Silent Connections

2011's Academy Award-winning The Artist is long gone from theatres, even discount theatres like the Cinedome 7 in Newark, and is now available on DVD and on the free outdoor movie circuit. Love or hate the film, pretty much everyone can agree that they hope the attention afforded this homage to 1920s Hollywood will translate into resurging interest in genuine silent-era movies among regular filmgoers and the general public. But few types of movies benefit from their presentation in restored prints at motion picture palaces as much as silent films do, especially when they're accompanied by live musicians (which, of course, The Artist wasn't, or should I say, hasn't been yet) as silent films do.

Fortunately, the 17th San Francisco Silent Film Festival begins tonight at the Castro Theatre- not this town's most opulent picture house built during the silent era, but certainly the grandest one that still plays movies. It's something of a homecoming for the SFSFF, which has rented the theatre twice a year since 2005, hosting a big summer extravaganza as well as a one-day winter event. This year the winter event was held at the Paramount in Oakland, and it was a production more ambitious as any the festival has attempted yet: a staging of a 5 1/2 hour version of Abel Gance's Napoléon complete with triple-screen finale and a full orchestra with composer Carl Davis flown in from London to conduct his score. But the festival's return to the Castro after twelve months is more than just a victory lap for Napoléon; it's also perhaps their most ambitious and exciting summer festival yet. Seventeen programs of films made  by at least seven national film industries, set on at least five continents plus the moon, backed by four small orchestras and at least three other expert musicians-- it will be impossible to know if any possible increases in attendance to this already-popular event might be due to interest sparked by The Artist or Napoléon, or just because the line-up is so strong.

If you're contemplating your first visit to the SF Silent Film Festival, be sure to read the Six Martinis And The Seventh Art blog for tips on how to survive the bustling festival atmosphere most comfortably. Those who desire more information about the provenance of the festival's prints than available on the festival website should be sure to read Carl Martin on the subject, bearing in mind he holds no quarter for digital projection or restoration techniques. Though I'm nowhere near as technically knowledgeable as Martin, I share concerns about the ongoing march into a digital-dominated cinephilia, discussed recently at an Italian film festival on a panel described here and available to view here. As I mentioned in my own previous preview, the SFSFF will be screening two of its features digitally (Wings and The Loves Of Pharaoh) and though I wish they were being presented on film, I'm certainly not going to skip these screenings on principle. Perhaps I'll even be convinced of the value of the new technology in certain circumstances.


It seems this year's free Amazing Tales From The Archives program is designed to convince the festival audience of the value of state-of-the-art digital restoration and presentation. As Michael Hawley notes in his excellent festival preview, Grover Crisp did a side-by-side comparison of DCP with 35mm prints in New York earlier this year, and he'll be doing a similar comparison Friday morning. Can we imagine a future SFSFF in which more than one or two programs are presented digitally? It may depend on how the audience reacts to this presentation.

Also on hand at the archival presentation will be Andrea Kalas of Paramount Pictures, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, and prepared a new digital version of its Academy Award-winning Wings as part of the celebration. With no less than five Paramount features on the program, this weekend ought to make a strong case for that studio as the top company in 1920s Hollywood. I'm a huge fan of Paramount's The Docks Of New York, and very curious about The Canadian, The Spanish Dancer, and Mantrap, all of which, I'm pleased, are screening on 35mm.


With so many Paramount silents in the program, perhaps there was no room for a film from another studio celebrating its centennial: Universal. Though most of the silent titles in this month's New York tribute to that studio have played at recent SFSFF editions, I long for a chance to see Paul Fejos's Lonesome on the big screen and hope its recent Criterion DVD release doesn't make local programmers shy away from it. The Pacific Film Archive has its own tribute to Universal on its current calendar (along with retrospectives for Raj Kapoor, Alexsei Guerman, and Les Blank among other series) but no silent films are included. 

Photo courtesy of Alpha-Omega digital GmbH

Silent films do, however, factor into the new Stanford Theatre calendar, which will have four Friday night opportunities to hear organist Dennis James accompany 1920s cinema sprinkled amidst a 7-day-per-week smorgasbord of films made between 1939 and 1964. Two of these are masterpieces previously brought by the SFSFF: The Wind and Seventh Heaven. I have not seen Son Of The Sheik or Way Down East before, but I'm sure audiences who can't get enough Wurlitzer action at the Castro this weekend as James performs for The Loves of Pharaoh and The Mark Of Zorro will want to take biweekly road trips to Palo Alto this summer.


The Castro Theatre itself is about to celebrate its own 95th anniversary, and includes two great late silent feature films, Sunrise and City Lights, as part of its impressively diverse slate of repertory offerings during an impressively-programmed August that I hope will continue in a similar spirit through the rest of the anniversary year. With no word on musical accompaniment for these screenings, it is likely that both will be, like The Artist, sound-on-film presentations of the kind that became popular if by no means exclusive after the arrival of The Jazz Singer in 1927. A third silent film not visible on the above link, but that word seems to be out about elsewhere, is a 35mm presentation of the newly-exhumed color version of A Trip To The Moon by Georges Méliès, which will play with a DCP version of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on August 26 & 27, with Bruce Conner's astonishing Crossroads on the bill on August 26th only. What a triple-bill for that giant screen!
  

