Written On the Wind (1954)

WHO: Douglas Sirk directed this.

WHAT: One of the best-known of Sirk's high-gloss melodramas made for producer Ross Hunter. I've historically preferred Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life myself, but I feel like it's about time I took another look at this one too. Tag Gallagher calls it the director's "fullest expression of [the] “Faust” theme". 

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:50 PM.

WHY: This screens as part of the PFA's Fassbinder's Favorites mini-series; a sampling of the German cinephile-director's most cherished films made before his own career began in the late 1960s. All but one of the four selections screen on the same night as a Fassbinder film at that venue; tonight's screening is preceded by one of Chinese Roulette. The odd one out is Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, which screens November 22nd, the same night that Cleo From 5 To 7 closes a short series of Agnès Varda's films inspired by her trip to the PFA this coming Monday and Tuesday.

HOW: 35mm print.

The Lodger (1927)

WHO: Alfred Hitchcock directed this (and was so credited), but also worked, uncredited, on the screenplay, and appeared in the first of his famous cameos.

WHAT: Of the nine surviving Hitchcock silent films which circulated as a group around the country earlier this year, The Lodger is probably the best choice to see on Halloween: its atmospheric depiction of night, of fog, and of a mysterious stranger stepping out of it while an entire section of London is terrorized by a "Jack the Ripper" style killer, makes it the earliest of Hitchcock's films generally thought of as possessing the identifiable signature of the future "Master of Suspense" in just about every scene.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at Davies Symphony Hall at 7:30 PM.

WHY: Every Halloween night for the past several years the San Francisco Symphony has taken the evening off and brought in a concert organist to perform a live score to a classic film from the silent era. Past titles have included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Phantom of the Opera, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This year the Symphony decided to expand the tradition by building four days of Hitchcock music & film programming into its Halloween season, but tonight's annual organ performance is for many the centerpiece of the week, as unlike last night's Psycho screening, tomorrow's Vertigo showing, or Saturday's Hitchcock grab-bag, it doesn't involve the reconfiguring of a sound mix originally approved by Hitchcock.

More silent films, most of them with live musical accompaniment, screening in Frisco Bay venues in the next months:

As I mentioned recently, the Rafael Film Center is showing the 1922 Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror tonight, and will hold another silent film program December 12th; only the latter will have live musical accompaniment.

The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont has just revealed its November-December schedule (as a pdf) including its traditional Saturday night screenings for November.

The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley is showing the last purely silent film starring the so-called "Chinese Garbo" Ruan Lingyu, The Goddess, on November 8th, as well as her first (sort-of) talkie New Women November 9th and Stanley Kwan's acclaimed film about Ruan starring Maggie Cheung, Center Stage, on November 29th. 

The Castro Theatre will host the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's next event: a January 11th day-long tribute to Charlie Chaplin on the 100th anniversary of his filmmaking career. Titles were just announced earlier this week, and include The Gold Rush, The Kid and a program of Mutual two-reelers..

Finally, the SF Symphony continues the 2014 Chaplin celebration April 12th by performing live the actor/director/writer/composer's own score for a screening of City Lights.

HOW: Since 2010 the Symphony's Halloween screenings have all been digital presentations. Tonight's features Todd Wilson on the organ.

Psycho (1960)

WHO: Bernard Herrmann wrote the music for this.

WHAT: When Alfred Hitchcock first planned out his ideas for Psycho he imagined no music at all accompany the now-famous "shower scene". But at that time Herrmann's stock with Hitchcock was such that he was allowed to persuade the director to let him score that scene with what has now become one of the all-time iconic music moments in movie history. Just hearing one note (maybe two) of Herrmann's dissonant strings is all it takes to evoke the shock and dread of this scene for anyone who has seen the film- and many who haven't. The rest of Herrmann's score, written only for a string ensemble, is brilliant as well. For more on Hitchcock & Herrmann's approach to music and sound in Psycho read this article at FilmSound.org.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at Davies Symphony Hall at 8:00, and at the Vine Cinema & Alehouse in Livermore at 7PM on November 7th.

WHY: Last month I attended a concert at Davies Hall, home of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, in which the Symphony performed famous musical excerpts from Jaws, Star Wars, Schindler's List and other movies made during my lifetime, with their composer John Williams behind the conductor's podium. Steven Spielberg was on hand to discuss his career-long collaboration with Williams and give a cursory introduction to how music makes its mark on motion pictures. 

