SFIFF52 Day 8: California Company Town

The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival is at the halfway mark; it runs through May 7th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about one film I've seen or am hotly anticipating.

California Company Town (USA: Lee Anne Schmitt, 2008)

playing: 8:35 PM tonight at the Pacific Film Archive, with two more public showtimes later in the festival.
festival premiere: Vancouver 2008
distributor: none that I'm aware of.

At the intersection of historical, geographical, political, environmental, and aesthetic upheaval lies California Company Town, made by CalArts faculty member Lee Anne Schmitt. It explores the communities and ex-communities built up around this state's extraction industries: mining, lumbering, large-scale agriculture etc. Schmitt's matter-of-fact narration tells story after story from our unheard labor history along with personal recounts of her experiences speaking with people and shooting footage in these forgotten pockets of California. Other times we hear the voices of political figures reciting relevant speeches, or else paid promoters selling faith in the American Dream. Often the soundtrack is wordless however, emphasizing an auditory windswept emptiness that aligns with the images we're shown. Schmitt interpolates archival film footage and close-up shots of the detritus of these commerce-ravaged communities with the bulk of her visual palette: landscape shots of the ghost towns, lunar landscapes, and even impromptu skate parks that exist in and around places like Boron, Darwin, Eagle Mountain, etc.

This essay film is possibly the most formally unconventional of the documentary features at the SFIFF this year, though its outwardly calm yet furiously pointed approach may identify it as a younger cousin of recent festival selections such as Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind and the Joy of Life. What a typical documentary viewer is likely to miss most, at least at first, in California Company Town is images of people. There are some, but they're almost exclusively shown in extreme long shot and remain strangers. However, this absence of human visual connection should strike a thoughtful viewer as entirely appropriate to the subject matter of locations where capital has starkly displaced human labor.

Perhaps most interesting are Schmitt's images of the remnants of workers' co-operatives such as Kaweah and Llano del Rio. Not company towns at all, but utopian alternatives, these former communities leave fewer traces than the emptied-out factory towns and mines. And she touches on the fact that some of these dying or dead towns are making unlikely comebacks as bedroom communities for labor pools for modern, capital-infused cities. I'm not quite sure how Manzanar fits in with the rest of the places she exhibits, but like her aesthetic decisions its inclusion in the film provides fodder for thought and discussion. The filmmaker is expected to be in attendance at tonight's screening.

SFIFF52 Day 8
Another option: Proving Ground (USA: Travis Wilkerson, 2007) Actually a multimedia performance piece originally entitled Soapbox Agitation #1: Proving Ground is the most notable vestige of the Kinotek programs of recent SFIFF editions. I wish I had taken advantage of more of them; this one sounds interesting.
Non-SFIFF-option for today: Road House (USA: Jean Negulesco, 1948) at the Vortex Room in 16mm; a noir starring Ida Lupino. Need I say more? If so, I'll let Noir of the Week do the talking.

SFIFF52 Day 7: The Lake

The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival is approaching its halfway mark; it runs through May 7th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about one film I've seen or am hotly anticipating.

The Lake (ISRAEL: Boaz Lavie, 2009)

playing: 12:15 PM this afternoon at the Kabuki, with no more showtimes later in the festival.
festival premiere: Ljubljana International Short Film Festival 2009 is the earliest I'm picking up.
distributor: none that I am aware of.

Some of the SFIFF's shorts programs are collected under a clear theme. Youth Bring the Truth showcases work by teenage filmmakers. No Voice Too Small compiles films made for children. A Thousand Pictures is animation not intended for kiddies. Parting Shots and Handle With Care are devoted to avant-garde films. Foreign Territories and Voices Carry are more curatorially amorphous.

I used the festival's press preview stations to take a look at films in the latter program and was unable to discern a unifying principle behind it. Voices that carry, I guess. No matter, it's an opportunity to watch a grab bag of short-form video work along with, according to the Film on Film calendar, one 35mm production entitled Next Floor, a dark, satirical, somewhat gruesome narrative piece from Canada. Other shorts in the program include the Conscience of Nhem En, an Oscar-nominated documentary short about the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, and 575 Castro St., which might find itself at home in one of the avant-garde programs, but has an emotional heft that deserves to be appreciated by viewers nervous about seeing a full program of experimental work.

I gravitate toward the documentaries, the avant-garde, and the animated shorts, but tend to be disappointed by the live-action narrative short video works, no matter what festival I see them at. It's nice to find an exception, though. I found one in The Lake, a comedy from a young Israeli writer-director named Boaz Lavie. It's a completely absurd piece about two brothers trying to make a living in Tel Aviv. A bizarre scenario is played with such straightforward deadpan earnestness that I could not help but laugh out loud in the oh-so-quiet viewing room. I suspect the Lake will appeal most to the sorts of people who have Fishing With John in their personal DVD collections, not because they're being Criterion-Collection-completist, but because they appreciate its off-beat humor. I also bet it's the only film ever made with songs recorded by Stevie Wonder, Vincent Gallo and Raffi all on the same soundtrack.

