A Movie (1958)

Screen shot from digital transfer of Facets VHS release.

WHO: Bruce Conner made this.

WHAT: Conner didn't bother with warning shots. His first film was a torpedo fired directly at moving image culture as it was in the late 1950s, and honestly as it still is today. Though it wasn't the first film to have been constructed completely out of pre-existing film material (Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart beat it by 32 years, and Soviet filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub had preceded Cornell) it was probably the first to do so with such exuberantly rapid editing and biting humor, in tribute to a memorable moment from the final reel of Leo McCarey's Duck Soup. Today Conner's aesthetic feels familiar and perhaps even stale on a single viewing, at least to those of us raised on music videos and popular compilations that "normalize" Conner's then-radical strategies. But multiple viewings reveal more about the film. Kevin Hatch has written:

With each encounter, the rhythm of the editing appears more natural and the shot selection less arbitrary, until the film's logic becomes intuitively evident. With each viewing of the film, we become accustomed to the abrupt breaks between shots and more comfortable allowing them to reveal unexpected formal relationships and trigger involuntary mnemonic associations. What at first appears chaotic comes to seem, with repeated viewing, compulsively ordered.

Hatch spends quite a bit of time going into more detail on A Movie in his book Looking For Bruce Conner, but one thing he neglects to mention are the dissolves that appear in the last few minutes of the film; previously all edits were of the simple cut-and-splice variety that reconcile with Conner's recollections of having used only the most rudimentary tools of "a little splicer and a rewind and a viewer" to make his earliest films. But in 1958 it was possible to instruct a film lab to insert a dissolve into a print when processing it, for a small fee, so it seems likely that Conner exploited this option to create images like the above crossfade from a smoldering volcano to a ecclesiastical coronation.

WHERE/WHEN: A Movie screens tonight at 7:00 at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: Though it's hard to find many bright spots in yesterday's election results, I did enjoy a reminder, through a glance at the facebook page of the proprietor of the Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland, that Bruce Conner in 1967 ran a losing campaign for Supervisor that garnered more votes than some recent winners of Supervisor races have (though at the time elections were citywide rather than district-by-district, and therefore unfair to compare). As I wrote in a 2006 blog on Conner, his campaign speech was nothing more than a list of sweets.

I can think of no better cinematic post-election hangover cure than to see a Bruce Conner movie and a Craig Baldwin movie on the same bill. Baldwin's Tribulation 99 screens after A Movie tonight at the PFA, making a near-complete piecemeal retrospective of the living legend of San Francisco underground curation and filmmaking in the last few months, after terrific screenings of Mock Up On Mu, Sonic Outlaws and more at Artists' Television Access back in September. Tribulation 99 is probably Baldwin's most quintessential and essential film, and he'll be at the theatre to discuss it with anyone who dares to attend.

Tonight's program is part of the PFA's Alternative Visions series of experimental films, which winds down this month with shows devoted to Polish artist Pawel Wojtasik and to recent experimental films made by filmmakers who I'm guessing would probably acknowledge a debt to Conner in their own work. Many of them would likely acknowledge a debt to Baldwin as well, but probably none as vociferously as Linda Scobie, whose playful collage Craig's Cutting Room Floor is a 16mm film-assemblage of just what it describes: the material found beneath Baldwin's feet as he works in the editing room.

These may be the last three strictly experimental film programs at the PFA for a while, as recent tradition has held that the Alternative Visions series has been a Fall-only program with Spring devoted to cutting-edge documentary. With the PFA closing after July 2015, to re-open in a new, more BART-friendly, location in 2016, if the pattern holds it may be a couple years before we get a shot at seeing this kind of material in Berkeley again. Although there are some who would consider Jean-Luc Godard's films (especially his more recent ones) to be experimental films as well, and the PFA promises to continue with their retrospective of his work next Spring (presumably to culminate in his newest Goodbye To Language 3D, which in the meantime premieres locally next week in San Rafael). The current installment of this Godard retro covers his 1982-1994 work, and starts with his masterpiece Passion this Saturday. I'm pleased that a greater proportion of this segment of the Godard series is screening via 35mm prints than did in the last segment focusing on the 1970s. In fact the lion's share of the PFA's November-December calendar is 35mm, including everything in the Hou Hsiao-Hsien series, nearly everything in the Georgian film series that will also continue into 2015, and more than you might expect in the political documentary series entitled I’m Weiwei: Activism, Free Expression, Human Rights.

