Ten Decades of Frisco in Film

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS PAGE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 11/14/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

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In preparation for tomorrow's launch of the Balboa Theatre's Second Annual Reel San Francisco series of films from a diverse range of genres and time periods, all made in and/or about Frisco, as well as the Celluloid San Francisco book event at the Public Library next week, I present a list of some of the titles I think of first when I think of Frisco and film.

The post title is a bit of a misnomer, as Frisco Bay has been a motion picture hotbed for more than ten decades. It all began when Edward Muybridge first successfully photographed a horse's gallop for Leland Stanford in 1878. I've seen interesting Frisco films made in every decade since the Lumiere Brothers invented film exhibition in 1895, starting with 1897's Return of Lifeboat and including 1905's a Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire, which was shown at the PFA last weekend and I suspect might be among the films shown this Tuesday at 7PM as part of the Balboa's "City Quakes" earthquake centennial commemoration program. But I will start this list formally with the decade where films first grew to running times similar to those we expect today:

the 1910s: The Tong Man (William Worthington, 1919)
Japanese-American screen idol Sessue Hayakawa played a Chinese anti-hero in this studio set-bound and somewhat sensationalistic depiction of the Frisco Chinatown underworld. It's no masterpiece and I wonder if there was even a single ethnically Chinese actor or crewman on set (most or all the Chinese parts were played by Japanese or white actors, which was customary for the time period) who could speak up against the film's stereotyping. Still, it's a fascinating curio and Hayakawa gives a typically strong performance.
On my to-see wish list: the Chaplin Essanay film a Jitney Elopement.

the 1920s: Greed (Erich Von Stroheim, 1924)
Von Stroheim gained a reputation as one of the first advocates for film realism in large part through his desire to shoot his version of Frank Norris's novel McTeague in the Frisco where Norris had lived and, as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, "scouted locations" for his story of a love triangle doomed by the sudden appearance of wealth. A masterpiece in its own right, Greed also feels like a primer on making Frisco locations (in this case the corner of Hayes and Laguna, the Cliff House, and dozens more) work to the advantage of a great film, one that surely influenced future directors trying the same trick like Orson Welles (see below). The studio cut (not Stroheim's original 47-reel version now lost, or Rick Schmidlin's digital "recreation") played the Balboa series last year.
On my to-see wish list: Lon Chaney surviving the Great Quake in the Shock.

the 1930s: San Francisco (W.S. Van Dyke, 1936)
I had never seen the most famous film about the 1906 Earthquake until the Balboa played it last April for the 99th anniversary of the event. Now it's being brought back April 16-18 for the 100th, and if you live in the area and have never seen it before you really ought to. Though this film, directed by Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke (aka "One Take Woody"), has a not wholly undeserved reputation for stodgily moralizing, it really is a grand entertainment nonetheless. I like to think of it as the movie that represents to Frisco what Gone With the Wind is for Atlanta: It's a big-budget, star-laden special effects extravaganza that distorts history through a potentially worrying lens, but it also treats The City as the center of the Universe. If you, like me, think of Frisco as a better candidate for that honor than Ted Turner's town, you'll almost certainly like San Francisco better than the even more famous picture Clark Gable made three years later. And perhaps this film's conservative reputation has been overblown too; the Terry Diggs piece I linked to convincingly argues that the film was covertly packed by screenwriter Anita Loos with pro-labor jabs against the MGM hegemony.
On my to-see wish list: the Howard Hawks Barbary Coast, which plays the Balboa on a bill with Pal Joey April 23-24.

the 1940s: the Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947)
You may need to be automatically predisposed to Welles to be able to get over his silly brogue and fully enjoy this film, the only one he made with his then-wife Rita Hayworth, but there's no denying the power of the scenes that make use of some of the eeriest Frisco locations imaginable, now all the eerier because these places are no longer with us. I'm speaking particularly of Playland at the Beach, where this loopy noir ends in an especially bizarre fashion, and the murkily-lit halls of the recently demolished Steinhart Aquarium, where the (by this point in the Welles-Hayworth marriage) fictional-only lovers rendezvous and talk about a doubly-impossible future together. If the story doesn't totally hang together it certainly doesn't matter when Welles is making use of such dream-logic images as moray eels and funhouse mirrors to make an end run around the glib symbology often found in Hollywood classicism. I didn't see this film when it played in last year's Balboa series, but I've seen it several times, most memorably a few years ago at an outdoor screening in New York City's Bryant Park; admittedly this film is just as much a New York movie as a Frisco movie, but Frisco gets the last word.
On my to-see wish list: I Remember Mama, based on the book I remember my mama reading to me as a kid.

the 1950s: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
What to say about this film I often consider the greatest of all time? I've seen it too many times to be surprised by its basic plot structure like I was the first four or five times I saw it, always suckered in by the false first climax. But each time I'm still surprised by another Hitchcockian touch I notice, little things like how Pop Liebel's nostalgia for "the power and the freedom" associated with manhood helps Scottie give himself permission to resist the post-war modernization of gender relations and throw himself into an old-fashioned romantic melodrama. And I'm always struck by another glimpse of the Frisco that existed before I was born but am slowly trying to understand. I've had this site on my sidebar since starting this blog, and if you've never taken the time to lose yourself in it for a while, how about now?
On my to-see wish list: the National Film Registry-selected D.O.A., which plays at the Balboa with another noir, the Bigamist, April 25th.

