economic realities otherwise prominent in the film. I understand this film doesn't want to be a serious downer. It wants to entertain, to show respect for migrants who too often go ignored. So I won't harp on Pinoy Sunday too much since it does bring to the attention of Taiwanese audiences some of the plights of those brought into Taiwan in order to make their economy work in ways more privileged citizens demand.
　
In its portrayal of present Taiwan (Film) day reality, Pinoy Sunday avoids being The Help. As Noy Thrupkaew so expertly critiques in The American Prospect, The Help may "peep into the past" of American injustices, but without any hint that that past is still with us in the present treatment of domestic workers in the U.S. (now more likely Latina than African-American). But it takes a movie like this to inspire a great (yet underappreciated) writer like Thrupkaew to school us on the lives of domestic workers in the U.S. today, so I'm glad The Help is out there hoping viewers smitten by it might stumble onto Thrupkaew's online history lesson. Pinoy Sunday may not confront all the issues of Filipino migrant laborers in Taiwan, but it confronts nonetheless, while staying more entertaining than didactic, which might make all the difference regarding its ability to reach folks who sequester themselves off from facing up to economic realities.

You Wish To Go To The Festival(s)?

Fall festivals are flying fast and furious, as Frisco Bay film organizations jockey for the attention of eager movie lovers. Two local film festivals are already winding down as I type this (Michael Hawley has details), and undoubtedly at least one or two more will send an announcement into my inbox before I finish writing this post. Tonight marks the beginning of a pair of weekend-long festivals I've never attended, the SF Irish Film Festival at the Roxie, and the Oakland Underground Film Festival at various venues in that city. The former screens new work from the Emerald Isle along with some retrospective entries like Once, In The Name of the Father (both, according to Film On Film, on 35mm prints), and artist-turned-film director Steve McQueen's Hunger. As for the OUFF, if their Friday night selection Marimbas From Hell is any indication of the festival's spirit, expect a weekend of wonderfully weird films unlikely to find commercial distribution. Marimbas From Hell is Guatemalan filmmaker Julio Hernández Cordón's first film since his low-budget scorcher of a debut Gasoline, and it bursts with humanity and eccentricity as it follows an unemployed xylophone player who joins forces with an aging heavy metal god to create a musical fusion that blurs documentary and fiction as much as Julio Cordón's style seems to.

Tonight is also the Sf Film Society's kickoff party for its 2011 Fall Season, a nearly nonstop parade of themed collections of international film selections at its new home New People Cinema (and a few other venues as well). Festivals announced so far include: Hong Kong Cinema (September 23-25) with recent films by directors Ann Hui, Johnnie To and others; read Adam Hartzell's write-up for more. Taiwan Film Days (October 14-16) including the goofy cross-cultural comedy Pinoy Sunday. The NY/SF International Children's Film Festival (October 21-23) features at least one 3-D animation with serious potential to impress, French silhouette master Michel Ocelot's Tales Of The Night, to be screened at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio rather than at New People as most of the rest of the Children's Fest will be. This is a rare opportunity to experience perhaps what's probably the most technically perfect screening venue in town.

Though Cinema By The Bay (Nov. 3-6), the San Francisco International Animation Festival (Nov. 10-13) and New Italian Cinema (Nov. 13-20) have yet to be unveiled on the SFFS website, they'll have to be pretty impressive to displace French Cinema Now (October 27-November 2) as my most anticipated of these Fall Season series. Three of the most talked-about films from this year's international festival circuit (Cannes, Toronto, etc.) get their Frisco Bay debuts during this series, and I can't wait to see all three of them: Goodbye, First Love, young director Mia Hansen-Løve's follow-up to her stunning second feature Father Of My Children, The Dardennes Brothers' The Kid With A Bike, which won the Grand Prix (essentially second prize to Terence Malick's Tree of Life) at Cannes back in May, and Le Havre, the new feature by Finland's most famous director, Aki Kaurismäki, his first in more than five years. The original mission of French Cinema Now is stretched by the inclusion of films from Finland and Belgium along with France, but if we interpret the "French" in the series title as a reference to the language of the dialogue and not the nationality of the crew, all three films are equally at home here. As are the other French-language films in the program, none of which I've heard much about as of yet. Mathieu Amalric's The Screen Illusion is the only one of these directed by a filmmaker I've seen other work by: his On Tour closed the the last SF International Film Festival. That screening was the final public appearance of Graham Leggat, who ran the Film Society brilliantly for more than five years until stepping down shortly before he succumbed to cancer late last month.

Leggat's recent passing was solemnly mentioned, along with local legendary filmmaker George Kuchar's, at a press conference announcing the line-up of the 34th Mill Valley Film Festival last week. Kuchar was subject of a MVFF tribute in its second year of operation, back in 1979. (He'll be subject of a pair of posthumous tributes by SF Cinematheque this December. Jordan Belson, another recently departed Frisco filmmaking giant, will be posthumously honored at the Pacific Film Archive in October). These days MVFF tributees are less likely to be dedicated underground filmmakers like Kuchar and more likely to be individuals in the early stages of an Oscar campaign. This year the festival tributes Glenn Close with a screening of Albert Nobbs, and spotlights Michelle Yeoh, Ezra Miller and Jennifer Olson, all year-end-awards possibilities for their new films, The Lady, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Martha Marcy May Marlene, respectively. One 2011 MVFF tributee is most definitely not stumping in hopes of hearing his name mentioned by Eddie Murphy next February. Gaston Kaboré is one of the top film directors from Burkina Faso, the country that hosts Sub-Saharan Africa's most prestigious film festival, the biannual FESPACO. Though his films are known to some cinephiles, they are rarely revived and, apart from his brief contribution to the international omnibus Lumiere And Company (all I've seen of his work), not easily found on DVD. So it's wonderful that two of his most acclaimed films Wend Kuuni and its sequel Buud Yam are being brought to Marin along with their maker next month. Unfortunately tickets to Buud Yam are already at "Rush Status" so make sure to buy tickets in advance for Wend Kuuni if you don't want to have to wait in line on a Tuesday night for a sample of Burkinabé cinema.

