SFFILM 61 Day 12: Drop By Drop

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival is almost over; it 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 Drop By Drop provided by SFFILM

Drop By Drop (PORTUGAL: Alexandra "Xá" Ramires & Laura Gonçalves, 2017)
playing: 3:00 today at the Roxie, as part of Shorts 3: Animation.

Drop By Drop is in my opinion the most visually impressive of the animated short films found in either the Shorts 5: Family Films program (in which Louise Bagnall's Late Afternoon and Erick Oh's “Pig: The Dam Keeper Poems” Chapter 4 are the standouts) or the Shorts 3: Animation program intended for mature audiences (not that they're particularly racy this year; in fact they're far less juvenile than the typical "Sick & Twisted" fare you might find on some animation programs).

A great example of documentary/animation hybridization, Drop By Drop takes audio interviews of Portuguese villagers reacting to the social and environmental impacts of climate change and desertification on the Iberian peninsula and imagines a fantastic visual landscape based on the metaphors in its interviewees' descriptions. Not only is the imagery striking and strong, the animation itself is a wonderful example of the under-utilized concept of "camera movement" in animation. Where so many independent animations have a very closed-off, shoebox feel (which can be beneficial to certain, but not all, subjects), Drop By Drop moves in all directions, creating a sense of vastness that befits its theme of long-rooted traditions becoming upended as families scatter to the four winds.

Other noteworthy selections in the Shorts 3 program include Oscar-nominated Negative Space by Max Porter & Ru Kuwahata, which is probably the best example of character animation in the set (I sorely wish it had won the Oscar over the self-important celebrity promo Dear Basketball), Leah Nichols' sweet, locally-focused rotoscope doc 73 Questions, and the humorous Icebergs by Elrini Vianelli.

The one that got to me emotionally was Oh Hi Anne, from local artist Anne McGuire, perhaps best known for her reverse-ungineered 1970s blockbusters like Snatchers Body The Of Invasion and Strain Andromeda The, or her performances as half of The Freddy McGuire Show. Here she also takes documentary audio, in this case voicemail messages left by underground film & video legends & longstanding Mission District residents George Kuchar (1942-2011) and his brother Mike, and applies a simple set of drawn images to them to create a little narrative about her friendships with her former teacher George, and later Mike. Combined with audio of a lovely song written and performed by McGuire, that I've gladly had running in my head for over a week now, and my own memories of meeting George, and showing him an article I'd written about one of his films Wild Night in El Reno, shortly before he died, I was in tears by the end of the short.

However, judging by the dismissive reaction of audience members around me during and after last weekend's Roxie screening, Oh Hi Anne was done a disservice by being placed into a program that, while perhaps pushing the boundaries of narrative and documentary animation, never really pushed past those boundaries. There used to consistently be a few examples of experimental animation in this program in the festival. With no selections like 2016 San Francisco International Film Festival picks All Rot by Max Hattler or Kazue Monno & Takeshi Nagata's Track to warm the audience up to expanding their ideas of what animation can do and be, it was easy for some viewers to pick on Oh Hi Anne as overly earnest or seemingly crude (I don't suppose any of the grumblers I heard are aware of McGuire's exquisite watercolor "Dark Universe", currently on display (along with Mike Kuchar's 1980 drawing "Faery Tale" and a slew of other great work by local artists from throughout history), at BAMPFA's must-see Way Bay exhibit). Admittedly, by most definitions of animation I'm aware of, Oh Hi Anne doesn't really qualify. But to me it feels like an essential piece of this year's SFFILM, challenging aesthetic boundaries and linking back to a gentle giant of Frisco Bay filmmaking who is still sorely missed by many members of the local community. I suspect if the experimental animation ハネムーンHanemun Honeymoon had been plucked out of the Shorts 4: New Visions program and put into the Shorts 3 set, perhaps in place of the slick, cute, but ultimately go-nowhere selection Hybrids, McGuire's film wouldn't have been the first in the show to totally upend audience expectations, and had a better chance of hitting with some of the cynics in the crowd.

