Ed & Pauline (2014)

Screen capture from trailer.

WHO: Famed film critic Pauline Kael and lesser-known film exhibitor Ed Landberg are the two subjects of this short documentary.

WHAT: If you've spent much time traveling in Frisco Bay cinema circles you've probably at some point heard that Pauline Kael was, before making an indelible mark on English-language film criticism, an important force in the local moviegoing scene. Kael was born in Petaluma, educated officially at the now-defunct San Francisco Girls' High School and UC Berkeley, and cinematically at places like (according to Brian Kellow's 2011 biography) "the Fox, the Roxie, the Castro and...the Paramount over in Oakland." She fell in with the San Francisco Renaissance crowd, living with and ultimately bearing a child by experimental filmmaker James Broughton.

Ed & Pauline, co-directed by former San Francisco residents Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic, takes up at about this point, referencing Broughton only by still photograph and their daughter Gina only by a moment in the narration when Kael is described as a "single mother". For someone who has gleaned only the barest outlines of this period in Kael's life, this 18-minute documentary appears to do a wonderful job painting a richer portrait of how her early work as a freelance film critic in magazines and at the influential radio station KPFA led to her involvement with Landberg. In 1952 he had founded the Cinema Guild near the corner of Haste and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and which he (erroneously) liked to claim as the country's first twin-screen cinema. At any rate it was Berkeley's first repertory house and an early training ground for future Frisco Bay exhibitors like Sheldon Renan, Tom Luddy, Mike Thomas, and Bill Banning, each of whom are interviewed on-camera here (joined by more widely-recognizable figures like J. Hoberman and John Waters). Kael and Landberg formed a dual partnership: she began writing program notes for the Cinema Guild screenings, and later selecting the films to screen as well, and they got married. Both partnerships were fleeting.

Though this film's generous archival footage, engaging interview clips, and understated re-enactments might make it a fine brief introduction to the history of arthouse culture for a casual moviegoer, for a cinephile it's also tremendous fun to hear choice snippets of Kael's discussions of certain landmark films such as Letter From an Unknown Woman, Passion of Joan of Arc and Night of the Hunter as scans of old Cinema Guild calendars are flipped through. Keen eyes will pick out the recurring auteur names (Chaplin, Renoir, Bergman, Flaherty, McLaren...) and feel a greater sense of the primordial cinema scene from which came the eventual champion of filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah and Brian De Palma.

Kael is much better known than Landberg, of course, but his part of the story is equally prominent, in part because Bruno and Vekic were able to interview him and even have him revisit the section of Telegraph where his cinema once stood (since filming, even the cafe that replaced it has been demolished). If, as Tom Luddy relates, Landberg was "the first exhibitor in this country to show Ozu in a truly crusading way" then as far as I'm concerned he's a genuine unsung hero.

One quote from Ed & Pauline particularly stood out for me. Mike Thomas, who would go on to run the Strand on San Francisco's Market Street, notes that "it's hard to imagine when these films were not all around us, but they were more legendary, than anybody actually got a chance to see them." For those of us who haven't fully embraced the ethereal future of all-digital cinephilia there's a deep sense of the loss of the screening as an unrepeatable event. Wayfinders like Kael and Landberg helped thirsty moviegoers locate water in the desert. Now we all can swim in an ocean, but are in no less need of divining rods to help us find fresh drink.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:30 tonight at the Pacific Film Archive, 1:00 on May 2nd at the Clay, and 6:15 on May 4th at the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF).

WHY: Tonight's screening is the only one happening in Berkeley, mere blocks from the Cinema Guild itself (and the scene of the crime of my first exposure to Kael's program notes, which I actually prefer to her reviews.) If you can fit it into your schedule you won't be sorry; I understand the filmmakers are expected to be present as well (I'm not sure if they'll still be in town for the later, San Francisco screenings).

But seeing this film at the SFIFF at all feels particularly vital as a stand for an institution proving it harbors no grudges- at least not after 54 years. Kellow's book on Kael devotes a paragraph to her withering opinion of the festival circa 1961: that "those who had paid $2.50, expecting to see a movie of quality, emerged from the festival 'sleepy and bored, asking, how could they have picked that movie?'" Especially harsh words about a year in which Jean Cocteau's The Testament of Orpheus, Luis Buñuel's Viridiana and Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles were all screened.

