SFFILM 62 Day 4: The Grand Bizarre

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival began Wednesday night and runs through April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A scene from Jodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM.

The Grand Bizarre (USA: Jodie Mack, 2018)
playing: 3:30PM today at BAMPFA in Berkeley, and Monday, Apr 15 at 8:45PM at YBCA.

Although I was able last November to see a digital projection of this film (SFFILM audiences will be treated to a 35mm print at each screening) and placed it on my list of my five favorite undistributed features of 2018, I don't feel up to the task of writing much of a review. Not when a critic as perceptive and eloquent as Michael Sicinski has already written three terrific paragraphs about Mack's latest. Let me excerpt a few sentences:

Mack’s film is whimsical, features some sick beats (including a riff on the Skype theme), and is so personal that it ends with the artist’s own sneeze. But the fact that it may be the most purely pleasurable film of the year shouldn’t prevent us from appreciating its exigency. The Grand Bizarre is a film about embracing all the colors and patterns of the wide, wide world, and in that regard, it’s exactly the film we need right now.

I must confess I don't love The Grand Bizarre as much as Mack's previously-longest opus, Dusty Stacks of Mom, but that's surely in large part because I'm just inherently more fascinated by the world of rock poster distribution than that of colorful textiles. But even I can recognize that there's a bit more thematic "heft" to this project, not just because it's a bit longer, but also because it's more international in scope at a time when the need to reach out across borders seems greater than ever. For anyone with an open mind about the parameters of what an animated feature can be (The Grand Bizarre descends from the lineage of Norman McLaren's landmark Neighbors, but ends up with a far more radical approach to narrative), it's one of the real must-sees of this year's festival.

SFFILM62 Day 4
Other festival options: Expect more traditional animation techniques to be on display at the Castro Theatre's 10AM Shorts 6: Family Films program; I attended last year's set for the first time with my young nephew, and we both had a great time seeing a mixture of the latest cartoons, documentaries and short narratives with definite kid-appeal. This year's group includes the Oscar-nominated One Small Step. Another animation program is aimed more for adults: Shorts 4: Animation, having its first showing 5PM today at the Roxie. But to make that you'll have to miss the Persistence of Vision Award presentation to African-American documentary pioneer Madeline Anderson at SFMOMA. No animation expected in this set, but expect a wonderful conversation with a veteran filmmaker finally getting her due.

Non-SFFILM option: In memory of the April, 18, 1906 earthquake and fire that reshaped San Francisco, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum is devoting its weekly Saturday 16mm film screening showcase to films that shed light on this tragic event. First, a pair of documentaries shot by the Miles Brothers, one shortly before and one, recently re-discovered, shortly after the destruction. After an intermission, they'll show one of the best of the surviving early features starring Lon Chaney, Sr., The Penalty, which was filmed in 1920 throughout a rebuilt San Francisco (a wonderful website devoted to its filming locations is found here).

Ian Rice's 2018* Eyes

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2018. An index of participants can be found here. 

First-time IOHTE contributor Ian Rice is part of the curatorial committee putting on ATA@SFPL events at the Noe Valley library, including an upcoming 16mm screening of Lee Grant's The Willmar 8 March 5th. He decided to provide a list of favorites from 2017 as well as one from 2018.

Soft Fiction

Jan 13: Soft Fiction (Palace of Fine Arts, 16mm) A 2018 continuation of last year’s Chick Strand revelations, this too is a unique masterpiece in her catalogue, from its haunting (and subsequently symbolic) structuralist introduction to its harrowing storytelling and its brilliant musical interludes; it only grew more powerful on a second viewing a few months later. 

Feb 10: I Can't Sleep (SFMOMA, 35mm) Denis structures her narratives more elliptically and ultimately elegantly than most contemporary filmmakers, making them a sort of puzzle whose demands of engagement (similar to Altman’s theory of layered sound) encourage a heightened awareness of details and technique. The Intruder kept me reinterpreting its design for days and weeks afterward, but the force of the drama of this film - and its intimate, sensual compositions of skin of many colors - give it more of an edge. 

The Night of June 13

Feb 20: The Night of June 13th (Stanford, 35mm) An incredible rarity in the Stanford’s Paramount series, there are no especially great stars or auteurist signposts to recommend it - unless, with some justification, one is a Charlie Ruggles completist. It wanders across a small town with great sensitivity toward distinct characters and slowly develops its conflict only to resolve it in a remarkably radical pre-Code conclusion, not so far off from Renoir's M. Lange.

Feb 22: Elements (New Nothing, 16mm) Several more of her films would show later in the year at a Lamfanti screening the night of the Space-X launch, the same program at which “Antonella’s Ultrasound” received its world premiere, but this Julie Murray short at a Baba Hillman Canyon salon stood apart from those also-excellent works of dread and sex and mutilated found footage as a more lyrical, gorgeous journey through natural landscapes with hypnotic rhythm. 

Zodiac screen capture from Paramount DVD

May 27: Zodiac (YBCA, 35mm) My last time at the YBCA - at least until management sees the error of their ways, reinstitutes their cinema program and rehires its excellent programming/curatorial and projection staff - this was a brilliant send-off as part of a seamy San Francisco series, one of whose shooting locations I realized afterward was a few blocks’ walking distance away. Its accumulation of small details and slowly-becoming-psychotic performances are hypnotizing. 

Jul 22: Wieners and Buns Musical (Minnesota Street Project, 16mm) Thanks to an eleventh-hour update on the Bay Area Film Calendar I was able to find out about this year’s Canyon Cinema cavalcade in time to squeeze in several rare masterworks from their catalogue, including pieces by Friederich, Gatten, Brakhage, Benning, Mack, Glabicki and many others seen last year as well at the Exploratorium. This McDowell short was the most fun and perhaps the most radical musical ever filmed, with some of the best low-budget opening titles. It screened again later that year but the sound was much better the first time. 

Commingled Containers screen capture from Criterion DVD "By Brakhage"

Aug 21: Comingled Containers (Little Roxie, 16mm) Because Canyon Cinema only has a handful of his films in their catalog, the year’s many well-deserved tributes to Paul Clipson's work ran the risk of overplaying things, especially by the point in the year at which a Little Roxie tribute screening appeared. But the brilliance of this particular night was that it - overseen by a good friend - was curated by Clipson himself, fitting his works into a wide array of others in an incredible dialogue and refreshment of films that had come to feel very familiar. This Brakhage short was one of many masterpieces (including works by Marie Menken and Konrad Steiner among others) I saw for the first time, utterly and unutterably magical in its light and shapes. 