the 1960s: the White Rose (Bruce Conner, 1967)
I first planned this list to be entirely made of feature films, but once I thought of this experimental documentary short, I had to bump the Birds (at the Balboa April 21-22) or Take the Money and Run (April 26-27) or whatever else I was considering for this decade. It's the first Bruce Conner film I ever saw, back in 1996 at the old DeYoung Museum when it was showcasing art of the Beats. The centerpiece of the exhibit was Jay DeFeo's painting/sculpture the Rose, which she applied 2,300 pounds of oil paint to over the course of eight years before removing it by forklift from her apartment at the Pacific Heights section of Fillmore Street. Conner lived nearby and was on hand to film the extraction, which he edited into this beautiful seven minute piece accompanied by music from Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain.
On my to-see wish list: Experiment in Terror, the classic Blake Edwards thriller I missed when the Balboa showed it last year.

the 1970s: the Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
This is another one of those films that I've seen so many times that it's seemingly seeped into my DNA, but that doesn't mean it's easy to know where to begin to talk about it. I might as well start where the film does, with Union Square, which in a single extended zoom shot morphs from a picturesque cityscape into a paranoia-inducing intrusion. The transformation seems oddly paralleled in the history of the location since Coppola's film was released; gradually the public square has felt more and more encroached upon by the neon-lit signs of the corporations that surround it, culminating in a recent remodel that has shifted the focus of the space toward the Macy's on its South side. I don't know all the locations used in the Conversation but I'm not sure I want to know either; the Cathedral Hill Hotel, which I pass nearly every day on the way to work, has felt just a little creepier since I realized it used to be called the Jack Tar Hotel and was the site of the film's most disturbing scene.
On my to-see wish list: Time After Time starring Malcolm McDowell as HG Wells.

the 1980s: a View to a Kill (John Glen, 1985)
I never said these were "the best" films shot in Frisco, just the ones that for me feel the "Frisco"-est. But honestly the last of the many times I saw this film, probably when I was in ninth grade, I still loved it. I was just the right age for James Bond when it came out in '85, and I can't begin to convey the sense of civic pride I felt when I learned that the international playboy and super-spy was going to be coming to my town, which meant that I obviously lived in a location as exciting and exotic as India or the Bahamas. Opening weekend fell near my twelfth birthday, and my dad took me and a dozen buddies across the Golden Gate to the theatre in Corte Madera he liked to avoid the Frisco crowds at. This was my last birthday party at which I felt no sense of inadequacy for not feeling cool enough to invite girls. I was outwardly resisting my looming teenager-hood as strongly as I could (I didn't even really know who Duran Duran was, but I did like their theme song) and a View to a Kill was the perfect preadolescent fantasy to allow me to do that for another two hours, plus get a glimpse of Grace Jones's naked bum. But probably my favorite scene was the fire engine chase scene culminating in the nail-biter at the "Lefty" O'Doul Drawbridge. The insanity of Christopher Walken's Zorin dueling against Bond on top of the area's most famous bridge was just good gravy. Since my middle-school-age days of intense study of Bondology, I've come to learn that a View to a Kill is considered by most to be one of the worst films in the series. I suspect it's at least in part because it's the film which let Roger Moore beat David Niven in Casino Royale as the oldest actor ever to play James Bond (he turned 57 during filming). One of these days I'd like to revisit it and see what I think, but in the meantime I don't mind reliving the memories.
On my to-see wish list: Chan is Missing, another National Film Registry selection.

the 1990s: Chalk (Rob Nilsson, 1996)
Like the Tong Man and San Francisco, I've only seen this film (actually shot on video) once but it left a powerful impression and turned me into a real Rob Nilsson admirer. Nilsson's Cassavetes-influenced filmmaking style cuts through the extraneous baggage of ego and image that he sees clogging up the independent film scene in this country. Probably his most crucial departure from the norm comes through the way he works with actors to develop their characters and stories. In the case of the Tenderloin-birthed poolhall drama Chalk he brought nonprofessional actors like Earl Watson and Johnny Reese together with local pros like Kelvin Han Yee and longtime Nilsson collaborator Don Bajema. It worked extremely well, and not surprisingly created a story that feels oh-so-Frisco in its composition.
On my to-see wish list: Crumb, another of the titles I missed last year.

the 2000s: In the Bathtub of the World (Caveh Zahedi, 2001)
This week Zahedi's hybridized documentary I Am a Sex Addict is playing the Balboa's other screen, but it would fit right into the series, as it was partially set in Frisco and uses local locations to stand in for Paris and elsewhere. But his earlier In the Bathtub of the World is a Frisco film (video again, really) with an even more radical approach. It proposes that a filmmaker does not need to go out and capture or create a particular story, but can make an important, inspiring film capturing some of the very essence of life just by turning a camera back on himself or herself. If a View to a Kill, Vertigo and even Greed use Frisco as the backdrop of the director's vacation film, In the Bathtub of the World turns the home movie of a Frisco resident into something at least as large and profound. Here's a fascinating thing I found that helps to explain why not everybody's heard of it.
On my to-see wish list: the Bridge, Eric Steele's controversial new doc on the topic of Golden Gate Bridge suicides. Another consideration of the subject, the Joy of Life by Jenni Olson, was a highlight of last year's SFIFF (and plays again at the PFA this Tuesday) I expect Steele's film to be of a completely different sort, but my expectations are still high. It's playing at three screenings in this year's edition of the festival, on April 30-May 2.

