Seven Centimeters

What a spectacular shot. It's a dramatic moment in Lawrence of Arabia. We've been following a certain character through a particularly difficult, waterless ordeal in the desert. Then, off in the distance a tiny speck appears on the line between sand and sky, still too small to be confirmed as anything other than a mirage. But now, just as Maurice Jarre's triumphant score swells on the soundtrack, we can just barely make out that the speck has become a moving object, approaching the camera, surrounded by a screen-full, a world-full, of empty space. Here's a freeze-frame of the moment:

Oh, you say you can't see the speck on your computer screen? Funny, neither can I. Such are the limitations of standard DVDs. No Blu-Ray release of Lawrence of Arabia has occurred, nor is there any officially on the, ahem, horizon. It hardly needs reminding that for the overwhelming majority of us, home and mobile video have long since become the default methods of viewing movies more than a month or so old. No wonder; digital and video have made the alternative that used to be the norm, the theatrical revival screening, seem inconvenient and expensive by comparison. For those lucky few of us who live in places like New York, Paris, Berlin and even San Francisco, however, classic films still live and breathe in theatres, where their makers expected them to be seen.

It's hard to imagine a better time for a San Francisco movie lover to partake in the by-now almost subversive act of watching a great classic film in a cinema, than when our city's architectural pride and joy, the Castro Theatre, devotes its screen to a 70mm film series, as it will for eight days starting this Saturday night, when it plays West Side Story, which repeats on Sunday. Monday and Tuesday bring Jacques Tati's Play Time, which I'd like to see in 70mm at least once every year. Another movie I can never tire of plays Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The series wraps up the following Saturday and Sunday (June 11 & 12) with twice-daily showings of Lawrence of Arabia.

Yes, all four of these titles are available on DVD. One of them (guess which!) is even available as a Blu-Ray. But it's still a hotly-debated topic whether or not Blu-Ray can look as good as a pristine, well-projected standard (35mm) film projection. I don't want to get too technical here, but I'll just say that I'm aware of almost* no-one who's claiming that digital formats can compete with 70mm film, projected from strips about twice as wide as in a standard film reel, and with roughly four times as much resolution. The clarity of 70mm is simply unbeatable in my book.

The Castro is the only San Francisco theatre equipped to show classic films in 70mm, but this is their first such series in two years. It was intended to be even more ambitious as originally planned. Two films, Tron (which I've seen in eye-popping 70mm with a sold-out Castro crowd) and It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (which I've never seen) were hoped to be part of the series, but because the Castro's 70mm projection equipment needs an expensive repair before it can handle certain prints (getting technical again, they can only show prints with DTS Audio timecode at the moment) those two titles had to be canceled. I hope audience turnout for this series encourages the Castro management that there's an audience hungry for 70mm, making the prospect of shelling out for the repair a no-brainer. If all goes well, maybe we'll be able to see Tron and other films in 70mm relatively soon after all. Take that, DVD!

The Violent Years/Dance Hall Racket

Don't have time to blog much; I'm too embroiled in my research and writing on Yasujiro Ozu for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for the moment; the festival has announced its full slate, is showing I Was Born, But... and I'm finishing up work on an essay and slideshow to be presented along with the July 15 screening. So, following her first dispatch, here's another piece from Miriam Goldwyn Montag on the current series running at the Roxie:

You can't please everyone and just about every "Noir"-labeled event always elicits cries of, "That was a whodunnit (or a police procedural, or a gangster flick or what-have-you)!" somewhere along its varied run. "Not Noir!" "It had ballet in it! How could it be Noir?"

The two local (rival?) Noir impresarios do, in fact, stray from Noir quite a bit. Partly to stretch the meaning of the label beyond the fedora-and-femme-fatale trappings, of course. The roles both Elliot Lavine and Eddie Muller play in giving San Francisco back a little taste of rep programming should discount any misgivings about drawing from outside the sometimes narrow definition of Noir. The Christmas double bill Noir City presented to publicize the January fest was a prime example. I Wake up Dreaming's opening night smash Dementia deserved an outing on an SF screen, as did the not-quite-Noir of C Man.

