The End of History, Geography, Cinematography...

San Francisco moviegoers, as a rule, love to see their city on screen. Many of us especially enjoy seeing how our streets, shops, and landmarks were captured by filmmakers of bygone eras. Even a glimpse of the stock-footage skyline in a Hollywood studio-shot film like John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon will usually earn a cheer from the assembled crowd when projected on a local theatre screen. At the last edition of Noir City, the double-bill of Frisco-set noirs (Red Light and Walk A Crooked Mile) was almost undoubtedly the weakest pairing of the festival, but it packed the Castro Theatre more thoroughly than perhaps any other program in the series. There’s something about seeing “Old San Francisco”, whether in a great film like Vertigo or Greed, or in a lesser one like House on Telegraph Hill or It Came From Beneath the Sea, that connects us to our collective histories, and many of us frequently seek that kind of connection.

All but the most devoted scholar of Frisco Bay film locations is certain to discover unseen camera perspectives on the region’s past by attending shows in the Radical Light series of independent films, both canonical and obscure, that dominates SF Cinematheque’s fall calendar. So far, in the first three screenings in the series (held at the Pacific Film Archive, at SFMOMA, and in an elementary school’s redwood grove in Canyon, California), we’ve seen Market Street in 1906, North Beach ca. 1958, the Emeryville mudflat ca. 1981, Richmond railyards ca. 1966, Transbay Terminal ca. 1961, Mission Creek ca. 1990, and much more, thanks to filmmakers like the Miles Brothers, Dion Vigne, Chris Marker, Bruce Baillie, Dominic Angerame, etc.

Tonight at 7:30 the Pacific Film Archive kicks off four successive Wednesday evening Radical Light screenings that take a chronological approach to Frisco Bay experimental filmmaking. Those of us lucky enough to attend will see a deep-sea diver dragged onto Ocean Beach in the Lead Shoes tonight. We’ll see a Frisco Bay trash dump accompanied to the music of Carl Orff and the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Have You Sold Your Dozen Roses on October 6th. We’ll see an S.F. Mime Troupe-inspired farce enacted all over town in Oh Dem Watermelons on October 13th. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; in addition to all the other films in these four programs, the chronological screenings are supplemented by thematically-curated programs on October 16-17 and a book launch party October 15th.

I'm particularly excited that tonight’s screening includes Christopher Maclaine’s 35-minute opus The End. This apocalyptic masterpiece incorporates more cuts than many feature-length films, but from even the briefest of its shots flickers a San Francisco quite recognizable to anyone closely familiar with the city, even if we arrived here decades after Maclaine made the film in 1953. I was born here twenty years later, for example, but upon taking an opportunity to see this long-sought rarity three years ago, I was startled to recognize my alma mater George Washington High School as a location in the film. This only served to cement the personal re-calibration of my cinematic senses the film seemed to be achieving. When I later had a chance to speak of the experience with Brecht Andersch, who had introduced the screening in his role as part of the Film On Film Foundation, we determined to tour the film’s many, many San Francisco locations.

This year, we’ve done our best to do just that, tracking down the places where Maclaine and cinematographer Jordan Belson pointed the camera whether in the touristed northeast corner of the city or the wild West sections of Frisco. Brecht has begun posting the initial results of our tour at the SFMOMA Open Space blog; so far there’s an introduction and an initial set of screencaps with description. There’s also a photograph I took of how one of the locations (Alta Plaza Park) looks in 2010; future entries in Brecht’s series will include many more of these.

Research begets research, and when Brecht made unlikely contact with Wilder Bentley II, one of the two heretofore-identified (in any publications we’re aware of, at any rate) actors in The End, we felt compelled and privileged to venture to his residence in Sonoma County to interview him. He is expected to attend tonight’s screening of The End and talk about Maclaine, Frisco’s Bohemian scene in the early 1950s, etc. It promises to be quite an evening; whether you've seen The End before, or not, prepare yourself for re-calibration!

