A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973)

WHO: Jacques Demy directed this

WHAT: I haven't seen this film before, so let me quote from Dan Callahan's review:

This seems to be a very personal movie for Demy, a gay man who married another talented filmmaker, Agnes Varda. Not much is known about their marriage and what it entailed, but A Slightly Pregnant Man clearly expresses the yearning of an artist who wanted to have family and who also wanted to be with men. Male pregnancy is the most romantic solution to Demy's dilemma (gay adoption is today's prosaic alternative). The concept of the film isn't a commercial gimmick played for easy laughs, as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Junior—it's a metaphor for change, both social and otherwise.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:00.

WHY: We have now arrived at the part of the PFA's Jacques Demy retrospective where the venue is showcasing real rarities among the director's feature films. This film, A Room In Town, The Pied Piper and Three Seats For the 26th have all been absent from Frisco Bay screens in my memory, and represent blank spots in my experience with Demy's films. None of them screened at the 2006 mini-retro of the director's films, and may not re-appear in local cinemas any time in the foreseeable (or even conceivable) future.

The PFA is one of the few venues in the area that can be counted on to provide us the "deep cuts" of a director's filmography like these ones, at least some of the time. The recent Raoul Walsh series included a nice mixture of films that one might expect to see at the Castro or another venue sometime, and those (such as Wild Girl) we might not ever get a chance to see otherwise. The next series beginning at the PFA is a selection of Alfred Hitchcock silent films that did appear at the Castro recently, but might not make their way around again very soon, at least not in a group portrait like the one we're getting a second shot at taking starting tomorrow.

Further on the horizon, I've been given the go-ahead to mention, although at the time you read this the information might not yet be found on the PFA website, are two more retrospectives of European directors who, like Demy, died young and are thought of as great filmmakers at least as frequently as they are as gay or bisexual filmmakers. From September 20th until the end of October the venue will host a comprehensive set of screenings of the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini. In addition to repeat showings of the six 35mm prints screening the weekend before at the Castro and Roxie (that I mentioned yesterday) another thirteen of his features and shorts will play in 35mm, filled out by a few shorts on digital formats. Meanwhile, a large series devoted to West Germany's Rainer Werner Fassbinder begins October 4th with a double-bill of Love is Colder Than Death and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and continues until December 15th.

There's much more in September and October at the Berkeley archive, of course. I've already talked about the Chinese classic films being brought this Fall in conjunction with the Yang Fudong exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum; these titles are on the PFA site so I'll move on. Curator Kathy Geritz's regular Alternative Visions program of experimental film and video resumes Wednesdays after a summer break on September 4th. In-person appearances by filmmakers Nancy Andrews, Lawrence Jordan, Kerry Laitala, James Sansing, Stacey Steers, John Gianvito, Phi Solomon, Abigail Child and Paul Chan, as well as screenings of work by Jodie Mack, Marielle Nitoslawska, Leos Carax (Holy Motors September 18) and more should make for a lively season of exploration.

And that's not all when it comes to in-person filmmaker guests. Six features apiece by little-known Morrocan filmmaker Moumen Smihi and by famous 1970s (and beyond)-era auteur William Friedkin help round out the September-October calendar with more chances to pick director brains than it's probably possible to squeeze into a two-month span. Finally, the horizons of creative programming continue to be pressed with what I wouldn't be surprised to learn is the PFA's first-ever series devoted to a supporting actor. Ten films featuring 1940s & 1950's Hollywood's generally-unheralded Wendell Corey is at the very least a great excuse to show films by Anthony Mann (The Furies September 7th), William Wellman (My Man & I September 13th), Robert Aldrich (The Big Knife September 15th), Budd Boetticher (The Killer Is Loose September 27th) and more, including an early Elvis Presley vehicle, Loving You from 1957 (October 5th).

HOW: A Slightly Pregnant Man screens via DCP. I haven't yet sampled the PFA's 4K digital projection capabilities, and thus remain skeptical of this technological shift. The good news from my pro-35mm perspective is that there's a smaller proportion of DCP on the September-October PFA calendar than there was on the June-July-August one.

