The Shining (1980)

WHO: Stanley Kubrick.

WHAT: You don't have to be a Kubrick fan, a horror movie fan, a Jack Nicholson fan, or a Stephen King fan to love and/or be obsessed by The Shining. It incorporates all of those broad categories of fandom but transcends them as well. So much has been said about this film, but I'm sure there's more to say. I'll have to leave that for another day however, and simply link to this amazing site for The Shining devotees.

WHERE/WHEN: 9PM tonight only at the Balboa Theatre, presented as part of Another Hole In The Head.

WHY: Unless you're a big Jaws fan this is clearly the greatest film playing this year's Another Hole In The Head film festival (I'm prejudging a lot of unseen horror films by saying this, but we're talking about what I consider to be an all-time masterpiece here). It's also the last "HoleHead" screening at the Balboa before the festival moves to New People in Japantown (where a digital "backwards and forwards" screening inspired by the movie Room 237 will occur next Thursday night.)

Not only that, it's screening in 35mm, an occurrence I'd expected to disappear now that a digital version of the film has been the go-to theatrical distribution method for Warner Brothers. The Castro and Roxie have both been forced to show The Shining digitally in recent years, and a "last-ever" 35mm screening happened over a year and a half ago (with the last Frisco Bay screening further back in history than that; my last viewing was almost precisely four years ago). I have no idea where and how the SF IndieFest folks who run HoleHead got this print and the permission to show it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's not another long while before there's another chance to see it unspool this way. If ever.

HOW: Billed as a "perfect" 35mm print.

Children's Party (1938)

WHO: Joseph Cornell made this film, and gave it to Lawrence Jordan to finish shortly before his 1972 death. Jordan writes that he left the editing structure intact, and that his contribution was that he "made the films printable".

WHAT: I've seen quite a few of Cornell's collage films (and a few of his other, later collaborations with Rudy Burckhardt as well), but I don't believe I've seen this or the other two films that make up what is called "The Children's Trilogy" (Cotillon and The Midnight Party) before. I do know that, like the majority of Cornell's films, they were not screened publicly until decades after they had been conceptualized and created. Few sources seem to agree which year these films even belong to; I've seen them dated as early as 1930 and as late as 1970, and frequently using multiple years (presumably in reference to the time when they were originally made and when they were finally printed and projected) or, as in the Canyon Cinema catalog, a vague range (1940s). 

Girish Shambu has written on these films evocatively. An excerpt:

He inserts title cards but only holds them for a frame or two, with the result that they fly by in a flash and are impossible to read. On the other hand, he’ll take an ordinary image—a boy sleeping or a girl sneezing—and will freeze-frame it and hold it, forcing us to examine every inch of it with care. In other words, elements of the film that might provide information about plot, character, narrative causality, etc., are purposely de-emphasized, while our eyes are redirected to stay with ‘unexceptional’ images on their own and in conjunction with other images (through montage), so that they start to appear anything but banal.

WHERE/WHEN: Scheduled to screen at 6:45 and 8:20 tonight only at the Kadist Art Foundation's Mission District storefront.

WHY: Children's Party and its sisters in the "Children's Trilogy" screen, along with Michael Snow and Carl Brown's dual-projector Triage and Anthony McCall's seminal 1973 para-cinematic piece Line Describing A Cone (which I've been dying to see for years and especially since hearing Robert Davis & J. Robert Parks discuss it on a podcast last year), as part of the launch of a Canyon Cinema Pop-Up in which the Kadist space will become the site of a kind of temporary avant-garde cinema DVD rental store for titles you'll never find through Netflix or Redbox or probably even Le Video or Lost Weekend. More details on that here. 

If you can't make tonight's screening event, there will be three more events at the space in the next two weeks; a live performance of Kerry Tribe's tribute to Hollis Frampton's 1971 film Critical Mass this Saturday, an as-yet unannounced selection of humorous experimental films (that I strongly suspect will include Robert Nelson's The Off-Handed Jape) on the following Saturday, December 14th, and a presentation of films selected by Janis Crystal Lipzin and Denah Johnston on December 18th.

HOW: All of tonight's selections screen from 16mm prints from Canyon Cinema.

All Is Lost (2013)

WHO: Robert Redford stars in this. He's practically the only soul in sight during the entire movie, in fact.