No Time Like Cinema Time

The are only two days left to see Dogtooth on the San Francisco Film Society Screen at the Sundance Kabuki. I had hoped to write a full review of this remarkable, unsettling film about one family's bizarre home-schooling experiment gone to the extreme, which I was able to catch at the Greek Film Festival back in May. A modern-day application of classical Greek philosophy- particularly Plato's concept of The Cave, it's one of the best films I've seen all year, and it demands to be seen on the big screen, where one is held captive to cinema's traditional nature as a purely time-based medium (a quality compromised by the existence of the DVD player's pause function). Unfortunately time has not been on my side on this matter, so I must refer you to recent reviews by Cheryl Eddy and Dennis Harvey instead.

On Friday, Dogtooth will be replaced by Change Of Plans on the SFFS Screen, and also joined at the Kabuki by a weaker new opening, Zhang Yimou's A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop. The latter is a remake of the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple that is at least (at most?) interesting in that it's more faithful to the original film in some of its aesthetic approaches, including a long wordless segment that mirrors the Coens' achievement, and even a recurrent sound effect surely intended to replicate the Balinese chant on the original film's soundtrack, than it is to the overall milieu, plot, tone, or character design. More broad Chinese-style slapstick than we Westerners are likely to forgive makes this remake a rather jarring one, even if certain individual scenes are impressive.

As the SFFS begins unveiling its Fall Season, it's also trying to negotiate a takeover of the Clay Theatre on Fillmore Street, which was expected to close near the end of last month but was spared for the time being; a French film Mademoiselle Chambon opens Friday. Michael Krasny recently hosted a fascinating radio program on the fate of the Clay and other single-screen theatres on Frisco Bay, in which the SFFS's Graham Leggatt outlined his hopes for the 100-year-old venue. In the meantime, R.A. McBride and Julie Lindow's book Left In The Dark has begun appearing on the shelves of Frisco Bay bookstores (City Lights and The Green Arcade, for two). I was honored to be quoted in a piece by Sam Sharkey, formerly of the Clay, now of the Red Vic, on the future of moviegoing; other essays by Chi-hui Yang, Eddie Muller, Gary Meyer with Laura Horak, and Sergio de la Mora help make this book a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Frisco Bay cinemagoing, but it's the superb photography by R.A. McBride which makes it a must-own for anyone with a coffee table or a bookshelf.

Another Frisco bay-centric film book entitled Radical Light focuses on the many permutations of experimental cinema made and screened here over the second half of the last century. After purchasing it at the Berkeley Art Museum Store on Friday, I've only been able to get about halfway through it so far, but it's absolutely required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in American avant-garde filmmaking, of which Frisco Bay has been the major center for much of the time period covered in the book (1945-2000). And since, despite having twice as many pages as Left in the Dark, it's actually got a cheaper list price, at least in paperback, I have to say I'm even more satisfied with this purchase (as unfair as it feels to compare these two very worthy and exciting publications). The Pacific Film Archive and SF Cinematheque will hold a spectacular array of special-guest laden screenings in conjunction with the book release over the next several months, beginning with a PFA screening September 19th that I cannot recommend more highly. Aesthetically diverse masterpieces from Dion Vigne's North Beach to Bruce Baillie's All My Life to Chris Marker's Junkopia will play together, and filmmakers Ernie Gehr and Lawrence Jordan will appear in person. BAM will also open a gallery exhibition of documents related to the book and to the experimental film scene on October 6th.

Among other tasks that took up my time in recent weeks was a very enjoyable one: writing a review of the new Josef Von Sternberg box set published over a week ago at GreenCine Daily. As I begin the review, Criterion has traditionally not been a major force in releasing American silent films, but with this set (of Underworld, the Last Command, and the Docks of New York), and its upcoming Charlie Chaplin releases, it seems intent on becoming a major player in this field after all. Criterion's affiliated company Janus is bringing five days full of Chaplin films to the Castro Theatre later this month, and I can't wait to see these films on the big screen.