A Trip To The Moon will also screen at the SFSFF this weekend, in color, and it will be accompanied by the extremely talented pianist Stephen Horne (who accompanies five other SFSFF programs this weekend!) This is part of the festival's closing night program, along with Buster Keaton at his most Dziga Vertov-esque in The Cameraman, with Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra providing music. British silent film fan Paul McGann, best known for his acting career in films like Withnail And I and Alien³, will read the text Méliès wrote to accompany A Trip To The Moon at fairgrounds and other 1902 screening venues. He will also be at the festival to narrate Frank Hurley's documentary on Ernest Shackleton's polar expedition, South, in the spirit of Shackleton's own presentations with the film in his day.

It's interesting to note which SFSFF films are co-presented by which local film organizations. Saturday night's The Overcoat is co-presented by both SF Cinematheque and by MiDNiTES FOR MANiAX, which tells me it should appeal both to fans of avant-garde filmmaking and to fans of under-appreciated seventies- and eighties-era gems like Car Wash, Phenomena, Assault On Precinct 13, and Halloween 3: Season of The Witch (to name the next four MiDNiTE movies I'm told to expect at the Castro on August 3, September 14, October 5 & November 2nd, respectively.) I've been hoping to see the film version of The Overcoat since seeing an A.C.T. Production years ago, but I really have no idea what to expect from it now. 

I'm also extremely eager for Sunday afternoon's screening of Erotikon, introduced by Jonathan Marlow of Fandor, and co-presented by the San Francisco Film Society, which usually presents a silent film or two at its own annual film festival or during its year-round calendar of events. So far they haven't shown too many silents on their SF Film Society Screen in Japantown, but they have been screening Mark Cousins' epic documentary The Story Of Film: An Odyssey over the past several Saturdays, with two more to go. And this summer has seen more repertory-style programming at the venue than we've seen in previous months, with more to come in August: Kinji Fukusaku's 2000 cult classic Battle Royale gets its Frisco Bay week-long theatrical premiere August 10-16 and the locally-made 1996 animation James And The Giant Peach plays a matinee August 11. The 1952 portmentaeu film Love in the City, with segments directed by a young Fellini, Antonioni, and five other Italian directors (including the still-living Dino Risi and Francesco Maselli) will screen August 17-23, and perhaps most exciting of all, Robert Bresson's neglected The Devil, Probably shows in a new 35mm print August 3-9.


I'm straining to think of Silent Film Festival connections to the current SFMOMA screening series, at which filmmaker Trent Harris is expected to be present for tonight's screening of his bizarre and brilliant "Beaver Trilogy", for the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts series of photography-connected short films by the likes of Agnès Varda, Arthur Lipsett, Ken Jacobs, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Hollis Frampton, Raul Ruiz, Jean Eustache, and others (also starting tonight), or for the music-centered documentaries sharing a screen at the Roxie tonight, Songs Along A Stony Road and Sprout Wings And Fly, which will also be attended by its filmmakers George Csicsery and Les Blank (respectively). But it's time for me to sprout a decent outfit and fly off to see Wings in a couple hours, so I won't strain any longer. Have a great weekend and hope to see you at the Castro!

Local Interest

Gramophone Video on Polk Street is set to close up shop; today is it's last day of selling its rental DVDs for $2.99 apiece. I don't usually get as sad over the loss of a video rental store as I do for the loss of a movie theatre, but Gramphone is different, for me. Its small size deceptively hid a collection that was as robust and diverse as any brick-and-mortar video store I've seen in this town with the exception of Le Video and possibly Lost Weekend, and it included some titles (some on VHS) that neither of the other two legs in this 'Frisco trifecta' of rental shops happened to carry. The coziness perhaps was what facilitated more friendships with staff and fellow regular customers there than I've made at other stores. At least I expect these friendships to last, even if the site of their formation doesn't.

As they began selling off their collection, I couldn't resist purchasing the long Out-Of Print World Artists DVD of Caveh Zahedi's In The Bathtub Of The World. I like to think I would've made the purchase even if I didn't have Zahedi on the brain, as I was working on an article on the former local filmmaker's latest video work The Sheik And I.  This was my favorite feature seen courtesy of the San Francisco International Film Festival this past spring (my second-favorite, The Exchange, has just been announced as part of the upcoming SF Jewish Film Festival, incidentally), and it's been echoing in my brain for weeks. My article was just published the other day at the Keyframe blog arm of streaming-video company Fandor, which includes two approximately half-hour Zahedi videos I Was Possessed By God and Tripping With Caveh, as part of it's online-viewing offerings. Yes I am aware of the ironies.

Do read the article and let me know what you think, if you have the time and inclination. I found it an endlessly fascinating and discussable film, although not everyone agrees. Notably, Frako Loden's recent round-up of SFIFF capsules (which also serves as reminders of summer arthouse releases like Alps, Farewell My Queen, and Found Memories) reveals she was no fan. Other worthwhile reading on The Sheik And I comes from Sean Gillane, Adam Schartoff, David Hudson (with links, naturally) and, with an interview with Zahedi, the Documentary Channel Blog. I swear I had not read the latter when I completed my own article, so when both pieces touch on some of the same metaphors and topics it's purely coincidence. Or perhaps a sign from God- another title I'm not sure if I'd been able to track down without Gramophone Video.

