Himala (1982)

WHO:  Ishmael Bernal directed this.

WHAT: About five years ago, CNN selected ten films from Asia and the Pacific Region to compete in an online poll to determine the audience favorite all-time film from the region. Most of the ten selected titles should be well-known to, and probably frequently-seen by, most Western cinephiles. I'd seen seven and certainly heard of all but one: Himala, which translates to "Miracle".

That Himala was able to handily best established classics like The Seven Samurai and Pather Panchali, as well as widely-admired more recent films like Oldboy, Spirited Away and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, may be best explained by the mechanics of online polls and the social-media passion that can arise around an internationally-neglected cultural artifact, and that more broadly famous artworks might not have access to. (Does the Mona Lisa have a cult following?) But it's also a sign of the mismatched reputations of certain national cinemas' classics when placed next to the international 'canon' of great films.

One understandable instinct of a cinephile who finds a film she or he has never heard of winning a popularity poll might be to pooh-pooh it as a purely mainstream-appeal film, an equivalent to a mediocrity like The Shawshank Redemption winning audience polls despite critical indifference or disdain. In the case of Himala such a reaction is misplaced. I don't want to oversell the film, but it seems to me to have potential to be more like a Casablanca: appreciated greatly by audiences but also by critics, if they found their way to see the film. I really liked it myself but haven't the time to explain why, so I'll link to one of the few English-language reviews I've found, by critic Michael Mirasol.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 7:30 at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

WHY: It may seem incongruous that a thirty-year-old film has been selected to launch a five-day, 16 title program called New Filipino Cinema 2013. But scratch the surface and it's not so strange. As YBCA film curator Joel Shepard remarks in a just-published interview, he's screening a brand-new restoration that only just premiered in the Phillippines last Christmas. He points out that "it's new not only in that it's a new digital restoration, but it's new in the fact that film restoration itself is a relatively new concept in the Philippines. In general, they haven't done a good job of taking good care of their film history; but, there are a lot of efforts now to change that."

I highly encourage you to read the entire interview, conducted by the perceptive and knowledgeable Michael Guillén, as it not only provides fantastic context for the series as a whole and its potential for shedding light on a multifaceted, vibrant, and truly independent cinema scene in the often-overlooked archipelago, but more practically serves as a guide to which of the New Filipino Cinema selections might be particularly rewarding viewings this week. You might also look to Adam Hartzell, who highlights his own most-anticipated titles for the VCinema site.

HOW: Digital projection, preceded by a 6:30 PM reception for the festival.

Before Midnight (2013)

WHO: Richard Linklater directed and co-wrote, with his lead actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, this  feature.

WHAT: What started out as nothing more than a particularly fortuitous mid-nineties Indiewood feature (Before Sunrise) and nine years later became an audacious experiment in sequelization (Before Sunset) is now, with Before Midnight, well on its way to turning into a monumental reinvention of that long-buried, little-regarded cinematic genre: the Saturday matinee serial. Only these films aim at adult audiences, feature more talk than action (or perhaps it's more accurate to say talk as action), and neither compress nor extend time between one episode's cliffhanger and the next's opening moment, but rather allow the audience and the actors as long to wonder what's befallen beloved characters Celine (Delpy) and Jessie (Hawke) in each nine-year interim. So real does this snapshot-moment approach feel, that most critics bypass making comparisons to Pearl White or Buster Crabbe, and head straight to Michael Apted's 49-year, 8-segment (and counting) documentary epic the "Up Series" when making cinematic comparisons in their reviews.

I found Before Midnight to be an incredibly satisfying part three in this (so far) trilogy; it keeps the spirit of the originals (neither of which I've revisited in more than brief clips since 2004) while making some serious structural departures that feel like perfectly logical extensions of the project. But I don't feel I have the words in me to write a review that truly does justice to the achievement here. So instead I'll link to the film's Metacritic page, wherein you'll find plenty of other reviews by some of the country's better critics. I'll note they range from the mostly positive to the wholly positive; I haven't seen any well-argued pans of Before Midnight yet.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at various screens around Frisco Bay this week, including the Embarcadero, Shattuck, Kabuki, Sequoia, Guild, and Camera 7 Theatres.

WHY: You should know, if you haven't already figured it out, that Linklater is not just a filmmaker but a real cinephile. In the 1980s he co-founded the Austin Film Society and befriended one of the real titans of American experimental film, James Benning; this friendship is the subject of a currently-in-production film by one of the smartest young cinephiles around, Gabe Klinger.

Linklater's devotion to the underseen masterpieces of cinema history is well-documented as well; he recently had a piece on Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running published in a book and excerpted in Movie City News (that film screens the Stanford Theatre this Thursday & Friday). Another Minnelli film The Clock came up as an acknowledged influence on the "Before Trilogy" in his on-stage appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival with Julie Delpy and Mike Jones a month ago. (And a lovely clip from it came up in Christian Marclay's The Clock during the early, coffee drinking hours of the installation.)

Delpy was on the verge of revealing another classic film influence on the trilogy, and on Before Midnight in particular, during that SFIFF conversation, but was pulled back by her director, who apparently wanted to keep it a surprise for the audience, most of which had not seen their film yet but would the following night at the fest's designated closing screening. In that spirit I won't reveal the title on this blog other than by linking to the Castro Theatre and Rafael Film Center pages for its upcoming screenings at those venues. So click if you've already seen Before Midnight or don't mind having one of its cinephile references spoiled in advance.