Although I must admit, I may be a bit exhausted by the time the Chaplin series begins with his still-underrated The Circus September 18th. I'll have just returned from over a week at the Toronto International Film Festival, my first-ever visit to this festival, or indeed this city. In fact, I'd better wrap up this post now if I want to make my flight! See you in a week and a half!

Sean McCourt on Ray Harryhausen

Late August is traditionally one of the few moments of the Frisco Bay filmgoing year during which there are no film festivals- a quiet before the storm of autumn festivals whose flyers are sure to blow onto our doorsteps like fallen leaves soon enough, when the Arab Film Festival, Docfest, the United Nations Association Film Festival and others get into gear, and when the San Francisco Film Society begins its Fall Season in earnest (they've already announced their line-up for a new presentation of something called the NY/SF International Childrens' Film Festival in September, and a few other isolated screenings including Mauritz Stiller's silent Sir Arne's Treasure with music by the Mountain Goats on December 14). In the absence of festivals, several local cinemas have outdone themselves in programming older films worth discovering or revisiting on the big screen in the next few weeks. The Roxie begins a truly amazing and eclectic series entitled Not Necessarily Noir tonight with a double-bill of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Quatermass Experiment; other great selections by programmer Elliot Levine include Andre De Toth's Day of the Outlaw, Brian De Palma's Obsession, Paul Schrader's Blue Collar (image below) and Hardcore, and Abel Ferrara's The Bad Lieutenant.

Also tonight, the VIZ Cinema begins two weeks screening Akira Kurosawa's most broadly-beloved samurai pictures, just as the Pacific Film Archive winds down their summer-long Kurosawa retrospective with the final few films of his career. In addition to the PFA's regular programming (they've just announced their schedule through October as well, by the way) the Berkeley venue has been rented out the afternoon of Sunday, August 22, when Franco Zefferelli's 1981 Endless Love is presented by the Film on Film Foundation, with screenwriter Judith Rascoe expected to be present to talk about her adaptation of the Scott Spencer novel for the screen. FOFF's Brecht Andersch has penned two compelling articles on the "accursed" nature of the film and its place in the great tradition of American melodrama, but the only way to be sure whether or not this never-on-DVD Brooke Shields vehicle deserves its less-than-stellar reputation or not, is to see it on 35mm for ourselves.

The Castro Theatre, too, is an exciting repertory venue in August and September, with films by David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Frank Tashlin, Charlie Chaplin, and other sure-bet directors on the horizon. This weekend the venue turns its screen over to the special effects career of the great Ray Harryhausen. Sometime Hell On Frisco Bay contributor Sean McCourt interviewed Harryhausen in 2006, and I'm pleased that he has offered up his article on the nonagenarian wizard, originally published in a slightly different form in the Marin Independent Journal, for publication here. Here's Sean:

Much like the mad scientists of classic horror films that diligently toiled in remote and mist-filled secret laboratories to bring their mutant creations to life, special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen had to invent unconventional techniques to bring his movie magic to the big screen when he revolutionized the world of fantasy film making in the 1950s and 1960s. His work on Jason and the Argonauts (above image), Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms among many others has influenced several generations of filmmakers that grew up watching his stop-motion creatures—icons that have rampaged their way into the imaginations of children and children at heart for more than fifty years now.

Harryhausen, celebrated his 90th birthday this year, and the Castro Theatre is honoring him this weekend with a six-film tribute including /The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (image below), a film that contains one of his best known scenes—a climatic duel between Sinbad and a sword-wielding skeleton. The effect was created by using a technique called “Dynamation,” where live action footage is combined with stop-motion animation to give the illusion that the intricately detailed models of monsters or people are interacting with the real world.

