SFFILM 62 Day 7: Confidence Game

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival began a week ago and runs through April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A scene from Kathleen Quillian's Confidence Game, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM

Confidence Game (USA: Kathleen Quillian, 2018)
playing: 8:30PM today at the Roxie as part of the Shorts 4: Animation program

Some of my favorite things seen so far at SFFILM this year have been shorts. Madeline Anderson's I Am Somebody, for instance, screened as part of her Persistence of Vision Award presentation Saturday, was a rousing, formally inventive half-hour documentary about a 1969 hospital workers' strike in Charleston, South Carolina, that included footage of Coretta Scott King orating in support of the strikers just a year after her husband's assassination. On a completely different tack, the latest nine-minute mindfuck from Guy Maddin and his recent co-directors Galen and Evan Johnson is called Accidence, and it's probably my favorite new Maddin work in dozen years, starting as a planimetric riff on Rear Window and turning quickly into something much more diabolical. It was the warm-up for each screening of The Grand Bizarre over the past few days.

But tonight I'll finally begin to start watching some of the Golden Gate Awards-eligible shorts at the festival. The Shorts 4: Animation program includes ten separate pieces representing seven North American and (mostly Eastern) European countries. Six are by women animators, including the only one by a filmmaker whose work I'm already familiar with: Kathleen Quillian. Her piece Confidence Game made its local debut on a program that I was able to attend a year ago at Craig Baldwin's notorious Other Cinema (where, incidentally, she'll be premiering another new work this coming Saturday) and I liked it enough to place it on my list of top 20 shorts as part of Senses of Cinema's latest World Poll. I've written a bit about Quillian's work before, for instance on the occasion of her 2011 piece Fin de Siècle screening at a 30th Anniversary marathon presentation at Artists' Television Access. But Confidence Game feels like another leap forward for her. Her tendency to center objects in the frame, when repeated against various collage backdrops, gives the piece a hypnotic effect that I'm certain is completely intentional, given the thematic interest in cults of personality that the work is clearly expressing. She ends Confidence Game with an almost psychedelic finale that includes stroboscopic flashing backgrounds, so be forewarned if that sort of thing gives your senses too much of a workout.

I haven't made a terribly close comparison, but it seems like there are more shorts programs in this year's SFFILM than I've ever seen in 20 years of attending. In addition to Shorts 4: Animation there the usual Golden Gate Award contender programs devoted to shorts by and for youngsters. The usual two programs of GGA-nominated documentary and narrative shorts have been expanded to three, and the New Visions program of experimental and form-expanding works appears to be quite strong this year, with new work by Akosua Adoma Owusu, Zachary Epcar, Laura Huertas Millán, Sandra Davis, etc. The New Visions section of the Golden Gate Awards was on the chopping block twenty-five years ago, and saved only due to an outcry from the local experimental film community. You can read a bit about that in this excellent interview between Russell Merritt and SFFILM artistic director Rachel Rosen.

One program that's gone missing this year, after nearly as long, is the annual co-presentation between SF Cinematheque and the Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). This was another set of experimental short films, differing from the New Visions program in various ways over the years. Perhaps because it was an out-of-competition program it tended to involve more 16mm and sometimes even 35mm prints, more work by established artists (though not exclusively so), and more flexibility in terms of the recency of completion; sometimes a program would include a new restoration of a short film made decades prior among a program of new works, and sometimes even the new works weren't always so new, having traveled on the generally slower experimental film festival circuit for a few years before making their way to their first San Francisco and Berkeley screenings. One might argue the need for two programs of experimental work at the festival has been made unnecessary by the sprouting of new festivals devoted entirely or almost entirely to such work: Crossroads, Camera Obscura and Light Field come quickly to mind. But I'm not as certain of the stability of all these younger organizations when compared to the venerable San Francisco International Film Festival, and more importantly I think there's a lot of value in SFFILM's long-standing "big tent" approach to bringing together different, sometimes fractuous communities together to see each other's work and have discussions about it. The loss of one program, even one that's run for 24 years straight, doesn't destroy that but it puts a damper on it.

