Adam Hartzell's Silent Film Festival Preview

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The Silent Film Festival opens tonight with Ernst Lubitsch's MGM extravaganza starring Norma Shearer and Ramon Novarro, the Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, with other films like Camille and the Godless Girl playing throughout the weekend. I've already mentioned here that I had the privilege of being part of the festival's research committee this year, researching the Sunday afternoon film Miss Lulu Bett. This is the first year I've spent months prior to the festival discussing the films in the program with the esteemed members of the committee, and I have become thoroughly convinced I'm going to enjoy all of them. But though my own objectivity may arguably have become compromised, I don't want Hell on Frisco Bay to be conspicuously quiet on this weekend. There have already been a good number of excellent advance articles on the festival, from interviews with the festival programmers to anticipatory previews. Knowing that friend and Hell on Frisco Bay contributor Adam Hartzell was going to be missing the festival this year, I arranged to get a few screeners from the festival for him to watch at home, hoping he'd provide a take on a few of this weekend's films that wasn't laced with the same information provided in the program guide; a less "inside baseball" take, as it were, than I'd probably supply. So let me clear out and let Adam take over:

Of all the festivals in San Francisco, the Silent Film Festival is my favorite. And for the second year in a row, I'm going to miss it.

Work is sending me abroad, which will enable me to catch a couple days of the Pucheon Fantastic Film Festival in Bucheon, South Korea, just outside of Seoul, so I would be an entitled prick to complain, so I won't. But I am still bummed I'll be missing the 12th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival as I missed the 11th. In spite of all that the home theater industry enables these days, The Silent Film Festival still demonstrates aspects of the communal theatre experience that can't be duplicated easily in the home, since most of us can't afford the individual overhead of the accompaniment of a live organist or pianist, let alone a live orchestra.

And the live orchestra is my favorite of the unduplicatable assets. One of the films I attended during the 10th Annual was the Brazilian film Sangue Mineiro (Blood of Minas, dir. Humberto Mauro, 1929). Mauro Correa and the Latin American Chamber Music Society performed along with the film, which very much heightened the actions on the screen and the electricity in the packed theatre. (My personal electricity was due to the fact that I was attending this screening with a woman from Montreal with whom I was quite smitten. And thankfully, at that time, she was equally smitten with me. There's nothing like attending an orchestra-accompanied screening of a silent film with a romantic interest if you're lucky enough to have that in your life at the same time as the festival.) This year, only two films will feature an orchestra (the others accompanied by piano or 'The Mighty Wurlitzer" organ), Beggars of Life (William A. Wellman, 1928) and Miss Lulu Bett (William DeMille, 1921). Aware that I wouldn't be able to attend these screenings, nor the screenings of the British film A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929) and the Italian film Maciste (Luigi Romano Borgnetto, 1915), Brian was gracious to snag me screeners from the festival so I could regret what I was missing.

The Maciste screener came without translation, as the festival screening will feature live English translation of Italian intertitles thanks to the Center for the Art of Translation. (An organization I was made aware of by the wonderful Independent Press Spotlight series at Intersection for the Arts, since the Center for the Art of Translation also produces the lovely journal Two Lines.) I'm hesitant to say much about it, but ignorance of language can provide its own pleasures, trying to figure out the narrative without the assistance of the title cards. Actor Bartolomeo Pagano debuts as a larger-than-life strong man whose fancy suits can barely contain his muscle-bound torso. In this first of what would be 26 films about this character, we watch Maciste as he engages in set-ups of sit-ups, push-ups and pull-ups to exploit his strength such as throwing evil-doers onto carts and busting through ceilings to save a distressed damsel. All silent films give us a glimpse of the times they were made within, but this one also presents us with the early serializing of the action flick genre.

Speaking of action, Beggars of Life contains some its own impressive moments, such as when our two main character hobos are jumping onto, and being propelled from, a train. Directed by the director of the first film to win the Best Picture Academy Award, William A. Wellman for the film Wings, the film soon begins with a special effect lesser used these days, probably partly responsible for my finding its use quite appealing. That is, the superimposing of two film stocks upon each other as actress Louis Brooks' character tells her soon-to-be hobo companion (played by Richard Arlen) about the sexual abuses of her adoptive father. The film allows a glimpse of a lifestyle, the boxcar life of hobos, long abandoned like the rail system of which our infrastructure-vulnerable country now laments the passing. As much as it's a romanticized portrayal of this community, far from the real experienced on the rails, it's still as interesting to see how this community was organized on screen, having established their own legal and welfare systems outside the wider body politic.

