Frako Loden'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. 

Five-time IOHTE contributor Frako Loden is an educator and writer, at www.documentary.org, Eat Drink Films and elsewhere.

1. The year-long Ingmar Bergman centenary program at Pacific Film Archive. I barely attended it—concentrating mostly on the remarkable 1940s films—but it spurred me to watch all the Bergman DVDs I've collected and never watched. I was astonished by my virgin viewings of Winter Light and the long-form version of Fanny and Alexander.

Le Trou screen capture from Cohen Media DVD of My Journey Through French Cinema

2. The Jacques Becker retrospective, also at Pacific Film Archive. I did a completely inadequate writeup for it—I've still only touched the surface of this French master's genius and look forward to repeat screenings. I'm grateful for the 20-minute analysis of Becker's work in Bertrand Tavernier's My Journey Through French Cinema, a masterwork in its own right.

3. The "Documenting Vietnam" series at PFA. The brief Whitesburg Epic (Appalshop, 1971) questions the citizens of a small Appalachian town, suggesting that young people with nothing to do go to war, especially when the town thinks that it's a good idea. The grueling Interviewswith My Lai Veterans (Joseph Strick, 1970) lays bare the toll on five young soldiers forbidden to talk about their experience of this pivotal civilian massacre. Frederick Wiseman's 1971 Basic Training shows how individual personalities and independent thinking are erased during the prelude to sending these boys off to war. Other documentaries were even more brutal and timely: Peter Gessner's 1966 Time of the Locust and the Winterfilm Collective's 1972 Winter Soldier. The latter documents a speak-in organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit, as one bearded and longhaired veteran after another, GIs and officers alike, testify to the cruelty and dehumanization of their fellow soldiers.

Saga of Gösta Berling image from San Francisco Silent Film Festival

4. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which for over 20 years has stayed at the pinnacle of the local film-festival pantheon with its attention to the best prints and brilliant live musical accompaniment. After its five-day run this summer, scenes from the French Lighthouse Keepers (Jean Grémillon, 1929) and the Swedish Saga of Gösta Berling (Mauritz Stiller, 1924) still play in my head. Even more recently, the December Day of Silents continued to astonish with Jean Epstein's 1923 Coeur Fidèle and my introduction to the young Beatrice Lillie in Sam Taylor's 1926 farce Exit Smiling.

5. Wendell B. Harris, Jr.'s 1989 Chameleon Street at SFMOMA's "Modern Cinema: Black Powers" series. What an amazing film! It really hasn't dated in its themes, techniques or cultural references. There are mentions of "black Barbie," obsession with Marvel Comics ("my Thor voice"), Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and Edith Piaf. It ends with a re-telling of the fable of the scorpion and the frog, which is no different from the lyrics of the song "The Snake" that Donald Trump likes to repeat in speeches to his base. The film is based on the true story of Detroiter William Douglas Street, Jr. (played by Harris himself), a con man and impersonator who over the years pretended to be a Time magazine reporter, surgeon and civil rights attorney. At the beginning of the film, a psychiatrist notes Street's "complementarity": the ability to inhabit whatever persona someone else wants him to be. He knows all the tricks of being something that he isn't. It's a way of getting back at, or simply surviving in, the white world that won't let him do things legitimately. He has to be a trickster, a con artist. It's a major form of code switching. He doesn't just use his "white voice" (like in Sorry to Bother You)—he uses a kind of "white self," or at least a black self that doesn't threaten the white powers that be and that gives him entrée into their circles of privilege.

Personal Problems screen capture from Kino DVD

6. Bill Gunn's 1980 Personal Problems at the Alamo Drafthouse, adapted from an idea by writer Ishmael Reed (who at the Q&A established himself as the most righteously curmudgeonly guy in the world, even managing to slag James Baldwin). This film, by the director of Ganja and Hess, was considered lost because it was never aired on public TV as planned. Now restored and starring culinary anthropologist and writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, who in a later career celebrated Gullah food and culture, we can see Gunn's influence on Spike Lee's films in its inspired improvisations and confrontations between aggrieved and angry people. Perhaps more than that, it's a rare, deeply humane look at the private lives of black people.

Ian Rice'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. 

First-time IOHTE contributor Ian Rice is part of the curatorial committee putting on ATA@SFPL events at the Noe Valley library, including an upcoming 16mm screening of Lee Grant's The Willmar 8 March 5th. He decided to provide a list of favorites from 2017 as well as one from 2018.

