Night On Earth (1991)

 

WHO: Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed this. Gena Rowlands appears in the first of its five segments.

WHAT: One of the more neglected films from the director of such independent-film classics as Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Dead Man, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai as well as the upcoming Only Lovers Left Alive, it's also one that, through its construction of five vignettes set in five separate cities across the United States and Europe, demonstrates the scope of Jarmusch's insider-cinephilia through its location and casting choices, many of which are meant to pay tribute to favorite directors through his choices of location and cast. Working backwards longitudinally (and chronologically), the Helsinki episode features actors known for working with Jarmusch's friends Aki & Mika Kaurismäki- and the late, great Matti Pellonpää even plays a character named Mika. Rome memorably involves actor/director Roberto Begnini, whom Jarmusch had worked with on Down By Law and the initial Coffee and Cigarettes short film, but also has Paolo Bonacelli playing a priest, a twisted homage to his role in Pasolini's Salò. The Paris segment casts Isaach De Bankolé, who had by this point already filmed performances in the first two features directed by Jarmusch's assistant director on Down By Law, Claire Denis. And the New York segment features Gianacarlo Esposito and Rosie Perez, both actors heavily associated with the work of Jarmusch's former NYU schoolmate Spike Lee. This paragraph is long enough so I'll deal with the fifth vignette in the "WHY" section just below...

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 9:05.

WHY: Jarmusch wrote the Los Angeles taxi passenger part for Gena Rowlands as a tribute to her performances in films made with her husband John Cassavetes, one of Jarmusch's filmmaker idols. On the supplemental materials for the Criterion DVD of Night On Earth Jarmusch says he was honored that Rowlands agreed to make his film mark her return to film work after the death of Cassavetes in 1989. However, this is contradicted by a New York Times article claiming that her performance in Lasse Hallström's Once Around was shot in January of 1990, when compared to the Night on Earth commentary track by cinematographer Frederick Elmes and sound man Drew Kunin, who indicate that the reason her scene begins at the Santa Monica Airport rather than a larger one was because of security issues relating to the First Gulf War.

No matter. Having Rowlands play a casting agent soon after her husband's death was surely a great honor for Jarmusch nonetheless. And it's a rare privilege for Frisco Bay audiences to be able to see Rowlands on the Castro screen on two consecutive Wednesdays; her Oscar-nominated performance in Cassavetes' 1980 film  Gloria screens there in 35mm on July 24th. I can't recall the last time this particular Cassavetes film screened in a local theatre and would be shocked if it was sometime in the past ten years.

HOW: On a double bill with Jarmusch's previous film Mystery Train, both on 35mm prints.

Fruitvale Station (2013)

WHO: Ryan Coogler wrote and directed this.

WHAT: About midway through Fruitvale Station, the docudrama account of Oscar Grant III's last day or so on earth before being fatally shot on the platform of  the BART stop between Lake Merritt and the Oakland Coliseum, it becomes clear that we're witnessing a series of Grant's goodbyes to his loved ones. We know it. The filmmakers know it. Only the characters don't as their real-life counterparts didn't back on the eve of 2009 when the incident took place, although Grant's daughter Tatiana, as played by Ariana Neal, seems to have a sense of it as she voices her fears for her father as he heads out into the night.

Knowing a tragedy is soon to unfold for the characters in a movie can imbue a movie with the ability to make us pay a different kind of attention than one in which fate is undetermined as narrative progresses. If we like the characters (and thanks to excellent performances by Michael B. Jordan as Grant and Melonie Diaz as his baby mama Sophina, we probably do unless we're the sort of folks who are predisposed not to be able to relate to imperfect people), we want them to experience every moment to their fullest before the inevitable curtain close. This translates to our wanting the filmmakers, led by Coogler, to make the most of every scene and every shot. And frequently Coogler does, helped by the familiarity with location and regional slang that comes with being an Oakland native. The scenes on the BART train heading into Frisco (as the characters call it) walk a lovely line between expressing the exuberance of living in the moment and making the best of a mildly disappointing situation (being stuck in a train car during the strike of the New Year), and performing a celebratory send-off for Grant and for his relationships with friends and family.

But not every scene feels so natural in its expression of a life being wound down, completely unawares. I think the different register of attention a preordained finale invites has invited certain critics to become particularly judgmental of scenes that for one reason or another don't seem to "fit". A scene in which Grant holds a pit bull in its last moments after a hit-and-run has been criticized in particular, for being an incident taken not out of Grant's own life, but Coogler's brother's, and speculatively placed into a blank spot on Grant's known itinerary that day. The scene has been condemned as a manipulation intended to get audiences to sympathize with a drug dealing philanderer as an animal lover, but ignored in the critiques I've read is the visible stain of dried dog blood on Jordan's white shirt, visible for the next several scenes but (as I recall, though perhaps my memory fails me) uncommented on by other characters. One would think he'd change shirts first chance he gets, but instead he puts on another shirt over it, as if wanting to hide the mark from the outside world but keep the life-force of another being close. I'd like to see the film again sometime, if for no other reason than to try to further tease out the significance of this stain.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, the California in Berkeley, the Metreon in San Francisco, with more Frisco Bay theatres expected to be added over the coming weeks.