One of the educations I've received from early cinema is how the world doesn't progress linearly, but in a circular momentum, regressing before it can progress again to greater things. (This is what leads me to be hopeful that my country can recover from the major regressions in human rights and democracy engaged in by the present Cheney/Rove Administration.) Miss Lulu Bett provides glimpses into earlier feminisms through a story that eventually has its revolution in a room without much of a view, but plenty of pots and pans. Played by Lois Wilson and directed by Cecil DeMille's brother William de Mille, Miss Lulu Bett is a sister-in-law relegated to kitchen duty for what appears to be the rest of her days until two suitors come a courting, one more assertive than the other. You know the drill, but according to what the excellent researcher who wrote the program notes told me, if you've read the book or the Pulitzer Prize winning play it’s based on, you don't really know how this will end.

When watching films of early cinema, I find myself often thinking about gestures and how they evolve just like words and grammar within our languages. If certain phrases fall out of common parlance, it makes sense that certain gestures fall out of use as well. When the character Carmen of Sangue Mineiro raises her leg while she kisses her suitor, we know in the past this signified a less chaste kiss within the guise of a chaste one. Although we still know what this leg bend signifies, we never expect to see this in real life outside of intended camp, intended playfulness. So I wonder about the forlorn arching of the torso, head tilted back to signify a whoa-is-me sigh from Miss Lulu Bett's niece that she displays at the front gate with her suitor. Did women really make these gestures back then? Or were they merely the necessities of expressing emotion sans words in silent cinema? And if women did make these gestures, if not stuck in a chicken-or-the-egg genesis confusion, were the gestures heightened or exaggerated due to cinema's influence?

The most powerful scene for me of the four films I watched was the silent film within the silent film of the British film A Cottage on Dartmoor. Besides making me wonder if early cinema had 'Take Off Your Obnoxiously Large Hat' commercials before screenings like our cellphone service providers reminding us to 'Turn Off Your Cellphones', what's so striking about this scene for me is how director Anthony Asquith presents the various ways the cinema was used by the patrons of this time. Some go just for the show; others go to be the show. Some are on dates, some are on the prowl for dates, and some seem to pay more attention to what's going on behind them than to what's in front of them. And when an intriguing suspenseful story such as this barber obsessed with his manicurist colleague takes a turn for the worst in the second half, where my politics cringe at the misplaced sympathies, as is the case for me with A Cottage on Dartmoor, it's nice to know that the experience of cinema will allow for many other various options for enjoyment and education besides the narratives. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival provides history, culture, language, music, and the spectacle of the sounds and visuals on screen and around the lovely Castro Theatre that each work together and in spite of the other to entertain the most and least distinguishing patrons amongst us.

So go and take advantage of what I can't. See one of these films, any of them. It's an experience that gives you hope in the future from the dreams of the past.

Adam Hartzell on Killer of Sheep

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There are a lot of options for Frisco cinephiles this week. The Mission Creek Music/Film Festival wraps up Sunday with events at Artists' Television Access and the Lab. Film Night in the Park starts its summertime video series this Saturday with the Graduate in Washington Square Park. Nanook of the North plays the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum the same night. Naked Lunch plays as a midnight movie Friday and Saturday at the Clay. Both parts of Olympia screen at SFMOMA on Sunday (and again the following Sunday). You can follow along with some of the current Hollywood selections at the Cannes Film Festival by checking out Zodiac at the Red Vic Friday and Saturday, and Grindhouse all week at the theatre it was seemingly just about made for, the Parkway. And the Film on Film Foundation will present 16mm prints of Venom and Eternity and Christopher MacClaine's The End at the Roxie on Wednesday, May 23rd. That's just a sampling of the cinematic opportunities here; check my sidebar for more.

