The 39 Steps (1935)

WHO: Alfred Hitchcock directed.

WHAT: The 39 Steps is one of Hitchcock's most celebrated films, and perhaps the most celebrated of all the films made during his "British period" before he moved to Hollywood. If you've only seen it on home video, alone, it might be difficult to understand why this has been true. Sure, it has a perfectly acceptable spy-thriller plot and fine performances from its cast, but what distinguishes it from all the other well-crafted films he made in the 1930s? Seeing it on a big screen makes its reputation understandable. Surrounded by an audience, one is more likely to appreciate how this is not just a thriller but also one of Hitchcock's funniest films, and how its treatment of male-female relationships mirrors the developments in the screwball comedies of Hollywood of the same era. One also realizes how Hitchcock employs no fewer than three separate scenes to explore ideas about performers and audiences (as he later would in The Man Who Knew Too Much's remake, North By Northwest and elsewhere), making this one of his first, and most powerful, meta-cinematic films.

WHERE/WHEN: At 5:55 PM and 9:15 PM at the Stanford Theatre tonight and tomorrow night only.

WHY: Every few years the Stanford programs a month or two of Alfred Hitchcock films. This year's collection includes 18 films, all on double-bills (The 39 Steps is paired with the equally-excellent The Lady Vanishes) and runs from this last Thursday until April 7th. It's not as extensive as the Pacific Film Archive's current Hitchcock series, which has 28 features and a short, with more on the way. But the PFA is only showing each film one time apiece, while the Stanford shows each of its selections six or eight times per week. If you haven't been attending the PFA series it's possible to see all but two (the frequently-confused Sabotage and Saboteur) of the films you missed at the Stanford.

HOW: 35mm prints only in this series.

Pootie Tang (2001)

WHO: Lance Crouther plays the title role, and will be introducing the film in character and giving a not-in-character q&a after the screening.

WHAT: I hope I never get so wrapped up in the investigation of sophisticated works of cinema by important auteurs that I can never find time to appreciate a silly, broad comedy. It's true that most Hollywood-produced comedies over the past fifteen years haven't made me laugh nearly as hard as everyone (me, the filmmakers, anyone I watched the film with) had hoped I would. Pootie Tang is a notable exception. I missed seeing it in a theatre- it opened the same weekend as the much-anticipated A.I. and quickly disappeared from screens, so a lot of cinephiles missed seeing it that way. But upon being turned onto the film shortly after its video release, I soon found myself rewatching it frequently and spreading the Pootie Tang gospel with anyone I could find who wasn't simply put off by the title. That admittedly was not a lot of people. It doesn't sound like a movie title but the punch line to a very nasty and unfunny joke. Even co-star Chris Rock used it as such when he hosted the Academy Awards one year.

When comedian Louis C.K. starting becoming widely famous a few years later, I was late to realize it, as usual with pop culture figures. Friends would talk about his stand-up or his television show and I'd pipe in with, "oh, the writer-director of Pootie Tang?," which sometimes got me strange sideways looks. But more and more I find myself meeting out-of-the-closet Pootie Tang fans, some of whom have been fans at least as long as I have. It's easier to be a proud Pootie Tang lover as respect for Louis C.K. and Wanda Sykes increases. Occasionally I still encounter resistance from skeptical cinephiles. That's when I point out that Pootie Tang's cinematographer was Willy Kurant, who shot Masculin-Féminin for Jean-Luc Godard, The Immortal Story for Orson Welles, Under the Sun of Satan for Maurice Pialat, Trans-Europ-Express for Alain Robbe-Grillet and Dinky Hocker for Tom Blank.

WHERE/WHEN: 10PM tonight at the Castro Theatre, presented by SF Sketchfest

WHY: Sketchfest is in its final days but there are still quite a few events of interest to movie fans. Just before tonight's Pootie Tang screening, Peaches Christ will present a screening of Welcome To the Dollhouse with star Heather Matarazzo on hand. Tomorrow afternoon there's a showing of The Naked Gun with David Zucker and Priscilla Presley attending, followed by two sold-out shows (thanks to Patton Oswalt's involvement methinks): Twilight and Army of Darkness.