Soft Fiction

Jan 13: Soft Fiction (Palace of Fine Arts, 16mm) A 2018 continuation of last year’s Chick Strand revelations, this too is a unique masterpiece in her catalogue, from its haunting (and subsequently symbolic) structuralist introduction to its harrowing storytelling and its brilliant musical interludes; it only grew more powerful on a second viewing a few months later. 

Feb 10: I Can't Sleep (SFMOMA, 35mm) Denis structures her narratives more elliptically and ultimately elegantly than most contemporary filmmakers, making them a sort of puzzle whose demands of engagement (similar to Altman’s theory of layered sound) encourage a heightened awareness of details and technique. The Intruder kept me reinterpreting its design for days and weeks afterward, but the force of the drama of this film - and its intimate, sensual compositions of skin of many colors - give it more of an edge. 

The Night of June 13

Feb 20: The Night of June 13th (Stanford, 35mm) An incredible rarity in the Stanford’s Paramount series, there are no especially great stars or auteurist signposts to recommend it - unless, with some justification, one is a Charlie Ruggles completist. It wanders across a small town with great sensitivity toward distinct characters and slowly develops its conflict only to resolve it in a remarkably radical pre-Code conclusion, not so far off from Renoir's M. Lange.

Feb 22: Elements (New Nothing, 16mm) Several more of her films would show later in the year at a Lamfanti screening the night of the Space-X launch, the same program at which “Antonella’s Ultrasound” received its world premiere, but this Julie Murray short at a Baba Hillman Canyon salon stood apart from those also-excellent works of dread and sex and mutilated found footage as a more lyrical, gorgeous journey through natural landscapes with hypnotic rhythm. 

Zodiac screen capture from Paramount DVD

May 27: Zodiac (YBCA, 35mm) My last time at the YBCA - at least until management sees the error of their ways, reinstitutes their cinema program and rehires its excellent programming/curatorial and projection staff - this was a brilliant send-off as part of a seamy San Francisco series, one of whose shooting locations I realized afterward was a few blocks’ walking distance away. Its accumulation of small details and slowly-becoming-psychotic performances are hypnotizing. 

Jul 22: Wieners and Buns Musical (Minnesota Street Project, 16mm) Thanks to an eleventh-hour update on the Bay Area Film Calendar I was able to find out about this year’s Canyon Cinema cavalcade in time to squeeze in several rare masterworks from their catalogue, including pieces by Friederich, Gatten, Brakhage, Benning, Mack, Glabicki and many others seen last year as well at the Exploratorium. This McDowell short was the most fun and perhaps the most radical musical ever filmed, with some of the best low-budget opening titles. It screened again later that year but the sound was much better the first time. 

Commingled Containers screen capture from Criterion DVD "By Brakhage"

Aug 21: Comingled Containers (Little Roxie, 16mm) Because Canyon Cinema only has a handful of his films in their catalog, the year’s many well-deserved tributes to Paul Clipson's work ran the risk of overplaying things, especially by the point in the year at which a Little Roxie tribute screening appeared. But the brilliance of this particular night was that it - overseen by a good friend - was curated by Clipson himself, fitting his works into a wide array of others in an incredible dialogue and refreshment of films that had come to feel very familiar. This Brakhage short was one of many masterpieces (including works by Marie Menken and Konrad Steiner among others) I saw for the first time, utterly and unutterably magical in its light and shapes. 

Aug 22: One from the Heart (Castro, 35mm) The second half of one of the year’s greatest two-venue double features after Todd Haynes’s spellbinding Velvet Goldmine, I began this viewing feeling like the cinematography (maybe the finest hour both of Vittorio Storaro and of Hollywood studio technique) was far better than the flimsy and insipid narrative but soon had the epiphany that this was (or at least might have been) Coppola’s intention all along - the plot is there merely as the simplest of archetypes to push the mind and eye back toward the power of the image, a different sort of “pure cinema.” 

Sep 15: The Caretaker's Daughter (Niles Essanay, 16mm) Despite discovering a slew of incredible new Laurel & Hardy and Keaton films this year there was something to me more special about getting to know the work of Charley Chase - namely the intricacy and machinations of his plots, which slowly accumulate small details that eventually coalesce into extraordinary gags, as with the pinnacle of this one, a setpiece that anticipates and even outdoes a similar one in Leo McCarey’s later Duck Soup. 

