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.

Spend It All (1971)

WHO: The late, great Les Blank directed this.

WHAT: Some critics, curators, and historians try to group Les Blank's documentaries into three categories: the music films typified by The Blues Accordin' To Lightnin' Hopkins and Chulas Fronteras, the food films such as Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers and All In This Tea, and the "everything else" films like Burden of Dreams and Gap-Toothed Women. In truth, all of his films that I've seen (not the entire catalog, but a good-sized selection) are rich in scenes depicting the preparation and/or consumption of food. They all prominently feature music, usually by accomplished 'folk' or 'roots' musicians. And they all contain a great deal of "everything else". 

Spend It All, one of Blank's (in Max Goldberg's words) "city symphonies set to the languid pace of Cajun country" is exemplary of this. If I had to classify it in one of the three categories I wouldn't know how to choose. There's plenty of  music, performed by fiddlers and accordionists like The Balfa Brothers, Nathan Abshire and Marc Savoy, a familiar face in later Blank documentaries J'ai Été au Bal, Yum, Yum, Yum!: A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking and Marc and Ann. There's plenty of food, too, with copious scenes of shellfish, crustaceans, and even coffee being prepared Louisiana-style. But there's a lot of "everything else" as well: shots of young (and younger) jockeys at a country horse racing track, for example. And most poignantly for a film screening so soon after its maker's death, we get a tour of a brushy cemetery, including a shot of a tombstone engraved with a common Cajun name very similar to his own: "LeBlanc".

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screenings tonight at 7:00 at New People and 8:45 Friday at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Spend It All is part of a three-film tribute to Les Blank, who was known to be dying of cancer when the SFIFF announced these screenings last month, and who indeed succumbed a week later. The set of three rarely-seen shorts includes two not featured in last summer's PFA retrospective: the 1967 Christopher Tree, which Blank photographed and edited but is not credited with directing, and Chicken Real, Blank's own favorite of the sometimes-subversive industrial films he made for hire, early in his career, for various American companies including Shakey's Pizza, Smucker's Jam, and in this case factory farming pioneer Holly Farms. 

Blank's son and fellow filmmaker Harrold is expected to attend the screenings.


HOW: All three films will screen in brand new 16mm prints of recent restorations by the Academy Film Archive.

Into The Abyss (2011)

WHO: Werner Herzog directed this documentary.

WHAT: Here's how Roger Ebert began his November 2011 review:

Into the Abyss may be the saddest film Werner Herzog has ever made. It regards a group of miserable lives, and in finding a few faint glimmers of hope only underlines the sadness.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:00 PM tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Roger Ebert and Les Blank: two "men of cinema" who died of cancer in the past week. It's hard to believe they're gone. I already miss knowing they're around. I have a lot more to say about each of them, but no time to say it all, at least not yet.

For today, I just would like to acknowledge the link Werner Herzog was in a chain that connected one to the other. Though I think Nosferatu the Vampire was probably the first Herzog film I saw, back when I was a teenager and didn't really care about foreign films, it also may have been Aguirre: Wrath of God, which I liked even better. I know first watched the latter at around the same time, with my father, a religious viewer of Siskel & Ebert and the Movies. I remember looking it up afterwords in his copy of Roger Ebert's Home Movie Companion, which I suspect I consulted more frequently than he did, making the fact that I gave it to him as a birthday or Father's Day or Christmas gift seem rather suspect now that you mention it. 

Seeing that film and reading that review (I'm not even sure it was a full review; it may have just been a write-up accompanying its place on his 1982 all-time top 10 list) must have planted a seed that would eventually blossom into cinephilia in my post-college twenties (yes I'm a bit of a late bloomer compared to most cinephiles I know who were movie-mad by age 18 if not earlier).  It was in this period that I started catching up with Herzog's other films (an ongoing process as I've still yet to see a few, most notably Heart of Glass, which Ebert preferred to Aguirre as late as 1980), which led me of course to Fitzcarraldo and its inevitable companion Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's remarkable making-of documentary that's better than the original film. After a decade of watching Blank's films at least as fervently as I had Herzog's, I had the great privilege of interviewing him at his El Cerrito studio. I excerpted a piece from that interview on this blog just the other day, where I got to see the preserved remains of the shoe Herzog didn't quite finish during the event that Blank filmed and released as Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.

Anyway, I'm sure that many who attend tonight's screening will be thinking of Herzog's connections to both Ebert and Blank. These connections aren't just a creation of my own cinephiliac nostalgia kicking in. Here's a link to audio and a transcript of Herzog's comments after hearing about Ebert's death.

HOW: Into the Abyss screens in 35mm.

Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)

WHO: Les Blank directed this. Word is the legendary documentarian is not doing so well.

