SFFILM 61 Day 2: Barry

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began last night and runs through April 17th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

Image from Barry supplied by SFFILM

Barry (USA: Bill Hader & Alex Berg, 2018)
playing: 6:00 tonight only at the Victoria

This is perhaps a perverse choice for the initial daily spotlight from a dedicated cinema blogger who has never seen an episode of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, The Wire, Six Feet Under, or practically any of the marquee titles in the era of "prestige television" that has turned the attention of many potential attendees of thoughtful film presentation toward their home screens with the force of a rare-earth magnet. But this crime comedy series, the first three episodes of which are screening tonight with actors Sarah Goldberg and Henry Winkler (yes, "The Fonz" and the director of Memories of Me and Cop and a Half) expected to attend in lieu of co-creators Hader and Berg, happens to be the only thing playing the festival today that I've had a chance to sample so early in the festival. I spent last weekend in Los Angeles (missing a BAMPFA screening of Salaam Cinema that I later learned was a harbinger of a larger Mohsen Makhmalbaf retrospective there this Fall) and though I didn't go to any movies, my fiancée and I did relax on one of our hosts' comfy couches where she showed us the first (and thus far only available) episode of Barry via her HBO streaming set-up. I wouldn't say I was immediately hooked by the set-up of the eponymous affectless Afghanistan War vet (Hader) being manipulated by an oily opportunist (Stephen Root) to use his savant-like military skills to earn a living as a hit man, but I can't deny enjoying the "worlds collide" frictions that emerge when Barry stumbles into an acting class run by a pricey coach (Winkler) from the "tear-'em-down-to-build-'em-up" school, and befriends one of the more volatile students (Goldberg), and the backstage/showbiz humor hits a little closer to where I live. I'm not sure I'm likely to give up a rare chance to see a foreign film just to catch this on a much bigger screen (even with talent in tow) but if there was nothing else in its slot calling my name, I certainly would consider it, especially knowing how long it will likely take me to get around to watching it as a non-subscriber to HBO.

The paradox of the television vs. cinema debate is that, at least under current conventions in this country, television is prohibited from being legally presented in cinemas while movies screen everywhere from IMAX houses to, eventually (and dishearteningly), smartphones. So the kind of rare opportunity to see a new show that, if it isn't quite on the artistic level of Fassbinder, is certainly destined to be more popular than Eight Hours Don't Make A Day, will surely be of interest to viewers who find more appeal in serialized, character-driven narratives than the kinds of narrative-exploding cinematic attractions I tend to seek out. Who knows, perhaps some TV fans will stick around to check out more of the festival, which is certainly a home for a sort of binge watching they might not be so familiar with.

SFFILM61 Day 2
Other festival options: Speaking of film festival television, as of this writing there are still a few FREE tickets for tonight's 8:45PM screening of BBC/PBS co-production Civilizations: How Do We Look (episode 2) at SFMOMA. I doubt it's crucial to have seen episode 1 before diving into this. It's in fact the only one the SFFILM free events not currently at RUSH status. Today also marks the first festival screenings of titles like The Rider, The Workshop, and Angels Wear White, to name a few I've heard strong advance word about.

Non-SFFILM option: Tonight is Artist Television Access's monthly 8PM Open Screening event, where anyone can show their work to the assembled masses on Valencia Street's last outpost of underground, un-gentrified cinema. A wonderful article on ATA's Open Screenings was published earlier this year in Xpress Magazine.

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival: Forgetting the Alamo?

Image from ★ supplied by SFFILM

Since last September, my moviegoing habits have been dramatically altered. As any longtime reader of this blog (and/or its appallingly garish predecessor) would probably guess, I've for many years treated the San Francisco Bay Area cinema scene like my own personal buffet table, sampling as many different kinds of films as I could from different eras, genres, nations and formats (with an admitted bias towards 35mm, 16mm and 70mm, especially for films originating in those gauges) at any venue I could reasonably visit, given the limits of time, money and public transportation. It has seemed to me that too many people are looking for any excuse not to go to the cinema, an attitude I've found dismaying.