More than six years ago, when I wrote a blog post about a favorite film from each of the last ten decades of Frisco Bay filmmaking, I named In The Bathtub Of The World as representative of the 2000s. Today I'd write that post a little differently, and might be more likely to include an experimental short such as one of the beautiful Nathaniel Dorsky films screening this evening at Pacific Film Archive on such a list. But a recent re-watch of my new (previously-viewed) DVD re-confirms it as a staggeringly ambitious and prescient feature. 

I've been thinking a lot about Frisco-based filmmaking recently, actually. I went to the Stanford Theatre last night, on the penultimate night of its Howard Hawks restrospective, to see, for the first time, Howard Hawks's 1964 comedy Man's Favorite Sport. I had never before heard that it was partially set in town, including several street shots and a scene at a revolving sky room bar, which seems to be modeled on the Fairmont Hotel's Crown Room. Perhaps it was even shot there?  I'm almost certain that stars Paula Prentiss and Maria Perschy (and perhaps, to a more eagle-eyed viewer, Rock Hudson as well) can be spotted in the just-prior scene ascending that hotel's famous Skylift external elevator. If so, Man's Favorite Sport joins Ernie Gehr's brilliant structural piece Side/Walk/Shuttle as a film that ought to be included on lists of films shot at the Fairmont. 

Side/Walk/Shuttle, for its part, is fresh in mind because its publicity stills are currently under glass at the Old Mint, along with "ephemeral" material from the Pacific Film Archive's collection of documents from the rich history of Bay Area avant-garde filmmaking and exhibition. Also included: a Tony Labat storyboard, flyers from film screenings by local organizations like SF Cinematheque, Film Arts Foundation, the SF Art Institute, and more. I was particularly interested to see original advertising from the notorious October 23, 1953 "Art In Cinema" series screening at the original SFMOMA, in which Christopher Maclaine's The End was shown to an unruly audience. The End is in fact not listed on the ad as it was a last-minute replacement for another film, but I immediately recognized the document thanks to the intense research Brecht Andersch and I did on The End prior to a screening I helped him put on last year.

Why are these objects at the Old Mint? They're part of an exhibit the San Francisco Historical Society is holding as a fundraiser for their project of turning the Old Mint into a permanent exhibition space. As a fundraiser, it's an exhibit put together on a limited budget, but with a great deal of creativity on the part of curator Miguel Pendás of the San Francisco Film Society, who quietly dazzles festgoers with his knowledge of local film locations at the Noir City festival each January. He's divided the Old Mint space into several themed rooms, including a room of silent-era filmmaking with creative input from David Kiehn of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, a room of nothing but noir posters from the personal collections of Noir City's Eddie Muller and the Telluride Film Festival's Gary Meyer, a photographic look inside local studios like Pixar and Lucasfilm, a room devoted to "Cars, Cops and Cocktails" which has tips for anyone wanting to know how to mix drinks imbibed in After The Thin Man, Days of Wine and Roses, or Zodiac, and more, including an Vistavision camera used to shoot Vertigo and full-size wax figures of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and Charlie Chaplin in A Jitney Elopement (shot in Golden Gate Park). Michael Fox and Frako Loden have written good overviews of the exhibition, which ends today. It's quite possible to take the entire thing in about an hour or so.

The PFA documents I described above were the centerpiece of a room devoted to independent filmmaking in San Francisco- a scratching of the surface, really, but one that also represents documentary filmmaking with a poster from Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, and major studio-distributed projects by independent-minded makers, represented by a poster from the version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers made by Philip Kaufman (who will, it's just been announced, introduce the screening of Wonderful Lie Of Nina Petrovna at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival next month). This room and the silent-era room were the most interesting to me. When I attended a press preview two weeks ago, not all of the displays were in place yet, so I was glad when returning to see the full exhibit this week, that Lon Chaney had been added to this particular room. Not only did he perform on San Francisco stages before his film career, and make films like Outside The Law and The Shock in town, but a dream sequence from his villainous vehicle The Penalty has him directing a crime wave from the steps of the Old Mint itself! Some things about the building have not changed very much since 1920, but I didn't see any obvious criminal masterminding on my excursion. Today is the last day of the exhibit. A perfect thing to do on the way to the Stanford to see Man's Favorite Sport (and its co-feature Rio Bravo) if you haven't yet.

I also recently attended a free program at the San Francisco Public Library hosted by Jim Van Buskirk, author of the useful but frustratingly incomplete book Celluloid San Francisco. An hour+ of clips from narrative and documentary films that make particularly interesting use of the Golden Gate Bridge as plot device or thematic signifier (not mere pictorial backdrop), this program was more completely satisfying than his book, and not only because it was free. He began with the 1936 Frank Borzage film Stranded, which includes plot developments centered around the worksite for the builders of the still-unfinished bridge, and ended with an extended battle film Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and crammed clips from dozens of films including Dark Passage, the Man Who Cheated Himself, The Love Bug, A View To A Kill, The Joy Of Life, and Monsters Vs. Aliens into the presentation, knowing when it best to provide audio commentary for the clip and when to let it play out un-intruded-upon. After the show there was ample time for a spirited conversation to spring up among the attendees. He gives his presentation one last time this month, on Wednesday at the Excelsior SFPL Branch. 