One of the films in the advance screenings which most dazzled me was an appealing J.D. saga, The Violent Years. It's chock-a-block with bottom of the bill audacity, yet one fellow film-goer seemed almost proud to be staying in on Monday to wash his hair. "Not noir!" The promise of a Edward Wood, Jr., script with its proto-John Waters sensibility did not move this maven of Noir.

Well-constructed and coherent, The Violent Years won't leave anyone feeling cheated out of Wood touches. The more durable ones are here: Wiggy plot twists, ham-fisted "message" speechifying and mild cross dressing all take a bow. There`s even a scene stealing sweater.

One might wonder if this was a repurposed script originally about a boy gang. The gender issues here are so off track with what we expect from girls, even bad ones, in this genre. Gang leader Paula Parkin has her own crazed issues with the fellas in her life. Man attack indeed!

Played by Jean Moorhead, Paula has a sassy yet patrician edge and plays Wood's dialogue straight as can be. Both the spoiled, neglected teen and her junior gang leader spring from the same wounded base. When she's spitting out orders to her gang, she's in charge, but in Junior Leaguer on a tear kind of way. It's a tone anyone who has ever sold upscale housewares for a living knows well. Playmate of the Month for October 1955, Moorhead gives a true B movie performance, certainly, but it is one of the great J.D. portrayals.

Want to see what sort of film you could have made for 47 cents back in 1952? Shabbiness alone might be a draw for Dance Hall Racket, but for its curio cabinet of a cast. Lenny Bruce wrote and starred in this empty Kleenex box of a movie. Completing the set: Honey Bruce (billed as Honey Harlow here) and mom Sally Marr making this a must-see for fans of 1974 bio-pic Lenny. Series organizers note this film as a curiosity, and even if most of the film going public knows Bruce from the Bob Fosse's stark drama, it is an amazing souvenir. The fact that this comes to us in a 35mm print is sort of miracle, Mr. Lavine pointed out rather proudly.

One cannot keep one's eyes of of Bruce. His twitchy greasiness might owe some of its magnetism to the legend, but what the hell. It would be heartwarming to think that among Bruce's motivations for making this film was as a way to immortalize his Vaudeville veteran mother. Marr, a steadfast supporter of her son, has three set pieces here, all fun.

A generous portion is given over to black-out sketch style interludes, all the performers seemingly in different films. There's peek-a-boobie tease, Swedish dialect comedy and oddly staged action. It's not as Noir as the real story of the people behind it, but do you really care?

Miriam Goldwyn Montag Still Wakes Up Dreaming

Has it really been over a week since the San Francisco International Film Festival ended? It still reverberates in my cinephiliac bones, and I'm still reading the articles being posted about it. A handful: Adam Nayman, Ryland Walker Knight, Kimbery Lindbergs, Alejandro Adams, and Fernando F. Croce all wrote excellent, often provocative wrap-ups of their festival experiences. Will I have time to write one of my own? Who knows; I'm already getting caught up in post-festival activities. On that note I'll unbury this pre-festival piece, which is growing quickly outdated but still provides a sense of the current screening scene. On the other hand, I've got a bit of the "burden" relieved by my friend Miriam Goldwyn Montag, who has been catching films playing the Roxie's current series of noir delights. Here's the first of her previews, covering films playing this weekend:

The Spiritualist has an alternate title, The Amazing Mr. X. A third title would be even more apt: Mr. Alton Goes to Town. Cinematographer John Alton was said to have been given free rein here and the results range from beyond sublime to just this side of ridiculous. The moonlight beach scene which opens the film is stunning enough to linger in the memory longer than some of the plot's hairpin twists. None of the performers in this film have ever been so luscious before or since; Turhan Bey's turbaned smoothie is almost alluring. When the reliable Cathy O'Donnell finds herself newly and intoxicatingly in love, Alton puts an actual twinkle in her eye and bathes her in a silvery glow. Try not to swoon, that's a dare! The Spiritualist is the perfect meeting of artist and material. The strange worlds of the spiritual con artist and the cinematographer both rely on tricks of shadow and light in a darkened room full of dreamers.

