Humoresque (1946)

Screen capture from Warner DVD.

WHO: Joan Crawford and John Garfield star in this.

WHAT: Another film I've yet to see and am excited to. Here's what Noir City festival honcho Eddie Muller had to say about this film when I interviewed him last week (but couldn't fit into my Keyframe article):

I could argue that Humoresque is Joan Crawford's best performance. What interests me about it is it's not Joan being Joan. She plays a very different character, very vulnerable, and trying to be a big woman and kind of failing and breaking down. It's really dramatic. She's just great in it and I think I said in my notes something along the lines of that it's one of those Hollywood movies where you can see every calculated thing in it, just how archly melodramatic the whole thing is, and it doesn't matter. It's almost like its incredible theatricality is what makes it so emotionally affecting. It really is a powerful film. And to see Hollywood go all out in a film about classical music in both of those movies, it's like Hollywood treating classical music like there's no higher art form in the world. And to see the special effects, and how they make John Garfield a musician with very complicated effects that aren't in the camera. These are physical effects that are just extraordinary. Garfield is a multi-armed character when he's playing, you know: one arm belongs to somebody and another arm belongs to somebody else. Unbelievable. You honestly can't tell.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre, with showtimes scheduled at 3:50 and 8:45.

WHY: There's a tendency, when viewing films in pairs, as the hardcore denizens of Noir City do this week thanks to its double-feature format, to compare one film against the other as if they're in competition. I do the same thing myself sometimes, as when I say things like "Rear Window is a better movie than The Public Eye, but I preferred seeing the latter Friday night because its 35mm print looked a lot better than the Rear Window DCP did." It's more fruitful to consider the ways a pair of films can build upon each other, deepening both viewing experiences, as the colliding of two films about ethically questionable Manhattan photographers did for the opening of the Noir City festival.

Last night's pairing of pitch-black noirs from Argentina and Sweden, Fernando Ayala's The Bitter Stems and Hasse Ekman's Girl With Hyacinths, is another example. These films were clearly not just chosen to be together because they're both extremely pessimistic, because they both tangentially fit into this year's "Art of Darkness" Noir City theme, or because they're both featured in recent or upcoming (New York City) MoMA retrospectives. All of the above is true, but is overshadowed by the films' fundamental connection despite being made six years and over eight thousand miles apart from each other: both films are obsessed with their nation's neutrality during World War II. This is something I'd enjoy writing about in much greater depth (after a second viewing of each film, too, ideally). But for now I'm just going to avoid talking about which of the two films is "better" than the other, as I overheard many do as I left the Castro last night, and focus on the ways each film strengthens the other in my memory as I think about them a day later.

On the heels of that, it seems funny to comment on today's double-bill of musician-themed melodramas featured on the cover of the gorgeous program book available only to Castro attendees this week (and a reason alone for noir-loving shut-ins to buy at least one ticket to the festival). I believe it's the first time Noir City has paired a Joan Crawford film (Humoresque) with a Bette Davis one (Deception) on the same double-bill. Going way back to the second Noir City festival in 2004, there were three "Crawford vs. Stanwyck" double-bills that year (this year Barbara Stanwyck appears separately, in tomorrow night's The Two Mrs. Carrolls), but the famous history of the Davis/Crawford rivalry really invites the audience to make today's pairing into a competition (perhaps especially so on a day when spandex-clad gladiators compete for a trip to Frisco Bay next week). Just a reminder that this might not always such a productive way to view movies, as one can be appreciated without having to be "better" than the other one...

HOW: Today's films are both screening in 35mm; according to the aforementioned program book, all upcoming Noir City screenings are expected to employ 35mm prints except for The Picture of Dorian Gray, which screens from a Blu-Ray, and Corridor of Mirrors, The Red Shoes, and Blow Up, which screen from DCP.

The Public Eye (1992)

WHO: This film was shot by cinematographer Peter Suschitsky. who was the Director of Photography on The Empire Strikes Back as well as on films for Peter Watkins, Tim Burton and M. Night Shyamalan, but who is probably best-known as David Cronenberg's regular cinematographer since Dead Ringers in 1988.