Aug 22: One from the Heart (Castro, 35mm) The second half of one of the year’s greatest two-venue double features after Todd Haynes’s spellbinding Velvet Goldmine, I began this viewing feeling like the cinematography (maybe the finest hour both of Vittorio Storaro and of Hollywood studio technique) was far better than the flimsy and insipid narrative but soon had the epiphany that this was (or at least might have been) Coppola’s intention all along - the plot is there merely as the simplest of archetypes to push the mind and eye back toward the power of the image, a different sort of “pure cinema.” 

Sep 15: The Caretaker's Daughter (Niles Essanay, 16mm) Despite discovering a slew of incredible new Laurel & Hardy and Keaton films this year there was something to me more special about getting to know the work of Charley Chase - namely the intricacy and machinations of his plots, which slowly accumulate small details that eventually coalesce into extraordinary gags, as with the pinnacle of this one, a setpiece that anticipates and even outdoes a similar one in Leo McCarey’s later Duck Soup. 

The Day I Became A Woman screen capture from Olive Films DVD

Sep 29: The Day I Became a Woman (PFA, 35mm) An early-in-the-year screening of Salaam Cinema became a prelude to a wonderful series that encompassed the whole Makhmalbaf family of filmmakers, none of whose work I’d ever seen before and almost all of which was quietly poetic in its storytelling while enchanting in its imagery. This tripartite work by the cinematriarch of the family gets special recognition from me because (among many other things) its middle section features the best depiction of any film I’ve seen of the experience of riding a bicycle, both how it feels to be humming along the road and how it feels to be avoiding other encroaching issues! With Lupino’s Hard, Fast and Beautiful, further proof that more women should direct sports films.

Here's top 2017, in order of screening date only, culled from a larger list: 

Jan 14: Showgirls (Roxie, 35mm) 
Feb 4: Come and See (YBCA, 35mm) 
Jun 18: Les enfants terribles (PFA, 35mm) 
Jul 28: Footlight Parade (Stanford, 35mm) 
Aug 4: Election 2 (SFMOMA, 35mm)
Oct 14: Loose Ends (ATA/Other Cinema, 16mm) 
Oct 15: Crystal Voyager (YBCA, 35mm) 
Oct 18: Chromatic Phantoms (PFA, 3 x Super 8) 
Oct 24: Take Off (California College of the Arts, 16mm) 
Dec 10: Light Music (The Lab, 2 x 16mm)

Nanook of the North (1922)

Screen capture from Music Box Films DVD of The Story of Film

WHO: Robert Flaherty directed this. He was also a producer and (uncredited) writer and cinematographer on the piece.

WHAT: The last time I watched Robert Flaherty's seminal Nanook of the North I was sitting in on a City College of San Francisco course taught by Ira Rothstein. He introduced the showing with a quote from Jean-Luc Godard on fiction or "narrative" films: that they are "nothing more than documentaries of actors at work."

One might say the same thing about non-fiction or "documentary" films as well (I use quotes around the word "documentary" because the term was not in use at the time Nanook of the North was made). Acting is not just merely a profession, marked by its connection to training facilities and professional guilds.  It's also an action that each of us has learned to perform to make it through the varied situations of the modern world.  And when we are conscious that there is a camera trained upon us, we tend to "act" differently than we otherwise would, whether we want to or not.  If the photographer explicitly asks us to pose or to perform a certain action, we're all the more likely to be pulled out of the actions we would take were a camera not present; we may attempt to conform to the requester's expressed wishes, or else rebel against them, but it becomes difficult if not impossible to act as we would if we didn't know the camera was there.

As one learns when watching Claude Massot's 1988 documentary Nanook Revisited (available on the Flicker Alley Blu-Ray edition of Flaherty's film), Nanook of the North was made with the hearty cooperation of its Inuit subjects.  Indeed Allakariallak, the actor who played the title character (Nanook was not his real name) was delighted to comply with his director's requests, which included: acting as if he had not heard a phonograph record before, when in fact he had, and engaging in a walrus hunt using methods that he and his fellow tribesmen had not employed for years - which Erik Barnouw seems to imply was actually an idea generated by Allakariallak himself, knowing it would be in sync with Flaherty's own aims in encasing in the amber of celluloid film the singular traditions of the Inuits.  

It's often noted that Nanook and its offspring like Chang (Cooper & Shoedsack, 1927) are not "pure" documentaries because the actions of their subjects were not merely observed and captured, but directed by their makers, and because they're edited, with the help of title cards, into a narrative form that distorts fact in the service of adventure and excitement (and, say the cynical, box-office). But is there not documentary value in seeing people perform tasks that, even if they may be obsolete on a day-to-day basis, are still in their living muscle memory? Allakariallak may or may not have ever hunted walrus without a rifle himself, but at the very least he'd known people who'd had no other option, and was a far more authentic choice to do so on screen than any Hollywood actor would have been.  As Barnouw wrote about the Inuits involved in the film: "Unquestionably the film reflected their image of their traditional life."

WHERE/WHEN: Nanook of the North screens today only at the Castro Theatre, at 1:45 PM, presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

WHY: Though I haven't seen the shorts screening as part of the Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema program launching the 21st SFSFF's final day, nor the Hal Roach two-reeler What's the World Coming To?, which plays as part of the Girls Will Be Boys noon program, I've seen all five "feature-length" films screening today: Ernst Lubitsch's I Don't Wan't To Be a Man (the other piece of the aforementioned gender-bending showcase), Nanook of the North, Fritz Lang's haunting Destiny, Rene Clair's final silent Les Deux Timides and the mindblowing Douglas Fairbanks extravaganza (and Victor Fleming's directorial debut) When the Clouds Roll By, though of these only Les Deux Timides in a cinema with live musical accompaniment.  If I could see only one of them again today (and I'm so grateful that this is not so) it would be Nanook. Though I'm excited to finally see the Lubitsch, Lang and Fleming on the Castro screen with an audience, I remember them all (and it's been quite a while, especially for Destiny) as films with incredible scenes rather than as incredible films from start to finish. Nanook is a more consistent, coherent work despite its controversial aspects.

Despite being the most famous of today's films, it also seems the least likely candidate to screen again in a Frisco Bay venue any time soon. I could picture When the Clouds Roll By appearing at the Stanford Theatre, for instance (Victor Fleming seems pretty popular there; his most famous film Gone With the Wind screens July 1-3 to celebrate Olivia de Havilland's 100th birthday). And it's been long enough since the last Lubitsch, Lang, and especially Clair retrospectives at BAMPFA that I wouldn't be so surprised to see their films show up there (though I wouldn't count on it either). Nanook of the North could appear as well, but since it's screening SFSFF as a BAMPFA co-presentation I rather doubt it would be soon.