HOW: Ed & Pauline screens in front of a documentary co-directed by Gina Leibrecht and the late Les Blank, who worked together on 2007's All In This Tea; this new film is called How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy, a title self-explanatory to anyone who knows about Leacock, one of the instrumental figures along with D.A. Pennebaker and David and Albert Maysles in revolutionizing non-fiction filmmaking in the post-World War II era.  Both films show digitally.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today's the sole SFIFF screenings of Liz Garbus's documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? about the phenomenal singer, playing at the Castro, and of the first of the "Dark Wave" midnight-ish screenings at the Roxie, Cop Car. It's also the first festival screening of Lisandro Alonso's critically-acclaimed Jauja at the Clay.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: A 35mm print of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window screens at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland tonight.

Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine (2015)

A scene from Alex Gibney's STEVE JOBS: THE MAN IN THE MACHINE, playing at the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23 - May 7 2015. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Alex Gibney directed and co-produced this documentary in between his recent Scientology exposé Going Clear and his upcoming Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. It's all in a season's work for a man who has director credit on about two dozen non-fiction releases since busting onto the scene as a feature documentary director ten years ago with Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room.

WHAT: Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine hasn't screened publicly anywhere since its world premiere last month at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, TX, as far as I can tell. It was that screening that prompted Ryan Lattanzio of Indiewire to write:

This bracing film at first seduces you with the charms of the man, and then guts you with what a tricky riddle he was, an at-times sociopathic mogul who flew close to the Sun, touched it and never quite fell as he should have.

I'm curious about this documentary, although as Kelly Vance notes at the tail end of his epic East Bay Express SFIFF preview, Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine "is neither the first nor the last movie to capitalize on the late Apple godhead's popularity." I doubt it will be able to supplant this concise video as my own personal favorite moving image take on the Apple founder and his legacy.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:00 tonight at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF)

WHY: Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine is the opening-night film of the "longest-running film festival in the Americas" as David Hudson calls SFIFF in his essential Keyframe Daily preview. Last year I attended this festival's opening-night event for the first time ever, after writing a bit on why I hadn't ever done so before. Unfortunately I picked a bit of a dud year to finally walk down the red carpet, as Two Faces of January, while showcasing its actors and locations nicely enough, was ultimately a rather dull and predictable thriller and a disappointing directorial debut by a strong screenwriter. Still, it was nice to see what kind of a crowd the festival was able to assemble at the Castro; familiar faces from just about all corners of the Frisco Bay film scene (excepting, perhaps, the 35mm purists) were gathered together to watch a film that ended up being one of the least-memorable of the year. A bit of a waste, really.

Opening the festival with a documentary by a proven director seems a much safer choice, but in some ways it's quite a bold one; since SFIFF first appeared on my radar screen in the late 1990s, the festival has always selected a narrative feature to kick off its fifteen days of screenings. I should ask Michael Hawley, whose memory as an attendee goes back much farther, how long this tradition goes back, but at least in the past twenty years there has never been a documentary screened on SFIFF's opening night. Which is perhaps a bit strange considering that local film festival audiences tend to collectively eat up documentaries like they're scoops of ice cream in danger of melting in the hot sun. This year's crop at SFIFF also includes highly-anticipated non-fiction works like The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer's follow-up The Look of Silence, the late Albert Maysles' Iris, and from locals, Stanley Nelson's The Black Panthers Vanguard of the Revolution and Jenni Olson's experimental doc The Royal Road (which, full-disclosure, I contributed to the crowd-funding campaign for).

It's always fun to see a movie in a packed Castro Theatre, though (in just about every way except for the line for the restroom), so I hope I can make it to quite a few festival screenings there even if I miss tonight's show. This year the festival's using the 1922-built venue for more screenings than it has in the recent past, including three six more showings over the upcoming weekend, each of which is highlighted among the festival's own opening weekend picks. I will definitely be there for the Saturday afternoon showing of Barbara Loden's sole directing effort Wanda, one of the three films expected to screen via 35mm print in the whole festival, and a film that's been high on my to-see list for years, and even more so since I was out of town during its last San Francisco screening.

