Shanghai Express (1932)

Screen capture from TCM/Universal DVD

WHO: Josef Von Sternberg directed this, the chronological center and arguably the best of the seven masterful films he made starring the incomparable Marlene Dietrich.

WHAT: Here's what Elliot Lavine said when I asked him why he picked Shanghai Express from among all the great Von Sternberg films to play in his current I Wake Up Dreaming tribute to pre-code Hollywood:

Elliot Lavine: It's a tough call. I'd have been happy putting any of them in. I have a personal fondness for this film. Beyond that, everybody loves the train in the early '30s. The sexual tension is totally honest. You can totally believe everything that they're telling you about this relationship between her and Clive Brook, and I think people respond to it that way. You know, there's a handful of pre-codes that show out of that context and still get a great, enthusiastic crowd. 

Hell On Frisco Bay: Plus, Anna May Wong?

EL: Especially Anna May Wong. Any opportunity to get her in. And she's used to beautifully in the film. Yeah, there's a whole lot going for that film. The last time I showed it was at the Roxie a couple years ago and it was packed. Beforehand I thought "this will probably be the one that doesn't draw quite as well." 

HoFB: Because people have seen it. 

EL: Yeah, but boy they all came out. 

HoFB: Because they want to see it again! 

EL: And that is a great, great quality. People gleefully seeing a movie multiple times. It still happens.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:45 tonight at the Castro Theatre and 2PM Sunday March 12 at the Rafael Film Center.

WHY: I think it's pure coincidence that both the Rafael and the Castro are showing this great film this week, but it's a terrific opportunity to see it on big screens, if you have yet to do that. More than once if you're game for that. The Rafael has booked it as part of a train film series that also includes 35mm prints of John Frankenheimer's The Train and Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train, as well as DCPs of David Lean's Brief Encounter, Tony Scott's Unstoppable and, of course The Lady Vanishes (which also shows up in 35mm in Palo Alto next month as part of the Stanford's just-begun Hitchcock series). 

But I first saw it and instantly fell in love with it as part of a Castro Theatre pre-code series nearly fifteen years ago, and would definitely select tonight's option of seeing it in a similar context, if I could only attend one showing. There's something so special about seeing an early-1930s film in a single-screen theatre still essentially the same as it was in that era, as I did two weeks ago when I saw the tremendous Two Seconds when it opened Elliot Lavine's current weekly pre-code series. If you haven't already, please do read part one of my interview with Lavine. Here's more of part two:

HoFB: The Castro hasn't done a proper pre-code series in years- although Eddie Muller has tried a pre-code night at Noir City a couple times, it's even been a few years since the last one of those.

EL: I don't understand why those guys don't go deeper and I'm glad they don't, because I like having this territory to myself. For now, until somebody gets hip to it. But the Castro jumped very enthusiastically, when I proposed it to them, so I'm very grateful to those guys for seeing the value in it.

HoFB: Obviously it means that everyone felt that your August 2015 noir set was a success. 

EL: Oh yeah. We'll be back in August with another noir show. I really love the vertical programming concept. To be honest with you I was getting burned out on the whole notion of doing eight to twelve days in a row. I think it's putting a lot onto the audience. A lot of them do it. They come night after night after night. But if you took them aside secretly and said 'would you prefer doing it once a week' they would say 'yeah. We would.' I had so many people last August at the Castro.

HoFB: Will it also be Thursdays, like last year was? Or Wednesdays like these pre-codes?

EL: It'll be either Wednesday or Thursday.

HoFB: I'm rooting for Thursday. I'll be missing the first feature for this series almost every week because of my work schedule. If I race over from work I can see all the last features, though, except for The Cheat. 

EL: These really play well at 9:30.

HoFB: But it's also why I didn't go to your California Theatre shows last Fall. Can't get over to Berkeley on a Wednesday.

EL: I'll be doing another film noir show there in April. It has to be all digital. They don't run 35 there anymore.

HoFB: I know they brought a 35mm projector back in to screen Interstellar. Did they take it out right away afterward?