WHAT: I haven't seen this film, beyond a few short clips and enough of the uncharacteristically monochromatic opening credits, which feature photographs by Arthur Fellig a.k.a. WeeGee, the renowned New York photographer of the 1930s-1960s.  Joe Pesci plays a character based heavily on Fellig/WeeGee. I recently spoke to Eddie Muller, who programmed this film as part of tonight's Noir City festival opening. and had this to say about it:

I'm not gonna say that it's a modern classic or anything like that but there are parts of it that are absolutely spectacular. Mostly the stuff that captures WeeGee at work. That's what is just fabulous. Where he's driving around New York to Mark Isham's score, and he's finding things to photograph. It also fits the theme of this festival perfectly because it's about a newspaper photographer who believes he's creating art. There's a gimmicky crime plot and all this nonsense with Barbara Hershey being threatened by these gangsters, but that's just defined to follow this other thread which is about the difficulties he has having people take his work seriously as art.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 9:30 PM.

WHY: The "theme of this festival" Mr. Muller speaks of above is "The Art of Darkness", this year's organizing principle for Noir City, providing excuses to show two dozen films about morally questionable painters, writers, curators, dancers, musicians and filmmakers as well as photographers. Although Muller makes a strong case for photography as a particularly cinematic artistic medium in an excellent, brand-new podcast interview on the Cinephiliacs which touches on several of the same topics as my own just-published Keyframe Daily interview article with him: film restoration, his days as a student in George Kuchar's San Francisco Art Institute class, etc. Muller gives a great interview, and since quite a bit of what we discussed didn't fit into my Keyframe article, I plan to publish more excerpts from our talk over the next several days as Noir City unfolds. Stay tuned.

I'm excited to see The Public Eye tonight, although I wouldn't be surprised if a number of Noir City diehards are feeling more skeptical about the festival's first-ever full-color opening night double-bill (and closing day, come to think of it) and might be tempted to skip tonight in order to catch the Stanford Theatre's weekend presentations of Casablanca and Gilda in 35mm, or the Rafael's 35mm showings of (non-noir, but a big-screen must see) Foreign Film Oscar frontrunner Son Of Saul, which after Sunday is expected to screen digitally, as it's showing in every other Frisco Bay cinema despite its director's preference for 35mm presentation (which I agree with, especially for the format's tendency to exacerbate the disorientation of the opening moments). Because you don't want to miss anything screening Noir City on Saturday or Sunday, right? Especially not Saturday night's international noir showcase. But I'm lucky to have seen Casablanca, Gilda and Son of Saul in 35mm, twice apiece, so I'm ready, willing and able to start following Muller's art theme at the beginning and, hopefully, do my best to follow it to the end next weekend when it closes with 1960s photographic subversions Peeping Tom and Blow Up.

HOW: The Public Eye screens on a double-bill with Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Rear Window. The Public Eye will screen from a 35mm print. I'm not certain about Rear Window's format.

Brazil (1985)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

WHO: Terry Gilliam directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: This may be Gilliam's most deeply black comedy, set in a near-future dystopian society that places great importance on bureaucracy, security, consumerism, and ceiling ducts. Jonathan Pryce plays a middle-aged everyman who dreams of escaping his life as an office drone to become a winged knight, to get a taste of life in the tropics as might be described in a dated samba song (from which this film derives its meridional title), or at least to get to better know the truck-driving young woman that he keeps fleetingly encountering. As he juggles his job duties, his visits with his plastic-surgery-obsessed mother, and unorthodox visits from the underground repairmen resistance, he comes closer to learning the cruel truth about his position in this society.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre, at 2:15 and 8:00 PM.

WHY: This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of this film's release in the United States. lthough it had screened all over the world starting as early as February in Europe, September in ustralia and October in the nation sharing its name, Even the 132-minute version that Gilliam was able to eventualy convince Universal to release just before Christmas 1985 was missing 10 minutes of footage now expected to be included in the print showing at the Castro today (according to the theatre's claim of a 142-minute runtime).  This is considered to be the definitive version by most modern fans, and it includes a few more overt references to the Christmas season, during which many viewers tend to forget the film is set.