Seeing 1933’s King Kong as a young boy inspired Harryhausen, and he thinks the stop-motion animation methods that were employed in King Kong and that he later used in his own work did a better job than the computer generated special effects of today. “If you make fantasy too realistic, I think it defeats itself,” says Harryhausen. “It suddenly becomes mundane you know, because half the charm of the early Kong was it was like a nightmare, you knew it wasn’t real, and yet it looks real.”

Bay Area film fans will likely recall It Came From Beneath the Sea, a 1955 sci-fi romp that featured a giant octopus tearing down the clock tower of San Francisco’s Ferry Building and destroying the Golden Gate Bridge. If had been up to city officials, however, the latter scene, another of Harryhausen’s most famous, may never have come to fruition. “We submitted the script to the San Francisco city fathers, and they felt that it would weaken the bridge in the public mind if somebody pulled it down, like a giant octopus,” he laughs. “We had to do everything in a devious way—we put the camera in a bakery truck and went back and forth over the bridge to get our background shots. But the picture was released there and there were no complaints.”

Another hurdle Harryhausen had to overcome on the picture was the lack of sufficient funding. To cut financial corners, and to save some time in the process, the special effects guru made the octopus with only six tentacles, as opposed to the anatomically correct eight, cleverly hiding the fact by making it look like the missing arms were simply under the water. “If they had cut the budget anymore we would have had a tripod,” he laughs.

Limited financial resources were a common bond between most of the films that Harryhausen worked on in those days, as science fiction and fantasy pictures were often regarded as “B movies” by the big studios. “Unfortunately we had to work on very tight budgets, and we always had to compromise—we could never get quite what we wanted because of time and money—but today they’ve outlasted nine tenths of the ‘A pictures’ of that time.”

SFSFF Weekend Wrap

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival facilitated four tremendous days of cinephilia. So many rare opportunities to see films from the early part of the previous century (and even one from 1898) presented with live musical accompaniment with a knowledgeable and appreciative audience, and to talk to musicians, scholars, offspring of key players in silent filmmaking, and enthusiastic fans, made for a truly overstuffed weekend. I saw every "full-length" film shown, and most of the short films and public presentations as well. Some highlight memories of many from the past weekend:

1. Walking down Castro Street after Sunday's screening of The Shakedown, I saw the familiar face of Leonard Maltin approaching. I had to stop him to quickly thank him for his introduction to the film. In the course of interviewing its director William Wyler's three daughters, Catherine, Judy and Melanie, he spoke of Wyler's second film made outside the Western genre as a good, but not great picture. Watching it, I found the Shakedown to be more than just a terrific entertainment and a showcase for Wyler's developing skills as an inventive filmmaker. In the way it depicts con artists on the show-biz boxing circuit, it's a deeply meaningful look at the way acting a persona can envelop a performer's personal life and self-identity. The resonances of leading man James Murray (also of the Crowd) and his sad biography surely added to this deep feeling. On the other hand, his co-star Barbara Kent is one of the few silent-era players still living today.

I told Mr. Maltin how much I'd appreciated his approach to introducing the film: keeping audience expectations modest, so that we could in a sense "discover" the film's virtues for ourselves. This as opposed to the approach of praising a film to the skies to an audience just before we're about to see it, which seems unnecessary as we're not going to be buying any more tickets to it at that moment, and it may inflate expectations to the point where the film, no matter how good it is, can't measure up. Maltin's smiling response: "It's probably never played so well in its history." Surely a tribute to the receptive festival audience, and perhaps even more to Donald Sosin's virtuosic jazz piano accompaniment (Sosin really outdid himself with his three accompaniments this year, and the Shakedown was his best performance of the three, I felt.) But most of all to the nature of the Silent Film Festival, which is able to create almost utopian presentations of the films selected, by aligning all the right factors: venue, audience, accompaniment, and best available film print.