Though I'd had mixed experiences with Sketchfest shows in prior years, I'm feeling very good about the popular event after Wednesday night's Roxie screening of Animal House, before which Inside Joke's Carl Arnheiter spoke with the film's director John Landis. Arnheiter struck just the right balance as interviewer, I felt, between making wisecracks and encouraging Landis's joke-telling instincts (this is a comedy festival after all), and eliciting some incredible stories about his first years in Hollywood, working in the Fox Studio's mailroom, rubbing elbows with George Stevens (who bought him lunch because he was a rare young American who could name his films), Bruce Lee (whom Landis did a looney impression of), and Robert Altman (who was apparently a hard man to find on the M.A.S.H. set). Best of all was Landis's demonstration of just how new the art of the motion picture is: his frequent editor George Folsey Jr, is the son of the cinematographer George Folsey, who during one of his conversations with Landis casually spoke about interacting with Edwin S. Porter, inventor of much of narrative cinema language before D. W. Griffith or anyone. This was pure cinephile catnip, and I'm so glad I was able to be there, even if Animal House isn't exactly Pootie Tang.

HOW: 35mm print, thankfully. Now that it's become difficult to pry 35mm prints out of the clutches of certain studios unless the screening involves the presence of the talent who had worked on the film, it feels like a wasted opportunity when a festival invites talent yet screens from a digital copy. So I'm pleased that although Sketchfest only involved one 35mm screening two years ago (Broadcast News), this time around they conduct four of them. Animal House was shown in a practically pristine print, and Welcome to the Dollhouse and The Naked Gun join Pootie Tang as shows expected to use 35mm prints.

Silence Has No Wings (1966)

WHO: Directed by Kazuo Kuroki.

WHAT: In the mid-1960s, the studio system in Japan was facing serious structural problems and began exploring new strategies to holding the attention of audiences. When Toho Studio distributed Hiroshi Teshigahara's independently-produced Woman in the Dunes it became a hit in Japan and abroad. Toho asked the film's producer Yasuo Matsukawa to provide a follow-up for them to distribute. Matsukawa enlisted Kuroki, a director of documentaries who had always been interested in breaking into features, to make the film, which ended up being Silence Has No Wings. With all the publicity already set for its distribution through  the studio, once Toho executives viewed the completed film they cancelled its intended release, calling it a "lunatic film". It was instead distributed by the Art Theatre Guild, a company that specialized in releasing films by European auteurs to Japanese cinemas, a much more natural home for a film by a director profoundly influenced by Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. A year and a half later, the ATG released the first in a string of dozens of films produced under its own auspices: Shohei Imamura's remarkable A Man Vanishes.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:00 PM tonight at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Silence Has No Wings opens a spectacular series at the Pacific Film Archive, Chronicles of Inferno: Japan's Art Theater Guild. It's three weeks of rarely-shown works made by filmmakers associated with the ATG, all of them legendary in the history of the Japanese New Wave. Although this weekend's in-person appearance by another documentarian-turned feature filmmaker Susumu Hani unfortunately has been cancelled, his ATG-distributed She And He will still screen Saturday night, while two of his early classroom-set shorts and his best-known film, The Inferno of First Love (produced by the ATG) screen in his absence Sunday. 

Hani's sudden cancellation is disappointing because chances to meet key figures of 1960s Japanese filmmaking are all-too-rare here in the Bay Area. Takahiko Iimura is the only director from that era that I can recall making a public appearance here in the past 10 years or so that I've been faithfully paying attention to such matters. (Two of Iimura's films are part of a complimentary/competing series of films even more underground than the Art Theatre Guild, happening at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, incidentally.) And opportunities for this to occur are disappearing rapidly. Ten years ago, eight of the nine directors with films in this PFA series were still alive (all but Shuji Terayama, who made Pastoral: Hide And Seek but died in 1983 after making his, and the ATG's, final film, Farewell to the Ark.) With the mid-2000s passings of Imamura, Kuroki, and Kihachi Okamoto (Human Bullet), and more recently of Koji Wakamatsu (Ecstasy of the Angels), who died last October, and of Nagisa Oshima (The Ceremony) who died less than a month ago, there are only three filmmakers in this series still among us: Hani, Masahiro Shinoda (Double Suicide) and Toshio Matsumoto (Shura).

HOW: 16mm print. The entire series screens on either 35mm or 16mm.

The Wind (1928)

WHO: Victor Sjöström directed this.