But no matter how many of the above events you attend, any self-respecting follower of non-mainstream cinema should have as the top priority of the week at least one screening of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, playing May 18-24 at the Rafael, Shattuck and Castro Theatre in beautiful new 35mm prints. Before this year it had only been seen on 16mm prints, and reportedly they were often beat-up and scratchy ones at that. Still, the film made a strong impression on just about anybody who saw it. When Adam Hartzell, who occasionally contributes to Hell on Frisco Bay when he's not immersed in Korean cinema, heard the film was coming to town he immediately offered to write on it. Here's his piece:

Starting this weekend at the Castro Theatre, through the tireless efforts of many unsung individuals, San Franciscans will have the opportunity to see a film that has been kept from us for way too long. Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep will finally see the release it has deserved for many years, roughly 30 years after it was completed. Killer of Sheep was the culmination of Burnett's graduate work at UCLA. My understanding is that it has taken this long for it to receive its release because the film has been locked up in copyright wranglings regarding the jazz numbers used on the soundtrack. So those of us who have seen it have, perhaps, been involved in questionable practices. But we engage in such ambiguous practices not out of lawlessness, but out of strong interests in cultural documents that present to us moments of transcendence.

My only screening of this film was in April 2001 thanks to Joel Shepard bringing Charles Burnett to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (When Burnett was brought to the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley a few years later, they weren’t able to show Killer of Sheep due to the copyright issues. Why YBCA could screen it and PFA couldn’t, I don’t know. I’m guessing it has something to do with where the films legal matters were at the time of each screening.) Although I am always open to how my factual memory fails me, I feel quite confident in my emotional memory. I recall being completely captivated by this black and white homage to the everyday life of African-Americans in South Central Los Angeles.

Since Killer of Sheep was completed while Burnett was at university, Burnett used non-professional actors. In spite of this, or because of this, I found the film truly visionary. There is a deep sadness in the faces of many in this film, particularly the father who works in a slaughterhouse. But there is never pity. The sadness is clearly a part of the human condition, showing the working class without the buffer of buffoonery. Burnett says that he was reacting somewhat to the primary portrayals of blacks in cinema of the time, the caricatures of blaxploitation and the black characters that spoke more to a white community than to his own. Mind you, there is some humor and playfulness in the film, such as the refreshingly commonplace scene of a large appliance being moved around the house. And those who've seen David Gordon Green's debut film, George Washington, will experience the dissonance of allusion out of order caused by discovering that Green's masking of one of the children in his film was clearly a reference to Burnett's definitive work. But the film's main intent is human dignity for everyday people.

As demonstrated above, Killer of Sheep is often positioned against the dominant media portrayals of African-Americans at the time. But binaries and other oppositional frames are too easy. Christine Acham demonstrates the need to get beyond these oppositional frames in her book Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power. She shows that even much maligned TV shows such as Julia (1968-71) and Good Times (1974-79) had their moments of resistant discourse if not through the shows but through what Robin D.G. Kelley calls "hidden transcripts", where the respective lead actresses of those shows, Diahann Carroll and Esther Rolle, sought agency within the counter-narratives permitted in mainstream magazines when they found they couldn't push the shows in the directions they desired. What Burnett accomplishes with this film is what many African-Americans maneuvering through the restrictive environments of movie and TV screens of the time hoped to negotiate with their crafts, to display their community with the deep respect denied them for so long. Not many were able to create the complete visions they aspired towards since much of the production and direction was outside their full control. Burnett accomplished what he did because he was outside the industry through the productive and supportive space of academia, where, at least during the era when Burnett attended, making money from ones academic projects wasn’t a concern. Then his art ran into the commodification of another art form and his work was suppressed for a few decades.

But it's finally here for us to enjoy free of ethical dilemmas. Persistence pays off. Just like many of us were anxious with anticipation to finally see Tears of a Black Tiger, a very different film than Killer of Sheep, earlier this year after its sentence to release-limbo, the long-term investments many have made in this work will pay off with experiential dividends. (Interestingly, both these films were released from release-limbo the very same year that the Catholic Church abolishes the whole theological concept of the "State of Limbo".) Yes, I have many more American films to see, but I'm confident Killer of Sheep will maintain its rightful place in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry as one of the greatest American films ever made.