HOW: Digital projection.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Ernst Lubitsch's masterpiece Trouble in Paradise screens in 35mm at the Stanford Theatre along with Rouben Mamoulian's flawed but interesting (and containing the most sublime Russian Easter scene ever filmed, surely) Tolstoy adaptation We Live Again. It's the midway point of the Stanford Theatre's ongoing series of Lubitsch/Mamoulian pairings every Wednesday and Thursday.

Christo's Valley Curtain (1973)

WHO: Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Ellen Giffard co-directed this.

WHAT: The first of six films the Maysles Brothers made documenting the creation of ambitious, if temporary, "environmental art" installations by Bulgarian-born visionary Christo and his artistic and matrimonial partner Jeanne-Claude, Christo's Valley Curtain is also at 28 minutes the shortest of these six films, and the only Maysles film to be nominated for an Academy Award. It documents the erection of a giant strip of orange fabric in a windswept valley in Colorado. Joe McElhaney writes in his top-notch book, Albert Maysles:

The film places great importance on the two remaining hours the workers have in which to get the curtain up before the winds change direction, thereby threatening not only the completion of the curtain but the lives of the workers. But time here is simply a question of deadlines to be faced -- a classical overcoming of obstacles, successfully achieved in all of these Christo and Jeanne-Claude films, which, with one exception, end on a note of triumph. These films return to a variation on the crisis structure of the Robert Drew films from which David and Albert Maysles had originally wanted to break away.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight as part of Oddball Films's 8PM Monumental Artscapes program, and will also screen during the week of May 8-14 (precise time/day to be announced) at the Vogue.

WHY: With the passing away of great filmmaker Albert Maysles earlier this month at the age of 88, an era of documentary production in America seems to have come to an end. The influential figure who, with his late brother David (as well as other collaborators) filmed such landmark non-fiction works as Salesman and Grey Gardens is deserving of as many cinematic tributes as can be thought up, especially in the Frisco Bay area, at the outskirts of which at least two of his greatest achievements were filmed (Gimme Shelter, portraying a Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway on the Eastern edge of Alameda county between Livermore and Tracy, and Running Fence, the second Christo/Jeanne-Claude film, set at the border of Marin and Sonoma counties.)

Tonight's Oddball Films show juxtaposes Christo's Valley Curtain with Robert Smithson's 1970 film of his own Spiral Jetty in Utah's Great Salt Lake, as well as films and footage focusing on artists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Claes Oldenburg and G. Augustine Lynas, providing an opportunity to contrast the Maysles documentary approach against other filmmakers'. A more jarring juxtaposition may be achieved by the opening double-bill in the Castro Theatre's just-announced April calendar, which pairs the Maysles' (and Ellen Hovde's and Muffie Meyer's) Grey Gardens with a 35mm print of the notorious John Waters gross-out Pink Flamingos. No fooling!

Further down on the horizon, details are just starting to come out about a week-long Maysles tribute at Frisco's forgotten single-screen cinema the Vogue, on May 8th-14th. Sixteen films co-directed by Albert Maysles will be collected together, presented by luminary special guests including (but perhaps not limited to) Jon Else, Joan Churchill, Stephen Lighthill, and (by Skype) D. A. Pennebaker and Susan Froemke. All of the aforementioned Maysles films will screen at least once during the festival, as well as Meet Marlon Brando on May 8th, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! on May 9th & 14th, and more Christo/Jeanne-Claude films The Gates May 10th and both Islands and Umbrellas on May 12th. More information is forthcoming. The festival is the brainchild of Brisbane documentarian David L. Brown, who I suspect was involved in the film screening at this "Sneak Preview" tribute to another non-fiction legend, Les Blank at the Sebastapol Documentary Film Festival tomorrow night.

HOW: Tonight's Oddball screening will be all 16mm; I'm told Christo's Valley Curtain is a particularly lovely print. The May festival's formats are as yet unspecified, although I would bet on digital knowing how infrequently the Vogue has screened celluloid in the last couple of years.