WHAT: Mick LaSalle's generally dismissive review of this "old man and the sea" tale updated for the age of the adventure-seeking (and law-breaking) solo yachtsman has some genuine insight into why Redford is so effective in this role. But as is too often the case, LaSalle's disinterest in the inherent properties of cinema (the language of shots, cuts, and the relationship between sound an image) makes him oblivious to some of the film's merits. For me, it was as thrilling to see just how writer-director J.C. Chandor was going to tell this story of survival despite his self-imposed limitations: an almost complete lack of dialogue, no solid ground on the horizon, no attempts at backstory or getting into Redford's head by means other than his facial expressions and actions. It's among my favorite American films of 2013.

WHERE/WHEN: Multiple showtimes today through Thursday at the Opera Plaza and the Century 9 in San Francisco, and the Aquarius in Palo Alto. It also screens at the Elmwood in Berkeley at least through Thursday, December 12th.

WHY: Today the New York Film Critics Circle announced its 2013 awards, the first awards of the year I pay more than a minute's attention to. Year-end awards have their limitations as diviners of true quality pictures, but they do serve as effective promotion for films worth seeing in theatres.  The New York Critics this year gave awards to three films not yet arrived in Frisco Bay cinemas (American Hustle, The Wind Rises and Inside Llewyn Davis) and two no longer on local screens (Fruitvale Station and Stories We Tell) but the majority of other awarded films are still viewable in nearby theatres. A 35mm print of Blue Jasmine with the NYFCC Best Actress pick Cate Blanchett is still hanging on at the Opera Plaza. Foreign Film awardee Blue Is The Warmest Color continues at the Clay and other local cinemas. Dallas Buyers Club (which contains Supporting Actor Jared Leto's awarded performance) and 12 Years a Slave (which earned Steve McQueen a Best Director NYFCC award) continue at multiple theatres. But All Is Lost is not only my favorite of the five films I've seen that won awards today, it's also the only one that I'm not sure will still be playing on a San Francisco screen by the end of the week.

HOW: Shot digitally, All is Lost is projected via DCP at all aforementioned venues except for the Opera Plaza, which has a 35mm print.

Discopath (2013)

WHO: Renaud Gauthier wrote and collaborated with Marie-Claire Lalonde to direct and co-produce this, the first feature film for either of them.

WHAT: I have not seen it, so let's let an excerpt from Fangoria do the talking:

Everything about Discopath, in fact, feels appropriate to the period that’s its setting and its inspiration—the movie even looks just right, John Londono’s cinematography capturing the hues and image density of pictures from those decades past. Clearly a fan of the era, Gauthier doesn’t filter his affection through ironic detachment or condescend to the material; he’s simply created a film—making the most of his low budget, and bringing it in at a tight 80 minutes—that could easily have played on 42nd Street alongside the latest indie stalker flicks and Italian imports.

WHERE/WHEN: 9PM tonight only at the Balboa Theatre, presented as part of the Another Hole in the Head Film Festival.

WHY: I don't think of myself as a particular fan of horror movies, but I've checked my records and confirmed that I've always attended at least one, and sometimes up to as many as four or five of the programs in Frisco Bay's biggest annual festival of (mostly) new (mostly) horror films over the past ten years of its existence. This is not nearly as much as someone like Jason Wiener, who is a true loyalist to all of SF IndieFest's annual events, but for me it's unusual. As much as I like to keep tabs on Frisco Bay festivals, there are only a few that I make sure to attend year after year, and only one with more longevity (Noir City, soon to be in its 12th year in San Francisco) that I've been with since its inception. Affectionately nicknamed simply HoleHead, the Another Hole In The Head Film Festival (as in, "this town needs another film festival like it needs...") appeals to me because it shows things no other festival in town would even consider booking, like Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl, Andrew Lau's Haunted Changi, or Jason J. Tomaric's Cl.One. These and the other HoleHead films I've seen over the years are not exactly profound works of deep meaning, and some of them are certainly better than others, but they all are very confident of what they want to be, with little or no regard for conforming to the rest of the cinematic landscape.

