Mountain (2015)

A scene from Yaelle Kayam's MOUNTAIN will play at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival, on April 21 - May 5,2016. Courtesy of San Francisco Film Society

WHO: This was written and directed by Israeli director Yaelle Kayam. It's her first feature-length film.

WHAT: Shani Klein, who played the ambitious officer in the military comedy Zero Motivation does an about-face here, carrying the drama as Tzvia, an Orthodox Jewish wife and mother awakening to her increasing alienation from her familial roles, and doing something about it. She lives a fairly isolated existence from everyone other than her Yeshiva teacher husband and their four children, as they make their home in a very unusual location: in the middle of Jerusalem's Mount of Olives cemetery, surrounded on all sides by white graves and stunning views of the surrounding hillsides. As she explains to a pair of cemetery visitors from far-off, exotic Tel Aviv, who have knocked on her door asking to use the bathroom, she's there to provide a "Jewish presence" on the sacred site, although she also jokes that her family is called "the petting zoo". When the visitors describe Orthodox life in Israel's largest city as having "everything a community needs", Kayam allows their words to settle in, as a community is precisely what Tzvia lacks.

In its absence, she occupies herself in her few housework-free moments by sneaking tastes of jelly and smoking (it's been a long time since I've seen a new film that allowed its heroine to derive such satisfaction from nicotine- a metaphorical foreshadowing of the death that will soon come from Tzvia's little rebellions.) She makes innocent small talk with a Palestinian gravedigger and then lies about it to her husband. She communes with a South Korean tourist visiting the grave of the famous Hebrew poet Zelda, who recites a translation of her poem "A Drunk, Embroiled Will" in Korean (left unsubtitled in the film, which is an interesting choice as it's clear Tzvia has it memorized in Hebrew; audience members who don't know it, or Korean, are excluded from what's in her mind as she hears him speak.) Meanwhile her husband grows increasingly distant, siding against her when she tries to discipline their eldest, taking on new responsibilities outside the home and finding excuses to avoid his duties in the bedroom.

So when Tzvia stumbles upon people copulating atop a one of the tombs on one of her evening cigarette breaks, she's primed to be curious. It's the last thing she or the audience expects to see, but it turns out to be a functioning community (albeit a sacreligous one) of prostitutes, pimps and johns regularly making use of Tzvia's "backyard" as an open-air substitute for an hourly-rate hotel. Chased away after she's discovered observing this surreal sex mart, she returns subsequent evenings with a pot of specially-prepared sustenance- her contribution to a community that may be the complete opposite of the Orthodox Judiaism she's used to, but which is the ultimately more welcoming one? How our protagonist answers that question is the hinge for one of the more wickedly delicious (as soon as I could see it coming a big grin came upon my face) open-endings I've had the pleasure of viewing.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, at 6:30 PM, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: I have a half-baked (no, that's too generous; quarter-baked is more like it) notion that Mountain forms a kind of unintentioned trilogy with a pair of other features I've recently seen set within religious communities: each of the three major Abrahamic groups is represented here: this one involves Judaism, Under the Shadow (which I just saw at SFIFF the night before watching Mountain) is Islam, and The Witch (not a SFIFF film but one I saw at the Alamo Drafthouse a couple months ago) is Christianity. All three rely on an immediate high-definition video aesthetic that somehow makes them feel very current, even though the latter two are period pieces. Nobody, least of all yours truly, is trying to sell Mountain as a horror movie like the other two are, but each of the three films involve questions of faith and community, and end with life-or-death stakes considerably raised. I wouldn't want to say much more without giving each film a rewatch (especially The Witch, since it's least fresh in my mind).

HOW: digital projection.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: As much as I liked Mountain the SFIFF screening I'd most like to recommend today is the remarkably one-of-a-kind Cameraperson, directed by Kirsten Johnson, my new idol after seeing her documentary Sunday. But its final festival screening tonight, at the New Mission, is at RUSH status (a.k.a. no guarantee of any available tickets), and I wouldn't be able to write more than 100 words on it anyway due to press restrictions in place until its expected theatrical release later this year. Another alternative is the Animated Shorts program happening at the Roxie tonight; I saw its first screening and although it's not the strongest such set I've seen programmed at SFIFF, it definitely includes plenty of worthy work including Caveh Zahedi's self-perpetuating Bob Dylan Hates Me, Max Hattler's abstract, post-industrial All Rot, Chenglin Xie's brutal, honest Life Smartphone, Dan McHale's lovely Splotch and Kazue Monno and Takeshi Nagata's unique Track.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Witch screens tonight at the New Parkway in Oakland. This is the last Frisco Bay cinema screening of it that I am aware of.