I Only Have Two Eyes: 2014 Edition

Screen capture from Warner DVD of Macao

We're already well into the 2015 film-going year, but it's not too late to take time to reflect on the cinematic character of 2014 before it recedes into memory too far. One major release bucked trends by bringing 35mm and 70mm projectors back to life in a few cinema spaces. Otherwise, 35mm screenings of new films all but disappeared from the Frisco Bay screening landscape, with only the 4-Star in San Francisco and the Bluelight Cinemas in Cupertino by year's-end still regularly playing whatever new commercially-available films they're able to track down prints for from the studios still striking them. Remaining film projectors at a place like the Opera Plaza were so under-utilized in the past twelve months that learning that the venue just the other day removed them from all but one of its tiny screening rooms (installing DCP-capable equipment into its two comparatively "larger" houses) felt completely unsurprising and barely disappointing at all to me. It's safe to say that film festivals are no longer a home for 35mm either; as far as I'm aware the only new films that screened in that format at any local fests in 2014 were the throwback short Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret at the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival in June, and Yoji Yamada's The Little House at Mill Valley in October.

Most of the major local festivals have only kept the embers of sprocketed film warm in 2014 either by showing 16mm works by "experimental" artists still employing celluloid, or by showing a few revival titles in 35mm. Indeed, revivals and repertory houses are now where almost all of the action is at for those who like to view light passing through 35mm strips onto screens. Frisco Bay still has venues where this is a major component of programming, as well as a growing contingent of cinema spaces finding creative ways to attract audiences out of their home-viewing patterns (which are shifting themselves) by embracing digital-age developments. I'm eager to see what 2015 will bring to the cinephiliac landscape in San Francisco and its surroundings. Changes are afoot; the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley will be closing midyear to prepare for a move to a new, more transit-connected space; meanwhile the biggest DCP advocate among its programming team has just retired. The Alamo Drafthouse is expected to open its first branch in the region in 2015 as well, at a site within walking distance of several cherished repertory haunts. As highlighted in the new Film-Friendly Links section of the Film On Film Foundation website, Alamo CEO Tim League appears committed to involving 35mm in his company's continued expansion. I'm excited to see how that shakes out.

My annual "I Only Have Two Eyes" survey of local cinephiles' favorite screenings of revival and repertory films may have more mentions of digital screenings than ever for 2014, but as you'll see as I unveil the various contributions over the next week or so, there is plenty of diversity of format, venue, and of course the films themselves, in their selections. I'm so pleased to have gotten a strong turnout for this year's poll, including many participants from the past seven years when I've conducted it, as well as new "faces". Enjoy perusing their lists and comments as more are added!

January 26: Veronika Ferdman, who writes for Slant Magazine, In Review Online and elsewhere.
January 26: Lucy Laird, Operations Director for the SF Silent Film Festival.
January 27: Michael Hawley, who blogs at his own site film-415.
January 27: Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, educator at the Academy of Art & MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS
January 28: Margarita Landazuri, who writes for Turner Classic Movies & elsewhere.
January 28: Ben Armington, Box Cubed Box Office guy for many Bay Area Film Festivals.
January 29: Terri Saul, a visual artist who posts capsule reviews on Letterboxd.
January 29: Lincoln Spector, the proprietor of Bayflicks.
January 30: Michael Guillén, schoolmaster of The Evening Class and contributor to other publications.
January 30: David Robson, editorial director of Jaman and caretaker of The House of Sparrows.
January 31: Jonathan Kiefer, critic for SF Weekly and the Village Voice.
January 31: Adrianne Finelli, artist, educator, and co-curator of A.T.A.'s GAZE film series.
February 1: Haroon Adalat, a designer, illustrator and video editor.
February 1: Maureen Russell, cinephile and Noir City film festival volunteer.
February 2: Ryland Walker Knight, a writer and filmmaker with a new short at SF IndieFest.
February 2: Carl Martin, film projectionist and keeper of the FOFF Bay Area Film Calendar.
February 3: Claire Bain, an artist, filmmaker and writer.
February 4: Brian Darr, a.k.a. yours truly.

IOHTE: Brian Darr

First, a hearty thank you to the seventeen other participants in 2014's "I Only Have Two Eyes" survey of Frisco Bay repertory and revival screenings; please check the final update of the hub page for links to each of their exceptionally diverse entries. I don't believe any film was mentioned by more than three participants, but there are certain trends; I feel like film noir was represented more than ever this time around, in keeping with its status as the Bay Area's seeming favorite repertory film genre.