Raging Bull (1980)

WHO: Martin Scorsese directed this.

WHAT: First, let me quote from an extensive article on the film by Richard Schickel:

It’s typical of very potent movies that we tend to remember their most explosive scenes—in this case the vivid carnage in the ring, the cringe-inducing scenes of domestic violence. They often blot out sequences of a different, indeed contradictory nature. I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but if you re-encounter Raging Bull today, after a long absence, you will find it far more tender than you remember—even, at times, rather sweet-spirited.

Having that in mind, perhaps the most explosively memorable scene in this biographical film on boxer Jake LaMotta is the depiction of his loss of his championship title to Sugar Ray Robinson. Scorsese & his team shoots and edits Robert De Niro in a torrent of sweat and blood, with a flurry of bright bulb-flashes that pushed the scene into the visceral territory of an experimental filmmaker assaulting the eyes of the audience. It's also a scene laden with allusions to the Bible and its visual representations over the years, from the trainer's insertion of a guard into De Niro's mouth as if a Eucharist wafer, to the boxer's arms extended, almost Christlike, over the ropes of the ring, an iconography-influenced interpretation of LaMotta's recollection that he was too exhausted to keep his arms up on his own by the thirteenth round of that fight. The scene has been interpreted as a moment of martyrdom for De Niro's character; unable to beat Robinson, he allows himself to become a punching bag, absorbing countless brutal punches but refusing, at least, to let himself be knocked to the mat. "You never got me down, Ray!" is the famous (if ahistorical) quote.

It's frequently said that when Scorsese made Raging Bull he expected it to be his last movie, at least for Hollywood. Whether because he saw his place in a rapidly-changing industry disappearing in the late 1970s, sped along by the financial failure of his 1977 musical New York, New York, or because he expected to be physically unable to direct after his recent health scares after prodigious cocaine usage, it does seem like Scorsese became revitalized by the project, bringing everything he had to the production, from collaborators like screenwriter Paul Schrader and Thelma Schoonmaker (both had only worked on one of Scorsese's films previously, but had their association cemented by this film), to all his most major cinematic influences. One can easily see shadows of Alfred Hitchcock, John Cassavetes, Buster Keaton, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, Elia Kazan, and Pier Paolo Pasolini in this film. Sometimes they all seem to appear at once.

Of all of these influences, however, it's Pasolini whom I think may have been foremost in Scorsese's mind in constructing sequences like the one described and pictured above. Glenn Kenny has written eloquently about Raging Bull and Jake LaMotta as being a kind of "savior" for Scorsese at this point in his life, but he doesn't mention this particular scene, or Pasolini's influence, which has been most succintly summarized, I think, by a pseudonymous Mubi commenter who called it "secular appropriation of religious iconography".

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre at 2:30 & 7:00 PM.

WHY: If you've checked out the UPS-truck-wreck that is The Canyons this week at the Roxie (where it will continue for another week after this one) you may want to see something to redeem your feelings about its director Paul Schrader. Though he has had "a film by" credit on some great films (I'm a big fan of Blue Collar and Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters for instance), he also has, let's face it, a better track record writing for other directors. (Scorsese, De Palma, etc.)

I mentioned Pasolini above. In a month's time, both the Roxie and the Castro will be participating in a weekend devoted to 35mm screenings of films by the crucial Italian auteur, surely one of the most exciting cinema events to come to Frisco Bay in September. As I've previously noted, the Pacific Film Archive is expected to have a Pasolini retrospective in the Fall, but as yet it's not been announced how encompassing this will be (it seems, however, that 22 of the director's films are available on newly-made 35mm prints, so I'm optimistic). But the weekend of September 14-15 will include in-person appearances by scholar Barth David Schwartz and Pasolini's frequently-cast actor Ninetto Davoli, parties, and an opportunity for intense immersion in Pasolini's world for a weekend, as six films will screen in just over a 24-hour period. Titles include his second feature Mamma Roma starring Anna Magnani, Medea with Maria Callas, the entire "Trilogy of Life" (all featuring Davoli) and the notorious Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. I'm blocking off this weekend to participate in as much as I can, and if you like Pasolini or the many filmmakers he influenced (not just Scorsese but Derek Jarman, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder are certainly among his disciples) you might consider doing the same.