WHY: Fruitvale Station has, of course, a built-in reason to be worth seeing by Bay Area audiences who are interested in the way that their home (primarily the East Bay, but Frisco gets its moment as well) comes off in a feature film likely to be seen and taken seriously by large audiences around the country and beyond. A film based on a real event, using real locations, and funded in part by the San Francisco Film Society is practically required viewing for anyone interested in the local film community. Thankfully it's worth seeing. 

And then, I can't escape mentioning, is the timing of the film's release with the weekend's announcement of the Trayvon Martin verdict in Florida. There are some undeniable similarities, as well as some stark differences, between the two slayings. Perhaps the biggest similarity between the two tragedies is the desperation for polarized commentators to portray the people at either end of the guns in each case as either a violent thug or a boy scout (albeit one who hadn't rightfully earned his Emergency Preparedness badge). By instinct, I'd rather avoid weighing in on the Martin case myself because I really haven't followed it as closely as everyone else I know seems to have, but this is a situation where a few brief, unoriginal statements (in lieu of the fully-reasoned-out essay the subject deserves) seems less cowardly to me than a false front of neutrality. 

So here goes: I think institutional racism is alive, well, and one of the most horribly pernicious aspects of our society today. I think that the extent of the legality of gun use in this country is absurd from every point of view other than the munitions industry and its (perhaps unwitting) supporters, and that "Stand Your Ground" laws in particular are horribly ill-conceived considering the solid tradition of self-defense in our legal system. Finally, I'm simply appalled by the instinct to turn George Zimmerman into a hero.

HOW: A 35mm print screens at the Grand Lake, while other venues screen digitally. Fruitvale Station was shot on 16mm film. UPDATE 7/18/2013: I've been informed by two separate sources that despite the Film on Film Foundation's listing of Fruitvale Station as a 35mm screening at the Grand Lake, it's in fact showing on DCP.

A Band Called Death (2012)

WHO: Brothers David, Bobby and Dannis Hackney and Bobbie Duncan made up the band Death, the subject of this documentary.

WHAT: Hard to think of a more compelling rock-doc subject than a punk band from the heart of Detroit but a world away from the Motown sound, who was active forty years ago but, because of their failure to make it with record companies, saw their legacy become all but forgotten until a few years ago. I haven't seen A Band Called Death yet, so here's some of what Slant Magazine's Drew Hunt had to say about it:

Though A Band Called Death is visually unexciting, predictably interspersing as it does talking-head and archival footage with present-day material, it's made impetuously watchable and disarmingly emotional by the filmmakers' strong command of docudrama and nonfiction narrative style. The strength and seductive nature of the material doesn't hurt matters. Prior to Death's emergence, the typical storyline for the history of punk rock usually begins in New York with the Ramones or London with the Sex Pistols—not inner-city Detroit with three black kids from a working-class family.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens twice nightly through Thursday at the Roxie Theater, and once a day at the New Parkway in Oakland, today, Wednesday and Thursday.

WHY: Last year's Roxie weekend of screenings entitled This Must Be The Place: Post-Punk Tribes 1978-1982 was so successful that the venue is holding a sequel which has recently had its full lineup revealed. This Must Be The Place: Post-Punk Tribes 1983-1990 runs July 26-28 and includes films and videos by Charles Atlas, Nick Zedd, D.A. Pennebaker and others, about musicians from Psychic TV to The Residents to Lydia Lunch to Depeche Mode. Of special interest are 16mm screenings of Rick Schmidt's locally-shot 1983 film Emerald Cities, featuring performances by Flipper & other Frisco Bay legends, and Tony Gayton's Athens, GA: Inside/Out, on the Deep South college town music scene that made home to bands like Pylon, the Flat Duo Jets, the Squalls, and oh yes, R.E.M. and the B-52's as well.

Death's active era predates the time period covered by this year's This Must Be The Place series- and last year's too! But it seems unfair to the tide of music history to watch films involving 1980s musicians without first learning about their forgotten forebears. 

HOW: A Band Called Death screens via digital projection.

Suspension (2008)

WHO: Vanessa O'Neill made this film, and makes up one half of the duo Beige, which will be presenting the film as a live performance

WHAT: Suspension was one of the highlights of the Crossroads festival presented by SF Cinematheque this past Spring. As the program note for the screening/performance said, Suspension "layers a toned and black-and-white reel creating subtle shifts of hue and tone of abstracted seascape."

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 8:00 at the Temescal Art Center in North Oakland.