Adam Hartzell on Michel Brault

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS SITE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 5/27/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

* * * * *Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive serves many functions for a cinephile like me. It's a venue for film festivals such as the increasingly vital African Film Festival and the upcoming SFIFF (and while I usually stay on this side of the bridge during the SFIFF, I often use the festival's PFA line-up to help me pick which unknown quantities to see at the Kabuki and the Castro, as I've noticed over the years that Berkeley bookings usually include the "artier" films, just as the Penninsula venue, this year the Aquarius, usually tends to avoid the "artier" films.) It plays host to touring retrospectives for the world cinema's great feature filmmakers, like Naruse's recent retro (with a reprise of Wife! Be Like a Rose this Sunday, April 9) and the complete Kieslowski retrospective in June, including a Three Colors marathon on the 17th. It provides the East Bay stop for restored revival prints other bookers pass on with its A Theater Near You programs (on the horizon: a pairing of Bresson's Mouchette and Sautet's Classe Tous Risques May 26-27.)

One of the more excting things the PFA does is bring world-class documentary filmmakers to Berkeley in brief residencies through its Documentary Voices program. In the past couple years guests have included Anand Patwardhan, Thom Anderson, and Marina Goldovskaya. Next week brings Kim Longinotto as she tours the film she made with co-director Florence Ayisi, Sisters in Law (which will begin a run at the Balboa April 28). And last month brought a chance to be exposed to the work of a Canadian filmmaker I was embarrassed never to have heard of before, Michel Brault. I was only able to squeeze in a single program, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's radical investigation of the documentary form Chronicle of a Summer, on which Brault was a key cinematographer, preceded by the short that got Brault that job, Les Raquetteurs. But my friend Adam Hartzell, who shared his 2005 top ten list in this space in between his writings for other websites, caught two of the programs Brault actually appeared at, and was generous enough to write about the experience as a Hell on Frisco Bay exclusive. I'm honored to turn this blog over to Adam now:

A friend of mine once told me that the most provincial of people he'd ever met were born and raised and still living in Brooklyn. As ironic as this may seem, when you think about how the world comes to New York, and Brooklyn being a hot borough for those trying to make it there, if you're growing in Brooklyn, there isn't much reason to travel anywhere else. The San Francisco equivalent are young adults from the Richmond and Sunset neighborhoods whom I've met who have told me their first trip over to the East Bay was when they began their first year at UC Berkeley. After over eight years living in San Francisco, I know what they mean. I rarely go over to the East Bay anymore. When I do, it's the usually the same street, Bancroft Way in Berkeley where both University Press Books and the Pacific Film Archives reside.

Books and cinema are my intellectual and spiritual Prozac. I will always find another thoroughly engaging book to read at UPB - my most recent visit had me discovering Martin Kevorkian's (yeah, bummer on the last name, huh?) analysis of the recent habit of placing African-American movie characters in front of computers, Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America and Jamie L. Mullaney's title-grabbing, sociological study Everyone Is NOT Doing It: Abstinence and Personal Identity, looking at the vegans, celibates, and others amongst us who forgo things to find themselves - and there will always be wonderful works by fascinating directors that I knew nothing about until the PFA's well-rounded program gets hammered into my poorly-squared mail-box.

This time around, the PFA decided to school me on Michel Brault. I had no knowledge of this Quebecois director and cinematographer prior to the retrospective of his work that the PFA brought to their screens the second weekend of March. Chris Gehman is quoted in the program notes as arguing that ". . . Brault achieved what many documentarians were striving for throughout the fifties: a form of documentary filmmaking not reliant on scripts, dramatic re-creations, staged events, and literary devices, but deriving its form from material gathered in contact with the real events and people portrayed . . ."

And all well and good for me to learn, but what really drew me to Brault's screenings were not these historical footnotes in cinema's history, but the fact that the films were about Canada, a country whose cinemas, politics and cultures I've been interested in for some time. I had this interest well before I fell in love with a Vancouverite years ago and maintain this interest through the cœur brisé ("broken heart") caused by a wonderful woman from Montreal this summer. To educate myself about all things Canada, I regularly read Maisonneuve and The Walrus and often listen to the CBC and RCI online. Since my Anglophonic self limits my access to Canada's Francophone culture, I took BART over twice to the exotic East Bay to catch two of Brault's shorts, one documentary work, and one fictional work based on real life events and interviews with those individuals who lived through the events on screen. It is this latter work that resonates most prominently since similar actions are being shamefully enacted by Canada's southern neighbors presently.

As with the cinema, first the shorts. A late addition to the screenings was the inclusion of Les Raquetteurs (1958). Les Raquetteurs is French for Snowshoers and a Snowshoe festival somewhere in Quebec province (I didn't write down the actual city's name) was the site of Brault's first directorial effort (which he co-directed with Gilles Groulx). The Canadian Film Encyclopedia notes that this short was ". . . heralded as a sort of manifesto for the National Film Board of Canada's francophone filmmakers." Adding an extra zero to the cashiers check he received to make the film afforded Brault the opportunity to extend this piece beyond the original 3-4 minutes of film he was officially allotted. (Yes, Canadian taxpayers, Brault admitted to this at the screening.) The result was one of the least propagandistic newsreels I have scene from this period. Brault and his collaborators strip the festival down to its essence of disorder and overreach without condescending to his audience or subjects. Scenes of a sparsely attended stadium hosting a snowshoe sprint come back to us when an announcer later asks the crowd not to come onto the field to 'assist' the women sprinters. We are left wondering which of the two or three people we saw justified such a warning from the announcer.