Probably the most likely venue to show any of these films again is the most consistent silent film venue around: the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's Edison Theatre, the same room where Charlie Chaplin watched movies over 101 years ago. Next weekend the Edison will play host to two days and one night full of Chaplin film screenings as well as a Chaplin look-alike contest on Sunday in honor of the annual Niles, CA Charlie Chaplin Days. The following weekend Chaplin's The Vagabond opens a four-film program of comedy shorts also including a Charley Chase film, a Laurel & Hardy, and Buster Keaton's Cops (in case you missed it at SFSFF yesterday), all in 16mm with live piano accompaniment from Judith Rosenberg. And the final weekend of June is given over to the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, whose line-up seems especially strong this time around, with an opening night showing of my favorite early Cecil B. DeMille drama The Golden Chance (RIP Bob Birchard), a Saturday evening show including this year's SFSFF MVP Wallace Beery in Behind the Front, and a Gish-filled Sunday afternoon with Dorothy in Nell Gwyn followed by her better-remembered sister Lillian in the excellent Victor Seastrom adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. Not to mention a plethora of one-and two-reelers shot in Niles and/or other Essanay locations, including the 2015 throwback Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret, which was shot in the area by a modern crew using vintage equipment. Diana Serra Carey (the former silent-era child star Baby Peggy) is among the cast members.

But I suspect Niles is not likely to show Nanook of the North in the near future, if only because it just screened there this past February and repeats of that sort are rare for this venue.

HOW: Nanook of the North screens via a 35mm print, with live musical accompaniment from the Matti Bye Ensemble.

That Night's Wife (1930)

Screen shot from Eclipse DVD

WHO: The great Yasujiro Ozu directed this. It's my personal favorite of his pre-1932 work, or should I say, the half of his output from this period that still survives in full or in part. So much of Japanese cinema history of this era is lost to us.

WHAT: When I last saw this on the big screen (at the Pacific Film Archive) I found it so compelling it made my list of best repertory screenings of 2011. But I'll all the more excited to revisit the film after reading Imogen Sara Smith's marvelous essay on the film in the newly-published San Francisco Silent Film Festival program guide. Here's a brief excerpt:

There has been a long-running debate about whether Ozu was essentially a formalist, an experimental filmmaker, as Bordwell argues, or whether, as Donald Richie contends, he was primarily interested in a singular narrative theme, the dissolution of the family. That Night's Wife shows how these two impulses were integrated as one: to tell a story through purely cinematic means. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 3PM today only at the Castro, as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

WHY: Thanks to David Hudson for including me in his essential Keyframe Daily round-up of articles about this year's SFSFF. Read all the articles linked there, and listen to Andrea Chase's excellent podcast interview with Anita Monga, and you'll get a pretty complete picture of this festival weekend.

Today is perhaps the day I'm most excited about overall, with the Amazing Tales From the Archives program, two Bay Area-shot features (A Woman of the World was shot in Pleasanton and Mothers of Men was made in Santa Cruz, Berkeley and Sacramento- thanks to Michael Hawley for alerting me to this website highlighting the locations where it was films), and the newly-restored submarine thriller Behind the Door, starring Wallace Beery, who stole the show from Louise Brooks last night in Beggars of Life. I've never seen any of these before. I have seen E. A. Dupont's Variety but only via a very poor VHS transfer, and am excited to watch it on the Castro screen with a 14-piece orchestral accompaniment.

HOW: Carl Martin of the Film on Film Foundation has published a detailed report on all the 35mm presentations at this year's SFSFF, and That Night's Wife is among these. It will screen with live piano accompaniment by Maud Nelissen, who is making her SFSFF debut with this presentation. She is actually the first woman to perform a SFSFF musical accompaniment on her own, unless you count Judith Roseberg's performances for Champagne and Easy Virtue at the festival-produced Hitchcock 9 program three years ago. 

Monte-Cristo (1929)

A scene from Henri Fescourt's MONTE-CRISTO, playing at the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23 - May 7 2015. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Besides Alexandre Dumas, père, who wrote (or actually co-wrote with Auguste Maquet) the famous novel from which this screen adaptation was based, the best-remembered creative involved in this film's creation is probably Lil Dagover, who performed in this French film a decade after her roles in Fritz Lang's the Spiders and Harakiri,and in Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

WHAT: I haven't seen this yet, so let me quote from a recent article by David Cairns:

If the style is modernist (also: extreme close-ups; zip-pans; swooning drifts in and out of focus; a shot of a sparkling sea when the hero, long imprisoned in the dark, is blinded by daylight), the settings are gloriously traditional, with lavish sets, augmented by special effects, elegant costumes and varied exotic locations.

WHERE/WHEN: 1:00 today only at the Kabuki, courtesy of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF).

WHY: Monte-Cristo is one of the last serials produced during the silent era in the country that made such an early and critical mark on the form with multi-episode films like Les Vampyres and Judex. Seriality of course now dominates popular cinema, at least at this time of year, even if we don't always admit it to ourselves. For those who enjoyed attending UC Berkeley's conference and screenings on seriality in silent cinema and beyond this past February, attending today's screening is a no-brainer.

Monte-Cristo was not long ago restored from disparate sources in various archive, and is presented as the carte-blanche selection of Mel Novikoff Award winner Lenny Borger, who will be interviewed by Scott Foundas on stage prior to the showing. Recent recipients of this award have included critics (David Thomson, J. Hoberman, the late Manny Farber & Roger Ebert), archivists (Serge Bromberg, Kevin Brownlow, Paolo Cherchi Usai) and programmers/exhibitors (Anita Monga, Bruce Goldstein, Pierre Rissient, the late Peter Von Bagh.) This is, I believe, the first time the award is going to someone who is best known for his work as a subtitler. It's high time, as this key role in the transmission of international cinema is often taken for granted, especially in a near-insatiable market for foreign films like that of the Bay Area, where a recent trend of exhibiting films with utterly (and often obviously, even to a linguistic ignoramus) amateur subtitle translations has gotten a foothold in at least one prominent independent theatre.

Is it ironic that a subtitler has chosen a silent film as his presentation selection? It makes me wonder if he is able to enjoy watching a film with subtitled dialogue without giving the translations his own professional critique.