Most of the pieces were played without any visual accompaniment outside of the spectacle of seeing a celebrity conductor and a world-class orchestra in action, or whatever images from the films or other associations might dance in our minds' eyes. But for a few of the pieces a screen hung above the orchestra, allowing us to look at clips from Close Encounters of the Third Kind while a suite of music from the film played, or clips from a wide variety of swashbuckling adventure films from throughout cinema history while a rousing piece from Spielberg's animated The Adventures of Tintin was performed by the orchestra.

But the most unique surprise of the evening, for me, was a side-by-side comparison of one continuity-intact sequence from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade screened twice in a row. If you know the film, it was a version of the "circus train" sequence that had been specially prepared so that sound effects and dialogue were audible but the originally recorded music score had been digitally "scrubbed" out somehow. For the second viewing of the scene, the orchestra performed the music live, occasionally coming close to drowning out an individual line of dialogue or sound effect, but gloriously conveying a sense of rollicking adventure and excitement. 

If the intent was to show how 'flat' a Spielberg action scene is in the absence of his composer's contribution, it didn't have that impact on me. Williams is a terrific film composer, don't get me wrong. But I found the scene no less gripping, and indeed found more gravitas to its evocation of urgency and physicality, when stripped of its underscore. Whether or not such gravitas is appropriate for an early sequence in an Indiana Jones film is certainly debatable. I've probably seen too many Jean-Pierre Melville films to have a sensible answer, but I did very much enjoy this enhanced peek into the moviemaking process.

I'd seen entire films screened at Davies Hall before, both with the San Francisco Symphony performing (as with The Gold Rush in 2010) and with an outside group using the space (Philip Glass presenting Powaqqatsi in 2006) but these are, music aside, completely silent films. I was aware of the fact that the Symphony had in recent years performed live alongside screenings of sound-era films such as Psycho, Casablanca, and The Matrix, but last month was the first I'd gotten to see the technology in action, and was curious to learn more. Knowing there were four days of Alfred Hitchcock screenings coming up starting with tonight's reprise of Psycho and continuing with Friday night's premiere presentation of the "score-scrubbed" Vertigo with live symphonic accompaniment, I decided to inquire with the symphony about the series. Here's what SF Symphony Director of Artistic Planning John Magnum had to say about the year-long series this week launches at Davies.

We’ve been doing films as part of our Summer and the Symphony concerts for a few years now, and we’ve had a terrific audience response to them. We heard from our audience that there was an appetite for more of these projects throughout the year, and so we thought we’d pilot a four-concert series in 2013-14. To launch the series, we put together a week of performances around the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and the starting point for that was actually the world premiere of Vertigo in concert, which seemed perfect for San Francisco. 

We have a list of films that we know are out there, available for performance with orchestra. We also have some ideas of other films and projects that we’d be interested in producing. We want to have a balance between full-length films, and mixed programs with highlights from various movies – it’s half and half this season, and we’ll probably have about that mix going forward. And of course the basic criteria is that the film is known for having a great score – Bernard Hermann in the case of Vertigo and Psycho, great classical pieces for Fantasia, and so on.

There are a few producers working with the studios to create the projects, which we then license from the producer for live concert performance. In a couple of cases, we have worked directly with the studios or a creator’s estate, which basically accomplishes the same thing. This is an area that other orchestras are interested in as well – Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, for example, as well as some of the European orchestras and presenters – so there are new projects in the pipeline for future seasons, too.  

The Symphony's Hitchcock week has been recently profiled by Thomas Gladysz, The Saturday "Hitchcock! Greatest Hits" program focuses especially on Dimitri Tiomkin's music for Strangers on a Train and Dial 'M' For Murder, as well as Herrmann's for North By Northwest (including the main title, the drunk driving scene, and the Mount Rushmore finale.) It's filled out by two scenes piece from Vertigo and To Catch a Thief (music by Lyn Murray), and of course Charles-Francois Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, which became synonymous with the Master of Suspense from its use in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series.

Unlike the Symphony's silent film presentations (such as that of Hitchcock's The Lodger tomorrow night), these programs are not ideal for purists or for newbies, but for fans of a film interested in experiencing it in part or in full again on a large screen in a unique way: with live musical accompaniment from a terrific ensemble, If you can't make it to the Hitchcock series, the Symphony will screen Singin' in the Rain with live music December 6th and 7th.