Sunday`s co-feature is The Night has a Thousand Eyes, a spooky tale of strange powers and dark motives. You can prime your pump for the supernatural with Saturday`s Ministry of Fear, Fritz Lang`s tense gem based on the Graham Greene novel. Ray Milland, freshly sprung from the laughing academy, enters a web of treachery over a crystal ball at a garden fete. These fortune telling phonies aren't fleecing widows, they're playing the longest con of them all. Personally, I never trust anyone who picks at dessert.

SFIFF54 Day 15: Sync

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival ends today. Each day during the festival I've been posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

Sync (UK: Max Hattler, 2010)

playing: at 5:00 PM at the Viz/New People as part of the Get With The Program animated shorts collection, which has no further screenings during the festival.
distribution: No commercial distribution is currently anticipated for this 10-minute long film.

The Golden Gate Awards for SFIFF documentaries and shorts were announced yesterday evening. As usual, I've seen only a few of the winners (listed at Indiewire). The only category in which I've watched all the contenders is the Animated Short category. I have trouble arguing against the shorts jury's choice in this case: The External World by Irish-born, Berlin-based animator David O'Reilly is conceptually the most expansive and ambitious of the six nominated shorts. It plays something like an entire program of Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation condensed into fifteen minutes, and amped up with a hypodermic full of cinematic self-reflexivity and paranoia about our increasingly digital-mediated society. Though two of the Golden Gate Award winners, Into the Middle of Nowhere and Young Dracula, can be viewed today on the festival's website, and the Fipresci prize-winner The Salesman plays today at 2PM, The External World is the only GGA winner that screens at a festival venue today.

The other animated short nominees all have their own merits, but perhaps a few shortcomings as well. Pixels takes on some of the same thematic concerns as The External World in a more directly entertaining way, but there are limits to the depth of exploration that can be achieved in an essentially one-joke film such as this. It also seems less necessarily suited to a theatre; its pleasures can be pretty much just as easily obtained as an shared video on the internet (and in fact it made a big splash in this manner over a year ago.) Dromosphere by Thorstein Fleisch, and Once It Started It Could Not Be Otherwise by Kelly Sears, are strong works, but probably not as strong as other pieces by their respective filmmakers (I'm partial to Energy and The Voice on the Line myself). In A Purpleman, a clay animation from South Korea, images provide illustration for a documentary audio interview of a North Korean refugee recounting his experiences as an in-between outsider in his new home. Surely the most obviously sincere of the nominees, some may find it the most sincerely obvious as well.

All of these (except for the Sears piece) play on today's program Get With The Program, but the short in this set I feel most powerfully demands being seen on the big screen is Max Hattler's Sync, which was not in competition for an award at all. Hattler's had a piece in each of the past five SFIFF editions now, starting with Collision in 2007. Sync is much less overtly political than that piece, and in fact might be argued to be an example of animation completely free of representational attributes. But it's even more beautiful, and in fact hypnotizing in its constantly spiraling, expanding complexity.

SFIFF54 Day 15
Another option: On Tour (FRANCE: Matthieu Amalric, 2010) Actor Amalric is known to some as the actor fetiche of Arnaud Desplechin, to others as the star of the Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and to still others as the Bond Villain™ in Quantum of Solace. Lesser-known is the fact that he's directed a few films as well. His latest directorial feature in fact won him the Best Director prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival for this film about American burlesque performers touring in France. I can't wait to see it tonight, especially since it may be the last theatrical screening the film has locally; rumor has it that there are music rights complications to a theatrical release in the United States, limiting it to festival showings only. Good thing there are a lot of seats in the Castro Theatre for all the people who might want to see this possibly-once-in-a-lifetime screening.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: The Strange Case of Angelica at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. Like many SFIFF films, this has traveled the festival circuit, from Cannes to Toronto to New York and elsewhere. Instead of landing at SFIFF, the Yerba Buena Center has decided to book it for two nights and an afternoon in their intimate screening room. In my view it's better than any of the SFIFF films I've seen that are playing this evening, but then again I haven't seen them all, and mileage for a Manoel de Oliveira film may vary. If you feel like sticking with the festival tonight then it plays again Saturday evening and as a Sunday matinee.