From snowshoers to Wrestling (La Lutte, 1961), another collaborative short about a professional wrestling match in Montreal. Even though Brault stripped away the artifice by showing the wrestlers coached to fake punches and taught by the coach's pre-teen assistant to throw opponents, I still found myself riveted by the performance in and around the ring. Close-ups on intertwined bodies locked in a wrestling hold are coupled with equally close views of contorted faces witnessing the action. Later we will see more parallels, such as a man holding back his girlfriend's (wife's?) body just like a referee holding back an illegally entering tag team member. The staged performance in the ring results in an un-staged performance outside in the audience. Brault demonstrates that the wrestling auditorium has executed a smackdown of the fourth wall of theatre. I found myself thinking that Roland Barthes had to be involved in this somehow and the credits soon confirmed this.

Onward to the longest of the longer works I caught, Of Whales, the Moon, and Men (Pour la Suite du Monde, 1963) has Brault working with another director I'm supposed to know something about but don't - Pierre Perrault. For this film, Brault and Perrault ventured out to Ile-aux-Coudres, or "Isle of Hazelnuts", to stimulate a return to a previously big part of the local economy, whale-trapping. (Key word "trapping". I had to calm the cringes that came from people who appeared to have visions of seal-beating in their heads when I mentioned what the film was about. No metal-toothed traps were involved in what appears to be the most "humane" way of trapping a mammal. And the trapped whale is eventually taken to an aquarium in New York rather than slaughtered.) This big part of the local economy became a big waste of resources so the practice died out many decades ago. However, the younger adult generation is interested in jumpstarting the tradition after Brault and Perrault's instigation. What follows are efforts from the enthusiastic younger to extract the traditions from ambivalent elders, slowly watching the trap set up in low tide without much exposition. The comfortable performances of the islanders whom we presume are acting as they would everyday provide the most endearing moments in this film.

The wonderful mood of Of Whales, the Moon, and Men had me excited for the next film I was to catch in the Brault retrospective, Orders (Les Ordres, 1974), a film about Canada's "October Crisis" of 1970. After the kidnapping of a British Trade Commissioner and the kidnapping (and later murder) of the Vice Premier of Quebec, Pierre Laporte, by the FLQ (Front de Liberation due Quebec - a violent, militant Quebec nationalist group), Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act. Only the third time ever enacted, the other two times during the two World Wars, this Act permitted such actions as warrant-less searches and arrests. The film was based on interviews with 50 of the 497 people rounded up and jailed for over two weeks. Those who were interviewed for the film were amongst the 88% of those who were never charged with a single crime.

Screenings of films like these allow for wonderful examples of the education and mis-education that film can provide. If I had taken for complete accuracy what I learned from the screening (including the Q&A after), I would have left thinking that no one had been charged with a crime after the civil-liberties-be-damned dragnet. But after venturing over to the online historical community at Wikipedia, I was informed such was not the case since 62 people were charged, 32 without bail. (Although whether their charges were anything related to domestic terrorism, I do not know.) Of course, Wikipedia as a community represents history as a subject; further revisits to the incidents in question may reveal more frightening or comforting aspects across the political spectrum around which each of us orbits. But trusting Wikipedia's reliability - and a recent article in the respected science journal Nature supports me in this trust, finding Wikipedia to be as accurate a source as the hallowed Encyclopedia Britannica - doesn't mean I find this addendum to the information in Orders comforting. The fact that 62 people were charged with something doesn't justify the response. Proper police procedures for a democratic society could have brought just as many charges, if not more, without having to falsely arrest and terrify so many citizens.

That said, I appreciate the way each character comes into Orders. Brault was encouraged by a National Film Board of Canada reviewer to bring the verisimilitude to light at the very beginning. Each actor introduces themselves as themselves, as actors, and then tells us who of the never accused they are going to play. This had the effect of conveying a certain reverence to the real life people played and the real life issues of civil rights, terrorism, and our response to terrorism that this film explores.

Particularly striking about Orders, considering its topic, is its lack of physical striking. No one is shown physically beaten up neither in the rounding-up of citizens nor in the prisons, although the scenario is no less horrifying since psychological torture can dig just as deep. There is a mental terror here, especially when one falsely accused citizen is led to believe he is about to be executed, that bleeds throughout the screen, ever more vivid when the black and white of Montreal's snowy streets becomes the color of the prison cells. I wondered if financial issues were the motivation behind this intermittent use of color since I've heard such explanations from other directors of this time period working with limited funds. Later, in the question and answer, Brault would confirm this when asked by another person in the audience. This use of black and white for the outside world and color for the 'inside' of jail is 'counter-intuitive' because it's counter the cliché of how prisons are often portrayed, as dreary and drab. I'm sure they are dreary and drab and warrant such filters on the camera lens, but going against the grain here, Brault underscores the intensity of bewilderment, confusion, and psychological devastation of each character.