SFFILM61 Day 12
Other festival options: Today's menu options include the presentation of the George Gund Craft of Cinema Award to collaborative filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman before a screening of their short doc End Game and the so-called "Closing Night" showing of Gus Van Sant's Don't Worry He Won't Get Far On Foot with Van Sant and composer Danny Elfman expected in person (I can't help but wonder if, with Elfman's former girlfriend Kim Gordon in the film, and speaking at the Nourse tomorrow night, she might make a surprise appearance as well. Pure speculation on my part), both at the Castro Theatre. BAMPFA's last day as a festival venue looks strong, with Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, Wajib, a set of 16mm Nathaniel Dorsky shorts including Avraham, and Michael Hazanavicius introducing his Godard, Mon Amour. Meanwhile YBCA closes out its time as a 2018 SFFILM venue with Angels Wear White, Shirkers and Carcasse, and The Children's Creativity Theater says goodbye to its first festival year with Bisbee '17 and A Prayer Before Dawn. None of the titles mentioned in this paragraph will play during the final two days of the festival when it contracts to fill only the Roxie and the Victoria.

Non-SFFILM option: Another festival opened yesterday at a former SFFILM venue I have a lot of fondness for, Japantown's New People Cinema; they're hosting the 2nd Annual Cherry Blossom Film Festival, highlighting features made in Japan. Yesterday they had a 3-title tribute to a filmmaker I first encountered via the San Francisco International Film Festival, Shunji Iwai, but the rest of the festival is devoted to animation, such as The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, by the great Studio Ghibli master Isao Takahata, who passed away this week. Today's offerings include a Japanese-dubbed, English-lauguage version of Takahata's partner Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro (which originally was released in Japan on a head-scratching double-bill with Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies), and the more recent Miss Hokusai.

SFFILM 61 Day 11: To Be Or Not To Be

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival is down to the home stretch; it 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 To Be Or Not To Be provided by SFFILM

To Be Or Not To Be (USA: Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
playing: 1:00 tonight at SFMOMA as part of the Mel Novikoff Award presentation to film scholar Annette Insdorff.

I often try to make it out to SFFILM's annual Mel Novikoff Award presentation to an individual or organization that has deepened the general public's understanding of world cinema, and last year's presentation to local hero Tom Luddy (which I wrote up in some detail) was one of last year's festival highlights. I must confess not being directly familiar with Insdorff's importance, but I trust the award committee to select someone worthy, and I'm excited to learn more about her at the event. She already gets points for making To Be Or Not To Be her carte blanche screening pick. If she has anything to do with it screening in 35mm she gets double points; I've been wanting to see it this way for years, as I wrote in a previous brief blog post, almost five years ago during a (vehemently) different Presidential administration.

Hollywood movies of the so-called "Golden Age" of the 1930s and 1940s are known for their glamour, for their stars, and for their maintenance of a consistent baseline standard of production quality. They're not often known for their boldness in speaking truth to power, To Be Or Not To Be might be one of the most noteworthy exceptions (not that it skimps in the glamour, star and production quality departments).

Filmed in the fall of 1941 and released just a couple months after the United States declared war on Hitler's Germany, To Be Or Not To Be combines a wartime spy-thriller plot with breakneck comedy, underlining the buffoonish aspects of Adolf Hitler and his beyond-brutal regime while drawing parallels between high-stakes politics and the little vanities and betrayals common in the show business world.

This improbably clever film follows a band of Warsaw actors who unexpectedly get caught up in a scheme aiding the underground resistance movement after Hitler's invasion of Poland. Radio star Jack Benny and Carole Lombard (in her final completed role before her plane crashed in early 1942) play the central pair of Shakespeareans; each turns in what is probably the greatest screen performance of their career. Though directed by a Berlin Jew who'd fled Germany not long before Hitler rose to power, the film's subject matter was seen as too raw at the time of its release for some critics and audiences. Others instantly praised it as the timeless comedy classic it has become.

SFFILM61 Day 11
Other festival options: Today marks the sole SFFILM screenings of the kid-friendly Shorts 5: Family Films program or the probably more adult-minded documentaries on Ruth Bader Ginsberg (RBG) and Joan Jett (Bad Reputation), all at the Castro; the last of these is expected to feature an in-person appearance by its subject as well as its maker; the others will have to settle for the latter. It's also your final chance to see SFFILM screenings of the excellent I Am Not A Witch at BAMPFA, of the Georgian film Scary Mother and an intriguing Swiss film by a director mentored by Lav Diaz and James Benning: Cyril Schäublin's Those Who Are Fine, both at the Creativity Theater, and of the festival's first selection from Kyrgyzstan in 20 years, Suleiman Mountain, at the Roxie.