EL: It's not being used. Initially when I talked with Jed about doing a show there, I said, are you really sure you want to do it in digital? Because these aren't DCPs. These are DVDs. Blu-Rays. Are they gonna look great? And he said, 'don't take my word for it. Bring a stack of them down one afternoon and we'll sit and watch and you be the judge.' I was flabbergasted. I felt confident to do it. I can speak for this show in a great way. And we had a good crowd. Nobody complained about anything. They were just thrilled to have repertory in the East Bay.  

HoFB: There's one DVD presentation expected at this Castro pre-code series. William Wellman's Safe in Hell. I'm guessing it's too obscure a title to be given the DCP treatment yet, but there's also probably no circulating 35mm print. 

EL: Well, there was. I ran a 35 of this way back in the '90s. That's long enough ago that, yeah, a print can get completely disintegrated, and this is not the kind of film that would wind up high on the priority list, especially in the '90s. But now there's a growing awareness of the film.

HoFB: One of my favorite Wellmans.

EL: Me too. It's in my top five, and that says a lot. He made a lot of great films. This one is especially stunning. When people come to it for the very first time, especially if they've been hyped by their friends or by me, that this is gonna be a serious, major experience, they come out and say, "yes you were right. I can't believe it. Oh my God." But it is spectacular for a variety of reasons. I think one of the great reasons is the performance of that actress Dorothy MacKaill.

HoFB: Yeah. I looked at another of her films on DVD a couple days ago because I hadn't seen any of her others- The Office Wife. It's okay, but it's nothing like this.

EL: She didn't have a big body of work. Any actress in the world, if this was in their resume it'd be their calling card, but if you don't have a whole lot to back it up, you're not going to be well-remembered, necessarily. And even though Wellman is a top director, a high-echelon director, you can't expect people to be savvy to every fucking film he ever made. So this one was sacrificed.

HoFB: Do you think it's forgotten partially because of the sordidness of it?

EL: Indirectly, I think so, because, with a handful of exceptions, the majority of the pre-code films from that period, '31 through '33, when studios sold off their packages to TV stations, they excluded those. They were, more often than not, left out of the package. So, Warners might sell a hundred of their titles to ABC affiliates or whatever for Afternoon Movie, Late Show, that kind of shit. But it was a very select group. Things that showed off the studio in a way that would be family-friendly on television. So Safe In Hell didn't have a prayer.

HoFB: They might show a cut version of The Public Enemy, or maybe Night Nurse.

EL: Exactly. A film like Public Enemy was on all the time. So was [I Am A Fugitive From a] Chain Gang. You couldn't go six months without stumbling across it. And that's great, but what about Two Seconds? What about Safe In Hell? What about a thousand other films that were kind of put into the vault?

HOW: Shanghai Express screens as a 35mm print on a double-bill with Safe in Hell (which screens from a DVD) at the Castro, and as a DCP at the Rafael.

Scarface (1932)

Screen shot from Universal DVD

WHO: Howard Hawks directed this.

WHAT: I believe this is the first Hawks film I ever watched as a Hawks film, (I'd seen Bringing Up Baby long before I'd heard the word auteur, or at least known what it meant). It still informs my ideas of that director's interest in men and women and the spaces they inhabit more than any other film, probably. Which makes sense, as it was usually cited by Hawks himself as his own favorite of his films. Richard Brody has collected a salient quote from a Joseph McBride book, while himself calling the film

by far the most visually inventive and tonally anarchic movie that Hawks made. Among other things, it’s a tribute to the freedom that independent producers afforded directors then—and still do today. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 7:45 PM.

WHY: Scarface is the ideal opening salvo in Elliot Lavine's I Wake Up Dreaming series of so-called "pre-code" films released before the enforcement of the a censorship code for Hollywood films began in 1934, which morphed into the MPAA rating system in 1968 (still in place and constantly obsessed over in certain quarters today). Lavine earned a reputation as one of Frisco Bay's most creative film programmers in part by putting together week-long or longer binges of these films to the Roxie Theatre beginning in the 1990s. Now, following on bringing last summer's successful series of film noir to the largest repertory screen in town, the Castro, Lavine launches a 14-title pre-code series in that venue, reserving each of the next six Wednesday nights for double- and triple-bills of films featuring sex, violence, political content and other subjects that would be taboo on American movie screens just a few years after they were made. I was able to interview Lavine briefly last week, and here is a transcript of part one of our discussion. Expect more of the interview in this space in coming weeks.