There are still plenty of other Xmas-themed movies screening in Frisco Bay cinemas over the next several days. For the traditional-minded, the Stanford shows its usual December Lubitsch film The Shop round the Corner this week from Monday to Wednesday (on a double bill with The Wizard of Oz) before screening its annual 35mm Christmas Eve It's a Wonderful Life show. It's sold out of course, but the Castro screens the same film digitally on Tuesday, December 22nd.

The Roxie, meanwhile, has a MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS-presented double bill of Christmas-themed eighties movies, Die Hard and Gremlins, that provide a different sort of Yuletide experience than a Lubitsch or Capra classic, but that are increasingly well-remembered as Christmastime films by new generations of movie lovers. These are both to be screened as DCP (Digital Cinema Package) files on the Roxie's far -improved digital projection system installed this past pril.

I finally had an opportunity to see the Roxie's digital system in action this past Friday when I went to see another 30th-anniversary screening, a presentation of The Last Dragon, introduced by comedian W. Kamau Bell and with its Tae Kwon Do expert star Taimak on hand for a very lively audience q&a. Though I was initially very disappointed that the screening was not presented in 35mm as originally advertised (mainly because it meant I was missing a 35mm print of The Straight Story across town at the Castro), I do see a silver lining in that I got to see for myself that the Roxie's main house can project digitally as well as anywhere (something that recent years' experience had left me in serious doubt of), in addition to the fact that I got to see a film I'd never seen before in a packed house of devoted fans more racially diverse than I can recall seeing a movie anywhere. I sat with a couple of friends who told me they'd experienced 35mm projection problems at the Roxie the Friday before, and although I'd just seen a truly flawless presentation of Brothers Quay shorts on Sunday December 3th, I pieced together from their comments and those of a Roxie staffer I spoke to briefly before leaving the screening after the q&a, that there'd been a recent pattern of 35mm projection problems at the cinema that had led them to decide to screen The Last Dragon digitally.

The next day I mentioned the issues on my twitter feed, and within a few hours received a very thorough e-mail from the Roxie's new Executive Director Dave Cowan, detailing the three separate problems the venue recently had projecting 35mm prints, and how they were resolved. He explained that the decision to project The Last Dragon digitally was made because of "issues with the mechanisms that align and advance the positive and negative carbons in our old Peerless Magnarcs." I've never operated a 35mm projector myself, much less a vintage carbon arc projector, but I believe the problem they were trying to avoid is one I've seen occur several times at the Roxie (though never at the Stanford, which also projects carbon arc, but which is run by a wealthy cine-philanthropist who can easily afford to keep all gear in top condition at all times.) Perhaps you have too: a film's image suddenly fades to dark as the soundtrack continues to play, until a few seconds (which can feel like minutes) later, the image is restored as bright as before the problem. Not as disruptive as a frame melt (which I've experienced this year at the Castro and YBCA, once apiece) or certain digital glitches, but something that certainly would have put a damper on an otherwise positive screening.

I'm glad to hear from Cowen that the Roxie believes it has now solved this carbon alignment issue, and will test further in the following days before its next scheduled 35mm screenings of Casablanca (a film that plays a key part in a humorous scene in Brazil) on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and of Strange Days on December 30th. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend any of these showings myself, but I encourage readers who do to report back either via comment or by emailing me.

HOW: On a 35mm subversively Christmas-themed double-bill with Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

20th Century Fox DVD screen capture

WHO: William Fox produced this film and F.W. Murnau directed it.

WHAT: One of those rarities of cinema: a technical marvel with a living, beating heart. As I wrote in my 2009 essay on this film when it screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Valentine's Day event:

Charles Rosher, one of the top cinematographers in Hollywood, had spent time with Murnau in Berlin serving as an unofficial consultant on Faust, the director’s most effects-laden film to date. Rosher worked alongside Murnau as a student as much as an advisor, learning about the innovative German camera methods that amazed American critics and filmmakers. 