Non-SFFILM option: I'm actually hosting this one myself. At 7PM tonight, I'm screening a new documentary called Parque Central, which premiered locally at the San Francisco Latino Film Festival last September, at a non-profit in the Tenderloin called the Faithful Fools (address: 234 Hyde between Turk and Eddy), and the filmmaker Ricardo Gaona, up from his home in Los Angeles for the weekend, will be in attendance. There will also be a short doc called Temporal Cities made right in the Tenderloin; its co-director Lizzy Brooks will also be in attendance projecting 35mm slides as part of the presentation. There will be a discussion following. Oh, and it's all FREE to the public.

Parque Central doesn't have distribution yet, as far as I know, but it isn't the kind of film you'd want to watch on a tablet, computer monitor or even a large television set, if you had the chance to see it projected on a screen like the one at the Faithful Fools. Seeing it large, it transports you to another part of the world: the ancient city of Antigua in the highlands of Guatemala, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most increasingly popular tourist destinations in Central America. Gaona shows us the beauty of the city not through the typical tourist gaze but through the daily routines of several children who live and work near the town square, called "Parque Central." Domingo, Eduardo, Hugo, Miguel and Yesenia shine shoes, sell refreshments, or braid hair for the plaza visitors and send the profits back to the cash-poor Mayan villages where their families reside. But thanks to Gaona's aesthetic choices, the documentary's tone is not one of sadness but of resilience, hope, and making the best of a difficult situation. His instincts are to observe and not comment, letting the audience come to our own conclusions about what we see. A counterpoint to his visual storytelling strategies is provided partway through with the introduction of an English-language narration voiced by a Bay Area-born tour guide, whose comments reveal the entrenched history of colonialism in the region.

SFFILM 61 Day 10: Wajib

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began last week 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 Wajib provided by SFFILM

Wajib (PALESTINE/FRANCE/GERMANY/COLOMBIA/NORWAY/QATAR/UAE: Annemarie Jacir, 2017)
playing: 6:00 tonight at SFMOMA and 3:15 Sunday at BAMPFA.

Wajib is the third feature film directed by Annemarie Jacir, whose Salt of the Sea has been called the first feature film directed by a Palestinian woman. It featured a performance by Saleh Bakri, who had just made his feature film acting debut in The Band's Visit and would soon play Elia Suleiman's father in his marvelous, autobiographical The Time That Remains from 2009. It's a shame that it's been close to a decade since Suleiman's last feature film; he exhibited a rare brilliance that is missed from cinema screens. But it's great to be reminded of him through Bakri's role in this very fine feature. He and his real father, Mohammad Bakri (an acting legend in his own right, who has worked in films by Costa-Gavras, Amos Gitai, Eran Riklis, Rashid Masharawi, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani among others) play an estranged father and son, one living abroad and the other having remained in Nazereth. As father and brother of the bride they have the "duty" (the translation of the title) of delivering invitation to her upcoming wedding, and the social and political disagreements that flare up along the way constantly threaten to unravel their partnership. It's firmly in the long tradition of neorealist-inspired film festival fare, but it also reminded me of a variation on Broken Flowers or Two Days, One Night in which each door-to-door encounter is a catalyst for exploration of a father-son relationship, rather than of an individual.

SFFILM61 Day 10
Other festival options: With so much talk in the past few days about the feud between The Cannes Film Festival and a little mom and pop operation called Netflix, my position is that I've never been a Netflix subscriber but that I'm probably going to join at some point just to watch Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind when they decide to release it. Then I'll probably cancel until I find myself making a lifestyle change that precludes frequent cinema visits (heaven forbid.) I'm thankful no such feud exists between Netflix and SFFILM, and that I was able to see one of my favorite films of 2017, Nocturama, at the Castro Theatre because of it. Tonight SFFILM is showing two Netflix-owned titles that I doubt will screen in a larger local venue than they will tonight: Sandi Tan's Shirkers, playing 6:00 at BAMPFA, and John Woo's Manhunt, playing 9:00 at the Castro; in the latter case it's the sole SFFILM screening. Tonight's also the only SFFILM presentation of something called Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences, which I'm not sure qualifies as a movie or as a cinema-aided variety show from Cory McAbee, director of the wonderful American Astronaut and Stingray Sam. I don't think this one will be available on Netflix down the road.

