Noir News is...

Greetings from Noir City! First of all: make sure you read Max Goldberg's latest essay inspired by the festival and its newsman theme, found here. It's far more insightful than anything I've ever written about noir myself, that's for sure. Also of related interest are Brecht Andercsh's comments on being "festive at a festival".

Wednesday's San Francisco Film Society co-presentation night at Noir City 7 went pretty much as I expected. Film Society creative director Miguel Pendas came on stage before the film screenings and talked about the grant money the SFFS is planning to distribute to Frisco Bay filmmakers, and spoke of upcoming events of interest to an audience hungry for the cinema of yesteryear. Then Noir City's own Eddie Muller joined him on stage to talk about an in-the-works series of international noir titles, commenting that it's possible to "end up face-down in the gutter anywhere in the world." No details on series dates or titles were revealed, but Pendas spoke of scouting a large-scale series of Japanese noir at last year's San Sebastian International Film Festival, while for his part Muller recounted a recent trip to Buenos Aires to meet the archivists who made last summer's announcement of rediscovered footage lost from Fritz Lang's sci-fi parable Metropolis. While in Argentina, Muller was able to open the lid on a trove of early films made by the great noir cinematographer John Alton in the 1930s, when he was working in that country's film industry. I wonder how long it takes to get a film subtitled in English when it's never been exported before? Would an earmarked donation to the Film Noir Foundation help speed the process along?

The print of Lang's newspaper/crime drama While the City Sleeps was not, as I had predicted after checking various on-line sources, screened in a "Superscope" aspect ratio. However, the compositions didn't look the least bit cropped or awkward, and a bit of poking around the internet reveals that Lang did not intend the film to be shown widescreen. It was great to see such a terrific cast including Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, Thomas Mitchell (last seen in Alias Nick Beal Monday night), George Sanders and Ida Lupino, in action, and the newsroom setting of the film couldn't be more appropriate to the theme of this year's festival. By 1956 a rather late entry in the noir cycle, While the City Sleeps is less concerned with the psychic turmoil of the insane "Lipstick murderer" than it is in the reaction of the larger society to his crimes. Andrews' protagonist is in many ways a mirror to the murderer (played by John Barrymore, Jr.) even if he seems outwardly untortured, even by his own temptation to infidelity which is portrayed as a natural male weakness at worst. I'm eager to see the other Lang/Andrews collaboration Beyond a Reasonable Doubt when it plays on Saturday.

Before introducing the co-feature Shakedown, Muller plugged two more film events on the coming calendar. First, on February 14th, is the Silent Film Festival's winter event, the centerpiece of which is the "proto-noir" Sunrise, which he called his favorite silent film of all time. I'm with him, which is why I was so pleased to be able to research the production and reception of the F.W. Murnau-directed film for the festival, as I prepared an essay for the program guide and a slideshow on the first Academy Awards ceremony that will show before the film unspools to Dennis James's musical accompaniment that evening.

Muller also pointed out a double-bill put together by the Film on Film Foundation on March 8th at the Pacific Film Archive: the Bigamist and Outrage, both noirs starring and directed by Ida Lupino, neither of which I've seen before. You can bet I'll be there. This bill is not the only noir coming to the PFA in the next several weeks, though. A series entitled One-Two Punch: Pulp Writers on Film runs Feb. 13-21 and includes adaptations of the writing of Cornell Woolrich, Frederic Brown, Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, tackled by noir and neo-noir directors like Robert Siodmak and George Armitage.

Shakedown was terrific, incidentally. It was great to see Frisco circa 1950 in the outdoor shots and through the picture windows of the apartments. But the story, in which Howard Duff's ambition as a photojournalist takes him into the lap of dangerous gangsters with his camera as his only protection, charts one of those grippingly doomed trajectories that pulls me in deeply enough that "spot-the-location" games quickly become unnecessary. What I found most fascinating about Shakedown, in the end, was the fact that just as location shooting, perhaps influenced by Italian Neo-Realism, was inflecting noir with a blurring of the boundary between captured documentary and staged fiction, here was this film whose protagonist blurs the boundary between capturing and staging a photograph, and must deal with the consequences.

Undisposed

This week, some moviegoers are flocking to see the films currently competing for prizes ensuring a legacy, at the very least in the almanacs and surveys of the future. Others, at least here in Frisco, are mobbing the Noir City festival and other venues (the Stanford, perhaps?) to watch films that have already stood the test of time.

But for those with an interest in charting the position of so-called ephemeral media in the ever-changing tide of motion picture history, it might be worth popping over to the Disposable Film Festival at the Roxie, ATA, and Oddball to see videos exclusively made with "non-professional" cameras: webcams, cellphone cameras, one-time-use cameras, etc. Some (certainly not all) of the shorts presented may be available on Youtube and the like, but this is a chance to see them in an uncompressed format on a big screen with an audience. As the festival explains, "these films are often made quickly, casually, and sometimes even unintentionally." Rest assured, they were not selected in that manner. The competitive program happens tomorrow (Thursday) night at the Roxie at 8PM (a sold-out show) and repeats at 10PM. More events at other venues occur throughout the weekend. Details here.