Rosher recruited Ben-Hur cinematographer Karl Struss to help him shoot Sunrise on Rochus Gliese’s elaborate sets. Gliese built a vast indoor city set designed to appear even larger through the use of forced perspective. It cost $200,000—nearly the entire budget of a typical program picture of the day. He also created a studio-bound marsh with an uneven floor that could not accommodate a dolly setup. Instead, tracks were attached to the ceiling and Struss filmed upside-down, a maneuver Rosher had observed on the Faust set. It was only one of many radical techniques used in Sunrise. Nearly every shot in the film involves a striking effect, whether from an unusual light source, a superimposition, or a complex camera movement. Yet each is motivated by allegiance to the story and its emotions. Murnau told an interviewer, “I do not take trick scenes from unusual positions just to get startling effects. To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind one is watching the events on screen.”

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Stanford Theatre at 3:50 PM.

WHY: The Stanford is halfway through its most appealing and ambitious program in at least the past 18 months: a tribute to the twenty year reign of the Fox Film Corporation, which began releasing films in 1915 and ceased in 1935, when it merged with the lesser-known upstart Twentieth Century Pictures. So far the series has brought little-screened films featuring stars such as Clara Bow, Will Rogers, Spencer Tracy, and Janet Gaynor, the luminous star of Sunrise who rose from her roots in San Francisco (where she went to Polytechnic High School and was employed by the Castro Theatre) to become the first Best Actress Oscar winner for this film as well as Seventh Heaven and Street Angel. All three of these masterpieces will be screened at the Stanford in 35mm prints as part of its Silent Sunday series, and I can hardly imagine a better introduction to most of these films if you've never seen them before, or to the Stanford if you've never traveled to Palo Alto to visit it before. Gaynor also features in The Johnstown Flood, the rarest of the Stanford's Silent Sunday offerings (on a double bill with Seventh Heaven December 6th) and Lucky Star, which screens with Murnau's lovely final film made in the United States, City Girl, to close the Fox Film Corporation series December 20th as the Stanford moves into its traditional Christmastime screenings: The Shop Around the Corner, It's A Wonderful Life, etc.

Dennis James, Wurlitzer organist extraordinaire, has been performing live music to all the Stanford's Silent Sundays screenings thus far, and will continue to do so for the final three Sundays of the series. Today he gets a week off, as the Stanford has elected to screen Sunrise not with live music but with the pioneering sound-on-film Movietone score that was prepared for the film's original 1927 release in the United States. This score is beloved by many fans of Sunrise but I find it merely adequate and more interesting as a historical curiosity than as an artistic statement. I'm swayed by Janet Bergstrom's research that indicates it was quite possibly not, as is frequently assumed today, prepared by famous composer Hugo Riesenfeld, who definitely composed the musical score for Murnau's swan song Tabu: a Story of the South Seas. To me, it sounds like a mostly-pedestrian compilation score whose tendency to be overwhelmed by non-musical sound effects destroys some of Murnau's poetic treatment of soundless sound in the film (such as in the scene of George O'Brien reacting to an off-screen dog bark, as pictured above). I always found it interesting that Dennis James has so frequently spoken of his insistence on performing originally-composed scores to silent films for which scholars have found them, but often ignores his own rules when it comes to Movietone or Vitaphone soundtracks, having played his own scores to Sunrise and to West of Zanzibar when at the SF Silent Film Festival in 2009. In the case of Sunrise, perhaps he feels (and if so, I agree) that the Movietone score that premiered in New York is less sacrosanct than the live score performed in Los Angeles would be were it not lost to the sands of time.

In fact more notable on today's Silent Sunday docket is the presentation of the almost universally beloved Movietone score to John Ford's heartbreaking, Sunrise-esque World War I picture Four Sons, which was to the disappointment of many excluded from the 2007 DVD release of the film. Rarely screened in any form, Four Sons will be for many attendees today the real gem of the program; I've only seen it once myself and never in a cinema, but still I can imagine myself being among them despite my deep, abiding love for Sunrise.