WHAT: A year and a half ago I had the honor of interviewing Blank at his studio in El Cerrito, for an article published in the "Radical Foods" issue of First Person Magazine. There are still a few copies of this gorgeously-designed publication (which also includes interviews with individuals at the nexus of food and art such as Sandor Ellix Katz, Jon Rubin, Marije Vogelzang, Ben Kinmont, and more) at Park Life in the Richmond District. I excerpted a segment from my interview prior to the launch party which included a screening of Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, but here's another brief excerpt from Blank's remarks to me, about the time when he showed a work-in-progress version of the film to a Museum of Modern Art audience in New York that folkorist Alan Lomax attended. 

I was waiting to hear from him, since I respected his opinion so much. He said, 'Your film makes me so mad I want to punch you in the nose.' I was taken aback and wanted to know why. He said, 'Because it shows all these yuppies out in California playing in their food and thinking their garlic is so lovely and wonderful. Garlic is really the food of the people who live close to the earth-peasants, poor people, the starving. Garlic is what ties it all together for them. You trivialized it. I'm ashamed of you.' When I got over being mad at him, defensively, I decided that he had a point. I then went out and looked for people from other cultures who would demonstrate using garlic.

A "who's who" of some of the individuals seen in Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers has since been compiled by John Harris, who appeared in the film as seen in the above image.

WHERE/WHEN: Plays at 7:00 tonight at the Roxie.

WHY: Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers screens as part of the inaugural Food and Farm Film Festival, which pairs each foodie-centric screening with delicacies prepared by local chefs. Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters, who appeared in this film as well as in Blank's Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, will introduce tonight's screening. The festival began last night, but today it will also host a 35mm matinee showing of another locally-made food film, Pixar's Ratatouille and a shorts program, with more screenings to be held at the Roxie tomorrow.

It's time to flip over the Roxie's Spring 2013 calendar if you've got it hanging on your refrigerator. You'll probably notice a photo of Roman Polanski but no film titles listed. Well, just last week titles and (most) showtimes were announced online for next weekend's three-day tribute to the director, during which Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne will Skype with Polanski after the audience takes in an afternoon screening of that 1974 classic.

HOW: Evidently Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers will be a digital screening.

The Two Eyes Of Frako Loden

If you didn't attend some wonderful repertory/revival film screenings in 2012, you missed out. As nobody could see them all, I've recruited Frisco Bay filmgoers to recall some of their own favorites of the year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Frako Loden, college instructor in ethnic and film studies and contributing editor to Documentary magazine.

Life is Short: Nikkatsu Studios at 100, Pacific Film Archive
This retrospective vies with French Film Classics (also at PFA, below) as the best and most extensive repertory series I attended in 2012. Both showed me films I’ve waited years to experience. Kawashima Yuzo’s 1956 Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District was a gratifyingly unpredictable melodrama on the miseries of post-World War II Japan. Makino Masahiro’s 1939 Singing Lovebirds was an astonishing, delightful integrated musical featuring samurai-film stalwart Kataoka Chiezo as a young ronin pursued by several girls. I got roped into sitting up in the projection booth providing real-time subtitle advancing for Suzuki Seijun’s outrageous 1964 Gate of Flesh, which gave me an intense appreciation for the exact time that an English title should appear in a shot. And now I’m completely in love with that film because of what we’ve been through together.

French Cinema Classics 1928-1960, PFA
I’ve long dreaded seeing Georges Franju’s 1949 Blood of the Beasts, but I’m glad this series forced me to. It’s a lyrical meditation on animal slaughter—something that seems cruelly impossible. I was viscerally unprepared for the horror and beauty of watching a white horse fall dead to its knees. It was also my chance to experience for the first time two unforgettable films: Jacques Becker’s 1952 Casque d’or, named for Simone Signoret’s golden gangster moll’s helmet hairdo; and Max Ophuls' 1955 Lola Montes, which left me speechless. It was during this series that I experienced a rare mixup on PFA’s part: they showed Marcel Carné’s 1946 Les portes de la nuit instead of the advertised 1938 Port of Shadows. I couldn’t be happier trading Jean Gabin for Yves Montand.

Always for Pleasure: The Films of Les Blank, Pacific Film Archive
In addition to serving the opening-night audience a pre-film helping of beans and rice—a Blank special effect since back when he wafted the smell of garlic through the UC Theatre lobby during his 1980s films—this series gave the much older me a chance to revisit most of Les Blank’s work. Not only do the films all hold up, but I like them even more for their freeform curiosity and willingness to let the subject control the rhythms of a scene.

At Jetty’s End: A Tribute to Chris Marker, 1921-2012, PFA
I finally got to see Marker’s 1977 essay film on revolutionary movements around the world, A Grin Without a Cat, and see how Fidel Castro really did like to readjust the mikes during his speeches.