Non-SFFILM option: Tonight, after a week of build-up Alfred Hitchcock films finally screen in the Stanford Theatre's April-June calendar entitled "Hitchcock and Other Masters of Suspense". This weekend's double bill is the often-shown Rebecca, paired with the infrequently-screened (yet all-too-available via shoddy public domain home video transfers) Sabotage. It was one of these transfers that made me sit up around twenty years ago and realize Hitchcock's British period was just as well-worth exploring as the Hollywood hits I'd grown up on such as Rear Window and North By Northwest (which both show up later in the series). I've yet to see Sabotage in 35mm and I bet most of my readers haven't seen it that way either.

SFFILM 61 Day 9: I Am Not A Witch

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began last week 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 I Am Not A Witch provided by SFFILM

I Am Not A Witch (UK/FRANCE/ZAMBIA/GERMANY: Rungano Nyoni, 2017)
playing: 6:00 tonight at the Roxie, with RUSH status showings at YBCA 8:15 Friday and at BAMPFA 5:30 Saturday.

One of my favorite new discoveries of this year's SFFILM festival so far, I Am Not A Witch tells a story, set entirely in the Southern African nation of Zambia, of an 8-year old girl accused of witchcraft and sent from her village on a tour of her country as a kind of combination lucky charm and sideshow. Often absurdly humorous in tone and visionary in design, this ultra-widescreen fable with a ring of truth is something that should certainly be seen on a big screen.

SFFILM61 Day 9
Other festival options: Though there's nothing hotter in the festival than tonight's double-venue (Grand Lake & Castro) centerpiece screening of Sorry To Bother You, which has been quickly selling each new set of advance tickets released by the festival, we all know it's getting a major theatrical release in just a few months, so it may be wiser to avoiding tying up precious time in a RUSH line and check out something less likely to show in a local cinema. That could mean Hong Sangsoo's Claire's Camera, distributed by Cinema Guild (which notoriously lets SFFILM festival runs substitute for true local release) and playing for the third and final time at YBCA tonight. Or perhaps a distributor-less selection like Jenny Suen's The White Girl, with cinematography by Christopher Doyle, and playing the Creativity Theater tonight. Or another without a current distributor, Jupiter's Moon by Johanna and White God director Kornél Mundruczó; it plays the Castro tonight.

Non-SFFILM option: Tonight's the final night at the Stanford Theatre to see the original 1940 version of Gaslight, directed by UK undersung auteur Thorald Dickinson and starring Anton Walbrook in the role Charles Boyer later made his own, along with the 1944 Lewis Allen ghost story The Uninvited, both in 35mm prints.

SFFILM 61: Day 8: I Was Born, But...

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began last week 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 I Was Born, But... supplied by SFFILM

I Was Born, But... (JAPAN: Yasujiro Ozu, 1932)
playing: 8:00 tonight at the Castro Theatre

What to say about I Was Born, But...? It's one of my very favorite Ozu films, one of my favorite silent films, heck, one of my favorite films of all time. As I wrote in my essay for the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival screening:

Usually described as a comedy, I Was Born, But… has been compared to Hal Roach’s Our Gang series. Yet it is much more, reflecting a tumultuous 1930s Japan being shorn of its traditions. The film focuses on the family of a typical white-collar worker (“salaryman”), his stay-at-home wife, and two school-age sons, who have just moved from Tokyo’s crowded center to an unfinished suburban development. As the boys struggle to find a place in the pecking order among neighborhood kids, they outwit the dandified young Taro and his bullying protector with their wily antics, only to be humiliated when their father plays jester to his boss, who happens to be Taro’s father. Ozu uses schoolboy politics to mock the hypocrisies of adult hierarchies. 

I haven't watched I Was Born, But... since that SFSFF showing, so I'm excited to finally revisit it tonight in 35mm. The musical accompaniment at the Castro is Blonde Redhead, a band I don't think I ever listened to in their 1990s heyday, but whose somewhat Sonic Youth-esque album Fake Can Be Just as Good I've been listening to a bit over the past year or so. I'm not sure how the pairing of a New York band with roots in noise punk, and a boisterous but thoughtful silent comedy are going to gel, but I'm almost always up for giving the San Francisco International Film Festival's annual silent film/indie rocker mash-ups a try in the hopes of another sublime night like Dengue Fever & the Lost World.

