John Slattery's 2018* Eyes

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 2018. An index of participants can be found here. 

Two-time IOHTE contributor John Slattery is a filmmaker based in Berkeley. He decided to provide a list of favorites from 2017 as well as one from 2018.

The Headless Woman image screen capture from Strand DVD

1.     La Cienaga, Holy Girl, and The Headless Woman - Lucrecia Martel (PFA) Three very strong examples of her masterful filmmaking (even though I am of the very few who would not have great things to say or write about her latest film, Zama). 
2.     Satantango -  Béla Tarr, (PFA) Much more than a great film. Much more. More. 
3.     The Apple - Samira Makhmalbaf, (PFA) I can see what she did – there is little mystery to the mechanics of it. But what she did, and the way she did it, is so, so great!  
4.     The Hart of London - Jack Chambers (Artists' Television Access by San Francisco Cinematheque) A film that remains the single most memorable, shocking, beautiful, haunting and amazing film, for me, of the last few years.   

2017
The First Teacher - Andrei Konchalovsky  (PFA)

Johnny Guitar - Nicholas Ray (PFA)
L’Argent - Robert Bresson  (PFA)
Kevin Jerome Everson and Edgar Arceneaux (PFA)
Los Olividados - Luis Buñuel - (PFA)
Lost Landscapes of Los Angeles (Internet Archive)
What Have I Done to Deserve This? - Pedro Almodóvar, (PFA)

Monica Nolan's 2018 Eyes

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 2018. An index of participants can be found here. 

Four-time IOHTE contributor Monica Nolan is an author and editor who regularly writes for the Film Noir Foundation and the SF Silent Film Festival.

Quiet Please, Murder

Quiet Please, Murder (John Francis Larkin, 1942, at Noir City): George Sanders tortures library denizens with a harp string while future producer of Perry Mason Gail Patrick looks on!

Destiny (Julien Duvivier and Reginald Le Borg, 1944, at Noir City): a mannered, mangled masterpiece.

Jealousy (Gustav Machaty, 1945, at Noir City): Karen Morley’s super-charged performance as the mild-mannered murderess brought a round of applause from the audience.

Rosita (Ernst Lubitsch, 1923, at SF Silent): Gorgeously restored and long underrated Lubitsch gem.

Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness (Piel Jutzi, 1929, at SF Silent): Slum living ends in infanticide/suicide. Now that’s realism.

The Wind Will Carry Us screen capture from Cohen Media DVD

The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999, at SFMoMA): a mysteriously sublime rightness in every cut and camera angle.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932, CFI San Rafael): More Lubitsch perfection.

Les Rendezvous d’Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978, at the Roxie) Still wondering why no one (I mean you, PFA programmers) has done a massive retrospective of Chantal Akerman’s work.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, 1938, at the Castro) a reminder of the sheer delight of big screen technicolor.

Honorable mention for rarity and glimpse of San Francisco of yore: Whatever Happened to Susan Jane? (Marc Huestis, 1982, at SFPL)

SFFILM 61 Day 14: Minding the Gap

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began two weeks ago and ends today. Each day during the festival I've posted about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

Image from Minding the Gap supplied by SFFILM

Minding The Gap (USA: Bing Liu, 2017)
playing: 8:45 tonight at the Roxie

With this year's daily SFFILM blog posts I've made an effort to highlight festival selections I've already seen, even if that meant highlighting a television show or an unannounced cartoon that ended up screening in a black-and-white Castle Films print (which was fine, honestly; that show could've benefited from Xenon 16mm projectors to make the image brighter, but the event was really as much a showcase for the musicians than the films; which was much better than Wednesday night's event where the band and its ego completely overwhelmed the image. I had to walk out midway through).

Today, on the festival's final day, I admit defeat. I'd made the best-laid plans to attend Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. and Tigre and Jupiter's Moon last week but couldn't make it happen after all. They all sound good and I hope to see at least one of them in a cinema today. Tigre will have to be the sacrificial lamb; it's just been revealed as one of the eleven SFFILM 61 features available for members to stream online (also including: Carcasse, Claire's Camera, Djon Africa, Louise Lecavalier - In Motion, The Next Guardian, The Other Side of Everything, Purge This Land, Salyut-7, Those Who Are Fine and Golden Gate Award honorable mention City of the Sun). But the most promising-sounding title screening in a cinema today, that I already have a ticket for is Minding the Gap. It's a much-praised feature from the venerable Chicago documentary production organization Kartemquin Films, best known for incubating Steve James films such as Hoop Dreams. James executive-produced Minding the Gap, and it appears to share his signature film's focus on young men inspired by athletic activity, in this case skateboarding. I'll see tonight if the similarities run deeper. I'm excited because Minding the Gap has been screening in festival after festival and picking up prizes at many of them.

In fact, today is definitely not your last chance to see Minding the Gap on a Frisco Bay screen. In May, it will make a return visit to two different festivals, the California Film Insitute's 2nd annual Doclands in Marin County, where it screens May 4th, and CAAM Fest (formerly known as the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival), where it screens May 13th. I was very pleased to see that the latter festival, which like SFFILM had used the Alamo Drafthouse in 2016 and 2017, has declined to do so in 2018.Read my "Forgetting the Alamo" blog post from a couple weeks back to see why this venue change matters to me.