As much as I know I have so much more to learn about all the countries of the world, I was surprised to find out something like this happened in Canada. I shared the reaction to Orders of my fellow attendees as a dis-ordering of some of the stereotypes some of us State-siders have about Canada. Sure, the Cheney/Rove Administration is evidence that the United States is vulnerable to the totalitarian it happening here in the United States, but not in Canada? Unfortunately, civil liberties many of us find sacred to our democracies were suspended up North in the October of the year of my birth. Slowly, my innocent belief in Canada's complete moral superiority to the United States has been challenged by some less than stellar moments in Canada's history, such as the incident involving the ship the Komagata Maru. Although I continually stumble over the name of this ship, whenever I mention it to Sikhs I know they immediately pronounce the name for me. Although a bit of hidden Canadian history, the Komagata Maru is firmly etched in the collective memories of Sikh communities everywhere. The Komagata Maru carried 376 citizens of the British Empire, most of whom were Sikhs, into the Vancouver Bay in 1914. The Canadian government denied the ship from docking and disembarking for over two months, limiting access to food and fresh water for the passengers, due to Canadian immigration policies that privileged Whites, and to a lesser extent Japanese, over those from the Indian continent. This stalled moment in Canada's history was revealed to me by another Canadian film, a powerful documentary by Ali Kazimi entitled Continuous Journey that played at both the San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival and the 3rd-I International South Asian Film Festival in 2005.

As for the October Crisis, Canadians will have a chance to again revisit this tumultuous moment in their history with the upcoming TV mini-series October, 1970 scheduled for a September airing this year. If only NAFTA worked both ways culturally. Because it is Canada's Southern neighbors, with their Guantanamos, Abu Ghraibs, illegal wiretapping, and (too ordinary) extraordinary renditions, who could learn the most about their shameful present from Canada's history lessons.

But let me finish on a more hopeful note, by mentioning my pleasant surprise when I slid my recent GreenCine DVD selection, Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971), into my DVD player. I was delighted to see that Brault had lens-ed this film as well. This film about the relationship between a young boy growing up with his aunt and uncle includes a lovely scene reminiscent of Of Whales, the Moon, and Men as well as The Snowshoers and Wrestling (and, thankfully, none of Orders). It is Christmas Eve and a mass of recently pay-checked factory workers head down the road as a pack of recently Christmas-vacationed school kids march towards them. When they meet, playful wrestling in the car-trodden sludge commences. It is a sincerely touching, small town moment that Brault captures consistently in the few films I've caught of which he's been a part. Such respect and dignity for the people and communities he films gives me hope even when the subject matter might seem hopeless.

The Worst Police Officer New York's Ever Had

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS SITE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 5/15/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

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I'm something of a late bloomer when it comes to my cinephilia. My family never had cable television, we didn't have a VCR until well into the 1980s, and throughout high school I only went to a few movies a year, usually of the sci-fi blockbuster variety. I was much more interested in computer games and music during my teen years, and I was practically oblivious to Frisco's diverse and thriving film culture. Ironically, this city boy had seen precious few non-Hollywood films until attending a small liberal arts college that offered free film and video screenings to students as partial compensation for living in a small Midwestern town with few cultural offerings attractive to its would-be-sophisticated student body. Suddenly I had easy access to screenings of films totally off my radar screen: Drugstore Cowboy, L'Enfant Sauvage, My Twentieth Century, Alice in the Cities, etc. I enjoyed going to see films I knew nothing about beforehand, but to be honest few of them floored me. I was still much more interested in music, including the healthy campus band scene.

Every weekend could be counted on to provide at least dorm party or house party featuring one or more of the many rock (or punk, metal, noise, funk, or jazz) bands made up of students. It seemed as if there were almost as many bands as there were students, but my favorite was the Shepherd Kings. What they lacked in traditional charisma or virtuoso musicianship, they more than made up for in creativity and eagerness to do absolutely anything to make their shows entertaining. Every show was an event that culminated in a whirlwind of purgative screaming, insane robots, amplified feedback, mass chaos and destruction and some kind of material, whether animal or vegetable or mineral, interacting with (okay, usually "thrown at") the audience. But along the way the Kings played a selection of well-crafted songs with titles like "Radiation" and "Jacques Cousteau". I always looked forward to a driving death march called "Lieutenant Bad", clearly inspired by the Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant. Here's a link to an mp3 of a live recording of the song, which in 1997 was released on CD by Gourmandizer, a now-defunct indie label:

"Lieutenant Bad"

I suspect I get more out of listening to that than people who've never seen a Shepherd Kings live show might. I've probably heard the song a hundred times and I still can't make out a good portion of the lyrics being shouted in tag-team fashion by Jason Elbogen and Mike Kraus. I've pieced together that each line ticks off another debased transgression of "a corrupta police officera" (I want to say that bassist Jack Simpson was in my Latin class, but I could be misremembering, as I never knew any of the band members very well personally), including "breeding disease", "dealing angel dust", and being "dirtier than the streets". It's true that Johnny Breitzer's drumming is anything but metronomic, and it may help to be able to visualize what his playing style actually looked like. I'm sorry I'm unable to provide that image.

I'm not sorry, however, that today's Ferrarathon finally prodded me to see my first Abel Ferrara film, a decade after the Shepherd Kings played their last note, and after seeing the likes of Ed Gonzalez and Zach Campbell praise the director almost from the beginning of my entry into full-fledged cinephilia in the late 1990's. In writing about Bad Lieutenant it's tempting to model my form on that of the song, and list the countless transgressions of the Harvey Keitel character (referred to in the film only as "LT") in the approximate order they appear in the film. First: when he drops his kids of at school, he snorts some coke as soon as they've gotten out of the car. Then: we see him run into a fire trap apartment building, perhaps to chase down a perp? No, it's to score drugs from one of his regular dealers. Next: he stops a convenience store hold-up, but only to order the shopkeeper out the door and submit the robbers to a shakedown. Etc. Is there a single shot of LT in the film in which he isn't pictured doing something immoral, illegal, or at least grossly irresponsible?