If free library screenings fit your budget perfectly, then you might want to know that more than 20 SFPL branches will be hosting DVD screenings of San Francisco-themed films throughout July. Titles include Flower Drum Song, The Lady From Shanghai, Time After Time, and The Social Network. If image quality is more important to you than price, the Castro Theatre is going to be screening a number of San Francisco films as part of its August celebration of its 90th year in operation. So far, only an August 1-2 booking of The Maltese Falcon (with the New York-set The Asphalt Jungle) has been announced, but rumor has it that there will be more announced soon. 

Adam Hartzell's Canadian Frameline

Of all the so-called "special interest" film festivals on Frisco Bay, there's none larger, more festive or more inclusive than Frameline, which began yesterday. This "Cannes of gay film festivals" builds its programming of films to appeal to a core audience of LGBT moviegoers, but invariably brings film programs that straight, cis cinephiles won't want to miss either. I'm personally most interested in delving into the New Queer Cinema retrospective, in seeing George Kuchar's final SF Art Institute "class film", Empire Of Evil at the Roxie. and in attending the Castro for the Iranian film Facing Mirrors, which my friend Michael Hawley calls "the Frameline36 film no one should miss." The Film On Film Founcation dutifully indicates which of the festival's screenings are to be shown on that dwindling festival format: 35mm. But another friend, Adam Hartzell, has got me thinking about another set of Frameline selections. Here's Adam: 

The embarrassment of cinematic riches San Francisco's larger festivals provide can be overwhelming at times.  In spite of that, I always appreciate the opportunity to self-curate a deeper festival focus nested within the larger mission of each festival.  And for the 36th year, Frameline presents so many different aspects of the Queer community on which to focus.  Hmmm, I could center my viewing on Intersex issues, the Bear community, or even the intersection of Queer folk and sports.  Instead, I chose my screeners based on country of origin.  And those who know me know I have more than a soft spot for Canada.

And Frameline has a spot for Canada in its closing film this year.  Cloudburst (Thom Fitzgerald, 2011) features the star power of Olympia Dukakis as Stella, an lesbian of the senior set who wears a cowboy hat but her back is anything but broken, because she won't take any shit from anyone.  And I choose to cuss because Stella never met a swear word she needed to censor.  As for her partner of 31 years, Dot (played by Brenda Ficker of My Left Foot), her language is more polite (and Irish-ly-lilted), but along with her vision being mostly gone, her bones are a bit more brittle, as evidenced by a vibrator-induced fall that leads to a broken butt.  This incident begins the power struggle with Dot's granddaughter who seeks to separate Stella and Dot.  As you can guess by my quick analysis of Stella, she won't let this happen, so she helps Dot break out of the nursing home and they head from Bangor, Maine to the Canadian border, (picking up a young, hunky hitchhiker on his way to Lower Economy, Nova Scotia), in order to get married with hopes this will provide a stronger legal grounding to contest Dot's granddaughter's control of Dot's final years.

The enjoyment of Cloudburst solely comes from the wicked pleasure of the vulgar dialogue given to Dukakis.  Sadly though, that's where the enjoyment ends.  One has to snip out these creative fits of curses and hold on to them as the film rides from one bit of otherwise choppy plot progression to another.  Not  even a great actress like Dukakis can save this from the lesser hands of the editing and direction.

But there are the two more Canadian films to choose from.  First, there's Margarita (Dominique Cardona & Laurie Colbert, 2012), but there's a review hold on that one, so I can't tell you that I fairly enjoyed it and how it provides an interesting opportunity for a critical frame from the POV of a bicycle seat.  The other is the best of the three, Daniel Roby's Funkytown, which proves that along with yogurt, bagels, circuses, protests, and corrupt construction industries, the French Canadians do cinema way better than their anglophone compatriots (Egoyan, Cronenberg, and Maddin excepted, of course). 

Quebec Cinema continues to represent recent periods lavishly on screen. I know none of you saw it, because it was basically just my wife and I in the theatre during the Tiburon International Film Festival this, and pretty much every, year, but one great example of these Quebec period pieces (in this case the 1960s) brought to the Bay Area recently, was the powerful Michel Monty film Life Begins, about a boy dealing with his father's death by popping papa's little helpers. Funkytown recreates 1976, jumping between English and French because, as Roby told Bernard St-Laurent on the CBC's English language program on French Canadian culture, C'est la vie, Montrealers regularly jumped between languages back then. The film primarily focuses on two characters - Bastien (Patrick Huard of Bon Cop, Bad Cop), a radio DJ and host of a show called 'Disco Dance Party' who eschews his family responsibilities for the disco lights, dazzling drugs, and sexy ladies; and Tino (Justin Chatwin from the Middle of Nowhere), a young Italian Canadian carving out a space for his desires within the cultural confines of mandatory heterosexuality.

Other characters with considerable screen time include father-son owners of the 'first disco club in North America' The (later, thanks to the PQ, 'Le') Starlight, a has-been French disco star, a model turned fashion 'reporter' wanting a turn at musical stardom, and an early gay icon in Montreal's disco world.  Each of the characters are handled with enough depth to keep you from feeling they are tossed in as afterthoughts or poor editing choices.  The portrayal of Adriana the model, (played by real life Guess Girl model Sarah Mutch), is particularly refreshing.  When she is interviewing a Montreal fashion designer that doesn't know English, (and Adriana knows no French), Adriana doesn't come off as the cliched 'dumb blonde' but as someone way out of her league positioned merely because she's considered beautiful by the media.