Sledgehammer (1986)

Screen capture from Rhino DVD

WHO: Nick Park, Peter Lord, Richard Starzak and the Brothers Quay animated this under the direction of Steven J. Johnson.

WHAT: I'm pretty sure I've never written about a music video on this blog before, but why not break the mold today with the video that turns up on nearly every list of the greatest music videos of all time, and that as recently as 2011 still reigned as the most-played video ever on MTV (and I'm guessing it would remain so if someone updated the tally today).

My family never paid for MTV when I was growing up, however, so I didn't see Sledgehammer until November 1989, when we had a month-long free cable-box trial that coincided with MTV's countdown of the Top 100 videos of the 1980s. I actually saw and was blown away by Johnson's other Peter Gabriel video Big Time first thanks to a friend who lent me a VHS he'd recorded it onto at one point. So when I saw Sledgehammer out of order from most of the rest of my generation it couldn't quite match the reputation I'd expected for it after more than three years of build-up.

But going back and watching the pair on the DVD Peter Gabriel: Play The Videos, it's clear that Sledgehammer is the more thoroughly creative and impressive piece. It involves so many varying techniques, from the opening manipulation of scientific footage, to Norman McLaren-esque pixilation, to Jan Svankmajer-esque stop motion, to things I'm not quite sure how to describe (the ice-sculpture sequence, for instance). Johnson developed a technique for lipsynch animation that had apparently never been tried before. And the shoot involved the musician far more thoroughly in its creation, particularly in capturing the white clouds in a blue sky frame-by-frame repainted over his face. And it integrates the creative sensibilities of some of my favorite animators despite their diversity: the sequence created for the second iteration of the chorus, in which the singer is covered over by a confining wooden structure from the Street of Crocodiles universe and then emerges as an oh-so-Aardman clay figure (complete with hammer-hands) that then goes through a series of quick transformations leading up to the famous "chicken dance", is one of my favorite half-minutes of animation of all time.

WHERE/WHEN: Sledgehammer screens as part of a program happening at 5PM today, at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: I don't know if the Sledgehammer video, obviously made-for-television, has ever been shown on a cinema screen as large as the Castro's before, but it certainly gets me excited just thinking about it. It screens as part of a score of films, videos, advertisements and episodes displaying the full range of short-form creativity at the Aardman studios. Yes, the wonderful Oscar-winners Creature Comforts and The Wrong Trousers will be among them, but so will the bizarre and disturbing The Pearce Sisters and a good number of early rarities. Oh, and Aardman co-founder Peter Lord will be on hand to receive an award from the festival and talk about his company's impact on the international moving image scene (most recently with the feature-length Oscar nominee Shaun the Sheep Movie).

The Castro is the only major SFIFF venue I haven't yet talked about this year. It's not only by far the largest 2016 festival venue, it's also the only one that has now been in use by SFIFF on an annual basis for more than two years. In fact the festival has been using the theatre since the early eighties, at least (does any long-time festgoer want to chime in and tell me if its use goes back to the 1970s or earlier?) Which is why seeing High Rise with an absolutely rabid audience of J.G. Ballard fans there last night, my first Castro event at this year's SFIFF, felt like such a heartening, traditional San Francisco event, even if I'm not quite sure what I think of the film twelve hours later. (I hope to see it again sometime, preferably after reading the book this time.) If you haven't been to the Castro for a SFIFF event yet you have a few more chances, including today's Aardman tribute and a 2PM showing of queer cinema classic The Watermelon Woman with director Cheryl Dunye in person, tomorrow's showing of Carl Dreyer's Vampyr with a live improvised music score by members of Mercury Rev and the Cocteau Twins (I'm skeptical of this one but may have to see it for myself anyway), and Thursday night's closing film The Bandit, a documentary about the making of the famous Burt Reynolds star vehicle directed by the man behind The Overnighters.

