Two Eyes: James Brown

In the San Francisco Bay Area, moviegoing is not just for the newest releases. In 2013 there were more theatrical opportunities to see films spanning the history of cinema than any one person could take advantage of. Therefore, I've asked a sampling of local moviegoers to select a few favorites seen in cinemas last year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from James Brown, cinephile, musician, DJ and blogger

Here are my favorite vintage films that I saw last year.

The Earrings of Madame de... (1953) at Alliance Francaise

Max Ophuls' delectable bon mot starring Danielle Darrieux and Charles Boyer as an aristocratic French couple whose surreptitious affairs are exposed by a pair of earrings that are secretly traded amongst their illicit lovers. Ophuls' camerawork is dazzling, as usual.

Tree Of Wooden Clogs (1978) at The Randall Museum

This three hour masterpiece, directed by Ermanno Olmi, is a triumphant homage to an earlier cinematic age of Italian neorealism. A film about 19th century poor Italian peasants in which every role is played not by an actor but by real farmers and locals.

And Give My Love to the Swallows (1971) at PFA
Czechoslovakian director Jaromil Jires, best known for Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders, adapted to the big screen this dramatization of the real life letters written in prison by young Czech resistance fighter Maruska Kuderíková, who was imprisoned by the Nazis, sentenced to death, and beheaded with an axe. Haunting, powerful imagery.

Rolling Stones performance clips (1962-1972) at the SF Main Library
Local rock music historian and writer Richie Unterberger often does shows of music video clips around the Bay Area, but this one composed of rare live and studio performances by the Stones in the first decade of their career was exceptional.

French Can Can (1954) at Alliance Francaise
A light-hearted Jean Renoir film about Paris' most notorious dance hall, the Moulin Rouge, starring Jean Gabin. Fun fun fun.

Revenge Of the Pearl Queen (1956) at YBCA

Shintoho exploitation flick with the stunning Michiko Maeda trapped on an island with five horny male castaways. First Japanese film to feature female nudity.

Le Joli Mai (1963) at Opera Plaza

Director Chris Marker takes to the streets to interview Parisians about love, life, politics and other social issues, made around the same time as his infamous La Jetee.

King Of Marvin Gardens (1972) at The Castro

Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Scatman Crothers, Atlantic City, the 70s. Enough said.

Street Angel (1937) at PFA

A Depression-era Chinese film set in Shanghai about a good-hearted musician tries to rescue two young sisters from poverty and prostitution. Great black and white cinematography and made by a leftist collaborative.

Bring Me The Head Of Afredo Garcia (1974) at The Castro
Sam Peckinpah's surreal Mexican bloodbath starring the inimitable Warren Oates. A flop at the time but now considered one of the best cult films of the 70s.

Two Eyes: Carl Martin

In the San Francisco Bay Area, moviegoing is not just for the newest releases. In 2013 there were more theatrical opportunities to see films spanning the history of cinema than any one person could take advantage of. Therefore, I've asked a sampling of local moviegoers to select a few favorites seen in cinemas last year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Carl Martin, projectionist and keeper of the Bay Area Film Calendar.

the rep scene is not healthy, and i saw far fewer films than in years past (and read far more books).  but i saw enough that i still had to do some winnowing to get down to ten.  except for Shura in 16mm, all were screened in 35mm.  once again i broke a rule and included a private screening.  it was part of a curated series, just not a public one.  these days film is being driven underground.

january 19, pfa: China 9 Liberty 37.  the red-herring title comes from a mile-marker sign glimpsed in this ultra-obscure late classic-era monte hellman film.  a film needs a title, you know, for marketing purposes.  beyond that, hellman doesn't give a f-star-star-k!  endless foul-mouthed quotability.  faded (unique?) print.

february 24, pfa: Shura - the 48th Ronin.  an audacious formal exercise.  what is real, what is not?  it is all cinema.

april 11, roxie: The Witch Who Came From The Sea.  whether intentionally or not, a bizarre millie perkins performance meanders through narrative holes to weave a concise, tragic portrait of a very messed-up dame.  we had to bring this back later in the year as a film on film show.  shot by dean cundey!

april 26, castro: Duel.  i would come across spielberg's debut when it played on tv years ago and be transfixed, but had never caught the beginning where some of the subtext is clarified.  a complete and proper screening confirms its brilliance.  life in the twentieth century has left dennis weaver unmanned, un-humanned even.  his malaise takes the shape of a gnarly big rig he can't shake.  hellish.  hellman-ish.