The Day I Became A Woman screen capture from Olive Films DVD

Sep 29: The Day I Became a Woman (PFA, 35mm) An early-in-the-year screening of Salaam Cinema became a prelude to a wonderful series that encompassed the whole Makhmalbaf family of filmmakers, none of whose work I’d ever seen before and almost all of which was quietly poetic in its storytelling while enchanting in its imagery. This tripartite work by the cinematriarch of the family gets special recognition from me because (among many other things) its middle section features the best depiction of any film I’ve seen of the experience of riding a bicycle, both how it feels to be humming along the road and how it feels to be avoiding other encroaching issues! With Lupino’s Hard, Fast and Beautiful, further proof that more women should direct sports films.

Here's top 2017, in order of screening date only, culled from a larger list: 

Jan 14: Showgirls (Roxie, 35mm) 
Feb 4: Come and See (YBCA, 35mm) 
Jun 18: Les enfants terribles (PFA, 35mm) 
Jul 28: Footlight Parade (Stanford, 35mm) 
Aug 4: Election 2 (SFMOMA, 35mm)
Oct 14: Loose Ends (ATA/Other Cinema, 16mm) 
Oct 15: Crystal Voyager (YBCA, 35mm) 
Oct 18: Chromatic Phantoms (PFA, 3 x Super 8) 
Oct 24: Take Off (California College of the Arts, 16mm) 
Dec 10: Light Music (The Lab, 2 x 16mm)

Michael Fox'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. 

First-time IOHTE contributor Michael Fox is a film journalist and critic for KQED Arts and the curator and host of the Mechanics' Institute's CinemaLit screening program.

Here is my 2018 list. I promise to get out more in 2019.

Persona screen capture from Criterion DVD

1. Persona (1966) with Liv Ullmann on hand at BAMPFA: I spent a little time with the classics in 2018.

2. The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) at BAMPFA: Our affections for various directors naturally wax and wane as we get older, but I can't imagine ever falling out of love with Jean Renoir (especially 1930s Renoir).

3. La Dolce Vita (1960) at the Castro: Every time I see a Mastroianni film, I'm persuaded all over again that he's the greatest screen actor of all time.

4. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) at Alamo Drafthouse: Melvin Van Peebles was a bad mutha.

5. The Cameraman (1928) at the Mechanics' Institute: Forgive me for including one of my screenings, but few things are as fun as a room full of adults falling for a Buster Keaton film they'd never seen.

Aparajto screen capture from Criterion DVD

6. The Apu Trilogy at SFMOMA: Satyajit Ray made it look so easy—and he was just getting started.

Carl Martin'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. 

Ten-time IOHTE contributor Carl Martin is keeper of the Bay Area and Los Angeles Film Calendars for the Film on Film Foundation, where he also occasionally blogs.

I didn't think I could do it.  Did I even see 10 films total in the Bay Area?  Yes, enough to produce this:

Overlord screen capture from Criterion DVD

March 28, Roxie: Overlord

This d-day account combines insane archival WW2 footage with beautiful new (mid-70's) scenes to present a poetic, personal picture of war's tragedy, confusion, and meaninglessness.

April 4, New Mission: Taxi Zum Klo

Many years ago I encountered this on VHS and thought, "Ha ha, taxi to the bathroom... what the heck is this?"  (paraphrased.)  And i saw some crazy shit i had never seen before.  It was interesting enough that it stuck in my brain though.  Seeing it again decades later confirmed my hunch that Frank Ripploh's autobiographical, self-referential, elliptical, very explicit film is indeed a very important work of "experimental" cinema as well as classic gay smut!

April 16, New Mission: To Live and Die in L.A.

A single tracking shot during a car chase is better than most entire movies.

June 2, Castro: Mare Nostrum

A haunting, dreamy tale of maritime intrigue (mostly not at sea if I remember rightly).  Guillermo Del Toro stole the ending for one of his crap movies.

The Godfather Part III screen capture from Paramount DVD

July 8, Castro: The Godfather, Part III

Most folks dismiss this movie for some reason and it is rarely shown.  I'd been waiting to see it for some time.  It's really good!  Andy Garcia's performance is dynamite, and Sofia Coppola's is unfairly maligned.  Themes of power, loyalty, and betrayal over generations carry the film through to its operatic denouement.  As for the print, it had succumbed to vinegar syndrome and wouldn't hold focus worth a damn.

July 18, Roxie: Sleaze Apocalypse

I like outrageous trailers so of course I was going to watch this compilation show.  They came from Joel Shepard's collection so this is also an excuse to bemoan the loss of his curatorial hand at YBCA.