HOW: All the Aardman shorts including Sledgehammer are expected to screen digitally.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Unfortunately forking The Watermelon Woman's sole festival screening, today is the first screening of Kirsten Johnson's highly-buzzed Cameraperson at the Victoria (Tuesday's Alamo Drafthouse showing has long been at RUSH status). Today is also the final showing of any of the Drafthouse Dark Wave selections, the Iran-set horror movie Under the Shadow, screening 10PM at the New Mission.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: It's the final day to see 35mm prints of A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront at the Stanford Theatre. This Friday (the day after the SFIFF ends) the Palo Alto venue begins a 9-week centennial tribute to Olivia de Havilland.

NUTS! (2016)

Screen capture from trailer

WHO: Penny Lane, director of Our Nixon directed this as a follow-up. She also was an editor, cinematographer and producer on the documentary.

WHAT: Another hold review; sorry to make it two in a row. But I can't resist plugging this one. My 100-word capsule:

Ever wondered why Buster Keaton brings his horse to a "goat gland specialist" in Cops? Thanks to John R. Brinkley these were the Viagra of the 1920s, except they didn't work. Brinkley's treatments were questionable at best, but his innovations in promotion & distribution were game-changers still impacting our economic landscape. Lane collages archival audio and film footage (in its correct aspect ratio - avoiding a common pet peeve in history-centric documentaries) with myriad animation techniques, digitally-rotoscoped re-enactments especially effectively, to explore a corner of weird American history that's unfortunately been forgotten. Perfect entertainment for this erection year.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at BAMPFA at 6:15 PM, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: If you weren't aware of Penny Lane from Our Nixon, perhaps you read her open letter to the Tribeca Film Festival last month in protest of their announced (and subsequently withdrawn) screening of the anti-vaccination propaganda film Vaxxed. I haven't seen Vaxxed (it opened at the Opera Plaza yesterday, which is very disappointing to this longtime Landmark Theatres patron) but I don't have to see it to know that a co-directing credit from a proven research fabricator marks it as an anti-scientific example of 21st-Century quackery.

I hate to trot out the "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it" cliche, but NUTS! reminded me how little I actually know about certain aspects of American society in the 1920s and 30s, despite devoting a great deal of time immersing myself in the popular culture of the era. Any regular attendees of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (which recently announced its 2016 slate), for example, should definitely see NUTS! to get a fuller sense of the era in which its films were initially received. The fact that it includes a brief excerpt from Cops is a pleasant bonus for Buster Keaton fans.

HOW: Digitally projected.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today marks the final SFIFF screenings of No Home Movie and of Sixty Six, both also at BAMPFA. The sole festival screening of the Johnny To-produced action thriller Trivisa is at 11:30 PM tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission. At 3PM Joel and Ethan Coen will appear at the Castro Threatre to present the festival's Mel Novikoff Award to Janus Films and the Criterion Collection; the Coens named a character from Inside Llewyn Davis after Novikoff as belated tribute to his championing of their first feature Blood Simple more than thirty years ago; it will screen at the event. Finally, Wesley Morris delivers the festival's annual State of the Cinema Address at the Victoria at 1PM; it's the first time a film critic has been given the job since 2004 when B. Ruby Rich did it. (I strongly approve but am still waiting for an archivist to get a chance at-bat.)

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Niles Film Museum screens Buster Keaton's masterpiece Steamboat Bill, Jr. as well as his short film The Bellboy and a Mutt & Jeff comic short The Big Swim. All are 35mm prints, the latter tinted.

Sonita (2015)

A scene from Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami's SONITA, playing at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 21 - May 5 2016. Courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: "Afghanistan's youngest female rapper" (interestingly the only two Afghan rappers listed on English-language wikipedia are female) Sonita Alizadeh is the subject/star of this documentary, directed by Iranian filmmaker Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami.