I'm intrigued by the fact that CAAM Fest is moving back to their home base through 2015, the Kabuki. The ownership chain at this Japantown cinema goes back to the 1980s, when it was transformed by AMC from a live theatre to San Francisco's first 8-screen multiplex. When AMC sold the theatre to Robert Redford's Sundance Cinemas in 2006, both SFFILM (then SFIFF) and CAAM (then SFIAAFF) used the venue as their main hub. They continued to do so when Sundance replaced the old seats with more comfortable, better raked chairs and small tables suitable for heavier-duty food and drink options. But the Sundance Cinemas chain was purchased by Carmike in 2015, and I've heard many people speculate that the new owners had no interest in hosting film festivals, at least not without higher rental payments. Now, with Carmike gobbled by AMC, the Kabuki's ownership has come full circle. CAAM's return to the venue may reflect more willingness on AMC's part to host a festival than a stand taken about the Drafthouse. But I'll take it. Look for me at some of the CAAM shows; at minimum I hope to be at the Kabuki (for the first time in over three years) for the May 15th screening of the Shaw Brothers martial arts classic Golden Swallow starring the legendary Cheng Pei-Pei.

SFFILM61 Day 14
Other festival options: The last two days of the festival were originally supposed to involve only two venues but on today, the very last day, a third was added; Lauren Greenfield's follow-up to The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth, is getting a make-up showing from a previous one that had technical difficulties, and it's happening at a venue I can't recall being used during the San Francisco International Film Festival before (though my festival memory only goes back 20 years), the underrated Laurel Heights single-screener the Vogue. If you'd prefer to stick to the Mission venues as planned, your options include the aforementioned Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. or Jupiter's Moon at the Roxie, or Tigre or (the non-aforementioned) Jordana Spiro's Night Comes On at the Victoria.

Non-SFFILM option: The New Parkway's weekly Tuesday Doc Night is tonight, this time featuring a screening of The United States of Detroit, with its director Tyler Norwood and Detroit native Karinda Dobbins in person. The United States of Detroit had its Frisco bay premiere at Doclands.

SFFILM 61 Day 13: .TV

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival is nearly done, running through April 17th. Each day during the festival I've been posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

Image from .TV supplied by SFFILM

.TV (USA/TUVALU/NEW ZEALAND/FRANCE: G. Anthony Svatek, 2017)
playing: 4:30 today at the Roxie as part of the Shorts 4: New Visions program

Yesterday SFFILM Festival announced its annual Golden Gate Awards winners as well as Audience Awards winners. The latter are Sam Green's live documentary on the Kronos Quartet, A Thousand Thoughts and Youtuber Bo Bunham's directorial debut Eighth Grade; I've seen neither but Eight Grade screens one last time again today, 2PM at the Roxie.

The Golden Gate Award winners are all listed in David Hudson's SFFILM round-up, if you scroll down to yesterday's date. Again I haven't seen any of the features but I've seen most of the shorts (all but the narrative winner Shadow Animals & runner-up Jodilerks Dela Cruz, Employee of the Month). I don't have any major quibbles with their other selections but my sensibilities matched the jury's most precisely in its selection of .TV for the New Visions Golden Gate Award for experimental film and video works. Named for the internet domain extension that, if current climate change trends continue could become the last remaining trace of the Polynesian nation Tuvalu, .TV draws on (according to its end credits) video footage of Tuvalu's islands from Youtube and the hors-frontieres website, along with a voiceover by Tuvaluan-in-exile Tiueli Papau, to create an experimental documentary with traces of apocalyptic "fiction". Add in the element of video footage streaming directly from websites paying to use the .tv extension (to the point that, according to a title card, it's become Tuvalu's steadiest source of income) in mundane domestic and office spaces, and we have a film that perfectly intersects our transforming world in the age of internet pervasiveness and environmental catastrophe. Not only can we watch images of beauty before their destruction on our multiplying screens, we can make movies about countries we may never have visited and even win prizes for them (if we're as talented as Svatek).

Second prize in the new Visions category went to Ameer Kazmi's meandering but eye-popping Fair Grounds; I personally prefer Akosua Adoma Owusu's small-gague sequel to an Academy Award-winning classic, Mahogany Too, or Kevin Jerome Everson's mesemerizing Rams 23 Blue Bears 21, or Hope Tucker's eerie exploration of a never-activated nuclear power plant Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf, but it's a matter of small differences in taste, as the entire New Visions 4 program is solid work. Check it out today if you can slot it into your schedule, and check out SF Cinematheque, Other Cinema, BAMPFA and the Silent Film Festival for upcoming screenings of experimental film and video from the present and past.

SFFILM61 Day 13
Other festival options: In addition to Eighth Grade, today's the last SFFILM opportunity to see Amy Adrion's documentary about the hurdles facing women directors in Hollywood, Half the Picture, which I just learned includes an on-screen interview with local filmmaker Jennifer Phang in addition to the women (Miranda July, Ava DuVernay, Penelope Spheeris) listed in the festival program guide (one might think this year's program notes weren't written by locals). It shows at the Victoria. as does the French-Canadian zombie film Ravenous.

Non-SFFILM option: With the passing of Miloš Forman this weekend, I'm thinking fondly of his appearance at the 2004 edition of the festival, my first as press. In fact I named my wrap-up piece in Senses of Cinema after his great film shown that year, Taking Off- though I hesitate to link to the article because I'm embarrassed how I misgender the subject of one of the films I talk about (Beautiful Boxer). I'm trying to grow and learn. Anyway, tonight the San Francisco Symphony is presenting a screening of Forman's Amadeus at Davies Symphony Hall with live music replacing that of the film (though dialogue and sound effects will remain) and if I weren't working past the start time I'd be pretty tempted.

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.