Breaking Silence

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I've really been enjoying the 50th S.F. International Film Festival over the past few days. The filmgoing is fun of course, but at least as much of the fun has been found in meeting up and talking movies with discourse-hungry cinephiles, whether longtime friends I don't see as often as I should, or with folks I've only just met. This evening at the Kabuki the festival publicity department hosted a gathering of bloggers and other web-centric writers, many of whom I'd only ever been introduced before to through their work online. I swapped stories with Cathleen Rountree, exchanged a few words with Kevin Lee, and more, all only a day after finally meeting Lincoln Specter of Bayflicks, a major inspiration for this site. I particularly enjoyed a brief conversation with Tony An because he too had seen Sounds of Sand and, though our reactions to the film were very different, I found I finally had an outlet in which I could respectfully dislodge all my opinions on the film, and get a thoughtful rebuttal to boot. I don't feel I can really get into too many of the specifics, as the film is at "hold review" status, meaning I'm supposed to wait until it gets a commercial release before I say more than seventy-five words on it. But to put it briefly, I agree with others who have called the film "soulless", "predictable" and "self-congratulatory", though I must admit that because of a) its eye-popping landscape photography and b) the cross-cultural issues it brings forth through its very existence as a film shot in Africa by a European, an international film festival is perhaps the ideal environment for it to be seen and discussed in.

Another hold review film is Private Fears In Public Places, which I'd call a mediocre play, exquisitely directed. In other words, a real test to the limits of my auteurist predelections (not that I'm nearly as well-versed in the cinema of Alain Resnais as I'd like to be). My favorite new film seen at the festival so far has got to be the aptly-named Opera Jawa. (And no, it has nothing to do with cloaked scavengers other than the fact that back in the seventies a certain festival honoree took to appropriating names from the world's cultures for his creature creations, including the word Indonesians use for their most populous island Java.) But this New Crowned Hope film is something I feel I need to sit with for a while before being able to say anything substantial about. It certainly was beautiful on the big Castro Theatre screen.

No, the films I feel I can most usefully talk about at this bleary-eyed stage of festival madness, are the ones I attended in my capacity as a silent film devotee. Well, near-devotee, I suppose. A full-fledged devotee would never have let himself miss Saturday afternoon's Castro screening of the Iron Mask with Kevin Brownlow in attendance, even if he was scheduled to work and the film was screening with a sound-on-print score instead of a live musical accompaniment. I mean, I'm not the hugest fan of Carl Davis but he is the man the utterly tasteful Brownlow chose for the job of providing the music to the film he restored, and I'm sure the score has merit. Anyway, I wish I could have made it to that screening, which I hear was, of Brownlow's three festival appearances this weekend in honor of his hugely justified receipt of the Mel Novikoff Award for "enhancing the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema," the most delightfully anecdote-rich.

You probably already know what a legend in his own time Brownlow is. If he had only made his two so-called "amateur" masterpieces, It Happened Here! and Winstanley, his places in British and World Cinema History would be assured. But he has so generously recorded and popularized under-explored sections of cinema history through his unceasing efforts as a writer, interviewer, preservationist, and documentary filmmaker, that his impact is even more felt on the way we and future generations will be able to regard these histories. For my part, I can credit my borrowing of his "Cinema Europe: the Other Hollywood" miniseries from the local library, as much as anything else I can think of, for my interest in movies blossoming into a full-fledged cinephilia. I haven't read all of his books or seen all his documentaries yet, but so far I've been transfixed by each I've encountered. And the idea of seeing his 2000 restoration of Abel Gance's Napoleon in a cinema, even if due to rights issues it has to be in another country, is one of my greatest cinephile dreams.

Seeing Brownlow speak in person, taking a rapt audience through a program of immaculately-projected, grandly-accompanied (by pianist Judith Rosenberg) short films and excerpts, at the Pacific Film Archive yesterday evening might have been another, had I the imagination to dream it. Some of the films and scenes he showed were great. Others were not terribly special beyond their status as relative rarities. But all were provided with fascinating context by Brownlow. Before showing the 1913 short Suspense, directed by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, he alerted us to take note of an early use of a three-way split-screen effect to acknowledge a telephone conversation and its subject (the splitting diagonals elegantly taking their angle from a lampshade in the center of the frame), but also ruled out the possibility of it being the earliest such use, as he'd seen an earlier Danish film employ a similar effect. He showed a film made in Frisco Bay's backyard, Broncho Billy's Adventure, filmed by the Essanay in a rather empty-looking San Rafael before the studio settled in at Niles in the East Bay. He showed a film promoting kit homes, made by the Ford Motor Company, that he suspected was a likely influence on Buster Keaton's One Week, and then he showed both complete reels of Keaton's comedy tour-de-force. Believe it or not, I had never before seen One Week, though it plays fairly often at Frisco Bay theatres, including a showing at last year's SFIFF. Somehow I'd never made it to another local screening, and I had resisted successfully the lure of DVD and youtube presentations of the film. Now I know why: to save myself for the privilege of experiencing it for the first time with a terrific live score, a laughing audience, and in the glow of Brownlow's marvelous enthusiasm and insight.