Other upcoming Stanford screenings of particular note include the wonderful Me & My Gal this Wednesday and Thursday, my favorite Janet Gaynor talkie (heck, one of my all-time favorite films as well) State Fair on December 18-19, and most unusually a December 4-5 triple bill of the rumored-excellent Zoo in Budapest along with Seventh Heaven/Street Angel/Lucky Star director Frank Borzage's bizarre 1930 version of Ferenc Molnár's play Liliom as well as Fritz Lang's 1934 version (which I have yet to see). The last of these is a real surprise to see on a Stanford calendar, as it's not a Fox film at all but Lang's sole film made in France on his way out of Germany and into Hollywood. In my fifteen years or so of following the Stanford calendars I'm positive this is the first time I've seen a French film booked for a theatre that in my experience focuses exclusively on classic Hollywood and British productions with the two notable auteurist exceptions of Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. Given that I have to stretch to imagine any other currently-operating Frisco Bay cinemas willing to book a 1934 French film in 35mm, I welcome this development wholeheartedly.

Luckily, although the Liliom/Zoo in Budapest/Liliom bill screens on the same day as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's December 5th "Day of Silents", it also screens the day before, so it won't be necessary to miss a rare 35mm screening of the Anna May Wong vehicle Piccadilly, or the other offerings at the Castro Theatre that day. I'm excited to revisit Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate, this time with Alloy Orchestra accompaniment and introduced by Tracey Goessel, whose new Fairbanks biography The First King of Hollywood I'm in the midst of devouring. Also to see rare documentary footage of China and a Harry Houdini feature The Grim Game. And if you've never seen Marcel L'Herbier's L'inhumaine on a cinema screen it's worth it for the set design alone. Alloy Orchestra takes on musical duties for that one as well; the rest go to the terrific pianist Donald Sosin.

The Day of Silents is just the first cinephile-catnip program on a December full of goodies at the Castro Theatre. Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre with Michael Mann's The Keep, Noir City Xmas pairing The Reckless Moment and Kiss of Death, December 17th Stop Making Sense and Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave and a twisted Christmas booking of Brazil and Eyes Wide Shut are some of the more enticing all-35mm double-bills there this month. The venue also hosts the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco show December 9th and will ring in January with a set of Alfred Hitchcock masterpieces. But even more than all of those, I'm finding myself most excited for a digital presentation of a San Francisco cult classic that deserves to be far better known than it is. I'm speaking of course of Curt McDowell's Thundercrack!, starring (and scripted and lit by) the great underground film icon George Kuchar. It screens twice with director McDowell's sister Melinda and his frequent collaborator Mark Ellinger on hand at (I'm told) both shows, but only the evening show will be hosted by the one and only Peaches Christ. Even if you have no awareness of Thundercrack!, the most entertaining "Old Dark House"-style quasi-pornographic art film ever to get Fox News in a tizzy, this is a rare opportunity to see a Peaches Christ show for less than $20. Mark December 11th on your calendar- in ink!

There's a lot more happening in December at other Frisco Bay venues, but for now I'd better sign off. But in case I don't have time to put up another post before this Tuesday, December 1st, I want to point out that, with the help of other Artists' Television Access volunteers, I'll be helping to present a free 16mm screening of Curtis Choy's untoppably topical 1983 documentary The Fall of the I-Hotel at the Noe Valley Public Library, and I hope you can make it out that evening.

HOW: Sunrise screens on a 35mm double-bill with Four Sons.

The Assassin (2015)

Screen capture from trailer.

WHO: The legendary Hou Hsiao-Hsien directed and co-produced this film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Xie Hai Meng, Zhong Acheng and his longtime collaborator Chu Tien-Wen.