I'm curious to know the reason for the loss of this program. I wasn't satisfied by the answer I got when I asked about it at SFFILM's program announcement press conference in March. I was told the reason for the change is because the festival wanted all the shorts programs to feature works in competition. That doesn't seem to hold water though, because of the existence of the Shorts 8 program, bringing together two of three Netflix-owned shorts. Both are out-of competition even though the third Netflix short, Life Overtakes Me,appears in the Shorts 1 program and is Golden Gate Award eligible. There must be some other reason.

Anyway, the festival has more than made up for absence of the SF Cinematheque/BAMPFA program in quantity at any rate, by highlighting shorts in their Persistence of Vision Award presentation, to the shorts presented in last night's Evening With Kahlil Joseph and in the Friday night live music presentation that I talk a bit about in the last paragraph of this post. Read on...

SFFILM62 Day 7
Other festival options: Today's the final screening of the Vanguard section of SFFILM, Lapü, about the Wayuú people, who also feature in the recent crime saga Birds of Passage. It screens 4:00PM at YBCA, followed by the final festival showings of the Uruguayan feature Belmonte at 6:15PM, and finally Mariam Ghani's documentary on the re-opening of Afghanistan's national film archive, What We Left Unfinished at 8:30PM. I've heard good buzz on all three so it might be a good place to camp out for the afternoon and evening.

Non-SFFILM option: A terrific set of 16mm shorts comes to the Coppola Theatre at San Francisco State University at 6:30 tonight. There's animation (Sally Cruikshank's Quasi at the Quckadero), documentary (the Miles Brothers' Mt. Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway), found footage classics (Arthur Lipsett's Very Nice, Very Nice and Bruce Conner's Valse Triste) and live-action based experimental films (Bruce Baillie's Mass for the Dakota Sioux and Maya Deren's A Study in Choreography for Camera, which is not among the Deren shorts screening digitally with a new, live soundtrack replacing Teiji Ito's scores at the Castro Friday), showcasing some of the diversity of treasures in the J. Paul Leonard Library collection at SFSU. This collection was the source for one of my favorite film screenings so far this year; it holds one of two known prints of SFMOMA Art In Cinema curator Frank Stauffacher's own filmed mini-masterpiece Sausalito, which showed in late January at BAMPFA with Stauffacher's widow Barbara Stauffacher Solomon on hand to discuss its filming and reception among other topics. Though Sausalito is not among tonight's showings, it will hardly be missed in such a strong line-up (I vouch for five of the six films and perhaps if there's a large enough turnout future screenings from the J. Paul Leonard Library collection might be organized. Best of all, this program is FREE to all!

SFFILM 62 Day 5: Winter's Night

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival began Wednesday night and runs through April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A scene from Jang Woo-jin's Winter's Night, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Winter's Night (SOUTH KOREA: Jang Woo-jin, 2018)
playing: 5:30PM today at BAMPFA in Berkeley, and Monday, Apr 15 at 8:30PM at the Children's Creativity Museum Theatre.

Have you ever had one of those weird nights? The ones where you can't sleep and you end up doing things you never would under ordinary circumstances? If not, perhaps you've been caught up in someone else's weird night, which can end up making your own night pretty weird anyway.

The third film from 34-year-old director Jang Woo-jin (and the first I've had the chance to see) Winter's Night takes this premise and gives it a uniquely Korean spin. It turns out Hong Sangsoo doesn't have a monopoly on comedies about soju-infused middle-aged men unable to control their feelings for unavailable women. I was a little disappointed that SFFILM this year declined to program either of Hong's most recent efforts, Grass or Hotel By the River, making Frisco Bay four feature films behind the prolific auteur's output (unless I've somehow overlooked a showing of The Day After or Nobody's Daughter Haewon in a local venue.) But putting that disappointment aside, Winter's Night provides a fresh perspective on some of the same material Hong works with, and quite a bit of other material as well. In fact, there's enough different that I wouldn't even bring up Hong at all, if the comparison didn't feel invited by Jang's chosen setting, the tourist-centric Kangwon Province that provided the backdrop and the title for Hong's second feature film, and by the casting of Seo Young-hwa, a veteran of at least six Hong films including prior SFFILM selections Hill of Freedom and Right Now, Wrong Then.