Of course the PFA is not the only place to show experimental films in the Bay Area; far from it in fact, when there's an organization like SF Cinematheque entering into a particularly busy month including tomorrow's Castro Theatre(!) screening of Andy Warhol's dual-projection epic Chelsea Girls and Friday's YBCA showing of Warhol's Hedy, both with fascinating and eloquent Factory star Mary Woronov in person, its annual art (and film) auction and benefit November 15th, and much more.

HOW: A Movie and Tribulation 99 both screen from 16mm prints in the PFA's own collection.

To Have And Have Not (1944)

Screen shot from Warner DVD

WHO: Lauren Bacall made her first on-screen appearance in this film, playing Marie 'Slim' Browning.

WHAT: This Casablanca-esque romantic adventure is perhaps not quite as purely entertaining as its 1942 predecessor, but it's arguably "greater", and endlessly more analyzable, as a quintessential Howard Hawks directorial project, as an Ernest Hemingway adaptation (co-written by no less than William Faulkner!), as an expression of American wartime philosophy, and as the genesis of the long romance between its stars Bacall and Bogart, who met on the picture. Here's Manohla Dargis writing in the New York Times about one very memorable moment:

If the movie’s political backdrop tends to go missing in the mists of the Bogart and Bacall legend — they fell in love during its making — it’s understandable given how they steam up the joint. Before teaching him how to whistle, Slim slides into Steve’s lap and leans down to kiss him. “Whaddya do that for?” he says, as if the question needed asking. “Been wondering whether I’d like it,” she says. He asks her verdict. She murmurs “I don’t know yet” before going in for another try. This time, he pulls her close, his hand circling her neck, and they kiss deeper and longer. She stops, pulls back and stands, taking the camera with her, and delivers the film’s other great line: “It’s even better when you help.”

WHERE/WHEN: 7:50 PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: The Castro yesterday revealed the front page of its full October calendar, just in time for the month to begin. It's a typically eclectic mix of Halloween-ish favorites of various kinds, new restorations of classics, 2014 hits in one-night-only "second-run", and memorial tributes to recently deceased film personalities. The latter includes not only Bacall, who stars in six films playing the venue this month (all but one, How to Marry a Millionaire, showing in 35mm prints), but also Richard Attenborough, who directed Gandhi, which screens (digitally) Sunday October 5th. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Harold Ramis already have received Castro tributes this year, but they show up again in October as well; Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man October 22 and Ramis in Ghostbusters October 24th. James Garner has yet to have an official screen tribute in San Francisco this year, but we can look ahead to November 7th when Jesse Hawthorne Ficks screens The Notebook (along with John Cassavetes' Minnie and Moskowitz) for an at-least-unofficial one.

For October, Ficks's MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS series brings a Christian Bale double-feature of Reign of Fire and The Dark Knight on Friday the 17th. Naturally both will be screened on 35mm; the latter being an opportune time to revisit the signature hit by Hollywood's perhaps most powerful film-on-film proponent (with apologies to Quentin Tarantino) Christopher Nolan in advance of his 70mm IMAX release Interstellar (rumored to be the last "real" IMAX film in the pipeline).

As of now the Castro website has not revealed the formats for most films screening after the 17th; we know that Carrie, The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, Spartacus, Sunrise, and The Fugitive Kind will screen from 35mm prints while Vertigo and Rome: Open City will see their Castro debuts in 4K digital projection, but I'm unsure as yet whether film is involved in the Alphaville/Orpheus double bill October 21st (I suspect no), The Black Cat/The Raven October 23rd (I suspect yes) or 2001: A Space Odyssey/The Tree of Life October 26th (I don't want to speculate). The Bay Area Film Calendar and the Castro seem to be oddly at odds over the October 18th Bernardo Bertolucci marathon; the former indicates only the Italian master's Last Tango in Paris and The Sheltering Sky will be in 35mm, while the Castro's Special Events page adds The Conformist to that pool. The new, seemingly-unnecessary-but-I-suppose-I-should-keep-an-open-mind 3D version of The Last Emperor will screen digitally of course. Joan Chen is expected to be in attendance.