WHAT: Like No Home Movie, this is another SFIFF selection with US distribution (in this case through Women Make Movies) so I can only write a 100-word capsule review. Here goes:

America reflects in this window onto the eponymous charismatic, teenage, homeless Afghan refugee in Tehran, nascently negotiating her public persona. Overtly because she dream of following Eminem to rap stardom; subtextually because most viewers know so little just how our foreign policy's shaped this region. The narrative centerpiece, Sonita's cry against child-bridehood, is both personal and universally coherent and applicable. (Big kudos to the Dari-English rhyme translators/subtitlers!) Ghaemmaghami's own transformation from observer to catalyst is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of her documentary. It's left underdiscussed but enough camera-captured clues remain to provide countless theorists grist for important philosophical analyses.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at BAMPFA tonight only at 8:45, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: There's nothing like seeing a crowd-pleasing festival film with a sellout audience of respectful festgoers. That's why I picked this multi-award-winner as today's blog pick despite the fact that the final screening has gone to RUSH status, meaning that all advance ticekts have been sold and only a few will be made available at the door for those willing to wait in line an hour ahead of the showtime. I haven't ever tried seeing a RUSH-status show at BAMPFA (at its current or previous sites), but I've almost always had good luck using this method to see a popular film at other festival venues. The Alamo Drafthouse New Mission has a major advantage over the former festival flagship venue when it comes to Rush lines: a long wind-shielded corridor leading up to the door to the lobby makes an hour wait much pleasanter in any weather than the Kabuki could claim.

HOW: Digital screening with director in person. Here's a brief report on her appearance at the prior screening.

OTHER SFIFF SCREENINGS: Tonight being a Friday night, there have been a number of screenings at RUSH status including the final showing of another music-themed/Iran-centric feature Radio Dreams at BAMPFA, Late last night the second showing of Lebanese comedy Very Big Shot at the New Mission and the first showing of French nun drama The Innocents were marked at RUSH, but today they aren't- perhaps a few more advance tickets have been made available day-of. If you like nothing better than free tickets, you should definitely check out Contemporary Color, a documentary about a David Byrne-instigated color guard show, by the Ross Brothers (who made Western and Tchoupatoulas) that screens outdoors for free (with SFIFF ticket) at 432 Octavia, near Hayes.

NON-SFIFF SCREENING: 8PM tonight Oakland's Paramount Theatre hosts its (approximately) monthly movie screening. This time it's Sean Connery as James Bond in Goldfinger. For $5 you get a 35mm feature, cartoon, newsreel and organ concert in the grandest movie palace on Frisco Bay.

Sixty Six (2015)

A scene from Lewis Klahr's SIXTY SIX, playing at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival, on April 21 - May 5, 2016. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society

WHO: Los Angeles-based experimental filmmaker Lewis Klahr made this. Here's Jordan Cronk's interview with him.

WHAT: "I don't think of myself as an animator. I think of myself as a re-animator". Lewis Klahr said this at a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening in December 2011 which inspired me to write, shortly after:

Klahr's collage films can provide a closer look at vintage comic book art than even the most finicky collector is likely to take unless scrutinizing that line between "very fine" and "near mint". We see the visual DNA of colors and shading magnified, and at the same time we read between the panels, guided by the filmmaker's temporal and spatial dislocations. The standout of a strong set of new-ish work Klahr brought for local premieres this year, Lethe is a remix of a 1960s Doctor Solar story that becomes a noirish drama set to Gustav Mahler.

I still agree with all that, but the brief paragraph doesn't begin to convey how Klahr's films and videos aren't really for comic book obsessives (though they might appeal to some of the more adventurous among them, and I'd love to see what would happen if Pony Glass -which I briefly described here- screened before a showing of one of those big-budget spandex-fests that all the kids go crazy for these days), but use their detritus to tap into universal emotions and conditions. Such as Helen of T, which is clearly more about the ravages of human aging than paper aging. Klahr screened it at an SF Cinematheque show in February 2015 and detailed how the main character was torn from the pages of an unusual comic book with a science fiction theme, I believe (I don't seem to have taken notes at the screening and am relying on memory). Or Ichor, which screened in an SFIFF program two years ago, and which marries a narration of fortune-cookie-esque pronouncements to cut-out images of midcentury men on the lam, weaving a fractured narrative on the theme of fate. The images he employs once told one story, but now they've been decontextualized and appropriated for Klahr's own purposes. This must be what he means when calling himself a "re-animator".