Seo plays Eun-ju, wife to the aforementioned middle-aged man Heung-ju (played by Yang Heung-ju), spending time together on a vacation to the region important to their mutual history more than thirty years ago, when he was fulfilling military service and she was traveling from Seoul to visit him. After visiting a thousand-year-old mountain temple she realizes in a taxicab that she'd left her phone behind. They return to look for it but are still unsuccessful by the time the temple's closed for the night and, after Eun-ju's aborted attempt to sneak onto the grounds, the couple resigns to staying overnight at the handiest guesthouse. There seems to be an eerie aura at this place, and it's not just the LED lights flooding the nearby frozen waterfall. The couple keep getting separated, and running into other unexpected denizens of the dark, including a seeming set of younger doppelgangers, and one of Heung-ju's old flames, whom he drunkenly makes passes at after an excruciating karaoke session.

Ultimately Winter's Light is a very accomplished example of the established "slow cinema" movement that seems to be waning from local festival screens when compared to its relative dominance 10-15 years ago. Jang has an intriguing concept, a middle-aged couple being tested by unusual, if not quite extraordinary, circumstances, and he keeps it fun and fresh by highlighting the comedy of situations more akin to the ironic stance of a Tsai Ming-Liang than to a ponderous Tarkovsky. In one scene, Heung-ju frantically searches for his wife, inquiring with a local innkeeper, when suddenly she steps into the frame as if she's been watching him all along. "Don't lose her again, you clumsy man!" is the inkeeper's droll response. Jang often transitions between scenes by inserting frames of a series of traditional Korean paintings that, upon accumulation over the film started reminding me of the famous ox-herding pictures associated with a strand of Zen Buddhism. I'd be curious to view Winter's Light again with these ancient prompts for contemplation in mind.

SFFILM62 Day 5
Other festival options: The festival has been really pushing the Castro's noontime showing of Photograph with its star Nawazuddin Siddiqui in attendance; I guess word hasn't gotten out to the Bollywood-loving community as pervasively as happened when Shah Rukh Khan appeared there a couple years ago and I got to see firsthand the closest thing to Beatlemania I suspect I'm ever likely to experience. Either that or Siddiqui's not quite the draw that SRK is; I know him mostly from Ashim Ahluwalia's 2012 "Hindie" film Miss Lovely, but I guess he's probably made more fans in movies like Gangs of Wasseypur and The Lunchbox, the latter of which was, like Photograph, directed by Ritesh Batra. After that show, the Castro will make way for an award presentation to Laura Dern and a screening of Trial By Fire, with its director Edward Zwick also expected to attend. Finally, I've been hearing good buzz on the Argentinian feature Rojo, including from my friend Michael Hawley, whose festival preview is the best I've found, as usual, even though he's no longer even living in Frisco Bay! It screens at BAMPFA at 8PM, after Winter's Night wraps up.

Non-SFFILM option: Today's the final day of the all-35mm Stanford Theatre's annual Alfred Hitchcock series -- sort of. While Psycho and The Trouble With Harry showing today for the final times (a late afternoon and an evening show each) marks the end of the schedule published in late February, the venue has recently announced its first-ever Doris Day series, to open next weekend with prints of two of her mid-1950s films Young At Heart and The Man Who Knew Too Much. The latter of course is a Hitchcock title as well, thus extending the Master of Suspense's grip on Palo Alto's jewel of a theatre for one more week. Though I wouldn't expect the 97-year-old Day to make the trip up from her Carmel home to attend any of these showings, I do hope to see at least one of the films she made with Frank Tashlin (ideally Glass Bottom Boat) in the program somewhere, and hopefully not the same weekend as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

SFFILM 62 Day 4: The Grand Bizarre

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival began Wednesday night and runs through April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A scene from Jodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM.

