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 4: Smoke

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began Wednesday 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 Smoke provided by SFFILM

Smoke (USA: Wayne Wang, 1995)
playing: 7:30 tonight at Dolby Cinema as part of the festival's Tribute to Wayne Wang

I believe I saw Smoke years ago, perhaps shortly after it was released onto videocassette (I seem to associate it with those Blockbuster plastic cases) but I barely remember it at all. I definitely recommend listening to its director talk about how he protected this Miramax release from the meddling of Harvey Weinstein in his recent KQED interview.

I'm interested in this screening for two main reasons beyond refreshing my memory of what at the time was apparently a forgettable movie for me (albeit one that I've heard others talk of more positively in the meantime). One is that I'm interested in hearing the director of great San Francisco (and not just Chinatown) films like Chan is Missing and Dim Sum: a Little Bit of Heart speak about his work in person; he'll be interviewed by the auteur of Colma: the Musical and Fruit Fly, H.P. Mendoza.

The other reason is my curiosity about the Dolby Cinema, which as far as I know has only opened to the general public for ticketed screenings twice: during the first weekend of the San Francisco International Film Festival last year, and during the first weekend of the festival this year. In 2017 I took advantage of the occasion only for one film, Score: A Film Music Documentary, which certainly showed off the sound capabilities of the space well by way of Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Hans Zimmer etc (it was heavy on big-budgeted Hollywood symphonic music and barely addressed anything foreign or indie for better and worse). This year I want to see how it stacks up when showing work shot by a great cinematographer, and I think Adam Holender, who shot Midnight Cowboy and Puzzle of a Downfall Child a quarter century before spending time as something of a Miramax house DP, lensing Boaz Yakin's Fresh a year before Smoke and M. Night Shyamalan's studio debut Wide Awake a few years after, qualifies. Normally I'd want to see a movie made during the 35mm era (even if at the tail end, by many though not all accounts) on 35mm but I've heard miraculous things about the Dolby's deep blacks and I want to see them tested out on a new remastered digital "print" so I can know precisely what photochemical restorations are up against these days.

Unfortunately at this writing all advance tickets to Smoke are unavailable, but you can check the SFFILM website again at the daily "noon release" of tickets to some (not all) SFFILM shows, or wait in the RUSH line to see if you can be seated at the time of the screening. Just remember to eat dinner beforehand; no food or drink of any kind is allowed inside the Dolby, and they check you bags to make sure you won't be a scofflaw.

SFFILM61 Day 4
Other festival options: The first screenings of Golden Gate Award nominated shorts are today, all at the Roxie: narratives & documentaries in one program, animation in another, and experimental works in a third. It's also the second of three SFFILM screenings of Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof's A Man of Integrity, 9:30 tonight at SFMOMA.

Non-SFFILM option: I can't limit myself to just one: if I weren't going to SFFILM I'd be sorely tempted by tonight's female-focused Other Cinema line-up or the 100-year old Mary Pickford film Stella Maris, with a screenplay by San Francisco's own Frances Marion, screening in 16mm at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont.

SFFILM 61 Day 3: Avraham

The 61st San Francisco International Film Festival began Wednesday 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 Avraham supplied by SFFILM

Avraham (USA: Nathaniel Dorsky, 2014)
playing: 6:00 tonight at SFMOMA as part of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award presentation, and at 5:45 Sunday April 15 at BAMPFA.

Avraham is, like all of Nathaniel Dorsky's recent films, an extraordinary beautiful silent 16mm film intended to be projected at 18 frames per second (rather than the 24 fps standard cemented in the early sound-film era), which he calls "sacred speed" and considers "gentler" than the faster pace most of us are accustomed to viewing films at. As Jeremy Polacek writes, Dorsky's films "hover on the rim of recognition, not quite perceptible, because knowing would somehow be less." Unlike his other works, however, Avraham was named before it was filmed, making it a break from the filmmaker's prior work in that it directly and explicitly dialogues with Dorsky's Jewish heritage.

I have a particular interest in the way films exist as records of the world around us, and I've spent a good deal of time and energy investigating how the great tradition of experimental filmmakers in my hometown (most notably, in partnership with my friend Brecht Andersch, Christopher Maclaine, but I've also worked on the pychogeographic implications of films by San Francisco-based artists like Bruce Baillie, James Broughton, ruth weiss, Sidney Peterson, Curt McDowell, etc.) So it's tempting, knowing that Mr. Dorsky is a resident of my childhood neighborhood of the Richmond District, to attempt to identify the places and objects, the store windows and sidewalks, that his camera captures in his films. I have learned to resist this temptation, however, for several reasons. First, watching his purely cinematic films in this way feels very much at cross-purposes to their intentions and to the calming, meditational magic that they can work on the viewer when their rhythms and explosions of nurturing light and beauty are understood not as representation but as structures of images unto themselves. Second, trying to identify these images and place them in the world outside the film, is almost always impossible, even for someone familiar with the streets he is shooting in. I'm convinced that Dorsky knows exactly how long to hold a shot so that it can cut to another one just a moment before recognition can register, and almost always chooses to use this knowledge.

I say "almost always" because of shots like the one shown above, from Avraham, is an exception, as I recall. I saw Avraham one and three quarter times (long story; short version: the projector belt broke the first time through) back in November 2015, and I recall being shocked by the camera's attention to this magnificent tree that I was able to recognize as the one growing out of Mallard Lake in Golden Gate Park. Even the majority of viewers of Avraham who don't recognize the tree as deeply as Golden Gate Park frequenters might, I suspect if I ask anyone who'd seen the film if they remember that tree, they'll know exactly what I'm talking about. I got a distinct sense that Dorsky wanted us to see it with a different set of eyes than we see most of the things in his films, which is why he allowed it to risk a representational quality that earlier films I've seen generally don't flirt with. Though I haven't seen some of the works Dorsky has filmed in the interim -- I've seen Intimations but not Autumn or The Dreamer, which is why I'm pleased that all three join Avraham in tonight's program -- at least the first two of the seven films in Dorsky's geographically-themed (and named) Arboretum Cycle, Elohim and Abaton seem to me to continue this representational risk, and I don't think it's pure coincidence that a) the first of these films, like Avraham, has a Hebrew word as its title (the second is Greek) or that b) Mallard Lake is less than a mile from Golden Gate Park's Arboretum.