That scene has the Montreal Olympic stadium as its backdrop, and Funkytown begins at the apex of Montreal's standing, the Olympics of 1976, then slowly follows the four years as Montreal's bills came due.  (Montreal didn't finally pay off those Olympic bills until late 2006.  For a long time, the Olympic Stadium, or 'The Big Owe', stood as signage for poor municipal decisions, such as the genius use of the stadium as a bureaucratic dystopia in Denys Arcand's The Age of Ignorance.)  This financial debt due serves as background for the moral/ethical debt due for many of the characters in the film's foreground. 

Something else that Adriana's scene underscores is the interplay between French and English in Montreal and how Roby uses this in his film.  As the interview with St-Laurent on the CBC notes, Roby's decision to mix-up French and English in the film was controversial in Quebec.  Yet I am happy he made this choice because there are moments, such as lovely scene where Bastien hopes to reconcile with his daughter, where the code--switching adds layers of how we negotiate intimacy and emotional connection through the languages we use with different people in our lives.

And what is a festival like Frameline but one expanding the language of cinema in speaking on topics about which we often feel forced to remain silent.

Adam Hartzell: I Wish

Summer moviegoing in a city like San Francisco doesn't have to mean check-your-brain trips to the mall. Alternative screening venues abound in this town- their schedules linked on my sidebar a click away. I'll make special mention of the particularly strong programming at the Roxie, the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, and the SF Film Society Screen over the next month or two, before mentioning a pair of special events featuring local musicians picking favorite locally-made films (Foul Play and The Conversation) at the Vogue this weekend. Also opening this weekend? A return-to-form from one of Japan's most internationally-esteemed directors right now, Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Adam Hartzell reviews the new film. All photos courtesy Magnolia Pictures:

It speaks to the power of cinema, and Hirokazu Kore-Eda's story-telling in particular, that the director's latest film had my wife and I changing our minds so quickly with such strong re-commitment.  The morning before we sat down to watch I Wish at the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival, we had made the difficult decision that traveling to see our family in Japan this summer probably wasn't the best for us financial-wise.  But once the credits closed the film, my wife was first to exclaim, and I was quick to second, "I really want to go to Japan now!"


This is, of course, exactly what the folks of jeki want to hear. jeki, (I've only seen it officially referenced in lower-case), is the East Japan Marketing & Communications advertising group, which is a subsidiary of the East Japan Railway Company.  And jeki partially funded I Wish.  If an international audience wasn't the intent, at least it can be assumed that they hoped to inspire their fellow Japanese citizens to travel to the most southwesterly island of Japan's archipelago, Kyushu.    Although my wife and I won't be heading that far south this time, (we went to Oita during our past visit), we are definitely heading to other prefectures along other railway lines after witnessing this engaging story of kids rallying around something bigger than themselves.

What was it that so transfixed us?  First, a quick plot summary.  The film follows two brothers who are amicably apart after the separation between their mother and father.   The two brother characters, older Koichi and younger Ryonosuke, are played by two real life brothers, Koki and Oshiro Maeda.   Koichi feels stuck in the ash-y air of Kagoshima where an active volcano (Sakurajima) brews and occasionally spews ash, resulting in daily habits particular to Kagoshima residents such as vigorously brushing off the ash upon arrival at school or wetting ones finger to see if ash collects on the upright phalange.   (My wife was born there and these Kagoshima gestures resonated with her memories of visiting her grandmother.)


It appears the younger Ryonosuke got the better deal in the bargain.  He is having the childhood most can only dream of, running around the more bustling Fukuoka with his posse of mostly girls, all while helping sell the merch at concerts for his dad's rock band.  Ryonosuke is truly the hyper one that walks ever so closely towards that annoying line, but never fully crosses it.  The plot consists of the possibility of the family reuniting and Koichi's attempts to assist in this re-cleave post-cleave by conjuring up a story that if you make a wish when two bullet trains pass each other, your miracle (the literal Japanese title of the film) will come true. 

Simply watching the wonderfully expansive train system of Japan and the freedom it provides is advertising enough for someone like me who is stuck in the backward-thinking highway-bounds of a car-dependent nation. But the director's deft story-telling makes sure I Wish is so much more than an ad for the railroad industry.  Kore-eda shows us the joy of watching kids throughout their day, wandering around their respective cities unchaperoned, creating adventures for themselves, from as complicated as their journey to make a wish to as simple as rushing to a favorite food stall.  To me, this was precious without being sickeningly kawaii. 


In this way, I Wish further solidifies Kore-eda's reputation of being one of the best directors of young actors and actresses.  What particularly transfixed me was just the importance of that less self-conscious time of childhood when if you can dream it, you can do it, at least in your head.  For my wife, it was nostalgia for what her adult self is no longer permitted to enjoy.  She and I can enjoy it vicariously now by watching our nieces engage in these privileges of youth, and by watching I Wish again when it is released this weekend at the Lumiere in San Francisco, Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

I cannot recommend I Wish enough, but it is important to point out something missing from the narrative that comes off chasm-atic if you are aware of it, as Japanese citizens would be.  