Hell On Frisco Bay: I noticed that this festival is focused very narrowly on films released during a twenty-two month period: November 1931 to September '33.

Elliot Lavine: Yeah. It's the center of the apple. Especially '32. '32 is a ground-breaking year, actually. Some of the best films were made in '31. My personal favorite was made in '31, which is Safe In Hell. But '32 is endless. You could do a whole festival. It's to pre-code what 1947 is to film noir.

HoFB: I think New York's Film Forum did a 1933 festival at one point.

EL: Not a shabby year either. You even find some good ones in 1934 before the boom came down. The Black Cat is one that came out that year.

HoFB: Why is this the center of the apple?

EL: Maybe because in '31 they were perfecting things. Getting away with murder. A code that nobody chose to enforce. And I'm sure they were feeling really frisky. Like European artists, they could do whatever they wanted. People in bed together, smoking opium, getting away with shit. It was really kind of unbridled. It was like the Wild West in the 1880s or something. I think at some point you have to peak. There's a zenith. Call Her Savage came out in 1932. The Story of Temple Drake. One after another, and all of them are just phenomenal. It's wide-ranging. It's not just sex shows; it's things like I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. Two Seconds- that's 1932. So it's film after film after film after film. And I think it was like the Alps, right up there at the peak. Which is not to say that '33 slipped off, but by '34 it was gone, so it gave you a very short window to measure. And you could almost get a micrometer in there and say, 'when did it peak'? 'Well, September 1932.'

HoFB: Do you have any theories on what was the impetus for making these kinds of films in the first place?

EL:  I would say it was a combination of knowing that they could get away with a lot; that nobody was going to enforce any kind of censorial nonsense on them, up to a point. I mean they can't have people fucking in them but they can allude to it.

HoFB: Or saying 'fuck.'

EL: Right, but they didn't care about that. They just wanted to be able to deal with adult themes in a way that translated to an audience, especially an audience that was being kicked to death by the Depression. That is a big component to why the films work so incredibly well. That layer of doom and despair. It's like World War II's relationship to film noir- a horrible crisis that is complicating everybody's lives. It's a dominant motif of the world. So many of the stories reflect that. Wild Boys of the Road more than any- now that's 1933. Probably more than any film of that generation. I think it's a combination of smart directors who are artistically valid and interesting guys, in an environment where people felt desperate and in need of stories that reflected their own reality. Who the fuck wants to see happy-go-lucky musicals all the time? That crowd was being taken care of. But the other people who were making hardly any, or no money, and they would try to scrounge to keep things going. Scrape together that nickel, you know. They wanted to see something that makes sense. They didn't want an escapist fantasy.

HoFB: Of course some of the best happy-go-lucky musicals had a lot of sex in them too.

EL: That was de rigeur. It probably never occurred to these writers and directors that it would be any other way, ever. They probably thought, 'this is the way it's gonna be. It's gonna get better and better and better. By the forties we'll be showing everything, like Sweden.' Obviously that was not meant to be. There had to be a way of mollifying the great middle crossroads of America. People dug it in New York, L.A. and San Francisco. Everywhere in between, exhibitors were feeling the pinch because people just weren't coming. They were boycotting the movies. They were saying "we're fed up. We don't like all the sex and the murder, and it's not what we want to see. We're gonna stop coming to your theatre unless you start showing more wholesome entertainment." So [exhibitors] would say "Okay Warner Brothers, this is your friend Bob in Ohio, and I'm telling you my patrons are clamoring for cleaner entertainment." When you start hearing it from thousands of exhibitors, "we won't go to your shows." "We will boycott Warner Brother films." They had to listen. That was the sole motivating principle behind enforcing the code.

HoFB: Some of the histories indicate the provocative material was a desperate grab for box office.

EL: Yes because the marketing department of every studio was looking for hooks to hang everything on. What's gonna get people in New York interested about this movie. People have seen everything. They've done everything. Let's promise them a movie that will measure up to that level of recognition. They're gonna see people having sex, taking dope, committing murder, all kinds of fun stuff that you only get in the movies. It's a shame because censorship in any form is not welcome. It's not a good thing. However it did drive the industry in a slightly different way. I think we had a greater gravitational pull for directors who could work within those restrictions and still turn out interesting films. They may not have been as provocative or real as the pre-code films but they achieved some different artifice.  I guess we should, just because it's what we wound up with, feel grateful for that.