Of course Frisco Bay loves its silent films and usually embraces another opportunity to see an obscure one on the big screen. We're coming up on a season of many such opportunities, as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is just around the corner at the end of this month (aforementioned Bromberg, Brownlow, Goldstein and of course festival director Monga all expected to attend) and the Niles Silent Film Museum has just issued its newest calendar pdf, including the line-up for its Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival in late June.

SFIFF also provides two more silent film screenings, both with live musical accompaniment, this week. Cibo Matto performs to a 35mm print of Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (as well as some more recent works in which they will replace an original soundtrack with their own) Tuesday, and Kronos Quartet provides the music for Bill Morrison's recent compilation of World War I footage on Wednesday.

HOW: Screens from a digital master (the only way this particular restoration exists), with Borger's preferred musical accompaniment recorded onto the digital "print".

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today's the final screening of the excellent program of experimental shorts that I discussed Wednesday, and of the animated shorts program I touched on last weekend. It's also the first screening of local filmmaker Jennifer Phang's sci-fi feature Advantageous (full disclosure: I'm friends with Phang and her editor Sean Gillane, and contributed to this feature's crowd-funding campaign. I bought my ticket to tonight's show and can't wait!)

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Today SF Cinematheque hosts a video/performance variation of the incredible installation Kit Young had up at Artists' Television Access earlier this year, as well as performance from Any Puls and others.

Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine (2015)

A scene from Alex Gibney's STEVE JOBS: THE MAN IN THE MACHINE, playing at the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23 - May 7 2015. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Alex Gibney directed and co-produced this documentary in between his recent Scientology exposé Going Clear and his upcoming Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. It's all in a season's work for a man who has director credit on about two dozen non-fiction releases since busting onto the scene as a feature documentary director ten years ago with Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room.

WHAT: Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine hasn't screened publicly anywhere since its world premiere last month at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, TX, as far as I can tell. It was that screening that prompted Ryan Lattanzio of Indiewire to write:

This bracing film at first seduces you with the charms of the man, and then guts you with what a tricky riddle he was, an at-times sociopathic mogul who flew close to the Sun, touched it and never quite fell as he should have.

I'm curious about this documentary, although as Kelly Vance notes at the tail end of his epic East Bay Express SFIFF preview, Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine "is neither the first nor the last movie to capitalize on the late Apple godhead's popularity." I doubt it will be able to supplant this concise video as my own personal favorite moving image take on the Apple founder and his legacy.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:00 tonight at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF)

WHY: Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine is the opening-night film of the "longest-running film festival in the Americas" as David Hudson calls SFIFF in his essential Keyframe Daily preview. Last year I attended this festival's opening-night event for the first time ever, after writing a bit on why I hadn't ever done so before. Unfortunately I picked a bit of a dud year to finally walk down the red carpet, as Two Faces of January, while showcasing its actors and locations nicely enough, was ultimately a rather dull and predictable thriller and a disappointing directorial debut by a strong screenwriter. Still, it was nice to see what kind of a crowd the festival was able to assemble at the Castro; familiar faces from just about all corners of the Frisco Bay film scene (excepting, perhaps, the 35mm purists) were gathered together to watch a film that ended up being one of the least-memorable of the year. A bit of a waste, really.

Opening the festival with a documentary by a proven director seems a much safer choice, but in some ways it's quite a bold one; since SFIFF first appeared on my radar screen in the late 1990s, the festival has always selected a narrative feature to kick off its fifteen days of screenings. I should ask Michael Hawley, whose memory as an attendee goes back much farther, how long this tradition goes back, but at least in the past twenty years there has never been a documentary screened on SFIFF's opening night. Which is perhaps a bit strange considering that local film festival audiences tend to collectively eat up documentaries like they're scoops of ice cream in danger of melting in the hot sun. This year's crop at SFIFF also includes highly-anticipated non-fiction works like The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer's follow-up The Look of Silence, the late Albert Maysles' Iris, and from locals, Stanley Nelson's The Black Panthers Vanguard of the Revolution and Jenni Olson's experimental doc The Royal Road (which, full-disclosure, I contributed to the crowd-funding campaign for).

It's always fun to see a movie in a packed Castro Theatre, though (in just about every way except for the line for the restroom), so I hope I can make it to quite a few festival screenings there even if I miss tonight's show. This year the festival's using the 1922-built venue for more screenings than it has in the recent past, including three six more showings over the upcoming weekend, each of which is highlighted among the festival's own opening weekend picks. I will definitely be there for the Saturday afternoon showing of Barbara Loden's sole directing effort Wanda, one of the three films expected to screen via 35mm print in the whole festival, and a film that's been high on my to-see list for years, and even more so since I was out of town during its last San Francisco screening.

HOW: Digital projection.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Ernst Lubitsch's masterpiece Trouble in Paradise screens in 35mm at the Stanford Theatre along with Rouben Mamoulian's flawed but interesting (and containing the most sublime Russian Easter scene ever filmed, surely) Tolstoy adaptation We Live Again. It's the midway point of the Stanford Theatre's ongoing series of Lubitsch/Mamoulian pairings every Wednesday and Thursday.

Broncho Billy's Wild Ride (1914)

Publicity photograph provided by Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

WHO: Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson directed and starred in this.

WHAT: A short film featuring Anderson, Marguerite Clayton, True Boardman and a number of local schoolchildren from Niles, California where Anderson's studio was located. David Kiehn's page-turner of a history book, Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company, indicates that part of the story took as inspiration a real-life injury that would haunt Anderson well into his retirement. That book's short synopsis of the plot is as follows: "Billy, an outlaw on trial, escapes from court, but is caught after he saves the judge's daughter on a runaway horse."

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, at 7:30PM.

WHY: I wrote about Niles in a PressPlay/Indiewire article a few years ago, that has for some reason unknown to me be taken down:

Niles nestles against the hills of Fremont, California, 30 miles east of San Francisco and 350 miles north of Los Angeles. Filled with antique shops and humble residences, it’s a town steeped in motion picture history. The first cowboy movie star, G.A. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, and Charlie Chaplin were among those who encamped there to shoot pictures in the mid-1910s, before Hollywood became THE go-to site in California for filmmaking, 

Now, nearly a hundred years later, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum keeps the past alive with weekly Saturday evening screenings of silent movies backed by live musical accompaniments. It’s one of the few public venues where one can regularly see 16mm and 35mm prints of all kinds of American and occasionally European silents.