WHAT: Although I was able to view Hou's first feature since 2007's Flight of the Red Balloon at a Mill Valley Film Festival-sponsored press screening, I'm not supposed to provide more than a brief "capsule" review until its commercial run a week and a half from now. Just as well, as I'd need at least one more viewing to feel comfortable talking about it in any depth. For now I'll just call it a visually sumptuous, anti-kung fu film that verges closer to "avant-garde" than anything else Hou has done. Ninety-nine percent of the film is presented in a square-ish Academy aspect ratio, which along with its black-and-white opening makes The Assassin seem more like a 1950s Akira Kurosawa film than like the wuxia pian made by King Hu and others (always in widescreen) in the 1960s and beyond. Though honestly Mizoguchi, especially a late color film like Princess Yang Kwei Fei, feels like a more relevant referent (and one I'm not surprised to see Danny Kasman had perceived long before I did). Hou has worked with square ratios before, but (I'm pretty certain) only in his framings-within-framings in widescreen films like City of Sadness and Good Men, Good Women. It's as if he's reclaiming 4:3 Academy as a more truly "cinematic" shape in this era of wide televisions and phones.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight at the Embarcadero Cinema at 6:30 and 9:15, and 8:30 on October 17th at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. All these showings are "at RUSH", meaning advance tickets are sold out and would-be buyers must form a line in hopes of obtaining seats as they're made available. The Assassin opens a regular theatrical run at the Metreon, the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, and Camera 3 in San Jose starting October 23rd.

WHY: Although tonight's screenings will take some persistence to get into for those who haven't already secured tickets, it's fair to say they'll be worth it, as Hou Hsiao-Hsien himself is expected to attend at least the first one, a rare occurrence here in San Francisco indeed. An auteur of his stature visiting this city is cause for real celebration, and the SF Film Society has complied by making Hou a main focus of its entire Taiwan Film Days mini-festival tonight and tomorrow. In addition to the two showings of The Assassin there's a revival showing of what many consider Hou's first great film, The Boys From Fengkuei, and although Hou is not (as far as I understand) expected to attend this showing, he does make a cameo appearance in a very early-eighties perm. There are still advance tickets available for this screening as well as for the Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema, a recent documentary about the 1980s and 1990s heyday of Taiwan's cinematic production history, focusing attention on famous names like Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-Liang and Hou (whose Flowers of Shanghai obviously inspired the doc's title) but also on lesser-knowns like Wang Tung, who employed a pre-Rebels of the Neon God Tsai as a screenwriter on multiple films. Director Chinlin Hsieh will be on hand for tomorrow night's showing.

Although the Mill Valley Film Festival The Assassin screening on the 17th is also at "Rush" (as was its Frisco Bay public premiere via the festival this past Thursday), there is still a lot of this festival to go that has plenty of tickets available. There are still seats for tonight's second screening of the Hungarian prize-winner Son of Saul, for instance. I'll be attending this as consolation for missing Hou in person, thankful that the film's distributor insisted it be screened in 35mm. It's the only new film in the festival (and so far, to my knowledge, any 2015 Frisco Bay feature-oriented film festival) to screen in this format, but MVFF has also booked a couple of retrospective titles showing on actual film reels: The Sorrow and the Pity October 16th with director Marcel Ophuls on hand, and on October 18th Autumn Sonata, Inmgar Bergman's final made-for-the-cinema film and his only collaboration with Ingrid Bergman. A documentary about her, Ingrid Bergman - In Her Own Words also screens at the Rafael Film Center tonight, launching an eight-title series celebrating her centennial. I'm told than the program page for this series contains a typo and that the documentary will not screen in 35mm but that Autumn Sonata and Notorious definitely will (the latter is also newly booked to play the Paramount in Oakland in that format) . As will Confidential Report and F For Fake in the Rafael's upcoming Orson Welles centennial conclusion, and Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home on December 3rd. In fact, between the Mill Valley Film Festival (which is far more thoroughly explored at The Evening Class by Michael Hawley and by Michael Guillén) and the upcoming Rafael winter calendar, I feel safe to say the California Film Institute holds a commanding lead among local cinephile institutions stepping up their game in the absence of the Pacific Film Archive this Fall, at least from my perspective. No, the Stanford's current Rogers & Hammerstein festival is not going to cut it for me, and though the Castro and Roxie both have some interesting programs on their slates (I'm most excited by Ken Russell's The Devils October 20th, the Brothers Quay shorts in December and Audition Halloween week), neither venue is doing quite enough to prevent me from wishing it were as easy to get to San Rafael in public transportation as it was to get to Berkeley.

HOW: The Assassin screens as a Digital Cinema Package (DCP).