As you can see, I'm very happy with the SFFILM decision to give their POV Award to Dorsky. I'm a fan, and we have many mutual friends. I can't wait to see these 16mm prints in the refurbished SFMOMA space, which in its prior incarnation was often singled out by Dorsky as a particular favorite place to show his work. He's already announced that on June 14th he'll be back to screen at SFMOMA, this time with the Arboretum Cycle, the seven films shot and edited since he completed the four screening tonight. Moreover, while the POV Award annually goes to moving image artists working in various modes, from documentary to animated short to video art and gallery-style installation, to my mind (and according to an SFFILM press release) Dorsky is the first pure "experimental filmmaker" to have gotten the award since Pat O'Neill did fifteen years ago.

SFFILM61 Day 3
Other festival options: Tonight the new-for-2018 SFFILM festival venue Creativity Theatre hosts the first SFFILM screening of Amy Scott's documentary Hal, about the director of one of the 1970s' most remarkable streak of American narrative features, running from The Landlord through Being There & including shot-in-Northern California classics Harold And Maude (entirely local) and Bound For Glory (partly shot in Isleton & Stockton). Tonight also marks the first SFFILM screenings of Edouard Deluc's Gaugin: Voyage to Tahiti (early in his career Dorsky received an Emmy for his photography for a documentary on Gaugin, incidentally) and Paul Schrader's First Reformed, both at the Victoria. Schrader is expected to attend his film.

Non-SFFILM option: Palo Alto's all-35mm gem (which I've seen the main subject of this blog post attend on several occasions) the Stanford Theatre begins its new April-June calendar, this one focused mostly on thrillers by Alfred Hitchcock and others. Tonight's (as well as tomorrow's and Sunday's) double-bill is the George Cukor-directed 1944 version of Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Angela Lansbury, along with the 1943 Best Picture Oscar winner Casablanca. I've never really thought of Casablanca as a thriller before but it does seem to share some DNA with films like Ministry of Fear and Notorious, both of which come later in the Stanford season.

The City Luminous: Spectral Canopy Variation (2015)

WHO: Award-winning filmmaker Kerry Laitala made this, and I actually assisted her on some of her studio shoots. I've mentioned Latiala on this blog every so often since before I'd ever met her, but in the past several years we've become close, as I've explained before. I don't want that to stop me from featuring her work here every so often. Hope my readers don't mind.

WHAT: A four-projector video installation celebrating the centennial of the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), particularly its innovative lighting presentations. But don't take my word for it. Here's what Joe Ferguson had to say on the website SciArt in America:

Kerry Laitala’s The City Luminous: Spectral Canopy Variation is a collage of documentary material of the PPIE, intercut with expressionistic video segments. It features Laura Ackley, author of San Francisco’s Jewel City, as one of the Star Maidens of the PPIE’s Court of the Universe--one of the largest and most ornate courts during the fair. The installation also features dancer Jenny Stulberg performing a tribute to Loie Fuller--a pioneer of modern dance and theatrical-lighting techniques. 

Laitala’s piece cleverly reminds us that the works of innovative minds can be as impressive and inspiring now as they were a century ago. Her own work, though on a smaller scale, is no less affecting. Viewers pause in front of the glowing windows where her installation is projected before beginning their commutes home. Like those spectators a hundred years ago, they brave the chill of a San Francisco evening to glimpse at the possibilities of emerging technologies providing insight, hope, and beauty.

WHERE/WHEN: Loops from sundown to midnight tonight and tomorrow through the windows of the California Historical Society, on the corner of Mission Street and Annie Alley (between 3rd Street and New Montgomery). It's planned to reprise from December 21 to January 3 as well, but who wants to wait that long? UPDATE 6/29/15: The installation will remain up for one last night, tonight!

WHY: This weekend is an extremely busy one here on Frisco Bay. It's a particularly celebratory pride weekend (and the final couple days of the Frameline film festival). Huge numbers of librarians (and more than a few film archivists) from around the world are converging on San Francisco for their annual conference. There's a big gathering of poets, musicians, and even a few filmmakers from the Beat era. (ruth weiss, known to Beat cinema aficionados for her 1961 film The Brink, will be performing and David Amram will give a presentation about Pull My Daisy, which he scored, amidst the more usual documentaries about the scene.) The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum is hosting its annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival (with the expected appearance of a genuine silent-era child star, Diana Serra Carey, alongside a 35mm print of the 1924 film she starred in as Baby Peggy, The Family Secret, showing Sunday afternoon). And then there are the usual screenings at your favorite cinemas, like the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, launching an Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective tonight, or the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, now in the second week of its new summer calendar. Yerba Buena Center For the Arts is screening a nearly-six-hour Lav Diaz epic not once but twice. There's absolutely no way for anyone do experience a fraction of all this.

But The City Luminous: Spectral Canopy Variation is less than a fifteen-minute loop, and it's free and convenient to any passers-by in the neighborhood. A few of the aforementioned activities particularly are in close reach; if you survive all 338 minutes of a political drama from the Philippines at Yerba Buena, you're just a block from Mission and Annie Alley and what are another fifteen minutes of viewing (with four screens visible at once from some angles, it's like watching an hour of movie in a quarter the time!) A.L.A. conference attendees are also right in the neighborhood.

