The Mattei Affair (1972)

WHO: Francesco Rosi directed this.

WHAT: Not only have I never seen The Mattei Affair, I've never (to my shame) seen any film directed by Rosi. Please don't tell him. Anyway, since I want to highlight this screening today, but am supremely unqualfied to say anything about it, let me quote from a Senses Of Cinema Rosi profile by Gino Moliterno:

Rosi employs a non-linear investigative mode which allows him to bring together, often paratactically or in juxtaposition, a range of disparate materials, both real and fictionally recreated, in an attempt to get closer to the truth.

WHERE/WHEN: Final San Francisco International Film Festival screening today at 1:30 PM at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: It's at that point in the festival when I'm too overextended to write much. But I just wanted to highlight this screening, which as I noted yesterday has been changed from a DCP to a 35mm film presentation at the last moment, and which starts a full day of unique and highly interesting programs. Following The Mattei Affair is No More Road Trips?, Rick Prelinger's interactive amateur-movie compliation that contemplates our history automotive travel at a time when it's becoming less and less affordable for the majority of Americans. (I wrote on it the other day.) The evening ends with the festival's annual Directing Award, this time going to Philip Kaufman, who made The Right Stuff, Henry & June, and perhaps most beloved among Frisco Bay movie fans, Invasion of the Body Snatchers- the latter will screen after an onstage conversation.

HOW: 35mm print.

Helsinki, Forever (2008)

 

WHO: Peter Von Bagh made this.

WHAT: I have not seen this film, so let me quote from a short piece by Jonathan Rosenbaum:

a lovely city symphony which is also a history of Helsinki (and incidentally, Finland, Finnish cinema, and Finnish pop music) recounted with film clips and paintings

Sounds great, and perhaps not so dissimilar from Thom Andersen's amazing 2003 visual essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, which argues a history of that city through clips from fiction films shot there. And it turns out this comparison has been made before by writers who have seen both works.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screening this afternoon at 3:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: First of all, the subject of the film sounds just up my alley and makes me think I'll be trying to track down a copy of World Film Locations: Helsinki soon after the screening. Which reminds me to mention that the volume in that series of books that I contributed an essay to, World Film Locations: San Francisco, is now available for pre-order.

But the occasion of the screening would make me want to attend even if the film didn't sound as interesting to me as it does. Director Von Bagh will be on hand for the show, as he is receiving the Mel Novikoff Award for work that has "has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema"- an award that has gone to critics like Manny Farber and Roger Ebert, archivists like Kevin Brownlow and Serge Bromberg, and programmers like Bruce Goldstein and Anita Monga. Von Bagh is not only a filmmaker but a historian and the director of the Midnight Sun Film Festival held in Sodankylä, Lapland at the time of summer each year when night never falls above the arctic circle, making the inside of a cinema the darkest place around 24 hours a day.

I don't know when I first heard rumor of this festival, but read more about it in Kenneth Turan's book Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made, which immediately shot it to the top tier of my list of festivals I dream of attending one day. Looking at a partial list of filmmaker guests over the years make it clear that Von Bagh and his programming team have terrific taste, and my understanding is that Von Bagh is something of a film-on-film purist, insisting on film screenings even in the waning days of its viability as a mass-market medium.

The other day, I happened to be at a screening sitting next to another award recipient at this year's SFIFF: Philip Kaufman, who will be at the Castro Theatre tomorrow evening for an on-stage conversation before a screening of his great 1978 shot-in-San Francisco remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We got to talking, and he told me he'll be at the Midnight Sun festival for the first time this summer, and that he's currently trying to track down good prints of films he hopes to show there. Invasion of the Body Snatchers will be shown tomorrow digitally, however. 

But as film purist Carl Martin notes in his latest SFIFF round-up, last night's screening of Marketa Lazarová began with an announcement that another Castro screening of a 1970s film tomorrow will be screened on 35mm instead of previously-expected DCP. The film is The Mattei Affair, a political thriller by Francesco Rosi, a filmmaker who, like Kaufman, received an award from the SFIFF (in 1981) and later went on to attend the Midnight Sun festival (in 1999). Why is it being shown in 35mm even though the Film Foundation has helped prepare a new DCP they're trying to show off? The answer lies in Frako Loden's latest SFIFF round-up article, in which she reports on last weekend's  Pacific Film Archive screening via its new digital projector, in which subtitles froze on screen and essentially ruined the experience for non-Italian speakers in the audience. Rather than risk a repeat of such a snafu at the Castro, the festival has opted to use a trusty 35mm print for the 1:30 PM matinee. 

HOW: Helsinki, Forever screens in 35mm.

Marketa Lazarová (1967)

WHO: Czech director František Vláčil made this.

WHAT: The second and final full week of the San Francisco International Film Festival starts today. I was recruited to provide seven week 2 picks for the 7x7 website and the piece was just published. Since one of my picks is Marketa Lazarová, let me quote from myself:

If you thought Soviet master Andrei Tarkovsky was the only Eastern Bloc filmmaker to meticulously recreate the Middle Ages in a stunning, black-and-white widescreen epic, you need to see František Vlácil's 1967 film, Marketa Lazarová, perennially named the "greatest Czech film of all time." Its unblinking approach to medieval violence between pagans and Christians easily puts it in a class with Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev,

WHERE/WHEN: Final SFIFF screening tonight at 8:45 at New People Cinema.

WHY: Tonight's screening is a special event. Marketa Lazarová screens in honor of George Gund III, who chaired the board of the San Francisco Film Society until his death this past January. Gund was a tireless advocate of Eastern European and Czechoslovakian cinema in particular, and the print of Vlácil's masterpiece I first viewed at the Pacific Film Archive more than ten years ago came to the PFA directly due to Gund.