2. Saturday's presentation Variations On A Theme: Musicians on the Craft of Composing and Performing for Silent Films was not organized quite how I expected, and I'm not sure how the hour would have gone over for an individual ticket buyer, but for those of us with festival passes, it was certainly well worth staying in our seats for. We even got to witness a bit of friendly but sharp disagreement between the panelists! Classical musician/writer/radio host Chloe Veltman seemed natural and confident as moderator, even if a few of her questions to the gathered accompanists betrayed some inexperience with watching silent films with live music (though at least she'd seen the festival screening of The Cook, Pass The Gravy and Big Business that morning). But the best part of the presentation was when the musicians took a couple of questions from the audience. Audience q-and-a is always a crap shoot but in this case the questions elicited responses that got close to the heart of some very real philosophical differences between the panel members.

Authenticity is perhaps the key issue at stake in the variety of approaches taken by different accompanists. Pianist Stephen Horne (or should I say multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne, as he sometimes plays flute or squeezebox with one hand while the other dances upon the ivories,) spoke up for an approach that privileges an authenticity to the scene and its emotional resonance. By contrast, both Rodney Sauer of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and theatre organist Dennis James argued for an authenticity to music that audiences of the silent era might have been likely to hear when attending a film. Interestingly, these two, whose approaches might appear at first glance to be the most closely aligned amidst the group, engaged in the most contentious exchange of the panel. James argued for fidelity to the original sheet music commissioned by the director or producer of the film, whenever possible. Sauer countered that such cue sheets or scores were often abandoned or otherwise ignored by accompanists after an initial premiere performance or engagement in large cities, which is why his group favors compilations from the repertoire of compositions that would have been familiar to a typical salon orchestra of the 1920s. What became evident is that each accompanist does a certain amount of research into conventions of the time when producing a score, but that none of them are absolute purists in their approach. Even James will make certain allowances for the modern audience in defiance of the instructions of silent-era film music decision-makers. He'll ignore a cue sheet's suggestion of (for example) Rossini's William Tell Overture, because ever since the popularity of The Lone Ranger on radio and television, that theme takes audiences out of the moment. So don't expect to hear that familiar theme when Dennis James plays the Davies Symphony Hall organ to back John Barrymore in the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde this October 31st.

3. One moment that felt particularly gratifying to this blogger was the unveiling, during the second of two sets of presentations by members of the film archiving community, of a newly-preserved print of a 1912 one-reeler called The Better Man. The film is notable as a rare positive portrayal of a Mexican character in a Western, and features some notably effective camerawork, particularly an unexpected long tilt up a cliffside, revealing just how far one character has just fallen. Apparently the first new print struck from the trove of American films recently discovered in a Wellington, New Zealand film archive, The Better Man is also one of three two films whose preservation was funded through the efforts of the For The Love Of Film blog-a-thon organized by the incomparable Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn Ferdinand this past February. Whether or not even one person donated to the blog-a-thon fund after reading my own written contribution to that online event, I felt a little pride just from my connection to a community that made seeing this film possible.

In truth, everyone who buys a ticket to a Silent Film Festival program can feel pride that they help to support not only the presentation of, but also the preservation of silent films. The festival organizes its own annual fellowship through the L. Jeffrey Selznick school at Eastman House, and unless I misinterpreted what I heard announced from the Castro stage, this year's fellowship recipient will prepare the Douglas Fairbanks feature Mr. Fix-It for preservation, and presentation at the 2011 SFSFF. It's never too early to begin anticipating next year's program, and given that Allan Dwan directed Fairbanks in arguably his two best costume pageant films of the 1920's (Robin Hood and the Iron Mask), I'm excited to see this little-seen Dwan-directed film from Fairbanks's 1910s filmography.

According to the festival's own blog, another title already announced for the 2011 festival is Fritz Lang's second-most-famous science-fiction epic Woman In the Moon. I must have been in the popcorn line or something during this announcement, because I certainly would have remembered had I heard such an ingenious plan. I did hear Anita Monga announce that another Lunar silent, a Trip to the Moon would be forthcoming at the next festival. By then, a hand-colored version of the film will have been subject to a new restoration, and will be exhibited in a 35mm print that shall surely put to shame all of the Georges Méliès films that played from digital projections prior to festival features this year.