july 20, castro: The House on Trubnaya Square (дом на трубной).  wonderfully riveting montage in a ravishing svema print.  the curtain wash came on for a spell in reels 4 and 5, casting a horrid red glow on the screen.  that was unfortunate.

august 15, roxie: Vice Squad.  wings hauser unchained!  shot by john alcott.

september 15, castro: Carnival of Souls.  i'd been wanting to see this for years.  the print was to die for.  such contrast, such sensuous tones!  low-budget poetry.

october 25, pfa: Fear of Fear (angst der angst).  i failed to appreciate this one when i first saw it back in '97.  it's fassbinder at his most sirkian.  when you peel the onion, tears come.

december 3, private screening: Tough Guys Don't Dance.  an outrageous, lurid potboiler from the machismo-addled mind of norman mailer (who helmed as well).  you never saw such lines delivered with straight faces by ryan o'neal, isabella rossellini, lawrence tierney, penn jillette, WINGS HAUSER, and a couple of palookas with the most ineptly overblown southern accents in cinema.  "ah just whasn't maaade for this kahnd of imbrohglio!"

december 18, castro: Blast of Silence.  i saw a triple feature one day back in the nineties at the uc theatre.  first, a quite excellent noir, i forget which one.  then, one of those amazing, unforgettable, genre-defining noirs, can't remember the title.  and then, Blast of Silence.  from that day on (one of the best days of movie-watching i've had), i've enshrined allen baron as a genius in my mind, despite never seeing any of his other work.  he came to the castro.  everybody loved him.  i was moved.  my only regret is that i couldn't bring him home with me.

Two Eyes: David Robson

In the San Francisco Bay Area, moviegoing is not just for the newest releases. In 2013 there were more theatrical opportunities to see films spanning the history of cinema than any one person could take advantage of. Therefore, I've asked a sampling of local moviegoers to select a few favorites seen in cinemas last year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from David Robson, who blogs at House of Sparrows,

Noir City. The Hitchcock 9. The Silent Film Festival. All three of these were great events to hit San Francisco, but if they're the only rep offerings you took in last year, you're part of the problem. Venues continue to struggle year 'round, and desperately need and deserve both your moviegoing dollars and your eyes. Since the three events above are covered elsewhere in Two Eyes '13, I'm going to skip them entirely. Not just because more than enough people will be sounding off on them, but because, frankly, removing them from consideration allows me to fit in more of the great stuff I saw outside them last year. SUCH AS:

--I'm resolving to get to the Stanford Theatre more this year - I worry that their recent reduction of days of operation and focus on name talent and classics is a kind of belt-tightening, and grow concerned for their future. Hard as it is to get down there for programs, I'm delighted by the few things I did see there. The highlight: Tower Of London, basically Richard III from the makers of Son of Frankenstein. An A-list historical period piece that moved like a B-horror. Wonderful!

--A couple of intriguing series of experimental Japanese films from the 60s and 70s made the rounds earlier in the year. Between them they offered a nice little retrospective of filmmaker/theatre director/provocateur Shuji Terayama. I was delighted to finally get a look at his feature Cache Cache Pastoral, a gorgeous and psychologically penetrating work that ranks among his most personal, laying out his mother issues alongside some truly stunning imagery.

--The attention on Hitchcock's silents prompted a lot of Hitchcock programming all over the Bay Area. I'm grateful to PFA for going all the way to the UK to summon a print of Under Capricorn, Hitchcock's stylized but little seen melodrama. Rope, with it's long takes and single setting, is now regarded as one of Hitchcock's boldest experiments, but Under Capricorn built on those experiments, interlacing Rope's technical feats with Rebecca's Gothic horror with still other elements quite unique to this picture. It's not an overt exercise in suspense; even in that pre-auteur era, people who praised Hitchcock as a great director found Under Capricorn a little too weird. Would that it enjoyed the attention and reappraisal given the Hitchcock 9.

--A rare, maybe even totally unheard-of afternoon screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show allowed its audience, if they were interested, to assess the joy, the multi-levelled queerness, the references to older horror movies, and the earnest plea for individualistic expression mostly absent of the crowd participation and other antics for which screenings of the movie have become known. The hosts of the movie may have been disappointed by the relative silence of the audience. Perhaps simply watching the movie is a more novel means of accessing its radicalism.

--Most people contributing to IOHTE (and I gather many of you reading it) have probably compared seeing movies at the Castro to attending church. This comparison was strongly in mind at a Sunday afternoon, one-off screening of Michael Mann's Heat. The cool, meticulous, blue-lit cop-and-crooks story isn't epic in scope, necessarily, but on this lovely and grey afternoon it became all things to all of us in attendance. (Coincidentally, that evening in Los Angeles a rare 35mm print of Mann's The Keep screened for what I'm told was a similarly faithful audience at Cinefamily.)

