10HTE: Ben Armington

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 2016. An index of participants can be found here. 

Ten-time IOHTE contributor Ben Armington works with local film festivals as part of BoxCubed.

Out 1: Noli Me Tangere DVD screen capture provided by contributor

1. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (Alamo Drafthouse)

Knightriders DVD screen capture provided by contributor

2. Knightriders (Roxie)

The Lusty Men DVD screen capture provided by contributor

3. The Lusty Men (PFA)

Losing Ground DVD screen capture provided by contributor

4. Losing Ground (YBCA)

Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia DVD screen capture provided by contributor

5. Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (Castro)

Insiang image provided by contributor

6. Insiang (YBCA, Filipino Film Festival)

Close-Up DVD screen capture provided by contributor

7. Close-Up (YBCA)

Looking For Mushrooms screen capture from Michael Kohn Gallery DVD

8. Looking for Mushrooms x 2 (Bruce Conner retro, SFMOMA)

Last of the Mohicans DVD screen capture provided by contributor

9. Last of the Mohicans (Castro)

Prince of Darkness DVD screen capture provided by contributor

10. Prince of Darkness (Castro, Midnites for Maniacs)

10HTE: John Slattery

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 2016. An index of participants can be found here. 

First-time IOHTE contributor John Slattery is a filmmaker based in Berkeley, CA.

The following films were seen at the new PFA—a theatre haunted by the ghost of the former (15 yrs of her life) house manager (Becky Mertens) who disappeared during the move from the shed on Bancroft. The latest word from the guy who is responsible for disappearing her (Executive Director Lawrence Rinder) is that she was boxed up with some artwork that has yet to be unpacked.

Maurice Pialat gave us unsentimental vitality: cinema as rupture. He made brutal, awkward, messy and alive cinema that impresses upon us the realization until THIS, we’d really never seen such a truthful depiction of the human on the screen.

1. The Mouth Agape: Yes! one of the greatest films of (French) cinema.

2. À Nos Amours: Sandrine Bonnaire …and a reminder that perhaps a real slap in the face is both what we see the least in cinema and one thing, perhaps, the camera captures best.

3. Van Gogh: Underrated and underappreciated. Aside from Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch (74) it remains one of the great naturalist renderings on film—one artist brings us another.

4. We Will Not Grow Old Together: Adults: you’ve always known them, but until now, maybe you’ve never really seen them - in movies.

5. Loulou: Isabelle Huppert herself (not just her character) breaks out in laughter at the oversized teenage ruffian Gerard Depardieu bouncing against the walls of the screen/world.

Ten Great Expanded Cinema Performances of 2016

The first month of the New Year has almost ended. Between travel, a new worksite, trying to make sense of a new Presidential administration (an impossible task given that its architect Steve Bannon seems to prize sowing chaos and confusion more highly than any other political aim), protesting against it, and attending local screenings, I've been remiss in posting my year-end round-ups of 2016 to this blog. Soon I'll begin unveiling the 2016 "I Only Have Two Eyes" project, presenting the favorite repertory and revival screenings of more than a dozen local cinephiles, including my own selections. But today I'm focusing on another corner of cinema. 

I originally wrote this list in the hopes it would be included in my submission to the Senses of Cinema World Poll of over 200 thoughtful cinema watchers from around the globe published earlier this month. I'm honored that the site decided to include my lists of top ten commercially-released films, top five undistributed feature films, and top twenty (numbered as nineteen but #6 includes two works by one artist) "short" or otherwise less-than-feature-length works I first had a chance to see last year. I'm not quite sure why they decided not to publish the following list of expanded cinema performances as well but at least I have this blog site to provide a place for them. Here's what I submitted (with a few minor alterations):

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Screen capture from vimeo file of Michael Morris's Second Hermeneutic

These ephemeral events have become increasingly integral to my moving-image-watching; I’m lucky to live in a region which supports a very healthy scene devoted to artists who employ film (and occasionally video) projectors in ways never intended: projecting multiple images on a single screen, employing multiple screens, and intervening live with the image in a myriad of other ways, never quite the same way twice.

I’m recusing from this list the multiple performances I saw (and in some cases assisted with) by my partner, filmmaker Kerry Laitala; she’s in good company though, as an arbitrary cut-off of ten excludes fine performances by Bruce McClure, Sally Golding, John Davis, Greg Pope, Lori Varga, Jeremy Rourke, Hangjun Lee, Jeanne Liotta, Keith Evans, Greta Snider, Beige, arc, Elia Vargas & Andy Puls, Simon Liu, Robert Fox, Bill Thibault, and others.

10. Philippe Leonard’s projections for a Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert at the Fox Theatre in Oakland, particularly his final piece of the evening. I saw it prior to watching Blake Williams’ stereoscopic single-channel video Red Capriccio at the Crossroads festival in April, but they seem very much thematically akin. This was the first time I'd ever seen film projections at this historic former movie palace (which opened in 1928 with a now-lost Howard Hawks film called The Air Circus.)

