Persécution (2009)

WHO: Patrice Chéreau directed, and Romain Duris and Charlotte Gainsbourg star in this.

WHAT: I have not seen it, so let me quote from the always-perceptive acquarello:

Stitching together pieces of a seemingly rootless and unremarkable life as itinerant worker, nursing home volunteer, and insecure lover, Chéreau creates a lucid and provocative exposition on the ephemeral - and searing - nature of the search for human connection.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:30 PM tonight and 5:00 PM Wednesday at the Vogue. UPDATE: A reader informs me it also screens March 20th at the Camera 3.

WHY: The Vogue screens this as part of the local stop of a touring package of contemporary French films entitled Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Though the series began on Friday, all but one of the titles play at least once more before Thursday, including Claudine Nougaret & Raymond Depardon's Journal de France, Jacques Doillon's You, Me & Us, and Patrice Leconte's The Suicide Shop.

HOW: I'm not sure. The Bay Area Film Calendar doesn't list any of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema screenings on its site, but that may be because the series snuck up on its compiler of local film-on-film screenings as quickly as it did on me. UPDATE: A reader informs that all these screenings will indeed be digitally projected.

Gare Du Nord (1965)

WHO: Arguably the key figure in documentary filmmaking in the past sixty years, Jean Rouch, directed this. However, it's not a documentary but a narrative film.

WHAT: Gare Du Nord was Rouch's contribution to a six-film portmenteau produced by future director Barbet Schroeder, and the only one of the six films (also including contributions by Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Jean Douchet, and Eric Rohmer) to feature Schroeder in an acting role. Each of the six vignettes highlighted a particular section of Paris through the eyes of it's residents, and Rouch's segment is arguably the best of the set. It's a pointed critique of the aspirational tendencies of the neighborhood, distilled through a portrait of a young couple (played by Schroeder and Nadine Ballot) whose conflicts are both magnified and dwarfed by the construction happening outside their apartment window. When Ballot takes to the streets still upset by their quarreling, she is approached by a stranger (played by Gilles Quéant) who seems to offer a solution to her troubles that she's both attacted by and resistant to. To say much more might spoil the surprises of the film, so I'll just encourage readers to see it.

WHERE/WHEN: 3:00 PM today only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: The PFA begins a 12-film retrospective of Rouch's work this afternoon with this short piece, which will precede the filmmaker's breakthrough Moi, Un Noir to set the tone for a series pairing full-length films and shorts that lasts until April 16th when his influential collaboration with Edgar Morin, Chronicle of a Summer screens along with Jackie Raynal's brief portrait of the filmmaker shot just before his death in 2004.

As if to get it out of the way, or to show that his aptitude for documentary did not indicate a lack thereof in the narrative department, or perhaps to argue that the line between fiction and non-fiction modes is more illusory than we think, the PFA is launching the series tributing the documentarian with this fictional piece. I haven't seen enough of Rouch's other work to weigh in on this curatorial decision yet, but I hope to be able to catch as many as I can, and perhaps share my thoughts on that subject later.

HOW: Gare Du Nord screens on 35mm, while Moi, Un Noir is a digital presentation.

Paris Is Burning (1990)

WHO: Jennie Livingston directed this documentary about the New York City ball scene. Image above is of Octavia St. Laurent, one of the characters the film helps us get to know.

WHAT: Two years ago I attended an afternoon screening of an incredible film portrait of a subculture I knew absolutely nothing about. It was the Frameline festival's commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Paris Is Burning's commercial release in 1991, when it became one of the best-attended documentaries ever released to theatres.  Director Jennie Livingston was on hand for the event, and even showed one of her short films made since Paris Is Burning was completed. In short, it was an ideal way for a newcomer to be first exposed to a landmark film that I can't believe hasn't been inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry yet. 

Or so I thought. Tonight's screening of the film, hosted by local drag celebrity Peaches Christ, promises to be an even more jubilant celebration of the film and its participants (most now deceased, sadly). If you've seen Paris is Burning you want to be there tonight. But if you haven't seen it yet you might want to go too. 

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 8:00 PM. Advance seats have all been sold, but there will be day-of-show tickets available for cash purchase when the box office opens at 2PM.

WHY: I believe this is the second time since beginning her career as a midnight movie presenter at the now-shuttered Bridge Theatre that Peaches Christ has picked a documentary feature to present to her loyal fans (the prior example being Madonna: Truth Or Dare in 2005), and also the second time she's presenting a feature-length film directed by a woman (after Doris Wishman's Double Agent 73 way back in 1999). 

HOW: 35mm print.

Cops (1922)

WHO: The great Buster Keaton wrote, directed and starred in this, along with his frequent co-writer and co-director Edward Cline, who in this instance also appears in the film in a small role.