HOW: Raging Bull screens in 35mm, on a double-bill with The King of Marvin Gardens, which will screen from a DCP.

The Lone Ranger (2013)

WHO: Johnny Depp starred in this, his second (by my count) attempt at playing a Native American character after The Brave in 1997.

WHAT: Business as usual in the world of Hollywood blockbusters is bad behavior. We've all heard about how, in the quest to gross their next billion for their corporate conglomerate masters, movie studios act in ways that put them on approximately the same moral ground as any other mega-industry. Pilfering the past by recycling properties to guard their copyrights and appeal to the name-recognition deities of mass taste. Off-shoring post-production work to exploited laborers overseas while forcing American visual effects houses to unreasonably underbid and over-promise just to get any work at all. Preventing anyone but white male actors to play leading roles in almost all big-budget releases, while relegating women and minorities to tokenistic roles. I could go on and on...

It's a wonder intelligent people who aren't paid to write about these movies are drawn to them at all. But there's something about (at least some of) us that wants to feel connected to the artifacts of modern mass culture dictated to us by advertising budgets, at least if we sense they're going to truly connect with audiences on the scale they're intended to.

Most people I know didn't get this sense about The Lone Ranger. Though it reunited the same team behind the Pirates of the Caribbean movies: Disney, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Gore Verbinski, and of course Depp, it smelled like a dud from the release of the first photo of Tonto (if not earlier) to the first appearances of critical reactions, and anyone looking for excuses not to see the movie found them. I almost didn't go myself, fearing a Johnny Depp performance akin to his terrible turn in Alice In Wonderland, but reactions from friends like Ryland Walker Knight made me decide to give it a shot. 

To my surprise, I really liked it. I liked it more the more I thought about it and talked about it with fellow admirers. I saw it a second time (at the last showtime in an actual San Francisco theatre, which was pretty close to a sell-out house) and became convinced the first viewing wasn't just a fluke. This is not a perfect movie, and it surely is guilty of some of the offenses I laid out in the paragraph-before-last, but it's much smarter and worth taking seriously than most are willing to give it credit for. 

I don't have time to write the full-fledged review the film deserves, but at least I've come across a few written by critics going against the tide that I feel capture a good deal of what I'd want to say about it anyway. Jesse Hawthorne Ficks correctly points out Johnny Depp's successful use of silent film star Buster Keaton as  a model for his interpretation of a character that was originally created to prevent awkward silence on the radio. Vern wrote the best defense of Depp's casting I've been able to find so far (possibly excluding the speculation of Natanya Ann Pulley, that didn't come to fruition): 

Of course it would be awesome if a full on, raised-on-the-reservation Native American actor got to star in a giant Disney summer event movie. Also, it would be great if he had the unique vision of this weird character and gave this great of a performance and worked as well with this team of people that Johnny Depp works with. Who do you have in mind?

But I think my favorite take on The Lone Ranger so far is one by Niles Schwartz, who writes, among other dead-on things:

The Lone Ranger, from beginning to end, feels strangely personal for the filmmakers, anachronistically photographic for an event blockbuster, riddled with detail and allusion, and even, as if in accord with the passing of a race that’s had their land stolen from them, understanding of its own tragic decline, as if it knew it would bomb and then perhaps be reevaluated and championed in the years to come.

I say "dead on" but I do have a problem with his wording "passing of a race"- the Comanche Nation still exists, and in fact some of the actors and extras in the film come from among their number. But substitute "passing of a way of life for a race" for the phrase, and I think there's some real insight here.

If nothing else, The Lone Ranger is worth seeing in a cinema because it's great to have a chance to hear Rossini's notes piped through a good-quality cinema sound system.


WHERE/WHEN: Multiple showtimes daily through Thursday at the UA Emery Bay in Emeryville and the Blue Light Cinemas in Cupertino, the last Frisco Bay Theatres to keep it on a screen. It may stick around for another week on Friday but I wouldn't count on it.