(Image from Not In Kansas Anymore by Rebekah Estey)

Vigo & Vertov

The legendary French filmmaker Jean Vigo, upon introducing his first film À propos de Nice in 1930, made a profile of the ideal social documentarian: "thin enough to slide into a Romanian key-hole and able at the crack of dawn to film Prince Carol in his night-shirt, if such a subject is indeed worthy of our interest" and "sufficiently small to position himself beneath the chair of the croupier, that great god of the Monte Carlo casino." Vigo was positioning the social documentary as a democratizing force, revealing privileged knowledge to viewers who would be in the dark without this access.

The inventions of the camera and the sound recorder brought into the world the first technological eyewitnesses (and "ear witnesses"). Their products' authority could be trusted in a way that the words of a speaker or writer, or the sketches of an artist, each potentially subject to the faults of memory or the embellishment of imagination, could not. Of course a camera (and, in equivalent ways, a sound recording device, though I'll leave these aside since I'm focusing on silent cinema at the moment) and a filmed image can still be manipulated through editing, special effects, tricks of the lens, etc. And of course the image captured is always going to be dependent on the biases of the camera operator, who has control over when to start or stop cranking and at what speed, not to mention control over the direction the camera is pointed. But for all the control she or he has, there are always aspects of a filmed image that are beyond a camera operator's control, (perhaps) unless he or she is filming systematically in a highly-controlled environment like a Hollywood studio. A certain truth will inevitably be contained in the image, no matter how much imagination or bias the filmmaker applies in attempt to manipulate it.

All but the least sophisticated audience understands and can usually recognize, just by viewing, the differences between the two modes: the highly systematic studio style of filming in which each detail can be assumed to have been planned, and the "unbound" style that, though a great deal of planning may be involved, leaves space for randomness to be captured and for some of the truths of the world, apart from filmmaker intention, to be apparent. The former is often tagged with terms like "feature" or "narrative" filmmaking, while the latter is generally called "documentary". The distinction between these two modes is the reason why audiences find value in documentary, and it's also the reason why such films are often held to a different standard of scrutiny.

Which brings me to Dziga Vertov's 1929 masterpiece the Man With the Movie Camera. Surely it informed Vigo's filmmaking; Vertov's younger brother Boris Kaufman was Vigo's cinematographer for the director's entire (mournfully brief) career, and it must also have been the inspiration for Vigo's quote about filming through keyholes and from under chairs. Vertov's film begins with a set of titles listing qualities that pronounce it in the second category: no intertitles, no script, no "theatre" or its accouterments of actors or sets. The film's entire purpose seems to be to demonstrate and argue for the range of uses of the documentarian's camera: to show a process up close; to illustrate the huge scale of an object; to witness a location too dangerous for a crowd; to show using slow-motion how an activity can be performed by a superb athlete; to show through editing juxtapositions the range of beauty found among humans, and much much more.

But it's fascinating that along the way Vertov is constantly reminding the viewer of the other mode and how it can in fact co-mingle with the documentary approach. The very first image seen is a special effect achieved through split-screen. The film also employs highly-systematized techniques like animation and the obvious manipulation of sets, and, contrary to the title-card proclamation, the use of actors. In particular, Vertov and Kaufman's eldest brother Mikhael Kaufman plays the role of a camera operator on the move. By making the melding of the two modes explicit, the Man With the Movie Camera seems to be a warning of the dangers of confusing them, and how this confusion might be seized on by the propagandist.

À propos de Nice and the Man with the Movie Camera play together at the Pacific Film Archive on Thursday, January 29th, with live piano accompaniment provided by Judith Rosenberg. It's part of a series entitled the Way of the Termite: the Essay in Cinema that began last Thursday and runs through April, with titles announced (so far) though February 24th. Other films included in the series are Fernando Birri's revered Tire dié and Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread, playing together with two other short films tonight at 7:30 PM, Humphrey Jennings' stirring a Diary For Timothy February 3, Jean Rouch's the Mad Masters and Jean-Marie Teno's Chief! February 5 (a program also tying in with the African Film Festival), Perfumed Nightmare February 10, and Forough Farrokhzad's masterpiece the House is Black, playing with Trial February 17th. The series was guest-curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin, who was expected to attend this weekend at Thursday's screening as well as on Friday and Saturday with screenings of one of his collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard, Letter to Jane, but "unforeseen circumstances" forced a cancellation of his appearances. The films will go on, however, and deserve to be seen on the big screen.