WHY: Though many moviemakers and watchers have given up on the future of physical film as a production and exhibition medium, I think that "death of film" epitaphs are short-sighted. Ideally, I can imagine film professionals realizing that some of the essential virtues of the motion picture artform are being lost in the current global conversion to digital cinema, and a concerted effort being made to turn back the tide of transformation. In a worst-case-scenario I can picture the death of physical film as a mass production and distribution medium, but a core of committed artists and technicians continuing to keep the reel and projector alive through more artisanal means.

There is already a growing network of film proponents who have taken on the task of developing means of producing and exhibiting film with ever-decreasing reliance on industry. I think the core of this potential infrastructure are the practicioners of "expanded cinema" or "projector performance". People who create or appropriate film works to screen in performance settings, often involving multiple projectors, multiple projectionists, extra-celluloidal interventions, and live musicians and/or sound artists as part of each exhibition, which involves enough improvisation or other performance elements that it's comparable as a one-of-a-kind an event to a music concert.

I was only dimly aware of this piece of the film world as little as three years ago, when I began to explore the scene thanks to venues and performers such as the Pacific Film Archive, SF Cinematheque, Other Cinema and its founder Craig Baldwin, Stephen Parr, Paul Clipson, etc. Last summer saw the opening of a dedicated series devoted to presenting these kinds of performance works to the public- and for free, no less. Shapeshifters Cinema launched with an orgy of projectors screening all kinds of collected films, some as well known as Norman McLaren and Denys Colomb Daunant but most as obscure as they were beautiful. It was a performance by the Cinepimps (Alfonso Alvarez and Keith Arnold, the latter of whom is better known as programmer for the Castro Theatre.) In the past year, Shapeshifters Cinema has brought a wide variety of film peformance practicioners (as well as a few video-based performers) to Oakland for unique monthly shows. Right now they reserve the second Sunday of each month for these events. Tonight it's Kent Long and Vanessa O'Neill performing under the name Beige; Along with O'Neill's Suspension, the duo will perform with Long's lovely 2003 work The Waves, and a pair of completely collaborative pieces: Which Ceaselessly Float Up (which was performed at the New York Film Festival's Views From the Avant-Garde last autumn) and The Pass. Next month Shapeshifters Cinema will screen video work with live musical performance by Kadet Kuhne, who is fresh from a dual-retrospective showcase with Texas Tomboy at Frameline last month, which was my first exposure to her exuberant, clever work.

Another performative video piece, this one involving live narration from its maker, is Love Letter to the Fog, by Sam Green (whom you may have seen perform The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller or Utopia in Four Movements). It's had recent screenings on the East Coast including New York City and Waterville, Maine, but had its genesis in Green's Artist-in-Residency at San Francisco's Exploratorium, which just re-opened a few months ago. The museum's Cinema Arts program is up-and-running with regular screenings on certain Wednesdays and Saturdays (including this Wednesday and Saturday), but look further on its web calendar and you can see an October 2nd date for something called Fog City, which I suspect is another name for Love Letter To the Fog or an iteration thereof.

HOW: Suspension will screen with three other works as a multi-projector performance with live sound.

Stray Dog (1949)

WHO: Akira Kurosawa directed this.

WHAT: Though I've gotten lots of pleasure from watching Kurosawa's samurai films, over the years my favorite of all his films (so far- I've still yet to see a few from his first and final years of filmmaking) must be this story of a police detective named Murakami (played by Toshiro Mifune) who loses his gun and conducts an exhaustive search of a sweltering Tokyo in order to find it. Although it's about as taut in story construction as Kurosawa could be, Stray Dog uses real location shooting of the cityscape before economic development came to post-war Japan in earnest, thus preserving as a kind of time capsule urban landscapes that reflected the characters, themes and style of the film nearly perfectly. No wonder it's the sole Kurosawa film profiled in the book World Film Locations: Tokyo. Here's a brief excerpt from John Berra's article on the film:

Murakami's self-ssigned mission takes him to Ameyokocho where, disguised as an unkempt ex-soldier, he wanders around, attempting to establish the necessary lead. This lengthy sequence was shot by second unit director Ishiro Honda, who his his handheld camera in a box as a means of capturing footage of Tokyo's seedy underbelly that would work within Kurosawa's film noir framework. 

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:30 PM.

WHY: Kurosawa based Stray Dog on a novel he wrote in the style of French detective novel pioneer Georges Simenon, thus the PFA has included it as the second of twelve titles in its current series Dark Nights: Simenon and Cinema. Compared to the other eleven, its inclusion is perhaps a stretch, as the rest of the titles co-curated by the PFA's Kathy Geritz and by Jed Rapfogel of Anthology Film Archives (which will bring the eleven non-Kurosawas as well as three more films to New York later this summer) are adaptations of particular Simenon stories and not just pastiches. But any excuse to show Stray Dog is okay by me, especially when it brings an Asian perspective into a series otherwise built exclusively on films by directors from Europe (Marcel Carné, Claude Chabrol, Béla Tarr, etc.) and the U.S. (Burgess Meredith, Phil Karlson, etc.)

HOW: 35mm print