This year I'm intrigued by several of the HoleHead selections, including Discopath, which screens tonight, and The Dirties, a favorite of my blog buddy Michael Guillén, who has called it a "tremendously entertaining low-budget feature that implicates the culpability of its audiences by way of an unidentified camera operator". Wednesday night and Thursday night are extremely special however; HoleHead has always included a retrospective component (the first show I attended my first year at the festival was a revival of Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer and last year an in-person appearance from director Richard Elfman at a digitally-colorized version of Forbidden Zone was a highlight), and this year it's a doozy: 35mm screenings of two classic horror films that I had thought had simply become unavailable to see on film any longer now that their rightsholders are committed to the DCP projection format: Jaws and The Shining. I've never seen the former on the big screen and had pretty much given up on the possibility of ever doing so on film. I have seen the latter in a good 35mm print and a good audience before, and it's one of the highlights of my life as a Kubrick admirer. Don't miss these screenings if you want to see these films the way their makers truly intended them to be seen!

HOW: Discopath screens digitally.

We Were Here (2011)

WHO: David Weissman and Bill Weber co-directed this.

WHAT: Though released a year beforehand, We Were Here makes an ideal compliment to David France's 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary How To Survive A Plague. The latter is comprised almost entirely of archival video footage of East Coast AIDS activists, the overwhelming majority of them white, male, and connected to ACT UP New York. It's a film filled with inspiring anger, caustic wit, ferocious energy, and quite a bit of rousing chanting. We Were Here includes some archival footage (the above screen shot is from one ACT UP moment on Castro Street) but is on the whole far more calm and even contemplative. It relies almost exclusively on sit-down interviews and still photographs, and focuses on San Francisco rather than New York and Washington, but takes a broader historical look at the history of AIDS from its mysterious and alarming beginnings, includes more oral histories of women and people of color, and gives at least as much attention to the role of caregivers and support networks as to activists in the the fight against the disease's ravages. That at least two excellent documentaries of such disparate styles and approaches have been made on the topic in the last few years is a sign that the subject of the AIDS crisis is likely to yield a wide range of more valuable films to come.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro at 7PM.

WHY: Today is World AIDS Day. A good day to hold in mind the many filmmakers the world has lost to the disease (a partial list here) and wonder what beautiful works might have been created were they still with us. The Castro observes the day with a special screening of We Were Here at which Weissman (who also produced the film) and some of the cast will be present to answer questions afterward.

It's also the first day of December and a new calendar for the theatre, which aside from the glimpse in the above image is also mentioned by one of the We Were Here interviewees, who recalls first learning about the "gay cancer" on his way to a double-bill of Golden Age classics Casablanca and Now, Voyager. Neither of those films are on the December docket, but quite a few Hollywood Studio-System era films of the sort that have grown somewhat scarce within the Castro walls make appearances: To Catch A Thief, Dial 'M' For Murder, It's A Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, Some Like It Hot and Singin' in the Rain screen via the new-fangled DCP technology, while Blast of Silence, Christmas Eve, The Fortune Cookie, A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup will show on 35mm prints just as they would have on their original releases or as revivals during the 1980s. The month's sole foreign-language offering is the 1946 French classic Children Of Paradise (not Phantom of the Paradise as I was led to believe earlier) and it will screen from a DCP.

Films made in 1968, 1977, the mid-eighties, early-nineties and beyond each get their own 35mm double-bills sometime during the month: The Tbomas Crown Affair and Bullitt December 21st, Eraserhead and Killer of Sheep on the 13th, Gremlins and Lethal Weapon (both Christmas-related actually) on the 19th, True Romance and Pulp Fiction on the 27th, and the MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS pairing of Home For The Holidays and Love Actually on the 20th of the month. More recent fare includes the documentary on the John Waters collaborator I Am Divine (for which David Weissman is thanked in the credits- perhaps related to the fact that he and Weber's prior film before We Were Here was The Cockettes) December 9th, 3D showings of Gravity on the 10th and 11th, and (in a preview of early 2014) Blue Jasmine January 2nd.

December has more than the usual number of days in which the Castro will be used for something other than motion pictures, but of particular interest is a December 16th Holiday Benefit Concert intended to help raise money to prevent the theatre from losing its Wurlitzer organ. There's also the traditional Christmas Eve Gay Men's Chorus concert of course, which recalls that you've always wanted to sing along to a movie at the Castro, you have several chances over the coming week, including this afternoon. I'm more interested in finally attending another audience-participation screening event; Every year I've had to work during Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes of San Francisco programs of local home-movie and other "ephemeral" footage accompanied by the sounds of audience members calling out questions and comments about the Frisco Bay history unfolding before them on the screen. This year I have the night off and wouldn't you know it the event is sold out already. Look for me in the walk-up line for unclaimed tickets with my fingers crossed.

HOW: Digital production and presentation.