HOW: I believe Before Midnight, the first in Linklater's/Delpy's/Hawke's trilogy to have been shot digitally, is only available to screen as a DCP right now.

The House (2011)

WHO: Zuzana Liová wrote and directed this.

WHAT: I have not seen this, so here's the opening of Eric Prindle's review:

The House (Dom), a recent Slovak film written and directed by Zuzana Liová, offers a nuanced take on the familiar coming-of-age genre, setting itself apart with carefully drawn characters confronting non-ideal circumstances in intriguing but believable ways.  

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie at 7:00

WHY: This screens as part of a national-focused touring screening series called "Czech That Film"- the series ends tomorrow with a film called In The Shadow. These are not to be confused with a French film also screening this week at the Roxie, In The House by François Ozon.

Both of the remaining screenings in this series are in fact co-productions between the Czech and Slovak film industries, which were frequently grouped together in the pre-1992 period, but which in fact were separate, if cross-pollinating, even then. Two of the three so-called "Czech New Wave" films screening at the Pacific Film Archive this summer in fact can be claimed as "Slovak New Wave" films as they were made by Slovak directors: The Cremator by Juraj Herz and The Maple And Juliana by Štefan Uher.

HOW: The House screens via a 35mm print.

The Champion (1915)

WHO: Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, edited and of course starred in this picture.

WHAT: Of the five one- and two-reelers that Chaplin made while working at the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company's studio in Niles, California, this was one of the biggest hits of its time, and still gets laughs from audiences of all ages today. A boxing-themed picture that is sometimes seen as an early precursor to the astounding boxing sequence in Chaplin's 1931 City Lights, but perhaps not quite as meticulously timed for the proper frame rate (as I just heard silent accompanist Ben Model speak about) as he had the means and time to do sixteen year later. 

Joyce Milton's biography Tramp: the Life of Charlie Chaplin is not generally admired by Chaplin fans who are more interested in his artistry than his celebrity, but it does include some interesting information in its focus on his many lawsuits, scandals, etc. According to Milton, it was The Champion which inadvertently launched the famous wave of Chaplin imitators, when a legal attempt to block the distribution of a collage film mashing-up The Champion and a fantasy film called Daughter of the Gods provoked a soft decision from the judge: the pastiche film could be distributed as long as it was not advertised as a Chaplin picture. This judgement opened the door for imitators to make their own films; some of these imitators, Oliver Hardy and Harold Lloyd, for instance, would parlay their experience making such films into a successful career using their own more original characters.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today at 12:30 PM at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

WHY: This weekend has been the annual Charlie Chaplin Days celebration in Niles, California (a small town that became incorporated into what is now Fremont back in 1956. But almost hundred years ago it was for a few months the home of the most famous silent film actor ever, Charlie Chaplin.

Today, each of his five films made in town will screen, for a suggested donation of fifty cents apiece, at the Museum's Edison Theatre, the same room where Chaplin himself watched films when he was in town. They screen in chronological order, with his first Niles film A Night Out at 11:30 AM, and his last, The Tramp, at 3:30, with plenty of time in between showings to browse the museum or its giftshop, or to take in some of the other activities happening on Niles Boulevard today.

HOW: 16mm print, with live musical accompaniment.

A River Changes Course (2013)

WHO: Kalyanee Mam directed this

WHAT: The winner of the San Francisco International Film Festival's Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature (I reported on all the festival's awards last month), this is a polished and interesting documentary about the ecological and economic pressures facing average families in Cambodia. When placed in comparison to the more probing and poetic (and frequently more harrowing) documentaries of the great filmmaker Rithy Panh (who just won a Cannes prize for his latest film The Missing Picture), it comes across as a somewhat lesser work, at least for someone like me who has visited the country and is generally familiar with its many problems and wonders. But Mam's take functions as an ideal "Cambodia 101" for people who haven't heard much about the small country beyond the famous horrors caused by American intervention in the region forty years ago.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 7:00 at the Goldman Theater in the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley, as part of the San Francisco Green Film Festival.

WHY: A River Changes Course is not strictly about environmental issues, but then again environmental issues and their potential solutions are impossible to extract from other human challenges. Thus it's a good choice for the 2nd annual San Francisco Green Film Festival, which opened the other night and runs through June 5th. The underutilized New People Cinema is the main festival venue, but there are screenings at various other Frisco Bay venues, including a free San Francisco Public Library screening of Plastic Paradise, which shows us images from Midway Atoll, a chain of islands affected tremendously by the accumulation of petroleum product waste in the North Pacific Gyre. 

Tonight's screening is one of two at the David Brower Center, a venue I've yet to investigate for myself. The other screening at the space is Tuesday's showing of Breathing Earth - Susumu Singu's Dream, the latest feature by director Thomas Riedelsheimer, who made two wonderful previous documentaries called Rivers and Tides and Touch the Sound, both about unique artists working with  materials in ways that set them apart from some of the ecologically-unsustainable practices used in many sectors of the art world. This portrait of a wind sculptor, and this afternoon's other Riedelsheimer screening Garden in the Sea, about an underwater installation in the Sea of Cortez, seem to fit this pattern as well.

More documentaries of interest to eco-minded cinephiles are to be found at the Rafael Film Center this week and at SF IndieFest's DocFest showcase opening the day after the SF Green Film Festival ends.

HOW: Digital screening of a natively-digital work.