As for my own list. More than in other years, the bulk of it is made up of films I had little or no expectations for when I entered the cinema to see them. A good half of them were made by directors whose other work as director has eluded me so far, and I hold relatively few auteurist preconceptions about some of the other half's directors, either. I don't know why I cherished these surprises more than I did years-in-the-waiting screenings such as Don't Look Now at the Castro, other than to guess that expectations built up over too long a period of time can be impossible to fulfill; I did find Don't Look Now to be devastating and remarkable and if I'd seen it an earlier year I might well have placed it on my list even if the competition from other screenings was fiercer. But this year, I just feel more attached to the following screenings:

Never Open That Door (Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1952), Castro Theatre, January 30th, 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Eddie Muller.

Noir City's 2014 festival was my favorite edition ever of Frisco Bay's highest-profile annual exhibition of cinema heritage. The international theme wasn't just window-dressing but a meticulously-crafted argument against the jingoistic notion that film noir was in essence a Hollywood construction, and I couldn't resist attending, for the first time, every single film shown during those ten days, including the Japanese and British films I'd seen on the Castro screen before or the ones I'd recently watched to prepare my Keyframe Daily preview. Among the festival's high points was a final-day showing of Martin Scorsese's personal 35mm print of Josef Von Sternberg's Orientalist nightmare The Shanghai Gesture, but my very favorite experience of the 10-day chiaroscuro marathon was seeing the first of the three Argentine noirs presented for their first gringo audience in decades- if not ever. Never Open That Door is an elegant fusing of a pair of complimentary (one urban, one rural, etc.) Cornell Woolrich adaptations that simply oozed tenebrific dread and reminded me that John Alton spent several years working in Buenos Aires before making his mark on Hollywood; I don't know if this film's cinematographer Pablo Tabernero ever crossed paths with Alton, but I'm intrigued by his background; he appears to have been a German exile named Paul Weinschenk, who changed his name while making documentaries for the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War before heading to Argentina. I'm thrilled to learn via the Noir City Annual #7 that this film is being restored with English subtitles (this screening was soft-titled) and better yet, reunited with another Christensen/Tabernero Woolrich adaptation called If I Die Before I Wake, and that screening foreign-language films at Noir City is not a one-year oddity but a new tradition.

Rich Kids (Robert A. Young, 1979) Roxie Cinema, March 8th, 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Mike Keegan & Jesse Hawthorne Ficks.

San Francisco's longest-running cinema the Roxie has for various sensible (and regrettable) reasons moved away  from screening much 35mm and 16mm in the past year, putting its energy into creative approaches to running a digital-era cinematheque with programs like this upcoming one. But for five days, in anticipation of the local release of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Mission venue threw a 35mm feast of daily Wes Anderson features. This heartbreakingly hilarious and touching portrait of New York preteens from aristocratic but broken homes, an obvious touchstone for Anderson and/or frequent screenwriting partner Noah Baumbach, was nestled into the program one afternoon, and was a uniquely big-screen experience, as this reputed sole surviving widescreen print contains sequences cut from any panned-and-scanned video copies you might see floating around. Though directed by Young it was produced by Robert Altman when he was at the peak of his clout, and its approach to childhood feels more alien to modern filmmaking than Altman's own approach to environmental catastrophe that year (Quintet), and its showing helped set me on a path of Altman research and rediscovery that continued throughout much of the year and will pick back up again this month at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Passage à l'acte (Martin Arnold, 1993) New Nothing Cinema, March 26th, 2014. 16mm. Introduced by Mark Wilson.

As usual, a sizable portion of my viewing in 2014 was of the experimental film variety; screenings presented by familiar organizations like Oddball Films, the Exploratorium, the Pacific Film Archive and SF Cinematheque each had a distinct impact on my wider appreciation of cinema history. But there's nothing like a new venue, even if it's one that's been around for a while like New Nothing in SOMA. I'd heard about this space for years, but it wasn't until last March that I learned exactly where it was, what it might screen, and how I might find myself there. The occasion was the second in a year-long series of salons presented by Canyon Cinema filmmakers invited to draw from the collection of prints held by this stalwart film institution (which ended 2014 with some wonderful momentum). I attended far too few of these programs, but I'm so glad I made it out for my friend Mark Wilson's presentation of short investigations of human movement on screen. Martin Arnold in particular was a figure I'd long heard of but never seen for myself (like New Nothing) and to experience his optically-printed appropriation of an iconic Hollywood movie amidst great films by Ed Emshwiller and Jeanne Liotta felt like the ideal introduction to a master filmmaker's work. Although I do wonder how I would have reacted if I'd seen it when it was made in 1993, at a time I was immersing myself in industrial and other collage-oriented music but had yet to see my first Robert Mulligan film.