But after Tim League, the CEO of Alamo Drafthouse, LLC admitted nearly seven months ago that he'd secretly hired back a former employee who had resigned after confessing to sexual assault, I could no longer see myself supporting the local link in his growing national cinema chain in any way. I'd attended and enjoyed dozens of screenings at the New Mission Theatre since it had been refurbished and reopened under Alamo auspices in late 2015. I had (and still have) nothing but respect for the New Mission employees and programming. But I wanted Tim League and his Austin-based enablers to feel some repercussions for their extremely (if not criminally) poor judgement. So on September 12, 2017 I sold back all my advance tickets to Alamo screenings and said goodbye to the staff of Lost Weekend video, which for the past few years has been housed in the New Mission lobby. I haven't been back inside the building since. (Now I limit my DVD/Blu-Ray rentals to what I can find at Faye's or Video Wave). With more damning details about Alamo's Austin operations coming out since, I don't regret anything except that I don't see as many of my cinephile peers coming to the same decision as I'd expected. I do remain hopeful that someday League might publicly answer the hard questions about his management decisions and make meaningful amends so that his brand, which had traded so heavily on themes of inclusiveness, progressive politics, and respect for the patron experience, can begin to be genuinely rehabilitated. So far reports of company changes have felt like little more than window dressing.

Depriving myself of the Alamo Drafthouse was a big change for someone who prided himself on seeking out as many of the best, most unique screenings in the region as he could, but it was an easy decision. Harder was taking the next logical step of writing to the many local film presenters and organizations that have partnered with Alamo to hold events at the New Mission in the years since it re-opened, asking their intentions about involving Alamo in future presentations and making clear that I wouldn't be attending their events held at any venue if they continued to work with League's company. Few organizations got back to me and none wanted me to publish their response publicly, for reasons I can only speculate on. (My best guess is that making public statements on this topic puts a festival at a disadvantage when negotiating with other venues?) But when organizations I'd previously supported, such as SF Sketchfest, Noise Pop, or the Jewish Film Institute, continued hosting events at the New Mission, I determined not to attend or promote their events at other venues like the Castro, no matter how appealing they were.

Image from Ravenous supplied by SFFILM

With this as the backdrop, I was thrilled to discover at last month's press conference for the San Francisco International Film Festival that in 2018 SFFILM would not be using the New Mission as a festival venue as they had in 2016 and 2017. From my perspective, SFFILM was the first established Bay Area film organization to publicly partner with Alamo Drafthouse, LLC when for their 2015 festival they brought Tim League on to guest curate and co-host their annual (rebranded from "Late Show") "Dark Wave" screenings at the Roxie and the Clay, months before construction on the New Mission was completed. As the longest-running film festival in town (not to mention, depending on your definitions, in the Western Hemisphere), SFFILM often sets trends that other major nearby film festivals follow. It feels only right that they be the first film festival to publicly distance themselves from the Alamo Drafthouse in the wake of Tim League's misjudgments, especially since such an action dovetails so neatly with the "Bay Area values" that were frequently touted at the press conference and in subsequent write-ups, and with SFFILM Executive Director Noah Cowan's remarks found on the inside cover of the festival program guide, and reprinted online.

To be sure, SFFILM's distancing from the Drafthouse was not a forcefully presented statement, but it it was clearly presented, and that's good enough for me. When I asked at the press conference if the decision not to use the New Mission this year was due to the scandals at the company's Texas headquarters, Cowan responded that SFFILM looks forward to continuing its relationship with the Alamo Drafthouse in the future as the latter's issues were being resolved, but that the festival would take a break from the New Mission this year while that was happening. It may not have been the rousing battle cry for institutional change at the Drafthouse that I'd dreamed of, but having a major regional festival put a pause on its partnership is still one of the very few concrete consequences for that company I can think of happening in the past months. Nonetheless, I'm not too surprised that, Lincoln Specter's initial Bayflicks festival announcement reaction aside, none of the 2018 SFFILM previews, articles, or interviews I've come across so far (as always, David Hudson has collected the best of them) have mentioned the reason why the New Mission is not among the venues this year. Six months on from the initial reporting on Harvey Weinstein's far fouler misdeeds, it sometimes feels like there's a general fatigue with #MeToo in the film industry, sadly, as a noble and important movement is now being improperly co-opted as a shield for the cowardly actions of ignoble institutions. Of course the Tim League story predates all of this, but it never really got enough traction to be taken seriously outside a few insular circles that most Bay Area journalists probably aren't paying close attention to. Perhaps if it's talked about more in the context of SFFILM's decision the overall conversation might change, even nationally. I hope so.