HoFB: Speaking of directors, I want to talk about Howard Hawks and Scarface, because although it was released in 1932, it's the one film you're showing that was made before the others. I read it was originally slated for release in 1931.

EL: Ready to go in '30.

HoFB: And it was held up precisely for some of the things you've been talking about.

EL: It went farther than most other films were going at the time, and most films were going pretty far. But he kept running into problems. Censorial problems, essentially around sex. The violence was pretty extreme. Really casual. People were dispatched very routinely. That went against what would ultimately be deemed the moral tempo of the film- that people could just murder people casually! And kids in the audience are cheering.

HoFB: Do you think people in Hollywood found ways to see this film? Did it have a reputation before its release?

EL: Insiders probably saw it.

HoFB: Do you think it had an influence prior to its actual release?

EL: It's funny because when people talk about classic gangster films of the 1930s they'll immediately bring up The Public Enemy and Little Caesar- well, actually Little Caesar was made in '30 as well if you look at the release date [January 9, 1931], but nevertheless Scarface, by people only looking at the numbers printed on the pages, "well that was in the aftermath" But that was the predecessor. Had it gone out in '30 or even '31 it would probably be a better known film. It's not that it's not known. To be honest with you a lot of people who come to Little Caesar and Public Enemy, while they're impressed by certain things about it, they don't really enjoy the films that much. And they think, "I don't need another one. I don't need to see Scarface. I'm done with that. Show me a musical now, or a prostitute movie." So I think it suffered a little bit. It also had sketchy ownership issues for a while. You couldn't see the film, even after it had been released. I can't think of a single time, growing up, that I ever saw it listed on television. Maybe it did sneak in here and there but I was glued to the TV Guide. I was a nine-year-old kid with a subscription to TV Guide. So it comes as a big, pleasant surprise, because it wipes the floor with those other movies. Public Enemy, if you were to excise maybe 10 minutes...

HoFB: It doesn't exist in its original form anyway.

EL: Hardly any of them do. Freaks- can you imagine seeing a 90-minute version of that? Which is what people did see in a preview setting.

HoFB: Is that why so many of these films are so short?

EL: Many of them. They probably lose at least five minutes because they've gone too far somewhere. Someone says, "oh the hand is going under the dress..." Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was re-released in the mid-'30s, heavily cut. Seven or eight minutes were cut out. They're back in the 97-minute version that Warner Brothers now has the print of.

HOW: Scarface screens on an all-35mm double-bill with another pre-code crime picture, Two Seconds.

I Only Have Two Eyes 2015

El Sur screen capture from Spirit of the Beehive Criterion DVD (disc 2 supplement)

Though June 2015 marked the 10th anniversary of this blog, I didn't feel a strong desire to mention it at the time. Sometimes I wonder about the utility of an amateurly-put-together, ad-free site with an outdated design in today's era of feeds and streams and an increasingly video-centric online culture. But around this time of year (slightly later than usual, sorry) I remember one of the main annual joys I get to experience as founder and proprietor of Hell On Frisco Bay: collecting and posting repertory round-ups from some of the most thoughtful and devoted local cinephiles in my "I Only Have Two Eyes" project, so-named because it's impossible for one person to witness every great film screening occurring in a Frisco Bay cinema in a given year.

Unbelievably, this is the ninth consecutive year that I've conducted this survey, and this year's responses are as wide-ranging and reflective of the cinematic highlights of Bay Area revival/repertory screens as ever, in my opinion. Huge thanks to each and every one of the contributors this year! Without further ado, the list of entries (which will grow multiple times daily for the next week or so):