Tonight's Niles screening is the 500th Saturday night silent film show scheduled at the Museum's Edison Theatre since it was refurbished and reopened in 2005. 51 Saturdays per year (the only annual week off is the San Francisco Silent Film Festival weekend), film prints show on a very regular basis. Upcoming 16mm feature-film shows include The Lost World November 29th, and in December, parts 1 & 2 of Fritz Lang's epic Spiders (it's apparently the season for Lang's silent epics as the Castro shows Metropolis tonight digitally and the Berkeley Underground Film Society brings Die Nibelungen in two parts tonight and tomorrow), and finally for 2014, the delightful Colleen Moore film I dragged my family to the last time a Niles Saturday show fell on Christmas, Ella Cinders.

But one-reel and two-reel films that were the specialty of a studio like the one in Niles a hundred years ago, and programs made up of these are particularly popular today. Every month the museum programs at least one Saturday of silent comedy (November 22 is Chaplin in The Rink, Buster Keaton in The Boat, the Thanksgiving classic Pass the Gravy and Laurel & Hardy in Leave 'Em Laughing, while December brings Chaplin's Easy Street, Keaton's The High Sign and a pair of Christmas-themed shorts Their Ain't No Santa Claus and the anarchic masterpiece Big Business.) Tonight's program is an extra-special shorts program made up entirely of films shot in Niles, most around 100 years ago, including, in addition to Broncho Billy's Wild Ride, Arthur Mackley's The Prospector, the Snakeville Comedy Versus Sledge Hammers, and the first Chaplin film made entirely in the town back in 1915, The Champion.

The exception to the 100-years-ago rule is Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret, a brand-new silent Western shot in Niles with a genuine Bell & Howell 2709 hand-cranked camera (formerly used by John Korty) and starring Christopher Green, Bruce Cates, former silent-era child star Diana Serra Cary, and a slew of Western-garbed re-enactors. This film has screened in workprints and other preliminary versions before, but tonight is the official premiere of the finalized version at the Edison!

Tomorrow the Edison will host a screening of a independently-produced talking picture made in Niles in 2007. From the museum's press release:  

Weekend King is a romantic comedy filmed in Niles about a California dot-commer who buys a bankrupt town in rural Utah. Rupert is rich, but awkward, friendless, and loveless. In a quest to overcome his loneliness, Rupert expects to lord over the New Spring Utah populace, but ends up contending with people who don't buy into his newly invented confidence. But grappling with his bad investment turns out to be the key for finally finding friendship and love. See local characters in cameos in the local haunts including Joe's Corner, the Vine Cafe, the Mudpuddle Shop, and Belvoir Springs Hotel.

Before both days' screenings, there will be a free Walking Tour of Niles. This 75-minute tour will take you around downtown Niles and its neighborhoods, telling you tales of times gone by including film locations for the films being shown during the movie weekend. Nationally-recognized film historian David Kiehn, who is the film museum's resident expert on the Essanay film company, also knows his stuff about local buildings and historic sites. His walking tours always attract a crowd. This event is free but donations are gladly accepted.

HOW: All of tonight's films screen in 35mm prints with live music by Frederick Hodges.

Stray Dogs (2013)

A scene from Tsai Ming-liang's STRAY DOGS, playing at the 57th San Franicsco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based auteur Tsai Ming-Liang directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: Tsai's films have long developed recurrent themes of home and rootlessness, but with Stray Dogs he uses these to create his rawest, bitterest attack on Taiwan's inequalities thus far. His first digital feature employs surveillance-style footage of his actor fetiche Lee Kang-sheng and two youngsters tramping through and setting camp in locations "stolen" whether by crew or characters. It culminates in a fourteen-minute take that's simultaneously unforgiving and about forgiveness.

That 75-word capsule is all I'm allowed to write while we await a potential commercial distribution of this film, but there are plenty of more untethered critics who have written very thoughtfully and substantially on Stray Dogs and most (though surprisingly not Martin Tsai's useful reading) are linked on the addictive Critics Round Up website.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 3:15 PM today at New People and 6:30 PM tomorrow at the Pacific Film Archive, both thanks to the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: It's been just over seven years since a new Tsai Ming-Liang feature film has appeared in Frisco Bay cinemas. The last was I Don't Want To Sleep Alone, which debuted here in April 2007 at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. In the meantime, Tsai's 2009 film Face received mixed-at-best reviews at other film festivals around the world, bypassed local cinema screens, and has not even been officially released on DVD (though I've been told it's on Netflix Instant, I've never subscribed and have still yet to catch up with this work; I suppose I still hold out hope it may arrive through another means). And a new featurette called Journey To The West has just started making festival rounds, though it has yet to land here yet.

Watching Stray Dogs made me realize how rusty I've gotten at watching Tsai's films in cinemas, and made me want to have that experience again with one of his prior films. Not a moment too soon, I received an advance look at a program YBCA's Joel Shepard put together for this summer. One of the selections in this screening series is my own (a real honor and my first stab at programming 35mm, I picked a Robert Altman film that means an awful lot to me) but I think I'm equally excited to see the other nine films in the series. Eight of them I've never seen at all and in most cases have longed to for years, and the ninth (or should I say the first), screening July 20th, is a Tsai film I've only seen on home video before: The Hole. It was my introduction to his work way back when, and I'm thrilled to be able to get a chance to watch it in 35mm in just a few short months. Here's the full line-up for the YBCA series:

Invasion of the Cinemaniacs!
July 20 - Sept 25
Sun, Jul 20, 2pm Karen Larsen presents The Hole By Tsai Ming-liang
Thu, Jul 24, 7:30pm Brian Darr presents The Company By Robert Altman
Sun, Jul 27, 2pm Jonathan L. Knapp presents Colorado Territory By Raoul Walsh
Sat, Aug 9, 7:30pm Cheryl Eddy presents Death Wish 3 By Michael Winner
Sun, Aug 10, 2pm Adam Hartzell presents Madame Freedom By Han Hyeong-mo
Sat, Aug 23, 7:30pm Michael Guillén presents Hell Without Limits (El Lugar Sin Límites) By Arturo Ripstein
Sun, Aug 24, 2pm David Wong presents The Exile By Max Ophüls
Thurs, Sept 18, 7:30pm Alby Lim presents Pietà By Kim Ki-duk
Sun, Sept 21, 2pm Lynn Cursaro presents Little Fugitive By Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin & Ray Ashley
Thurs, Sept 25, 7:30pm David Robson presents The Brides Of Dracula By Terence Fisher

HOW: Stray Dogs screens digitally, as it was shot.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 6 allows festgoers a final chance to see Manuscripts Don't Burn, Blind Dates and All About the Feathers, and features the first of two silent film/indie rock pairings of SFIFF57: Thao and the Get Down Stay Down playing new music for Charlie Chaplin's The Pawn Shop, Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich’s The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, and more.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub's Too Soon, Too Late screens digitally at Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland.