It was an intensely disturbing film for me to watch. This is really a genre I try to avoid: an absolutely humorless character study, in which the character is inexorably descending into a drug-filled pit of Stygian torment. I usually just find them depressing, and compounded with my squeamishness around images of graphic self-destruction through substances (a reaction that kicked into high gear quite often during this film), it's really no wonder I'd put off seeing this for so long. The lead character's unchecked misogyny was extremely uncomfortable, too. If it wasn't for Ferrara's extremely stylish (though never over-stylized) direction, I wouldn't have been able to bear the film and its subject matter at all. Shot after shot won me over with its conjuring of a heightened reality. And some scenes conveyed a drugged-out unreality; at one point LT tenderly kisses his dealer's mamá after receiving a cash bribe big enough to make his gambling debts seem potentially far less disastrous. It feels for a moment like it might be a turning point for LT; the woman speaks only Spanish to him but exudes a maternal grace that seems like it could spark his salvation. But no, the very next scene is an expressionist nightmare; strung out on something clearly taken just after leaving the dealer's apartment, he staggers down the stairwell like Cesare let out of Caligari's cabinet.

The other aspect of the film that made it all worthwhile was, strangely, the ending. Yes, MAJOR SPOILERS are on their way. I've never been a Catholic or an especially religious person, but I found something very moving and beautiful about LT's nihilistic "redemption". The key scenes are the ones between LT and his fellow cops; at a grisly crime scene they're more interested in talking about their National League pennant bets than in doing their jobs or really dealing with the death and lawlessness surrounding them. Later, LT shows that he's spiraled much further out of reality than his fellow officers have, when he accuses the Catholic Church and Major League Baseball of being "a racket" in practically the same breath. First the Church is corrupt and a nun's rapists unworthy of the high bounty placed on their heads, then baseball is so fixed that the Mets must keep winning in order to force a game seven and raise more advertising revenue. It makes perfect sense that such a corrupt cop would see everything as a racket. So why does he keep putting his money on the Dodgers? Two possible reasons: either he is in such a self-destructive cycle that he wants to lose his bets and ultimately his life. Or, he doesn't really believe in the fix after all and wants his fellow substance abuser and traitor to New York, Darryl Strawberry, to hand him salvation with a Dodger victory. Either interpretation has fascinating repercussions for the end of the film; if it's self-destruction LT wants, it's self-destruction LT gets by mainlining heroin and parking his car in front of Trump Tower after sending his lifeline on the next bus out of town. But if the baseball Championship isn't fixed, then perhaps neither is Catholicism, something LT finally seems to admit just before the famous appearance of Jesus at the end of the film.

Whether LT is motivated by faith or by a suicidal urge, or by a twisted combination of the two (I tend to think it's this third option), I found something appealing about the neatness of the ending that I don't usually get out of most films of this genre. It works because LT is so clearly a fictional creation, where so many substance abuser movies focus on real or reality-based people. Somehow it's cathartic for this character who was never really portrayed as fully human but more as a personification of the most selfishly depraved human tendencies, to be able to be released from his abject existence. I won't go so far as to say I found the end uplifting, but at least it was a kind of relief. I really don't expect I'll ever want to see Bad Lieutenant again, but I'm very glad I saw it this once.

And I'm excited to try out more of Ferrara's work. Like Michael Guillen I hope Mary is among the titles announced as part of the 49th SFIFF tomorrow. And I definitely plan to explore more of the director's filmography with aid of this Blog-a-Thon. Ms. 45 and New Rose Hotel seem like the most likely next candidates for me to track down.

One last note: in one scene of Bad Lieutenant two children are watching a cartoon on television. A song plays: "We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again." The cartoon is the Fifth Column Mouse and it was directed by the most underrated of the great Warner Brothers cartoon directors, Friz Freleng, creator of Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, the Tweety and Sylvester team-up, Bugsy and Mugsy, the Pink Panther and a huge animated legacy. Despite sources to the contrary, I understand 2006 is Freleng's centennial year, and I haven't heard a peep about it from anywhere other than my mouth. Would anyone be up for a Friz Freleng Blog-a-Thon sometime between now and Freleng's August 21 birthday?

24th SFIAAFF Preview, Part II

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS SITE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 2/14/2011. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

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Every film is a cultural document, packed with signals that reflect the identity of those involved in its creation. Arguably, it's these signals that make films interesting to watch, though sometimes we can lose sight of this and get caught up in the mechanics of narrative or filmmaking technology, as if these are elements that can be wholly extracted from issues of cultural identity. A festival with a geographic, cultural, and cross-cultural focus like the SF International Asian American Film Festival (which opened last night with a sold-out screening of Eric Byler's Award-winning AMERICANese) can help remind those of us who might otherwise wear cultural blinders to look at film through a different lens. No wonder it's such a popular festival in a city like Frisco, where so many residents have traditionally had roots in more than one identity group that it's as if the whole city is a cross-cultural experience.