2/1/2016: Max Goldberg, archivist and critic whose writings are collected at mgoldberg.net.
2/2/2016: Claire Bain, Canyon cinema filmmker, artist and writer. Her website.
2/2/2016: Brian Huser, high school teacher & film/media studies graduate.
2/3/2016: Lincoln Spector, proprietor of Bayflicks.
2/3/2016: Terri Saul, Berkeley-based artist.
2/4/2016: Ben Armington, who works for Box Cubed and participates in this podcast.
2/4/2016: David Robson, who blogs at the House of Sparrows.
2/5/2016: Adrianne Finelli, artist and co-curator of A.T.A.'s GAZE film series.
2/5/2016: Carl Martin, who maintains the Film on Film Foundation' Bay Area Film Calendar.
2/6/2016: Maureen Russell, cinephile and Noir City volunteer.
2/6/2016: Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, educator, writer & Midnites For Maniacs curator/host.
2/7/2016: Frako Loden, educator and writer for outlets such as documentary.org.
2/7/2016: Adam Hartzell, writer for koreanfilm.org as well as other outlets.
2/8/2016: Philip Fukuda, volunteer at various local film festivals.
2/8/2016: Michael Hawley, who runs the blog film-415.
2/10/2016: Marisa Vela, cinephile and artist.
2/11/2016: and my own list.

Brian Darr: IOHTE

Screen capture from Columbia DVD

Thanks for reading the 2015 edition of I Only Have Two Eyes, my annual survey of Frisco Bay cinephiles' favorite cinematic revivals seen in local cinematheques, arthouses, museum screening rooms, movie palaces and other public spaces between January 1 and December 31, 2015. The hub page for this year's results will point you to the selections and, in many cases, eloquent write-ups, by sixteen esteemed allies in appreciation of the screen, the programmers, and of course the films that could be seen in Frisco Bay venues last year. Though not all by one person, as the name of the survey should suggest.

I compile a survey that eschews new releases in favor of focusing on our cinematic heritage not because I don't have interest in new films (you can see some of my own favorites listed here), but because I feel there are plenty of others covering that ground. And, perhaps as importantly, because I feel that the usual film rankings often obscure the circumstances under which they're viewed. So many variables play into how a viewer receives a film: method of delivery, reaction (or lack thereof) of fellow viewers, preconceptions before viewing, mood of viewer, among others competing with "quality of the film" in shaping a judgment. I know there are fastidious critics who take care to rewatch a film multiple times, often in multiple ways, before committing it to a top ten list, but though I admire the approach, it feels too much like a vain attempt to cram opinions into boxes made for facts for me to adopt it myself. Rather I prefer to present a year-in-review that emphasizes the unique nature of every viewing of a film. In-cinema screenings of older films are easier for most of us to think of as unique, I feel (in part because they very often are!)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

I suspect the timing and placement of my first-ever viewing of The Honeymoon Killers couldn't have been better for appreciation of this exceedingly disturbing 1969 portrait of the murderous Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck. It was the final film shown at the January 2015 edition of Eddie Muller's Noir City film festival, pushing an audience who'd just taken in a week full of mysteries, thrillers and melodramas made in the classical Hollywood style (square frame, presentational acting style, continuity cutting, the works) out into the world on a completely different note. It's the only film written and directed by opera composer Leonard Kastle, with a few scenes filmed by a very young Martin Scorsese until the producers determined his methods ate up too much of the film's quick schedule and extremely low budget. Kastle created a raw and unflinching window into a notoriously lethal marriage, filmed mostly in long takes, in cars and in non-descript dwellings, giving the feeling of a nightmarish home movie exploding in widescreen on the the Castro screen. I felt shell-shocked after the screening and felt like I wouldn't want to watch another noir again for at least another year (although this wore off eventually, certainly in time for me to see the majority of screenings in the Castro's summer noir series hosted by Elliot Lavine.)

2015 was the last year, or should I say half-year, of the Pacific Film Archive's existence at its 16-year "temporary" location at 2575 Bancroft, across from a lovely Julia Morgan- & Bernard Maybeck-designed gymnasium. I witnessed so many outstanding screenings inside this corrugated shed, and though the new location holds great promise, I'm sure I'll miss the cozy purple-cushioned seats and the walks from the BART station through the forested campus quite a bit, if not as much as I'll miss some of the staff that was not invited to make the hyperspace jump to the new screening space when it opened this past week. Luckily I took great advantage of the old space during its final few months, sampling great retrospectives for filmmakers like Billy Wilder, Gregory Markopoulos, John Stahl, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Victor Erice. But I think my favorite PFA screening of 2015 was a mystical film completely unknown to me before viewing it in February: The Day is Longer Than the Night, with the director Lana Gogoberidze on hand to discuss her poetic, pictoral approach to national narrative (my tweet at the time), in a nation that didn't exist independent of the Soviet Union at the time she made it, and the fallout from its success at a crucial moment in Soviet film history. I wish I'd been able to take in a lot more of the PFA's monumental survey of Georgian film during late 2014 and early 2015, but I'm sure glad I at least caught this precious work.