It wasn't all laughter and delight, though. When introducing a clip from Raymond Bernard's the Chess Player, Brownlow reminded the room full of silent film enthusiasts, with a healthy contingent of scholars and archivists, of a darker side to the history of film preservation. He told of how "we owe the existence of this film to the Gestapo," as the Nazis, who I did not realize had created the first film archive, confiscated the Chess Player among other films when they arrested Bernard during the occupation. They released the director on the urging of his famous father Tristan Bernard, but kept the films safe from destruction during the war (except for reel one of the Chess Player, which disappeared). The clip made the film look like a tremendous epic, but I'm not sure I'll ever be able to watch Bernard's film without thinking of how bitter a victory it is when great objects of art are saved while so much else is lost.

After the screening, there was a very brief question-and-answer session in which Brownlow demonstrated his quick wit and ability to oh-so-gracefully deal with a question asked in more of a spirit of showing off in than requesting knowledge, but before the house was cleared I was thankful to get a chance to approach the man and ask a question in person. I felt I had to ask something about the documentary he'd directed, Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic, since he'd had to bow out of the q-and-a after that 9:15 PM Saturday screening due to jet lag. I probably should have asked about the doc's absolutely breathtaking Elmer Bernstein underscore (according to imdb, it's the legendary composer's last credit), or about how his impression of DeMille had changed since making the "Autocrats" episode of his "Hollywood" miniseries in 1980. Or else just thanked him for the evening. But I couldn't resist posing an entirely too-big question about DeMille's sincerity, and he oh-so-gracefully gave an answer about how the director's cynicism was far more evident in the sound era than the silent. Though I doubt Mr. Brownlow intended it as such, I'm trying to take it as a lesson against wordiness.

Which should be my cue to wrap this post up. But before I do, I just want to point out a few more silent film-related offerings that are of great interest to me. While the SFIFF is still in full force, there are two more such programs: Notes to a Toon Underground, a May 5th program of old and new silent animations backed by live music from local indie rockers, and Guy Maddin's neo-silent Brand Upon the Brain with live music and Joan Chen as guest narrator on May 7th, both at the Castro.

This summer, the Niles Essanay Film Museum will show 35mm prints of Broncho Billy's Adventure and 56 more Essanay films of all sorts in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the film company's founding. It starts June 2nd when the 1915 Charlie Chaplin Essanay short His New Job plays in front of the first feature he directed, the Kid. Each subsequent Saturday evening will find Essanay films gracing the Edison Theatre screen, culminating in the tenth annual edition of the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, June 29-July 1, which will include Essanay films featuring Max Linder, Gloria Swanson, Frances X. Bushman, Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson of course, and many many more. Niles is nestled in a remote enough corner of Frisco Bay for me to have only been there once, but I'd love to go again, and this series may just be the perfect excuse.

Then from July 13-15, it's Frisco's own Silent Film Festival, which has announced a sneak preview of four of the titles it's bringing to this year's edition: Beggars of Life by William Wellman, starring Louise Brooks as a cross-dressing railroad-hopper, the Cottage on Dartmoor, the final silent film directed by British director Anthony Asquith, the Student Prince of Old Heidelberg, one of the Ernst Lubitsch silent films that had been absent from the retrospective held at the PFA earlier this year, and the Godless Girl, clips of which were featured prominently in Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic. It looks to me like a great lineup as usual, but I have to admit my bias: I was recently honored to become a volunteer member of this year's film research committee, which means I'm charged with writing program notes for one of the films playing this July. Don't bother trying to guess which, since I won't tell, and it may not even be one of these four that have been announced so far. What I will say is this: the one I'm writing on is the only one I've seen as of yet, and as I'm learning more about the other researchers' films I'm growing more and more impatient to see them all on the big Castro screen.