The Grand Bizarre (USA: Jodie Mack, 2018)
playing: 3:30PM today at BAMPFA in Berkeley, and Monday, Apr 15 at 8:45PM at YBCA.

Although I was able last November to see a digital projection of this film (SFFILM audiences will be treated to a 35mm print at each screening) and placed it on my list of my five favorite undistributed features of 2018, I don't feel up to the task of writing much of a review. Not when a critic as perceptive and eloquent as Michael Sicinski has already written three terrific paragraphs about Mack's latest. Let me excerpt a few sentences:

Mack’s film is whimsical, features some sick beats (including a riff on the Skype theme), and is so personal that it ends with the artist’s own sneeze. But the fact that it may be the most purely pleasurable film of the year shouldn’t prevent us from appreciating its exigency. The Grand Bizarre is a film about embracing all the colors and patterns of the wide, wide world, and in that regard, it’s exactly the film we need right now.

I must confess I don't love The Grand Bizarre as much as Mack's previously-longest opus, Dusty Stacks of Mom, but that's surely in large part because I'm just inherently more fascinated by the world of rock poster distribution than that of colorful textiles. But even I can recognize that there's a bit more thematic "heft" to this project, not just because it's a bit longer, but also because it's more international in scope at a time when the need to reach out across borders seems greater than ever. For anyone with an open mind about the parameters of what an animated feature can be (The Grand Bizarre descends from the lineage of Norman McLaren's landmark Neighbors, but ends up with a far more radical approach to narrative), it's one of the real must-sees of this year's festival.

SFFILM62 Day 4
Other festival options: Expect more traditional animation techniques to be on display at the Castro Theatre's 10AM Shorts 6: Family Films program; I attended last year's set for the first time with my young nephew, and we both had a great time seeing a mixture of the latest cartoons, documentaries and short narratives with definite kid-appeal. This year's group includes the Oscar-nominated One Small Step. Another animation program is aimed more for adults: Shorts 4: Animation, having its first showing 5PM today at the Roxie. But to make that you'll have to miss the Persistence of Vision Award presentation to African-American documentary pioneer Madeline Anderson at SFMOMA. No animation expected in this set, but expect a wonderful conversation with a veteran filmmaker finally getting her due.

Non-SFFILM option: In memory of the April, 18, 1906 earthquake and fire that reshaped San Francisco, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum is devoting its weekly Saturday 16mm film screening showcase to films that shed light on this tragic event. First, a pair of documentaries shot by the Miles Brothers, one shortly before and one, recently re-discovered, shortly after the destruction. After an intermission, they'll show one of the best of the surviving early features starring Lon Chaney, Sr., The Penalty, which was filmed in 1920 throughout a rebuilt San Francisco (a wonderful website devoted to its filming locations is found here).

SFFILM 62 Day 3: The Sisters Brothers

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival began Wednesday night and runs through April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix star in the Western The Sisters Brothers, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM.

The Sisters Brothers (FRANCE/SPAIN/USA/ROMANIA/BELGIUM: Jacques Audiard, 2018)
playing: 7:00 tonight only at the Castro

A year and a half ago, attending a SF Opera production inspired me to wonder on twitter why there have been so many great movies made about the Klondike Gold Rush, from Chaplin's canonical classic to my personal favorite, The Far Country, to more recent entries like Dawson City: Frozen Time, but none (that I've seen) devoted to the famous California Gold Rush of 1848-1855 that played such an important role in the growth of Northern California cities and towns, including of course San Francisco. I noted that I hadn't seen Michael Winterbottom's The Claim (a former San Francisco International Film Festival closing film) but that I understand it's set later than the real height of the era, that Antonia Bird's Sierra horror movie Ravenous is set before the era, and that I'm not a particular fan of Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (being filmed with Idaho standing in for the Sierra foothills being the least of the problems I had with it on a single viewing, though I'd be open to revisiting it, especially if a 35mm prints came around sometime.) Others suggested Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which is great but set in Washington State, and Thomas Carr's The Forty-Niners, which I haven't seen for myself. I'll certainly allow that there may be a forty-niner movie as good as The Gold Rush or The Far Country, but that I simply have yet to run across it.