But now that I've got all that off my chest, I can dwell on my excitement about this year's films and guests. This year's SFFILM has plenty of events that make me feel so relieved I'll be able to attend without compromising my principles. I'll be writing about some of these in more detail in the coming days, but for now, here's my planned schedule, which if last year's schedule is any indication, will change by about 30% over the course of the next two weeks, but may still provide a good snapshot of what I'm most interested in.

Image from The Rider supplied by SFFILM

Thursday, April 5:
Chloé Zhao's The Rider, 3:30, SFMOMA
Larent Cantet's The Workshop, 6:00, Roxie
Dominique Choisy in person with My Life With James Dean, 8:30, Roxie

Friday, April 6:
Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award to Nathaniel Dorsky, presenting Avraham, Intimation, Autumn & The Dreamer in 16mm, 6:00, SFMOMA (interviewer Steve Anker also expected)
Paul Schrader presenting his First Reformed, 8:45, Victoria

Saturday, April 7:
Creativity Summit: Alex Garland in Conversation, 2:00, Creativity Theater
Shorts program Shorts 3: Animation, 5:00, Roxie (Carlotta's Face director Valentin Riedl, Oh Hi Anne director Anne McGuire, 73 Questions director Leah Nicholas & Weekends director Trevor Jimenez expected)
Tribute to Wayne Wang, presenting his Smoke, 7:30, Dolby (interviewer H.P. Mendoza also expected)

Sunday, April 8:
Guy Maddin giving the festival's annual State of Cinema address, 12:30, Victoria
Mohammad Rasoulof's A Man of Integrity, 3:15, BAMPFA
Johann Lurf's ★, 7:00, YBCA

Monday, April 9:
Hong Sangsoo's Claire's Camera, 4:00, SFMOMA
A Celebration of Oddball Films with Marc Capelle's Red Room Orchestra in 16mm, 8:00, Castro

Tuesday, April 10:
Steve Loveridge's Matangi / Maya / M.I.A., 9:00, Grand Lake

Wednesday, April 11:
Shorts program The Shape of a Surface: Experimental Shorts, including some in 16mm, 6:30, Roxie (unnamed director(s) expected)
Blonde Redhead with I Was Born, But... in 35mm, 8:00, Castro

Thursday, April 12:
Rungano Nyoni's I Am Not A Witch, 6:00, Roxie
Kornél Mundruczó's Jupiter's Moon, 9:30, Castro

Friday, April 13:
Sandi Tan presenting her Shirkers, 6:00, BAMPFA
Ulises Porra Guardiola & Silvina Schnicer presenting their Tigre, 8:30, BAMPFA

Saturday, April 14:
Mel Novikoff Award to Annette Insdorff, presenting Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be in 35mm, 1:00, SFMOMA (interviewer Anita Monga also expected)
No evening SFFILM screening; I'm hosting a FREE open-to-the-public screening of Ricardo Gaona's Parque Central with Lizzy Brooks's Temporal Cities at 7:00, 234 Hyde Street in San Francisco, both filmmakers in person.