Finally, looking ahead again to November (in this case the 6th), SF Cinematheque is presenting its first Castro event in quite some time, a dual-16mm screening of Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls with the hugely-entertaining former "Factory Girl"  Mary Woronov in person, as she will be the following night with Warhol's Hedy at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. I'm preparing for those screenings by attending tonight's Pacific Film Archive presentation of another Warhol dual-16mm film called Outer and Inner Space; otherwise I'd surely be at the Castro tonight for To Have and Have Not.

HOW: 35mm print, on a double-bill wih Dark Passage, another Bacall/Bogie team-up, but one particularly dear to Frisco Bay hearts as it was actually filmed here.

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Screen shot from Kino DVD

WHO: Robert Weine directed this

WHAT: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is huge in cinema history and in my own personal history with cinema. It's frequently (incorrectly) cited as the first horror movie, and its iconic imagery has been borrowed shamelessly by other filmmakers from the silent era to Tim Burton and beyond. With few of its director's other films available for view, it generally frustrates auteurists, especially those highly influenced by the theories of realism put forth by the influential French critic Andre Bazin, who labeled Caligari a "failure" under his criteria for worthy photographic art. 

When I first became interested in exploring silent film history many years, ago, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was one of the first films from the era that made a very strong and immediate impression upon initial viewing. Though I was watching a rather muddy VHS transfer, I loved what I saw, and became a little obsessed. I read about every article or book I could find about it (including David Robinson's excellent monograph), purchased an 8mm print on ebay (my first and ever such purchase, even though I didn't have a projector at the time) and even dressed as the somnambulist for Halloween that year (immortalized in a photograph I've recently cycled in as my twitter avatar). 

WHERE/WHEN: 9PM tonight at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

WHY: Since my first viewing I've taken a few opportunities to see the film when it's screened in local cinemas (which happens less often than you might expect, actually), and have seen it projected from an even muddier video transfer at the Castro accompanied by the local ensemble Club Foot Orchestra, and have seen a 1950s-era retitled 35mm version at the Pacific Film Archive with Judith Rosenberg at the piano and accompanied by a lecture by film scholar Russell Merritt, who has just joined the board of the Silent Film Festival. 

None of these viewings, or of the DVD viewings I've also experienced in the interim, have been afforded use of a new 4K sprucing of the best original elements. This version premiered in Berlin earlier in 2014, and tonight is the US premiere. It's also the first time I'll be able to view a 4K digital file projected through the Castro's recent acquisition, a 4K projector to replace the 2K one they've had for several years and which had recently developed an "undead pixel" problem (which is even scarier than it sounds). Although I wish the Murnau Foundation would have made a 35mm print available of this new restoration, I'm curious to see what 4K projection at the Castro might look like when applied to a classic film that I'm very familiar with.

Tonight's screening is the capper to a full day of Silent Film Festival shows, the entirety of which have been enthusiastically rounded-up by my friend Michael Hawley of the film-415 blog (which I hope he never has to change to film-628). 35mm screenings for this all-day even include the 11AM program of Laurel & Hardy two-reelers, and the 7PM showing of Buster Keaton's The General with live musical accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra (who last performed this at the Castro in 2004- I was there and was very impressed by how a percussion-heavy score helps amp up the action-adventure elements of the classic Keaton comedy.) The Alloys' 3PM world-premiere presentation of their new, years-in-the-making score to Rudoph Valentino's allegedly best film Son of the Sheik will be sourced from a DCP, as will the BFI's A Night in the Cinema in 1914 show.

HOW: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari screens as a 4K DCP, with live music by the versatile keyboardist Donald Sosin. I've heard his eerie score for the Kino DVD and am very interested in hearing how he transforms it in a live environment.