Screen capture from Lionsgate DVD

There's no getting around it: now that I no longer live three blocks from the Roxie Theatre (since moving to Grant Avenue almost two years ago) I don't find myself there nearly as often as I used to. It may just be an optical illusion that has me thinking there's not quite as many can't-miss screenings happening there since I moved away- at least for a film-on-film proponent (though not purist). I did get to see perfectly-projected 35mm prints of Brandy In the Wilderness, Takeshi Miike's Audition, and a set of Quay Brothers shorts there in 2015, and am glad that Polyester screens in 35mm AND Odorama tonight (though I'll be helping present The Fall of The I-Hotel at the nearby Artists' Television Access instead). But my favorite recent-ish screening there has definitely been last March's showing of Kathryn Bigelow's solo directorial debut Near Dark, a post-punk vampire variant set in rural American states where, (as I tweeted after the screening) "blood flows as cheaply as beer & gasoline". I think it's my new favorite Bigelow film. The screening was presented by the Film On Film Foundation, which paired the film with the schlocky Stephanie Rothman grindhouser Terminal Island, but my mind really connects it with a more closely-kindred film seen at the Castro a month and a half before: Abel Ferrara's 1993 Body Snatchers remake.

More than fourteen years ago, after I saw my first Budd Boetticher Westerns midway through a Pacific Film Archive series, I started to visually devour as many as I could get my eyes on, whether via VHS tapes or Turner Classc Movies airings (at my neighbor's house, since I've never subscribed to that channel myself). But for some reason I'd always held that series opener The Tall T (pictured at the top of this post) at arm's length, in the hopes of another theatrical opportunity arising. Meanwhile, the movie was released on DVD, and then went out of print, and then back in again (this time only as an on-demand DVD-R), with no such screenings appearing in this cowboy-hat-averse region until this past April when the intrepid Yerba Buena Center for the Arts finally booked it as part of a very fine Western series (couched as "Noir Westerns" to help lure in horse opera skeptics). It proved itself to be the most formally and narratively "perfect" of Boetticher's Ranown films made with unassuming star Randolph Scott. A case in which my patience really paid off in a tremendous first-time viewing.

Screen capture from Parlour DVD

"If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You might as well be dead. You're not even a citizen of the United States." The greatest film I saw at the San Francisco International Film Festival this past Spring was a 45-year-old revival of the sole feature film directed by its star, who also wrote the screenplay and won an award at the Venice Film Festival back in 1970. There's not much new I can say about Barbara Loden's Wanda in a world where Bérénice Reynaud's essential Senses of Cinema article on the film exists, but I will add that Rachel Kushner's introduction to the Castro Theatre congregation not only quoted a passage from her novel The Flamethrowers that discussed the film, and gave shout-outs to Frisco's fallen repertory houses (the York, the Strand, the Red Vic), but debunked one notion in Reynaud's article: that Wanda never screened in the United States beyond an initial New York run. The SFIFF catalog refers to at least 1970 screening in San Francisco, and Kushner spoke eloquently of how her mother saw the film in an Oregon arthouse and always maintained it was the best film ever made. Watching with those words ringing in my ears, it was hard to disagree, at least for the 102 minutes it played, which is the most I can ever ask of a film anyway.