But assuming I haven't just failed to strike the right mother lode, I'd guess the main reason for a comparative lack of great gold fever movies set in the Golden State than in The Land of the Midnight Sun is because the later can be easily visualized by filmmakers because of the contemporaneous actualities that were made during the period; the California Gold Rush of course predates the invention of the motion picture by several decades. But though 1840s & 50s California may have lacked movie cameras, there was certainly no lack of dramatic situations. So it's rather ironic that the first relevant movie I saw since composing that twitter thread was based on a book praised by some reviewers for eschewing deep historical research. I would call The Sisters Brothers a pretty good California Gold Rush movie, not a great one disproving my original position. Again, it's not really such a problem that it includes severe historical inaccuracies like including a scene at Folsom Lake, which didn't exist before Folsom Dam was erected in 1955 (just a hundred years or so too late). But its various plot threads don't ever really feel like they add up to that much.

That doesn't mean it's not a gorgeous film, or that it doesn't contain wonderful performances, including a terrific dramatic turn from John C. Reilly, an actor I first took note of in Paul Thomas Anderson's early drama Hard Eight, but who is much better known these days for his ability to carry comedies like Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story and Cyrus. In fact I saw The Sisters Brothers on one of the Castro Theatre's semi-perverse double-features, in this case with Step Brothers, also starring Reilly. And I'm not surprised to see that, of these two fraternal features, SFFILM was always more likely to pick the more (though not entirely) serious-minded one to accompany its award presentation to an underappreciated actor. I always applaud efforts to bring more Westerns to the big screen, and The Sisters Brothers is certainly at least as good as any new ones I've seen in the wake of The Lone Ranger. And how can an organization that calls its annual prizes the Golden Gate Awards pass up a chance to show a movie like this at this moment, which Rebecca Solnit identified as a modern-day San Francisco Gold Rush six years ago, and which hasn't felt any less like a boom town since?

SFFILM62 Day 3
Other festival options: For those of us dying to hear more Stuart Staples music after last night's screening of High Life, today's biggest must-see may be the first of two festival showings of Minute Bodies: The Intimate Lives of F. Percy Smith, an investigation of the early-cinema non-fiction pioneer probably best known for his 1908 film The Acrobatic Fly. Not only is Staples (a.k.a. the lead Tinderstick) the musical guide for this "Vanguard" section selection, he's credited as its director. It shows at YBCA tonight, followed by the first festival showing of A Useful Life director Federico Veiroj's latest Belmonte.

Non-SFFILM option: On the subject of great mining movies, one of my very favorite things seen at last year's SFFILM edition is making a return appearance tonight only: Robert Greene's brilliantly re-enactment-heavy (and I normally loathe re-enactments) documentary about labor history in an Arizona mining town, Bisbee '17. This FREE outdoor showing launches the Spring series of Friday night screenings at ProxySF in Hayes Valley; other SFFILM alumni in this set include The Miseducation of Cameron Post  April 26th and Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. May 10.

SFFILM 62 Day 2: High Life

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival began last night and runs through April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A still from Claire Denis's High Life, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM.

High Life (FRANCE/GERMANY/UK/POLAND/USA: Claire Denis, 2018)
playing: 8:00 tonight only at the Victoria

I was able to see an advance screening of High Life, which opens for at least a week-long engagement tonight at theatres around San Francisco, as well as screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival. But I don't think Claire Denis, responsible for amazing films such as Beau Travail, Friday Night and 35 Shots of Rum, is expected to be on hand for any of the showings at the Embarcadero, Kabuki, etc. The first tickets I bought to a festival event this year, long before my press credentials were confirmed, was to see one of my very favorite working directors appear at a SFFILM event along with a showing of her latest; at least two previous attempts to bring Denis to the festival or a festival-sponsored event (in 2011 and 2018) were fruitless but tonight should mark the long-awaited ripening of that strawberry.