Our Man In Havana (1959)

Screen capture from Sony DVD

WHO: Alec Guinness, the versatile English actor who would have turned 100 earlier this year if he were still alive today, stars in this film directed by Carol Reed.

WHAT: I haven't seen this particular Guinness film, but Cheryl Eddy, in a recent article on Guinness, describes it thus:

Guinness is brilliant as an expat whose desire to provide a better life for his materialistic teenage daughter (Jo Morrow) leads him to set aside the vacuum-cleaner biz and accept a gig as a British secret agent. Thing is, he'd rather just sip daiquiris than engage in espionage, so he fakes his way, with luck and imagination, into being "the best agent in the Western hemisphere."

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Rafael Film Center at 4:30 & 7:30.

WHY: Our Man in Havana screens as part of a seven-title centennial Guinness tribute that's been running each Sunday since August, and which winds down the next two weekends with new DCPs of his Ealing comedies The Man With The White Suit and The Ladykillers. Of course the irony of Guinness's legacy is that he's by far best remembered for a role he frequently voiced his disdain for, that of Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas's original Star Wars and its two immediate sequels. Though these films have been left out of this mini-series, fans of Guinness as Kenobi will be able to see him on an even bigger Marin County screen on Monday, October 6th, when The Empire Strikes Back (or the 1997 revision thereof, to be precise) is brought to the Cinema Corte Madera by the Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF).

One of Frisco Bay's largest remaining single-screen theatres, the Corte Madera is where I first saw The Empire Strikes Back upon its original 1980 release, a still-vivid memory for this then-seven-year-old. I'm a bit surprised to see this Marin-made blockbuster in the line-up, as it just screened the festival in 2010, on the 30th anniversary of its release, kicking off an annual string of Lucasfilm productions revived on some multiple of five years after it's debut (1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark in 2011, 1977's Star Wars in 2012, and 1983's Return of the Jedi in 2013). I was expecting this year to bring a 30th anniversary showing of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or a 25th anniversary of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but it appears the expectations for the 2016 arrival of new Star Wars saga episodes is "altering the deal." The MVFF program guide refers to a "count down" so perhaps we might expect the 1977 Star Wars, which (spoiler alert) features Guinness's Obi-Wan in a larger part, to appear at the Corte Madera next year...

This is one of the many surprises the MVFF program had in store when last week it revealed the full program for its 37th edition, to be held in Mill Valley, San Rafael, Larkspur and Corte Madera from October 2nd-12th. The longest-running and highest-profile of Frisco Bay's "general interest" film festivals outside of the San Francisco International Film Festival, MVFF has built loyal audiences through employment of a successful formula over the years: securing Northern California (and sometimes West Coast or even U.S.) premieres of several major end-of-year awards "hopefuls", most with acting and/or directing talent expected in attendance, bringing a healthy selection of documentaries and unsung independent films, many with local ties, choosing foreign-language films fresh from Cannes and other festivals, and filling out the program with shorts, retrospectives, and the annual "Children's Filmfest" within the main festival. Lincoln Spector of Bayflicks has written a good first overview on his site, and I plan to write more soon myself. In the meantime, look at the list of MVFF films at or near RUSH status for a sense of what tickets to buy in advance if you're thinking of attending this year.

HOW: It's rare for the Rafael to screen 35mm prints these days, but they still have the capability, and will be utilizing it to screen Our Man In Havana. The next print scheduled to play there is of Yoji Yamada's award-winning follow-up to last year's wonderful MVFF selection Tokyo Family, entitled The Little House, which is the only 2014 MVFF title expected to unspool in 35mm.