August 22, Roxie: Velvet Goldmine

I didn't much care for this one on its initial release.  Maybe the trailer led me astray.  Or maybe the weird Oscar Wilde interlude at the beginning threw me.  Indeed the film can hardly keep up with its own ideas.  I'm not going to say it's Haynes's masterpiece but it's solid and is full of killer songs i'm largely unfamiliar with.

October 30, Castro: The Hollywood Knights

My old boss was fond of quoting this one and i finally got to slake my curiosity.  Floyd Mutrux, whose debut was the ultra-bleak Dusty and Sweets McGee, delivers a raunchy ensemble comedy.  American Graffiti as if directed by Robert Altman.  It does have a wang to it!

Sanshiro Sugata screen capture from Eclipse DVD

December 16, PFA: Sanshiro Sugata

Kurosawa's first film surprised me doubly: I was sure I'd seen it before but hadn't, and it's a good, sure-handed effort.  The various devices used to show the passage of time impressed me particularly.  I believe I detected a thematic anticipation of Yojimbo and other later films.

Unknown date, private screening: Mosori Monika

Chick Strand's film starts with a McGraw-Hill logo.  Is it possible that this "ethnographic" film was shown to schoolchildren?  Would they have caught on to its subtle subversions?  A voiceover with a "benign" colonialist perspective is challenged by other voices and images to present a complex portrait of colliding cultures.

Terri Saul'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. 

Nine-time IOHTE contributor Terri Saul is a Berkeley-based artist and writer.

Out of all the films I saw with other people in Bay Area cinemas in 2018, there were only two older films. The others were 2017 films from other countries that premiered in the US in 2018. As interesting as the festival screenings were, if I could only pick two films out of all the movies I saw, these two older films would be at the top of my year-end list.

As Above, So Below screen capture from UCLA DVD "L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema"

1. As Above, So Below (1973, dir. Larry Clark) screened at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley on Wed, 11/14/2018, at 7:00 p.m. preceded by short, Everybody Dies! (2016, dir. Frances Bodomo), followed by an art slideshow and conversation with Larry Clark, and Ra Malika Imhotep and Jamal Batts with The Black Aesthetic.

In the opening short, the grim reaper as a matriarch decides which children live and die as part of a surreal children’s television show. Everybody dies.

Also centered on the precarious, the feature, As Above, So Below, is a surreal and spiritual portrait of Black liberation and rebellion in a Chicago neighborhood, featuring a recovering Marine who finds compassion and community in a neighborhood coffee shop. Another safe haven, the neighborhood church, also provides dramatic cover for something else. Clark says he made the film in his community, by his community, for his community, and after surveying the audience, concluded it was not made for a large portion of the people attending the screening.

As a layer, the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) soundtrack drones on in the background, which at first seems to be included for dramatic emphasis, but is actually an archival tape of US government hysteria and plans for a forthcoming military occupation of Black neighborhoods.

Clark asked us to please try to approach the story through the lens of 1973 and not to project current situations on to it. It was difficult to follow his instructions, and not apply the early 70s setting to today.

Screen capture of Summer in Sanrizuka excerpt from Academy Video VHS of 100 Years Of Japanese Cinema

2. Summer in Sanrizuka (1968, dir. Shinsuke Ogawa) screened at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley on Thursday, 11/29/2018, at 7:00 p.m.

A chaotic documentary created by the filmmaking collective Ogawa Pro, follows radicalized student activists and poor farmers in Sanrizuka, fronted by lines of sturdy women linking arms, as they come together to resist eviction from their land to make way for the Narita International Airport which was built in Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo and resisted for a decade.

Cops and corporations attempt to criminalize people occupying their own land. Residents, in particular the elderly, find ways to shame them for doing so. Young and old come together to resist water cannons, land surveyors, and capitalists, using rocks, shit catapults, sticks, plastic helmets, hand-towels, and other defensive gear made out of materials available on a farm. The day-to-day gains and losses are recorded by a crew constantly tasked with compressing time during the unfolding of a standoff with an unknown trajectory or endpoint.

Partway through production, the cameraperson is arrested. What follows is a break with the shooting style of the previous section. For the rest of the doc, a portrait style emerges as we move closer in and spend moments in stillness, confronting and in some ways disarming the cops via a camera’s gaze.

This exchange of one set of eyes for another offers an additional layer of understanding, pulling the viewer inside the community in a way that only two eyes and one lens never could.