9. Michael Morris’s Hermeneutics, performed opening weekend of SF Cinematheque’s Perpetual Motion expanded cinema series at the Gray Area (former Grand Theater) on Mission Street, demonstrates his finely-honed skill at precisely and powerfully merging video and 16mm film projections onto a single screen. I'm not sure I've ever seen someone merge film and video formats so adeptly.

8. Kat Schuster’s multi-projector presentation at San Francisco’s Oddball Films in early July, mixing nostalgic and chilling scenes from San Francisco history, including images of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, was a masterclass in juxtaposition. It feels even more precious now that it appears Oddball has at least temporarily suspended its twice-weekly 16mm screenings in favor of more occasional events.

Screen capture from vimeo file of Civil Projections

7. The only one of these performances I saw outside of my home region of the San Francisco Bay Area was Avida Jackson’s Civil Projections, a rapid-fire dual-projector montage of unsettling archival unearthings shown at my favorite out-of-town film festival: Albuquerque, New Mexico’s annual Experiments In Cinema. The full piece is available to watch on vimeo but was truly something to behold with the prints unspooling in the wonderful Guild Cinema.

6. Kathleen Quillian’s stately The Speed of Disembodiment, at Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema space in San Francisco, which incorporated 35mm slides & animation in an exploration of Eadweard Muybridge’s legacy. Quillian and her partner Gilbert Guerrero run the Shapeshifters Cinema media-performance series in Oakland; their next show on February 12th is a curated selection of responses to our current political moment.

5. Karl Lemieux, with a sonic assist from BJ Nilsen, presented two multi-projector works in the Perpetual Motion series; the literal show-shopper was the world premiere of Yujiapu, a quadruple-16mm piece using images shot in a giant, uninhabited city, its geometric lines creating a disorienting, almost 3-D effect when intervened on with red filters.

4. Suki O’Kane’s Sweeping, Swept, Out of My Head employed a small army of mobile camera feeds (operated by Jeremy Rourke, Wayne Grim, Alfonso Alvarez, etc.) on the ends of brooms booming across the Shapeshifiters Cinema home at Oakland’s Temescal Art Center, incorporating touchstone footage from classic films into a cathartic video ablution.

3. Trinchera Ensemble filled the back wall of the Gray Area space hosting the Perpetual Motion series for its jubilant sensory overload performance Lux-Ex-Machina, abstractions layered upon abstractions in constant motion that Harry Smith would surely have approved of. Sound contributions led by violinist Eric Ostrowsky, as I noted on twitter, "recalled the soundtrack to McLaren's Fiddle-De-Dee, reprocessed through a Masonna filter".

Screen capture from vimeo excerpt from Towards the Death of Cinema

2. Malic Amalya’s images of Bay Area ruins and landmarks, collected on a tiny strip of 16mm film burnt in the projector gate frame-by-frame to Nathan Hill’s industrial sounds made Towards the Death of Cinema a truly “end times cinema” (to quote Perpetual Motion organizer Steve Polta’s program booklet) experience while watching it. Thinking back on it after the Oakland warehouse fire that occurred a mere week and a half later, it feels like a chilling act of unintended augery in retrospect.

1. Jürgen Reble’s Alchemie set the Perpetual Motion series bar very high on its first night as Reble ran a 16mm loop through a positively Cronenbergian projector, chemically transforming the fragmentary images with each pass-through into ever-more otherworldly (literal and figurative) whiffs of a time long gone.

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Outer Space (1999)

Screen capture from Other Cinema DVD "Experiments In Terror"

WHO: Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky created this.

WHAT: One of those experimental short films that has the power to impress open-minded cinephiles who normally find themselves too bored, confounded, or otherwise alienated from the 'avant-garde' to enjoy non-narrative underground filmmaking, Outer Space is a triumph, both conceptually and in terms of the painstaking processes that created it. Tscherkassky started with a print of Sidney J. Furie's horror film The Entity, in which Barbara Hershey plays a single mother who survives repeated attacks from a ghostly rapist who has invaded her suburban home and ultimately attempts to defeat the titular assailant with the qualified aid of a team of parapsychologists. He manipulated footage of some of the film's spectral assaults on a light table, creating a film in which Hershey appears to be attacked by the material of film itself. It's an astonishing film, and the highlight of the Other Cinema Experiments in Terror DVD, but it works best when seen on its native 35mm format.