I'm very proud of Kerry for having executed this installation, and I'll miss being able to see it as I wander in SOMA in the evening, although I'm excited to see the next four-screen videos in the California Historical Society's nearly year-long Engineers of Illumination series (Scott Stark kicked off the series in the Spring with Shimmering Spectacles and Kevin Cain more meditative The Illuminated Palace is set to open Thursday, July 2nd, followed by pieces by Ben Wood and Elise Baldwin; all five will then reprise for shorter stints in the final months of the year).

It's not the only art exhibit featuring my girlfriend to come down this weekend. She's also the subject of Saul Levine's film As Is Is, the namesake of a gallery show ending today at the Altman Siegel Gallery on Geary near Market Street in which it screens (as digital video) along with moving image portraits by Kevin Jerome Everson, Anne McGuire, Jem Cohen, Tony Buba and others.

Laitala's The City Luminous: Spectral Canopy Variation is one of several moving image works she's premiered or will be premiering this year to mark the PPIE centennial, most of them named for one of the original night-time lighting effects presented by Walter D'Arcy Ryan at the fair a hundred years ago. She'll be presenting more of these works at an Oddball Films soiree on July 9th, and at a free show at Oakland's Shapeshifters Cinema on July 12th. These will be multi-projector performances with live soundtracks from local experimental music duo Voicehandler. Among the performances will be reprises of Spectacle of Light, their collaboration which won an audience award when presented at the 2015 Crossroads festival this past April. Three of Laitala's 3D chromadepth works will also screen at these shows, including Chromatic Frenzy, a piece that recently screened in Brooklyn as an apertif for Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language as part of a 21st Century 3D series. Kerry also asked me to perform a live keyboard accompaniment to a single-channel 16mm film called Side Show Spectacle at the July 9th Oddball screening. I hope you can make it to one or both of these upcoming shows!

HOW: The City Luminous: Spectral Canopy Variation screens as four video files projected through four separate, synched video projectors.

Ed & Pauline (2014)

Screen capture from trailer.

WHO: Famed film critic Pauline Kael and lesser-known film exhibitor Ed Landberg are the two subjects of this short documentary.

WHAT: If you've spent much time traveling in Frisco Bay cinema circles you've probably at some point heard that Pauline Kael was, before making an indelible mark on English-language film criticism, an important force in the local moviegoing scene. Kael was born in Petaluma, educated officially at the now-defunct San Francisco Girls' High School and UC Berkeley, and cinematically at places like (according to Brian Kellow's 2011 biography) "the Fox, the Roxie, the Castro and...the Paramount over in Oakland." She fell in with the San Francisco Renaissance crowd, living with and ultimately bearing a child by experimental filmmaker James Broughton.

Ed & Pauline, co-directed by former San Francisco residents Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic, takes up at about this point, referencing Broughton only by still photograph and their daughter Gina only by a moment in the narration when Kael is described as a "single mother". For someone who has gleaned only the barest outlines of this period in Kael's life, this 18-minute documentary appears to do a wonderful job painting a richer portrait of how her early work as a freelance film critic in magazines and at the influential radio station KPFA led to her involvement with Landberg. In 1952 he had founded the Cinema Guild near the corner of Haste and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and which he (erroneously) liked to claim as the country's first twin-screen cinema. At any rate it was Berkeley's first repertory house and an early training ground for future Frisco Bay exhibitors like Tom Luddy, Mike Thomas, and Bill Banning, each of whom are interviewed on-camera here (joined by more widely-recognizable figures like J. Hoberman and John Waters). Kael and Landberg formed a dual partnership: she began writing program notes for the Cinema Guild screenings, and later selecting the films to screen as well, and they got married. Both partnerships were fleeting.

Though this film's generous archival footage, engaging interview clips, and understated re-enactments might make it a fine brief introduction to the history of arthouse culture for a casual moviegoer, for a cinephile it's also tremendous fun to hear choice snippets of Kael's discussions of certain landmark films such as Letter From an Unknown Woman, Passion of Joan of Arc and Night of the Hunter as scans of old Cinema Guild calendars are flipped through. Keen eyes will pick out the recurring auteur names (Chaplin, Renoir, Bergman, Flaherty, McLaren...) and feel a greater sense of the primordial cinema scene from which came the eventual champion of filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah and Brian De Palma.

Kael is much better known than Landberg, of course, but his part of the story is equally prominent, in part because Bruno and Vekic were able to interview him and even have him revisit the section of Telegraph where his cinema once stood (since filming, even the cafe that replaced it has been demolished). If, as Tom Luddy relates, Landberg was "the first exhibitor in this country to show Ozu in a truly crusading way" then as far as I'm concerned he's a genuine unsung hero.

One quote from Ed & Pauline particularly stood out for me. Mike Thomas, who would go on to run the Strand on San Francisco's Market Street, notes that "it's hard to imagine when these films were not all around us, but they were more legendary, than anybody actually got a chance to see them." For those of us who haven't fully embraced the ethereal future of all-digital cinephilia there's a deep sense of the loss of the screening as an unrepeatable event. Wayfinders like Kael and Landberg helped thirsty moviegoers locate water in the desert. Now we all can swim in an ocean, but are in no less need of divining rods to help us find fresh drink.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:30 tonight at the Pacific Film Archive, 1:00 on May 2nd at the Clay, and 6:15 on May 4th at the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF).

WHY: Tonight's screening is the only one happening in Berkeley, mere blocks from the Cinema Guild itself (and the scene of the crime of my first exposure to Kael's program notes, which I actually prefer to her reviews.) If you can fit it into your schedule you won't be sorry; I understand the filmmakers are expected to be present as well (I'm not sure if they'll still be in town for the later, San Francisco screenings).

But seeing this film at the SFIFF at all feels particularly vital as a stand for an institution proving it harbors no grudges- at least not after 54 years. Kellow's book on Kael devotes a paragraph to her withering opinion of the festival circa 1961: that "those who had paid $2.50, expecting to see a movie of quality, emerged from the festival 'sleepy and bored, asking, how could they have picked that movie?'" Especially harsh words about a year in which Jean Cocteau's The Testament of Orpheus, Luis Buñuel's Viridiana and Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles were all screened.