SFIFF52 Day 7
Another option: Khamsa (FRANCE: Karim Dridi, 2008) has been recommended by Carl Martin as well as other festgoers I've spoken with. Here is another review if you still need convincing to attend the film's last SFIFF screening today.
Non-SFIFF-option for today: the Clown and the Führer (SPAIN: Eduard Cortés, 2007) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I haven't seen it, but here is a review.

SFIFF52 Day 6: Le Amiche

The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival is going strong; it runs through May 7th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about one film I've seen or am hotly anticipating.

Le Amiche (ITALY: Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1955)

playing: 8:15 PM tonight at the Pacific Film Archive, with no more showtimes later in the festival.
festival premiere: Venice 1955
distributor: Image Entertainment released a DVD back in 2001, but this restoration may be lead to a new home video transfer. More theatrical showings might be unlikely in the near future, however.

Michaelangelo Antonioni has the reputation of being one of the severest of the great international auteurs of the 1960s arthouse. But his work in the 1950s was very different in formal seriousness and tone, as evidenced by this relatively rare screening of a recently-restored 1955, Le Amiche. Translated as the Girlfriends, it begins in the aftermath of a suicide attempt and follows a group of women, some married and some unmarried but in direct competition for the attention of the husbands. Its theme of the dissolution of the traditional family structure in post-war Italy certainly prefigures the so-called "trilogy of alienation", but it's positively breezy when compared to the director's canonized works like L'Avventura and L'Eclisse.

That's because Antonioni hadn't yet pushed his formal experimentation into the ground-breaking realm of those masterpieces. Le Amiche provides a fine example of that maxim for artists: that one must Know The Rules before successfully Breaking Them. For Le Amiche has a structure that, while by no means predictable or conforming to a rigid genre floorplan (not one that I'm aware of at any rate), is also no assault upon the very tenets of narrative as some later films reportedly felt like to audiences of the time. And on a shot-by-shot basis, this is not the Antonioni that Orson Welles complains about to Peter Bogdanovich in This is Orson Welles:

I'm so bored with Antonioni--that belief that, because a shot is good, it's going to get better if you keep looking at it. He gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road. And you think, "Well, he's not going to carry that woman all the way up that road." But he does. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the road after she's gone.

No, in 1955 the Italian master was still using relatively conventional pacing. There is a crucial shot of a woman disappearing down a street, but she disappears into the darkness and it's quite clear what emotion the audience is expected to feel as the camera is being held there. For some, an Antonioni film without the long-take, long-shot ennui may be hard to fathom; why see a film by an auteur that doesn't highlight his most essential strength? But Charlie Chaplin made a masterpiece out of a Woman of Paris without employing his knack for comedy, and David Cronenberg's Fast Company is as good as any of his other early films, without the employment of overt "body horror".

The truth is these filmmakers are men of prodigial talent, and display it even when not plucking the same string they're best known for. In Antonioni's case, his eye for framing a composition and skill at delineating character shine through in a film like Le Amiche, and it should be sought out by anyone interested in the work of this great master. Conversely, it might even turn around the opinion of an Antonioni non-fan put off by the likes of Red Desert and Zabriskie Point.

SFIFF52 Day 6
Another option: Rembrandt's J'Accuse (UK/NETHERLANDS: Peter Greenaway, 2008), with the director expected to be in attendance. UPDATE: As it turns out, Greenaway is not in town after all. Michael Hawley points out that a new Greenaway film hasn't screened in Frisco since 1999. What's up with that?
Non-SFIFF-option for today: Wendy and Lucy (USA: Kelly Reihardt, 2008) at the Red Vic, a truly heartbreaking, beautiful film I recommend very highly. Check out this interview with the film's director by SFIFF shorts juror Jesse Hawthorne Ficks.

SFIFF52 Day 5: Empress Hotel

The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival has completed its first weekend; it runs through May 7th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about one film I've seen or am hotly anticipating.

Empress Hotel (USA: Allie Light & Irving Saraf, 2009)

playing: 6:00 PM tonight at the Kabuki, with two more showtimes including an added screening on the last day of the festival.
festival premiere: Nashville Film Festival 2009
distributor: none that I'm aware of.

Forty years ago, a former lawyer named Frederick Wiseman made a film called Titicut Follies, out of footage he shot inside the Bridgewater (Massachusetts) State Hospital for the criminally insane. Though he had the permission of the hospital and its staff to film inside, after the film's completion a legal decision blocked its screening on the basis that the patients' privacy would be infringed upon. This despite the fact that Wiseman's camera was attempting to benefit the patients by improving their conditions; it showed those few who were able to see the film (before the ban was lifted in 1991) how Bridgewater was maltreating its inmates: housing them naked, force-feeding them in an improper manner, etc.