The opening celebration for the northern section of Kyushu extension noted in the film takes place on the 12th of March, 2011.  This should have been a momentous event that further solidified Japan's forward-thinking in establishing a railway network envied by many.  But the celebration was canceled by an incident of world-wide proportion that happened one day before the opening - the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.   Neither the earthquake, nor the tsunami, nor the nuclear disaster enters into the plot of I Wish.  This can be argued as a major omission.  Even though kids can go about their days without knowing much of the wider world, this was an incident of such devastation to the country it ought to have been mentioned somewhere.


And, arguably, it is indirectly mentioned.  But to flesh this out, I have to ruin the plot.  So your time here is done if you hold onto the view that 'spoilers' spoil a film.  (Recent evidence suggests otherwise.)

But here's some non-plot spoilers regarding how the new northern Kyushu lines connect the dots of the plot.  Koichi is so bummed about living in Kagoshima, he takes one of the things that bothers him about it, the ash-spewing Sakarujima volcano, and melds a fantasy in his mind where an eruption of Sakarujima will force his family to leave Kagoshima.  The wish he plans to plead for once the bullet trains pass is that Kagoshima be destroyed.  Now, Koichi isn't evil in that he hopes people die.  It's just that he's a kid, living in his often selfish world.  If he really thought his wish through, he'd realize folks might die in the process of living his fantasy. 

And Koichi does seem to realize that his dream is selfish, because he lets go of it and doesn't wish for a disaster when the trains pass.  He resolves to accept his present plight and will make the most of life in Kagoshima.  If we read Koichi's disbanded disaster as the triple disaster that actually shook Japan the day before the launch of the new northern Kyushu line, even though neither the earthquake, the tsunami, nor the nuclear plant disaster are mentioned, perhaps that is partly an unspoken motivation for Koichi to relinquish the disaster in his mind.  (The reasons the film presents are more pedestrian, but still virtuous.) 

Unfortunately, this reason for exclusion is not an argument I find too convincing.  It makes me feel like I’m stretching it.  If you are going to place a fictional world within the borders of a real-life event, it's hard to justify silence on a national tragedy.  (By the way, I am not implying at all that jeki encouraged such silence.  And let’s also keep in mind that the funding and story line were probably well solidified prior to the horrible disaster that inflicted Japan.)  Still, I wish Kore-eda would have found a way to make note of what's excised from the narrative.  Such is the only flaw in an otherwise wonderful film.

Best Fests In the West?

It's that time of year again. For The Love Of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon is holding its 3rd annual outpouring of blog-love for the integral activity of film preservation, hosted earlier this week by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy On Films, and now by This Island Rod. For the third year in a row, the Blogathon is raising funds for a San Francisco-based preservation non-profit. In 2010 funds raised from For The Love Of Film went to the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve color-tinted versions of two hundred-year-old Western one-reelers, The Sergeant and The Better Man. Last year's donations went to the Film Noir Foundation to help pay for a new restoration of blacklisted director Cy Endfield's Try And Get Me, which is expected to be finished in time to screen at the January 2014(!!!) edition of Frisco's Noir City festival. Consider that a year-and-a-half early scoop (in the meantime, Endfiled's The Underworld Story screens at the Roxie next week). This year's blogathon is taking donations for, once again, the National Film Preservation Foundation, this time to make what remains of The White Shadow, a very early feature worked on by Alfred Hitchcock and until recently thought completely lost, available at the NFPF's online screening room with a musical score by Michael Mortilla.  Donate today to help further the world's knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock and British silent film!

Many of the blog pieces being written for this week's blogathon have focused on Hitchcock films and related subjects, and I considered writing about his Vertigo star Kim Novak, who will be returning to this city for a gala event June 14th to help kick off a week-long exhibition of Frisco Bay movie-making memorabilia at the Old Mint, put together by the SF Museum & Historical Society. Novak was in the news earlier this year, as you may remember, for objecting to The Artist's re-use of Bernard Herrman's iconic love theme from Hitchcock's love/hate letter to San Francisco. Well, less for objecting to it, than for using a very controversial word choice to express her objection. My own tweets at the time of the controversy expressed my feelings on the subject pretty well, I think.  I chalk the whole incident up to the usual Oscar-season mudslinging, and would never hold an isolated comment against an actress I admire as much as Novak, who is undoubtedly absolutely brilliant in Vertigo although I've barely seen any of her other acting work.

A more detailed appreciation of Novak in Vertigo will have to wait for another day, because I cannot resist using the blogathon as an excuse to talk about a few upcoming film festivals that feature preserved and restored films in their program. The NFPF screening room and the DVD sets it releases are wonderful boons to home viewing, but the importance of getting our film heritage in front of audiences in cinemas should not be understated. Sometimes the essential qualities of films made to be screened theatrically cannot be fully decoded in other settings. With the world of film exhibition under increasing pressure to conform to Hollywood studios' desires to turn cinema into a digital wonderland that threatens to be a digital blunderland and, as David Bordwell warns, a "freezing of the canon," film festivals may become one of the last remaining models for getting actual film prints on cinema screens. While certain local festivals have scaled back their retrospective screening components, it's heartening that others remain committed to giving past cinematic glories as much or more attention than the newest motion picture trends.