This past May's San Francisco Silent Film Festival was filled with gems, and I didn't even have time to see all of them, I'm sure. Most of my festival favorites (Ben-Hur, the Swallow and the Titmouse, the Bert Williams presentation) have been mentioned by other IOHTE contributors this year, but since nobody else mentioned another silent film event that happened earlier that month and opened my eyes equally wide to the place of pre-talkie cinema history in modern life, I'm going to use this slot to give it some attention. It's an experimental silent film called The Big Stick/An Old Reel by Massachusetts filmmaker Saul Levine, who made a rare Frisco Bay public appearance courtesy of an SF Cinematheque co-presentation at Oakland's more underground Black Hole Cinematheque, an admission-always-free screening space that will celebrate its fifth year of operation later in 2016. The Big Stick/An Old Reel is quite simply one of the most effective "found footage" films I've ever witnessed, and a 10-minute manifesto of how "old" films don't survive simply to be seen, but to be applied to our lives. Between 1967 and 1973 (it took him six years to perfect), Levine expressed this by splicing together footage of police trying to quell a mass protest, shot with his regular-8mm camera off a television broadcast, with fragments from 8mm reduction prints of pertinent Charlie Chaplin comedies. Namely 1914's Getting Acquainted, in which the Little proto-Tramp evades Edgar Kennedy's Keystone Cop as he interacts with Mabel Normand, Mack Swain, Phyllis Allen Cecile Arnold and Harry McCoy (strangely, much of the literature identifies this film as In The Park, which Chaplin filmed in San Francisco with an entirely different cast for Essanay in 1915), and 1917's Easy Street, in which Chaplin himself plays the cop- and a pretty outrageously abusive one. As if juxtaposing these three sources together didn't create an intense enough layering, Levine creates even more with additional interventions such as blackening parts of the image and varying the rhythm of the cuts. Indeed the very nature of 8mm splices, which leave a highly noticeable scarring on the frame (perhaps exacerbated when blown up to 16mm, as I believe the print I saw was?) creates more texture in an already-dense film. And context adds yet another level of layering. Watching cycles of violence so embedded into a film print in 2015 Oakland of all times and places felt like a particularly apropos summoning.

Screen capture from Universal Vault DVD

Last year the Stanford Theatre provided opportunities to watch all of the feature-length talking pictures Ernst Lubitsch directed up through 1939, and I took advantage of the opportunity to see the two from this period that had eluded me up to now: The Man I Killed, his sole pure drama during this period, and which is also known as Broken Lullaby, and the film I now think might be the summation of his powers, the 1937 Marlene Dietrich/Herbert Marshall/Melvyn Douglas love triangle Angel (which could also bear the title Broken Lullaby, as I noted in a post-viewing tweet). It was released after the longest period of apparent inactivity in Lubitsch's career as a director, which I can't help but notice coincides with the period of strict enforcement of the Hays Code (the precise date was July 1, 1934, two weeks before the end of principle photography on Lubitsch's prior directorial effort The Merry Widow). It's as if he needed a period of time to regroup and rethink how to extend his "Touch" into a more censorious Hollywood environment. He found some marvelous solutions, creating a masterpiece that walks a fine line between marital drama and aching comedy that somehow befits the strange combination of satisfaction and melancholy I feel at the thought that I'll never again see a 1930s Lubitsch feature for the first time. At least there are still a couple from the 1940s and a slew from the 1910s and 1920s I can look forward to making the acquaintance of...

The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco presented its third annual tribute to a filmmaker from "the beautiful country"; after Pasolini in 2013 and Bertolucci in 2014 this year's maestro was Vittorio De Sica, still world famous of course for Bicycle Thieves, but whose lesser-known works like Shoeshine and Miracle in Milan are more beloved to me personally. The second Castro screening that September day was another for me to add to that list: Gold of Naples, a wise and witty portmanteau film made on the streets of De Sica's hometown, featuring six (approximately-) equally-wonderful Giuseppe Marotta short story adaptations. Sofia Loren plays a philandering wife with a misplaced wedding ring. Silvia Mangano a prostitute who takes revenge on a self-loathing nobleman. De Sica himself plays an inveterate gambler (a role that his friends considered his most autobiographical) and Totò (another Neapolitan) a put-upon clown. Other segments portray a neighborhood problem-solver and a haunting funeral procession for a dead child. Each vignette could stand on its own as a top-notch short film; together they conspire to create a filmic work worthy of standing with Rossellini's Paisan and Pasolini's Trilogy of Life films as proof that Italians have understood the power of portmanteau better than anyone.