Other announcements made from the Castro stage over the weekend:

If you enjoyed The Iron Horse, you'll want to know that another John Ford film, this time a comedy from his F.W. Murnau-influenced phase, will have its "repremiere" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on September 1st. Normally I wouldn't mention screenings happening all the way at the Southern end of the state, but since Upstream is one of the films being repatriated from New Zealand along with the Better Man, and because John Ford fans are hoping this screening is a success and leads to more around the country (including, hopefully, here on Frisco Bay) it seems worth noting.

Closer to home, Susan Oxtoby of the Pacific Film Archive announced, as part of her introductory remarks on Man With A Movie Camera at the festival, that the PFA is planning a Dziga Vertov retrospective for that venue, most likely for September-October of 2011. The Alloy Orchestra seems too large and loud a group to fit into the Berkeley venue to provide a reprise of the frantic scoring we heard Sunday afternoon, so my imagination is running wild trying to think of how Vertov's 1929 masterpiece might be accompanied musically there; I've regrettably missed several chances to hear what Judith Rosenberg does with Man With A Movie Camera (though I got a sampling when she performed to a DVD snippet at the SFSFF's press conference back in May), but I'm also very curious about Dennis James's score for the film, last performed here almost fifteen years ago. And then there is recent rumor of a "definitive" soundtrack recording on the horizon. If anticipating screenings more than a year in advance is too exhausting, Frisco Bay Vertov fans will surely be interested in the work of filmmakers his theories inspired, some of whom are sure to be a part of the PFA's focus on Frisco Bay's avant-garde filmmaking history this fall in celebration of the long-awaited release of the Radical Light book. Another filmmaker influenced by Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, will have his first feature film on local screens for a week starting tomorrow. I've had a chance to see this new Rialto print of Godard's Breathless, with its new and improved subtitle translation unavailable on DVD, and it's certainly the upcoming week's cinematic must-see. Rod Armstrong of the San Francisco Film Society will introduce tomorrow night's screenings at the Embarcadero Center Cinema.

More random notes on the 2010 Silent Film Festival and upcoming related screenings:

The San Francisco Film Museum has posted the photos taken of SFSFF attendees disguised as the Maria Robot from Metropolis this weekend, so take a gander. For those who were shut out of Friday night's screening, the Castro will hold digital screenings of the restoration, albeit without live musical accompaniment, on August 13-15. Also part of the Castro's upcoming August calendar will be a screening of Fritz Lang's most well-known Hollywood film, the Big Heat, on August 30. The Jewish Film Festival is the next organization to bring a silent film with live accompaniment to the Castro, with this Monday's presentation of the 1922 film Hungry Hearts.

I always know I'll see some of my favorite local bloggers at the Silent Film Festival. Michael Guillén, Lincoln Specter, Jay Blodgett, Jason Wiener and shahn, who surely exaggerates when calling me a "local sensation". Then again, I am quoted on my experience watching Häxan by Jeremy Mathews in his article for Moving Pictures Magazine, and a conversation with Adam Hartzell is described in his piece for GreenCine Daily. I guess it's in the nature of being something of a blogosphere gadfly, but I'm a little embarrassed to find my name singled out in so many blog write-ups on the SFSFF when so many of my writers' group colleagues produced superior work on much more difficult subjects. For example, David Kiehn's essay on the Iron Horse is filled with drama and quotes from personal accounts, and avoids at least one oft-repeated but easily debunked myth about the film's masterful final scene. Megan Pugh's essay on the Flying Ace and Monica Nolan's on L'Heureuse Mort must surely be among the most substantial pieces written in English on these two previously-obscure films. I could go on and on. At some point all the essays should be available to read in the Silent Film Festival's website archive.

