10HTE: David Robson

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.

Five-time IOHTE contributor David Robson is the Film/Video Curatorial Assistant at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He almost never documents his movie-viewing at his own blog the House of Sparrows, and he cohabitates with those adorable simian cinephiles at Monkeys Go To Movies.

Blow Up screen shot from Warner DVD 

I insist, likely to the point of tedium, that Noir City is at its best when it goes "not quite noir" or even "...wait a minute is this even noir?". Fedora'd purists be damned: expanding the scope of the series into other realms brings a noir perspective to familiar movies that, when it clicks, renders them new. Case in point: the series' final screening of Antonioni's Blow-Up, which played to a packed house that included many of the Noir City faithful, and the often rowdy NC crowd was taken into the movie's confidence, watching the climactic tennis match unfold in rapt silence. It felt like I was seeing this famous, much-debated scene for the first time, and I've never felt an Antonioni movie connect so powerfully with an audience.

About four times a year the San Francisco Symphony accompanies a film screening with its score performed live. And though neither the venue nor its audience seem to understand the differences between these events and regular film screenings it proved the ideal way to experience Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, giving Bernard Herrmann's score the primary focus. Hearing and seeing the score performed live proved that the story had the scope and depth of an opera, with Herrmann deploying Wagnerian motifs to dizzying ends. Kim Novak's act 3 confession played like an aria in this context, proving my suspicion that a composer of a film (specifically this composer for this film) could be its most powerful auteur.

The conflict of interest prevents me from listing any of the offerings of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' film program, but I feel I can name a film that screened there prior to my return there: Joel Shepard's entire Gothic Cinema series (link here, please: Gothic Cinema: Darkness and Desire ) was a beautiful cross-section of shadowy horrors, fantasies, and romances, and among its many gems I got to see Jack Clayton's The Innocents for the first time. The gorgeous 35mm allowed it to shine within the context of the series, but even without the support of its fellow Gothics Jack Clayton's tale of a governess protecting her charges from unseen threats was and is clearly a superior picture. Crystalline photography by Freddie Francis, and even the 20th Century Fox logo is tastefully, powerfully deployed at movie's start.

The Matador image provided by contributor 

The 21st century closer of the Castro's Bond and Beyond series paired the lite entertainment of Die Another Day with Richard Shepard's spectacular black comedy The Matador. The latter features a post-Bond Pierce Brosnan in exceptionally sybaritic form as a strung-out hitman, with fine support from Greg Kinnear as a square businessman caught in his orbit and Hope Davis as Kinnear's wise, adoring spouse. It had been a dark horse favorite in 2005, and it was an absolute joy to experience again, its three lead characters returning like cherished friends, David Tattersall's photography capturing an eye-popping palette of colors. Lynn Cursaro pointed out that too rarely does rep cinema venture into the recent past, naming this movie as exactly the kind of hidden gem that are due another shot. Her hilarious posts about the movie in the days following the screening helped extend its spell.

Prince is Dead, Long Live Prince. And much, much gratitude to our friends at the Alamo Drafthouse for scoring the lovely print of Sign O' the Times. The revival of Purple Rain in the wake of Prince's departure was inevitable, but Sign appears to be Prince's greatest cinematic testament, showcasing its star's considerable talent and charisma (and more-than-adequate directing chops, as well) while giving his band plenty of space to stretch out in individual and group moments. The greatest wake of the year.

Speaking of the Drafthouse: Mike Keegan's seized the standard of late-nite grindhouse programming, but my favorite of the films I saw under that aegis was Robert Altman's little-seen and less-regarded OC & Stiggs. It's a bizarrely ramshackle 80s teen comedy that feels like it's going to self-destruct at any second, but the Beast is one of cinema's greatest cars, the King Sunny Ade concert is an incredibly cathartic set-piece, and the obnoxious title heroes are no moreso than any of Altman's other two-against-the-world double-acts. The final freeze-frame seals Altman's affection for them, and our own.

Suture image provided by contributor 

A pair of digital restorations seemed to be dancing across rep venues in tandem, and they both wound up at the Roxie the same week: Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace was presented with loving care, its digital makeover preserving Bava's gorgeously lurid color schemes and giving Carlo Rustichelli's score a nice boost. Its starkly duo-chrome dance partner, McGehee and Spiegel's Suture, showed none of its age, its Shinoda and Teshigahara-inspired staging rendered with stark clarity.

It's funny how ubiquitous a rarely-seen movie can get, but one doesn't complain. The Vienna series that began in Berkeley at Pacific Film Archive, then went south-west to the Stanford, gave us multiple looks at Powell & Pressburger's Oh Rosalinda!! (And PFA's Powell & Pressburger retro in December gave it yet another curtain call.) Not knowing I'd get another chance I took in the first screening, after which I doubted I'd see a more visually splendid movie in 2016. (I was right.) Anton Walbrook, an actor always well-deployed by the Archer, dove into the Die Fledermaus role with zeal, capped with a polite but weary summation that shook even now, far from Vienna, but resonating with our current wars.

The Vienna series continued into the days after the election. Badly wanting to get away from the ongoing flood of terrible news, I hopped on Caltrain and headed to the Stanford Theatre. Herbert Ross' The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was a movie I'd been longing to see again, and the meeting between Nicol Williamson's Sherlock Holmes and Alan Arkin's Sigmund Freud was a connoisseur's delight. But the scene in which Freud levelled up to destroy an anti-Semite on the tennis court, was what I needed to see that day.

With love and gratitude to all of the programmers whose diligent work makes picking ten difficult, and a particular shout-out to Elliot Lavine, who's about to make Portland, Oregon a better place.

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.