Screen capture from Mileston/Oscilloscope DVD

I knew I'd be filling a major gap in my understanding of documentary history when I went to a 35mm showing of Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity at the Rafael Film Center. I didn't realize, however, just how much I'd learn from, be moved by, and even, dare I say, entertained by, this 1969 epic (over four hours, not including intermission) of cultural history and its intersection with "harder" political history. Ophuls, in San Rafael to receive a Mill Valley Film Festival tribute and to introduce a newer film as well as this one, sat and watched this one along with the audience, as if he hadn't already viewed it countless times before. Here he tears apart the myths associated with resistance in Nazi-occupied France, not as a radical but as a sly provocateur, using techniques that have since becomes hallmarks of successful documentary: the incorporation of disturbing "ephemeral" film footage (years before The Atomic Cafe solidified an American vogue for such), and of "enough rope to hang themselves" interviews like that of a merchant asked to explain why he took out an a newspaper ad proclaiming himself "100% French". Few of the interviews were as self-incriminating as this one, but they all wove together a damning self-portrait of a nation still unreconciled with its past. I'll never watch a Maurice Chevalier film in quite the same way again.

Finally, another French film that might never have been made without the unwitting participation of Nazi Germany: Fritz Lang's only film completed during his brief stay in Paris after fleeing Hitler's Germany (in style), albeit less abruptly than he'd maintain in later interviews. The film was Liliom, a 1934 adaptation of the same Ferenc Molnar play that Frank Borzage had made with Charles Farrell in 1930. The Stanford Theatre screened both back-to-back as part of a rapturous 100-year anniversary  tribute to the Fox Film Corporation, providing opportunities for me to rewatch rarely-revived personal favorites like the Borzage Liliom and Henry King's State Fair, and to see great works like John Ford's Steamboat Round the Bend for the first time. But none I'm as glad I made sure to trek to Palo Alto for as Lang's Liliom, which emphasizes the fatalistic elements of Molnar's play while presenting a "poetic realist" setting for its events to unfold in. Charles Boyer is particularly wonderful here as the title character, effectively differentiating his performance between different phases of life in a way that Farrell didn't even attempt. And the scene in which he watches his life unfold via a film projection is one of Lang's most inspired ever. Apart from a few late-career Satyajit Ray films co-produced by Soprofilms or Canal+, this is the first French film (made under the Erich Pommer-led Fox Europa) that I can recall the Stanford screening in the decade-and-a-half I've been paying attention to the venue's programming. I'd certainly be happy to see more.

Marisa Vela: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here. 

IOHTE contributor Marisa Vela is a cinephile and artist.

So much of my focus this past year was fighting for the right to remain in our studio spaces, a fight that we ultimately lost. I did not make it to as many films as i would have liked.

1. Wanda- Barbara Loden 1970 SFIFF screening Castro Theater. introduction by Rachael Kushner, who wrote about the film in her novel, The Flamethrowers. Beautiful, painful film, it has stayed with me. Saturated color and graininess of 16mm blown up to 35mm

2. The Wild Wild Rose- Tian-Ling Wang 1960 A Rare Noir Is Good To Find, Roxie. Grace Chang dazzles in this Hong Kong nightclub update of Carmen.

3. The Swallow and the Titmouse- Andre Antoine 1920 Silent Film Festival, Castro Theater. Woefully under attended, being the final film of a long day. Gorgeous scenes on a barge floating down waterways, with a tougher more perceptive view of the characters than one is initially led to believe.

4. The Honeymoon Killers- Leonard Kastle 1969 Noir City, Castro Theater. What’s not to like?

5. The Sleeping Tiger- Joseph Losey 1954 Noir City, Castro Theater Dirk Bogarde bringing that “something” to the screen that we will see more of in The Servant.

6. The Devils- Ken Russell 1971, Castro Theater. A full house on a Tuesday night.

7. Dementia- John Parker 1953, I Wake Up Dreaming, Castro Theater. A dark dream with a George Antheil score.

8. The Scarlet Dove- Matti Kassila 1961 A Rare Noir Is Good To Find, Roxie. Shared a double-bill with The Wild Wild Rose. This Finnish film is a cautionary tale of the lengths the protagonist will go once he begins to doubt his wife.

9. A Man Escaped- Robert Bresson 1956 Roxie.

10. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me- David Lynch 1992, Castro Theater.