Since 2011, I've been pleased to have near-annual chances to see Ozu's silent films at the Castro Theatre, thanks to the SF Silent Film Festival. They showed Tokyo Chorus in 2013, Dragnet Girl in 2014, That Night's Wife in 2016, and it was just the other week announced they'll be showing another one, his final silent An Inn in Tokyo, on the second day of its now-expanded-to-five-day 2018 festival. As an Ozu completist I love having opportunities to see on such a large screen these also-excellent films, but I have to admit the loyalty to two Japanese directors (the other being Teinosuke Kinugasa, who has seen two films show over the years), as much as I like them, gives me second thoughts when I reflect that the festival hasn't shown any films by the likes of Mikio Naruse, Kenji Mizoguchi, etc. So I was thrilled to see that for the first time SFSFF will show two films from Japan in 2018: An Inn in Tokyo and Policeman, which for more than ten years I've regretted missing at the PFA's Tomu Uchida retrospective. This means there will be an unprecedented three films from Asia in this year's SFSFF, the third being A Throw of Dice from India. It looks like a truly wonderful festival for a silent film lover like myself, with only two features selected (opening night film The Man Who Laughs and An Inn in Tokyo) that I've seen before, and the latter only on a French-intertitled VHS tape from Le Video. According to the Film on Film Foundation calendar, ten of the festival's twenty feature-length selections, as well as one full shorts program, will screen in 35mm prints; these include the Ozu & Uchida films as well as some of my most-eagerly anticipated selections like Jean Grémillon's The Lighthouse Keepers, Rex Ingram's Mare Nostrum introduced by Kevin Brownlow, the Tom Mix Western No Man's Gold, and an Italian film called Trappola which will be screening with footage of Market Street footage after the 1906 earthquake, filmed by the same brothers who filmed the famous A Trip Down Market Street just a few days before; this newly-uncovered footage will re-premiere digitally at a long-sold-out Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum screening this coming Saturday.

SFFILM61 Day 8
Other festival options: Tonight's your last chance to see The Shape of a Surface: Experimental Shorts program of 16mm works by some of the great modern practicioners of hand-made, medium-specific analog moving images. I already mentioned how the pair of the late Paul Clipson's films in the program are substitutes for two films that couldn't be finished onto 16mm prints in time for the festival, after his shocking February death. Since then I learned that another two films in the program, Pablo Mazzolo's NN and Jennifer Saparzadeh's Nu Dem, were originally intended to screen in 16mm (like the other seven films showing tonight will be) but that the sole available release prints were damaged in one case and destroyed in transit in another, thus necessitating digital presentation at the Roxie tonight. The same venue hosts the final SFFILM screening of No Date, No Signature, which I profiled yesterday, tonight as well, while BAMPFA hosts the second of three SFFILM screenings of Mila Turajlić's The Other Side of Everything, which she is expected to attend along with her filmmaking subject: her activist mother Srbijanka Turajlić.

Non-SFFILM option: In addition to being an SFFILM venue tonight, BAMPFA is hosting another installment of its Wednesday afternoon lecture and screening series led by UC Berkeley professor Anne Nesbit. The theme of the series this semester has been "Eisenstein and His Contemporaries", complementing the evening/weekend Sergei Eisenstein retrospective at the venue that will wrap up April 21st with a double-shot of Ivan the Terrible Part I & II (with a few minutes of surviving test footage from the never-made Part III). I've been able to catch a few of the screenings and lectures, and got a lot out of both viewing and lectures for Pudovkin's The Battle of St. Petersburg and Eisenstein's The General Line, as well as the lecture-less showing of the Swiss-made rarity Misery and Fortune of Women (shown half digitally, half in 35mm). But nothing compared to finally fillng one of my greatest cinematic gaps Alexander Nevsky in a great 35mm print. This is the film & print that will be discussed and be screened at BAMPFA today at 3:10. If you're free at that time you should definitely go. It's been called a masterpiece enough times to be a cliché by now, but it's true.