The National Film Preservation Foundation's aforementioned DVD sets cover a wide range of American filmmaking strands, from narratives of practically every genre and length to documentaries, animation, newsreels, home movies and even advertisements. But the bulk of these collections is given over to two general categories that tend to fall through the cracks for most commercial DVD-releasing enterprises: silent films and avant-garde films. Though their first set is perhaps their most eclectic in both themes and time periods, sets two, three, and five are almost exclusively devoted to silent-era filmmaking. The fourth set was given over entirely to this country's rich avant-garde filmmaking tradition, and the announced sixth set will be a sequel released next year. Correspondingly, there are three film festivals coming to Frisco Bay in the next couple months that celebrate silent films and avant-garde films: The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, and Crossroads.

Since it begins first- this evening, as a matter of fact- I'll take on Crossroads for a few paragraphs first. The third annual initiative on the part of venerable experimental film exhibition organization SF Cinematheque to program a full-fledged festival of artist-made film and video, Crossroads will screen more than fifty works from around the globe between now and Sunday. Many of today's most interesting truly independent moving image artists have work in the festival, from established masters like Scott Stark, Ken Jacobs, and Saul Levine, to rising talents such as Linda Scobie and Sylvia Schedelbauer -- I've seen Scobie's Craig's Cutting Room Floor and Schedelbauer's Sounding Glass and am certain both with make a strong impression on Crossroads attendees. Max Goldberg has written a fine preview focusing mostly on new works getting their Frisco Bay premieres at the festival.

Of great interest to the preservation-minded, however, is tomorrow afternoon's program of films made by Chick Strand, the co-founder of Canyon Cinema, the 1960s exhibition predecessor to SF Cinematheque that still operates as a distribution company today. Strand's film Fake Fruit Factory was included on the fourth NFPF DVD set and is available for online viewing in their virtual screening room. Last December, two years after Strand's death in 2009, the film was included on the list of new entrants to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry along with far more famous titles like Bambi  and Faces. I think it's great that she now has a film on the registry list, but am still a bit baffled as to why that particular one was chosen, fine as it is. The Crossroads festival will be screening two of Strand's (in my book) far greater masterpieces, her joyous 1966 film Angel Blue Sweet Wings and her 1979 tribute to Anne Frank, Kristallnacht. Also screening is her rarely-shown 54-minute 1979 film Soft Fiction, which I have yet to see. The program is titled Woman With Flowers after the name of a film that was originally also slated to screen; that title has been replaced with her 1979 found footage film Cartoon Le Mousse. I don't know the reason for the switch, but it's interesting that Woman With Flowers was completed by the filmmaker in 1995, yet she never created a distribution print. According to the website of the Pacific Film Archive, which screened the film last October, the Academy Film Archive completed post-production on the film posthumously, but that "no creative interpretation or intervention was necessary."

Contrast that statement against what preservationist Bill Brand has to say in the liner notes to the recent Criterion Collection DVD release of Hollis Frampton's films, which have been scarcely seen on Frisco Bay screens in recent years. Brand insists that preservation of avant-garde films invariably involves creative work, as film companies discontinue the stocks filmmakers originally used, and digital transfers demand compromises and aesthetic judgments. A 16mm print of the late Frampton's 1969 film Lemon plays the Crossroads festival on Sunday evening along with two other experimental film "classics": Bruce Baillie's simple yet breathtakingly rich 1966 film All My Life, and Morgan Fisher's Picture and Sound Rushes. All three have been programmed to compliment a five-film set of films by Basque filmmaker Laida Lertxundi, who comes fresh from the Whitney Biennial and counts these works among her influences. I haven't seen ant of Lertxundi's films yet, but I marvel at the programming of Lemon at a time slot coinciding with a rare annular solar eclipse. Lemon is often remarked on as an erotic interpretation of a citrus fruit, but the way its lighting scheme gradually shifts over the course of seven minutes recalls the (apparent) movement of a familiar solar orb around our own globe. Assuming the program runs continuously without extended breaks for introductions, the (partial in San Francisco) eclipse ought to peak right about the time when the films finish. But you probably won't want to race out of the Victoria Theatre to peek at it, for two reasons: looking directly at the sun, even during an eclipse, is far more dangerous to the eyes than looking at an on-screen lemon, and Lertxundi has been flown into town to speak about her work following the screening.


On the subject of flying in to film festivals, although it's undoubtedly too late to book a cheap flight to attend Crossroads, there's plenty of time for out-of-towners to plan to visit the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which announced its full program last week but doesn't commence until mid-July.  You'll hardly be alone, as scores of visitors from around the country descend upon the Castro Theatre every summer to join the thousands of locals in love with what has become the largest silent film festival in the country (and probably the largest one anywhere in the world that has yet to screen an Alfred Hitchcock silent film. Operative word, I hope: Yet.)  Continuing the aviation thread, the festival opens July 12th with the new restoration of William Wellman's World War I dogfight saga Wings, which will be accompanied by a live score from Colorado's Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and by Foley effects from renowned sound designer Ben Burtt (Star Wars). Though Wings, which stars Richard Arlen, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Clara Bow and Gary Cooper, is well-known as the winner of the Best Production award at the first Academy Awards ceremony - and often retroactively designated as the first Best Picture winner - few know that the other award the film won that year, for Best Engineering Effects, was designated equally for the film's ground-breaking visual effects and for the live sound effects that accompanied its gala premiere screening in Los Angeles. Silent films are by no means equivalent to silent screenings; though the prints include no sonic information, they have almost always been screened with musical accompaniments, sound effects, narration, etc. The SFSFF brings some of the best international accompanists to provide music for all screenings, and will experiment with narration for its July 14 screening of the 1919 British documentary South, for which actor Paul McGann will read from the diaries of the film's hero, Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, while Stephen Horne provides piano accompaniment. 