Berkeley In the Sixties (1990)

Screen capture image from First Run Features DVD

WHO: Documentarian Mark Kitchell, whose most recent release was last year's environmentalism doc A Fierce Green Fire, co-wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Berkeley In The Sixties is a well-crafted, aesthetically conservative film about leftists, radicals, and other key figures in the 1960s social protest movements that have been so strongly associated with the East Bay city's public image ever since. For those of us who know this period only second-hand, it's a concise primer on far-ranging subjects like the Free Speech Movement, Anti-Vietnam War protests, "Hippie" counterculture, the Black Panthers, and the battle over People's Park.  Made when the events were 20-30 years old (imagine, as a parallel, a documentary on the final ten years of South African apartheid released today), its interviews with 1960s activists show a remarkable candor about the relative strengths and weaknesses of their own protest tactics, frozen at a pre-Clinton-era moment. It would be interesting to know if the interviewees (including Susan Griffin, David Hilliard and Frank Bardacke) would have similar things to say today, now that the term "Free Speech" has been appropriated by the Right to mean "money". At any rate, this nearly quarter-century-year-old film has yet to be superseded by another documentary on these topics, as far as I'm aware.

In addition to interviews, Berkeley in the Sixties is constructed of often astonishing archival footage, collected from from rarely-seen films from the period, some by names as well-known as Agnès Varda, David Peoples, Irving Saraf, Lenny Lipton, and Will Vinton. Although I found it odd that Scott Bartlett's 1972 work OffOn was used to illustrate the visual component of a March 1966 Jefferson Airplane concert thrown by the Vietnam Day Committee and later denounced by then-gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan.  The first several archival clips used are not from Berkeley at all, but from early 1960s San Francisco protests that are said to have laid the foundation for the galvanization of UC Berkeley students to fight for freedom of speech on their own campus. The image above is from a remarkable anti-HUAC protest in San Francisco's City Hall in 1960.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM today only at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: Tonight's screening, which will be attended by filmmaker Kitchell as well as Frank Bardacke and other activists from the era, launches an important series at the Pacific Film Archive that will last until the end of next month. Entitled Activate Yourself: The Free Speech Movement At 50, this series collects a diverse array of rarely-seen films that together aim to paint an essential portrait of the Bay Area's political roots from a half-century ago or so. Tuesday, September 23rd's show highlights films from the San Francisco Newsreel media collective, as well as Desert Hearts director Donna Deitch's early PP1, which sounds irresistible from the PFA's description to this Steve Reich & John Cage fan. October 9th's Sons and Daughters is one of the especially obscure films whose footage is borrowed for Berkeley in the Sixties: extremely charged documentation of protesters trying to convince young military recruits to turn away from the Oakland Army Terminal where they're being processed on the way to Vietnam. October 14th's program features two sub-feature-length documentaries made by filmmakers with a very different viewpoint from that of the anti-HUAC protesters shown in the image above, and will be contextualized by a UC Berkeley law professor following the screenings.

Most of the series films are from the era itself, but KPFA On The Air by Veronica Selver (who was the editor of Berkeley in the Sixties) is a portrait of the broadcasting fulcrum of politics and culture released 51 years after the station first went on the air in 1949. It screens October 26th with Norman Yamamoto's Second Campaign. Finally, the series ends with the sole non-documentary of the set, Art Napoleon's The Activist, shot on the cheap in Berkeley and released with an X rating the same year as Midnight Cowboy was.

Although this series is certainly of interest to cinephiles and political history buffs from across Frisco Bay, not just Berkeley, most of its films do focus on that city. San Francisco gets its own spotlight in a perhaps-complimentary Yerba Buena Center for the Arts series showcasing activist-oriented films shot on this side of the Bay. Starting October 2nd, canonized independent classics like The Times of Harvey Milk and Chan is Missing rub up against lesser-known films documenting Frisco's key communities, such as Take This Hammer featuring James Baldwin on a visit to Hunter's Point (showing free October 26th) and Alcatraz Is Not An Island, about the "Urban Indians" who occupied the former prison, future tourist trap in November 1969. I'm especially excited by the 16mm screening of Curtis Choy's 1983 The Fall of the I-Hotel, which documented the destruction of the last remnant of a now-almost-forgotten neighborhood known as Manilatown. I've been wanting to see it for years, and I hope to be there among an intergenerational audience of activists and cinephiles, historians and tech workers, landlords and tenants, SF natives and newcomers, all realizing we need to come together to look at this city's past if we're going to understand how to prepare for its future.

HOW: Berkeley in the Sixties screens from a 16mm print