Sunday, April 15:
George Gund III Craft of Cinema Award to Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, presenting End Game, 1:00, Castro (interviewer B. Ruby Rich also expected)
Robert Greene's Bisbee '17, 4:00, Creativity Theatre
Gus Van Sant presenting his Don't Worry He Won't Get Far On Foot, 7:00, Castro (composer Danny Elfman also expected)

Monday, April 16:
Robin Aubert's Ravenous, 8:45, Victoria

Tuesday, April 17:
Bing Liu's Minding the Gap, 8:45, Roxie

Direct Cinema and the Vietnam War

Basic Traning screen capture from DVD Talk review

The 1974 Peter Davis film Hearts and Minds, screens in 35mm today (along with Carolee Schneemann's 1966 16mm short Viet-Flakes) as the midway point in BAMPFA's excellent series Documenting Vietnam: Self-Portraits of America at War, timed with the 50th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, which we saw a haunting, intimate portrait of from the perpetrators' POV last week in Joseph Strick's 1970 Interviews With My Lai Veterans. It's a film that contains exactly what its title promises: it consists entirely with one-on-one interviews (with very few interjections from the questioner) with five participants in the tragic event, each expressing different shades of regret. It was paired with a very good 16mm print of Frederick Wiseman's intensely immersive Basic Training, which eschews interviews by placing the camera as a kind of unacknowledged observer in the Fort Knox universe. Though Wiseman has rejected the term "Direct Cinema" and his name has been scrubbed from its contradictory wikipedia page, Basic Training hews to the precepts of the concept as described in books like Betsy A. McLane's A New History of Documentary Film and Erik Barnouw's Documentary: a History of the Non-Fiction Film. Placing the two films together is a reminder that the Vietnam War occured at the same time as great debates about non-fiction filmmaking techniques.

Hearts and Minds begins with an extremely memorable sequence. Vietnamese children are playing, and farmers are working in a seemingly idyllic rice paddy, free from any visible signs of war. Then, quite suddenly, a soldier walks into the frame. In addition to being a suitable metaphor for Western involvement in Southeast Asia, the image raises an important question: how was it captured? Did Davis or one of his cameramen plant a tripod in front of a known patrol path and wait? Or was the soldier directed to walk this particular route for the benefit of the shot? This question is related to an inherent limitation of the Direct Cinema approach: though filmmakers of that "school" say they avoid telling the subjects of their films to perform or repeat an action, sometimes it's not evident from the footage itself, except perhaps to the most sophisticated viewer, whether or not this guideline was actually hewed to. We must either a) trust that a Direct Cinema filmmaker is adhering to the guidelines of the method, or b) not care so much about how "pure" a piece of Direct Cinema filmmaking may be.

Many documentarians themselves take the latter approach to their filmmaking, opting for an "impure" hybrid approach that meshes Direct Cinema, cinéma vérité and other styles into kind of journalistic stew. Davis, as he reveals in his commentary track for the Criterion DVD edition of Hearts and Minds, was very much inspired by Direct Cinema when beginning his career making documentaries. The lack of a narrator in the film ties him to this group, though his reasoning for this artistic choice is not one I've encountered in readings on the movement (in Barnouw, McLane, and elsewhere): he felt a interlocutor worked as something of a blanket of safety around a war film, as a narrator would certainly sound as if at a comfortable remove from the distressing images on screen, perhaps inherently sanctioning them as a result.

Screen capture from Criterion DVD of Hearts and Minds

There are scenes in Heart and Minds that appear to utilize something like a Direct Cinema approach, for instance the scenes of the airmen wandering the streets of Saigon looking for cheap thrills. But this is not a "pure" Direct Cinema film. Subjects address the camera, whether in interviews, or in unscripted, unplanned reaction to its presence - the latter most notably in a moment where a Vietnamese man remarks "first they bomb as much as they please, then they film." The use of archival footage also seemingly dilutes "Direct Cinema" purity.

Essentially, Davis's film reveals that his allegiance to a specific approach to filmmaking is not as strong as it is to the message he wants to get across: that American involvement in the Vietnam War was ill-conceived, inevitably doomed, and caused greater harm to both nations than remaining uninvolved would have. There is little to no pretense of objectivity to be found in the film; though he gives opposing voices a say, he uses editing juxtapositions to make them seem as ridiculous or discreditable as possible within the context he's created. Cutting from General Westmoreland's platitudes about Asians' disregard for human life, to a wailing mother disrupting a burial in an attempt to join her son in his grave, is only the starkest of these.