The Good Bad Man (Allan Dwan, 1916) Castro Theatre, May 31, 2014. 35mm with piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin. Introduced by Dr. Tracey Goessel.

As I noted in my preview piece on the 19th San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the SFSFF has been slowly but surely funding and presenting new restorations of the early collaborations between beloved superstar Douglas Fairbanks and still-neglected auteur Allan Dwan (they ultimately completed eleven films together, culminating in the 1929 part-talkie The Iron Mask.) The third of these restorations is the earliest of the collaborations presented so far; The Good Bad Man was only the second Fairbanks/Dwan picture, after The Habit of Happiness, but the restoration looked impeccable for a 98-year-old film screening at only 16 frames per second; it surely didn't hurt that pianist Donald Sosin performed the musical accompaniment as if he were trying to show up all of the weekend's other fine musicians after a year on the bench (I think he succeeded).  It also happens to be the best movie of the three, a perfectly balanced synthesis of Wild West action and romantic comedy. I've barely glimpsed Dwan's non-Fairbanks films, but with this I'm starting to get a sense of his spatial and structural sensibilities. It just so happens that another Dwan silent, this one starring Gloria Swanson rather than the King of Hollywood, screens this Saturday at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. Tempting...

Screen capture from Music Box DVD of The Story of Film

Crucified Lovers: a Story from Chikamatsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) Pacific Film Archive, July 30th, 2014. 35mm.

Mizoguchi made some of the most emotionally potent political films ever, and this one, which I'd never seen before at all, edged ahead of my first 35mm viewing of his 1939 masterpiece The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum as the summit of my visits to the Pacific Film Archive's hearty director retrospective last summer. The inexorability of unfolding events, each peeling another layer off the rotten onion of patriarchal feudalism, held me transfixed to the screen.

Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl, 1933) Stanford Theatre, August 31st, 2014. 35mm.

It seems incredible that two entirely different films could both share the same title; I saw Isao Takahata's coming-of-age animation from 1991 and put it on my IOHTE list two years ago, and now I've caught up with this pre-code Hollywood employer of the same English-language title, as part of a Stanford Theatre World War I weepie double-bill with Random Harvest. Calling Stahl's Only Yesterday a melodrama in today's age sounds like a dismissal, but in this case the heightened emotions of its characters, particularly the sublime Margaret Sullivan (in her debut screen role!) are transmitted directly to the audience, making for an intense experience akin to that conveyed by its later, more famous remake Letter From An Unknown Woman, (which I also saw at the Stanford in 2014).

¡O No Coronado! (Craig Baldwin, 1992) Artists' Television Access, September 19th, 2014. 16mm. Introduced by Craig Baldwin and Steve Polta.

In 2014 my only "official" filmmaker interview was a mind-melting discussion with underground archivist and iconoclast Craig Baldwin, who summons the Other Cinema screenings most Saturday nights at the increasingly incongruous (and thus culturally valuable) Valencia Street microcinema Artists' Television Access. I also finally caught up with most of his films that I hadn't seen before (I'm still on the hunt for the elusive Stolen Movie). I was able to see a majority of them on the A.T.A. screen, either as part of its 30-hour marathon (of which I survived about fifteen hours of before the dawn showing of Damon Packard's brilliant Reflections of Evil sent me stumbling home for much needed sleep- or was it sanity) or this pair of programs. ¡O No Coronado!, Baldwin's 40-minute sub-feature made to commemorate commiserate the Quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's famed voyage (by presenting the story of a very different conqueror), employs perhaps his most elaborate and "effective" staged footage, shuffled together with ludicrous and expensive Hollywood detritus. His juxtapositions pull the rubber mask off the history-as-mythology industry that seems to dominate our collective understandings of the past.