HOW: Ed & Pauline screens in front of a documentary co-directed by Gina Leibrecht and the late Les Blank, who worked together on 2007's All In This Tea; this new film is called How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy, a title self-explanatory to anyone who knows about Leacock, one of the instrumental figures along with D.A. Pennebaker and David and Albert Maysles in revolutionizing non-fiction filmmaking in the post-World War II era.  Both films show digitally.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today's the sole SFIFF screenings of Liz Garbus's documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? about the phenomenal singer, playing at the Castro, and of the first of the "Dark Wave" midnight-ish screenings at the Roxie, Cop Car. It's also the first festival screening of Lisandro Alonso's critically-acclaimed Jauja at the Clay.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: A 35mm print of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window screens at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland tonight.

Christo's Valley Curtain (1973)

WHO: Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Ellen Giffard co-directed this.

WHAT: The first of six films the Maysles Brothers made documenting the creation of ambitious, if temporary, "environmental art" installations by Bulgarian-born visionary Christo and his artistic and matrimonial partner Jeanne-Claude, Christo's Valley Curtain is also at 28 minutes the shortest of these six films, and the only Maysles film to be nominated for an Academy Award. It documents the erection of a giant strip of orange fabric in a windswept valley in Colorado. Joe McElhaney writes in his top-notch book, Albert Maysles:

The film places great importance on the two remaining hours the workers have in which to get the curtain up before the winds change direction, thereby threatening not only the completion of the curtain but the lives of the workers. But time here is simply a question of deadlines to be faced -- a classical overcoming of obstacles, successfully achieved in all of these Christo and Jeanne-Claude films, which, with one exception, end on a note of triumph. These films return to a variation on the crisis structure of the Robert Drew films from which David and Albert Maysles had originally wanted to break away.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight as part of Oddball Films's 8PM Monumental Artscapes program, and will also screen during the week of May 8-14 (precise time/day to be announced) at the Vogue.

WHY: With the passing away of great filmmaker Albert Maysles earlier this month at the age of 88, an era of documentary production in America seems to have come to an end. The influential figure who, with his late brother David (as well as other collaborators) filmed such landmark non-fiction works as Salesman and Grey Gardens is deserving of as many cinematic tributes as can be thought up, especially in the Frisco Bay area, at the outskirts of which at least two of his greatest achievements were filmed (Gimme Shelter, portraying a Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway on the Eastern edge of Alameda county between Livermore and Tracy, and Running Fence, the second Christo/Jeanne-Claude film, set at the border of Marin and Sonoma counties.)

Tonight's Oddball Films show juxtaposes Christo's Valley Curtain with Robert Smithson's 1970 film of his own Spiral Jetty in Utah's Great Salt Lake, as well as films and footage focusing on artists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Claes Oldenburg and G. Augustine Lynas, providing an opportunity to contrast the Maysles documentary approach against other filmmakers'. A more jarring juxtaposition may be achieved by the opening double-bill in the Castro Theatre's just-announced April calendar, which pairs the Maysles' (and Ellen Hovde's and Muffie Meyer's) Grey Gardens with a 35mm print of the notorious John Waters gross-out Pink Flamingos. No fooling!

Further down on the horizon, details are just starting to come out about a week-long Maysles tribute at Frisco's forgotten single-screen cinema the Vogue, on May 8th-14th. Sixteen films co-directed by Albert Maysles will be collected together, presented by luminary special guests including (but perhaps not limited to) Jon Else, Joan Churchill, Stephen Lighthill, and (by Skype) D. A. Pennebaker and Susan Froemke. All of the aforementioned Maysles films will screen at least once during the festival, as well as Meet Marlon Brando on May 8th, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! on May 9th & 14th, and more Christo/Jeanne-Claude films The Gates May 10th and both Islands and Umbrellas on May 12th. More information is forthcoming. The festival is the brainchild of Brisbane documentarian David L. Brown, who I suspect was involved in the film screening at this "Sneak Preview" tribute to another non-fiction legend, Les Blank at the Sebastapol Documentary Film Festival tomorrow night.

HOW: Tonight's Oddball screening will be all 16mm; I'm told Christo's Valley Curtain is a particularly lovely print. The May festival's formats are as yet unspecified, although I would bet on digital knowing how infrequently the Vogue has screened celluloid in the last couple of years.

Woman on the Run (1950)

image supplied by Film Noir Foundation

WHO: Ann Sheridan (who was born 100 years ago this February 21st) stars in this, and was also an uncredited co-producer.

WHAT: As I wrote in a Keyframe Daily article previewing the Noir City film festival, published yesterday:

Ann Sheridan plays the hard-boiled spouse of a failed artist who has gone into hiding after witnessing a murder. She attempts to track him down using old sketchbooks of neighborhood inhabitants as clues to his whereabouts, while trying to evade detectives and newspapermen trying to get to him first. If her wanderings across city hills into various dives feel particularly authentic to San Francisco’s character, perhaps it’s because the cinematographer was a native son, Hal Mohr, who’d filmed extensively here. (His credits include the notorious The Last Night of the Barbary Coast for Sol Lesser in 1913.) Director Norman Foster, best known for his collaborations with Orson Welles, had also made his transition from actor to director in a 1936 San Francisco film called I Cover Chinatown. Woman on the Run is a completely unpretentious, excellent thriller and a genuine Noir City discovery making its long-awaited reappearance at the festival after the last copy was thought destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire.

Here's a link to my piece on the Universal fire at the time it happened, and more importantly, a candid 2010 interview with Eddie Muller about his exchanges with the studio after that event. I also must link to Brian Hollins's terrific Reel SF page for this film, which guides us through the specific San Francisco (and Southern California) locations where it was filmed.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:30 tonight only at the Castro Theatre as part of Noir City.