WHAT: On a first viewing, I must admit, this film didn't do much for me. But seeing it for a second time at the 2009 San Francisco Silent Film Festival made me realize just what a masterpiece it is. Here's an excerpt from Benjamin Schrom's excellent essay for that festival's program book:

The Wind marked the end of an era. It was the final silent major motion picture released by MGM, the final silent film by one of the era’s great directors, Victor Sjöström, and the final silent film for of one its greatest stars, Lillian Gish. It was also a box office failure, simultaneously panned and hailed by critics, called an “American western” as well as a “European” film, loved by those who worked on it and hated by those who produced it. 

WHERE/WHEN: The Wind screens as part of a two-film Pacific Film Archive screening of Sjöström films that begins at 7:00 PM. The other film was made by the director in 1917 when he was still working in his home country Sweden: Terje Vigen.

WHY: Singling this film out today is my not-so-subtle way to draw attention to the SFSFF's recently-redesigned website. There's lots to explore there, but I'm most interested in pointing out that for the first time, all of the program essays about past festival films and musicians, are easily readable (and share-able) online. Schrom's essay on The Wind is a fine example. If you'll allow me to toot an old horn, I'm excited that seven essays I wrote for the festival are now archived there as well, so if you're interested in reading about Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But..., Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera, Tod Browning's West of Zanzibar, Douglas Fairbanks as The Gaucho, F. W. Murnau's Sunrise, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro, or William de Mille's Miss Lulu Bett, I've just provided handy links to each article I've written for a SFSFF screening. 

I'm excited to see the films playing at the festival's upcoming (February 16th) Silent Winter, including a 1916 version of Snow White, a selection of Buster Keaton comedies, Raoul Walsh directing Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad, Mary Pickford's final silent film My Best Girl, and Murnau's final film before coming to Hollywood, Faust. Nearly as exciting as that are the live musical accompaniments planned for the day, with the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra handling the Fairbanks, organist Christian Elliot tackling the Murnau, and pianist Donald Sosin taking on the rest. But nearly as exciting as that, is reading the essays on these films by the current SFSFF stable of researcher/writers. The souvenir program books the festival produces get better and better every year.

HOW: Both films at the PFA tonight will run in 35mm prints, Terje Vigen imported from Sweden and The Wind from the PFA's collection. The Wind will feature Bruce Loeb's live accompaniment on piano, while Terje Vigen will feature a live string quartet score.

Adam Hartzell on Bound By Flesh

With Noir City behind us, more film festivals are populating in Frisco Bay cinemas and on my sidebar. The next one to begin is SF IndieFest, which starts Thursday February 7th and continues for fifteen days. Michael Hawley has written a fine preview, and my friend Adam Hartzell has a review of one of the few documentaries in the program. Here's Adam:

When we build up hopes for a film from which we anticipate big things, we may be setting ourselves up to letting ourselves down.  Will my anxious awaiting for Park Chan-wook's Stoker or Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer, two South Korean ventures into U.S. production territory, live up to my expectations of those two directors?  Will the rest of the U.S. population finally get on the Song Kang-ho greatness bandwagon with his role in Snowpiercer like some in the U.S. finally have with Bae Doo-na in Cloud Atlas?  Or am I just building a poorly constructed infrastructure of hope that will only collapse from the slightest nudge of less-than-greatness?

The examples I gave above are for dramatic films, but I think the danger of high hopes causes the greatest harm for documentaries.  Particularly when those documentaries are done about topics on which we ourselves have engaged in a great deal of outside research.  Case in point for me, Lisa Zemeckis' Bound By Flesh (2012), screening as part of this year's SF Indie Fest running from Feb 7-21 at the Roxie and other San Francisco venues.  If I hadn't read Alice Domurat Dreger's exhaustive medical anthropological study of the lives of conjoined twins, One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal (Harvard University Press, 2004), would I have found Bound By Flesh more compelling?  Instead, I only experience disappointment at a missed opportunity for something greater than the life of Violet and Daisy Hilton told from limited perspectives.