Screen capture from Kino DVD

Little Fugitive (Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin & Ray Ashley, 1953) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, September 22nd, 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Lynn Cursaro.

Full disclosure: of all the repertory/revival series of 2014, the one that loomed largest for me personally was one that I was honored to be chosen to be involved with myself: Joel Shepard of YBCA's gracious "Invasion of the Cinemaniacs!" series, the film component of the museum's triennial Bay Area Now focus on local artists and art communities. Shepard selected eleven local cinephiles (including six previous IOHTE contributors) to present a carte-blanche choice of a film at the YBCA's technically excellent, intimate screening space. I was humbled to be chosen, and humbled again to find that my buddy Ryland Walker Knight mentioned my selection (Altman's The Company) in his own IOHTE wrap-up this year. A few of the other Cinemaniacs selections have been cited by IOHTE 2014 participants such as Carl Martin and David Robson, but I'd like to single out a few that have been left unmentioned: Adam Hartzell's informed presentation of Korean drama Madame Freedom, Robson's lustrous program-closer The Brides of Dracula, and most importantly Lynn Cursaro's selection Little Fugitive, a wonderfully poetic, American-neorealist exploration of Coney Island through the eyes of a child who fears he might never be able to return home. Though co-directed by three filmmakers I was previously unfamiliar with, it's a film I've been waiting to see on the big screen for many years, ever since learning it was an early entry on the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Watching a 35mm print in a room (half) full of cinema devotees was worth the wait; this is clearly one of the great films of its time (when television was just growing out of being a seductive novelty) and place (on the opposite end of the country from Hollywood).

The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1993) Pacific Film Archive, November 14th , 2014. 35mm. Introduced by Kathy Geritz and Richard Suchenski.

This is the largest exception to the trend I mentioned in my introductory paragraphs: another film I'd been waiting for years to see on the big screen, in this case made by a director I already considered myself a committed fan of. In fact I'd hoped to see much more of the traveling Hou Hsiao-Hsien series brought by Richard Suchenski to the PFA in the last months of 2014 than I did; I'd have liked to attend every screening but scheduling consigned me to seeing only five films in the program. The Puppetmaster was the most revelatory for me of the five (although The Boys From Fengkuei came close) in terms of my understanding of Hou, and indeed (as I noted on twitter), in terms of my understanding of biographical storytelling modes in general. This no-admission screening was nearly full, which was especially gratifying after Suchenski noted that he'd essentially built the Hou series around his desire to see this film in 35mm, that it'd taken two years to negotiate to show it, and that it (and City of Sadness) would certainly become completely unavailable to view on that format after the tour concludes at the end of this year. Which has me giving sidelong glances to airfares after looking at the rest of the schedule...

Screen capture from Cohen Media Group DVD

The Book of Mary (Anne-Marie Miéville, 1985) Pacific Film Archive, November 29th, 2014. 35mm.

My favorite new film seen in 2014 was Jean-Luc Godard's 3D Goodbye To Language, which I saw three times (once for each dimension?) at the Rafael Film Center, the only Frisco Bay cinema it played in time for me to put it on my Top Ten list in time for Fandor's poll. (It screened at Berkeley's Shattuck Cinema in mid-December, and finally has its first showing in San Francisco at the Castro Theatre tonight). But my 2014 Godard experience was not limited to his newest work; the Pacific Film Archive provided many opportunities for me to fill gaps and revisit old favorites throughout the year, and I only wish I'd taken advantage of more of them (on the bright side the series is continuing through April.) Some of the films felt more impenetrable than wonderful, but they all had a touch of both qualities. Most pleasantly surprising, however, was the fact that my very favorite entry in the whole series was directed not by Godard, but by his longtime collaborative companion Anne-Marie Miéville, and screened, as it customarily does, before his 1985 release Hail Mary. It's a perfectly-realized short film, simultaneously naturalistic and expressionistic in its presenting a young girl's perspective on her parents' crumbling marriage (don't ask me why this theme recurs on this list.) Miéville is particularly gifted at framing her subject's body in motion, as in the above-pictured scene where she moves along to a section of Mahler's 9th Symphony. I attribute to The Book of Mary's effectiveness as a prelude the fact that I found Hail Mary to be my own favorite of the Godard films I saw at the PFA last year.