WHY: With yesterday's re-opening of the Pacific Film Archive for the Spring semester coinciding with a new Stanford Theatre Alfred Hitchcock retrospective, the new Frisco Bay repertory film year is now officially underway (although I've already seen some fine revival programs at the Exploratorium, the Castro, and Oddball Films, and regretfully missed some at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum)  I usually like to at least start my annual I Only Have Two Eyes survey of the prior year's repertory scene before the start of Noir City, but a combination of that festival starting early and my soliciting entries later than I'd hoped means that's not happening this year. But I'm hard at work compiling and you'll soon start seeing the results posted here. Just not before tonight's thrilling kick-off to ten days of 35mm noir heaven at the Castro.

As Noir City honcho Eddie Muller told G. Allen Johnson recently, tonight's festival opener Woman on the Run was the genesis of this year's "Unholy Matrimony" theme. I tried to avoid hinting at spoilers in my Keyframe article on the festival, so I didn't talk much about the marriage angle of the film in the above-quoted paragraph, but suffice to say (still eschewing revealing anything specific to those who might not have seen the film) Woman on the Run presents a really interesting portrayal of wedlock circa 1950. It's an ideal opener for so many reasons, and of the films in the festival I've seen before, it's the one I'm most excited to see again (followed closely by the Tuesday night Robert Ryan double bill and the Wednesday night Barbara Stanwyck bill, which is an exact duplicate of one I saw at the Stanford last April). Partly I'm so excited to see Woman on the Run on the big screen because in 2014 I moved into an apartment overlooking one of the locations where it was shot. To think Ann Sheridan was captured on film walking below my kitchen window sixty-five years ago! I can't wait to see that particular scene, and in fact the whole film again in what I expect will be a gorgeous 35mm print a zillion times more clear than the available DVD and youtube versions.

HOW: Woman on the Run screens from a newly-struck, never publicly projected, 35mm print on a double-bill with an archival 35mm print of what I'm pretty certain was Nicholas Ray's only film set in San Francisco: Born to be Bad.

The Thin Man (1934)

WHO: Dashiell Hammett wrote the novel this was based upon, first published in six consecutive issues of Redbook magazine in 1933 and early 1934.

WHAT: The Thin Man is one of those classic Hollywood movies that has little to no formal notability, but that stands out from the sea of studio-system potboilers by dint of character and tone. Its central characters are a married couple: a retired detective (William Powell) and his equally sleuth-like wife (Myrna Loy). Their marriage is one of the screen's most unique and beloved, for reasons that Brian Eggert gets into very well:

Nick and Nora’s blissful union is a rarity for onscreen marriages, even more so upon the film’s release in 1934, just two years after the end of Prohibition. Cinemas were filled with morality tales, further restricted by the recently established Production Code. But Nick and Nora’s penchant for drink isn’t represented as a kink in their marriage or a grand social problem; rather, it’s a social lubricant that greases the film’s funniest lines. A reporter asks Nick about the murder mystery: "Can't you tell us anything about the case?" and Nick replies, "Yes, it's putting me way behind in my drinking." Alcohol fuels their carefree party lifestyle, sustained by Nora’s moneyed background and Nick’s plan to live happily off his wife’s bank account. None of the usual insecurities apply—he’s comfortable with the fact that his wife’s the breadwinner, and her only complaint might be that her husband is less exciting when he’s not serving as a private detective.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at the Castro Theatre today at 3:00 and 7:00, and, presented as part of the thirteenth annual Noir City festival on January 19th at 2:00 and 7:00. Also at the Balboa Theatre January 22nd at 7:30 PM.

WHY: It's been almost two weeks since the Noir City XIII program was announced at an annual Christmas-themed screening at the Castro. With ten different holiday-connected mid-twentieth-century films screened in five Decembers, one might wonder if Noir City impresario Eddie Muller and his curatorial companion Anita Monga are running out of "noir" films appropriate to the occasion. And indeed, the "noir" elements to this year's pairing of O. Henry's Full House and The Curse of the Cat People were clearly outweighed by their seasonal elements. Three out of five of the O. Henry adaptations are winter-set, and one explicitly about Christmas, while only one contains a character we might expect to see in a "straight" noir- Richard Widmark's safecracker in "The Clarion Call", often cited as a reprise of his career-launching Tommy Udo character from Kiss of Death. Meanwhile The Curse of the Cat People, while a beautiful depiction of a family experiencing shifting seasons in New England, resists all classification usually attempted on it, whether as a horror picture, a sequel, or as Muller noted from the stage in his introduction, a B-movie; it wears the "noir" label no more comfortably.

So it's a bit of a surprise to see a Yuletime-set detective film like The Thin Man programmed as part of Noir City's main event in January, knowing it could've been "saved up" for a future December showing. I'm guessing it's also unprecedented for a Noir City selection to be shown so shortly after a Castro booking arranged by the "regular" venue programming team headed up by Keith Arnold. But there's surely a reason or two why The Thin Man simply had to be screened at this year's edition of Noir City and I'm here to tease out some possible culprits. 

First, The Thin Man has never screened at a Noir City festival before, not even at the daylong Dashiell Hammett tribute in 2012. What better year for it to make its debut than a year in which the festival theme is "'Til Death Do Us Part"? In the midst of a week and a half of nearly two dozen films celebrating some of the worst marriages in cinema history, it may be necessary to have a day set aside for perhaps the most memorably positive matrimonial depiction dreamed up by Hollywood. Contra the information in the first sentence of the last paragraph of this preview article, Muller and Monga have placed The Thin Man a third of the way into the festival, timed perfectly as a breather after a weekend of infidelities, murders, and other impediments to wedded bliss. 