Clara Bow is represented at the festival not only by Wings but by Mantrap, a 1926 Paramount comedy released on DVD last year as part of the NFPF's fifth box set of Treasures From American Film Archives. Stephen Horne, again, will reprise the piano score he performs on that DVD, but the film will be screened on a 35mm print. Indeed, the SFSFF has a reputation of using the best possible 35mm prints for their screenings, and nearly all of the films in the 2012 festival are expected to screen on 35mm- the exceptions being Wings, Ernst Lubitsch's last surviving German film, The Loves Of Pharaoh, and the color restoration of A Trip To The Moon which screens before a 35mm print of Buster Keaton's The Cameraman to close the festival July 15th. Presumably, as in the few (I count three) other instances when the SFSFF has used digital rather than film prints, there are not 35mm versions of these restorations available for them to screen. The festival has screened Wings in 35mm before, way back in 1999. That was the first time I'd ever heard of SFSFF, and I unfortunately couldn't make the screening and have yet to see Wings on anything other than VHS. I hope the new restoration is worth the wait, and the presence of pixels.


G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box is the other repeat selection in this year's festival, and although I saw it last time around (in 2005), I won't want to miss it this time either, as it's an extended version with about 10 more minutes than any other available, it will be shown in a 35mm print of a full restoration funded by Louise Brooks fan Hugh Hefner, and will be musically accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble, the Swedish accompanists who are quickly becoming many fans' favorites of the SFSFF stable of musicians. They will also accompany Mauritz Stiller's 1920 Erotikon (not to be confused with Gustav Machaty's 1929 film with the same name, which screened at the 2009 SFSFF), which I've been wanting to see for years. 

And there's more- much more. Musicians I haven't yet mentioned include Wurlitzer organist extraordinaire Dennis James, who will accompany Douglas Fairbanks (not Jean Dujardin) in The Mark Of Zorro and  The Loves Of Pharaoh. The Alloy Orchestra will premiere a new score for Soviet co-directing team Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg's Nikolai Gogol adaptation The Overcoat- another film I've had on my to-see list for quite some time. Keyframe recently published an interview I did with Alloy co-founder Ken Winokur, if you want to know more about why I'm excited by this pairing. And pianist Donald Sosin will play for no less than four film programs including Chinese auteur Sun Yu's well-regarded Little Toys starring Shanghai's answer to Greta Garbo, Ruan Lingyu. He'll also back Pola Negri in a brand new restoration of The Spanish Dancer, and my favorite Josef Von Sternberg silent film The Docks Of New York (which I wrote about upon its DVD release here), but I'm most excited to hear his collaboration with local ensemble Toychestra for a set of seven Felix The Cat cartoons. Felix is undoubtedly my favorite silent cartoon star, and Sosin's keyboard style seems especially suited to his antics.


Might as well mention the three other films, which I knew little or nothing about before the SFSFF program announcement: The Wonderful Lie Of Nina Petrovna starring Brigitte Helm of Metropolis, with music by Mont Alto, and two more for the versatile Stephen Horne: Stella Dallas (no not the Barbara Stanwyck version) and The Canadian. Not to leave out the program perhaps most pertinent to this blogathon, the annual "Amazing Tales From The Archives" program, free to the public, in which archivists from around the world present some of the latest, most fascinating finds for an audience of peers and newbies. I've met people who decideded to enter the field of film preservation after attending one of these enlightening sessions, and it was at such a presentation nearly two years ago that I was lucky enough to be among the first participants in a For The Love Of Film Blogathon to see the fruits of the project's first stab at fundraising: a brand-new 35mm print of The Better Man, with Horne doing his first improvisational run-through of the piano score he'd eventually record for the NFPF's fifth DVD set.

If I don't see you at Crossroads or at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, perhaps I will at the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, running June 29 through July 1st at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in the otherwise-sleepy town of Niles, California. This festival will also include a 35mm print of a film found on the fifth NFPF DVD set: Mack Sennett's The Tourists, starring Mabel Normand as a visitor whose stay in Albuquerque turns out to be longer and more exciting than she expected. And of a Clara Bow film: Helen's Babies, also starring Edward Everett Horton and Diana Serra Carey a.k.a. Baby Peggy (who, at age 93, will be in town for the festival). I've written about Niles and the unique screening venue for this festival before, and I usually make it out to their regular Saturday night screening series at least once or twice a year, even though it's not exactly simple to get there from San Francisco without a car. But I've never attended their biggest annual event. This year, as the festival celebrates its fifteenth year of existence, and the 100th anniversary of Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson's arrival in Niles to make some of the first cowboy pictures, I'm determined to attend at least one or two festival screenings. This year's line-up puts a particular focus on films made precisely 100 years ago, in Niles or elsewhere, including five films by Anderson, two by D.W. Griffith, and even one of the few feature length films made in this country that year: Charles Gaskill's Cleopatra.


But if you have a few bucks to drop on attending one or more of these festivals for your own enjoyment, why not also donate so that not only you, but anyone with an internet connection can benefit from film preservation. I just donated myself. I can't wait to see The White Shadow, through any legal channel available to me.