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

WHY: The Castro doesn't frequently show experimental short films in front of the feature-length films that are its bread and butter, but when it does it's a cause for celebration among fans of this mode of filmmaking. Unfortunately it's not always a cause for celebration among all viewers. I heard reports that when Outer Space played before John Carpenter's The Thing in March 2007, there was a great deal of consternation from certain audience members who couldn't wait an extra ten minutes to see a gory remake of a Howard Hawks alien invasion movie. I heard that audiences were better behaved when it played there along with its more natural companion The Entity in early 2013. Here's hoping tonight's Halloween horror crowd is ready for its visceral scares when it plays between two established classics.

I'm pleased to announce that Tscherkassky's most recent film, The Exquisite Corpus, is also planned to screen in San Francisco soon; to be specific at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on a bill with a new (digitally-distributed) documentary about film projection called The Dying of the Light, playing there November 3rd and 6th. I'm excited to see both, but the 35mm print of The Exquisite Corpus is the special draw for me; I've been waiting for this one since his last film Coming Attractions played here more than five years ago.

HOW: 35mm print preceding the 9:30 35mm screening of Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (note: NOT the 4:30 PM screening as well), the second half of a double-feature also including the digital director's cut of William Friedkin's The Exorcist.

In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

WHO: Nagisa Oshima wrote and directed this.

WHAT: In the Realm of the Senses is almost certainly the most-viewed Oshima film internationally, which I feel can be attributed equally to two factors: its high quality (I'd call it one of the two or three best of the dozen or so Oshima films I've managed to view, and I don't get the sense I'm alone in appreciating it narratively and formally) and its notorious reputation. The latter stems, of course, from, attacks on the film by censors over the years; it been banned from screening under obscenity laws around the world, including in parts of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany.

In Japan, where it was filmed, it to this day remains censored (though not banned, certain images including public hair remain obscured from all sanctioned home video and theatrical releases there). Oshima knew his film would be so treated in his country when he made it forty years ago, and correspondingly sent his film to be developed in labs in France to avoid "making his pure film dirty", as he would later decry the blurring and blacking out techniques that treat his film like it's porn. When my friend Adam Hartzell wrote about Oshima and In the Realm of the Senses on this blog on the occasion of an Oshima retrospective seven years ago, he noted that an uncut version of the film finally screened in Japan in 2000, but I've since learned that even that supposedly "uncut" print, while uncensoring female genitalia, still kept male genitalia obscured.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM tonight only at the Roxie.

WHY: Today is the final day of the Roxie's Banned Movie Week, a brilliant idea for a series (that I hope becomes annual) inspired by Banned Books Week, which has been celebrated in libraries and schools during the final week in September since 1982. I highlight this screening on my blog today not only because In the Realm of the Senses is a terrific movie deserving of attention, but because it gives me an excuse to mention that after over ten years working for the San Francisco Public Library in various capacities, I've left that position and am now working for another local library system. My hours and responsibilities have increased somewhat, so I'm not certain I'll be able to keep up the rate of posting on this blog that I've been used to maintaining over the years (sometimes it's been a post per day or more, though there have been frequent periods where'd I'd post no more than once in a month; so far I've never gotten less frequent than that, but I can't guarantee that'll remain true). I still plan to be involved, on a strictly volunteer basis, in the ATA@SFPL group which, for over a year and a half now, has been organizing and hosting screenings of film prints from the SFPL 16mm collection. I wrote a bit about this group on this blog last year, and though I'm not certain what we'll be showing at our next expected screening in December, I'm sure we'll know pretty soon; our group's next event won't actually involve SFPL prints at all, but will be a short presentation at Other Cinema on Saturday November 19, in which we'll discuss the project and show a couple prints owned by local filmmakers whose work we became aware of during our archival explorations: Rick Goldsmith's Anatomy of a Mural and Christian Schiess's Luminauts.

In addition to Banned Movie Week, the Roxie is currently hosting the final few days of the SF Latino Film Festival, a couple digital screenings of anime classics, and the opening week-long runs of new releases like Danny Says and Spa Night to close out September. Highlights of October include a 35mm showing of Point Blank, two MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS showings including a new DCP of Stand By Me paired with a 35mm print of Creepshow and a double-bill of truly neglected sequels, the Walter Murch-directed Return To Oz and my favorite George Miller film Babe: Pig in the City. Both of those are also 35mm, as is the same day's locally-made indie Treasure Island. It's not yet determined whether Takashi Miike's (arguably) sickest film Ichi The Killer will screen as DCP or 35mm print on October 27th, the formats for what may be the month's most exciting series, a horror showcase featuring only films directed by women, have been announced. Expect 35mm prints of Katheryn Bigelow's vampire classic Near Dark and the late Antonia Bird's unbelievable Ravenous, and DCP showings of (I believe) natively-digital features The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears, The Babadook, and Lyle. Only Gloria Katz's Messiah of Evil and Karyn Kusama's Jennifer's Body will be shown on a format other than how they were filmed, and even the latter was, I understand, a hybrid 35mm & digital production.

HOW: In the Realm of the Senses screens as a 35mm print.