Second, The Thin Man and especially its double-bill-mate sequel After the Thin Man fit snugly into a sub-theme running through much of this year's festival: San Francisco. After last year's international noir celebration in which almost all of the 27 films shown were set (and often shot) abroad, it was a natural to make Noir City XIII a real homecoming, with more films made in or about Northern California than any festival since 2003's inaugural edition. The festival kicks January 16th off with the big discovery from that festival, Woman on the Run, which I expect will permanently solidify its place in the canon of San Francisco noirs with this newly-premiering restoration funded by the Film Noir Foundation (and Noir City ticket sales). Also on that bill is the 1950 Nick Ray film Born To Be Bad, which is set in San Francisco but, unlike Woman on the Run, was not filmed here. Other films that either a) were set partially in San Francisco, Monterey, or otherwise north of the San Luis Obispo county line, b) were at least in part filmed in this region, or c) both, include both halves of the January 17 Joan Fontaine matinee of Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion and Ida Lupino's The Bigamist, of the can't-miss January 21 Barbara Stanwyck pairing of Clash By Night and Crime of Passion, and, I'm told, the January 24th Doris Day noir Julie. There may be other San Francisco connections throughout the festival (I've been clued in that my hometown somehow figures into another Stanwyck selection I've yet to see for myself called No Man of Her Own). The Thin Man's protagonists are, like Hammett himself, San Francisco residents, but in the original film the action is all in New York City, where they are vacationing. It's not until After the Thin Man that they return home and we get to see unprocessed shots of William Powell and Myrna Loy walking up Telegraph Hill and driving down Market Street.

Finallly, for the first time since 2006 the Noir City festival will be held during the week of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, meaning that unlike in recent years in which Monday night selections were often obscurities aimed at hardcore noir-heads, it makes sense to program a famous, crowd-pleasing title on a day which many potential attendees will be able to attend as a weekday matinee if they prefer that to evening showings. And those who might wish the Castro was screening films that wrangle with issues of civil rights and the ideals of Dr. King on his honorary day may at least approve that The Thin Man was shot by pioneering Asian-American cinematographer James Wong Howe, and that some of its key creators like Hammett and Loy were involved as white allies in civil rights struggles. But though Noir City has in the past hosted an "African-American noir" night, and even once planned to bring Harry Belafonte to town for screenings of Odds Against Tomorrow and Kansas City (he sent his regrets over video instead), the first few early years of the festival never involved thematic programs on the MLK holiday itself, and this year's programming above all continues that pattern.

HOW: Todays screening of The Thin Man is on a double-bill with a Marx Brothers comedy that I probably wouldn't want to see on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, A Day at the Races. Both films screen in 35mm.

The format for next month's Noir City screening of The Thin Man has not yet been revealed on the program website, nor via the reliable Bay Area Film Calendar. Curiously, only six of the twenty-five Noir City XIII film titles are listed on the Film Noir Foundation website as involving 35mm film: Woman on the Run and its fellow FNF restoration The Guilty, an archival print of Born to Be Bad, and restorations of The Bigamist, Douglas Sirk's Sleep, My Love, and the Max Ophüls masterpiece Caught. It's too early to read too much into this, as there are plenty of reasons why it might be so (including an uncharacteristic sloppiness on the part of designers). 

Perhaps these six prints are merely the ones with the most interesting pedigrees; other films in the program might be 35mm but simple release prints and not archival or restorations. It's also possible that these six are the only ones confirmed as 35mm, and that other formats are up in the air at this time, although it would surprise me to find out that rarities like, say, Joseph Losey's The Sleeping Tiger (part of an "American expatriate directors in Britain" night Jan. 22) or Luchino Visconti's career-launching James M. Cain adaptation Ossessione (screening with Les Diabolique Jan. 24 as an extension of last year's international noir foray) might be available in both high-quality 35mm and digital versions. But it's perhaps preferable to leave a format unannounced than to announce a 35mm print that might turn out not to appear (like the Castro did when listing this Sunday's Age of Innocence screening as 35mm on its "coming soon" page, only for it to become DCP when the actual January calendar was published). The possibility that the six mentioned titles will be the only ones screened on 35mm in the whole festival would be a rude shock for the many celluloid-loyal dwellers of Noir City's alleyways, but seems highly doubtful if only for the fact that a 35mm print of one of the other nineteen films on the program, The Thin Man, is screening today at the very same venue, if under a different aegis.

I believe the Balboa Theatre screening of The Thin Man will be digital, as the series of classics the venue is presenting is made up entirely of movies available via DCP. But the Balboa does retain 35mm capability and occasionally utilizes it, so it would be best to double-check the Bay Area Film Calendar shortly before the show date to see if it appears on it. If it does, expect a print after all.

UPDATE January 1, 2015: According to the Film On Film Foundation all Noir City screenings but one (No Man of Her Own on Friday, January 23) are expected to screen in 35mm, including The Thin Man!

Berkeley In the Sixties (1990)

Screen capture image from First Run Features DVD

WHO: Documentarian Mark Kitchell, whose most recent release was last year's environmentalism doc A Fierce Green Fire, co-wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Berkeley In The Sixties is a well-crafted, aesthetically conservative film about leftists, radicals, and other key figures in the 1960s social protest movements that have been so strongly associated with the East Bay city's public image ever since. For those of us who know this period only second-hand, it's a concise primer on far-ranging subjects like the Free Speech Movement, Anti-Vietnam War protests, "Hippie" counterculture, the Black Panthers, and the battle over People's Park.  Made when the events were 20-30 years old (imagine, as a parallel, a documentary on the final ten years of South African apartheid released today), its interviews with 1960s activists show a remarkable candor about the relative strengths and weaknesses of their own protest tactics, frozen at a pre-Clinton-era moment. It would be interesting to know if the interviewees (including Susan Griffin, David Hilliard and Frank Bardacke) would have similar things to say today, now that the term "Free Speech" has been appropriated by the Right to mean "money". At any rate, this nearly quarter-century-year-old film has yet to be superseded by another documentary on these topics, as far as I'm aware.