--A small Brian DePalma series (built around screenings of Passion, his latest) offered a welcome chance to see Femme Fatale in 35mm. I wrote that it was funny how in this film, after breaking from Hollywood and enjoying the freedom of foreign financing, DePalma had made a movie as graceful and elegant as Hollywood movies used to be. The opening heist scene is some of the most joyous, rapturous filmmaking I've ever seen - some people who'd seen the late afternoon screening before Passion stuck around to watch that sequence again.

--KROB took over the Castro for a day and showed, in reverse chronological order, Jonathan Demme's concert documentaries. I'd been long curious about Storefront Hitchcock, Demme's intimate film capturing Robyn Hitchcock performing live in a tiny Greenwich Village furniture store. It turned out to be an ideal introduction to Hitchcock's angular, idiosyncratic music, and is every bit as dynamic a music movie as Demme's more expansive Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. (Indeed, Storefront resembled a feature-length iteration of Sense's sparer first ten minutes.) I left the screening shaken, elated, knocked out, and disappointed that there were maybe ten other people in the Castro who saw it.

--A pre-Halloween screening of An American Werewolf In London, a movie I'd enjoyed for decades on video without ever seeing theatrically, broke it wide open. The spooky opening scenes on England's fog-shrouded moors honor the atmospherics of the movie's classic forerunners, and the much-lauded transformation scene make the most of then-current technology (as does, in a subtler way, the intense Steadicam chase scene through the Tottenham Court Road tube station). Making the film for Universal, John Landis clearly understood what making a Universal horror film meant, and his movie both honors that tradition and extends it into a new generation.

--Having assumed that the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder was of a piece with a misanthropic, miserablist tradition in recent filmmaking I approached the films in a recent, multi-venue retrospective with some trepidation. And yet I quickly figured out that his movies were leavened with a deep compassion that seems to escape contemporary filmmakers, who seem bent on making their audiences as miserable as their characters. Just as thrilling is Fassbinder's often theatrical mise-en-scene, which gives us some Brechtian distance to consider the plight of his protagonists while at the same time keeping us emotionally involved with them. I wish I'd seen more of them, and hesitate to put any of the movies I saw in the series over the others, so I'll name the brutal but (that word again) compassionate Martha as simply the series' most pleasant surprise.

--My second 35mm screening of Rumble Fish left me torn between thinking it was simply one of my favorite films and thinking it's one of the greatest films.

Two Eyes: Maureen Russell

In the San Francisco Bay Area, moviegoing is not just for the newest releases. In 2013 there were more theatrical opportunities to see films spanning the history of cinema than any one person could take advantage of. Therefore, I've asked a sampling of local moviegoers to select a few favorites seen in cinemas last year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Maureen Russell, film festival volunteer, member and aficionado.

1) Noir City 11 – annual San Francisco Film Noir Fest Jan. 25 – Feb. 3, 2013 – Castro Theatre Highlights of Noir City included opening night’s Gun Crazy (1950) with actress Peggy Cummins in an onstage interview; San Francisco double feature The Sniper (1952) with great location shots and Experiment in Terror (1962) – 4k digital restoration, directed by Blake Edwards (very different subject for him) – the cast, music, story and pace made this a tense thriller. (1/30/13) And a highly fun night 2/1/13 for the 1953 3-D noir double feature with Man in the Dark and Inferno. It felt like it was the 50s with a full house wearing 3-D glasses, and the films were great, not just made for the gimmick.

2) The Clock – dir. Christian Marclay, SFMoMA I was quite impressed by this carefully compiled installation piece using film and television shows with clocks in each scene, shown in actual time. Having to wait to enter the screening room and then stay as long as you wanted became part of the experience. Repeat visits and longer viewings brought more out of the piece, as it revisited certain films, scenes, and actors. I attended some of the 24-hour screenings and got to know people in the long line with me on closing weekend. It was fun to recognize scenes from films you knew. After seeing it, I became very aware of clock shots in other films. I did get to experience the midnight segment.

3) San Francisco Silent Film Festival – July, the Castro Theatre
I’m choosing the entire festival. Highlights include The First Born, dir. Miles Mander, UK, 1928, accompanied by Stephen Horne and recently restored by BFI. The story of love and betrayal amount the upper class felt completely modern, great acting and of course accompaniment, starring Miles Mander who cowrote it with Alma Reville. Another highlight was Denmark’s The Golden Clown, 1926, accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble, providing the perfect music for a tragic clown story.