One might say that, in using a hodge-podge of methods in the service of a particular point of view, Davis opens his film up for criticism and accusations of bias. But this only raises another question: is there any documentary which can claim to be completely free of "bias"? The Direct Cinema filmmakers may use a seemingly more "pure" filming approach, but it's always a means to put forth the subjective point of view of a "biased" individual filmmaker or group of filmmakers. Perhaps a film like Hearts and Minds which wears its political persuasion on its sleeve is more honest and, in a way, less dangerous for the discourse about objective journalism, than is a film which one way or another tries to conceal or be subtle about its maker's intentions.

The Anita Monga Era at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

As I find myself with less and less of the time and (perhaps more importantly) the ability to direct my focus away from the world's turmoil to write about cinema as much as I'd like to, I become increasingly protective of my old articles and interviews. I'm not proud of this feeling; I know it's the opposite of how most wordsmiths far more talented than I feel about their older pieces; to generalize from discussions I've had with some of them it's clear that many of them can't bear to look at most of their prior work, and that this feeling of near-disgust is one of their motivations for continuing to push themselves to become better writers. 

But for me, even though I of course see turns of phrase and ideas in prior writing that I wouldn't choose to employ today, I still find value in many of my past musings. So it was very disappointing to learn last month that all of the articles I wrote for publication at the Fandor streaming service's Keyframe website between 2011 and 2016 had disappeared from the "live" internet (though a few, though not all, of them still existed in google caches and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, last I checked) as part of Fandor's rebranding. What's worse is that so much of the other, better writing by other cinephiles and critics on that site seems to have disappeared too. I'm so glad that at least David Hudson, who'd been such an essential voice at GreenCine (R.I.P.) and The Auteurs (now Mubi) before his time at Keyframe, has found a home worthy of his Daily dispatches, namely Criterion. 

When I contacted Fandor about the disappearance of my Keyframe articles, I was told that "all content" from Keyframe would soon be republished on fandor.com soon. While waiting for that to occur, assuming it ever really does, I thought I'd republish some of my older articles here on my otherwise-underused blog. Being that tonight is the opening night of one of my annual cinephiliac highlights, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, I thought I'd start with this 2014 piece in which I discussed the history of the festival and especially the changes that its Artistic Director Anita Monga has made to it since being hired in 2009. Obviously some of the references to years passed have dated during the three years since this piece was originally published at Keyframe/Fandor, and the particular films I'm highlighting in this article aren't screening this weekend. In fact, as Michael Hawley notes in his detailed preview of the 2017 festival, not a single one of the feature-length films showing this year have played at a prior SFSFF (he doesn't say that it's the first time since 2010 that the summer festival includes no repeats of feature films screened at previous summer or winter events; the only repeat I'm expecting is the four-minute-long The Dancing Pig as part of Saturday morning's Magic And Mirth program.) But there are plenty of films I'm extremely excited to see this weekend, foremost among them Ernst Lubitsch's The Doll, which I've been waiting a long time to see on the big screen, the always stirring Battleship Potemkin (pictured at the top of this post), with live music from the Matti Bye Ensemble, and pretty much everything screening on 35mm per the Film On Film Foundation's latest info. (Especially the rarities from Poland, Italy and the Ukraine.) I've also heard great things about some of the movies screening digitally like The Informer and Terje Vigen, and will probably want to revisit longtime favorites like The Freshman and A Page of Madness as well.

Without further ado, here's the republication of my May 29, 2014 article "The Anita Monga Era at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival", relatively unchanged other than the links and images.

Twenty Junes ago, San Francisco moviegoers were first made aware of something called simply the Silent Film Festival, described as "a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the art of silent film and its value as a record of early 20th century life." This tiny upstart, run by two people (co-founders Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons) out of a one-bedroom apartment, had yet to consummate its first actual festival. It was making its debut in symbiosis with an already established festival, the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, then in its 18th edition (and now running 38 years strong as Frameline). This launch was a single Sunday afternoon Castro Theatre screening of Ernst Lubitsch's 1919 gender-bending comedy I Don't Want To Be A Man, with Dennis James providing Wurlitzer organ accompaniment and Leigh Crow (a.k.a. Elvis Herselvis) on hand to recite the English translation of German subtitles. Sandwiched between showings of Dionne Brand's documentary Long Time Comin' and the posthumously-assembled Derek Jarman film Glitterbug, I Don't Want To Be A Man was a hit with the SFLGFF audience, and a tangible foundation had been laid for future success. 