I couldn't help but use this lens to view a film like Grain in Ear (playing Saturday Mar. 18 at the Kabuki and Sunday Mar. 19 at the Pacific Film Archive) as a portrayal of immigrants, in this case a Korean woman and her young son trying to survive as outsiders in a Chinese coal mining town. Certainly the feelings of isolation and anguish the film portrays are not unique to immigrants, and director Zhang Lu's framing of the film as one about "terrorism" works. It's not what came to my mind while watching the film, though. Rather I watched how the kimchee peddler protagonist Soon-hee's attitude toward her Korean identity and the stereotyping it provokes in her neighbors (not so much her literal neighbors, the genial prostitutes who befriend her young son, but the closed-off larger community) shifts in the film. Early on she meets another Korean-Chinese who seems like a rare opportunity for human connection in an unfriendly town. But this connection only sets off a chain reaction of downwardly-spiraling calamities that culminate in the film's remarkable final shot. This shot has been mentioned in every review of the film I've encountered as notable because it's the only tracking shot in a film filled with static-camera shots. After the building feeling of being held back by a camera lens proscenium, we finally move forward into the action and for me it triggered a strong emotional response. Zhang is almost as sparing in his use of close-ups on the actors' faces; the few that appear are reaction shots to off-screen violent acts, and their presence is crucial. I get the feeling he understands how Brecht's "distancing effect" works a lot better than I do.

Two other films recalled my own limited experience living in an unfamiliar country and dealing with my own cultural baggage. In 1999-2000, while I was working at a high school in Northern Thailand, I took the opportunity to play budget tourist in as many nearby countries as my teaching schedule allowed. I only spent a few days apiece in Phnom Penh and Singapore, so I particularly value the deeper inquiries into life in two very different capital cities provided by the Burnt Theatre and Be With Me, respectively. Both films straddle the line between fiction and documentary. Be With Me (playing Saturday Mar. 18 and Tuesday Mar. 21 at the Kabuki) is categorized by the SFIAAF with the fiction films in the International Showcase, and somewhat resembles the deceptively placid narrative filmmaking style of Tsai Ming-Liang. But unlike some of the films made by Tsai's imitators, Be With Me is unforced in its taciturn motivations. At the nexus of the film's three interlocking stories is a real Singaporean, Theresa Chan, a blind and deaf teacher doing some of the same kind of work we see Fini Strauberger do in Herzog's Land of Silence and Darkness. She's devoted to her work and to typing her autobiography, expressed through subtitles representing an inaudible "voiceover". Her typewriter, the letter a security guard sends writes to a woman he's shy to meet, and the text messages sent between a pair of teenagers discovering their sexuality, make for a tidy set of nonverbal communication motifs.

The Burnt Theatre (playing Tuesday Mar. 21 at the PFA and Wednesday Mar. 22 at the Kabuki), on the other hand, was placed in the SFIAAFF's Documentary Features category. It shows the struggle Cambodian actors are faced with daily in light of the irony that the Bassac National Theatre survived the Khmer Rouge that singled out artists in its horrific genocide, but the structure fell victim to a 1994 fire that has left the artform's few surviving practitioners without a proper place to perform. Still, the theatre's wreckage remains a destination for the artists, many of whom live nearby in one of Phnom Penh's most impoverished shantytowns. The three films I've seen by director Rithy Panh have increasingly blurred the documentary-fiction distinction. S21: the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, which played the 2004 edition of the festival, eschewed documentary conventions like the talking head, the omniscient voiceover, and archival footage. Yet it was most disturbingly memorable for the way it utilized re-enactments: Panh asked former prison guard interviewees to demonstrate the practices they used to terrorize political prisoners. He uses his actor subjects in the Burnt Theatre to go a step or two further, mixing "fly-on-the-wall" documentary footage with dramatized scenes. This sometimes creates a disorienting effect, as in a scene in which one of the actors returns to the theatre triumphant that he'd found work, only to be shunned by his colleagues, disheartened by his willingness to sully his craft by acting in a karaoke video. Is this scene drama or documentary, or perhaps a combination? And how about one of the final moments, in which one of the troupe calls a radio station to request a song and tells the DJ his profession: "early retired actor." It's clear that a number of the film's scenes are staged but as the film progressed I grew less certain which ones. One documentary aspect of the film remained, however: the nearly ubiquitous pounding sound of a Malaysian corporation constructing a humungous casino near the theatre is a reminder that in a globalizing economy, commerce easily trumps aesthetics.

I hope reading these descriptions doesn't make the SFIAAFF seem overly concerned with serious films about serious subjects. My previous preview post highlighted a pair of films that are as close to pure fun as cinematically possible: Citizen Dog and Linda Linda Linda. And tomorrow afternoon's James Shigeta tribute film the Crimson Kimono (3PM at the Castro), while it breaks ground rarely sown subsequently in regard to certain American racial issues, is also purely entertaining as a noir-ish detective movie. Though I'm perhaps most excited about the Heroic Grace II films wrapping up the Berkeley run of the festival with a nice sample of work from four different influential martial arts directors. Chor Yuen's Clans of Intrigue and Korean director Chung Chang-wha's King Boxer play March 24th, while Chang Cheh's the Boxer From Shantung (assistant-directed by John Woo) and Lau Kar Leung's Dirty Ho play March 25th. If the four ShawScope prints look nearly as good as the print of King Hu's Come Drink With Me shown at the SFIAAFF two years ago, the PFA is going to have some happy audiences next weekend.

24th SFIAAFF Preview

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS SITE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 2/15/2011. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

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The blog-friendly publicity department of the SF International Asian American Film Festival, which runs from March 16-26, kindly let me attend its press screenings over the past couple weeks. I was able to fit four into my schedule.