4) Eight Deadly Shots, 1972, Finland, director Mikko Niskanen, B&W, SF International Film Festival, the Kabuki, 5/7/13 I took the day off to see this 316 minute classic of Finnish film, written, directed and starring Mikko Niskanen. Originally a tv miniseries, based on a true incident (but only a news clipping), you are drawn into the hard daily life of a Finnish farmer and the mindset that could have fired the shots at the beginning of the film. You also learn how to make bootleg hooch!

5) The Hitchcock 9 – Silent Hitchcock, SF Silent Film Festival, July 14 – 16, Castro Theatre Again, I’m picking the whole festival, and I did see all nine beautifully recently restored by the BFI, early silent films made in England by one of my favorite directors, most of which I’d never heard of before. Highlights include two starring Ivor Novello: Downhill (1927) accompanied by Stephen Horne on piano (the story of a promising young man whose life slides increasingly downhill after a series of women take advantage of him) and The Lodger (1926), accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, in which part of the suspense hinges on whether you believe suspicious Novello is the Jack the Ripper character or just a loner.

6) Hollywood Before the Code! Deeper, Darker, Nastier!, March 1 – 7, the Roxie The Roxie’s popular pre-code festival included many studio archive 35mm prints and great double bills A highlight was closing night’s Lyle Talbot double feature, with Lyle’s son in attendance, telling stories to a full house. Fog Over Frisco (1934) and Heat Lightning (1934)

7) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1964, 4K digital restoration, the Castro Theatre, 8/28/13 A great way to re-appreciate the Kubrick classic, with a story that still feels current, restored and on the big screen, almost 50 years from its release. Outstanding cast (Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden, et al), script, everything.

8) Repulsion, 1965, B&W, newly restored 35mm archive print Polanski at the Roxie series; Roman Polanski live via Skype I’ve seen this film a number of times over the years, yet it still shocks and I see something new. Hard to beat this performance by Catherine Deneuve and the imaginitive story in this psychological horror film. Polanski discussed making it during his Skype chat.

9) The Shining, 1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick, The Roxie, 4/18/13 Another Kubrick film on my list. I have never seen all of The Shining, and wanted to properly see it on the big screen for the first full viewing, but kept missing it. I finally got my chance at a late night screening at the Roxie, with a number of younger viewers in the audience. The film did not disappoint!

10) Fassbinder at the Roxie – Seven by R. W. Fassbinder, all 35 mm prints The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972) with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), both starring Hanna Schygulla, 10/4/13 Always love the over the top character, costumes and colors in Bitter Tears, shot entirely in one apartment - quite a feat.

Two Eyes: Ben Armington

In the San Francisco Bay Area, moviegoing is not just for the newest releases. In 2013 there were more theatrical opportunities to see films spanning the history of cinema than any one person could take advantage of. Therefore, I've asked a sampling of local moviegoers to select a few favorites seen in cinemas last year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Ben Armington, Box Cubed manager and moviegoer.

1. Heat  (Castro Theatre)

Michael Mann’s sinewy crime saga has been a favorite of mine since it was released in 1995, so it was a real, and rare, treat to see it big at one of my favorite theatres, the Castro.  A lot of the unabashed appeal is that of a good, page-turning popular novel---- situations familiar to genre fans given new life by confident storytelling, solid acting, and subtle detail... a neater trick than it sounds.  With great cameos from Tone Loc, Henry Rollins, and Tom Noonan. Screened with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, which unfortunately did not serve as an especially interesting co-feature.

2. Unfaithfully Yours and To Be Or Not To Be (Stanford Theatre)

I didn’t make it to the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto anywhere near as often as I had hubristically hoped to in 2013, but I did manage to hop the Caltrain for this rib-tickling double feature.  While the comic reversals embedded deep in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic To Be Or Not To Be kept us on the edge of our seats, it was the howlingly berserk and remarkably sustained climactic sequence of Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours that really brought the house down. 

3. Shakedown (Roxie, I Wake Up Dreaming)

A delirious shot of pure noir from obscure actor/director Joseph Pevny that stands comparison with Sam Fuller’s awesome Underworld USA in it’s unsparing portrayal of an unsympathetic protagonist.  Here the heel is an ambitious young hood (played by Howard Duff) who cons his way into a newspaper shutterbug job and proceeds to scramble up the social ladder, often on the backs of hapless accident victims, dithering colleagues, dim gangsters, and even his doe-eyed girlfriend.  He meets his match in a diffident high society dame who really gets his motor running by not instantly succumbing to his charms, and after that it’s only a few double crosses until the bullets start flying.  Pretty much perfect.      