In addition to interviews, Berkeley in the Sixties is constructed of often astonishing archival footage, collected from from rarely-seen films from the period, some by names as well-known as Agnès Varda, David Peoples, Irving Saraf, Lenny Lipton, and Will Vinton. Although I found it odd that Scott Bartlett's 1972 work OffOn was used to illustrate the visual component of a March 1966 Jefferson Airplane concert thrown by the Vietnam Day Committee and later denounced by then-gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan.  The first several archival clips used are not from Berkeley at all, but from early 1960s San Francisco protests that are said to have laid the foundation for the galvanization of UC Berkeley students to fight for freedom of speech on their own campus. The image above is from a remarkable anti-HUAC protest in San Francisco's City Hall in 1960.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM today only at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: Tonight's screening, which will be attended by filmmaker Kitchell as well as Frank Bardacke and other activists from the era, launches an important series at the Pacific Film Archive that will last until the end of next month. Entitled Activate Yourself: The Free Speech Movement At 50, this series collects a diverse array of rarely-seen films that together aim to paint an essential portrait of the Bay Area's political roots from a half-century ago or so. Tuesday, September 23rd's show highlights films from the San Francisco Newsreel media collective, as well as Desert Hearts director Donna Deitch's early PP1, which sounds irresistible from the PFA's description to this Steve Reich & John Cage fan. October 9th's Sons and Daughters is one of the especially obscure films whose footage is borrowed for Berkeley in the Sixties: extremely charged documentation of protesters trying to convince young military recruits to turn away from the Oakland Army Terminal where they're being processed on the way to Vietnam. October 14th's program features two sub-feature-length documentaries made by filmmakers with a very different viewpoint from that of the anti-HUAC protesters shown in the image above, and will be contextualized by a UC Berkeley law professor following the screenings.

Most of the series films are from the era itself, but KPFA On The Air by Veronica Selver (who was the editor of Berkeley in the Sixties) is a portrait of the broadcasting fulcrum of politics and culture released 51 years after the station first went on the air in 1949. It screens October 26th with Norman Yamamoto's Second Campaign. Finally, the series ends with the sole non-documentary of the set, Art Napoleon's The Activist, shot on the cheap in Berkeley and released with an X rating the same year as Midnight Cowboy was.

Although this series is certainly of interest to cinephiles and political history buffs from across Frisco Bay, not just Berkeley, most of its films do focus on that city. San Francisco gets its own spotlight in a perhaps-complimentary Yerba Buena Center for the Arts series showcasing activist-oriented films shot on this side of the Bay. Starting October 2nd, canonized independent classics like The Times of Harvey Milk and Chan is Missing rub up against lesser-known films documenting Frisco's key communities, such as Take This Hammer featuring James Baldwin on a visit to Hunter's Point (showing free October 26th) and Alcatraz Is Not An Island, about the "Urban Indians" who occupied the former prison, future tourist trap in November 1969. I'm especially excited by the 16mm screening of Curtis Choy's 1983 The Fall of the I-Hotel, which documented the destruction of the last remnant of a now-almost-forgotten neighborhood known as Manilatown. I've been wanting to see it for years, and I hope to be there among an intergenerational audience of activists and cinephiles, historians and tech workers, landlords and tenants, SF natives and newcomers, all realizing we need to come together to look at this city's past if we're going to understand how to prepare for its future.

HOW: Berkeley in the Sixties screens from a 16mm print

The Lineup (1958)

Screen capture from Sony DVD

WHO: Eli Wallach had one of his most memorable roles in this as a hit man named Dancer.

WHAT: Often grouped with great San Francisco noir films like The Maltese Falcon, The Lady From Shanghai, and Out of the Past, The Lineup came more than decade after those films, was based on a popular television cop show, and integrates new styles of acting and dramaturgy based in cutting-edge New York Theatre that feel to me somehow out of step with the noir tradition of the 1940s and early 1950s and more in line with the human-psychological explorations of Elia Kazan (who gave Wallach his start in movies), or with the future work of its director Don Siegel (best known for Dirty Harry), than with noir stalwarts like Fritz Lang, Joseph G. Lewis, etc.

Noir or not, it's undoubtedly a great San Francisco film, packed with exciting and/or atmospheric scenes shot in real locations as they were fifty-six years ago. And not just the typical shots from the northeast corner of town usually captured by Hollywood crews when shooting here. The above image was, according to Brian Hollins of the amazing Reel SF website, taken at 2011 Bayshore Blvd., the current site of the Bayshore Cafe. The Cow Palace might not be as familiar a landmark to our-of-towners as Coit Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, but to locals it's unmistakable.

WHERE/WHEN: Noon today only at the Castro Theatre

WHY: You may recall that Wallach died this past June at the age of ninety-eight and a half. Today's screening of The Lineup is the first of an unhappily large number of memorial screenings coming to the Castro in the coming month or so. August 27th tributes director Paul Mazursky, who died a week after Wallch, with his films Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Tempest. August 29ths screening of Robert Altman's Popeye, the first big film role for Robin Williams, was booked well before his tragic suicide last week, but has now become a de facto tribute to his performance genius. Shortly after his death was announced, the Castro's twitter account informed me that the theatre will screen The Fisher King, presumably as a dedicated Williams tribute, on Sunday, September 14th.

If you can't wait that long to see a Robin Williams film with a crowd of the actor's fans (and perhaps even friends?), then tomorrow's screening of the 1996 comedy The Birdcage at the Lark Theatre in Marin might be what you're looking for. The Lark is also the first theatre around to schedule tribute screenings to the iconic Lauren Bacall, who also died last week; they'll show Howard Hawks's classic To Have And Have Not August 24th & 27th. The Lark is not advertising their screenings today and this coming Wednesday of Breakfast At Tiffany's as a memorial to Mickey Rooney, who died at age 95 this past April, perhaps because his role in that film is for so many the aspect of his career and/or of that film they'd most like to forget.  By contrast, the Stanford Theatre's current calendar has reserved two days a week from now until October 7th to show a 35mm print of a film from Rooney's late-1930s/early-1940s heyday every Monday and Tuesday. This week it's showing The Human Comedy directed by Clarence Brown in 1943.