Society Information

Noir City 7, a newspaper-themed edition of the beloved festival, opened last night and runs through February 1st. Dismal weather has arrived with the festival, all the better for enhancing the rain-soaked city mood associated with noir (not to mention for enhancing the water table.) Check the Film on Film Foundation blog for some pointed comments on "noirsters" and film recommendations, and sf360 for an interview with Noir City publisher Eddie Muller.

This Wednesday, January 28, the Noir City screenings of Fritz Lang's extreme-widescreen While the City Sleeps and the Frisco-set Shakedown will be co-presented by the San Francisco Film Society. Last year at the SFFS/Noir City co-presentation of D.O.A., Film Society director Graham Leggat announced an intention to team with the Film Noir Foundation to put together an international film noir series- still no word on when that might be or what it might involve, but I hope it's still in the cards, and that it involves more than the obvious European suspects- I'd love to see some Latin American or Southeast Asian noir someday! Perhaps there will be an update on Wednesday.

The Film Society has a hand (or both) in a multitude of events including classes and film screenings all over town over the coming months, however. They resume programming a screen at the Kabuki on January 30th, when the Uruguayan hit the Pope's Toilet begins a week-long engagement. The just-Oscar-nominated documentary Trouble the Water plays four matinees on the SFFS screen on January 31, February 1, 7 & 8. These are joined by the Eritrean war-set Lake of Fire (Feb. 6-12), the 2007 SFIAAFF Audience Award winner the Owl and the Sparrow (Feb. 13-19) a Danish thriller called Just Another Love Story (Feb. 20-26) and a documentary on modern-day philosophers that's already getting buzz off the coast of cinephile island, Examined Life (Mar. 6-12).

I've not seen any of those, but I have seen the SFFS screen film scheduled to play from February 27 through March 5: Silent Light, by young Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. It's quite something, and I'm thrilled to know it's going to be in town for a whole glorious week. It's a film that fell through the cracks between my year-end lists for sf360, since it didn't play commercially on Frisco Bay in 2008, but was technically not "unreleased" since it was picked up by a distributor and played for a week at New York City's MoMA last September. The Secret of the Grain and In the City of Sylvia are two other films that fell into in this netherworld of list ineligibility, that I would have otherwise seriously considered for my top ten; perhaps the SFFS will bring them to the Kabuki this year, as they are Silent Light? One can hope. All are beautiful films that I can hardly imagine trying to appreciate in the distracting world of home video.

On February 3, the Film Society is presenting 13 Most Beautiful... at the Palace of Fine Arts. This event pairs a set of Andy Warhol's enigmatic Screen Tests in an unorthodox manner: accompanied by live music performed by Dean & Britta. The lucky thirteen faces to expect are: Paul America, Susan Bottomly, Ann Buchanan, Freddy Herko, "Baby" Jane Holzer, Dennis Hopper, Billy Name, Nico, Richard Rheem, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Ingrid Superstar and Mary Woronov. I saw Hopper, Holzer, Buchanan, and number of others including Gerard Malanga, Susan Sontag and John Cale on my last trip to New York five and a half years ago, silently screened together in a museum; this promises to be a very different presentation. This set is touring to promote a new DVD release, billed as "the first ever authorized DVD of Andy Warhol's films" though some of us are aware that Helmut appeared on DVD a few years ago.

Of course the Film Society's biggest annual event is the San Francisco International Film Festival. Its 52nd edition will run from April 23 to May 7, 2009, and two restoration premieres have already been announced: a Woman Under the Influence by John Cassavetes, and Le Amiche by Michaelangelo Antonioni are expected to screen in new prints on April 25th at the Castro Theatre. That's good news, if I do say so myself.

A Tale of Two Cities: Berlin & Noir

I've been missing my friends attending the Sundance Film Festival this week, but from what I can make out nobody's really seen anything earth-shattering there yet anyway. Or that's what it sounds like with those sour grapes in my ears, anyway. Meanwhile, I attended three terrific film programs at the Berlin & Beyond festival at the Castro Theatre last weekend. Two rarely-shown archival programs and a US premiere have more than made up for whatever I'm missing in Park City this week. And all three in one way or another worked as a warm-up to the next big festival at the Castro this week: Noir City 7.

The new film was Jerichow, my belated introduction to the work of up-and-coming director Christian Petzold. Though it contains none of the stylistic markings of classic noir, and its sunny small-town setting seems counter to the typical urban landscapes of true noir, Jerichow nonetheless classifies rather neatly as a neo-noir genre deconstruction, building on familiar themes of deception, betrayal and fate, in a fresh context.