It was nice to be able to build upon the research I did for the festival for last December's Winter Event when writing an article recently published in the Australian journal Senses of Cinema on West of Zanzibar and its director Tod Browning. Please let me know what you think of the article if you get a chance to read it, either at the e-mail address found on my profile page, or in a comment below. I also recommend highly that anyone who saw Diary of a Lost Girl last Saturday (or, anyone who didn't!) take the time to read a truly remarkable essay on the iconic status of Louise Brooks, published in the same issue. The twenty-fifth anniversary of her death arrives this August 8th.

Adam Hartzell: The Topp Twins

The above still comes from the formally-perfect Samurai Rebellion, one of the 35mm prints playing this week in a chambara film series at the VIZ Cinema. The VIZ will be showing five more classic Japanese films in 35mm prints in August, including one my friend Adam Hartzell's been bugging me to see for a while now, Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.

I met Adam at a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening of an Abbas Kiarostami film several years ago, where we hit it off immediately. In addition to being a friend, since 2006 he's been the most frequent guest contributor to this blog, and though it's been a few months since he last offered a piece here, I'm thrilled that he's offered up a new contribution, bringing his unique perspective to one of last month's Frameline festival offerings. Take it away, Adam!

Lately, it has been hard for me to watch DVDs. In some ways, it has become a chore, something I must do to keep up with the films I want to be conversant in. When such a film is showing at a theatre near me, I don’t have this trouble because I long for the preferred experience/ of film in the cinema. I find watching a film in the cinema a more visceral experience. A film, as opposed to a DVD, is something I can visually imbibe because it is a more tactile medium. As if I'm feeling the light reflected from the screen on my eyes, on my entire body.

Along with the visceral is the communal nature of a film in the theatre. This is why I put off sleep to catch a couple Ozu films last week that were part of the series of three Japanese directors at the VIZ Cinema that Brian discussed in a past post. Watching Ozu on the screen rather than on the box is so much more pleasurable to me. And watching it with my wife and her friend (also named) Adam added to the experience. Plus, I noted some people whom I’d never seen at a VIZ screening before, sensing my film-going community expanding. This doesn’t mean they’d never made it out to VIZ before, but they seemed to be an instance of VIZ expanding its audience beyond what the young ones prefer, bringing out some older folk by screening some old school Japanese cinema along with the new.
　
In addition to the visceral and the tactile aspects of a cinema, watching film is as much about the space and the audience and the context in which it is watched as it is about the film, which is why I will receive regular detention slips from the school of film criticism that demands you only talk about the film. The theatre screen is not bounded by four sides for me any more than the cinema is bounded by four walls. The sides and the walls are permeable. Stuff seeps in to talk with the film as I watch. All these factors just don’t infiltrate my viewing experience as much when watching them on the TV via DVD.

No more was my preference for the cinema evident then the only screening I caught at this year’s Frameline Film Festival, The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls (Leanne Pooley, 2009). Before I get into who they are and what the film tells us about them, let me share how I came to hear about the Topp Twins. I am a big fan of the Radio New Zealand National radio host Kim Hill. A voice of a thousand cigarettes, she has a timbre and a frequency that I find calming, reassuring and familiar even though her country’s history and accent is not mine and she insists on pronouncing the word film as ’fil-lum’. My two trips to New Zealand have been sound-tracked by her questions towards the various personalities and thinkers who she brings on to her show. Because she speaks for New Zealand, she presumes an understanding of many of these individuals and the issues they discuss, a knowledge that I as a Yankee often don‘t possess when the topics are first introduced. Part of the pleasure in listening to Hill and her radio colleagues is trying to figure out what goes unsaid while listening.