It would be another two years of fundraising and community-building before the first actual San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) was underway in July 1996. Three feature films (Gretchen the Greenhorn, Lucky Star and Ben-Hur) and a program of shorts, fragments and trailers from lost films (including Lubitsch's Oscar-winning The Patriot) packed a Castro Sunday with 1800 attendees. Everything screened as superior 35mm prints played at the proper projection speed, with expert musical accompaniment. This has been the template the SFSFF has followed ever since. Initially slow-growing (the 1998 event actually scaled back to one film - Erich Von Stroheim's S.F.-shot Greed - and was billed as a benefit for the festival, but has retroactively been counted as the 3rd annual festival), SFSFF expanded from one packed Castro day to two in its seventh year, adding a third day to its summer festival and an annual winter screening in year 10. This weekend the nineteenth edition of the festival will screen more than twenty-five films in eighteen programs over four days, plus a free presentation of recent work from archivists Bryony Dixon and Dan Streible, and industry veterans Craig Barron and Ben Burtt at the "Amazing Tales From The Archives" showcase Friday morning. 

In 2009 Anita Monga took the reins of Artistic Director over from Salmons. 'Peaceful Transition of Power' is an understatement here, as he was ready to step away from the organization he'd helped create, just as Chittick had a few years prior, and was overjoyed to be able to pass it to a beloved and veteran film booker (Monga oversaw the Castro's regular programming for sixteen years until 2004) with deep contacts in the distribution world. Since then the organization has been more ambitious and successful than ever, continuing the incremental annual expansion of its summer programs while mounting weekend retrospectives for individual silent-era directors (so far: Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin) and special events like, at Oakland's über-grand Paramount Theatre, Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc with a full orchestra and chorus and the to-date only four North American screenings of Abel Gance's triple-projector epic Napoléon in its full Photoplay restoration by Kevin Brownlow, with Carl Davis conducting his symphonic score. Annual attendance has grown to 18,000 and the festival has become at least as internationally significant as any silent film showcase outside Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Italy. 

Under Chittick and Salmons, SFSFF tended to avoid most of the silent film staples of Film History 101 classes in favor of films made, whether by auteurs or by skilled craftsmen and women, with entertainment rather than self-conscious artistry in mind. Though launched with a German film, the festival proper didn't feature a foreign-made film until its fourth year when Lev Kuleshov's By The Law was shown. Non-American films continued to be programmed but they were more likely to be lesser-known gems from Shanghai or Latin America than "warhorses" from Scandinavia or the Weimar Republic. Monga's arrival coincided with an explosion of European films in the festival line-ups, and this year's edition is the most impressively international yet, with two feature films from Germany and an unprecedented three from British producers, two from Sweden, two from the Soviet Union, and two from East Asia. Language barriers some filmgoers experience with subtitled sound pictures aren't an issue for silent pictures. "With silent film you don't have to be constrained because people aren't speaking in words; they're speaking in intertitles which can be easily translated." Monga reminded me when I interviewed her last week. "In the silent era everybody really sounds how you think they sound." 