WHY: I think it was Paul Mooney on Dave Chappelle's Show who commented on the Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai by proposing a Hollywood pitch: "The Last Negro On Earth starring Tom Hanks." The joke stings because there's no way around it: when a big studio decides to go ahead with a new ultra-expensive film production in the hopes of chasing a billion dollar gross and launching a profitable franchise, it's extremely rare for the cast not to be anchored by a white male actor. Usually this means the movie will take place in a white milieu, but even when it doesn't as with The Last Samurai, the lead character is almost invariably of European heritage. I'd love to see sweeping action epics drawn from African or Pacific Islander or pre-Columbian American legend that don't adopt the perspective of the white outsider, but the financial leverage for the creation of big-budgeted movies is so centered in Hollywood, and the studio inertia to keep remaking versions of the familiar so overwhelming, that they seem unlikely to be made any time soon. Even if they were, without the major involvement of creative personnel from the culture involved, there's little chance the end result would be anything other than appropriation.

In the meantime, there aren't many clear options for a dedicated movie fan who wants the status quo to change. I could try to shut out these desires for a less Eurocentric blockbuster and just accept whatever films Hollywood offers on their own merits, without staying conscious of what kinds of characters and stories are missing from the limited menu on offer. Or I could instead participate in a personal boycott of Hollywood film, rather focusing all of my moviegoing energies on independent film-making initiatives originating in communities of color and the numerous local festivals that support them. Both of these options have appeal, but I'm more comfortable with a middle-ground approach in which I focus attention on both strands. 

Which leads me to this August 27 panel discussion on Hollywood casting trends at the San Francisco Public Library. I'm hoping to attend and get exposed to ideas from perspectives from outside my own circles of attention.

HOW: The Lone Ranger screens via DCP at the UA Emery Bay, and (I'm told) 35mm at the Blue Light Cinemas. It was shot on 35mm.

The Women Outside: Korean Women and the U.S. Military (1996)

WHO: J.T. Takagi & Hye Jung Park directed this documentary.

WHAT: I haven't seen this, but here's a succinct synopsis from a footnote in Glen Mimura's 2008 book Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video:

This film centers on the stories of several Korean women who were involved in the sex industry, and illuminates the industry's multitiered political economy, including the more than 180 "camp towns" set up and regulated by the U.S. Army.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the New Parkway at 7:00. Though the venue website lists the run-time as "unknown", its distributor Third World Newsreel indicates it as 60 minutes long.

WHY: This month is "Karma Cinema Month" at the New Parkway, which means that every admission ticket purchased has 30% of it donated to local non-profits. Not only that, all ticket prices this month are "pay-what-you-wish"; I wonder if this might result in a higher-than-usual overall box office take, even with that 30% going to charity?

Other movies screening at the venue right now include Before Midnight (currently showing on 35mm at the Opera Plaza, but shot digitally so perhaps the New Parkway's projection is preferable for some), Man of Steel, Kings of Summer and Much Ado About Nothing. The upcoming schedule also includes quite a few interesting options during the month, including a showcase of African and Haitian films called the Matatu Film Festival August 15-17. But tonight's screening of The Women Outside is not just a boon to the non-profits on the New Parkway's "Karma Cinema Month" list; it's also a co-presentation of the Alipato Project and the usual licensing fee to screen the doc has been waived by distributor Third World Newsreel in order to help audiences support the East Bay domestic violence-combating organization.

HOW: Digital presentation. I have been unable to determine whether this was shot on 16mm, or on analog video, or on another format.

Harana (2012)

WHO: Director Benito Bautista teamed with guitarist Florante Aguilar to make this documentary.

WHAT: It doesn't have to be inevitable that massive urbanization and modernization is followed by an abandonment of valuable cultural traditions associated with a simpler or more provincial way of life. Music may be uprooted from its original contexts, and bring pleasure and emotion to a listener far removed from the soil of its creation. In the United States people like Harry Smith, Alan Lomax, and even the recently deceased filmmaker Les Blank have helped to create a record of unique musical traditions that may have been first developed to help illiterate people remember narratives, or to provide accompaniment for strict social interactions, but that can still be appreciated for its own sake by modern listeners.  In the Philippines, a figure like Aguilar is just the man to help preserve and revive music known as Harana, a century-old tradition of songwriting and performance intended to be used as serenade or courtship ritual in communities where direct communication between unmarried men and women followed strict cultural codes.