Also gone to "Rush Status" at MVFF are opening night Sequoia Theatre screening-only tickets to Jeff, Who Lives At Home, the latest from the Duplass Brothers, who made The Puffy Chair, Baghead and Cyrus. This was screened at the festival press conference, and from the moment early in the film when they start to make reference to M. Night Shyamalan's Signs I knew the film was going to be a lot smarter than the average contemporary comedy about unlikable man-children. I'm not supposed to say too much about the film until its general release next Spring, but I found it a very satisfying exercise in enjoyable audience manipulation. It's still possible to buy tickets to the film+party package, though they're quite expensive. The closing night film is another one I'm hotly anticipating: Michel Hazanavicius's neo-silent The Artist. More MVFF titles are commented on in Jackson Scarlett's SF360 article.

Since I mentioned silent cinema, let me step away from film festivals for a moment to note the Niles Silent Film Museum's current calendar. October brings, along with many other films, a pair of classics I've seen and can comment on: A Fool There Was is not a very good film, but it's a very important one as it's among the only features still surviving of superstar sex symbol Theda Bara's prodigious output. The Man Who Laughs, meanwhile, is a really wonderful film to see with an audience; it stars Conrad Veidt as a disfigured nobleman striving against a lifelong conspiracy against him. His make-up famously inspired Batman creator Bob Kane's vision of The Joker. The final Niles show of September 2011 reunites Mary Pickford and Cecil B. DeMille, who had acted together on the New York stage, but who came to Boulder Creek, CA to make Romance of the Redwoods with Pickford in front of the camera and DeMille behind it. Also on this Saturday's program are a Max Linder short and my favorite of all of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's films, the two-reel Fatty and Mabel Adrift. Earlier this month, I wrote an Indiewire article on Arbuckle, informed by my last trip to Niles, to see a film he made just before the scandal that destroyed his career ninety years ago: Leap Year. I hope you take a look at the piece and let me know what you think.

I could go on, but I really ought to wrap this post up. So I'll just mention the other Frisco Bay festivals coming up in the next month or so, and hope that you can tell me whether there are films screening at them that you're interested in, or think I might be. There's the brand-new Palo Alto International Film Festival (which includes what may be your last chances to see Werner Herzog's Cave Of Forgotten Dreams in "Real D" 3-D before the inevitable stereoscopic retrospectives come along), the Arab Film Festival, the 10th SF DocFest, the 14th United Nations Association Film Festival, and the ATA Film & Video Festival.

Linking Feller, August 2011

I haven't posted here in nearly six weeks (you don't need to hear the excuses), but I don't want to let the month of August go by without a single post- it'd be my first completely blogless month since first starting Hell On Frisco Bay in 2005.

So, without further ado, five links that seem relevant to Frisco Bay cinephiles on this final day of August 2011:

1. The San Francisco Cinematheque has announced its full program on its website. I don't have time right this moment to break down all the deliciousness in the programming, but since today is the 69th birthday of George Kuchar (and his oft-collaborating twin Mike Kuchar), I should definitely highlight the December 8 & 16 screenings of his films, from works as well-known as Hold Me While I'm Naked to those as rare as Aqueerius.

2. "Dan" of Dan's Movie Blog has been far more diligent at writing about the local cinema scene than I have lately. His latest post deals with the sad passing of San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggatt, as well as the cloudy futures of the Balboa and the New Parkway, as well as discussing some recent screenings at the Castro,

3. Cheryl Eddy's fall repertory film preview from last week's SF Bay Guardian summarizes nearly all of the local screening venues' and organizations' fall highlights. Yes, Fall starts this week at many of our beloved venues.

4. One Frisco Bay venue Eddy's piece does not cover is the UA Shattuck in Berkeley, which runs a Thursday night repertory series for five dollars a ticket. Here's an article listing all the titles being brought through November. Though a few are digital screenings, most are 35mm prints, some of them of films that rarely get projected these days. Note the September 15th showing of Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon, or the October 27th show of John Carpenter's The Thing. Though other websites indicate to the contrary, tomorrow night's 35mm screening of Metropolis is not a version of the 1927 Fritz Lang silent film, but of the 2002 Japanese animation (and, to my memory, Fifth Element ripoff) by Rintaro.

5. However, according to Kino International, Lang's Metropolis will come to the Castro for one screening only on October 27th. No, not the near-complete cut that's been popping up on Castro calendars for over a year now, but the Giorgio Moroder cut from the 1980s, complete with music from the likes of Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar and Adam Ant. It's all in preparation for this version's release on DVD & Blu-Ray the following month. It seems strange that Kino is able to put out this version, when they were prevented by German rightsholders from providing Alloy Orchestra as an alternate score for the DVD/Blu release of the "Complete Metropolis" last year. But what do I know about these kinds of wheelings and dealings. Anyway, this seems the apropos moment to provide an extra, fifth-and-a-half link to the site where you can buy a compact disc with the Alloys' complete score, which it's possible to play while watching the DVD at home. I wonder, since the Alloys' first Metropolis score was synced to the Moroder cut, could they make available a version we could play on headphones during the upcoming Castro screening?