WHAT: Leave it to Buster to take one of the most overused clichés of silent cinema, the chase involving a bunch of bumbling police officers, and turn it into something brilliant and sublime, just by extending the scale of the trope well past the point of any semblance of logic. While the Keystone Kops films were extremely popular in the 1910s, one might say Cops expands on their concept in a way most appropriate to how the popular view of policemen changed after Prohibition.

This is not the only topical aspect of this film. There's a gag that depends on knowledge of "goat gland" treatments, a chapter in American quackery that is almost entirely forgotten today, but was widely enough known in the 1920s to become the nickname for silent movies which contained one reel of talking scenes, uniformly for publicity and not artistic purposes, when sound came to cinema later in the decade. Goat gland treatments were disgusting enough that I'm not going to get into their so-called "medical" details, but if you want to understand this gag you might want to read about John R. Brinkley, but please, not while eating. Honestly, it's just one gag and not "getting it" won't hinder the rest of the film in the least.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the beautifully restored and shamefully underused (as a film screening space, at least) California Theatre in downtown San Jose at 7:00.

WHY: Cops plays as part of the Cinequest Film Festival's annual silent film presentation at the California Theatre, always with a live organist performing. The festival ends with the weekend, but before it does there are three full days of screenings, including the local premiere of Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children a week before its appearance at CAAMFest, an Argentine film featuring film critic Jorge Jellinek, last seen on screen in A Useful Life, and a 4K digital presentation of the restoration of Dr. Strangelove that San Francisco Silent Film Festival audiences got to see a sample of last summer. (It had phenomenal clarity compared side-by-side against an unrestored 35mm print- perhaps too much clarity, as it might be distracting to be able to make out background details I'm not sure Stanley Kubrick expected to register on screen.) 

HOW: Cops screens prior to the feature-length Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last!, both in 35mm prints, with live musical accompaniment by my own favorite silent film organist Dennis James, whose performances at local venues I try hard not to miss, yet somehow I'm not sure I've heard him perform for a Harold Lloyd film before- he's certainly excellent with Keaton, and is the one who reminded me of the aforementioned "goat gland" gag while I was preparing this post. He also had this to say about Harold Lloyd:

I spent the entire Summer of 1972 as a guest at 'Greenacres'- Harold Lloyd's mansion up in Benedict Canyon above Hollywood. Harold had died earlier that year and my residency was arranged by the executor of his estate. They had kept the house staff under employment, so I had a laundress, cook and even chauffeur plus vintage Rolls Royce at my command . . . talk about seeing just how those movie stars lived!

The Egg Cracker Suite (1943)

WHO: Ben Hardaway, whose nickname "Bugs" became immortalized while he was directing cartoons for Warner Brothers, and drawings by Robert Clampett of a Wascally character in Hardaway's Porky's Hare Hunt cartoon became labelled "Bugs's Bunny".  

WHAT: This cartoon about a mechanized egg production factory (made a year before the famous Swooner Crooner) is the only one Hardaway directed after leaving the Warner Studio (after being demoted from director upon Friz Freleng's 1939 return from a period at MGM) and working for Walter Lantz, for whom he helped created the character Woody Woodpecker. It seems only fitting that it features a rabbit as lead character. In fact it's the final cartoon ever produced featuring the Oswald The Lucky Rabbit character once created by Walt Disney and star of several silent films. It was Disney's loss of the exclusive rights to make Oswald cartoons that inspired him to jealousy guard the control over his next character creation, Mickey Mouse.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at 8PM at Oddball Fillms. Seating is limited, so it's best to RSVP by e-mailing or calling ahead at (415) 558-8117. 

WHY: This week David Bordwell wrote a lovely tribute to the 16mm film format and its history over the years. It read much like a euology. And perhaps it is, in a way. But although 16mm appears to be in its final, waning years as a format for working with as a medium of creation, there are still enormous quantities of 16mm film reels in archives and personal collections around the world. Leaving aside the many works natively created in this format, reduction prints are also the only method of reasonably accessing vast categories of films originally made in 35mm in a physical (as opposed to digital, or just as frequently, non-existent) form. So while I may have sounded dismissive when mentioning a 16mm print of Blood Money earlier this week, I was in fact thrilled to get any kind of chance to see that singular film, despite its less-than-perfect presentation.

16mm prints from the Oddball collection are also often less-than-perfect as well, but I've seen quite a few that were simply lustrous. And I always treasure a mediocre print viewing than a mediocre digital viewing; I doubt much of the Oddball collection is available on Blu-Ray or even good DVDs (the DVD versions of the Eames films screening there tomorrow night are adequate, but in my view still far inferior to watching 16mm prints). The Egg Cracker Suite was produced in 35mm but the odds of seeing it projected that way in your or my lifetime seems slim at best. I hope it's a good print, but I'll be glad just to see it one way or another.

HOW: The Egg Cracker Suite screens as part of a full 16mm program of delectables, also including industrial training films like Rush Hour Service and breakfast-themed excerpts from The Ipcress File, a feature film made by Sidney J. Furie, whose The Entity blew minds at the Castro Theatre last Friday.