Empress Hotel is a quite different documentary in almost every regard. It shows life inside a Tenderloin residential hotel intended to provide shelter for people who might otherwise be sleeping on Frisco's sidewalks or in its parks. Though a number of these residents have mental health or addiction issues, they are not "criminally insane" (though it's questionable whether the men in Titicut Follies were, either). They are not being held at the Empress against their will. The film was made in full co-operation from the staff of the hotel, and building manager Roberta Goodman even served as co-producer. More importantly, as suggested by the documentary's subtitle "Stories of the Residents," Empress Hotel was made with the active participation of its subjects. This interview indicates that material the residents wanted omitted from the film indeed was. It's their perspectives and the depiction of their joys and frequent sorrows of living in the center of Frisco's Tenderloin that forms the heart of the film. Like any documentary made by outsiders (in this case Oscar-winning non-fiction filmmaking team Allie Light & Irving Saraf) huge ethical issues of representation are wrangled with, but following in the true cinéma vérité tradition of Jean Rouch (as opposed to the Direct Cinema strand Wiseman stems out of) the presence of the camera is acknowledged and the ethical wrangling becomes a clear part of the finished film.

Light and Saraf make a few choices that I'm not sure work so well; notably during some of the residents testimonials of their life experiences they intercut heavy-handed images of liquor, drugs, and other personal demons the storytellers are describing in the audio track. And the film doesn't seem to know quite how to conclude. Perhaps this is because of the messiness of human existence and our inconclusive narratives. Personally, I would also have liked to see more paralleling of the lives of the "cared for" with those of their "providers" in order to break down the separations that we tend to feel when confronted with people in a so-called "worse off" situation than our own. But ultimately Empress Hotel is a important and eye-opening document. If Titicut Follies led its viewers to understand the tragic indignities of the institution it portrayed, this film is liable to bring a sensitive viewer to a better understanding of the tragic indignities of a society that shunts aside a portion of its population into near-invisibility. A film like Empress Hotel can only be part of the corrective to this sad situation.

SFIFF52 Day 5
Another option: Al Más Allá (MEXICO: Lourdes Portillo, 2008), screening as part of Lourdes Portillo's Persistence of Vision award tribute. I've only seen one of this documentarian's films, Missing Young Woman, but on the basis of that film alone I think she's a worthy choice for the award. Michael Fox seems to be the only critic around who has seen her latest film, but he makes it sound quite interesting.
Non-SFIFF-option for today: Milk (USA: Gus Van Sant, 2008) at the Castro. If you're in town just for the festival and have never seen this award-winning biopic inside the movie theatre much of it was filmed in front of, this is your chance to do so. If you're a resident and haven't seen it there, you'll get another chance May 22-28, when it plays on a double-bill with the documentary the Times of Harvey Milk.

SFIFF52 Day 4: a Woman Under the Influence

The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival has begun and runs through May 7th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about one film I've seen or am hotly anticipating.

A Woman Under the Influence (USA: John Cassavetes, 1974)

playing: 5:45 PM tonight at the Castro, with no more showtimes later in the festival.
festival premiere: New York Film Festival, 1974
distributor: Criterion has a DVD out of course, but Cassavetes films should be seen in theatres when the opportunity arises. Brecht Andersch expects the newly-restored print to receive "something of a commercial run" but I wonder if he's being overly optimistic.

I have a confession to make: I have never seen John Cassavetes' a Woman Under the Influence. Shadows, Faces, Opening Night, Love Streams, yes, and all in cinemas. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie on home video only (probably the main reason why I like it the least of these). But not the film that put him the closest to mainstream respectability thanks to its two major Oscar nominations. Gena Rowlands was nominated for Best Actress for her performance; she's expected to attend the Castro screening. And Cassavetes was nominated for Best Director, losing to Francis Ford Coppola, who the festival is honoring May 1st also at the Castro alongside a screening of his 1969 film the Rain People.

It should be noted that initially many critics were hostile to a Woman Under the Influence, and even the positive Variety review had little more to say than that the film was "technically superior to any of John Cassavetes' previous works." Whatever that means in the context of Cassavetes; I suppose I'll find out this evening. All I know for sure is that each Cassavetes film I've seen is wholly different from every other, yet so distinctively part of a larger (love) stream of work that it's impossible not to recognize the author's presence behind the camera (even when he's also in front of it). It's also impossible not to recognize his influence over imitators, for good or ill. I'm eager for tonight, what I expect to be a real highlight of the festival.

SFIFF52 Day 4
Another option: Le Amiche (ITALY: Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1955), which Carl Martin in his round up of SFIFF revival screenings laments was subject to digital restoration, but that won't deter me from partaking.
Non-SFIFF-option for today: Gone With the Wind (USA: Victor Fleming, 1939) at the Stanford, if only to see that crane shot Val Lewton conceived of as a story editor for Selznick, on a big, beautiful screen.