Syndromes and a Censor

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* * * * *Last night I finally got to see the new film I’ve been anticipating with more fervor than any other in the past six months, Syndromes and a Century by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (whose Tropical Malady was Cinemarati’s #10 film of 2005). This privilege felt bittersweet, however, knowing that Thai moviegoers, who had been anticipating the film at least as fervently as I, had just been denied an opportunity to see it on local cinema screens. As reported by Kong Rithdee, the Thai Censorship Board has demanded that Apichatpong cut four scenes from the film before letting it be released as scheduled on two Bangkok screens April 18th. The director refused to make the cuts, stating in the introduction to an online petition:

If these offspring of mine cannot live in their own country for whatever reasons, let them be free. Since there are other places that warmly welcome them as who they are, there is no reason to mutilate them from the fear of the system, or from greed. Otherwise there is no reason for one to continue making art.

If you’ve seen Blissfully Yours and are imagining the censored scenes might bear a resemblance to the sexually explicit images in that film, you might be surprised to learn that the contested content actually involves scenes with comparatively tame images:

1. A robed monk plays an acoustic guitar.

2. A doctor kisses his girlfriend while in his office, both fully clothed. A close-up of his crotch reveals that he is sexually aroused.

3. Another doctor hides whisky in a prosthetic leg in a hospital basement, and offers to share it with her colleagues, some of whom oblige.

4. A robed monk plays with a toy flying saucer in a city park.

It seems that these images are controversial because they show a human side to authority figures that are normally expected in Thai society to be portrayed in a very austere manner, even if it runs counter to the reality of daily life in modern Thailand. I’ve seen Thai monks playing guitars and otherwise recreating. Apichatpong’s parents are both doctors, so if any filmmaker might know about the behavior of the Thai medical profession when patients are not around, it would be him. Not that Apichatpong’s films employ documentary realism, or should be judged by those standards, of course. But a quote from a representative of the Thai Medical Council, "drinking whisky in a hospital is not proper conduct by medical professionals," betrays a rather simplistic understanding of the function and force of art in modern culture.

Syndromes and a Century itself shows the friction between as well as the gravity connecting the traditional and the modern, which befits a work commissioned for the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Perhaps it was somehow inevitable that the Thai government, currently at something of a crossroads following last fall’s coup that left the country in the hands of the military, might react negatively to some of the situations in Apichatpong’s unconventional film. Somehow this quote by George Bernard Shaw seems appropriate:

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

I encourage you to sign the petition here.

For those who have seen Tropical Malady

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Friday night's event at the Pacific Film Archive, in which Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul guided the audience through a screening of his 2004 Cannes prize-winner Tropical Malady, marked perhaps the first time I was thankful, with no reservations whatsoever, that a theatrical screening was being projected from a DVD rather than a 35mm print. Such a print had been shown the previous night for the benefit of those of us who wanted to soak up the richness of the film's images in their full glory, but this night was to be devoted less to pure aesthetic pleasure than to textual analysis. With Apichatpong (or "Joe", as he is often called) in front of a microphone with his hand on a remote control allowing him to pause, slow forward, or adjust the audio level at will, it was a unique chance for something like a live director's audio commentary only all the more illuminating for its flexibility. Not only did Joe provide his own personal reflections and interpretations on this famously enigmatic film at precisely opportune moments, but PFA curator Steve Seid also asked audience members to call out "stop" when we thought of a question to ask for ourselves. After putting forth a poorly-worded query fairly early in the process I found myself too shy to pursue more, but others had some very insightful questions triggering fascinating answers.

Joe made several disclosures that I'd never remembered reading in reviews or interviews (perhaps I've just read the wrong ones), or hearing in the audio commentary discussion with Chuck Stephens on the Strand DVD. Some are interesting little tidbits regarding production, while others feel right now something like world-shattering revelations that cast the film in an entirely new light. Maybe there's a bit of both in all of them. I'll share a few of them (in paraphrase), but I implore you not to read further unless you've seen Tropical Malady before. I get the sense that Joe would rather that these tidbits/revelations not interfere with anyone's first experience with this very personal film for him. a.k.a. SPOILER WARNING!!!

1. One reason why the film is credited to three directors of photography is that working with Jean-Louis Vialard (Investigations Into the Invisible World, Dans Paris) was frustrating and he was soon taken off the film. Apparently his aggressive style of persuasion did not mesh well with the Thai style of making a film (or Joe's style, anyway). Vialard was adamant that certain shots be captured just a certain way, which required very long periods of time to set up the lighting.