And yet, the context is not such a stretch from the American crime films of the late 1940s either. Two common film noir concerns are the role of the war veteran in a peacetime society, and the economic options open to immigrants and other marginalized citizens under a powerful capitalist system. In Jerichow the war vet (Benno Fürmann) is back from serving with NATO forces in Afghanistan, and the immigrant (Hilmi Sözer) is a German Turk running a chain of modest eateries with his blonde wife (Nina Hoss). These three characters form a twisted triangle of intrigue that kept my rapt interest around each curving bend in the narrative highway. I'd very much like to see the film again to understand better how Petzold maneuvers expectations and subverts them.

Wim Wenders' Kings of the Road may feature stunning black-and-white cinematography by the great Robby Müller but its noir connection is undoubtedly the weakest of the these three: it's a rambling, often comic road movie set mostly in environments even less urban than those of Jerichow. There are plenty of detours without echoes of Detour.


Bruno (played by Wenders regular Rüdiger Vogler) travels in a 1.66:1 wide truck from town to town, repairing and occasionally operating the projection equipment in small cinemas, many of them reduced to porno house status on their way to complete obsolescence. After witnessing a spectacular, laughably failed suicide attempt by Robert (Hanns Zischler, 30 years before his role in Munich), Bruno invites him along for the ride, as long as he agrees not to swap stories.

Later on, Robert delivers to his newspaperman father a manifesto against the telling of stories and other verbal expressions. He delivers it nearly silently. Kings of the Road seems to be for Wenders a similar manifesto, identifying his brand of 1970s contemplative cinema as a media revolution in which a new generation could demand a voice even if it had no particular words it wanted to say. It's this formal strategy, which brought to my mind a kinship with Chantal Akerman's Je tu il elle (solidified by a post-screening chat with a more experienced Akerman-watcher), that makes Kings of the Road for me Wenders' best film, along of course with its cinephile-catnip inside peek at the mechanical processes of film exhibition.

So what's the noir connection? Again, it's the post-war thread- a different country in a different phase of soul-searching, but there's no doubt that World War II and the subsequent German Economic Miracle hang like a shadow over this film- the latter repeatedly critiqued as incomplete at best, not least by the Wenders' travel route along the border of West and East Germany. So even if it doesn't do so by the dramatic means of, say, Thieves' Highway or They Live By Night, perhaps it performs a similar function, questioning: "What good is prosperity if its handmaiden is destruction?"

The third film of the weekend is the one most readers probably are already quite familiar with: Josef von Sternberg's the Blue Angel. I'd seen it before myself, but this was my first viewing of the so-called "English-language" version prepared by UFA for export in the early days of talking pictures before subtitles caught on. This version is worth commenting on; at first I thought it ironic that an English-dialogue version would play a German-language film festival, while across Frisco Bay at the Pacific Film Archive the original German-language version will play on February 1 as part of a Sternberg retrospective. But watching the rare, unsubtitled 35mm print on Monday I realized the rationale for screening it at Berlin & Beyond: not all of the dialogue is in English, in fact a great deal is untranslated German. This is because, unlike most trans-nationally-set films today (at least those made in Hollywood), the English speaking is presented as if organic to the story. Emil Jannings' professor of English practices the immersion method in his classroom, and speaks German only briefly to a few side characters. Marlene Dietrich as Lola is explained to be a native English speaker (and her accent is nearly convincing most of the time), an excuse for other characters to eschew German while she's in the room. Incidentally, an even earlier Dietrich film called the Woman Men Yearn For will screen in Niles on February 7th.

I love how the morality play of the Blue Angel works as an advertisement for the talking picture. The respectable professional (Jannings) gets lured into a debased existence by his flirtation with that most disreputable of entertainments: the variety cabaret. But entertainment itself is not dangerous unless there is a live performer (Dietrich) to seduce the spectator in her dressing room. The solution is to watch these debauched performances on the safe surface of a flat screen, far from the sound stage where it was captured. One can experience the titillation without the risk of ending up in a clown suit.

There's no doubt that the Blue Angel is an important precursor to film noir. It may not be concerned with deception as a major theme, as most noirs do, but it is as packed with the noir quality of obsession as any film featuring a femme fatale. And of course the interplay of light and shadow prefigure the chiaroscuro that became so prevalent in 1940s Hollywood. The story of how Germany's film artists fled to America to darken our screens with a particularly noirish pessimism has been told more times than practically any founding myth. Data in support can be gathered with ease at Noir City 7, where a good many of the films had major creative roles filled by at least one expatriate of Germany or its film industry. Here's a partial list to close out for the night:

Robert Siodmak: director, the Killers

Fritz Lang: director, While the City Sleeps & Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Billy Wilder: writer, director, Ace in the Hole

Michael Curtiz: director, the Unsuspected

Hans Dreier: art director, Chicago Deadline, the Big Clock & Alias Nick Beal

Franz Bachelin: art director, Chicago Deadline & Alias Nick Beal

Franz Waxman: composer, the Unsuspected & Alias Nick Beal