Strawberries figure into High Life, which features several key scenes in a garden tended by the prisoners living aboard a spacecraft heading directly toward a black hole. Like Denis's L'Intrus (like the aforementioned trio, also a film that made its local premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival) it's the kind of enigmatic, expectation-confounding movie that defies being reviewed after having been seen only once, although Durga Chew-Bose has made an excellent first stab. (I'm assuming her article's title indicates she hadn't seen High Life more than once before writing it.) It's part of why I'm so glad to get another chance tonight. I suspect many Frisco Bay Denis fans for whom tonight's screening is their first will want to make time during the festival to attend another, non-festival, showing somewhere. I'm an advocate of balancing film festival attendance with other screenings, which is why my daily fest picks will always include a "Non-SFFILM option" paragraph at the bottom.

I've heard grumblings from Denis aficionados about the festival's choice of venue for tonight's event; the Victoria is not a year-round cinema space and it has in some past years proven less than satisfactory in its presentation quality, especially in the sound department. If last year's presentation of First Reformed there is any indication, however, such fears should be relatively unfounded. Like Paul Schrader's feature (one of my favorites of last year) also distributed by A24, High Life revels in the digital video aesthetic, never attempting to mimic celluloid filmic textures. Denis and her director of photography Yorick Le Saux create a cool, synthetic aesthetic to establish High Life's setting. It's also entirely in English (many people calling it her first English-language feature are forgetting how much of Trouble Every Day is uttered in English, but even that film had a few subtitled moments) thus making the sight-line issues from certain spots in the theatre less problematic. And unless the 2019 sound set-up isn't as good as what the Victoria had installed for First Reformed and other 2018 festival screenings, I expect we'll be able to hear Juliette Binoche's, André Benjamin's and Robert Pattinson's dialogue as well as we did Amanda Seyfried's, Cedric the Entertainer's and Ethan Hawke's last year. The same should go for Stuart Staples/Tindersticks' music compared to Brian Williams/Lustmord's.

Between the guest and the movie, you can see why I had to feature High Life as my daily pick of the festival. The only drawback is that the show has long since gone to RUSH status, meaning that advance tickets for the public have all sold and anyone who wants to get a ticket tonight will have to wait in a line in hopes of a lucky break. My experience with SFFILM RUSH lines is that it's rare that you need that much luck however; an hour or so of waiting ought to do it. But given the rarity of a Denis in-person appearance in Frisco Bay, I'm not sure the standard advice will hold this time. Luckily, my daily always include other promising festival options. Read on...

SFFILM62 Day 2
Other festival options: This year's SFFILM edition includes four films screening in 35mm prints, and two of them are tonight. One, Tamara Jenkins' under-discussed The Savages is showing as part of a Laura Linney tribute, and like High Life is currently at RUSH status. The other, Jodie Mack's inventive animated experimental documentary The Grand Bizarre is the only brand-new 35mm film screening at the festival; it shows 6PM tonight at YBCA and has two more future festival screenings.

Speaking of RUSH status, tonight's BAMPFA screening of First Night Nerves is the only one of three festival showing of this particular movie NOT currently at RUSH status. Director Stanley Kwan (perhaps best known for his Ruan Ling-yu biopic Centre Stage) is expected to be in attendance.

Non-SFFILM option: If you missed local artist and educator Jeremy Rourke's 2017 hybrid animation/documentary/performance work I'll Be Around when he staged it a year and a half ago, you simply have to go to Artists' Television Access tonight at 8PM to see him re-stage it. It's a site-specific piece so it's better to see it at ATA than anywhere else it might be performed. Here's a short review from Kristin Cato.