A Century Ago: The Films of 1912, Rafael Film Center
This year’s films in this annual series, shown on a hand-cranked 1909 projector, emphasized the growing scope, speed and length of the movies. My favorite was a fake newsreel called Titanic, which instead of showing the actual passenger ship that hit the iceberg that year, displayed its more successful sister liner Olympic with her name sloppily rubbed out in every frame. A subplot featuring Teddy Roosevelt takes over, but the final shot (predating Life of Pi by a hundred years) urges us to shout three cheers for “a tiger!”

In a separate program at the Rafael, the 1914 Salomy Jane, shot in Marin County on a huge budget for its time, promised great success for the San Rafael-based California Motion Picture Corporation with a performance by long-forgotten Latina actress Beatriz Michelena, who later ran her own production company. Sadly, the works of both companies were destroyed by the explosion and fire caused by a boy’s tossed firecracker in 1931. Luckily, a print of Salomy Jane was found in Australia in 1996 and is her only surviving film.

Pretty much everything shown every year at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is terrific, but this year’s screening of William Wellman’s 1927 dogfight blockbuster (and first Oscar Best Picture recipient) Wings with Foley sound effects led by Ben Burtt was probably the most thrilling film event for me next to the festival’s historic presentation of Napoleon (magnificent and undeniably the repertory film event of the year, but I’ll let others rhapsodize about it). Brigitte Helm in Hanns Schwarz’s 1929 The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna took me by surprise. I didn’t think she could top her performance in Metropolis, but here her sophistication and subtle pathos overwhelmed me.

Feast Your Eyes

This weekend is the SF Film Society's annual Cinema By The Bay festival, a smörgåsbord of film screenings showing off the quality and diversity of Frisco Bay filmmaking, and culminating in an awards ceremony tomorrow honoring documentarians Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, Allie Light and Irving Saraf, impresario/filmmaker Joshua Grannell, writer/editor Susan Gerhard, publicist Karen Larsen, and the 50-year-old distribution institution Canyon Cinema. All exceedingly worthy honorees, and I wish I were available to attend the event tomorrow evening.

Not long ago I sat down for an interview with one of last year's honorees, the amazing, undervalued chronicler of music, cuisine, and the cultures encircling and encircled by them both, Les Blank. The interview was for an article to be published in the next issue of First Person Magazine, entitled "Radical Foods". When editor Betty Nguyen told me of this theme, Blank came to mind immediately as an ideal person to get involved. One of the most unique aspects of his filmmaking is his integration of food into the presentation of his films, as I experienced several years ago at a screening of his 1980 film Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers. Here's Blank's response to my question about the difference between "Smell-O-Vision" and "Aromaround":

Well, I've never used Smell-O-Vision. I use Smell-Around. Smell-O-Vision was, I believe, a patented system. When they first brought this concept out in the theatres I think they piped in smells. One theatre I think even had them under the seat. They had an exhaust fan to get 'em out, but they had trouble getting one smell out in order to make room for the next one.

John Waters had scratch and sniff cards. I didn't care for that myself. No one I know has the actual food being cooked in the actual theatre. When I'd screen Always For Pleasure and cook red beans and rice, I'd call that Smell-Around. If I was showing Yum Yum Yum or Spend It All, which has gumbo in it, I would call it Smell-Around too. But the garlic film, I'd always call Aromaround.

An elaborate version would be to take the pot of beans that hasn't been completely cooked yet. They're still in the small-making phase. Once you start cooking they let off their aromas and then, the aromas dwindle down, so the cooking beans don't really smell that much towards the end of the cooking period, but if you take a portion of the beans you're gonna be serving the public, and hold them back, then get 'em going to the point where they make the most smell, then you take that into the theatre, and one person carries the pot, one person stirs the pot, and the other person has a fan and they fan the fumes into the audience. You walk all the way around the theatre so everyone sees this whole operation. during the part of the film, where the film is being cooked or served, or in the cajun films, there's the gumbo.

With the garlic film you put toaster ovens in the front or the rear of the theatre, and then you turn on the oven to 350 degrees. If you turn it on in the beginning, the smell will be full strength about halfway through, about 20-25 minutes in. I like it best when it hits its peak when Alice Waters says "can you smell the garlic?" The audience might yell back. It might laugh, or sigh.

To read more from my interview with Blank, you'll have to find a copy of the magazine. I'm not sure of all the locations where it will be sold as yet, but it will certainly be available at the issue launch event this Thursday night at St. John's Church. The ticket price includes a dinner prepared by issue co-editor and artist chef Leif Hedendal, an edible sculpture presented by artist Leah Rosenberg, and Les Blank in attendance with a screening of Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers. Hope to see you there!