Ichor, Helen of T, and Lethe are among the twelve short works that Klahr has collected together to create Sixty Six, his new multi-chapter feature-length film set precisely fifty years ago, hence the title. Others (that as far as I am aware are making their Frisco Bay cinema debut at tonight's program) include Mercury, Mars Garden, Saturn's Diary, Jupiter Sends a Message, Venus (I'm starting to detect an interplanetary theme here), as well as Erigone's Daughter, Ambrosia, Orphacles (or is it a Classical mythology theme?) and The Silver Age (seeming reference to the comic books of Klahr's childhood). I'm excited to see them all together tonight. Manohla Dargis wrote a great review of it in the New York Times a few months ago, in case you're curious to hear more.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 6PM tonight at the Roxie and 8:30PM Saturday at BAMPFA, presented as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: When SFIFF announced that its 2015 program would be divided into categories like Marquee Presentations, Masters, Global Visions, etc. I wasn't so sure I liked the idea. It felt like a clear borrowing from the Toronto International Film Festival, SFIFF Executive Director Noah Cowan's former stomping ground, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I remember well my (sole) visit to that festival, and how much more attention and emphasis was given to programs in certain sections (Gala Presentations, Midnight Madness) at the seeming expense of the (to me) much more interesting things going on in sections like Discovery, Visions and Wavelengths. Noting that all the 2015 Marquee Presentations selections were either Anglophone or Francophone films, and that nearly all the Masters filmmakers were made men just a little bit more annoyed by the division.

But then I remembered that sectional programming like this is nothing SFIFF hadn't tried before; in fact the first year I really found myself delving into the program back in 2001, the festival had a Masters section (which helped guide me to great films by Agnes Varda, Jan Svankmajer and Bela Tarr, for instance), as well as Big Nights, Next Wave, Global Views, etc. And I realized how useful one particular section was for the festival: Vanguard. Though at TIFF this section name refers to cutting-edge genre films that are perhaps not quite so outré or outlandish to deserve Midnight slots, SFIFF is using it more to signify the most formally experimental films in the festival. Sticking with 2015 as the example, it was clearly quite helpful to the screening I attended of Jenni Olson's The Royal Road, for instance, that the film was positioned as something other than a straightforward documentary about Junipero Serra and the California-spanning thoroughfare he established. Audiences knew to expect an experimental essay film visually composed of landscape shots with no people in them, and seemed to respond well to what they saw.

For 2016, I'm pretty sure the Marquee Presentations are still limited to Anglophone and Francophone films (and that there are even fewer of the latter than there were last year). There are still too few female Masters (but at least the ones they've got are totally inarguable: Barbara Kopple and Chantal Akerman). But I'm fine with the categorizations now, if only because I've grown used to them after a year. And if the existence of the Vanguard section helped make it possible for the festival to program Sixty Six and target it to an appreciative audience, I'm more than fine: I'm all for it! 

Unfortunately nearly all the other Vanguard presentations at the festival have already passed. Other than Sixty Six's two showings, the last one remaining is Guetty Felin's "chorale for several voices in the wake of the Haiti earthquake", Ayiti Mon Amour, which screens once more at 9:15 tonight.

HOW: Digital screening with filmmaker in attendance.

OTHER SFIFF SCREENINGS: Today is the last chance to see screenings like Wild by Nicolette Krebitz, Southside With You by Richard Tanne, Les Cowboys by Thomas Bidegain and (as mentioned above) Ayiti Mon Amour, all at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission.

NON-SFIFF SCREENING: Tonight Oddball Films hosts its 99th monthly 16mm iteration of "Strange Sinema", this time on the theme of "Psycho Science". The program includes The Electric Eel,  Sun Healing: The Ultra-Violet Way With Life Lite and Living in a Reversed World (which I've seen, the last of them at SFIFF- all are extremely weird and entertaining) and Edgar G. Ulmer's Goodbye, Mr. Germ, (which I have not). Seems like the perfect program to warm up for Penny Lane's NUTS! (which I also haven't seen yet.)