Two Eyes: Brian Darr

Thanks to all the contributers in my "I Only Have Two Eyes" wrap-up of repertory and revival screenings that happened in the San Francisco Bay Area during 2013, and thanks to all readers who have been patient with my more-protracted-than-usual roll-out of selections. I blame myself, not the loyal contributers, for having lost focus a bit there while I turned to other pressing issues (such as finding a new apartment in this crazy market- please wish me luck as I continue to search!) 

I also blame the oh-so-slightly-lower response rate this year as compared to prior IOHTE editions on my own organizational difficulties, as I've usually been better at finding new contributers as prior ones move away, become busy, etc. I don't want anyone to take lesser participation as evidence of the shrinking of the revival screening scene here on Frisco Bay. If you want to make that case, you may be able to but I'd hope you'd find a more scientific data set. I do know that there are many venues and countless noteworthy screenings that went completely unmentioned by any of the participants this year, which to me says that the scene is still quite robust.

There was no Napoléon that drew votes from a majority of respondents this year. If you look through all the lists indexed here you'll see that most films get mentioned only by a single person, and that every participant picked at multiple screenings that nobody else mentioned. There are some recurring venues, festivals, filmmakers, and even films, however, and I find it noteworthy that the most-commonly cited favorite was Roy Ward Baker's Inferno, screened in digital 3D at the Castro during Noir City 2013. This is certainly the first time in seven years that the most-popular title was a digital rather than 35mm screening.

Without further ado, here are my own choices of favorite repertory screenings from last year.

Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926)

Though I usually try to focus on "new-to-me" films in this annual exercise, I sometimes let a title I'd seen previously slip into a slot. I suspect partially thanks to a slightly constricted variety of "new-to-me" 35mm film-going options, and partially thanks to the enthusiasm generated by my own daily blogging project (in which I tried to balance films I'd seen before with films I hadn't when selecting what to write about each day), I found myself revisiting more films than usual on cinema screens in 2013. There were so many that revealed so much more of themselves to me than ever before thanks to unique cinema screenings last year, but among them (Gun Crazy, Vertigo, Blow Up, the Long Goodbye, Pursued, Femme Fatale, Report) one stands out as particularly transcendent. I'd seen Faust before on home video and had even done a fair bit of research on its director Murnau when writing program notes for a San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation of Sunrise several years ago. But I'd never appreciated the film's dark and majestic strangeness to the degree I was able to when that festival presented it at its annual Winter Event last February.  As much as I found the experience of seeing a 35mm print thrilling at the time (here's my day-after tweet), in retrospect the screening becomes even more special because a) Christian Elliot's magnificent musical accompaniment was the only full-fledged silent movie organ score performed on the Castro's jeopardized Wurlizter last year (Günter Buchwald's performance for The Half-Breed in July was a duet between himself on organ and on violin) and, on a more personal note, b) it was the last film screening I attended along with one of one of my best friends who died, far too young, later in the year.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932)

Forget all the nominal re-makes of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This Poe adaptation is the most expressively cinematic Hollywood film to have taken Robert Wiene's Weimar era classic as a model, though it goes in arguably even more bizarre directions than that landmark of silent horror. The teaming of French-born director Florey, German cinematographer Karl Freund with a cast including Bela Lugosi and Noble Johnson makes for a guignol experience at least as arresting, and certainly more outre than any of the other Universal monster or mad scientist movies of the era. As Dr. Mirakle says, "if you are looking for the usual hocus-pocus, just go to the box-office and get your money back." Here's my tweet following its screening at the Roxie Cinema back in March as part of a pre-code series I'm crossing my fingers will be reprised again this Spring.

Welcome, Mr. Marshall (Luis García Berlanga, 1953)

It's very hard to believe this film, made at the "secretly pro-communist UNINCI production company" according to Rob Stone, was able to be completed and released in the midst of a Spain tyrannically controlled by Franco. But there it was, its unspooling on 35mm in front of my eyes to kick off a Pacific Film Archive of films directed by Berlanga. Unfortunately I was unable to catch the rest of the series, but this political comedy mixing barbed satire of the political ties between Spain and the U.S., and of the fantasies exported by Hollywood, will stick in my memory for a long time. It was co-written by Juan Antonio Bardem, Berlanga's better-known contemporary who'd soon go on to direct Death of a Cyclist, but if that film evokes 1940s Hollywood noir this one puts it on a skewer and roasts it at a merry campfire, which may be why Edward G. Robinson (in a rare moment of narrow-mindedness) denounced Welcome, Mr. Marshall after it screened the 1953 Cannes Film Festival. Again, my tweet reaction. Try this analogy on for size: Death of a Cyclist : Detour :: Welcome, Mr. Marshall : Hail the Conquering Hero.

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Of all the filmmakers that Andrew Sarris placed in "the Far Side of Paradise", Minnelli must be the one who appears most out of place in this position just shy of his Pantheon. The American Cinema's author accused the director of believing "more in beauty than in art" and though this is not the timeor place for semantic discussions, I can't help but think this assessment wouldn't have been made at any other time than the late 1960s, when Minnelli was still working but more than five years on from making Two Weeks In Another Town and a decade past the sublime 1958 Some Came Running. I can't believe it's taken me as long as it has to catch up with this extraordinarily rich, vibrant, fundamentally sad film, but the wait has definitely been worth it! Thank you, Stanford Theatre, for giving me an opportunity to see this (as well as another Dean Martin masterpiece Artists & Models and more) in your wonderful spotlight on 1950s Hollywood this past Spring. Some Came Running is, of all these selections, the film I'd most want to revisit again tonight, to relive its joys and tears, its colors and movements, and its beautiful performances from Frank Sinatra and Shirley Maclaine especially.

The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956)

I grew up in a household of Unitarian-Universalists, which meant we made a ritual of avoiding most of the religious traditions observed in many other homes, like watching Biblical epics on television or otherwise. So I'd never seen this most famous of Old Testament interpretations before becoming interested in cinema history during my 20s. At some point early in that process I heard a voice saying "Thou shalt not watch Cecil B. DeMille's most ambitious cinematic undertaking for the first time on anything less than a 35mm print on a big cinema screen." I'm glad I listened, as making the trip to Palo Alto to see all umpteen reels of widescreen, Technicolor opulence from the fifth row of the Stanford Theatre was unforgettable. You don't have to believe in Moses's miracles as history to have faith in their cinematic splendor.