HOW: Tonight's digital presentation of Psycho at Davies Hall. will be a version with the original music recording "scrubbed" off the soundtrack while sound effects and dialogue remain. Herrmann's score will instead be performed by the San Francisco Symphony with Joshua Gersen conducting. The Vine Cinema screening will be the original 1960 version, sourced from a Blu-Ray.

Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969)

WHO: Kenneth Anger made and appears in this short film. It features a Mick Jagger-created electronic soundtrack, and a brief cameo by the founder of the Church of Satan Anton LaVay.

WHAT: When I first saw the bulk of Kenneth Anger's films all in one go at a Castro Theatre screening with Anger present, this was the one that I was most drawn to, not because I have any particular interest in the occult or Satanism (though I love Halloween, and was always fascinated by the black house a few blocks from mine growing up, which is where LaVay lived and reportedly kept a pet tiger) but because the combination of its alienating soundtrack and its unusual editing effects seemed most "of a piece" to a budding cinephile. Since that day twelve and a half years ago I've grown more appreciative of other Anger films but this one still retains its eerie power. Here's a great blog collecting writing on the film.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight on a program starting at 8:00 at Oddball Films

WHY: Tonight's Oddball program is Satanic Sinema: The Devil Gets His Due. Also featuring animation like the Betty-Boop-in-Hell cartoon Red Hot Mamma and the 1970s Canadian TV special that haunted me as a youngster, The Devil and Daniel Mouse, as well as devilish live-action curiosities featuring burlesque dancer Betty Dolan, occult icon Sybil Leek, and future president Ronald Reagan.

It's part of a full week of screenings at Oddball, a venue that normally opens its doors to the public only on Thursdays and Fridays, but is going full-throttle for Halloween week, with a screening of the definitive Bible-Belt haunted house documentary Hell House Wednesday night, a shorts program including the Mario Bava-esque oral hygiene scare film The Haunted Mouth on Halloween itself, and a spooky animation spotlight on Friday, November 1st.

HOW: All of tonight's films are expected to screen on 16mm.

Cruising (1980)

WHO: William Friedkin directed this, and Al Pacino stars in it, although the latter was very dissatisfied with the completed picture and has never spoken about it in public since.

WHAT: I wasn't old enough to experience the controversies around the filming of Gerald Walker's novel and its initial release, nor was I in town when its 1995 revival at the Roxie (recounted by programmer Elliot Lavine in the SF Bay Guardian and The Evening Class) opened the gates for re-evaluation. But I did finally see it at the Castro in 2007, and found it an interesting if often unsuccessful film that didn't really match the reductive readings of it by its harshest critics, even if it ultimately lacked anything of the forceful impact of Friedkin's best films such as Sorcerer. A concise, fairly-balanced history of the Cruising controversy has been written by Michael D. Klemm.

When the PFA screened both films with Friedkin an attendance as part of a mini-retrospective last month, I missed the Cruising q&a but wasn't surprised that the first audience question after Sorcerer screened was actually about the more controversial later film. The question was about the recent James Franco picture Interior. Leather Bar. which imagines and re-enacts the "lost" footage from Cruising, more than a half hour of sex club shots that Friedkin says in his recent page-turner of a memoir that he put in the movie with the expectation it would be cut out so he could slide the rest of his film past the censors with an R rating. As you can see on youtube, Friedkin gives an entertaining answer about his relationship to Franco's piece, but also uses the question as an opportunity to talk about the making of Cruising as he remembers it- there is some crossover from his account in his memoir but in fact both accounts compliment each other.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today only at 3:45 and 8:45 at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: Today's screening of Cruising along with Interior. Leather Bar. dovetails nicely with the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts upcoming X: The History of a Film Rating program which collects many of the more high-profile, non-pornographic movies that have at one point or another been saddled with the MPAA's most restrictive rating. There are at least a few other titles on the Castro's just-released November calendar that also make a nice compliment to this series: John Waters's Female Trouble, which screens at the Castro November 7th along with the new documentary on its star I Am Divine, and David Cronenberg's Crash, which screens November 13th along with Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend. 

HOW: Both Cruising and Interior. Leather Bar. screen via DCP.