SFIFF54 Day 14: Let The Wind Carry Me

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival is in its penultimate day, ending tomorrow, May 5th. Each day during the festival I've been posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

Let The Wind Carry Me (TAIWAN: Chiang Hsiu-chiung & Kwan Pun-leung, 2010)

playing: at 3:45 PM at the Kabuki, with no further screenings during the festival.
distribution: no U.S. distribution is currently planned.

A documentary portrait of the cinematographer behind the lens of nearly all the famous films of great Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien? Sign me up. The film begins with a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of The Electric Princess House, Hou's 3-minute contribution to the 2007 omnibus Chacun Son Cinéma, which has still never played theatrically here on Frisco Bay (though the DVD is available to rent at Le Video). Getting a glimpse of any part of Hou's process is priceless for a fan like me, and we are also treated to peeks at on-set footage from the filming of Hou masterpieces like Flowers of Shanghai and Flight of the Red Balloon.

But I get ahead of myself. this is not a film about Hou, but a tribute to Mark Lee Ping-bin, a slightly bohemian-looking cinematographer who, in addition to working with Hou, has also shot films for dozens of other auteurs from across Asia and Europe. I'd seen a surprisingly high percentage of them, most often at previous SFIFF editions, and got enough pleasure out of realizing, "oh, Lee shot that film as well?" from the clips excerpted in this documentary, that I'll leave a listing out of this review, but link to his imdb page for a full recounting. The image quality of these clips has been taken to task by a few reviewers, inlcuding Michael Hawley. For my part, watching on 35mm, the only clips that seemed particularly degraded were those from Flowers of Shanghai. I appreciated that in the clips, when dialogue is spoken, it's left unsubtitled, alllowing English readers fewer distractions from Lee's compositions. The impression one gets from watching Let The Wind Carry Me is that Lee will accept any job that he feels will allow him to continue to elevate the art of cinematography; we viewers may rarely appreciate that many of the greatest contributions to cinema as an artform come from the kind of devotion to craft and work that involves a good deal of personal sacrifice.

The arc of Lee's relationship to his mother is the film's main illustration of this; though he lives and usually works abroad, while she has remained in Taipei, he makes efforts to visit her whenever he can, and to credit her in his acceptance speeches for awards he receives around the globe. I was surprised to verge on tearing up at one particularly emotional reunion moment between mother and son. Others may find the moments we're taken away from Lee's artistic process to be extraneous, but I found the tension between the subject's crossed desires to be a dutiful son as well as a prolific filmmaker to save the film from becoming a pure hagiography; it veers close enough as it is. It also seems to fumble around for a dramatically satisfying ending. Indeed, Let The Wind Carry Us is not a masterpiece. But it's a film about masterpieces, that helps enrich the relationships we can have with them.

At the screening I attended, one of the film's two co-directors, Kwan Pun-leung, was on hand to answer questions from the audience. During the q-and-a, it was announced that Mark Lee Ping-bin himself is expected to join Kwan for the post-screening q-and-a this afternoon!

SFIFF54 Day 14
Another option: Detroit Wild City (FRANCE/USA: Florent Tillon, 2010) Local archivist Rick Prelinger did an excellent job interviewing Serge Bromberg before last Sunday's Mel Novikoff Award screening, but he also wrote a piece for SFMOMA Open Space blog on Detroit, and has an interesting take on French director Florent Tillon's documentary on the unique city. Tonight's Berkeley screening is the last for this film in the festival.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Strangers On A Train and They Live By Night at the Castro, a double-bill in memory of Farley Granger, who died just over a month ago. These are certainly two of his greatest film roles; no wonder when you work with Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray. The pair screened as part of Noir City five years ago, and I was lucky to be able to attend. Granger appeared in person at the event; a blogger's recap has been preserved here.