HOW: On 35mm, as part of a Wallach tribute double-bill with The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (the latter on DCP)

Cosmic Flower Unfolding (2013)

A scene from Benjamin Ridgeway's COSMIC FLOWER UNFOLDING, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Benjamin Ridgeway created this work.

WHAT: There's long been a connection between San Francisco's experimental film scene and the concentration of interest in non-traditional and/or non-Western spirituality. In particular, Asian mystical and religious ideas have informed the work particularly of the Bay Area's legendary experimental animators, such as Harry Smith, Jordan Belson and Lawrence Jordan. Cosmic Flower Unfolding proves the durability of this confluence into the digital animation era. Ridgeway, a local university professor and video game animator, describes in a brief interview on the San Francisco International Film Festival's blog that he first visualized this very short (2-minute) work while meditating, and uses the Sanskrit term "mandala" to describe some of the neon forms he arranges and has pulsate throughout the piece, until they make the form of sage-like face. Ridgeway was influenced by the illustrations of nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel, but I was also reminded of snowflake geometries. Perhaps there's a mystic out there who'd argue that flowers, undersea creatures, ice crystals, and constellations of electronic data all are essentially the same thing in the scheme of things.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program starting 9PM tonight only at the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: If you have trouble accepting animation as anything other than cartoons for kids (by which I could mean either children or stoned college students) then you may have trouble with the SFIFF's Shorts 3 program, but if you are open to the breadth of how the medium can be applied in intellectually and sensorially stimulating ways, you'll likely find it to be a very worthwhile program. Ranging from exercises in eye-popping, near-complete abstraction such as Cosmic Flower Unfolding and two pieces by Max Hattler, to Subconscious Password, a piece of semi-autobiographical satire from Canada's Chris Landreth (who made the Academy Award-winning Ryan), this set of 11 shorts proves there are still a heck of a lot of ways to get your mind blown without taking drugs. 

Frequent SFIFF contributors Bill Plympton and Kelly Sears take their respective animating styles into extreme territories at polar opposite ends of the "cartoony or not" spectrum and both far, far from Pixar and its middle-of-the-road imitators. I was delighted to recognize Guilherme Marcondes's The Master's Voice: Caveirao as a worthy follow-up to the Brazilian-born animator's prior mini-masterwork Tyger almost immediately; it carries the same sense of menace and whimsy, and some similar visual elements even if it was created using wholly different techniques and is in a way far more ambitious. Another stunner is Gloria Victoria, by a Canadian filmmaker named Theodore Ushev that I was unfamiliar with but will be keeping an eye out for from now own; his striking Constructivist-influenced design style feels very attuned to his anti-war themes and his motion marches perfectly to the Shostakovich soundtrack he selected. But I picked Ridgeway's film to highlight in particular because he's expected to attend the screening tonight.

HOW: All the Shorts 3 selections will screen digitally.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 12 of the festival also includes the final screening of Manakamana- on the Kabuki's biggest screen!! - and of Kazakh film Harmony Lessons. It also features the first showing of Lukas Moodysson's We Are The Best!

NON-SFIFF OPTION: It's discount night at the Roxie Cinema so if you still haven't caught Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin on a big screen yet, tonight's your chance to do so for half the price of a regular SFIFF ticket.

Santa Cruz Del Islote (2014)

A scene from Luke Lorentzen's SANTA CRUZ DEL ISLOTE, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society. 

WHO: Luke Lorentzen is the Stanford-based filmmaker who directed this, and many other familiar Frisco Bay filmmaking names (consulting producer Jamie Meltzer, sound mixer Dan Olmstead, etc.) are found in the credits.

WHAT: I haven't seen any of the San Francisco International Film Festival's documentary features yet, but I'd be very surprised if many of them are more able to probe an otherwise-invisible corner of the globe with more artistic and documentary integirty than Santa Cruz Del Islote, a 20-minute short about the most densely-populated island in the world. Even Manhattan and Hong Kong have more open space per capita than this 1200-person, 2.4-acre speck off the coast of Columbia, made up of wall-to-wall fisherman's shacks. Eschewing talking heads and infographics for a visually sumptuous approach (every shot is simply gorgeous), Lorentzen allows the island's residents to provide a sparse narration to contextualize what we're seeing and hearing, but for the most part this is not a verbal but a sensory experience of what life is like in the built-up little town and out in the fishing boats. For the residents of Santa Cruz Del Islote, the sky above and the Caribbean around them is their only wilderness, and Lorentzen often frames the horizon low to emphasize the vastness of the island's blue surroundings.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program beginning tonight at 7PM and on Sunday, May 4th at 3:45., both at the Kabuki Theatre.

WHY: Santa Cruz Del Islote screens on the (numerically, not chronologically) first of the San Francisco International Film Festival's seven shorts programs (though one might call this Tuesday's Castro Theatre program an unofficial eighth). This program is nominally half-documentary and half-narrative, but there's definitely some bleedover. There's a documentary element to Jim Granato's comedic narrative Angels, for example, and though up for a documentary award, John Haptas, Kris Samuelson, and Seiwert's Barn Dance is really a performance staged for the camera. Throw in Bill Morrison's archival-footage-based Re:Awakenings, and it makes for a very diverse and surprising program, as SFIFF shorts programs so often are.

HOW: Digital

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 3 at the festival includes other shorts programs such as the also-excellent animation showcase. It's also the night of the first screenings of anticipated-by-me films like Tamako In Moratorium and Our Sunhi.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Other Cinema's weekly screening tonight features the local single-channel premiere of Sam Green's Study of Fog as well as other Frisco-centric offerings.