I was always too shy to approach the SFFS board president when I saw him at festival events. Part of this must have been due to a sense of regret planted in me from childhood. Growing up in a middle-class household less than a block from Alamo Elementary School in the Richmond District, I attended that school and befriended Gund's son Gregory, who was exactly one day older than me and was a member my first-grade class. When we became friends I had no idea how wealthy Greg's family was; all I knew is that hockey was a big deal in his household, but that he was also the only boy in my grade who was willing to forego playing team sports during recess and lunch in order to hang out with an unathletic kid like me and play word games and pore over Safari cards. Once I was invited over to the family home- I'd never knew about mansions with elevators before. My friendship with Greg ended when he moved to Idaho the summer after first grade (presumably a move related to the Gund connection to the Sun Valley Suns). I lost touch with him as most kids tend to do when friends move, and by the time I seriously thought of trying to contact him again, it was too late, as he'd recently been killed in a plane crash.

So I'll be attending tonight's screening not just to see a great work of cinematic art, but to pay some small tribute to the man whose parenting produced a little boy who made early elementary school far more bearable for an introverted kid like me.

HOW: 35mm print.

Words of Mercury (2011)

WHO: Jerome Hiler made this.

WHAT: I haven't seen Words of Mercury in over a year, and even when I did I was forced to see it in a compromised quality (on video rather than 16mm film) so let me excerpt a brief quote from a 2012 review of the film (which, if intrigued, you should read in its entirety) by P. Adams Sitney:

The opening superimposition of Words of Mercury ... layers a dance of jittering lights over a crepuscular landscape, as if the pencil-thin white and colored lines of light were swarming midair before a barely discernible background of trees, as night falls.

WHERE/WHEN: Words of Mercury screens on a SFMOMA program starting at 7:00 tonight only. 

WHY: Today marks the midpoint of the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival, and there are certainly screenings of interest happening tonight; the first festival showings of Salma, Computer Chess and Frances Ha (all at the Kabuki) and the final festival showings of Something In The Air and The Act Of Killing (both at the Pacific Film Archive), for example. 

But the festival is not the only interesting screening entity in town over these two weeks, as I noted by cataloging most of the alternative film screening opportunities during SFIFF in a post last week. Tonight in particular there are some very tempting alternate options to see rarely-screened films. The Stanford shows the 1953 War of the Worlds and the early Ray Harryhausen effects showcase 20 Million Miles To Earth today and tomorrow. Oddball Films has a 16mm set of Jewish comedy shorts. And the Castro hosts a very enticing Nicolas Roeg bill. Note that since my post last week, the Castro has released its entire May calendar, including a double-feature of Badlands (on DCP) and Electra Glide In Blue (in 35mm) happening the night before the SFIFF closing night presentation of Richard Linklater's terrific Before Midnight at that venue.

All of this is enticing but screenings of Jerome Hiler films projected properly may be rarer than all of the above combined. Although, as Carl Martin has noted, Words of Mercury was in fact a 2012 SFIFF selection, it screened on film only at it's PFA screening. It was shown on video at New People because the latter venue then lacked a variable-speed 16mm projector that could show the film at its maker's desired frame-rate. So tonight's screening feels like the completion of some unfinished business from last year's festival for some of us.

HOW: Words of Mercury screens in 16mm, along with a new work by Hiler and two of the films most newly made by his partner Nathaniel Dorsky.

Spend It All (1971)

WHO: The late, great Les Blank directed this.

WHAT: Some critics, curators, and historians try to group Les Blank's documentaries into three categories: the music films typified by The Blues Accordin' To Lightnin' Hopkins and Chulas Fronteras, the food films such as Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers and All In This Tea, and the "everything else" films like Burden of Dreams and Gap-Toothed Women. In truth, all of his films that I've seen (not the entire catalog, but a good-sized selection) are rich in scenes depicting the preparation and/or consumption of food. They all prominently feature music, usually by accomplished 'folk' or 'roots' musicians. And they all contain a great deal of "everything else". 

Spend It All, one of Blank's (in Max Goldberg's words) "city symphonies set to the languid pace of Cajun country" is exemplary of this. If I had to classify it in one of the three categories I wouldn't know how to choose. There's plenty of  music, performed by fiddlers and accordionists like The Balfa Brothers, Nathan Abshire and Marc Savoy, a familiar face in later Blank documentaries J'ai Été au Bal, Yum, Yum, Yum!: A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking and Marc and Ann. There's plenty of food, too, with copious scenes of shellfish, crustaceans, and even coffee being prepared Louisiana-style. But there's a lot of "everything else" as well: shots of young (and younger) jockeys at a country horse racing track, for example. And most poignantly for a film screening so soon after its maker's death, we get a tour of a brushy cemetery, including a shot of a tombstone engraved with a common Cajun name very similar to his own: "LeBlanc".

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at 7:00 at New People and 8:45 Friday at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Spend It All is part of a three-film tribute to Les Blank, who was known to be dying of cancer when the SFIFF announced these screenings last month, and who indeed succumbed a week later. The set of three rarely-seen shorts includes two not featured in last summer's PFA retrospective: the 1967 Christopher Tree, which Blank photographed and edited but is not credited with directing, and Chicken Real, Blank's own favorite of the sometimes-subversive industrial films he made for hire, early in his career, for various American companies including Shakey's Pizza, Smucker's Jam, and in this case factory farming pioneer Holly Farms. 

Blank's son and fellow filmmaker Harrold is expected to attend the screenings.


HOW: All three films will screen in brand new 16mm prints of recent restorations by the Academy Film Archive.