Monga's shown a few extremely famous European silents when there's been a special reason to, like premiering Fritz Lang's Metropolis reunited with footage that had been missing from it for over eighty years, introducing San Francisco audiences to Swedish composer Matti Bye and his ensemble with a signature accompaniment for Häxan, or showcasing Pandora's Box in a new photochemical restoration. But for the most part she eschews the "warhorses" as well, in favor of demolishing audience stereotypes. For 2014 she's picked films by Kuleshov, Dreyer and Yasujiro Ozu, but in each case they're films that go against the grain of their auteurs' reputation. Ozu's gangster picture Dragnet Girl has been called a "film noir" by David Bordwell, and may be the only film the Japanese family drama/comedy specialist made in which a gun is fired. Dreyer's The Parson's Widow is an uncharacteristically ironic comedy by the ponderous and austere director of Vampyr and Ordet. And Kuleshov, best known for his theory of using editing to change audience perception of an individual shot, made only one feature-length comedy and it screens Saturday night. The Extraordinary Adventures Of Mr. West In the Land of the Bolsheviks, as scholar Vlada Petrić has noted, does indeed utilize the "Kuleshov effect" when it intercuts its American-in-Moscow protagonist with real archival footage of a Red Square march to make it appear as if the Harold Lloyd-inspired character is integrated into a space the actor never occupied, the scene resonates with comic absurdity. It's a proto-Zelig moment. 

Most of the other international selections are truly obscure, at least here in the land of Mr. West Coast. I'd be pretty surprised to learn that China's first international prize-winning film The Song Of The Fisherman (by Cai Chusheng, slightly better known for The Spring River Flows East) or late-1920s German dramas Harbor Drift and Under the Lantern, had screened in a Bay Area cinema since the silent era, or ever. Monga singled out Swedish actress/director Karin Swanstrom's The Girl In Tails as particularly (though of course not literally) "made for San Francisco". She told me "it interweaves all of these disparate stories and there's a retreat with a group of wild women: intellectuals and lesbians and women living apart from society, embracing their goofy nephew who comes with the transgressing girl in tails. It was a surprise to me and I think people will really love it." 

One signature of Monga's programming is the annual inclusion of some kind of documentary in the summer program. I use the term loosely to include an exhilarating formalist study like Man With A Movie Camera or an ethnographic slice-of-life like Legong: Dance of the Virgins, but there's no mistaking The Epic Of Everest for anything other than history in the making. Filmed by Captain J. B. L. Noel, formerly of a British Army regiment in North India and an explorer in his own right, this chronicling of a G. Leigh Mallory's climbing team attempt to summit the planet's highest peak is rich in slices of Tibetan life, mountaineering drama, and Himalayan views that would make even Leni Riefenstahl gasp for breath. It's also a triumph of filmmaking technology's ability to withstand extremely harsh natural conditions, much like Herbert Ponting's footage of Captain Scott's doomed mission to the South Pole, which greatly inspired Noel even before it was edited into the form shown at the 2011 SFSFF: The Great White Silence. 

There are, of course, plenty of American films in the 2014 festival program, including six features and a generous helping of short films of various kinds. The opening night film is one of the landmark Hollywood films of the early 1920s and the one that made Rudolph Valentino a screen giant: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Cited by no less an authority than Kevin Brownlow as "the greatest World War I picture" it's an ideal choice for the festival to commemorate the 100th anniversary of The Great War. Monga promised they'll be showing "Brownlow's own restored print. So Patrick Stanbury, Kevin's partner at Photoplay, will be in the projection booth, changing the speeds as the film goes. It's 132 minutes but it is not all the same speed." The musical accompaniment to this Argentine-centric film will be provided by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, who are celebrating an anniversary as well, as they banded together as the Mont Alto Tango and Ragtime Orchestra 25 years ago. 

For the fourth straight summer, the SFSFF will screen a film starring acrobat extraordinaire Douglas Fairbanks. Like Mr. Fix-It and The Half-Breed before it, this year's selection The Good Bad Man is one of the lesser-known of the eleven films he made under the directorial guidance of Allan Dwan (the better-known ones include A Modern Musketeer and Robin Hood). All three films were restored with direct support from the festival, in fact. Mr. Fix-It was aided by the SFSFF preservation fund, and both The Half-Breed and The Good Bad Man are in fact SFSFF restorations (aided by archival partners of course) outputted to 35mm presentation prints that require special projection equipment. "The Castro projectors have variable speeds, but they don't go down as slow as The Good Bad Man needs. That creates a lot of flicker on screen, so we have to replace the blades. It's a three-blade shutter instead of a two-blade shutter," Monga explained to me. "We control it at the Castro, so we know that the print is not going to be ruined with one turn through the projector. That's the fate of 35mm. You can wreck a really expensive print really fast." 