Objective, Burma! (Raoul Walsh, 1945)

I was able to attend nearly every screening in the small Raoul Walsh retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive last summer, vastly expanding my experience with this prolific and quintessential classic Hollywood director. There wasn't a dud among the selections of films culled from just about every genre and period of Walsh's career, but my favorite was this exemplary picture made and released in the waning months of World War II. The narrative structure subverts expectations of the typical war picture (especially one made during wartime) in several ways, notably through the character arcs of its key protagonists (Errol Flynn as the platoon captain, Henry Hull as the embedded reporter) and through the darkening tone of a film depicting a mission that at first appears to be a cakewalk. The film excels on practically every aesthetic level, most especially through James Wong Howe's tremendous, newsreel-come-to-life cinematography. My retinas still carry the afterimage of the white-hot explosions crackling off the screen in the climactic battle sequence. (Pictured at the top of this post).

Spacy (Takashi Ito, 1981)

2013 was a good year for catching up with older works by important experimental filmmakers at various venues, from Peter Hutton and Phil Solomon at the PFA (and the latter also at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) to Scott Stark at the SF Art Institute, from Barbara Hammer at SFMOMA before it closed to Standish Lawder and Robert Nelson at the new Exploratorium after it opened. Three screenings of 16mm prints from Canyon Cinema at the Kadist pop-up gallery were also tremendous (and free!) opportunities to fill in canonical gaps; I took in the first and second and wish I could have made it to the third as well. But Oddball Films is an oft-overlooked home for experimental film showings, and a September program that merged ethnographic documentary with avant-garde work by Maya Deren, Pat O'Neill, etc. and featured the singlemost example of unexpected brilliance in a 16mm "short subject" I witnessed last year. I'd never heard of Spacy or its maker before, but this photographic animation feels like a headlong plunge into infinity, a peek into another universe in the shape of a single room that only filmmaker intervention could ever pull the viewer out of. Just amazing.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)

Another religious film I'd waited years to see on a big screen. As I tweeted at the time, it takes a completely different approach than a Cecil B. DeMille film in just about every way. Instead of elaborate studio artifice impressing the viewer into prostration, Pasolini has created out of the bounty of authentic-feeling locations, costumes and extras, and beautifully anachronistic music, a film that deeply probes our ideas about Jesus Christ and his place in the modern world. Pasolini's miracles rely not on matte paintings, miniatures and optical effects, but on the simple elegance of the edit. In his hands the mundane becomes the sublime, as if to ask whether each moment, cinematic or lived, is as holy and wondrous as a leper's cure. I caught up with or revisited quite a few of the Italian master's works in the early fall (and simultaneously read Pasolini Requiem), but this Pacific Film Archive 35mm showing was 

Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976)

I'm rather skeptical of cinema history narratives that privilege the 1970s as American cinema's Golden Age, as a time in which auteurs had unparalleled freedom to make anything their ambitious hearts desired without interference from corporate masters who hadn't yet determined to try to recreate the blockbuster successes of Spielberg and Lucas every time they released a movie. Although there's surely some truth in this frame, it doesn't explain a decade in which true artists like Orson Welles and Samuel Fuller had a harder time than ever getting opportunities behind a camera, in which good roles for female actors were nearly drowned in a sea of masculine energy, and in which there were still plenty of very bad movies. It makes me particularly pleased when I can add another unseen 1970s film to my personal canon of favorites. Thanks to an autumnal Castro Theatre screening, Elaine May's thus-far penultimate directing effort is a well-worthy addition. A drawn-from-family-biography Philadelphia story of betrayal showcasing two of the era's most indelible actors (Peter Falk and John Cassavetes), and featuring one of the highest shooting ratios and one of the most devastasting endings of all time, Mikey and Nicky makes me see the merit in the viewpoints of those who especially cherish 1970s cinema.

In A Year of Thirteen Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978) 

According to Fassbinder, every seven years is an emotion-churning "lunar year", and lunar years with 13 new moons are particularly catastrophic. 1978 indeed was, at least for Fassbinder, whose lover and frequently-cast actor Armin Meier killed himself on or around Fassbinder's 33rd birthday, perhaps to avoid an impending dumping by the volatile writer-director.  Fassbinder threw himself into making and releasing this extremely personal, nakedly emotional, and truly visionary film as if he knew he couldn't move forward as an artist without getting it out of his system (Berlin Alexanderplatz had been scheduled to begin filming during the time he was busy writing and preparing for shooting this, but would ultimately be held for another year). The result is a film with some of the strongest, strangest scenes ever shown in a cinema. I spent much of last year's latter months attending Frisco Bay's tri-venue Fassbinder series, and this final screening of an imported 35mm print, held at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts in late December, was the culmination of a highly rewarding series. I don't know if it's a coincidence that 2013 was also, according to Fassbinder's numerology, a "lunar year", but it seems to me that even seven years is too long to wait for another sizable RWF retro (in fact the last one before 2013 was in 2003). Come to think of it, 2014 will have thirteen new moons...

Two Eyes: Michael Guillén

In the San Francisco Bay Area, moviegoing is not just for the newest releases. In 2013 there were more theatrical opportunities to see films spanning the history of cinema than any one person could take advantage of. Therefore, I've asked a sampling of local moviegoers to select a few favorites seen in cinemas last year. An index of participants is found here.  


The following list comes from Michael Guillén, who blogs at The Evening Class.

Absence makes the cinephilic heart grow fonder.  Relocating to Boise, Idaho from San Francisco has all but meant letting go of repertory programming.  Although Boise's movie "palace" The Egyptian offers some older fare, they project from DVD onto a large screen and resolution suffers accordingly.  Hardly the ideal in-cinema experience.  Thus, I rely on my sojourns back to San Francisco and film festivals here and there to satisfy my hunger for restorations and revivals.  Here's what I've enjoyed in San Francisco and the Bay Area in 2013.

Gun Crazy (Castro / Noir City / 01/25/13)—The term "value added" has come to qualify the spectatorial experience.  Although the Film Noir Foundation's annual Noir City prides itself on screening titles generally unavailable on digital formats, they know how to up the ante when a film is available on DVD, Blu-Ray or online streaming.  Case in point would be the opening night for the 11th edition of Noir City where Peggy Cummins—"the deadliest female in all of film noir"—was fêted in an onstage conversation with "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller.