The documentary Harana follows Aguilar in his quest to find living practitioners of the dying Harana art, and bring their lovely sonorities to a new and appreciative public. Francis Joseph A. Cruz describes the film beautifully in a recent review I shall now excerpt:

It seems the sincerity that the music offers is a product of very modest circumstances, of timid gentlemen with nothing but their voices and their hearts to craft melodies from. They are unsung heroes passionately singing to save their songs’ fragile relevance. Harana marvellously allows their timeless voices to get heard and enjoyed along with memories of romances that persist or could have been had they not been rendered obsolete by the unstoppable passage of time. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screening today at 1:00, 3:00, 5:00 and 7:00 at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts screening room, with more screenings at the California in Berkeley, the Camera 3 in San Jose, the Piedmont in Oakland, the Opera Plaza in San Francisco, and the Aquarius in Palo Alto over the next few days and weeks.

WHY: Of all the cinemas I regularly cover here at Hell On Frisco Bay, YBCA seems to me to make the most concerted effort to connect with the full range of San Francisco's famously diverse ethnic communities, especially those under-served by well-established cultural institutions of their own. The venue has programmed healthy surveys of unusual aspects of Chinese, Brazilian, Korean, Indian, Iranian and numerous other national cinemas since I've been a regular attendee, not to mention series devoted to auteurs from Nigeria, Mexico, Argentina, Thailand, Senegal, Poland, Russia, and other countries. This kind of programming has an East Bay mirror at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, which has screened films from all these nations and more during the same period. But my anecdotal experience tells me that, for whatever reason, YBCA seems to be better at seeing a higher proportion of their seats for such screenings filled by people whose ethnic backgrounds match that of the filmmakers.

Recently, YBCA has been especially adept at reaching out to the Bay Area's Filipino-American community. Although Harana premiered to sold-out crowds at CAAMFest this Spring, where it won the audience award, it was equally successful as part of YBCA's New Filipino Cinema series earlier this Summer, where it again won the audience award. And so the venue has brought it back this weekend to coincide with what Asianweek calls "the largest celebration of Filipino Americans in the U.S.", the annual Pistahan event at the neighboring Yerba Buena Gardens.

Upcoming YBCA screenings that should appeal to members and allies of broader cultural communities in San Francsico include Back In The Day, a pair of documentaries on African-American street artists, and La Camioneta, another doc on the dangers of public transportation in Guatemala. Hopefully the fact that Thomas Riedelsheimer's terrific documentary Touch The Sound is screening digitally means that it can be screened with subtitles in order to make the screening accessible to hearing-impaired audiences, as its focus on sound artist Evelyn Glennie make it of particular interest to Frisco Bay's thriving Deaf community.

Although all of the above should also have appeal to members of the not-quite-cultural community known as "cinephiles" as well, of course. Another September YBCA series is the four film and video works collected under the Local Boy Makes Good banner: 4 features of diverse types but all directed by longterm Frisco Bay residents, at least two of them with serious ties to local cinephilia. I don't know much about The Singularity's director Doug Wolens, other than the fact that I've long been interested in seeing his earlier film Butterfly (and will have a big-screen chance to at the Castro September 16), but I'm acquainted with Gibbs Chapman, director of mother mortar, father pestle, and Konrad Steiner, director of way. I met the Chapman through his work as a PFA projectionist, and Steiner through his involvement in putting on local screenings, most notably the wonderful but lamentably concluded (or is it just a hiatus, Konrad?) kino21 series. As for the director of Fred Lyon: Living Through the Lens, I have not personally met Michael House, who now lives in Paris, but note that his prior film The Magnificent Tati screened as part of a YBCA retrospective of the French auteur's work a few years back. The best news is that all four of these makers will be on hand for their respective screenings.

HOW: Harana was shot digitally and will screen digitally.