My reaction: Maybe Vialard ought to have read a book like this before taking on the job? I must say, however, that the one shot Joe singled out as taking Vialard particularly long to set up (a half day), the one just before the end of the film's first half, in which Tong sits up from his bed, his body bifurcated by light and shadow, is particularly beautiful and perhaps on some level the key shot in the film.

2. According to Joe, one idea he had when making Tropical Malady is that all of the male characters in the film would be gay. Not only did he express this through certain casting choices and direction of actors, but also in design details such as posters adorning the walls of his locations.

My reaction: It's impossible not to notice the unblinking acceptance of homosexuality by the characters in Tropical Malady, including Tong's family who seem completely at ease with his interest in the soldier Keng, the sisters who offer to smoke the two lovers out, and essentially everyone else in the film. And there is definitely a lot of other flirtatious behavior with other men in the film, in scenes like the one in the pool hall for example. The entire first half of the film, at least up to the point of the roadside beating, feels like it exists in some kind of utopia. (Some have found the first half of the film to be so conflict-free as to be completely unsatisfying.) But it seems Joe's unifying idea behind this utopian state is one that never occurred to me at all. Fascinating food for further thought.

3. Tropical Malady has been praised for its sound design, in which the ambient sounds of the jungle and other environments are turned way up in the mix to a highly visceral level in a theatre with a good sound system. But according to the director, in Thailand there were many complaints that in certain scenes the dialogue was not audible enough to understand. Joe admitted that he didn't really mind that Thais couldn't clearly hear certain dialogue, an example being the conversation in which Keng tells Tong, "When I gave you the Clash tape I forgot to give you my heart."

My reaction: Though it might be tempting to use this disclosure as evidence that he makes his films for subtitle-reading festival audiences without thinking of audiences from own country, I think there's reason to conclude the contrary. In his DVD commentary with Chuck Stephens, Joe makes it clear that he's a little uncomfortable about the corniness of some of this lovestruck dialogue; it seems to me that he'd almost rather the audience not be let into his characters' private moment. Perhaps the Thai version, in which the dialogue can't really be made out, better represents his authorial intention in certain scenes than a fully subtitled version does.

I'm also interested in the way Joe deals with the foregrounding and withholding of sounds because I feel like his ideas on this front are interacting with the relatively short history of sound cinema in Thailand; as far as I know, no other country's film industry experienced a longer silent film era. As I understand it, it wasn't until the 1970s that Thai films stopped being distributed without soundtracks, with local troupes of voice actors providing the film dialogue in each village, a practice often seen as a holdover from the benshi-style narration practiced throughout East Asia until sound cinema displaced it, country by country, starting in the 1930s. What this has to do with Joe's films and videos is fodder for an entirely other realm of inquiry that I hope to explore someday.

4. The shot in which Keng rests against a tree was based on an old photograph of a resting hunter that Joe particularly liked. He asked the actor to hold the same pose as that of the subject of the photograph.

My reaction: More ammunition for a reading of Joe's work as postmodernist. He's clearly interested in a dialogue with imagemakers of the past, and not just those in the motion picture field. It's a great composition, anyway.

5. When you hear the sound of dogs crying in the distance, they were inspired by Joe's appreciation of hearing the same in Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry.

My reaction: I think this is the first confirmation I've heard that Joe has definitely been influenced by Kiarostami, though it's a contention that many critics have put forth. Even in this interview, in which he's asked to react to comparisons between his work and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's, Tsai Ming-Liang's, and Kiarostami's, Joe cops to a personal connection to Hou and Tsai, but essentially punts on the question of Kiarostami.

6. The shot of the tiger staring intently at Keng at the end of the film could never have been achieved naturally; tigers just don't do that sort of thing for the camera. Actually, the image was achieved through digital compositing by the German visual effects house that also worked on the ghostly zebu and the luminous tree effects. In fact the tiger's movements have been randomized and looped.

My reaction: Watch carefully the next time you see the film, and you'll definitely notice the loop. It's a pretty cool effect.

This event has definitely been a major highlight of my cinematic year so far, and I'm now all the more hungry to finally see Syndromes and a Century at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts next weekend. It gets six showings (five evening, one matinee) Friday through Sunday. Hopefully I can make it to at least two of them.