Wisit Sasanatieng has just been named one of the "three most important Thai directors" in a poll on www.thaicinema.org. His new film Citizen Dog, like his directing debut (still shelved from any US release) Tears of the Black Tiger, takes its gaudy color palette from the film posters, programs, hand-painted promotional stills and other ephemera that remain from the 16mm film production era of the Thai movie industry which lasted until the early 1970s. But instead of the genre pastiche that Wisit's previous film was, Citizen Dog is loosely structured through the cast of eccentric Bangkok characters country bumpkin Pod encounters while stumbling through a series of jobs hoping to defy the prediction his toothless grandma cackles at him as he leaves the family farm: "If you get a job in Bangkok, you will surely grow a tail!"

Luckily Pod (played by Mahasamuth Boonyarak, who I was not surprised to learn is actually a bass player in a rock band; he's got something of a pop star look) is quite unlike the rest of Bangkok's citizens. He's set apart from the crowd in an early sequence in which he's shown moving about town in crowds of people all singing the film's theme song, some quite soulfully, while he glances around at them quizzically. (Another memorable musical sequence comes in the form of a recitative rap song explaining Granny's reincarnation as a gecko clinging to Pod's lamp.) He also has a singular, unrequited devotion to Jin (Saengthong Gate-Uthong) a quirky cleaning woman he meets while employed as a security guard. I suspect this romance thread in the film, along with Pen-ek Ratanaruang's dryly bemused voice-over, is the origin of the many comparisons to Amelie Wisit's film has garnered. The time we spend with Jin reveals her to have an instinct for romantic self-sabotage similar to Amelie's. But from Pod's point of view, his romantic goals are thwarted not by his own lack of confidence but by the craziness of Bangkok and its absolutely bizarre residents. And indeed the unexpectable flourishes of the writer/director's imagination are the real selling point of Citizen Dog. Read all the plot synopses of this film you want beforehand, but I'm certain there will still be plenty of surprises for you when you actually see it. There's just so much crammed into the running time that no synopsis could cover it all without practically rewriting the screenplay. As of yet without a US distributor, Citizen Dog plays the Castro Theatre March 17 and the PFA March 18.

Linda Linda Linda is perhaps even more fun. It's another in the current cycle of films exploring Japan's teenage subcultures, but unlike my experience watching Kamikaze Girls, Go or All About Lilly Chou-Chou, my interest never flagged and I never sensed director Nobuhiro Yamashita reaching for a sentimental or "shocking" cliche. He drops the audience into the very richly detailed galaxy that is Shibazaki High School counting the days to the upcoming school festival and the accompanying rock and roll talent showcase held in a gymnasium-cum-stage. It took a few scenes for me to find my bearings, but soon after I did I was completely won over by these characters. Kyoko, Nozomi, and Kei need to find a vocalist for their Blue Hearts cover band, and to spite a former bandmate they pick the Korean exchange student, Son. They're not exactly striving against all odds to learn catchy Ramones-esque songs like "Linda, Linda", but rather there's a realness to their struggles competing for practice time at the school's pop music club room, dealing with hopeful and ex-boyfriends, and, for Son especially, figuring out how to fit in. By the end of the film you may just have to struggle not to get up and dance along in the aisles (not only is it a fire hazard as we've all been reminded by Sarah Vowell, but it also blocks the view of your fellow moviegoers. So restrain yourself.) Linda Linda Linda plays Friday, March 17 at the PFA and Wednesday, March 22 at the Kabuki.

The other two I saw were among the films passed over by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television in its selection of China's latest Oscar submission in favor of the Promise, which failed to be nominated.

Despite uprooting the setting from Austria to pre-Communist China, Xu Jinglei's Letter From an Unknown Woman is actually more faithful to Stefan Zweig's 1922 tale of romantic obsession than Max Ophuls' revered 1948 version. But perhaps it's most interesting to read Xu's film politically, as Jiang Wen's intellectual playboy character is surrounded by symbols of Westernization, transforming the heroine's infatuation into a manifestation of what might have been called "capitalist thought" after 1949.

Kekexili: Mountain Patrol tells the grippingly true story of a Beijing journalist who travels to the remotest corner of Tibet where the chiru, or Tibetan antelope, is being wiped out by poaching. The film's plot is filled with ethical ambiguities that hooked me in as tightly as a classic Hollywood noir or Western can. It's refreshing to see increasingly layered films like this one coming out of mainland China's film industry.

Though both films are set for US distribution, only Kekexili: Mountain Patrol has its Frisco theatrical release dates: April 21-27, right in the middle of the Film Society's film festival. If you're like me and you tend to be locked into festival mode at that time, avoiding the arthouses like the Lumiere and Act I/II, make an effort to see the film at its March 20th Kabuki screening.

Of course, Landmark would schedule its most enticing calendared programs for the weeks when another major festival, the SFIFF, will be running. Following Kekexili: Mountain Patrol at the Lumiere will be Carol Reed's 1948 the Fallen Idol April 28-May 4. The Act I/II will get the Confomist that week instead. The rest of the current Landmark calendar, I have to say, doesn't inspire me much. I've already seen the Devil and Daniel Johnston (at IndieFest 2005) and though I'd definitely recommend it to people who wish they knew a bit more about this Daniel Johnston guy they keep hearing about, I'm unlikely to prioritize a repeat viewing.