 4. The Lone Ranger/Dead Man/ Walker (Castro/Roxie Midnite for Maniacs “Acid Westerns”)

My favorite of 2013’s Midnites for Maniacs, Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ long-running and always illuminating engagement with accepted film history.  This triple feature invited us to consider three different (post)modern takes on that most American of genres, the Western.  While seeing Jim Jarmusch’s magnificently drone-y deathtrip Dead Man at the Castro in a breathtaking print was the highlight of the evening, it was the capper, Alex Cox’s punchy psychotronic spaghetti western Walker, that provided perhaps the most telling insight through it’s use of purposefully anachronistic elements: that whenever they are set, movies are always about the time, and the attitudes, in which they were made.  It will be interesting to see what people make of Gore Verbiniski’s film maudit The Lone Ranger twenty years from now, will they love it as much as I now love Elaine May’s similarly scorned Ishtar?

5. Modern Romance (Castro)

One of my great, late-breaking discoveries this year was the films of Albert Brooks, so I was front and center at the Castro when his second film, Modern Romance, screened with Fellini’s 8 ½.  Modern Romance finds Brooks bravely battling his own considerable neuroses for the hand of Kathryn Harrold while editing a schlock sci-fi film.  From here springs much of the Judd Apatow “style” comedy that is prevalent today, all though you would have to go back in time to Preston Sturges to match the sheer comic genius of the scene where Brooks works with a supremely unamused sound crew to overdub a scene of George Kennedy running down a spaceship hallway.   

6. “Satanic Sinema: The Devil Gets his Due” (Oddball Cinema)

This was my second trip to the Oddball Cinema on Capp street, and the draw for this Halloween program was Kenneth Anger’s legendary underground naughtie, Invocation of my Demon Brother, complete with stoney droney Mick Jagger on moog .  Which was great, but the real transgressive hysteria lie in the bizarre 1961 GE Theatre television show called “The Devil You Say”, which starred Sid Ceaser on vamp overload as the lecherous incarnate of the devil trying to tempt away the virtuous wife of stone-faced angel incarnate Ronald Reagan.  The gnomic double entendres, mostly revolving around sampling the wife’s cake, are delivered like the State of the Union by the Gipper and practically squealed by Caeser.  Very strange, and, spoiler alert, the devil does not get his due in this telling.    

7. Clockers (PFA)

A welcome opportunity to revisit Spike Lee’s scathing indictment of the 90s gangsta genre, with editor Sam Pollard in person.  Like a lot of Spike Lee joints,  including this year’s summarily dismissed Old Boy remake, there is a palatable tension between the source material (Richard Price’s gritty novel of the same name) and Lee’s flamboyant, almost Brechtian style.  While this tension rarely equates to gripping storytelling, it does yield the occasional visual and dramatic coups that are wholly Lee’s own.  Clockers also has a hard time recovering from it’s brilliant opening credit sequence, which unblinkingly portrays black men murdered by gang violence.  With strong performances by Delroy Lindo, Mekhi Pfeiffer, Isaiah Washington, Harvey Keitel, and John Turturro.   

8. Legend of Kaspar Hauser (roxie, sfindiefest)

This zonked out rave-sci fi-western featured Vincent Gallo in two roles--- at least one of which seemed to be channelling 70s era Dennis Hopper---, had something to do with the oft-told legend of Kaspar Hauser, and rocked a propulsive score by Vitalic.  Honestly, most of this visually striking film went sailing straight over my doggedly sober head, but there is something  charmingly sincere in it’s weirdness and that’s something you can’t fake.

9. Wild Girl (PFA, Raoul Walsh retro)

Raoul Walsh, along with Robert Aldrich and Frank Borzage, is a director I am perpetually trying to watch more films by, so I got very excited when I heard that the PFA was doing a retrospective of his work.  Unfortunately, it was more of a greatest hits collection than deep cuts, and even programmer Steve Seid seemed to be downplaying expectations when he introduced the series.  Out of the three programs I attended (all of which, I hasten to add, were excellent) I chose this one for inclusion because one of my top three favorite film critics, Dave Kehr, was in attendance and spoke after the film.

10.  Impolex (Roxie)

This is the debut film from Alex Ross Perry, director/star of The Color Wheel, and it is notable for being almost nothing like that film, or most any other, and is often unhelpfully described as being “like Pynchon” which I suppose is a reference to Gravity’s Rainbow?  I don’t know, I haven’t read it.  This film is about a world war two soldier searching for undetonated missiles and felt more like a dream or a reverie than a straightforward narrative (I mean that as a compliment).  Screened once, at 10pm, on a Tuesday.