Now, I can‘t recall confidently if I heard the Topp Twins themselves interviewed by Kim Hill, or if it was the director Leanne Pooley. (And outsourcing my recall to Google brings no verification through any links.) But I think it was the Topp Twins themselves. Regardless of the accuracy of my memory, my introduction to the importance to New Zealand of this lesbian twin yodeling comedy folk duo was thanks to Hill. And Hill spoke of the Topp Twins with such a reverence that I had to know more about the importance of these two women. And the significance of Pooley’s documentary to New Zealand cinema was validated by its inclusion in Hamish McDouall’s 100 Essential New Zealand Films, a book picked up for me on a colleague‘s recent visit to New Zealand. As McDouall differentiates the Top Twins’ humor from that of the Jackasses and The Offices, “This is not the comedy of cruelty but a heartwarming tribute to New Zealand and its odd and charming personalities...“ This was my build-up to The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls. I had to see this film. Thankfully, Frameline made that possible.

And Frameline’s audience was the perfect space in which to watch this movie. I came to this film wanting to know about these two women, while much of the audience at the Frameline Film Festival seemed to already know about the Topp Twins and were looking for an opportunity to laugh at what they knew would be hilarious and to show their applause-resounding, appreciation for what they already knew these women had accomplished. It was a perfect example of how the networks in which we are node-d might cause us to miss the significance of certain people and movements. Although I have made concerted efforts to school myself in Queer culture and movements around the world and have challenged my country’s provincialism by actually caring about the history and contemporary politics of other countries such as New Zealand, my self-education hadn’t found the Topp Twins’ place in my pedagogy until now.
　
The Topp Twins are a folk duo of country roots consisting of real life twins Jools and Lynda Topp who grew up on (and would return to) a farm in rural New Zealand. They both also happen to be lesbians. Their down-homey-ness is be part of what enables them to reach many demographics that might have shunned them were they city-folk lesbians. Their reality as lesbians is palatable to less-lesbian-receptive groups because they are talented singers in a genre favored by many in that less-receptive demographic. So much so that according to director Pooley, the Topp Twins have never received a single bit of hate mail.
　
It also helped that they crafted their comedy from the archetypes of New Zealand culture - such as the drag king get-up of Ken and Ken, blokes reminiscing about their rugby days at the bar of the pokie; Prue and Dilly Ramsbottom from Hawkes Bay, New Zealand’s own variation on posh upperclassness, people who Jill Caldwell and Christopher Brown call “The Remuera Tribe“; and the brilliant meta-layers of the camp of Camp Mother and Camp Leader. As British folk singer Billy Bragg notes in the documentary, too much protest music is somber. The Topp Twins were able to bring people over to human rights causes because they made people laugh. Be it Gay Rights for Kiwis in the 80‘s, anti-apartheid awareness during the infamous Springbok rugby tour in New Zealand, anti-nuclear protests in the Pacific leading to a nuclear-free New Zealand, and Maori land right claims, they made people move towards a future of greater justice by making the movement fun.
　
The documentary begins at a cabaret where many of the ‘patrons’ were important figures in history of the Topp Twins and the history of modern New Zealand. These figures are interviewed individually throughout the film, including the sitting prime minister at the time the documentary was made, Helen Clark, another farm girl whose rural roots won over New Zealanders. This is a documentary made for New Zealand, so just like when I listen to Kim Hill’s radio show, one less familiar with New Zealand’s 1980’s protest movements will need to make an effort to consider the significance of the events presented. (Still, particulars such as how intimidating protesting a rugby tour in New Zealand would be for a Kiwi are laid out in the documentary for the non-Kiwi.)
　
A yodeling comedy folk duo consisting of lesbian twins? To the uninitiated, it sounds like the premise of a mockumentary. But seeing this film amongst a Frameline audience, some of whom likely have been hip to The Topp Twins through folk festivals or women’s music festivals of the past, one realizes very quickly that The Topp Twins are all real, indeed, and thankfully so, because New Zealand is a better place because of them. It’s time for a wider swath of the U.S. to learn from them like the Kiwis have. And watching such a documentary amongst such a crowd is an experience that the DVD on the TV just can’t duplicate. In spite of this film preference, I did buy the DVD at the event, as a means to support The Topp Twins and the filmmakers, and as a totem to remember a film moment rather than the verisimilitude of one.