Curse of the Demon (Castro / Noir City / 01/26/13)—Featuring Peggy Cummins once again, and one of my favorite Jacque Tourneur vehicles because of its supernatural audacity, catching Curse of the Demon (1957) at an afternoon matinee screening made me feel all of 12.  Never discount how the movies can provide the sense of recapturing one's youth; surely one of the presiding aesthetics that inform repertory viewings.

Try and Get Me! (Castro / Noir City / 01/26/13)—There are absolutely no 35mm screenings in Boise, Idaho.  None.  Thus—as Paolo Cherchi Usai has recently argued—the screening of a 35mm restoration has all the earmarks of a "special event."  Attending the world premiere of a brand new 35mm restoration by the Film Noir Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive is about as special as filmgoing gets.  Stir in local interest—the film's narrative borrows from events in 1934 San Jose—and it makes for a tasty Saturday night experience.

The Other Woman (Castro / Noir City / 01/31/13)—Along with the aforementioned aspect of recapturing one's youth through revival screenings, sometimes films like Hugo Hass's The Other Woman (1954) featuring the voluptuous Cleo Moore harbor fascination for not being the literal films of one's youth but more films that informed the culture one is born into, especially with regard to sexual attitudes of the time.  As a young gay boy growing up in the hinterlands of Idaho I wanted desperately to be a bad girl.  My self-image virilified over time but I've never let go of thoroughly enjoying a Bad Girls Night at the Castro Theater.  It's an indulgence I look forward to once a year.

In effect, I could easily replicate the programming of Noir City 2013 to satisfy the 10-film requirement of this year-end wrap-up; but, that wouldn't be fair to the rest of the fine programming executed in the Bay Area during the rest of the year.  Before leaving Noir City, however, I have to give honorable mentions to the world premiere of a 3-D 4K digital resoration of Man In the Dark (1953), its Technicolor counterpart Inferno (1953)—also in a brand new 4K digital restoration—a traumatized Lee Remick in Blake Edwards' Experiment in Terror (1962), Edward Dmytryk's tense and engaging The Sniper (1952), Clarence Brown's 1949 adaptation of William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, the over-the-top close-ups of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) where Gloria Swanson's iconic and unhinged Norma Desmond stares out at all those faces in the dark, and the pre-Code proto-noir A House Divided (1931), notable for an early version of Walter Huston's infamous Treasure of Sierra Madre jig.

The Thief of Bagdad (Castro / Silent Winter / 02/16/13)—As I reduce the number of film festivals I'm attending, some cannot be forsaken for being so unique and stellar; namely the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's bi-annual events.  At Silent Winter 2013 I was thrilled to the marrow by Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad (1924) wherein Douglas Fairbanks embodied the role of Ahmed with athletic virtuosity to the welcome accompaniment of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.  Honorable mentions at Silent Winter 2013 would have to include J. Searle Dawley's Snow White (1916), which contextualized both Disney's animated version of the tale, as well as more contemporary efforts such as the Spanish Blancanieves and Hollywood's Snow White & The Huntsman.  Also, Buster Keaton's shorts, Sam Taylor's My Best Girl (1927) featuring sweetheart Mary Pickford, and F.W. Murnau's atmospheric adaptation of Goethe's Faust rounded out a satisfying edition.

 

Blood Money (Roxie / Pre-Code / 03/01/13)—Rowland Brown's Blood Money (1933) was one of the highlights of Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Deeper, Darker, Nastier!!"  With its endearing portrayals of transvestism and sadomasochism, Blood Money titillated, entertained, and/or offended its Roxie audience as much as it did 70+ years ago.  Add Judith Anderson's film debut, Frances Dee at her kinkiest, Katherine Williams' sapphic "Nightclub Woman Wearing Monocle" and Blossom Seely's bluesy musical numbers, and it was blood money well-spent.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Castro / SF International / 05/05/13)—Philip Kaufman was the recipient of the San Francisco Film Society's 2013 Founder's Directing Award.  The catalog related a lovely anecdote of how Kaufman met Anaïs Nin at the University of Chicago in 1962.  They spent the day together, shared ideas, and she encouraged him to become a film director.  Among the remarkable roster of films to follow, his 1978 adaptation of Jack Finney's classic novel updated Finney's 1950 Cold War paranoia to post-Nixon era San Francisco.  One could extend that narrative to the present day to wonder if all these Google buses aren't actually transporting pod people?  Just as the HBO series Looking weaves its San Francisco locations into its narrative design, Invasion of the Body Snatchers likewise provides a tangible sense of '70s San Francisco, such that to this day I can't walk through Civic Center without fearing that I'll encounter something half human, half dog.

Wild Girl (PFA / Kehr / 08/01/13)—Back to the notion of a "special event", Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive brought New York Times film critic/historian Dave Kehr to the Bay Area to introduce and contextualize three Raoul Walsh westerns: Wild Girl (1932), a new print of The Lawless Breed (1953), and the "noir western" Pursued (1947).  Having the opportunity to dine with one of my favorite film writers, hearing him in conversation with local critic Michael Fox, and sharing the experience with Idaho filmmaker Zach Voss who was visiting the Bay Area made for a special event indeed.  Further, on the occasion of these screenings, Film International granted permission for me to republish my seen-by-few interview with Dave Kehr upon the publication of his book When Movies Mattered: Reviews From A Transformative Decade.

Sorcerer (PFA / 09/19/13)—With my habit for recording nearly every public film appearance in the Bay Area, it seems almost unbelievable that I didn't bother to record or have recorded my on-stage conversation with William Friedkin when the newly restored digitally remastered Sorcerer (1977) screened mid-September at the Pacific Film Archive during their Friedkin retrospective.  Memory will have to serve with this one; but, oh, what a memory!!

The Gospel According to Matthew (PFA / 09/22/13)—I gave up on Pier Paolo Pasolini after being introduced to him via Salò: 120 Days of Sodom, which I was way too young and inexperienced to absorb.  But wooed back to his oeuvre by Fandor who invited me to interview Ninetto Davoli, one of Pasolini's key actors, during a Bay Area multi-venue retrospective of Pasolini's films, I was stunned to—first of all—discover that I could now appreciate Salò on its own merits (perhaps because of years of watching torture porn in the horror genre, which makes Salò seem nearly quaint by comparison), but just how beautiful some of his earlier films were, particularly the incandescent Gospel According to Matthew, which aligned neatly with my interest in the Historical Christ and the Gnostic Gospels.  Not only did this film reawaken my interest in Pasolini, but it literally reawakened my passion for arthouse cinema.