Bound By Flesh details the life of the Hilton sisters, conjoined sisters from  England who eventually found their way to the U.S., via Australia, where they found huge success on the vaudeville circuit.  Most cinephiles know them from their role in Tod Browning's Freaks (1932).  (How Dreger deconstructs Freaks by flipping the script of the dramatic arc in in that film as her own narrative arc for One of Us is part of what makes her rigorous scholarship so accessible and so brilliant.)  Along the way to stardom, they suffered child abuse, both physical and emotional, including being surveilled every hour of their lives by their guardians.  Eventually the Hilton sisters secured emancipation, but since they were now on their own in society for the  first time, they made some less than ideal choices, the consequences of  which they survived temporarily.  But when the vaudeville circuit began to crumble against the enticements provided for audiences by movies and (later) television, the Hilton sisters eventually found themselves impoverished in a new labor market where their skills didn't secure the income and  companionship to which they had previously become accustomed.

The life of the Hilton sisters is compelling and propels the linear narrative in Bound By Flesh.   The talking heads interspersed between the stills, film and TV footage,  and audio recordings of the twins have interesting details to add.  The most engaging of the talking heads is Amy Fulkerson, the curator of collections at The Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas.  To Zemeckis' credit, leaving in The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton's author Dean Jensen's giggles when talking about what he knows of their sexual lives reveals the prurient fascination some male audiences had for the sisters.  But when the former sideshow promoter Ward Hall chooses the word' handicapped' rather than 'freaks'  at one point, stated in a way by him that seems to dismiss liberal calls to re-think our language, it's an unintentional fissure in the text  that illuminates the primary problems with Bound By Flesh.

Why weren't any conjoined twins included amongst the talking heads?  Yes,  there aren't that many to choose from, but country singer conjoined  twins Lori and George Schappell are still boot-scootin' and as conjoined twin performers, they are as appropriate, if not more, than any of the talking heads dominating the film.  (Readers might know the Schappell twins as Lori and Reba, but in 2007, Reba began identifying as male and now goes by George.)   The historical notes on the impact of American entertainment choices is valuable, but so much important  history is still missing.  There's no mention of the lives of other conjoined twins in the circus, of earlier times or contemporary to the Hilton sisters.  For those who don't know, the reason conjoined twins were referred to as 'Siamese twins' was because the first world famous ones were Chang and Eng Bunker who were Chinese-Malay conjoined twins  born in what was then called Siam.  They were successful enough after their circus careers to purchase a plantation with slaves in North Carolina.  They also married two women who were themselves sisters,  although not conjoined, and had 21 children between them. (Darin Strauss wrote a fictional account of their lives called Chang and Eng: A Novel where Strauss decides to whip up some psycho-sexual speculation for some reason.)  Reference to the experience of conjoined twins past (Chang and Eng) and present (Lori and George) along with the seeming paradox that, although objectified, some performers, such as the little person Charles Sherwood Stratton (aka General Tom Thumb) were able to establish fulfilling careers through work in the circus would have expanded the lives of the Hilton sisters beyond an isolated 'freakish' moment in history.

An equally important history to weave in to the story of the Hilton sisters is the history of the Disability Rights movement.  Part of how such context would be helpful is in explaining how the isolation of the Hilton sisters later in life is partly related to issues of accessibility. Bound By Flesh briefly notes how the loss of a U.S. train network impacted the sisters' mobility, but the over-arching commentary of this historical fact is how 'out of touch' the Hilton sisters were with the contemporary Zeitgeist, not how disastrous our national  transportation policies have been for certain segments of the U.S. population.  The Disability Rights movement, like other civil rights movements, spawned a Disability Studies scholarship.  Inclusion of such scholarship in the documentary would have helped deconstruct the 'infinite wisdom' of the able-bodied savior of the Disabled that creeps in to 'save' the Hilton sisters when they are down on their luck along with countering the antics of the former sideshow promoter.

If the Schappell twins were not available, at the very least a film like this demands consideration of Dreger's book if not splicing in interviews of Dreger speaking herself.  As a result of the vast lacunae that unbounds Bound By Flesh, the fact that the life of the Hilton sisters was not conjoined with Disability Studies constructs is the biggest flaw of the film.  If Dreger's One of Us would have been one of the texts used to prepare Bound By Flesh, we would not only have learned that the Hilton Sisters' lack of desire to be separated was not an exception, but the very norm of conjoined twins, we might also have had a documentary that doesn't disappoint the  viewer who has come prepared with background knowledge before the screening, or who chooses to investigate the wider subject afterwards.