This fragility, and its effect on the policies of archives and distributors that supply films to a festival like this, is why the SFSFF is increasingly employing digital projection. About two-thirds of the 2013 summer festival program was screened on 35mm prints, while this year it's expected to be about half-and-half. All the slapstick comedy screenings, for example, are planned to be shown via DCP, for instance, including both of the Buster Keaton showings. A newly-discovered alternate version of his short The Blacksmith debuts as part of a program presented by Paris archivist Serge Bromberg (also including work by Roscoe Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin), and the festival closes with one of Keaton's biggest commercial successes The Navigator, preceded by an animated short from the Soviet Union called Pochta. Monga sounds particularly excited about this East-West program pairing. "There's something that is going to be perfect about putting it before the Keaton. In The Navigator particularly there's a kind of Rube Goldberg-ian aspect to the actions, and Pochta's forward momentum is all the letters being sent around the world in search of a guy who's one step ahead of the letter. You get to see this amazing progression." 

In fact every one of the SFSFF programs is a testament to the international cross-connections that informed cinema history as it was being made, and to those that continue to inform its rediscovery and restoration. The exportable nature of film has always defined it, especially in the years before recorded dialogue created obstacles to immediate comprehension of images across language-segregating boundaries. Every foreign filmmaker on display this weekend was directly influenced by American films, and it's fair to say all the Americans were influenced by international filmmakers as well. And it's through international archival cooperation that many of these films are being presented today. Midnight Madness, a DeMille Pictures production, was thought lost until it was repatriated from its hiding place in a New Zealand archive in 2010. A similar story involving the Czech Film Archive is responsible for the availability of the 1928 version of Ramona, starring Mexican import to Hollywood Dolores Del Rio and made by the most thoroughly American of the weekend's directors: Chickasaw actor-turned-director Edwin Carewe. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival's motto has long been "True art transcends time." It may be time to add a corollary. It transcends distance as well.

Terri Saul on Donkeyote

Image from Donkeyote provided by SFFILM

Today is the final day of the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival, and though there are a couple programs currently at RUSH status, you can still buy tickets to most of today's slate and avoid having to wait in line to see if you can obtain a seat. The Roxie seems to be the most popular of the festival's three remaining venues, as I can attest after attending an audience-packed shorts program there last night. The venue's 4PM screening of Donkeyote, Chico Pereira's Golden Gate Award competitor (though not among the award-winners) is your last chance to see a 60th San Francisco International Film Festival film at the venue without braving the RUSH lines for Shorts 2 (including the GGA winning Univitellin, In the Wake of the Ghost Ship and American Paradise) or Endless Poetry. I haven't seen Donkeyote yet but local artist, writer & annual contributor to my "I Only Have Two Eyes" repertory round-up Terri Saul has and offered to write a short capsule for publication here. Here's what she says:

Manolo, 78-year-old errant knight (and Pereira’s uncle) sets out with his best friend, a donkey, Gorrión to take a long walk across Spain as a precursor to retracing the Trail of Tears. The man-donkey friendship is shown via shallow close-ups of the donkey’s grizzled chin as he nudges our man onward. Competing for Most Stubborn Rover they both suffer the consequences of a chase. The drunken reciting of ancient poetry in a Spanish shepherd’s dialect and the singing of a workers' song offset Western frontiersman tropes. Our picaresque crew at times becomes so displaced that we, by comparison, feel sorted.

Thanks so much, Terri!

Tomorrow the Roxie hosts an enticing 16mm archival anomalies program presented by Craig Baldwin and screens the insane Nicholas Cage movie Vampire's Kiss; other upcoming bookings there include the SF Green Film Festival (including a 35th anniversary, 35mm screening of Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill director Judy Irving's nuclear documentary Dark Circle), MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS screenings of Bring In On/Revenge of the Cheerleaders (the latter an amazing grindhouse gem with a screenplay by Nathaniel Dorksy), Blue Velvet/Peyton Place and The Fifth Element/Run Lola Run, a large David Lynch celebration, and much more.